Category: Volume 21 – Number 2 – January 2011

In August 2009 the American cable network A&E (Arts & Entertainment) released the iniial installment of its reality series Hoarders. The docudrama’s setup was elementary: juxtapose the biographies of two individuals castigated as hoarders and spend an hour with their difficulty discarding stuff. The second episode, for instance, introduces Patty, a genial-seeming housewife who confesses that police officers removed her children from her home because of unbridled collecting. “Nobody knows and I’m sure they would be very shocked,” she not-so-secretly confides to the camera, “and especially since, you know, we basically aside from this have a very normal life” (“Patty and Bill”). Cut several minutes later to Bill Squib, a retiree from Massachusetts whose pack rat tendencies (tools, magazines, and computer gadgets) are straining his marriage to the point of possible divorce. The saga continues: Hoarders brings in a behavioral psychotherapist who assesses the psychologies of both parties and a certified professional organizer who assesses their clutter. Next befuddled clean-up crews arrive as battles royal heat up between Patty, Bill, and their respective kin over possession disposal. Closing credits cap the show and inform viewers whether or not the subjects successfully cleaned up their lives.
 
In many ways iconic, these two sensationalized stories epitomize A&E’s promotional claim that “each sixty minute episode . . . is a fascinating look inside the lives of two different people whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis” (“About the Show”). Oddly enough, Hoarders was intended as “an addition to a block of ‘lifestyle’ programming—’Trading Spaces’ meets hoarding,” to quote one producer, but “the pilot’s tone was completely off, and it had to be reconceived, refilmed, in a starker documentary style” (Walker). With this home improvement angle failing to attract viewers, Hoarders was reformatted as a small-scale freak show, and like a rash of competing TV series (Hoarding: Buried Alive, Clean House, and Obsessed) and earlier documentary films (Stuffed, My Mother’s Garden), its revised formula stressed the sordid spectacle of those whose material lives do not conform to normative standards of what we might call object conduct—the manner by which individuals socially and personally engage with matter. As it featured starker documentary footage from hoarded spaces across class, racial, sexual, and generational divides, A&E’s makeover worked well. “It’s like a train wreck,” gushed one online fan. “I don’t want to see things like that but I couldn’t stop looking” (Katewilson).
 
Yet while this revamped Hoarders proved a ratings dream (current episodes hover close to two million viewers), the show remains a nightmare for material culture. Better: the series offers a glimpse into what happens when material culture becomes a nightmare. Episode after episode features shell-shocked interviews with husbands and wives, sons and daughters, and friends and neighbors who cannot comprehend their loved one’s material object choices. June from California’s daughter: she “makes me feel sorry for her that she has emotional attachments to pencils” (“June and Doug”). Warren’s wife, Leann, from Long Island: “Having your home like this does take a piece of your soul” (“Gail and Warren”). And Lauren’s mother from Charlottesville, Virginia: “She shouldn’t have to think about a bottle of nail polish that deeply” (“Kerrylea and Lauren”).
 
Some featured hoarders have a different take on their stuff. A few refuse the show’s title outright. Dale from Boston: “I’m not crazy” (“their mind is different,” counters his on-site social worker) (“Chris and Dale”). And Shannon from Spanaway, Washington: “I wouldn’t want people to judge me and say you are a disgusting person for the way you live” (“Julie and Shannon”). Others betray—or feign—ignorance about hoarding as a clinical diagnosis. Linda from Virginia: “I never knew that hoarding was a disorder. Collecting things just seemed to happen” (“Linda and Todd”). Still others highlight the social disgrace that the identity-category “hoarder” carries. Missy from Atlanta: “There are really hurtful words that come when you live like this. Pig. Filthy. Disgusting. Freak” (“Paul/Missy and Alex”). And some try to depathologize their supposedly dysfunctional behavior. “This isn’t weird to me,” states Kerrylea from Washington. “This is normal” (“Kerrylea and Lauren”). In sum, even as most find themselves queered—made strange and abnormal—by the show’s format, many nevertheless refuse the rubric of the materially aberrant.
 
I’m intrigued by the way these individuals negotiate the trope of queerness throughout the show’s accounts of their stuff, and I employ queer throughout my argument as a term that applies not only to accounts of sexual nonconformity but also to other non-normative identities such as that of a hoarder and the material practices attached to that name. Noting in a foundational essay that queerness “cannot be assimilated to a single discourse” (343), Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner emphasize that the word is not to be predetermined: “We want to prevent the reduction of queer theory to a specialty” given that “queer theory is not the theory of anything in particular” (344). Most recently, Sara Ahmed advances this line of thought in a critique that I return to: “For some queer theories,” she finds, “‘the perverse’ [is] a useful starting point for thinking about the ‘disorientations’ of queer, and how it can contest not only heteronormative assumptions, but also social conventions and orthodoxies in general” (78). These claims for widening the range of perversions prompt us to think further about how possessions and their usage also become queer via discourses of contemporary object relations such as hoarding.
 
I thus begin with a few snapshots of debased goods and filthy persons—and I return to them as my main case study—to suggest that cultural sites like Hoarders can benefit from analytical tools that meld the insights of both material culture studies and queer studies. While these interdisciplinary fields relate to and overlap everyday practices such as accumulating and disposing that are reflected in popular media such as cable television, this overlap is less apparent on the scholarly plane. As it brings their unique methodologies into dialogue, I contend that merging a primary interest of material culture studies—the social status of objects—with a central concern of queer studies—the roles that deviance and normalization play in social management—can be beneficial for comprehending nonstandard productions of materiality. Placing material culture studies and queer studies together enables us to interrogate supposedly abnormal uses of material cultures which extend beyond the terms of explicitly sexual object choice. Such interdisciplinarity provides a means of scrutinizing how object pathology and deviant object conduct such as hoarding can upset normative social boundaries. My argument consequently attends to aspects of non-normativity present in material culture studies and aspects of material dissidence featured in queer studies in order to craft a theory of material deviance—one with which individuals such as Patty, Bob, Dale, Linda, Missy, Kerrylea, Dick, June, and Warren seem unfortunately familiar.¹ This theory, we’ll find, addresses not only what queer (and queered) people do with their sexualized bodies in particular but also what they do with their queer (and queered) things in general—of how they defamiliarize the material relations that make up any world of goods.
 
In so doing I take up archeologist Victor Buchli’s recent challenge that “the realm of the abject, the realm of the wasted beyond the constitutive outsides of social reality is where critical work needs to be done” in material culture studies (17). I draw up a provisional blueprint for non-normative material relations to consider how materiality queers individuals, and I simultaneously record the queer object relations inherent in postmodern material practices such as extreme accumulation. To do so I first canvass material culture studies to track its primary engagement with the socially beneficent uses of materiality as well as its secondary engagement with the aberrant usage of things, and I draw attention to a tendency within this wide-ranging field to normalize object usage. I then make a similar move with queer studies: my overview of this equally capacious discipline contends that its well-honed critiques of sexual aberration and deviant sexual object choice also apply to material conventions and orthodoxies in general. Pinpointing how both disciplines benefit by combining their respective insights, I next showcase how a hybrid theory of material deviance enhances our understanding of suspect material practices by looking at several moments of Hoarders. Throughout I contend that scholars need sharpened tools for attending to queer ways of relating to things—that critical analysis of dissident materiality should accompany the fascinated gaze.
 

I.

 
Are objects made to cheer on cultures? Examining how social worlds are constructed via material things, most work done in material culture studies takes this question as a primary interdisciplinary task. Perhaps the most influential formulation of this methodological impulse remains Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood’s buoyant 1979 claim in The World of Goods that “instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for subsistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture” (59). Implicitly sidestepping Marxist conceptualizations of material goods as congealed labor and explicitly overturning Thorstein Veblen’s theorization of possessions as conspicuous power plays in The Theory of the Leisure Class, Douglas and Isherwood insist that “goods have another important use: they also make and maintain social relationships” (60). Across the fields of anthropology, history, literary studies, sociology, industrial design, and elsewhere, scholars have realized this communal charge for the past several decades.
 
Given this now commonplace contention that “objects are social relations made durable,” scholars aplenty (to name but four: Tim Dant, Stephen Harold Riggins, Craig Calhoun, and Richard Sennett) stress the need to trace the beneficent social roles played by late modern material cultures (Miller et al. 141). Across disciplines they riff on Douglas and Isherwood to confirm that objects—alongside the persons who possess them—help stabilize and make cohere dynamic cultural worlds. “Material culture,” Dant finds, “ties us to others in our society by providing a means of sharing values, activities and styles of life in a more concrete and enduring way than language use or direct interaction” (Material Culture 2). In a later essay the sociologist likewise notes that “artificial material objects . . . are imbued and embedded with the social; meanings are attributed and built in” (“Material Civilization” 299). In an earlier edited collection on The Socialness of Things, Riggins agrees that objects buttress not only the cultural present but reinforce the cultural past: “through objects we keep alive the collective memory of societies and families which would otherwise be forgotten” (2). Together such findings confirm what sociologists Calhoun and Sennett call “material social relations”—the cultural ether of object matter that makes up valuable social contacts (1).
 
I cite four examples collectively invested in this ingrained project of charting material relations to signal its pervasiveness across material culture studies. I use four more to illuminate how these culturally stabilizing projects can unwittingly result in culturally normalizing ones. Anthropologist Daniel Miller, for instance, remarks that material cultures advance normalcy as they prompt social values and collective memory-making. Rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of pedagogy, Miller writes that
 

it was these practical taxonomies, these orders of everyday life, that stored up the power of social reproduction, since they in effect educated people into the normative orders and expectations of their society. What we now attempt to inculcate in children through explicit pedagogic teaching . . . had previously been inculcated largely through material culture.

