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ing ability and the pragmatic assessment of Reagan as a skilled political per-
former? In what follows, I propose that one answer to these questions is sug-
gested by the increasing importance of “performance” in American political
life, and its deployment in the embodied staging of cultural memory by the
nation’s first acting president.
The King’s BodyWhen Polonius is slain, Claudius sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to in-
terrogate Hamlet. “My lord, you must tell us,” entreats Rosencrantz, “where
the body is and go with us to the king.” Hamlet replies: “ The King is with the
body/ But the body is not with the king/ The king is a thing.” Hamlet’s form-
ulation of the thingness of kingness derives its ontic calculus from a represen-
tational economy that traffics in bodies and bodies of memory. The kingdom
of Denmark is at stake and the bodies are not with the king. Apparitions (old
Hamlet), usurpers (Claudius), unwilling heirs (Hamlet), and foreigners
(Fortinbras) contend for a throne whose rightful occupancy is in dispute until
“carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts” eliminate all claimants save Fortinbras
who must “take up the bodies” of the dead in a ritual transference of all legiti-
mate claims to the monarchy. The techniques and processes by which a
would-be king strives to attain this thingness of kingness are intimately con-nected in Hamlet to the credible enactment of the rites of memory—rituals
that invest the performer with the rights of memory—in which the would-be
king embodies or is inhabited by the corporeal memory of the dead.
Beginning with the return of the hostages from Iran on the day of his inau-
guration, the Reagan presidency, too, oriented itself around the reclamation of
bodies. The hostages were a source of national shame, symbols of America’s de-
clining global power, and their return was a propitious augury for a presidency
constituted on the proposition that under its watch “America was back.” Play-
ing Fortinbras to Jimmy Carter’s malaise-ridden Hamlet, Reagan proceeded to
“take up the bodies” from America’s battlefields, movie screens, and collective
memory and re-member them in the service of his political agenda.
In the Age of Reagan, the performance of the rites/rights of memory as-
sumed the form of strategic technologies of governance. Ronald Reagan’s per-
sonal and political authority as head of state was constructed around these
performances, thematized in the tropes of rebirth and resurrection, and staged
in his own body as the media/medium for re-collecting and incorporating the
damaged body of the American polity. This process of cultural reproduction
and re-creation is described by Joseph Roach as one of “surrogation,” in which
“actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitute
the social fabric,” and a surrogate emerges to replace the missing original. This
“doomed search for originals” requires “selective memory” and “public enact-
ments of forgetting” in order for the sacrificial substitute to successfully, if in-
completely, replace the original. It is this process, Roach contends, that we
most often mean when we use the word “performance” (Roach : – ).
To profess the intimate liaison between performance and the rites of memory
is to nominate the actor as a surrogate for the rights of memory. Ronald
Reagan claimed these prerogatives of the actor in his performances in the the-
atre of memory through the performative (re)construction of an imagined na-
tional past. These performances and their reception reflect a discursive shift in
our contemporary representational economies of memory and history. “Truth,”
as such, cannot be established through appeal to objective criteria. It is a phe-
nomenon of perception, an effect constituted through a performative act. Truthis not discovered, revealed, arrived at: It is performed. As in Hamlet , merely
producing the bodies (empirical evidence, data, credentials, etc.) to support
one’s credibility as a candidate for surrogation is insufficient and often irrel-
evant. The would-be king must act like a king. Fortinbras’s (and Reagan’s)
claim to “have some rights of memory in this kingdom” cannot be evaluated as
a representational truth, but must be assessed by criteria applied to the candidate’s
representational skill in performing the rites of memory.
When Garry Wills asked a group of American business executives their opin-
ion of Reagan’s fraudulent claim to have photographed the Nazi death camps,
“they supported the President for expressing a ‘higher truth’ of concern for the
persecuted. Heads nodded when one executive’s wife said, ‘Even Jesus spoke in
parables’” (:). In the postmodern state, political authority derives from
taking up the bodies the way an actor (or Messiah) takes up a role. By incorpo-
ration and incarnation the presidential performer legitimates his claims, authen-ticates his role, and captivates his audience. The performance is reviewed on
the merits of the fit between actor and role and the mimetic power of the
performative act, not on the representational truth(s) it conveys. Reaganism, to
paraphrase Jean-François Lyotard, was constructed around the massive subordi-
nation of critical memory to the finality of the best possible performance.
The Actor’s Body
Memory is a process that depends crucially on forgetting.
—Joseph Roach ( : )
Where’s the Rest of Me? is the title of Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, pub-
lished in , a year after Reagan’s nationally televised speech during the
Goldwater presidential campaign had established him as a viable political can-didate. The title derives from Reagan’s contention that as an actor “part of
my existence was missing” (Reagan and Hubler [] :), and is taken
from the film King’s Row (), in which Reagan played the role he consid-
ered the biggest and best of his career and “the one that brought me star sta-
tus” (). In King’s Row , