The foreclosure of difference in media

In the chapter "Military Multiculturalism", McAlister discusses the way mass media representation of the Gulf War dealt with the assertion of ‘particularist’ political identities happening in academic space in the late 90’s. His specific phrase for this happening is “the challenge of multiculturalism” (265). He goes on to describe how the US apparatus of media and material consumption mobilized support for the war, and used this support to consolidate an Americanness that simultaneously acknowledged and suppressed the challenge of radically separatist identity politics in a process of reincorporation. I’m reading some stuff for my thesis that sounds really boring and dense but I think it would be relevant to mention it here. Ernesto LaClau provides an interesting framework of political activity useful to McAlister’s discussion in which one speaks of a ‘field’ of discourse in which competing ideologies compete to make sense of a fundamentally unsignifyable political reality. Competing discourses that attempt to signify similar phenomena and experience in different ways create a traumatic awareness of the inability of any political discourse to fix a meaning in a space which is always impossible to completely understand. Thus when in conflict, discourses will attempt to create an understanding of competing discursive objects that obscures their meaning within their original context. In the article, McAlister discusses how the assertion by particularist political groups that a ‘national’ identity, a universal relation of subjects to a “social”, misrepresents (and, indeed, erases) the diverse and irreconcilable experiences of all those connected through symbolic and material exchange within the United States attacks the central thesis of traditional American political discourse. He offers that the US military comes to stand as a symbol of an already present equal opportunity across gender and race in America, which reminded me of the way that Barack Obama’s election to the office of President was constructed as a similar symbol of both an acknowledgement of a threat to a discourse of “national” US identity (lingering, denied, racial inequality), but was never decoupled from the rebuttal of this proposition. No real entertainment of the thesis that the US military was in fact part of a system of military industrial racial/economic oppression could exist in its depiction during the Gulf War, or the acknowledgement that it exploited and reproduced (as McAlister discusses) an intensely patriarchal, heteronormative, norm of masculinity. The acknowledgement of this argument as reasonable and perhaps valid would destabilize the claim to obvious truth that the images of an ‘inclusive’ military reinforced. Similarly, Barack Obama appeared in mass media only as an icon of a post-racism already enacted, not to entertain but to foreclose debate about a fundamentally different political relationship of those of African descent to the institutions of cultural and material power in the US than for those marked as White. Both examples highlight the way that US mass media’s investment in a discourse of “American” identity as a universal relationship of empowerment and agency from subject to state-as-source-of-power (challenged again, visibly and with impact, in the 1990’s) prevents any serious consideration of the claims of particularist political groups in mass media space.