(6)

In a less critical vein, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and sociologist Eugene Rochberg-Halton opine in 1981 that “things contribute to the cultivation of the self when they help create order in consciousness at the levels of the person, community, and patterns of natural order. . . . Thus [material culture] either helps the forces of chaos that make life random and disorganized or it helps to give purpose and direction to one’s life” (16-17). Anthropologist Grant McCracken confirms such benevolent claims when he contends that goods “vivify this universe. Without them the modern world would almost certainly come undone” (xi). And sociologist Harvey Molotch corroborates these findings in his genealogy of mass-produced products such as the electric toaster: “The presence of goods helps anchor consciousness around the social vertigo of living in a world of random and dreadfully unsteady meanings” (11). “Goods provide a basis . . . for there to be a sense of social reality,” he asserts. “They help us be sane” (11).

 
Might things still inculcate us into normativity once they leave the Bourdieuian classroom? Might goods and their owners ever go crazy? Each of these analyses confirms what we could identify as the idealized order of material relations. On the one hand we have what material goods should accomplish: cultural stability, purposefulness, vivification, psychic self-anchoring, and social well-being, and I emphasize the recurrent tropes of sanity, sound mental health, naturalness, and orderliness in these select accounts of material social relations that reach back to The World of Goods. On the other hand we’re left with the specter of what happens when an object fails to adhere to these values: the unpleasant prospects of personal, communal, and natural disorganization, epistemological crisis, unnatural acts, mental illness, even social apocalypse (an “undone” modern world).
 
Given these standard warrants for object relations across the field of material culture studies, I call attention to the ways past and present theorizations of material social environments often promote—however unintentionally—normative object conduct. Such conduct casts as abject (insane, doomed, ill, unnatural, disordered, and unhealthy) those material relations that do not “help substantiate the order of culture” or that do not confirm cultural ideals (McCracken 75). Hence when “the role of objects as signifiers of culture, human relations and society” starts to go off-kilter—when a person’s stuff questions, problematizes, or refutes the shared sense of social realities that goods are thought to foster—they worry the normative orderliness of what counts for everyday material life (Boradkar 5).
 
Yet it needs to be said that from an alternate vantage point in material culture studies, culturally bad things aren’t necessarily a bad thing. While a primary investment of the field resides in elaborating ideal cultures and shoring up normative social orders, there remain moments in this wide-open discipline that have found otherwise—moments that track what happens when material relations divorce from cultural values and stall the advance of cultural norms. I want to follow this train of thought that departs from those above in order to spotlight some instances where material goods do not churn into a cultural good—when object conduct becomes socially “polluted” or turns culturally “dangerous” (Woodward 89). Recording such moves gets us closer to understanding how queer studies can fill in some interpretive gaps in material culture studies as we begin to flesh out how matter goes “deviant” as much as it goes “normative” (Appadurai 13).
 
Though not filed under deviance or abnormality, some of the strongest theoretical foundations for advancing this last claim have appeared in Heideggerian-influenced thing theory, a research program inaugurated by literary and cultural critic Bill Brown to explain, in part, how the materiality of objects dislocates the world of goods—”when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily” (“Thing Theory” 4). Citing a passage from novelist A.S. Byatt, Brown gives as an example of this obstructive process a dirty window pane that blocks sight, reminding us of the “thingness” of the glass (mine will later be a rotten pumpkin and some scrap metal when I turn back to Hoarders) (4). In the collection where Brown outlines this theory of phenomenologically polluted material, cultural studies scholar John Frow notes that objects can potentially sully social relations as well. In his discussion he remarks that “no single description exhausts the uses to which their properties might appropriately or inappropriately lend themselves” (360). Such instances of culturally inappropriate material relations—a significant divergence from accounts by Csikszentmihalyi, Rochberg-Halton, McCracken, and others—enable scholars to discern occasions when objects or things undermine the cultural moorings of social worlds. Rather than “making visible or stable the categories of culture,” they ask us to appreciate what happens when things—and, by proxy, the persons who use them —become anti-social, or when material relations disappoint cultural expectations, or when stuff doesn’t shore up family memories or therapeutic self-cultivation or the mind’s rationality (Douglas and Isherwood 59).
 
In an extended review entitled “Can the Sofa Speak?” John Plotz takes up some of these questions to present the clearest account of the “destabilization of the object” to date (Brown, “Objects” 186). “Thing theory is at its best,” he contends, “when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. . . . [T]hese are the limit cases at which our ordinary categories for classifying signs and substances, meaning and materiality, appear to break down” (110). While a central “aim” of material culture studies “has been to unpack what the culture meant objects to mean,” Plotz finds that scholars should also “reflect on the failure of meaning” (110). He elaborates on this critical malfunctioning in a claim worth quoting at length: “its job should consist of noting the places where any mode of acquiring or producing knowledge about the world runs into hard nuts, troubling exceptions, or blurry borders—of anatomizing places where the strict rules for classifying and comprehending phenomena no longer apply” (118). In lieu of staving off “social vertigo” (Molotch 11), this anti-identitarian take on material cultures turns Douglas and Isherwood on their heads: Plotz’s reading asks for stuff to become more and more culturally dizzying rather than more and more culturally secure. Rather than witness the materiality of the world enhance and confirm social relations, we instead watch it unhinge them.
 
Theorists of thing theory do not hold a monopoly on these last ideas. In recent considerations of industrial ruins, cultural geographer Tim Edensor has advanced a similar project that “critically explores the ways in which the material world is normatively ordered” (“Waste Matter” 311).² In a rejoinder to the stabilizing trends of material culture studies that complements Plotz and Brown, he too finds that the field tends to “banish epistemological and aesthetic ambiguity” and contends that “objects reproduce and sustain dominant cultural values” (“Waste Matter” 312). To counter these propensities Edensor turns to unpopulated post-industrial ruins in urban Britain. There he finds that “the materiality of industrial ruins means they are ideally placed to rebuke the normative assignations of objects,” and he outlines “the ways in which this disordering of a previously regulated space can interrogate normative processes of spatial and material ordering” (“Waste Matter” 314). For Edensor, this turn away from normative object conduct yields rich methodological rewards—ones that we will build upon in our closer reading of hoarded possessions: “in inverting the ordering processes of matter, the wasted debris of dereliction confounds strategies which secure objects and materials in confined locations, instead offering sites which seem composed of cluttered and excessive stuff, things which mingle incoherently, [and] objects whose purpose is opaque” (317). To restate Edensor, inasmuch as they fall outside the dominant cultural orders of their respective societies, disordered materials can expose, and therefore destabilize, the normativity of the normal.
 
Such alternative approaches to a study of destabilized materiality ask that we attend to the ways cultural objects can go queer as much as they can go normal. The question at hand, then, is how we best apply these material deviations to material encounters beyond non-human sites such as window frames and factories where objects “have left the realm of human control” (Edensor, “Waste Matter” 321).³ Thus I extract from Brown, Frow, Plotz, and Edensor an inchoate theory of non-normative material relations, one that has emerged here and there by scholars in and around material culture studies as they chart what happens when objects cause trouble, act inappropriately, break down, or become incoherent.
 
Yet while I give equal weight to these disorderly moments of material culture studies in my rehearsals of the field, it is important to remember that the discipline’s methodological bent does not typically promote non-normativity as a primary focus. Queer studies, however, does, and by advocating a turn to thinking deeper about the non-normativity of material relations, I invoke a keyword from a discipline which has developed one of the sharpest accounts of this term to date. Queer studies presents fine-tuned models for further considering the social deviations of material relations, and so I pay a visit to this field in order to illustrate how the theories of material destabilization we have traced can also sponsor a queer theory of material dissidence.
 

II.

 
While it may seem unexpected to turn to queer studies to enhance material culture studies (“Isn’t that field usually about sex?” one might wonder with good cause), we have only to recall some claims made by a classic theory of material culture—Jean Baudrillard’s 1968 The System of Objects—to begin to get a better sense of a potential overlap. In this influential text, Baudrillard makes a striking observation: material relations are perverted. In a detailed analysis of collecting things, he asks that we “grant that our everyday objects are in fact objects of a passion” (85). He then suggests that there is a “manifest connection between collecting and sexuality” (87), and that when this connection takes on the form of a fetish, “the possession of objects and the passion for them is, shall we say, a tempered mode of sexual perversion” (99). Baudrillard’s theoretical claims for pathological material relations have been confirmed by more popular accounts of eroticized collecting, which find that “such things are related to sex, dirt, feces, violence, and those aspects of life that are barred from the confines of polite discourse” (Akhtar 37).
 
While these takes on relations with objects reinforce a normal/pathological binary, there have been moments in queer studies that depathologize the queerness of material collection and create a space for non-normativity that mirrors certain efforts in material culture studies. Such theorizations of a critical material perversity markedly differ from moralizing accounts of paraphilia (a pseudo-scientific term that describes psychosexual pathology such as erotic relations with inanimate objects) or standardizing takes on sexual fetishism (in classical psychoanalysis: the erotic displacement of a male child’s unconscious recognition that his mother does not have a penis; more generally, the libidinal overinvestment in non-genital sexual objects). In his discussion of recent gay male sexual practices such as barebacking, for instance, Tim Dean finds that “when an ordinary or undervalued object—one thinks, for example, of a used jockstrap or dirty underwear—is transvalued and made precious, we glimpse the extraordinary power of fetishism to destabilize cultural hierarchies” (149). And in her promotion of reparative acts of queerness, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has theorized the “recognitions, pleasures, and discoveries” inherent in campy lesbian and gay drag performances (3), which she describes as a pleasurable “‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products” (28). Joined by complementary investigations into children’s toys, lubricant, and videotape, these queer theories approach the non-normative use of objects as an erotically creative act that allows queers to cultivate and sustain novel material relations.⁴
 
In keeping with queer theory’s ongoing attempts to expand its horizons and interrogate “social conventions and orthodoxies in general” (Ahmed 78), other scholars widen this framework of object encounters to extend beyond LBGT identities. While it begins with an analysis of non-normative sexual desire, Jennifer Terry’s recent account of objectùm-sexuality—”a political and cultural formation of people who declare their sexual orientation and love toward objects”—goes further to address how this materialized desire reveals “regulatory mechanisms [that] are deployed to disallow or to disavow certain human attachments to objects, and to promote others” (34, 61). Terry’s sympathetic take on individuals whose sexual object choices are monuments such as the Berlin Wall leads her to consider how material object conduct in general can be queered across late modern cultures. “How,” she asks, “are proper objects being sorted from improper objects in the context of societies where commodification, possessive property relations, public policing, and technoscientific creativity are bound up with investments in security?” (70).
 
