Ned OGorman - The Iconoclastic Imagination: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11
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Bloody and fiery spectacles in American public life, from the 1960s to the present, have given us moments of catastrophe that easily answer to the question of where-were-you-when, events that shape our ways of seeing the Cold War and after. Three such iconic catastrophes are the John F. Kennedy assassination, the response by Ronald Reagan to the Challenger disaster, and 9/11. Why are these spectacles so packed with meaning? They are images of destruction, raising the questions for us of where their power comes from, what sort of history might they construct, what sort of world do they destroy. O Gorman approaches each one as an icon of iconoclasm, as an exemplar of fiery demise that gives us a distinct way to imagine social existence in American life. Here is his argument: in the 50 years since the Kennedy assassination, a period that witnessed the rise of neoliberalism, the most powerful way for publics to see America was in the destruction of its representative symbols, or icons, because in such catastrophes we grasp the impossibility of any image adequate to representing America. If neoliberalism the emergence of free market economics in social philosophy and public policy is linked with iconoclasm, that is, if neoliberalism promotes and benefits from the destruction of icons, we are led to reconsider events that seem to rupture a given world (catastrophes), or are beyond representation (the economy). Market ideology moves to a transcendent realm of invisible principles that can escape accountability and command sacrifice. The core arguments are challenging (indeed, iconoclastic), but this book will put a whole new kind of spotlight on neoliberalism and on the status of the image (and visual representation) in American political culture. The results are stunning: richly interwoven philosophical, theological, and rhetorical traditions turn out to be a basis for a complex and innovative approach to Cold War America, political theory, and visual culture studies.
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The Iconoclastic Imagination
The Iconoclastic Imagination
Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11
NED O'GORMAN
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Ned OGorman is associate professor of communication and a Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-31006-0 (cloth)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-31023-7 (paper)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-31037-4 (e-book)
DOI : 10.7208/chicago/9780226310374.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
OGorman, Ned, author.
The iconoclastic imagination : image, catastrophe, and economy in America from the Kennedy assassination to September 11 / Ned OGorman.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-31006-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-31023-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-31037-4 (ebook) 1. Social perceptionUnited States. 2. NeoliberalismUnited States. 3. IconoclasmUnited States. 4. DisastersUnited StatesPublic opinion. 5. Kennedy, John F. (John fitzgerald), 19171963AssassinationPublic opinion. 6. Challenger (Spacecraft)AccidentsPublic opinion. 7. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001Public opinion. I. Title.
E 839.044 2015
302'.12dc23
2015014457
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Linda, an Imago Dei
Why should we assume everything as we imagine it, as we make up our minds to imagine it? A thousand things may happen in reality which elude the subtlest imagination.
FETYUKOVITCH in The Brothers Karamazov
How does one stand
To behold the sublime?
WALLACE STEVENS , The American Sublime
Contents
This book consists of an inquiry into a history, indeed several histories. It is not, I want to stress at the outset, a history in and of itself. I offer no overarching narrative account of its main concern, the neoliberal imaginary. Rather, in the series of essays that follow, I build on historical narratives established by others as well as a range of primary sources as I consider a number of different histories and sketch out several typologies in an inquiry into the significance of neoliberalism as cultural and political discourse in the United States, one that I argue not only offers a positive vision of the unrepresentable but a negative ideology, perhaps even theology, that is iconoclastic. Historically, I locate the neoliberal imaginary at the conjunction of those catastrophic, where-were-you-when? events that have punctuated American life every fifteen years or so since the Kennedy assassination (and even earlier, in Pearl Harbor) and the emergence of free-market economics in social philosophy and public policy. More generally, I argue that the neoliberal imaginary entails a discourse of transcendence that appeals to invisible, unrepresentable orders as the overarching means of organizing and safeguarding society.
By imaginary I mean, following Charles Taylors notion of a social imaginary, a way of conceiving of and imagining ones social existence. Taylor characterizes a social imaginary as much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. Rather a social imaginary concerns the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.a depression-wrecked and war-torn West. But its key assumptions and most poignant critiques reached both backward and forward in time. Neoliberalism as a social philosophy tapped into long-standing arguments and anxieties within the liberal tradition about the status and significance of representation in society and about the role of (im)personal rule; at the same time it would go on to inform and invigorate Cold War discourses about society, economy, and nationhood, especially in its appeal to impersonal and invisible mechanisms for ordering society. This forward movement has been traced in intellectual histories and, even more, in accounts of revolutions in policy in the 1970s and 1980s. In this book, however, I follow it into a broader social imaginary, arguing that neoliberalism can be conceived of as a distinct way of imagining social existence, reflected especially in and around discourses of disaster and energized by what are perhaps best called aesthetic anxieties, as they have to do with the sense and sensibility of our social and political lives.
At the heart of this book are three critical studies of texts peculiar to three American disasters, or where-were-you-when? events: the Zapruder film of Kennedys assassination, Ronald Reagans rhetorical response to the Challenger explosion, and CNNs coverage of September 11. I approach each as an icon of an iconoclasm, attempting, as others surely have, to come to grips with their significance in American political culture. That significance, I argue, can be considered both in terms of the long history of iconoclasm and in terms of a recent history in the American imaginary (and the imagination of America), particularly as it relates to neoliberal social orders. The starkest argument of this book is that in the forty or so years after the Kennedy assassination, in concurrence with the rise of neoliberalism, the most powerful way for publics to see America was in the destruction of its representative symbols, or icons, because it was in such catastrophes that the impossibility of any image adequate to representing America, and social processes more generally, was asserted. The more nuanced argument of the book is that this phenomenon was the product of complex histories that can be traced as far back as the theological controversies of the Byzantine Empire over icons and iconoclasm and extended forward through the Protestant Reformation, the confrontations of the Enlightenment and Romanticism with the sublime, and indeed to the recent (say, post-1968) rise of neoliberalism against the backdrop of the Cold War.
In reflecting on the neoliberal imaginary, this book thus entails inquiries into several histories: where-were-you-when? events, iconoclasm, sublimity, and American political culture in the Cold War and after. It combines historical, philosophical, and critical modes of argument to reflect on these histories and on the broader problem of unrepresentable social orders. In this it works analogically, considering the relations among economy (specifically, forms of capitalism), technology (especially moving-image camera technologies), national security (especially in the Cold War), ideology (liberalisms), and rhetorics of catastrophe. The image, I argue, is integral to these analogical relations. We saw in the years after 1963 a marked change in the status of the image in American political culture, a product of numerous inter-animating factors: social, economic, political, technological, ideational, aesthetic, and moral. This change I characterize as an iconoclastic turn, but it is also presented as a neoliberal turn. This book thus offers an account of an era and its political culture. At the same time, it also entails an inquiry into the neoliberal imaginary and an argument for an intimate relationship between neoliberalism and iconoclasm.
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