Childless, Futureless?

Well, hope you're in for a long one. This episode: Lee Edleman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, as well as connections to Barthes and Benjamin, the myth of the Child and reproductive futurism, some psychoanalytic theory, existentialism and uncertainty, an examination and rebuttal to the recent Vice-Presidential debate, Tim Walz as America's Dad and JD Vance's utter commitment to myth-speech, and some historical econoimic data.

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)

Related links:
https://youtu.be/NjTDLyKP2p0?si=P7e9nnqlCzLnKPnb
https://youtu.be/0Nr0FemmLK4?si=cm6-ZVjCir0-7yaZ

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2004&locations=US&start=2000
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v47n7/v47n7p24.pdf
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/consumer-expenditures/2022/home.htm
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/credit-cards/average-grocery-cost/
“Knot Theory” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 13: Childless, Futureless? 

So, we have a lot to get through today. Yeah, I know, this one’s a little late, but this one took good bit more ‘additional’ research than usual because we’re addressing two distinct, but closely related topics; Lee Edelman’s No Future, and current politics, specifically, a rebuttal to the recent Vice-Presidential debate – mostly targeting J.D. Vance, as there’s just so much BS that needs to be shot down on top of reconciling the debate’s political discourse with Edelman’s No Future. Tim Walz was also certainly guilty of some key tropes of what Edelman refers to as “reproductive futurism,” so we’ll address that as well. We’re also going to start bringing together some of these ideas from Barthes, Benjamin, and, now, Edelman, towards the beginnings of something that, it’s my hope, will scaffold a methodology for de-mythologizing political discourse – or to be a bit more blunt, to cut through the bullshit in a definitively critical manner that doesn’t just cynically dismiss everything political as bullshit in order to engage with the political meaningfully – rescuing the past, from both myth and rubble, and divesting, psychologically, from the future while avoiding nihilism and cynicism. 

And, yeah, I know that’s a lot to ask, and if I knew how to do that already, this would already be a book instead of a podcast, but I’m working through these ideas as we go along. Welcome to my ride. 

I’m going to try to limit this, to stay in theme with what we’ve been talking about with Benjamin and Barthes as far as myth-speech, materialism, and sites of ‘discursive’ struggle, because No Future goes deep into theory, to quote Edelman, a “complicated use of Lacanianism.” No Future, perhaps ironically, fits squarely and explicitly in the category of Queer Theory, within the larger realm of Critical Theory. The full title is No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Now, for those unfamiliar with it, Queer Theory came about in the 90s and generally focuses on gender and sexual identities, but has proven a deeply rich area of study for anyone interested in difference and exclusion, traditional social roles, gendered division of labor, etc., especially in politics and ethics. No Future is told from the perspective and lived experience of a gay man, and his emphasis on queerness as a site of potential resistance to, what he’ll call reproductive futurism – which wasn’t a new idea per se, per Edelman, the idea had been percolating in Queer Theory for some time before he coined the phrase – it operates in tandem with an emphasis on centering the lived experience of all politically marginalized peoples. It’s not a romanticizing or heroizing of LGBTQ+ queerness. Again, think Queer as a representation of anyone that is different, external, even oppositional, to what society would consider “the norm”… the punk rock of critical theory. 

My target here, like Edleman’s, is futurity as a political tool and ideology, so I’ll be leaning on Edelman – and so trying to unpack some of his text to do so – in rebuttal to this “reproductive futurism” in the recent VP debate to provide the specific cases of reproductive futurism in current politics. Also, while the book gets very heavy into Lacanian Psychology, we’re not going to be going that route (though we do need to address a little of it, since it’s pretty formative to the whole argument). I’m going to try to keep mostly to the myth, or the figure of the Child (to use Edelman’s terminology) and the structure of politics as futurism; what that entails, and critically, whom it excludes. 

First, a brief on Lee Edelman, for those of you who have no idea who I’m talking about. I suspect unless you’re studying something like Psychology, Philosophy, Gender, or Film or Media Studies, you have likely never heard of him. Edelman is a professor in the Department of English at Tufts University, research areas being Literary Theory and Film Studies, specifically Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Post-structuralism – which we’ll get to when we get to Foucault and Deleuze, and others writing in that period – PhD from Yale, and author of four books including No Future and Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (which is meant positively, in that “nothing” is actually something we need to learn, more on this in a bit, this is Lacan sneaking in again), both of which put forward queerness as a negation, antagonism, resistance, to our existing socio-political structure (which seeks to achieve community through subsumption and culturally, if not legally, compulsory assimilation; a kind of us and them that requires everyone join the us or be labeled a political and cultural enemy of the whole – now for conservatives, this is pretty much explicit in their rhetoric these days, they’ve, since Trump anyway, given up the pretense of ‘all America’ for “our America,” liberals fall a bit more on the subsumption side than the assimilation side, but we’ll get to that in a bit, I want to get to what Edelman has to say about Utopia for the us and them in a politically liberal sense to… make sense. 

Where Benjamin, and others writing in a post-Hegelian/Marxist tradition of historical materialism, helps us grapple with history, and Barthes helps with tackling how language is transformed by myth, Edelman points to a real danger in the present as regards a politics of, and political discourse organized around, the future. 

Now, in the last episode, following Benjamin, I tried to make the point that we should only be reading “progress” as something that happens historically, and not something that does or, especially, necessarily will, happen in the future. Edelman, on the other hand, aims to upend the idea of progress entirely, tying the drive, in our politics, toward an imagined future, not to a material history, but a sentimental, imagined history. Where some read progress, like King’s ‘arc of moral history,’ as social conditions becoming better in the future, Edelman sees this psychological and emotional investment (a cathexis) in the future, as the basis of all politics, as a deferral that abandons the present. 

So now we have to unpack a little bit of psychoanalytic theory. Edelman’s argument is, essentially, Lacanian. So, what do I mean by that? Well, without falling too deep down the psychology rabbit hole – and, man, this is a deep, dark rabbit hole, it goes like this. One of the key psychological concepts coming from Freud is the Death Drive. Now, for Freud, this is one of the basic human drives, a principal desire of the brain, for nothingness – to return to nothingness. In Beyond the Pleasure Principal Freud notes that what the brain defines as a pleasure, is the lack of stimuli. The brain seeks stillness, quiet, it seeks to not think or conceive or process. Lacan defines lack differently. For Lacan, it is lack that drives us – now, this is not a mere lack in the sense of not having something, but a sense of lack of being – and is always associated with desire. Desire is the drive, the pulsion, to fill that lack. Now, this gets pretty complicated as Lacan also got really interested in mathematics and Knot Theory, specifically the Borromean Knot – imagine a Venn diagram of three partially overlapping rings, but in this case it’s a singular line forming a knot – and applying a kind of Knot Theory to Psychoanalysis – and, I’m not even going to attempt to explain that, but, I will cite one line from Colin Adams’ The Knot Book: An Elementary Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Knots, as cited under the Knot Theory Wikipedia entry for Knot Equivalence, as this does relate directly to Lacan’s, and thus Edleman’s theory; “A knot is created by beginning with a one-dimensional line segment, wrapping it around itself arbitrarily, and then fusing its two free ends together to form a closed loop.” Basically, think of the psyche as this one dimensional, self-wrapping, line-turned-closed-loop, That wrapping and closing is formed by lack, in the form of the Real (the material world that we perceive), the Symbolic (the media and mediation of language and semiotics), and the Imaginary (the mental or psychical world, representational thought). Clinical Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, always runs a very real risk of cutting this knot – which in the case of a pathology, the analyst may need to do, but does so at the risk of unraveling the knot, and therefore the psyche. So, Lacan identifies what he calls the sinthome, visualized as a second looped line segment that holds the rest of the knot together, even if another part of the primary loop-line is cut, it’s a specific form of symptom, following Freudian psychoanalysis, that comes from outside the psyche and makes jouissance (exuberant, energetic, physical or mental pleasure or ecstasy) possible.

The sinthome binds together the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, and makes jouissance, catharsis, and creativity possible. 

Alright, I know that’s a lot to take in, so here’s the big takeaways to keep in mind for reading Edelman’s critique of the political as reproductive futurism. 

Following Freud, the Death Drive, in opposition to Eros (the Life Drive), which seeks coherence and unity, seeks to undo connections, cut apart, destroy, to return to nothingness – which is what the brain desires. Paradise, not as Heaven, but as Nirvana. 

Following Lacan, Lack, as lack of a sense of being, is a fundamental driving principal, a pulsion. It, as opposed to Freud’s Death Drive, is the basis of Desire. 

The psyche engages with the world via the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary; and the sinthome is what binds them all together. 

Critical analysis always runs a risk of destroying that which is being analyzed. (side note, Deleuze and Guattari (a former student of Lacan’s) will push on this really hard in what they term schizo-analysis in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia – which, we’ll get to one day, that may be a whole arc all it’s own. It’s  uh… dense).

And, lastly, that Edleman holds up two particular figures; the Queer, the real in opposition to the heteronormativity of reproductive futurism, and the Child, the symbol of the imagined reproductive futurism. 

Flashback time; back when we were focused on Barthes, one of the examples used regarding signifiers and signification was the use of flowers, as opposed to rocks or stacks of paper, as tokens that mean one’s affection for another, another sign he references is a “black pebble;” "…take a black pebble: I can make it signify in several ways, it is a mere signifier; but if I weight it with a definite signified (a death sentence in an anonymous vote), it will become a sign."  Aligning this with Lacan and Edleman, you have the real, a black pebble, and the symbol, an anonymous vote in favor of a death sentence. As for the imagined, there’s the entire thought process that came to the conclusion to cast the black pebble in the vote. 

In contrast to Barthes’ description of the black pebble, imagine instead something like the “fantasmatic Child” that Edelman often refers to in No Future.  This understanding of the Child – and I’m going to try to punch this up a bit vocally, Edelman distinguishes between a child and the Child (capital C) that is the figure of, or figures, the Child - is the poetizing image of the child.  It seeks some immutable, impermeable Child, the Child that is irrefutable, the Child that no politics can stand against. Recall also what Barthes was saying about ideology and poetry, and poetry as the inalienable meaning of things; as well as the issue of indexicality, the difference between pointing to that child and referring to a child. Here, for Edelman, the Child, is a second order semiotic sign.

The Child as sign is the myth of the child.  In the single order sign ‘child’ the defined signified is the image of a young human, a school-age individual, not necessarily limited in its gender.  The image is intended, (recall, motivation is key to deciphering the myth) to call to mind other tangential associations, generally based on the memories of the individual understanding the signification; associations such as play (or poverty), joy (or fear), shelter (or abuse). etc.

The Child no longer means a child, it has become a stand-in, a place-holder, to use Edelman’s parlance, it figures the future, progress, and, critically, any and every political position, as all politics is oriented towards the future regardless of what it is that that political position seeks to accomplish in-or-with the future.  Thus, the Child is incontestable. 

A political order, consisting of a like-minded group of people, necessitates the pre-existing position that there is some agenda, some endeavor, that this group has come together to seek to accomplish.  Thus, it necessitates the belief that at some point in the future that agenda can be accomplished. Without a belief in the future, our imagining our real-selves and our projects into a future that doesn’t exist yet, as well as projecting the social structure of the political (writ large), no social projects could be possible. As such, reproductive futurism stands as the governing logic, the “ideological limit” of all political discourse.

Edleman, in his introduction, uses the examples of the Public Service Announcement and the speech of a political campaign consultant, in how they both, though seeking different ends, rely on a consensus logic of means of ‘for the child’ that prevents objection, as any rhetorical objection to that end is either opposed to the child, or opposed to something for the child. Once employing the Child, the speaker insists that there are only two sides, one side is for the child, whose side are you on? 