This is a smart question, and one akin to those asked by Sara Ahmed in an expansive phenomenology that parallels thing theory. As she traces “a queer phenomenology [that] might start, perhaps, by redirecting our attention toward different objects, those that are ‘less proximate’ or even those that deviate or are deviant” (3), Ahmed presents a queer reading of material culture rife with implications for broader analyses of aberrant stuff.⁵ In an extended theory of tables, she ruminates on “queer objects” to consider “the relation between the notion of queer and the disorientation of objects” (90, 160-61). She finds that “to make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things” (161), a disorientation that complements and enriches thing theory’s focus on material destabilization. In a searching analysis, she asks that we “rethink how disorientation might begin with the strangeness of familiar objects” (162), and she contends that “things become queer precisely given how bodies are touched by objects” (162-63). Hence Ahmed moves beyond—but doesn’t lose sight of—sexual cultures to argue that queerness “becomes a matter of how things appear, how they gather, how they perform, to create the edges of spaces and worlds” (167).
 
To my mind, this is a productive inquiry that allows us to further chart the dissidence of non-corporeal material objects, or what we might—tweaking Douglas and Isherwood—refer to as the queer world of goods. As scholars such as Dean, Sedgwick, Terry, and Ahmed track social orders of normalization and deviance that apply to both eroticized persons and things, their respective insights into queer objecthood let us consider materializations that exceed sexualized bodies and their object choices—the queer stuff that troubles the wide-ranging classifications of goods across late modern societies. We are now in a stronger position to bridge the material distortions featured in strands of material culture studies with the material aberrations found in strains of queer studies. By blending the insights of these disciplines, we can introduce a queer study of material cultures and advance a theory of material deviance—the critical negotiation of how object usage, object choice, and material conduct pathologizes as well as normalizes individuals as having proper and improper social relations.
 
Such a critical project allows us to survey suspect object choices not only in terms of erotic activity—the “sex products (whips, vibrators, condoms, and dildoes) [that] engender circumspection” (Molotch 104)—but in how object conduct might transgress other normative object cultures. By “object culture,” I reference Brown’s concise definition—”the objects through which a culture constitutes itself, which is to say, too, culture as it is objectified in material forms” (“Objects” 188)—and I offer material deviance as a corollary to his terminology in order to ask how we might think further about the aberrations of cultural object relations. As this keyword supplements material culture studies to reconsider the realm of the abject, it likewise deepens queer studies’ concerns with material attachments, world-making through things, and bonding via possessions—the ways, according to Ahmed, that bodies are “touched” by objects (163). A theory of material deviance thus expands our definition of queer relations of objects beyond limiting diagnoses of psychopathology featured in texts such as The System of Objects. It lets us concentrate further on the perverse subject-object relations that disorient, destabilize, circumvent, and reimagine what counts for polite material usage.
 
Like many forays into queer studies and material culture studies, this concept of material deviance is meant to be non-programmatic and interdisciplinary as it facilitates inquiry into material nonconformity. How, we might consider, does non-normative object conduct type individuals as reprobate, and how do these subjects rebuke or absorb these regulatory norms? What is the interplay between deviant persons and material deviations, and what does that feel like in different places and at different times? When do possessions function as a destabilizing form of queer relations, and when do they function as a mark of normativity or something in between? Why is one material life commended while another is reviled? Who calls these shots? Even further: what queer pleasures and desires might be found in those “marginal, waste, or leftover products” (Sedgwick 28)? A merger of material culture studies and queer studies better equips us with potential responses to these questions—and allows us to ask them. Thus with a working theory of material deviance in hand, I now return us to the domestic ruins of those purportedly pig-like deviants who overpopulate Hoarders.
 

III.

 
As a primer in queer objecthood, each season of Hoarders is a cavalcade of material perversion. I began this essay with an overview of the show’s narrative formula, and I concentrate more on its framing of subjects and matter to explore how it both normalizes material cultures and queers individuals who sometimes insist that, in the words of Patty, “we basically aside from this have a very normal life” (“Patty”). With her implicit reference to heterosexual marriage and motherhood, Patty’s is an interesting claim because it signals a material non-normativity that disturbs the other normalizations structuring her sense of self. She may be straight as an arrow, but when it comes to goods we discover that she’s pretty bent.
 
From its start Hoarders imposes a mark of material deviance on its subjects even as it strives to box them into ordinary object life by the sixty minute mark. The title sequence lays groundwork for the pathology-fest to come. Bold white letters appear on a black screen to state that “Compulsive Hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary.” After this frame fades, the next reads: “More than 3 million people are hoarders. These are two of their stories.” These notices are followed by the seemingly benign still image of the exterior of a hoarder’s home or apartment, identified at the bottom of the screen by his or her first name and geographic location, only to be followed with a lurid peek into his or her domestic life. From its first half-minute, the show not-so-tacitly confirms that the object activity to be featured is a material psychopathology mired in social pollution and improper conduct.⁶ This well-worn formula is a standard feature of the A&E cable channel in particular (one of their most-watched shows is the addiction-saturated reality melodrama Intervention) and American cable TV in general (think of the recent spate of programming on The Learning Channel that spotlights titles as Extreme Couponing, My Strange Addiction, Freaky Eaters, and Strange Sex).
 
Soundtracks further enhance this initial setup. After Hoarders presents its authoritative definition of compulsive hoarding, the show makes what stand-up comedian Kathy Griffin, in a send-up of the series during one of her acts, calls a “meep” sound—”the best music sting of any show on TV [that] is so much scarier than Paranormal Activity, Freddy Krueger, any horror movie can ever be” (Griffin). This “meep” is one of Hoarders‘ effective stings, the media term for background music that accentuates a scene’s intensity. It recurs throughout the show, and it instills in viewers a sonic sense of dread at the images before their eyes. Such stings are oftentimes accompanied by a thrash metal sound that accentuates the supposed danger of the hoarder’s possessions, making good on what one featured subject terms “the monster” that she “created in our home” (“Janet”). When the behavioral therapist or the professional organizer arrives on the scene to help the hoarder clean up, however, the soundtrack tellingly shifts to the delicate tune of whimsical chimes.
 
Hoarders‘ sophisticated camera work does more of the same as it too transforms everyday objects and ordinary persons into threatening sights. The show frequently uses overhead shots that pan across the debased objects of a hoarder’s home as well as long shots of his or her botched material culture. Its camera work also borrows a recent technique from the horror film genre as it employs fast forward tracking—a ramp shot —that chases through room after room of goods only to pause with a swooshing sound and freeze-frame on what appears to be the direst room of the house. Complementing these lightning-quick shots are slow-motion pans that linger over a material sea of inappropriately accumulated objects. And if children are in the picture, there are typically extreme close-ups of the child’s room as well as ominous pictures of an empty playground tire swing—a symbol of normal domesticity run amok. To return to Patty: we see Hoarders‘ title card revelation that the cops took away her children because she overstuffed their house; followed by an exterior image of her middle-class home; followed by its packed interior; followed by framed photographs of her family resting on their fireplace mantle; followed by a bleak winterscape of an empty rubber tire swinging from a large tree. Here abject piles of material signal abject personhood as the show’s camera angles further corner subjects into the problematic framework of pathological non-normativity.
 
Behavioral therapists obscure potential ways of understanding these individuals both by diagnosing their subjects with mental disorders and attempting to assimilate them within univocal understandings of object relations. Each episode showcases a revolving door of mental health professionals who make extended house calls such as Robin Zasio, an affiliate with The Anxiety Treatment Center in Sacramento, California, and it appears as if their primary function is to categorize, classify, legitimize, and scorn subjects as abject hoarders. Zasio to one recalcitrant accumulator whose overgrown collections of beer cans and Ukrainian Easter eggs are worrying some of his friends: “He is not recognizing that he is a compulsive hoarder. He is really holding on to the way in which he is viewing himself” (“Bob and Richard”). And her assessment of Janet: “Clearly an overvaluing of the smallest of things that most people could just throw away without any thought” (“Janet and Christina”).
 
Other on-call therapists do likewise. David Tolin, director of the Anxiety Disorders Center of the Institute for Living in Hartford, Connecticut, cautions Bill from Massachusetts that “recycling is fantastic. Hoarding is not so fantastic. There is a fine line here as long as we can make sure that you stay on this side of that line” (“Patty”). And after her conversations with another psychologist from the Hoarders stable, Julie from Scottsdale, Arizona confesses: “I had never heard the word hoarder until two days ago. Do I believe I am now? Yes. I am disgusted? It almost makes me want to throw up. It’s sickening” (“Julie”). Such interpellations into the “sickening” slur of “the word hoarder” are hastened by these therapists, who provide an “official” diagnosis that organizes the individual into a material-minded psychopathology and forcefully push their subjects into a standardized object relation. The acme of normative material behavior, the therapist comes to symbolize and to advocate for a material and psychic ordering that is contrasted to the hoarder’s improper object conduct. Curiously, while the episode’s hoarders are always featured in their sensationalized personal environments when they talk to the camera for an interview, the therapists are typically featured in front of a crisp blank screen with white light shining behind them.
 
All of these stings, fast forward frames, dead-certain diagnoses, and off-white backgrounds represent the hoarder as a material queer whose deviance can be cleaned up with the right DSM category (and haul-away dumpster), but I also have to admit that part of the perverse pleasure of this often depressing show lies in witnessing its subjects try to exceed the normalizing material impositions of the series. As I note in my introduction, many don’t take lightly to the diagnosis, and two previously unmentioned biographies support this thesis: Jill from Milwaukee and Paul from Mobile, Alabama. The former collects copious amounts of foodstuffs, the latter scrap metals, and both wreak no small amount of havoc on the Hoarders formula that I detailed.
 
