The Iconoclastic Imagination by Ned O'Gorman

Author:Ned O'Gorman [O'Gorman, Ned]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Language Arts & Disciplines, Communication Studies, Social Science, Sociology, Disasters & Disaster Relief
ISBN: 9780226310237
Google: A94pCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-01-15T00:37:36+00:00

But this is not an iconic I, no matter what conservatives and neoconservatives have made of Reagan since. Rather, it is the I of a television host, who merely channels the spirit of the occasion. Reagan’s repeated invocations of I effectively subsume and govern the pain of the shuttle disaster. The process of exploration itself, which subsumes and governs American existence and America’s future, is articulated in a voice that mediates between children and heroes, subject and object. This powerful I helps solidify the myth of process and progress by humanizing it through the heavy infusion of his hostlike persona. As Noonan wrote of the Challenger episode, “Reagan embodied; he became the nation holding you, he was the nation hugging you back, and there was nothing phony about it, nothing careless.”70 His voice articulates the tragic dimension of exploration in a vocabulary of personal pain and thus suggests a piety commensurate to the destruction of the image and violence to the imagination. It is, indeed, political piety that is at stake in Reagan’s speech. However, it is kept from being a question in the hostlike figure of Reagan, who claims for himself, as his own, the multiple affective and political dimensions of the Challenger disaster.

Reagan’s mediation of national disaster is the key to his rhetorical sublimation of the affective and political power of the destruction of an icon into a narrative of American progress. The efforts by his administration not simply to maintain the status quo but to articulate an affective response for the American spectator suggest that, for them, that spectator was a risk. Reagan’s speech itself characterizes the United States space program as a series of “wonders” that “dazzle.” But he worries that Americans have “grown used to the idea of space,” having developed a certain immunity to its symbolic power, and thus to the prospect of its spectacular neoliberal privatization. In short, like Kant’s sublime, the risk of the American spectators is that they might stand either too close to the disaster or too far away; both stances would result in a certain affective dissonance that would undermine the potential for incorporating the catastrophe into a narrative of American destiny. Just as in his first inaugural address, the Challenger speech attempts to bring the American spectator to see America with Reagan. But what exactly is it that Reagan sees in America from the median?

From the start, Reagan identifies the space shuttle disaster as a national tragedy. I have shown how Reagan’s appeal to the “national” in the opening of the speech is constructed around the emotive dimensions of the Challenger loss. More pragmatically, we could also say that it is national by virtue of its object, the US space program, and by virtue of its consequences, the US reputation. However, in the first words of the speech, Reagan introduces a much more spectacular sense of the national than any of these senses: national timing. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the speech begins, “I’d planned to speak to you tonight

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