Edleman states, “For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. The Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. Even proponents of abortion rights, while promoting the freedom of women to control their own bodies through reproductive choice, recurrently frame their political struggle, mirroring their anti-abortion foes, as a “fight for our children – for our daughters and our sons,” and thus as a fight for the future. What, in that case, would it signify not to be “fighting for our children”? How could one take the other “side,” when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends?”

By positing the myth of the Child as the subject of the political position, this position precludes counter positions by demanding that the opponent argue for their own impossibility.  As Admiral Ackbar famously announced in Return of the Jedi, “It’s a trap!”

Edelman’s answer to this question, which he notes is an impossible task, is that queerness, as the oppositional, external, of and to the normative social order, figures the social order’s own Death Drive, identifies those not on the side of the child, and thus “outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”

Now, I think it will help to hop outside the text of No Future to an interview Edelman gave in 2015 – No Future was published in 2004 – to get a full measure of what he means by politics and why he sees the project of No Future as an impossible one. I’ll leave a link to it in the show notes, it’s only a clip from a larger conference, about 7 minutes long, but if you’re interested you can also find some longer lectures and other videos on YouTube. He states in the interview that reproductive futurism is the dominant ideology of the cultures we inhabit. All politics, as we know it anyway, and as Edelman argues, that we can know it, are derivative of, and/or subservient to, reproductive futurism. 

As regards the impossibility of the task he’s set out for the text, he states in the interview that, “there is only politics because of impossibility.” He continues, and this gets us back to utopia as well, “If there were simply possibility of attaining some utopian endpoint, one would live in a world where fundamentally one were resistant to politics. Politics is dissensus, it’s not agreement. Politics is oppositional, it’s not oppositionality for it’s own sake, but it’s recognition that every attempt to totalize, to construct a universal or closed, idealized system always excludes something, and this exclusion will be the locus of queerness, which is why there could be no queer utopia. Queer utopia would itself be a space where queerness was excluded.” 

My reading of this is that politics is the limits of the possible. If we want a society that is one beyond the current, as shaped by reproductive futurism, we must think how to do the impossible. I also find in this a really interesting parallel to how Barthes refers to the impossibility of truly being a mythologist, of identifying and demythologizing all mythified signs. And, lastly, on these parallels, I think this opens some really interesting grounds for what Kathi Weeks has to say about non-teleological utopias. If taken teleologically, as a goal to be achieved, of universal equality and acceptance, then, logically, this is a utopia without queerness as queerness is that which is other. But, if taken non-teleologically, that universal equality and acceptance is a project worth undertaking… but, of course, now we’re back to reproductive futurism, projecting ourselves and our projects into an imagined future. A utopian project that we may never see come to fruition, but maybe our children will. 

Edelman, in the interview, notes what he considers the problem with a queer utopia – which, I’ll note, parallels my own thinking about counter-racist claims like ‘I’m colorblind, I don’t see color, all lives matter, etc.’ (which, note, are distinctly different from anti-racist positions that aim explicitly at opposing racism) that try to ignore or bypass racism; to lean on Benjamin here a bit, relegate racism to the rubble of history – Edelman notes that as ‘the Queer’ is that which is different (in its being), as much as we would all love a world without the violence that racism, homophobia, and sexism occasion, a world without racism, homophobia, and sexism is a world without racial, sexual, and gender difference. As long as there is difference, there will be a valuation of differences and hierarchies of difference. The utopian fantasy is a world without dissent, without politics. 

Now, on that, I disagree with Edelman, but I’m also in thinking with Weeks regarding non-teleological utopian projects. I will concede though that in terms of political telos, a universalizing as a flattening, the elimination of difference, is an incredibly dangerous project. I mean, this is the fascist utopian project, the us and them where they have been eliminated. However, and I’ll give a quick nod to Star Trek again, there’s a difference between trying to conceptualize something better and abandoning the project by allowing, as they say, the perfect to be the enemy of the good – how do we conceptualize something like that without projecting ourselves into the future? I have no idea. I do agree with Edelman though that we need to center present, real conditions and marginalized peoples in that conceptualization, and find a way to do so without implementing the myth of the Child. We also need to be on our guard of our opponents hiding their agenda behind the myth of the Child. 

Okay, we’re not done with Edleman (or Barthes or Benjamin for that matter), but I want to pivot now to the recent VP debate and start unpacking/debunking that mess. 

I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning, so, I would say opening comments, but they went right into questions, sort of. I should also note that I was really surprised by the, well, civility of the debate.

Side note, maybe check out John Oliver’s last episode of Last Week Tonight. He points to a lot of the problems with the media praising the civility of the debate, as I just did. We’ll get more into the details of this in a second, but, this was definitely a performance of civility; at the very least, on Vance’s part. It doesn’t take much beyond looking at other things Vance was saying on either end of the debate to know that the guy in the debate is not who Vance is. Back to civility. 

After eight years and three rounds of Trump, not to mention the Republican debates back in 2016 – snooze fest of the Pence/Kain debate, and the shitshow that was Pence/Harris debate – it was impressively civil and policy focused. That said, it was also completely one-sided on two fronts; the practiced slickness of JD Vance (I mean, from the get go, he not only avoids a real answer to the first question, but spends precisely one minute, man, he didn’t blink or skip a beat on this, on introduction and opening comments), and Vance’s utter disregard for fact or truth. From the start he gets straight to providing a ‘narrative,’ complete with half-truths and misrepresentations, and just moves further and further away from reality as the debate goes on. 

Now, I’m not going to go through the entire debate and rebut the whole thing point by point. My intent in referring to the debate is to bring it in line with what we’ve been discussing regarding myth as speech, and myths of the past and the future. To the extent that I try to debunk specific debate answers, my goal is to be a historical materialist and point to the real, material conditions that are being mythified and/or erased. I also have to concede that Vance’s performance – and it really was performative, and the folksy authenticity with which Walz carried himself, which, to be fair, could have been performative as well, I’m targeting Vance here as, unlike Walz, who has appeared generally consistent in speech and demeanor in all public appearances, Vance, despite whoever he is in his personal life, clearly performs particular behaviors and speech styles whether he’s at a rally, on a far Right podcast, or on the debate stage – Vance’s performance did leave me largely lacking the material I was hoping to challenge here though, namely, consistency with his prior statements regarding children, women’s bodily autonomy, and the centrality of ‘the traditional family’ to what it means to be both a citizen and a human being in general. Instead, dramatically softening his rhetoric regarding abortion to take up the Trump excuse of ‘it doesn’t matter what I think, it’s a states’ issue now.’ 

So, here we go. 

Right from the start, Vance opts for sculpting a narrative over answering questions; the, “I want to answer the question, but I want to introduce myself first…” where he goes into the story he’s told a thousand times that is told in Hillbilly Elegy. He notes he needs to do this because the American people don’t know who he or Walz are. Now, to be fair, he’s fairly right about Tim Walz. Walz’ national name recognition was incredibly low prior to the DNC. But, Vance is a best selling author, Hillbilly Elegy was optioned for a feature film on Netflix, directed by Academy Award winning director Ron Howard, and he’s been all over Fox and right wing podcasts for a few years now, even given his brief time in public office. If you’re a conservative or Republican, or watch Fox News (reminder, despite their constant droning on about how mainstream media is liberal media, Fox has a market share of nearly 50% of the cable news market for over 20 years, they are the number one news outlet in the country with, per Statista.com, more than triple the prime time viewers of CNN), you likely knew who JD Vance is. Despite that name recognition though, his approval polling prior to the RNC was at 25.6% favorable, and as of most recent polling on 538, his approval is up to 35%, but his unfavorables are also up to 45.1%. Compared to Walz, who, prior to the DNC, polling showed 9/10 Americans either didn’t know enough about him to have an opinion or they just had no opinion of him either way, who, since the DNC, his favorables are up to 40.5%. We’ll come back to this in a bit, since the core of Walz’ image is centered in reproductive futurism. 

Okay, next up, Vance’s comments on Hurricane Helene disaster assistance. Since the debate Vance has been in lockstep with Trump’s flagrant lies about lack of aid, inability of governors to get in touch with Biden, and the government not having any money for aid because it was all given to migrants. At the time though, it was a quick nonanswer of hearts and thoughts are with the victims (we have no action plan, but we’re thinking about you – which is some high level ‘violence of hope’ rhetoric if I’ve ever heard it, this gets chalked right up there with ‘thoughts and prayers’ in the wake of a mass shooting), followed by ‘Trump will put citizens first.’ As Vance continued to do throughout the debate, he deferred to the “success” of Trump’s time in office. Well, here’s another instance where we have material history to refer to instead. In 2017, in the wake of Hurricane Matthew, Trump denied 99% of the relief requested by North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper. Now, granted, Matthew struck in September/October 2016. Then President Obama approved emergency declarations for Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina; however, the federal aid and recovery was still in process of declaration and approval after the election and well into 2017. Aid was provided to Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, all red states with Trump-loyal Republican governors. Similarly, federal aid was held up, and almost completely denied to California following the 2018 wildfires, and only recently have former Trump aids come forward to state that the aid approved was only approved after Trump was given numbers on how many people in California voted for him – there’s a write-up in Politico if you’re interested in the details here. So, sure, Trump may put the citizens “first,” presuming of course they’re Trump voters in red states or counties, otherwise you’re likely on your own. 

Now, Vance spent most of the debate blaming migrants for everything from gun violence, to housing costs, to school budget shortfalls, to inflation. It would just take entirely too long to attempt to refute these on a case-by-case basis, but I will note this is just classic scapegoating. ‘We,’ are the real citizens, they are the invading enemy, they, the other – don’t look like us, they don’t talk like us, they don’t eat the same foods, smell the same way, wear the same clothes, go to the same churches, etc. and on and on – they are to blame for all of our problems. This argument is as old as politics, and, unfortunately, it’s just as effective now, for a large part of the electorate, as it was in ancient Greece. I was recently reminded that Aristotle commented on the same kind of rhetoric as regards tyrants, but, suffice to say, I didn’t study much classical philosophy. What I did focus on was, briefly, Plato – as an existentialist and someone interested in the impact of digital media in contemporary art, especially 3D printed sculpture and computer animation – and specifically refuting Plato’s essentialism. I also studied, though to a lesser extent, Epicurus as regards aesthetics and his informing Marx on historical materialism. So, this is an idea I’d like to come back to at some point, but I do need to do a good bit of reading up on it first. Or… maybe find someone who knows more about it and have a few drinks with them over the mic, we’ll see how things go. 

Alright, so that brings up to two areas I really need to push back on Vance on; economics, specifically work, wages, the working class, and government programs, and reproductive rights. Here we get to address how Vance really swings for the fences on distorting history, where he’s not outright erasing it, and committed to the myth of the Child in reproductive futurism. 

To tackle Vance on the economy, we have to start where he started, his constant rehashing of how he was brought up in a working-class household in Ohio, his mother’s and grandmother’s reliance on government programs for housing and food assistance, his reliance on government programs like the GI Bill to attend college, and how, somehow, all of this leads to him becoming a torchbearer for a party and presidential candidate fundamentally opposed to many of these same programs, and that have been opposed to them essentially his entire life. 

Okay, so, JD Vance was born in 1984, an election year, and one that resulted in Ronald Regan’s second term, he joined the Marine Corps at 17 in 2003, so, for our purposes, I’m seeing his ‘childhood’ or ‘upbringing’ years as 84-2003. During that time, the US had four Presidents; Regan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, three Republicans, one Democrat. So, here’s some economic data for you – I’ll put some links in the show notes, but for those interested, I’m getting these figures from the following sources: The US Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the World Bank, and reporting from USA Today – that last for an article on what US households are currently spending on groceries. 

So, let’s start with GDP, gross domestic product, a standard measure of the US economy as a whole, I figure this makes for a decent starting point to see how the whole country is doing economically before getting down to things like inflation and poverty. Now, to adjust for inflation, these numbers are based on the World Bank’s “US Constant” (so, all figures are adjusted for inflation to the value of the US dollar in 2015). 

84-88, the GDP rose from 7.98 Trillion dollars to 9.26 trillion, 14%. From 88-92, under Bush senior, 9.26-10.12, 8.5%, from 92-2000, under Clinton, 10.12-13.72, 26%, and from 2000-04, under Bush junior, 13.72-15.04, 8.8%. Now, to make this a little more ‘politically’ fair, I’ll go ahead and give the data for both Regan and George W. terms, since Clinton’s measured period is 8 years: From 80-88 we get 7.06 trillion to 9.26, about 24%, and from 2000-2008, 13.72-16.33 trillion, 16%. Overall, during Vance’s childhood, the US economy grew 47% with the largest period of growth under democratic leadership, under Clinton, with Regan a close second, though the bulk of that growth occurred between 80 and 84, before Vance was born. 

Okay, so, what about inflation itself? From 84 to 2003, inflation ran from 4.3% to 2.27%, peaking in 1990 at 5.4%. Side note, inflation from 2016 to 2020, during Trump’s term, ran from the 0.12% he inherited from Obama – to the extent that a President has anything to do with this at all, which, they really don’t, but Vance and Trump love bringing this up, so I will too – to 1.23% in 2020, with a high of 2.44% in 2018. Now, that’s not a lot of movement compared to the post-covid spike to 8% from 2020 to 2022 – and, yes, inflation fell in 2019, but keep in mind, that was as economies were shrinking worldwide because of the pandemic, the spike followed on the heels of people trying to buy things again, while so many people, especially in on-site work like manufacturing, had not returned to work yet, and supply chains broke down. 

Last data point I want to look at is poverty, because I find this one really interesting. The US “poverty line” grew year over year from 84 to 03, as it has continued to grow year over year since it was implemented as a statistical metric for government assistance in 1964. In 84, it was $10,527 for a family of four – two working adults with two minor children. In 88, it was 11,997, 14,228 in 92, and on, until 2023, last reported metric, where it was $30,900. Now, why do I find this so interesting? Well, 2 reasons, first, the poverty line is tied specifically to inflation, and second, because it is still based on inflation of the original number determined in 1955. The poverty line is based on what was called the Economic Meal Plan, the cheapest of three plans determined in congressional committee. The poverty line determines how much a household needs to earn, at minimum, in order to afford groceries based on spending one third of their income on groceries as priced by the 1955 Economic Meal Plan. So, in theory, if you have a family of four and you are taking in a combined $31,000 per year, congratulations! You are not in poverty! You can comfortably afford to spend 10 grand a year on all the groceries you need as determined for healthy food in 1955! 

Now, granted, we’re talking about economic data rather than philosophical theory, but this is a key area where it pays to be a historical materialist. Now, perhaps, and I’m not going to go any further down this rabbit hole to get specific figures, but let’s just say that in 1964 it was reasonable to expect someone to still be able to afford basic necessities like clothing, shelter, basic utilities, etc. on the remaining seven thousand dollars you had left after groceries. If you had 2 working adults and 2 children to take care of and you’re spending ten grand on groceries, that leaves you 20 thousand for the year for rent or mortgage, car payment, cell phone(s), internet provider – because, lets be honest, it’s a basic necessity for work and education, it’s not an expendable entertainment or other some such discretionary line in the budget, insurance payments, etc. Now, this is just from a quick Google search, but, nationally, average rent for a 2 bedroom is about $1800 per month, $525 per month for a used car, about $70 for internet, and about 288 for service/payments on 2 cell phones. I noted earlier the one article from USA Today on groceries, so that’s actually down to $475 per month (about 5700 per year), as of 2022 peak inflation rates (inflation was down to around 3% as of this summer), as far as average household spending on groceries. So, I suppose that’s a little good news – or the averages are horrifically skewed – since that average grocery spending is almost half the poverty threshold for the inflation adjusted 1955 metric of food spending.

Right, so, at average costs, we’re talking $37,896, at minimum, with no savings, no investing in yourself, your home, your children’s education, paying down debts like student loans, any form of entertainment whatsoever, new clothing, etc., per year needed to live most anywhere in the US. Well, the poverty line, where you could potentially qualify for government assistance, is nearly 8 grand below that, and if the food guidance metric is to be believed, the poverty line is too high! So, what’s changed? It can’t be inflation; the poverty line is tied to inflation. In fact, adjusted for inflation, every singe year from 1984 to 2003, as well as 1980 and 2023, and I suspect this holds true for all the years since the Social Security Administration started tracking this, come to about $32,000. 

84? $31,894. 88? 31,923. 92? 31,923. And so on. What this tells me is that, as far as poverty and inflation? Inflation isn’t the problem. That’s being accounted for, and very consistently accounted for, at least as far as government assistance is concerned, but the real cost of, seemingly everything, independent of inflation, is not being accounted for, and for that, we need to look at housing and healthcare costs, and potential price controls in housing and healthcare, student loan debt and cost of tuition, defunding of public schools and fund transfers from public schools to subsidies for private and religious schools (that effectively rob poor children, that need the most assistance for food, school supplies, and school resources, to subsidize wealthy families) and other issues that nearly all of the right, and most of the left for that matter, are opposed to even considering.

Now we finally arrive at the basic problem, the Child, or the myth of the child rather, and the political rhetoric, by both Vance and Walz, steeped in reproductive futurism – and yes, I know I just used school funding to help make my own point just a second ago. I’m not trying to pretend making a political argument without referring to children is remotely easy. Even as my point was addressing poverty through funding, it’s pretty likely, that if you did have an emotional response to anything in that list, you had some kind of response to the issues of funding schools and feeding children. 