Jill’s episode makes a complete mess of what scholars refer to as domestic material culture—the kitchen appliances, sinks, refrigerators, and ample foodstuffs that fill up her living spaces. When Hoarders features her rental home, cameras emphasize cats running rampant, fly strips more fly than strip, piled-high countertops, and overflowing shelves, and show close-ups of extreme freezer mold. There is also the obligatory slow motion pan that ends at the somewhat unintelligible contents of her basement refrigerator. An epic fail at housekeeping, Jill is pretty nonchalant about all of this. “I’ve been a messy person all my life,” she states. “I hoard food” (“Jennifer and Ron/Jill”). She also casually explains that “I use duct tape to close the freezer door sometimes when I’ve got too many things in there,” and she affirms that “I believe that if things have been kept cold and they’re not puffed up then they are fine.” Though she does later admit, after coaching, that “the mess that I live in now has reached a critical mass,” she nevertheless resists throwing out the eggs, the jars of green olives, the ground buffalo meat, and other semi-refrigerated goods whose expiration dates have long since passed.
 
Jill’s negotiation of the show’s discourses comes to a head over a rotting pumpkin, an object whose cultural cross-purposes include seasonal bric-a-brac, Halloween showpiece, and domestic floor covering (Native Americans once dried and braided them into mats). Jill seems to have bypassed these traditional object uses. Noting later that Jill is “pretty sick,” her sister says that “the food in Jill’s house is really scary because it is everywhere. I went into her home and I was shocked. I was just shocked.” Detailing his mother’s propensities (and acknowledging that “she is a really good cook”), her son Aiden tells the camera that “she gets pumpkins from the church sometimes so that she can make pumpkin pies.” Jill, however, has a different take. When asked to discard the decomposed pumpkin, she treats it like a treasure and offers it a requiem: “It was a very nice pumpkin when it was fresh,” she reminisces. Once the clean-up starts, she states that “it was a beauty when it was alive. I enjoyed you while you were here. Thank you. Good-bye.” After these last rites, a member of the crew assigned to her home attempts to throw it out, and Jill momentarily halts the process. “Let me just look and see if there are a few seeds in here . . . because this is an odd pumpkin. I’ve never seen one quite like this before, and if I can grow some that would be neat.” As opposed to seeing her relation to the putrid squash as a sign of mental illness, she instead approaches the supposedly “odd” thing as a wide-eyed seed keeper.
 
To restate this last point: Jill’s embrace of queer materiality refutes the normative object relations that surround her. When her son mentions that she receives the pumpkins from “her church” so that she can “make pumpkin pies,” Aiden alludes to the traditional American holiday of Thanksgiving and the material cultures that support this celebratory occasion—one typically aimed at social (if often passive-aggressive) bonding among family, friends, and religious groups. Jill, however, ruins the promise of this fall festivity and destabilizes the object’s standard use. While a pumpkin is traditionally meant to uphold the normative order of things when turned into a pie, she makes rotten the world of goods that the squash anchors. Her “‘over’-attachment” to this “leftover” product—to cite Sedgwick again—disorients proper subject-object relations, and she unexpectedly becomes a proponent of queer thing theory as she rattles the object’s cultural identities (28).
 
While it’s unclear to me if Jill registers that her pumpkin participates in the long-running material history of the use of foodstuffs to cement social bonds, I nevertheless emphasize that her queer object relations do not cultivate cultural or family memories. This unsettles her relatives and her assigned therapist, who tells the camera that “You have to have a certain amount of denial to allow this kind of problem to build up.” And later: “Clutter is the symptom, but hoarding is the disease.” And later to Jill: “Are your perceptions of food completely accurate? Or might there be something irrational?” And later: “Something is off. Your old way of doing things, your old way of thinking [is] self-destructive as hell.” But Jill remains fairly incorrigible from the start of her episode to its finish. She turns her spoiled food into personal treasures—a repeated material offense and an unruly example of what Edensor deems those “fortuitous combinations which interrupt normative meanings” (“Waste Matter” 323). Jill, in fact, seems to be in a fleeting objectùm-sexual relationship with her pumpkin as she takes deep material pleasure in her rotted object world. She lovingly insists that her fruit is a thing of beauty, and she emphasizes her personal enjoyment rather than the supposedly hellish self-destruction of her way of doing things. Refusing to admit to self-harm, she approaches the pumpkin in a reparative light and insists that it was very nice—an old flame with which to part ways.
 
Just as Jill tries to depathologize herself and her material relations, so too does “Paul Hamman from Mobile” (actually Semmes, Alabama, a small town outside the southern port city). Similar failures of standard material relations structure his two-acre junkyard-cum-front lawn—an Americanized-version of Edensor’s post-industrial ruins that Paul has filled with “ninety cars, forty to fifty refrigerators,” office signs, fans, appliances, computers, toilets, rubber tires, and a fishing boat (“Paul/Missy and Alex”). Hoarders informs us that Mobile County has given Paul one week to dispose of these goods or he faces ninety days in jail (he previously did five in the slammer). The show also notes that “Paul has been cited by Mobile County for criminal littering,” and it presents the image of a jail door closing shut as an omen of things to come.
 
Yet only on Hoarders does Paul become a hoarder. Before and even after the show’s September 28, 2009 air date, local television accounts described Paul as a “junkman” (Craig) or as a “King of Junk” (Burch), as notorious for wearing long underwear to his sentencing as he was for queer object conduct. Producers from the show discovered these media reports, contacted Paul and his family, recorded the supposed material disarray scattered across his lot, and made his episode their season finale. While journalistic accounts cast him as eccentric and bemusing, Hoarders framed him in a psychopathological light, and much of Paul’s screen time—like Jill’s—is spent trying to deviate from the material deviance that the show foists upon him. He first plays into its formula: “Part of my problem is when I did start collecting stuff I didn’t want to get rid of it.” He then tweaks the difference between an irrational hoard of objects and a cherished collection: “I’ve been collecting junk for quite a while. I’ve got quite a little bit of everything here—quite a few vehicles, a lot of refrigerators, stoves, used appliances, scrap metal, stuff I’ve collected over the years.” He later parrots the diagnosis but weakens its onus: “I guess hoarding is one of the definitions of what I do. My intentions were [to] haul it off. Make a little money.” He refutes the aberrance of his individual act and defamiliarizes it as a commonplace behavior: “Hoarding is not a bad thing. A lot of people collect stuff. It’s all ‘hoarding’.” And he stresses his upstanding civic life: “I thought I was a law-abiding citizen. Part of my job in the military was enforcing laws and treaties for the United States.” As a local annoyance with a legal violation (criminal littering) transforms into a psychological problem with a mental disease (hoarding), Paul struggles to renegotiate the various registers through which his queer material relations are understood.
 
To be honest he’s not that successful, particularly since exasperated neighbors and puzzled family members appear to side with the County (and with Hoarders) on the social status of his “junk collection.” “It’s just an eyesore to the neighborhood,” complains nearby resident Mary Alice Adams. “Everybody in the neighborhood would like to see it cleaned up.” Another neighbor laments that “I don’t think this subdivision was laid out to have junkyards in it.” His son, Paul, Jr. mostly agrees, though he does acknowledge his father’s perspective: “We look at the yard and it looks like junk and garbage and everything else. But to him it’s personal belongings. It’s his life.” Yet Paul, Jr. still equivocates about the social value of his father’s possessions: “He does recognize there being junk there, but to me I personally think he feels like it’s valuable to him—kind of like . . . you’re rich by possession.”
 
Though his strategies prove ineffective, I stress that Paul nevertheless wrestles with standardizing valuations of his objects (“It’s my property. I’ll do what I want with it”). As he puts up a good fight, he resists an orderly neighborhood, an orderly lawn, orderly civil conduct, and even orderly bargaining. When a bid for his goods comes in at only a “penny a pound,” Paul insists that “I’m not giving my stuff away,” and he throws a temper-tantrum over some aluminum cans. Faced with the daunting prospect that his things are economically and culturally almost valueless, he becomes enraged and, as a title card notes, “the process comes to a halt.” Rather than “rich by possession,” he feels impoverished by the demands of material normalization.
 
There is more to Paul’s tale than first meets the eye—and it is a decent way to conclude our case studies of material deviance. Recall that Paul wanted to “make a little money” with his hoard. At the show’s seven-minute mark we discover that these potential funds were intended to support his grandchildren—that his material disobedience also functions as an unregulated savings account. Matt Packston, the professional organizer on duty, informs viewers that “this is why Paul has collected all of this stuff. In his mind it was savings for his grandkids.” Of course I must admit that Paul appeals to a sentimental heteronormativity with this rationale, and he appears to confirm Lee Edelman’s influential theses on the cultural importance of the child.
 
Yet while Paul and his stuff seem to substantiate normative sexual and gender relations, his queer junk may also paradoxically disrupt traditional family values buttressed by possessive property. For starters, he appears to love his metal haul as much as he loves his grandchildren, and it’s not so obvious that he’s willing to give up his stash for more leisure time with his kin (he did, after all, go to jail for refusing to clean up the lot). We likewise learn that Paul introduced his grandchildren to the material pleasures of excessive collecting: he finds enjoyment in his stockpiles and wants to pass along this criminal delight. Paul, Jr. tells us that every Sunday his father would take his grandchildren “dumpster hopping. They enjoy it. They enjoy helping their grandpappy do anything they can.” We then witness one of his grandchildren blithely hauling metals. Much like Jill and her pumpkin, they too turn everyday things into queer goods as they make “precious”—to return us to Dean’s claims for undervalued objects—a world of outlandish material that disorients the locals of Semmes (149).
 
