"This is classic Alaskan decor. I don't know too many homes without a bear rug or antlers on the wall. Most Alaskan homes have something that brings the outdoors in."
Sarah's attempt to negotiate her own identity as a "real American" first by hunting then by demonstrating that she knows how to handle the animal aesthetically results in a dramatic restriction of Alaskan identity and a bizarre claim about the identity of Alaskans.
 |
| Sarah grapples with the phallus |
Since it is obviously not true that all Alaskans have taxidermy on their walls it follows that there is a set of "real Alaskans" that Sarah belongs to and which, presumably, other residents of the state of Alaska do not. Her essential claim to be a part of the Volk then forces her to exclude a portion of precisely the demographic she identifies as traditional, natural, and of course real. The identification of the real and authentic involves the drastic shrinking of that category. Ultimately this logic would yield no demographic at all, but simply a field of singularities. Her identity and adequacy is thus tensed between an auto-Orientalizing, essentialist narrative of Alaskan and American identity and a logic that isn't productive of collectives, but of singularities that are capable of reversing the moral value of individuality and uniqueness.
"Some people would probably consider Alaskans as having this unique way of decorating our house, you know, because we have a trophy there on the wall. Well, unique maybe to others is the way we talk. Some people think we have an accent. Some people think it's unique that once in a while I make up a word."
"Unique" presumably means unusual or abnormal, but her normalcy is precisely what she's trying to demonstrate. Her thoughts on Alaskan traditional aesthetics are capable existing on a continuum with her individual behavior, the much-contested "refudiate" and whether or not it's a quirky neologism or an inability to speak the national language and thus belong properly to the class of those capable of successfully identifying as American.
 |
| Regular folks as such sit down for a moment of national mediation. |
The contradictory travel narrative where the politician is tensed as a moment of national generality mediating between the authentic inside and the manufactured, political, economic outside is of course an essential part of modern American presidential campaigns. What we demand more than ever today is an impossible identity with the national politician that causes him to prove again and again his concrete identity in such a way that identities get voided of content.
3 comments:
Nice work. My experience of her presidential campaign will no doubt be deeply enriched by the theoretical groundwork you've laid here, hopefully to the point that I will be sufficiently distracted from what I am expecting to be a rather violent urge to self-immolation.
Well done. We should send the link to Andrew Sullivan, the Palinologist-in-chief of the blogosphere, and see if he will link to it.
As a Real Alaskan, I am in the frustrating position of wanting to constantly use the show to track my own experiences for the benefit of people lucky enough to have never set foot in Alaska. There's a beautiful moment when Sarah talks about how many jobs fishing represents for Alaska. In practice, being a bourgeois city-dweller from out of state makes me a significant demographic, but not nearly as significant as the (to borrow Simon Schaffer's designations) Pacific Northwest migrant worker population.
There's tracking hegemony and interpellation and then there's thinking about one's use of identity. It occurs to me that if we construe authenticity (or "reality" in Palin's terms) as bearing the marks of belonging to an essential population, it's no wonder identification fails. There really aren't any concrete SOCIAL universals, only imaginary ideals of belonging. In many ways it's more honest and certainly more prudent to constantly invoke American ideals, values and obviously non-instantiated but always assumed identities like "hard-working Americans" since these don't invite you to authenticate yourself as a member of a non-existent group. It's like Sarah is in the grip of a category mistake: having claimed to have an ideal triangle in her position, she is invited to produce this Platonic form, but all she can show you is more triangles. In other words, as a point of political strategy, don't ever claim to belong to a group. You can see feminism got into this kind of trouble in the 80s when it becomes clear that there are so many different "women" that there's no Woman. This is part of what prompts Haraway to ask us to talk about affiliations instead of identifications. Affiliations are like Latourian alliances. After the fact you may call one "society" or "woman" or "worker" but in their composition they're not forms, demographics or identities.
Post a Comment