For Walz, the issue of reproductive futurism is pretty easy to weigh, he comes at it from two directions. On the one hand, you have the standard democratic tropes of progressive narratives, the moral arc of history, better lives and opportunities for our children, the ‘opportunity economy’ (Harris’ fresh coat of paint on Bill Clinton’s ‘it’s the economy stupid’), even things like ‘we will preserve the ACA’ are defended in terms of infant mortality rates, child poverty and nutrition, and adolescents remaining on their parents’ healthcare plans. But Walz also comes at this wielding myth, though much differently from Vance. Rather than holding up the myth of the Child, Walz presents himself as America’s Dad, a teacher, and a football coach. He ties himself to notions of positive, and safe, masculinity, and, to be fair, he does come across sincerely as he does so. 

But whereas Walz puts himself forward in relation to the Child as parent, teacher, and coach, Vance hides behind the myth of the Child. He purports his interest to be in their futures, whether he’s referring to the economy, or abortion, or gun violence, and he has the same answer for all of them; devoid of detail, rooted in nostalgia or hope, and even when he refers to his own family, he does so in a manner that feels like he’s trotting out a prop in a stage show. ‘Look, I am a father, see, here is my proof, there are children on the stage now.’ (Personally, I think the most stark contrast between the two of them in terms of their general demeanor and as presenting themselves as father/provider, are the videos of Walz and crew at H&H Soul Food in Macon, Georgia, flipping out at the “Mind your own Biscuits, and Life will be Gravy” sign, charming the crowd and taking photos with the crew, and Vance at a donut shop, in Valdosta, Georgia, seeming to have no idea how to either make small talk or order donuts, dismissing the whole process as he’s just ordering for his staff and media entourage, that he otherwise couldn’t care less about). 

Finally Vance got the question on abortion bans and reproductive rights, and, to his staff’s credit, stayed on script and away from everything he’s said in the past about supporting national abortion bans, a, for lack of a better phrase, pregnancy registry – now, to be fair, Project 2025 doesn’t call for a registry as such, I suspect the rhetoric here is mirroring conservatives’ long standing gun registry boogeyman; but, it does call for HHS to track all live births and abortions nationwide, how you do that without tracking pregnancies, even if only after the fact, I have no idea – of his claims that children should ‘get votes’ but those votes should be made by their parents (so, if you’re an adult without kids, you get one vote, if you’re a typical middle class family with 2 kids, you get 2 extra votes, if you’re a rural or farming family, you get a couple more votes, and if you’re a Mormon, congratulations, you get, on average, double the extra votes of the average American family! And since Mormons run some 75% Republican, and rural counties trend about 60% Republican, according to Pew Research, this sounds like a good deal for Republicans to support.)

Now, Vance denied supporting proposals in Project 2025 and noted the Republicans need to re-earn the public trust on the issue of reproductive rights, noting that they want public policy to give women more options to raise families – ignoring the fact that the question was about abortion access and abortion bans, as well as his own comments that financially supporting these children and raising them would come from putting grandparents and other family members to work, as though they have nothing else to do, like, raising their own families or, for grandparents, dealing with the affects of growing old, but, hey, projecting oneself into the future typically doesn’t come with a real accounting of aging or dying anyway, except as specifically regards planning for end of life care, which Americans overwhelmingly fail to do – and, of course, passing the buck on the issue to the states and the voters, which of course ignores the 14th Amendment and allows for a geographical determination of basic rights, otherwise guaranteed to all, leaving the states to establish different classes of citizens with full or partial rights over their own bodies depending on where they live.  

Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, on the question of gun violence in schools, Vance quickly redirected blame to immigrants and Mexican drug cartels. As regards holding parents responsible for making legally purchased guns available to minors, he noted he didn’t know the details but trusts law enforcement, and as far as doing anything, deferred to fortifying school, locking them down. We can’t stop selling guns, but it’s also not a gun problem, it’s a border problem, and we can keep children safe if we make schools look like prisons. 

Now, Vance did say one thing I have to admit I agree with, though I suspect for categorically different reasons. Walz brought up the fact that Finland has a roughly similar rate of gun ownership, but doesn’t have nearly the problem with gun violence that we have in the US. Vance pivoted to the difference being one of mental health; that we have higher rates of mental health issues, depression, etc. in the US than in Finland, and suggested that we need to get to the underlying issue here. 

Well, on that he’s right. But if you take a look at the social life in the US and Finland, I don’t think he’s going to find what he’s looking for to explain their lack of gun violence, especially if gun violence is also simultaneously the result of a migrant invasion and mental health crisis.

So, differences in Finland to the US? Workers in Finland are entitled, by law, to 30 paid vacation days per year (the US? Zero). School? Free at all levels in Finland, meals and transportation (if the students live far enough away) are paid for, university tuition is free though books, room, and board are paid by the student. Maternity and child health? Free. All other healthcare is paid, but publicly supported with private options. A doctor’s visit costs, at most, 23 euro (about $25), “day surgery” is capped at 135 euros. Parental leave? Available for 320 work days, partially paid, per child. Available to both parents, they can take them divided equally or can transfer up to 63 days to the other parent. Maternity leave can be taken 30 days in advance of the expected delivery of the child. Mothers, in the EU, also get a “maternity grant” of child care items or 170 euro, and again, the maternity and child healthcare is free. The US, yeah, FMLA protects you from being terminated by your employer for up to 12 weeks, there are no provisions for pay or healthcare. 

Okay, so, lets bring this back to Edelman, Benjamin, and Barthes, starting with Barthes and some choice phrases from Vance – I’m going to keep picking on Vance here, because man was he guilty of using myth as speech in his performance – Walz is a bit more complicated here. There’s definitely an argument to be made for Walz leveraging myth in how he appears, at least far more so than in how he speaks. Walz’ choice of phrasing was far less practiced, far less slick, than Vance’s – which, to many pundits, actually gave Vance the advantage. I’ve heard the same thing from nearly every outlet that carried it, if it were being judged under the terms of a high school debate team, Vance won; because that criteria gives the advantage to style, smoothness, practice, confidence – basically rhetoric, as would have been recognized by Aristotle and Plato, and deeply scorned by Socrates – essentially, style over substance, especially where the moderators aren’t, except in flagrant cases, pushing back on any false claims. Walz, in his plain, midwestern, folksy speech and off the cuff delivery, definitely presents as the image of the guy next door, the typical suburban dad, the guy in the neighborhood whose house you go to to watch the game. As to whether that’s really who Tim Walz is or if that’s a practiced political persona, personally, I have no idea. I suspect most Americans don’t, which is a potentially huge political advantage over someone like Donald Trump that has spent the past forty years projecting an image of self as brand, and an incredibly well known one, whether you love him or hate him – and he thrives on both. 