A closing shot of Paul’s grandchildren playing side-by-side with a metal bowl, a green plastic bucket, and other toys bookends this moment, and it too calls into question any easy material normalizations. It turns out that we’ve seen some of these things before when Hoarders first featured Paul’s kin playing on his crime scene, and we may have even glimpsed more of their junkyard goods when a camera angle earlier scanned some stuff resting on one of Paul’s automatic dryers. But this final shot begs a lingering question: are these kids playing with culturally stabilizing toys or have they yet again turned granddad’s deviant scraps into fun time? It’s difficult to ascertain an answer, but I emphasize that rather than being terrorized by the King of Junk’s stuff, his grandkids improperly relish fooling around with Paul’s queer litter. They treat his “eyesore” like a playground sandbox and become what Katherine Bond Stockton characterizes as queer children who may not necessarily advance straight futurity (Queer Child). In so doing Paul’s episode suggests something that Hoarders‘ framing never really pauses to consider: some people love hanging out with other people’s deviant stuff, and as much as these aberrant items disturb the world of goods, they also foster wasted spaces—”edges,” according to Ahmed’s queer phenomenology—for desire to flourish with appliances (and pencils, and nail polish, and beer cans, and hand-painted eastern European eggs) (167).
 
As I hinted in my overview of the show’s framing devices, these material relationships may also include the viewer watching Hoarders on DVR, or on an iPad, or, as I myself did, on DVD. Many, no doubt, find this show a gross-out and tune in for a glimpse of material freaks. Yet others may take a cue from the observed pleasures of a hoarder’s things and relish how normalizing depictions of inanimate goods might hint at a surprising form of queer object world making. To return to Berlant and Warner, mentioned at the beginning of this essay: the show’s queer receptions can’t be anticipated in advance by its producers, and as much as it standardizes its subject matter, it also records the material treasures to be found in perverse object worlds across Alabama, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. This may explain my own pleasure in watching these episodes, and perhaps some of the two million viewers who also tune in week after week. Though Hoarders can be a downer, steeped in negative affects described by scholars such as Heather Love, Judith Halberstam, and others, it also suggests something hopeful: there are countless ways to inhabit a non-normative material life.⁷ As much as these sometimes depressing case studies want to be a cautionary tale, the show may function as an inspirational model. A “meep” sound can alarm but it also can beckon.
 
Still, as two out of the more than three million supposedly out there, neither Jill nor Paul enhances the social orderings of their respective material worlds, and their individual episodes invite rather than expel threatening forms of social vertigo that goods are often thought to stave off. We have come a long way from the material promises of cultural stability and communal vivification evoked earlier, as the queer object relations of Hoarders challenges these promises with such provocative images as a putrid holiday dessert and two children carting illegal aluminum. In presenting these counterexamples I’ve tried to reconfirm Bill Brown’s inaugural insight that there is “something perverse, if not archly insistent, about complicating things with theory” (“Thing Theory” 1). In his follow-up sentence to this claim, Brown wonders if “we really need anything like thing theory the way we need narrative theory or cultural theory, queer theory or discourse theory?” (“Thing Theory” 1). In presenting a theoretical model for illuminating how people repudiate standardized versions of material life, and how they take some satisfaction in accumulating alternatives, this essay has also argued that queer studies and material culture studies can learn much from each other.
 
Personhood, we know all too well at this point, can be non-normative in ways both ravaging and sustaining; hoarding is but one cultural arena in which objecthood does likewise. There are others. We have only to mull over the richness of queer material relations to be found in bodily modification, keying cars, biting nails, collecting toothpaste, competitive eating, collecting twine, improper recycling, dumpster hopping, and backyard burning—not to mention old standbys like fetishism—to get a quick sense of the extraordinary object attachments in our present moment. With their aberrant material conduct, individuals such as Jill and Paul join these motley activities. Intentionally or not, they destabilize possessions and propel theories of improper object usage into something that approaches an enjoyable if fraught everyday praxis. They remind us that people have been doing queer things for some time now, and that our well-honed theories should appropriately account for all of this inappropriate stuff.
 

Barack Obama’s place in the pantheon of American rhetoric was secure the moment he finished what has come to be called “the race speech.” Pundits compared him to King and to Lincoln even more freely than usual; over a million viewers watched it online in a day; newspapers reprinted the transcript; even rivals conceded its rhetorical brilliance.¹ Alongside such praise, however, ran a critique of the way Obama treated the subjects of his speech: dozens of commentators accused the candidate of throwing his grandmother, the Reverend Wright, and the nation itself “under the bus.” In this reading, the speech was little more than a ruthless bid for political self-preservation, and it wasn’t only Obama’s political opponents who took this view. Although arch-conservatives like Ann Coulter were among those who deployed the violent metaphor (“Throw Grandma Under the Bus” headlined her column the day following the speech), it was Houston Baker Jr. who offered perhaps the most pointed version of it: “In brief, Obama’s speech was a pandering disaster that threw, once again, his pastor under the bus.”² Though the victims of the figurative bus vary, the imagery is consistent. In fact, the phrase was ubiquitous in the months following the speech, prompting one columnist to suggest that it was “getting crowded under Obama’s bus” (Moran).³ Reactions were distinct and extreme enough that media columnist Howard Kurtz wondered “whether these pundits were watching the same speech.”⁴
 
This question is worth considering in earnest, for the exigency of the address demands at least two competing trajectories: on the one hand, Obama pointed beyond what he calls a “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years,” requiring him to interrogate deep assumptions beneath American identity politics. On the other, as a campaign speech, the occasion called for the kind of traditional, reassuring language that might ease the minds of voters made anxious by the racially-charged debate surrounding the infamous sound bites from Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons at Trinity United Methodist Church. In simultaneously challenging and reassuring listeners about race in the United States, the language splits the speech between traditional liberal discourse and tropes that undermine the most fundamental tenets of that discourse. It is the kind of aporetic moment that Emmanuel Levinas theorizes as constituting the subject: the speech reenacts the encounter that founds subjectivity by calling it into question; it is a moment characterized not by the reciprocity and equality imagined in the liberal social contract, but rather, by surplus, asymmetry, and aporia.
 
Far from shedding the vocabulary of liberal political thought, Obama frames his approach using familiar figures of identity politics and liberal universalism: repeated calls for unity are among the most obvious of such moments. The assertion that “we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren,” rests on both an identity-based model of subjectivity and a progressive view of history. When “we” come together to move toward that better future, in this mode, we do so as autonomous individuals who remain defined by our ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity. Thus, as Obama calls for the nation to work together to solve “problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian,” it is understood that people will do so as subjects who are, precisely, black or white or Latino or Asian. Reading the speech exclusively in this mode gives one the sense that, as one journalist suggests, Obama is reassuring voters that racism “does exist. . . but mostly as a memory,” or that “white people” are “off the hook” for past injustices (Hendricks 175; Mansbach 69).
 
Perhaps this is the pandering detected by Baker and others. Indeed, to read the speech in the mode of identity, where repetition is imitative, is to find that it parrots messages of American exceptionalism, that it might be understood as little more than a well-delivered “moment of mimicry,” as Baker calls it. An alternate reading, in which these repetitions are not mimicry but performative iterations, one that considers substitutions, contradictions, and the anachronic treatment of history, reveals the way in which the speech simultaneously deploys and undermines the model of subjectivity to which we are accustomed in American political rhetoric. Read in this way, the subjectivity that critics locate “under the bus” is not so much run over in the speech as it is called into question in a way that Levinas would recognize as profoundly ethical.
 
By constructing subjects that push against conventional assumptions of liberal political rhetoric, the speech invites us to step outside the pragmatist mode of reading that is conventionally applied to Obama’s thought.⁵ The recurring preoccupation with the relation to the other invites a reading that takes into account what Levinas names the face-to-face relation, a metaphysical concern that invisibly but powerfully impacts the social and political relations of any moment. Using this model to comment on such relations is neither simple nor unproblematic, for Levinas has been critiqued alternately for failing to comment on social questions and for his patriarchal theology and Eurocentric orientation. Other scholars, however, have productively linked his thought to questions of social and political power. Jeffrey Nealon builds just such a bridge by theorizing “alterity politics” as a performative alternative to identity politics that addresses the problems of lack and resentment embedded in the latter construction of difference. Nealon’s work reveals how Levinas’s ethics can and do function in political discourse, and Obama’s navigation of the competing rhetorical demands on the occasion of “A More Perfect Union” is a study in the uneasy and generative coexistence of this ethics and liberal political thought. On this level, Obama’s speech—like Nealon’s work on Levinas—reveals liberalism’s incongruities and asks listeners to imagine social relations otherwise.
 

Identity and Alterity

 
The subjectivity theorized by Levinas is paradoxical: its relation to the other at once makes the subject possible and renders autonomy impossible. Any clear separation between subject and object is factitious, because we are infinitely responsible for the other in a double sense: our subjectivity is a response to the other’s call, and as a result, we owe everything, including our identity, to the other. The self that underpins liberal political thought, on the other hand, resides in an ego that not only imagines itself to be sovereign, but operates in an imperialist and procrustean mode, appropriating otherness by comprehending it in terms of the horizon of self, always amputating what is incomprehensible or unassimilable. If I approach others in this mode, “their alterity is thereby reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a possessor” (Levinas, Totality 33; original emphasis). Moreover, because we are responsible to the other, we can never achieve the stability sought in this mode, premised as it is upon a violation of its founding otherness. The completion, the self-identity that we imagine to be essential, the “regulatory ideal of complete subjective freedom,” in Nealon’s words, remains unrealized, so our debt to the other must be understood as a failure of independence (7). To be sure, Levinas’s reimagined view of subjectivity is not without violence: to be called into subjectivity is, he insists, a traumatic event characterized by an imbalance of power; I become hostage to the other. The difference, for him, is that I am no longer striving for autonomy, and thus intersubjectivity is not failure. The subject is other than whole not because of a lack, but because of a surplus—it exceeds the bounds of the said and of the categories by which identities must be defined. In the realm of the performative and variable saying, a subject can never be a simple, self-identical, bounded entity. Obama’s language points toward this kind of subjectivity when he asserts that “this nation is more than the sum of its parts” (my emphasis).
 
