Response | Leigh Johnson
How Do You Measure a Miracle?: A Response to Pius Adesanmi, Wandia Njoya and Corey D.B. Walker
Miracles, for the most part, fall outside the purview of academics' intellectual consideration. In fact, the miraculous is by definition disruptive of and anathema to reasonable, rational, and coherent systems of thought. True miracles can be neither anticipated nor predicted; their probability is incalculable and their occurrences are, by most philosophical measures, either mistaken or inexplicable. And, yet, but... the etymology of the word "miracle" suggests, interestingly, that miracles should be the primary interest of philosophers. The English word "miracle" derives from the Latin miraculum ("object of wonder"), from mirari ("to wonder at"), which ought to remind us of the words Plato so carefully placed in Socrates' mouth in the Theaetetus: "...wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder." The Greek words rendered as "miracle" in the English Christian Bibles were semeion ("sign"), teras ("wonder"), and dynamis ("power")-in Vulgate translated respectively as signum, prodigum, and virtus. That is to say, the miraculous, the wondrous, the powerful signs-whether rooted in God, in Nature, in human being or in human making-have been, for ages in the "West," the recognized stimuli for intellectual inquiry.
By these standards, the Obama "phenomenon" is a miracle, or seems to be, inasmuch as his rise to the rank of presumptive Democratic nominee for the President of the United States signals an unanticipated and improbable disruption of that country's long history of oppression, disenfranchisement, exploitation and expropriation of blacks. So, it is with great interest that I read the essays by Adesanmi, Njoya and Walker, each of whom explicitly recognize the significance of Obama qua "signifier" of something for which we-including the most "hopeful" among us-could not have predicted with any confidence even a short year ago. Obama's campaign executives have brilliantly marshaled the desire of a wearied (and increasingly frightened) American populace for some indicator of real change, change we can believe in, and they have funneled that desire into a man who serves as the preeminent "sign" for not only all that is and has ever been invisible in our democracy, but also for the shrouded possibility of which our once-visionary democracy had sight. As Ralph Ellison noted in describing the peculiarity of his situation as the Invisible Man, the problem here in the U.S. is not that the invisible man cannot be seen, but rather that the putative "seers" suffer a deficiency in "the construction of their inner eyes." In a reversal of the conventional magician's trick, in which the miracle-worker makes ostensibly present things disappear, Obama's miracle seems to be his capacity to render the invisible (people, problems, and potentialities) visible. Consequently, he functions as the "sign" of change, the "sign" of hope, the "sign" of possibility, and the "sign" of what could be if the construction of our ideological eyes were reconstructed.
I worry that Adesanmi (who, refreshingly, "has no patience with the "unimplicated intellectual") problematically wants to separate Obama-as-subject from Obama-as-sign, even as he insists that Obama is both-subject-and-sign. My concern is that this otherwise clever discursive move on the part of Adesanmi is not only internally unsustainable, but also dangerous, and I suspect that placing his essay alongside the essays by Njoya and Walker only makes this danger more evident. Every "sign" or omen carries within it the possibility of being read wrong-a lesson we all surely learned from Sophocles' great tragedy Oedipus Rex-and so it behooves the implicated intellectual to always remain vigilant to the consequences of too-radically endorsing a an absolute and reductive separation of "subject" from "sign" (or, to use a more rigorously philosophical terminology: separating "signified" from "signifier"). I am deeply sympathetic with Adesanmi's desire to illustrate the oft-overlooked possibility that (in his words) "Obama-the-subject has little to do with, and almost no control over, Obama-the-sign"-and yet, this insight alone does not definitively liberate the sign from the subject (or the signified from the signifier). Especially in these days of politics-as-advertisement, in which "signs" substitute for and are valued more than whatever they might signify, the responsibility of the "unimplicated intellectual" for which Adesanmi pines must be to offer some provisional interpretation of the sign. Signs without meaning, signs that signify nothing (or nothing determinately significant), signs that are prima facie disconnected from the interpretive labor of those intellectuals who own their implication, after all, are no more than distractions, sleights of hand, ruses, simulacra.. which we should all know after the debacle that is the war in Iraq, means that they are implicitly dangerous.
Consequently, I find the essays by Njoya ("Obama's Victory: The Easy Part's Over, Now the Hard Work Begins") and Walker ("The Racial Politics of Symbols and the Crisis of Democracy in America") to be executing exactly the sort of "implicated" intellectual work that Adesanmi demands, but only partially accomplishes himself. That is to say, Njoya and Walker have implicated themselves as critical intellectuals in the process of interpreting the "miracle" of Obama-as-subject-and-sign. Njoya worries, rightly I think, that Obama-the-sign might become too disconnected from Obama-the-subject, thus resigning him to the ranks of American politicians-of-possibility who, in her words, "venerate grand ideas such as freedom, democracy and, in this case, hope, without an accompanying discussion in the American public discourse of what concrete measures will entrench those values." Walker makes Njoya's concern even more explicit, I would argue, by stating quite straightforwardly that "to equate the symbolic dimension of Senator Obama's campaign for the presidency with the substantive standing and status of American democracy is to commit a serious error." The error, of course, is to presume that the "sign" of "Obama" necessarily signifies a substantive change in American politics-or, rather, the error is to presume that Obama's (genuinely "historical") nomination signifies something absolutely contrary to the annals of American history. That is, to use the parlance of the Obama campaign, it is a mistake in the estimation of Njoya and Walker to presume that the "sign" of Obama can only signify "yes, we can." As Njoya and Walker point out, the concrete (in Adesanmi's language, "praxical") elements of Obama's platform, in particular his officially articulated stance on Israel and Cuba, demonstrate that there are more than one way to "read" a miracle, and it is the job of reflective, self-implicated, and conscientiously critical intellectuals to remind us of the range of possibilities that every sign, by virtue of its status qua sign, signifies.
Like most of the participants in this eSymposium, I also want to believe that Obama signals an unanticipated miracle in American politics. And, yet, but... the implicated intellectual carries the burden of recognizing miracles like this one as not only something that stymies-but also obliges-the human imagination