Side note, if you want to get an idea for the kind of person Trump is, without having to watch more Trump, check out the recent Netflix documentary on Vince McMahon, the (in)famous now former head of the WWE. McMahon’s family history, his rise from nothing to billionaire (a story Trump purports, but has been proven categorically false), his emphasis on his plainly immoral decisions being ‘just business,’ and love of what the wrestling world calls “heat” – the pile-on of aggressively negative attention that a good “heel” or villain inspires in the audience has some real mirrors to Trump, whom McMahon had a close business, personal, and political relationship with. I’d also note, even trying to ignore everything known about Trump’s past and his own prior civil conviction, I find it all but impossible to believe that Trump’s close ties with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein (convicted sex offender), Harvey Weinstein (convicted abuser, and facing new charges), and Vince McMahon – accused of assault and trafficking multiple times and currently under federal investigation, among others, is just mere coincidence. Guilt by association isn’t guilt legally speaking, but we, as human beings, tend to surround ourselves, for good or ill, with like-minded peers.

Right, Vance and Barthes, etc. 

Now, plenty has already been said in the media and the public sphere about racist dog-whistles from the Trump campaign, the emphasis on the “bad” migrants and “illegals” are coming from Mexico, Central, and South America, or their latest favorite target, Haiti, though they never have anything to say about white Europeans that overstay their visas, or anyone entering illegally from Canada, or the involvement of Russian and Russian mob criminal activity in the US – a great deal of which happening in the political sphere, and ‘incidentally’ in favor of Republican candidates, though Putin, to the extent he’s admitted to it, has noted his interest in fomenting discord in US politics, rather than actually favoring any one candidate or party. But I want to look at one particular phrase Vance used in the debate. 

As regards seizing Federal lands to develop as housing – now, this isn’t land the government is going to develop, it’s land that belongs to the public that they want to sell to private developers. These federal lands are largely in the middle of nowhere. There’s no infrastructure, no schools, no roads, no jobs, no sewer or water or power or internet. It’s utter nonsense that anyone could think this could in any way address the affordable housing crisis in the US. Someone please tell me how building a town in the middle of the Nevada desert, or the parts of the Appalachian mountains that have, for the past 200 years, been considered too remote, to heavily forested, or too rough, rocky, cliffsides, etc. are going to do anything to reduce the cost of housing in New York or LA, or Charlotte or Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, etc. Now, Vance and Trump have previously tied housing affordability to expanding oil drilling and resource extraction. So, if their proposal is that they want to seize and sell federal lands (another side note, I’m really curious how the federal government goes about seizing federal lands, and from whom, if not themselves – so, it’s my thinking there’s myth speech at work here too; phrasing in terms of making themselves sound like outsiders taking from the government while they are campaigning to lead that same government), if their proposal is to sell federal lands for housing development around federally protected lands they intend to reclassify for resource extraction… well, that’s something altogether different and the motivation here clearly isn’t addressing the affordable housing issue so much as propping up oil, coal, and other resource extraction ventures. 

So, here’s Vance’s really loaded quote, and, again, this is in the context of proposing policy that will make housing more affordable: developing federal lands for housing is “building more homes for the American citizens that deserve to be here.” 

This is where we need to stop the turnstile, dissect, and critically analyze what’s being said. Recall, if we want to get to the meaning of the myth, we need to identify the motivation of the speaker. 

Here’s some questions:

Who are the American citizens that deserve to be there? Are there some citizens that deserve the land where others don’t? Are we talking about some Americans do or do not deserve to be citizens? Trump and Vance, among other Republicans, have made clear on prior occasions they want to do away with birthright citizenship, so that even if you’re born in the US, you’re not necessarily a citizen. If they can pull that off – thankfully, unlikely, even with this current Supreme Court alignment, as it would explicitly and flagrantly violate the 14th Amendment, though, again, Project 2025 certainly pushes forward as though the civil war amendments don’t exist, and this court certainly doesn’t seem to care about protecting civil rights and liberties. 

Or are we talking about the place itself? Are there American citizens that somehow have a greater claim to the land? Federal lands means we, all American citizens, all own that land in common and its management is, supposed to be, entrusted to the federal government. If some citizens have a greater claim, how? Why? And, ultimately, who gets to determine who these ‘deserving American citizens’ are? Even if we want to claim this is the natural result of democratic processes, should Trump/Vance win and they implement something like this. Does democracy mean that 50%+1  American citizens can vote to steal the public property of all other American citizens? I would hope not, but there is a real danger that this is precisely the case. At they very least, it’s precisely what is at risk. And the irony here is really rich given one of the oldest arguments from the right is that any form of taxation is a theft of private property. 

Also, I should note, it’s unlikely a Trump victory would be a legitimate majority of the electorate. Keep in mind the Republican party has not won the popular vote since 2004, and despite Bush having been the incumbent, had lost the popular vote in 2000. And as far as GOP control of the House, they won by a margin of less than 3 million votes, compared to a Dem winning margin in 2020 of about 5 million votes, or 2018, where they won the popular vote by almost 10 million votes – at no point in the past century have Republicans come anywhere close to that kind of margin. When Republicans won control of the Senate in 2018, they lost the popular vote 34.6 million to 52.2 million, and gained 2 seats! 59% of the country, that voted, voted Democrat only to have an even smaller minority in the legislature. The last President to win with that large of a majority was Nixon in ’72, and, of course, he resigned in disgrace a year and a half into that term. 