Surplus, an inevitable aspect of subjectivity from a Levinasian perspective, constitutes a failure for the conventional liberal subject. Nealon calls it an “excess-that-is-lack,” one that prevents the subject from achieving self-identical wholeness, a condition for which s/he blames the other (13). The ensuing Nietzschean resentment renders identity politics an “inevitable social and political failure,” as in the case of the sometimes hysterical racially-charged rhetoric that prompted Obama’s speech (Nealon 4; original emphasis). Obama characterizes it as part of a “a racial stalemate,” implying that the way in which Americans have approached race in the United States has not only failed to bridge divides, it has kept American society from making any movement at all. It has, to paraphrase his own metaphor, blocked our “path to understanding.” This is a failure of identity politics that is made inevitable by the very assumption that founds such a politics: subjects who are defined in terms of identity categories are forced to approach the other in a way that attempts the impossible task of containing his or her alterity, of violently reducing his or her otherness to a “subset of the same,” a homogenous category that is defined in relation to a normative center. This identity-based approach to difference is what has characterized the dominant conversation on race, as Obama himself contends: “We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news.” The alternative suggested by Obama is in the same Levinasian vein as Nealon’s: “an ethical alterity politics that considers identity as beholden and responsive first and foremost to the other” (Nealon 2; original emphasis).
 
This politics shifts its focus away from an ontological attempt to pin identity down and towards a focus on the ethical effects and exigencies produced by difference. Nealon asserts that:
 

The stake of the subject and its ethical force remains a question of effects: the crucial question is not primarily a hermeneutic one, but rather a performative one—not What does it mean? but rather What can it do, how can it respond (otherwise)?

(170)

Such a shift from what something means to what it can do and, importantly, how it responds is one way of understanding Obama’s treatment of race and racism in the speech through Levinasian responsibility. He doesn’t ignore questions of hermeneutics or ontology, insisting that white Americans must acknowledge that oppression “does not just exist in the minds of black people” and “that the legacy of discrimination—and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past—are real and must be addressed.” In the last phrase, Obama plants one foot in identity before stepping outside of it: he asserts that discrimination is real to begin with, answering the need for social recognition that lies beneath identity politics. However, by adding that “it must be addressed. . . not just with words but with deeds,” he figures discrimination not merely as a fact but as a call that demands a response, one that makes us responsible—an echo of the face-to-face encounter that founds the subject. Such an encounter will recur in the speech, as I will address below, as the originary moment of national subjectivity.

 
Obama’s pragmatic concern with effects is characteristic: asserting that there is anger at the root of Reverend Wright’s most controversial comments as well as the explosive public reaction to them, he reminds us that such anger “is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems.” This critique of Wright takes little account of the content or meaning of Wright’s remarks; the first question at issue is not whether anger like Wright’s is valid, but whether its effects are desirable, whether it serves to alleviate oppression. He acknowledges “a similar anger. . . within segments of the white community,” that “they don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.” Critics have read this comparison of black to white anger as a leveling of difference, seeing it as an assertion that the history of overt and deeply-entrenched structural racism is “similar” to hurt feelings about being called “privileged.” Read this way, as a comparison on the level of ontology, it is understandably seen as “disingenuous, even irresponsible,” as pandering to white voters (Mansbach 75). It is worth noting, however, that the speech does not compare these angers on the basis of validity or depth, but rather on the basis of their effects and, most interestingly for my purposes, their shared assumptions about subjectivity. Obama is explicit about the former: white resentment, justified or not, has “helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation.” Its effects are equivalent to those he attributes to Wright’s anger: it obscures one’s vision, spawning (among other things) “talk show hosts and conservative commentators” whose appeals have much the same rhetorical effect as the particularly incendiary comments made by Reverend Wright.
 
Even as the effects of both groups’ feelings are compared, however, the language carefully preserves a distinction between the root feelings. Describing the effects of injustice on Reverend Wright and his generation, Obama uses the word “anger” exclusively. As he focuses on white Americans, what he initially calls “a similar anger” is immediately replaced by “resentment.” In subsequent paragraphs, the comparison is between black anger and white resentment: “Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze.” To read the two as synonyms, as we would have to in order to conclude that Obama levels the difference between the experiences of African Americans and white Americans, is to miss a key distinction between anger and resentment: one is a response to injustice, where the other, resentment, is “anger at the other.” The latter is, in Obama’s logic (and in Nealon’s), rooted in a mistaken view of subjectivity. The mistake is precisely the conventional notion that the subject is finite, autonomous and exhaustible, rather than excessive, intersubjective, and endlessly performed. Ironically, Reverend Wright’s “profound mistake,” according to Obama, is similar to that of resentful white citizens: “He spoke as if our society were static,” mistaking ongoing iteration and revision for repeated failure, a “profoundly distorted view of this country.” Among the distortions that follow is that “opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.”
 
Obama offers a corrective to the zero-sum formulation with another lexical shift: rather than rejecting it outright, he reminds us that “most working-and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” and he performs a substitution: “their experience is the immigrant experience.” By replacing an identity category, race, with “immigrant experience,” he offers what Deleuze and Guattari might call a line of flight for the “white” subject (or, at least, for the working-and-middle-class white American subject), freeing it from the totalizing category of race. This could justifiably be read as letting white Americans off the hook, of course, and it is also yet another pragmatic move away from ontology—shifting focus away from what a people putatively are (white) and toward what they have done (immigrated). Running alongside and perhaps counter to that, however, is a Levinasian current. Where “white” functions, like other racial categories, to efface difference and create the illusion of a homogenous group, “immigrant experience” highlights what had been concealed: the trace of the uncontainable saying within the said that characterizes Levinasian subjectivity. In other words, the phrase points to far more than it can actually hold: a signified that is more vast and varied than any signifier could contain. “Immigrant” is a more obviously diverse group than “white Americans,” and “experience” points to an infinite singularity that resists being totalized. The phrase gestures towards the radical unknowability of every “other” we might approach—though still functioning within the realm of the said, as all utterances must, it does so more transparently. A move towards the saying, Levinas asserts, “absolves me of all identity” and in doing so, serves as “a de-posing or de-situating of the ego,” creating a space for alterity (Otherwise 50). To thus unseat the stable, comprehensible identity imagined to be at the core of the ego points to a profoundly unstable subjectivity that, for Levinas, makes the ethical subject possible. For Obama, it offers an alternative to the zero-sum game. “This nation is more than the sum of its parts,” not a totality in which gains in one area must be offset by losses in another; it is no known quantity. Because the national subject is characterized by surplus, “your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams.” Ethics is possible precisely because the subject—whether the national subject or the individual—is not reducible to categories or sums. In this face-to-face relation, we cannot know the other, yet it calls us to respond, and for that we are enduringly indebted.
 

The Individual Subject

 
Obama’s reading of the national motto offers another glimpse of the unruly subject lurking in his speech—even in the most seemingly conventional trope. “Out of many, we are truly one,” he offers, later referring to this as the “message of unity” that underpins the campaign. His invocation of E Pluribus Unum points most immediately, of course, to the Enlightenment era in which it was first attached to the seal of the United States, and thus evokes precisely the self-identical, autonomous subject I am claiming he points away from. At the same time, the possibility of such a subject is undermined from the start; the unum that comes out of the pluribus is excessive, “more than the sum of its parts.” It conjures up the image of a seamless unity—as perhaps the founders envisioned—even as it evokes a subject that is founded in multiplicity, enacting contradictions and exceeding its own boundaries. Viewed against the expectations of liberal subjectivity, this is a flaw or a failure—but Obama’s language figures contradiction instead as a necessary and inevitable part of subjectivity. In doing so, listeners are reassured that we Americans are all one, even as Obama presents individual subjects, one after another, that are multiple and contradictory.
 
He begins with himself, with origins that are irreducibly multiple: “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,” reminding listeners that his experience includes both elite schools and an impoverished nation. He presents himself as a subject that is continually in flux, shaped as it is by experiences and encounters like the one he describes upon joining the Trinity congregation: “I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories, of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story.” The boundaries between subjects—”ordinary black people,” Biblical figures, and Obama himself—dissolve as their stories “merge,” and his identity shifts through religious conversion.⁶ This fluid identity and its diffuse genealogies defy categorization in ways that test the limits of discourse—as he points out, “At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either ‘too black’ or ‘not black enough.’” To some, his current affluence and Harvard education make him elite, while others construct him as the son of a single mother, a former community organizer with roots in the working class. The way in which Obama’s identity continues to be raised as a question defies reason and evidence; perhaps these intractable doubts offer a glimpse into the effects of an identity that very obviously exceeds categories of race, nationality and class. If demands for his birth certificate gained more media coverage than they seemed to merit, might this be understood as a compulsion to pin down his unruly identity in order to rescue conventional assumptions about subjectivity? We might also consider such intrusive questions as echoes of the face-to-face encounter, which Levinas locates prior to society and history, at a pre-conscious level where “a calling into question of the same . . . is brought about by the other” (Totality 43). One’s identity is called into question even before one’s subjectivity is formed, and the question is never off the table: “The I is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself” (Levinas, Totality 36). In this view, questions could never be fully answered—not even by a long-form birth certificate—yet this does not indicate a failure or a fraud. This aggressive interrogation inaugurates the subject, again and again, for it is our response that constitutes our very subjectivity.⁷ The debt we owe to the questioner is “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity” (Levinas, Ethics 95).
 
