With the approaching SOTU speech by Obama I know some may wish to focus on specific policies said or not said.  But what I will find interesting to watch during this fundamentally pure political theater event is the theoritical framing which builds with his discourse.  

As I have said in previous blog, I don't believe that most Americans fully embrace a liberal perspective, with the qualifier that is based on my definition of liberal.  This doesn't mean that there are policies and issues that one can find Americans falling as a majority into the liberal camp.  But if one really talked to them as a liberal, one would loose them pretty quickly.

To make my point, I have thrown together some quotes from Judith Butler that she might say in a SOTU speech, especially she embraced the political theater facet of the event. 

I have to find of cultural translation, modes of encounter, modes democratic participation, which actually work to foster understanding, without mandating unity. And it also means that when I take responsibility it is not a grandiose act, it's not a narcissistic act, in which I am responsible for the entirety of the world. No, I place myself in a vividly decentered way in a world with others, who are their own centers, and which I must understand to live socially, to live democratically, to live in a polity, is always to in some sense be displaced by the subject. It is partially what it is to live in a culturally diverse, democratic culture. But if one finds that the modes of communication and deliberation that allow for that to exist in its complexities, then I think we have the chance to take a kind of collective responsibility. But one cannot take collective responsibility alone. It is something taken with others.

Some people would say that we need a ground from which to act. We need a shared collective ground for collective action. I think we need to pursue the moments of degrounding, when we're standing in two different places at once; or we don't know exactly where we're standing; or when we've produced an aesthetic practice that shakes the ground. That's where resistance to recuperation happens. It's like a breaking through to a new set of paradigms.

What's needed is a dynamic and more diffuse conception of power, one which is committed to the difficulty of cultural translation as well as the need to rearticulate "universality" in non-imperialist directions. This is difficult work and it's no longer viable to seek recourse to simple and paralysing models of structural oppression. But even her, in opposing a dominant conception of power in feminism, I am still "in" or "of" feminism. And it's this paradox that has to be worked, for there can be no pure opposition to power, only a recrafting of its terms from resources invariably impure.

What is at stake is less a theory of cultural construction than a consideration of the scenography and topography of construction. This scenography is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that remains disarticulated if we presume constructedness and materiality as necessarily oppositional notions.

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

One point: Regardles if one disagrees or agrees with her viewpoint, what would be the most likely initial reaction is that what she said wasn't immediately clear.  People would not look at the value of her words, but that she expressed herself in a way that required not only full attention, but also reflection.  And the reaction would not be positive.  Even though life and the problems we face are not straightforward nor presented to us with clarity, we expect our politicians to behave as if they are. 

So how will Obama speak to this country and reflecting media which are both in effect a class of eight-graders?