We already engaged in quite a bit of historical materialism looking at Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy version of the American Dream, and looking at some actual economic data from 84-03 under Republican and Democratic leadership, so let’s go ahead and wrap this up by going back to Edelman. 

What makes Trump and Vance, and a lot of current Republican rhetoric, so seductive is, like religion, it offers simple, reassuring answers and clear blameworthy villains to complex problems and obstructions that have no one person or class of persons to blame. People want certainty, and the more uncertain, the more precarious life seems, the more they cling to, the more desperately they reach for simple sounding solutions, and the leaders that offer them. 

If you’re confused as to why there’s so much misinformation coming from the right regarding disaster relief right now, and private citizens claiming to fly private helicopters and getting told to turn away by governors and legislatures, it’s because there is a real political advantage to drumming up that uncertainty. 

I’ve mentioned before that, as far as worldview, I’m an existentialist. During that Existentialism Spring Break in Paris seminar, we met regularly throughout the semester, but Spring Break was an intensive, we had class ever day for three hours, and we were, at this point, about 70% through the required reading materials, and about mid-week, the undergrads started to ‘get it.’ That the precarity, instability, and contingency of life is the point. The basic meaninglessness of life, and the incredible freedom, and responsibility that entails. They started joking in full 2018 social media fashion, having a blast in Paris #lifeissuffering, and #condemnedtofreedom, wish you were here. It was fun to watch. 

In the final chapter, also titled “No Future,” Edelman uses the Hitchcock film, the Birds, as a case study in queerness, the death drive, and narrative meaning. In response to the scene in which a bird attack survivor belts out, “Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?” he states, “But why, we might ask, need we still ask why? [and citing film critic Robin Wood, notes Robin had] observed that ‘the film itself is quite insistent that either the birds can’t be explained or that the explanation is unknown.’ [Wood] then went on to argue, persuasively, that the birds ‘are a concrete embodiment of the arbitrary and the unpredictable, of whatever makes human life and human relations precarious, a reminder of the fragility and instability that cannot be ignored or evaded and, beyond that, of the possibility that life is meaningless and absurd.’ … The narrative that raises meaninglessness as a possibility, after all, necessarily bestows a particular meaning on such meaninglessness itself. By deploying, in other words, a given figure, such as, in this instance, the birds, as the signifier intended to materialize the general ‘possibility that life is meaningless,’ the text necessarily gestures toward a specific threat to meaning and suggests particular strategies by which one might manage to ward it off.”

Though it didn’t come up in the debate, one of Vance’s recurring tropes on conservative media and before far right Christian audiences, like the town hall he held the weekend just prior to the debate, in a talk with Christian Nationalist movement leader Lance Wallnau, is the trans community. And, par for the course, Vance deferred to the centrality of the Child and that they’re under threat by the very concept of trans persons, griping that children don’t know basic arithmetic, but they know there’s “86 genders” – under threat, our way of life; the figure of the victim, the Child, the fantasmatic threat, transgenderism, the threatened place, public schools. I’m almost surprised folks like Vance, Wallnau, and the crew of Fox and Friends haven’t started holding up The Birds as their own anti-queer horror-metaphor. 

Okay. Recall, Edelman’s theory is Lacanian, in that the human psyche’s functioning and relation to the world is in the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. This relates closely with Barthes’ semiotics of culture of signifier (the mental, acoustic image) + signified (the concept) = sign (the concrete word or image). 

Edelman identifies the image of the Child as signifier intended to materialize reproductive futurism. The meaning of life, politically, is the Child – but not any child specifically, and, potentially, excluding some children specifically, the mythical image of the Child, empty of specific meaning and refilled with motivated concept. 

Vance, though he managed to largely stay away from his prior rhetoric of abortion bans and childless cat ladies, still made consistent and powerful use of myth speech as far as the migrant as villain, the deserving citizen, our America, PhD holding elites with no “common sense” (itself, a reduction of intelligence from something to aspire to, to only holding value at the lowest common denominator). Walz, similarly, though to a very different extent, leveraged reproductive futurism and the myth of the child in his very bearing and presentation as dad/teacher/coach/veteran, as well as forward looking rhetoric around an “economy of opportunity.” 

Now, as Edelman points out, all politics is a politics of the future. Politics wouldn’t be possible if we couldn’t imagine our hopes, dreams, projects, etc. actually coming to fruition one day. And, as he notes in the interview, he holds politics up as fundamental, that a world without politics is a world without dissent, a world without difference. What Edleman brings to the table, like Barthes and Benjamin, is that, in a meaningless world, we need to be cautious of what we invest meaning in. We need to invest in the Real, and be wary of investing, emotionally, psychologically, politically, in the Imaginary and the Symbolic. 

Now, despite this being a long episode, I suspect we’ve only scratched the surface on No Future, for brevity’s sake we haven’t touched on a couple of his concepts at all, so, I believe we’ll be revisiting Edelman soon enough. 

I don’t really have anything clever or poignant to close with, so, I’ll just remind all of you here in the US, election day is rapidly approaching. If you haven’t voted in a while or if you moved recently, make sure your voter status is updated, know your polling precinct and location, make a plan to vote, vote early if that works best for you, and beware of misinformation. A lot of state voting boards, especially in contested states like Georgia and North Carolina, have proposed and in many cases passed a lot of changes that will impact how and when votes are counted and when results will be finalized. And that’s to say nothing of the catastrophic damage in western North Carolina and Florida, and across the southeast from Helene – and, now, Milton, bearing down. If it’s close election night, as it’s expected to be, it could be days or weeks afterwards that many results are known. For instance, Georgia recently changed their rules so that the state’s whole five million votes must be counted by hand, so don’t expect to hear anything conclusive from Georgia for quite a while. 

Next episode, before we swing back to the more practical side of utopian thinking with some post-work and anti-work politics, we take a look at Mark Fisher’s brief but critical Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative?

‘til then. 

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