It is this same kind of indebted, intersubjective, and contradictory subjectivity that structures Obama’s descriptions of his grandmother and Reverend Wright. The former is a subject not in spite of, but because of the fact that she lovingly raised a mixed-race child even as she “uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made [Obama] cringe.” She is indebted to both her grandson and the people she feared. The same is true of Reverend Wright; he too “contains within him the contradictions . . . of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.” It is his community, described in the previous paragraphs as encompassing “the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger,” that makes Wright the subject that he is. He, too, is the overflowing “one” rendered “out of many.” Obama’s E Pluribus Unum theme invites us to consider others as the origin of American subjectivities without straying outside the bounds of safe political tropes. It hints at, without fully enacting, a shift from a worldview that is centered on the stable self to an alterity ethics in which indebtedness and contradiction are irreversible—they are not a symptom or injury, but a foundation that makes justice possible.
 
The speech concludes with a disconcertingly simple story about a campaign organizer named Ashley, a young white woman working for the campaign in a primarily African American community. The story of Ashley’s effort to support her struggling mother appears at first to be more heartwarming platitude than profound meditation on otherness. As the kind of pseudo-personal story that politicians roll out by the dozen, it is a repetition of a familiar trope. In this repetition, however, there is a difference worth noting. The story ultimately points us not toward the same—not toward Ashley as a Joe-Sixpack kind of stand-in for the listener—but toward that call of the other that Levinas would identify as the originary experience of subjectivity. At a roundtable she organized, we’re told, participants shared their reasons for attending. They named specific social issues, for the most part, except for the last speaker:
 

Finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. . . . He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
 
“I’m here because of Ashley.” Now, by itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough.

Ashley’s invitation to the round table is only the most literal reenactment of the Levinasian cal l of the other; when it is cited and repeated by Obama, it functions on other levels. “I am here because of Ashley”: Because of the other, I am here. Obama repeats the phrase, and as this is a speech, lacking textual markers such as quotation marks, it is unclear to the listener whether he is again quoting the man’s words, or whether he is telling us that he himself is also “here” because of Ashley. The phrase becomes more than the recognition of a specific other named Ashley. To paraphrase Levinas’s fitting formulation, it describes a moment during which the subject’s spontaneity is called into question by the presence of the other (Totality 43). Alterity is not a choice freely made, for if we are to imagine that we can choose it, we are still starting with “I.” It is instead an involuntary response to the call of the other. I am here not of my own volition; I owe my subjecthood to the other. Obama’s phrase, doubly highlighted by repetition and by a simplicity that contrasts with the syntax of the bulk of the speech, bears a trace of the radically unsignifiable encounter that underpins consciousness (Levinas, Otherwise 159). For both Obama and Levinas it is an originary moment: it is “where the perfection begins” (Obama, “A More Perfect Union”); it is the “structure upon which all the other structures rest” (Levinas, Totality 79). In establishing it as a kind of origin, the relationship between Ashley and the nameless man unhinges time—the “perfection” called for by the constitution “begins” in a twenty-first century encounter. Obama situates this moment not as an effect of the Declaration of Independence but as an anachronic condition of its possibility. History, here, is no longer the story of linear progress—and the nation that emerges from it is a subject that is just as contradictory and unruly as the individual.

The National Subject: A more perfect union

 
Where the encounter between Ashley and the nameless man offers insight into the individual subject, Obama reads the Constitution for a view of the national subject, which he invokes by opening with a quote from the Constitution: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” As a sentence that most American children memorize without even trying, the quote teeters on the edge of threadbare cliché. Ultimately, though, it does much more work than it appears to do; the fact that we recognize the phrase is essential to its operation as a (re)iteration of the performative utterance that, in some sense at least, brought this nation into being. Obama tells us that these words “launched” an experiment; they “made real” the Declaration of Independence. As “launch,” the Constitution is originary; as the “making real” of a prior declaration, it is itself a repetition. What happens when those founding words are repeated again, performed again, as they are in Obama’s first line? The logic of performativity insists that each time the Constitution is quoted, it is not merely a repetition of the words written in 1787; it is a singular event in its own right. It is every bit as much an act of nation-building when it is quoted as when it was put on parchment, for the nation that came into being in 1787 was not, as we will be forcefully reminded in the speech, an unambiguous entity already filled with meaning. Obama’s opening gambit is to engage in a bit of nation-building, highlighting the fact that the nation is an effect of such performative responses; that it comprises a process of perfecting that begins in 1787 and in 2008; that it is a chain of effects without origin. If the Constitution’s work was to “make real” a declaration, then the work in repeating it is likewise to make real: to enact, and in so doing, to (re)make reality—to perform American nationhood and to revise it. Obama has set the terms and the stakes of the speech: more than an attempt to mollify critics, it is a response not merely to a particular controversy but to a Levinasian call; it is an enactment, and simultaneously a revision, of the nation itself. In and of itself this is not unique: national subjectivity is rhetorically at stake every time a speaker invokes founding documents. Here, however, the American subject is directed beyond what Levinas would call a totalizing ego towards seeing itself as an ethical subject that, like the rhetor himself, is (and must be) continually called into question. The speech’s opening recitation of history enacts a process by which the national subject is “a being whose existing consists in identifying itself” over and over again.
 
The opening quote promises, and demands, a performance. Obama stops short of completing the sentence: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” He repeats a fragment, an incomplete thought. The phrase operates as a promise in multiple senses: most obviously, it opens the founding document that functions as a promise among citizens. Cited here as an incomplete thought, it also grammatically enacts a promise. Obama opens his speech by doubling the opening promise of the U.S. Constitution. The role of such a “prefacing promise,” as Nealon calls it, varies according to the discourse in which it is framed. In the mode of identity, such promises “are invariably broken because the later materialization of the promised deed will always produce a remainder. The deed will always exceed (and thereby fall short of simply fulfilling) the original promise” (Nealon 13). Approaching the promise from the perspective of performative subjectivity, on the other hand, opens up the “positive logic of the promise”—the one that moves beyond identity’s inevitable lack (or excess-as-lack). Each promise is an act that promises another act (which will, in turn, promise another). It sets in motion a chain of performances, of responses “to the other—for the other” (Derrida, qtd. in Nealon 14). In fact, Obama’s opening fragment doubles that promise: not only does he repeat the promise of the preamble, he also enacts it grammatically by editing it into a sentence fragment. Like the Constitution itself, the quote is unfinished; both promise (and demand) further performance. The effects of such an opening multiply from this point. The first eleven words of the Constitution, reenacted, invoke the ethics and logic of performativity as a response to alterity: they set in motion a chain of promises and actions, ensuring that the American nation will never achieve plenitude of meaning but will be forever reinvented by repeated performances, repeated responses to the others that inhabit “We the people.”
 
The impossibility of plenitude that underpins performative logic is emphasized in the object of the opening phrase: “A more perfect union” is not the same as “a perfect union,” any more than the verb “to perfect” is the same as the adjective “perfect.” The adjective implies completion and stasis; the verb, process and movement. “More” leaves the phrase permanently open (and some would say grammatically fallacious): it is not simply a perfect union, but a more perfect one that we the people seek. It is what we are destined forever to seek, for whatever state of perfection we might reach, the preamble will always ask for “more”; it will repeat, keeping the totality of “perfect” perpetually out of reach. At the same time, the word itself offers a grammatical choice between the adjective that describes a state from which we will always fall short or the verb that describes our ongoing task. Obama consistently uses the verb form; moreover, he announces this choice: “This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” In a politics of identity, we are striving for perfection, and each time we fall short (which is every time) we have failed. Perfecting, by contrast, points to the performative mode of becoming, in which the process is what we are. We “form” the “more perfect union.” It is almost, but not exactly, the American identity—not in the form of a goal or conclusion, but as a perpetually open question. The ethics at work here leaves “the foundation of the subject always in question, always open to another performative call or response” (Nealon 169). The nation’s subjectivity lies in asking repeatedly, how can we perform ourselves as Americans in order to perfect our union? It is more verb than noun, a question rather than an answer. It calls us to the pragmatist process of perfecting our union even as it reminds us that this call is not one to which we can spontaneously assent or independently choose to answer—instead, it is an iteration of the deeply embedded metaphysical encounter with the other that initiates our national consciousness by compelling us to respond.
 
It is in this sense that Levinas asserts that the subject’s spontaneity is challenged by alterity. What appears to be a self-generated, original phenomenon is revealed to be a response or a repetition. In another deceptively simple move immediately after the opening quote, Obama again calls the spontaneity of the nation into question and reveals it to be one effect in a chain, an ongoing performance rather than an entity founded at a single point in time. In the second line of the speech, Obama orients himself by noting that the Philadelphia convention, like the words he has quoted in the first line, took place “Two hundred and twenty one years ago.” There is of course nothing original about rhetorically measuring the distance in time between the present moment and the founding of the nation, about drawing a self-aggrandizing line from the “founding fathers” to oneself. The task of tracing such a line through time is, however, ultimately rendered impossible by the speech, and again we have an opening towards alterity. “Two hundred and twenty one years ago”: It is hard not to recall Lincoln’s “Four score and seven years ago,” another overwhelmingly familiar opening phrase, an allusion that is not likely to be lost on listeners. It is, then, recognizable as a repetition of one moment that itself evokes another: Obama points to the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln points to the Constitutional Convention.⁸ Again we are denied a precise origin and instead directed to a chain of effects, more specifically to three moments in time: March 2008, November 1863, and September 1787. What appears to bolster the myth of the founding fathers-a shared and unitary past in which the “city on a hill” that we still inhabit was spontaneously built—breaks itself apart into three moments, three nation-building performances. The moments are not points along a timeline, though. Instead, they break history apart through what Derrida might call a “citational doubling,” a repetition that splits that which it repeats (“Signature Event Context” 17). At the heart of each of the three texts is the open question of union, always left unresolved. The layered allusion suggests that an undivided, seamless union has never existed: in 1787 the Declaration of Independence was “made real” but left unfinished because of, as Obama will point out, the slavery question; in November 1863, Lincoln repeated the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” even as the civil war raised the question of “whether . . . any nation so conceived . . . can long endure”; in March 2008, Obama repeats the Constitution’s performance as part of the ritual of election, having been forced to address the divisive issue of race in a way no candidate in recent memory has. Just as time splits, so does each nation-building repetition; if we were attempting a linear journey through history, we would, with each repetition, encounter a fork in the road. Our subjectivity as a nation cannot be traced so easily.
 

History Unhinged

There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea.

-Ibsen

 
Obama’s view of history typically falls into the progressive narrative of inevitable improvement that much liberal political thought takes for granted. He characterizes it early in the speech, for example, as a “long march. . . . towards a better future.” However, just as the liberal subject encounters aporia in the rhetoric, so does the U.S. American narrative of progress. The encounter with race, which demands an encounter with slavery, inevitably points to the dilemma at the heart of the nation, a question that both founds and undermines the national subject. In the discourse of Obama’s campaign and presidency, race and slavery are specters—they are ever present but rarely manifested. As he points out, race lurked in the background in the early stages of the campaign, when the public resisted “the temptation to view candidacy through a purely racial lens”; eventually, it came into the foreground as questions about Obama’s race and the role it played in his successes were asked and as the “firestorm” around Reverend Wright precipitated this speech. Turning to Faulkner, Obama suggests that the nation itself is similarly—in fact, far more profoundly—haunted: “‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’” Moreover, as the past is, in fact, present, “we do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country.” As with the opening words of the speech, Obama offers a quote followed by a standard rhetorical move (here, invoking racial injustice by disclaiming the intent to invoke it). And as before, this repetition enacts an important difference.
 
The figure of the past that is not past, a kind of ghost, is a figure of profound otherness —Derrida theorizes it as an alterity that cannot be erased or incorporated into a stable self, for its very existence undermines the notion of a boundary between self and other. The ghost is a “non-present present,” a “being-there of an absent or departed one” (Derrida, Specters 6). Such survival of the past into the present can often be traced back to an omission, which Derrida illustrates with a passage in which Valéry quotes himself, omitting a single sentence. Derrida asks, “Why this omission, the only one?. . . Where did [the name of Marx] go?. . . The name of the one who disappeared must have gotten inscribed someplace else” (Specters 5). Haunting, here, is a recurrence of that which has been omitted, and it is just such a recurrence that destabilizes the subjectivity of the nation in Obama’s speech. In this case, the specter arises from the most glaring omission from the Declaration of Independence: slavery. The paragraph that was famously edited out of Jefferson’s original draft condemned it as a violation of the “most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people.” The final version, of course, makes no mention of slavery, and the Constitution, far from condemning it, codified and arguably enshrined it. The erasure, then, did not secure the issue’s disappearance, as even Jefferson seems to have anticipated in his reflection on the changes made to his draft: “the sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also” (341). What Jefferson did not know, and what Derrida, Obama, and two hundred subsequent years of nationhood would bear out, is that “the name of the one who disappeared must have gotten inscribed someplace else”: that the contradiction of chattel slavery in a nation founded on democratic ideals would turn up insistently, haunting the nation, endlessly calling it into question. In a passage that could just as easily be about slavery in the United States, Derrida describes how the specter of communism haunted Europe to this effect:
 

[I]t does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day, Europe, as if the latter, at a certain moment of its history, had begun to suffer from a certain evil, to let itself be inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted by a foreign guest. Not that that guest is any less a stranger for having always occupied the domesticity of Europe. But there was no inside, there was nothing inside before it.

(Specters 4)

 
In this vein, slavery was never something inflicted upon the nation; this ghost, this haunting other, was always present—its return in Obama’s speech as well as in so many conversations about race in the United States reveals the fact that there is no inside to the national subject from which slavery can be excluded; there is “nothing before it.” This quintessential “other” of American ideals is as much the “self” of the nation as are the founding documents themselves—an insight captured by Toni Morrison in her descriptions of an Africanist presence in the nation’s founding principles: “The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery” (38). Slavery, Morrison suggests, created freedom even as it undermined it, much as the other both inaugurates the self and puts it in question. Slavery, in other words, made the Declaration possible and forever unstable. The “self” of the nation is, like our individual subjectivities, utterly beholden to the other; it will never be spontaneous or self-identical. In his discussion of slavery, Obama calls attention to that familiar contradiction at the heart of the nation, a contradiction that is most often cited as evidence of the nation’s failure to fulfill its promise—an indelible “stain,” as he will initially phrase it. Such a view takes as its baseline the possibility of a nation without such contradictions—the same kind of goal for subjectivity that, being unattainable, guarantees failure and resentment.
 
The speech intervenes in this conundrum with a shift in metaphor across iterations. Early in the speech, Obama claims that the Declaration of Independence was “ultimately unfinished” because “it was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery” (par. 3). The specter of slavery disrupted completion, then; the ghost, as past that will not pass, prevents full presence. It renders time “off its hinges” (Derrida, Specters 77). Obama’s figure of unhinged time here is stalemate: slavery was “a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to . . . leave any final resolution to future generations.” Stalemate functions as an interruption of movement-in-time, a deferral that causes a task in the present to fall behind, or outside, the time that we imagine marching towards future. Alternatively, we might understand stalemate as a kind of excess that disrupts completion, as over-satiety: an excess of meaning that renders a thing impossible to finish or to close. It is a moment in which contradiction cannot be contained in a consensus. In Levinas’s terms it is a moment that reveals the impossibility of enclosing the saying within the said; it bears a trace of the encounter with the wholly other. For Obama, the moment of ratification was a moment of stalemate rather than of completion. If it were a fully present, complete meaning that we were yearning for, the Constitution would have to be considered a failure. If this is not the case, it is because performative becoming is more important than being in that American text: the document is important because it is unfinished. It was not a failure: it was a deferral, a promise, one effect in a long chain. The signers bequeathed the task of a “final resolution to future generations” (Obama, “A More Perfect Union”). This is what allows the document to reach into the future even though, in the past, it became mired in the politics of its slaveholding present. In his reading of the Constitution, Obama figures this lack of full presence not as a lack per se, but as generative force. He describes it as calling “Americans in successive generations . . . to do their part—through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience.” In fact, as he tells us in the following paragraph, it is the very force that generated his own campaign. So this haunted stalemate that prevented full realization of meaning cuts across time, generating (as Obama notes) civil war, civil disobedience, and struggles for civil rights: all disturbances within the civic subjectivity, a chain of effects that highlights a profound alterity within the nation which, in fact, is the subject. How recognizable, after all, would the U.S. be without Gettysburg, Thoreau, King? Viewing the nation as an effect of destabilizing performances and iterations, however, undermines Obama’s first figure of slavery as indelible stain or “original sin.” It is at this point that the metaphor shifts in an important direction.
 
In his first metaphor, slavery is “stain” and “original sin”; both indicate a fixed, unitary, indelible mark. Obama’s use of original sin alludes to a fall away from “original holiness and justice,” as the Catholic catechism phrases it; it suggests humanity’s imperfection or lack. The Bible’s fallen humanity is strikingly similar to the figure of the subject in identity politics: we are constituted as subjects in terms of how far we fall short of what we wish to be—whether what we wish for is original holiness or inclusion in a normative center. If slavery is the United States’s “original sin,” then does its nationhood exist in the gap between the promises of the founding documents and the nation’s actuality? Is American subjectivity one founded upon lack? Perhaps we are back to what I’m claiming we have been pointed away from: the discourse of identity. We are not left in this aporia, though, for the “original sin” metaphor unravels a few paragraphs later when held up against a second metaphor: slavery as “inheritance.” If slavery is an American inheritance, it could be read as a kind of inescapable original sin that dooms Americans to perpetual insufficiency and resentment. Yet this is precisely how Obama characterizes Reverend Wright’s mistaken view, again, “That he spoke as if our society was static.” The inheritance invoked here has more in common with Derrida’s reading of the concept, one that refutes stasis:
 

An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. ‘One must’ means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause—natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret–which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’

(Specters 16)

This inheritance is not indelible stain but ongoing task, a kind of call to responsibility, “never one with itself,” like the Constitution, and like American national subjectivity. In this view, the coexistence of slavery and a proclamation of the inalienable rights of man renders fundamental questions undecidable, but it does not lead inevitably to failure. Multiple, contradictory possibilities constitute an inheritance, just as they do subjectivity. Inheritance in this sense echoes the way Obama gathers the experiences of “ordinary black people” and Biblical heroes into his own subjectivity as discussed above. As in that case, the boundaries between subjects are permeable, if not illusory. The distinction between the inside and the outside of the subject disintegrates in the implications of the metaphor: the oppression that we as Americans grapple with in our history comes from the inside, so from where did the nation “inherit” slavery, if not from itself? Inheritance, as a destabilizing force, calls for and defies interpretation, requiring continual “inhabitation” or performance. It does not guarantee failure but neither does it let the nation “off the hook,” for it is a task, a demand to continue the repetitions that transform, the reinventions of subjectivity that are at the bottom of an ethics of alterity. What Americans have inherited is responsibility, a call for, in Obama’s words, “a union that could and should be perfected over time.”

 
If Americans were to aim for final perfection, for contained identity in the model of Enlightenment subjectivity, then a speech highlighting the haunted nature of American subjectivity, the impossibility of it ever being self-identical indeed throws not just two individuals, but the entire nation under the bus. Yet the language of the speech reveals that the ethic at work here is not one of the blame or betrayal that such a metaphor invokes. While we cannot escape their violence, while we are indeed held hostage by them, the specters that we have inherited do not doom us to perpetual insufficiency; rather, they demand repeated performance, iteration that changes that which it repeats. In doing so, they call the nation into being. Obama’s speech enacts this very process of iteration: it simultaneously deploys liberal political discourse in a safe and instrumentalist way even as it calls into question the fundamental assumptions of that discourse. It is this aporetic performance that opens a space that, as one journalist hypothesizes, “has never been opened before” in mainstream U.S. political discourse (Quinn). In this view, Obama’s performative ethics functions not as a condemnation of shortcomings but as an acknowledgment of the conditions that make justice possible. “It is,” Obama assures us, pointing at once to our past, present, and our future, “where we start.”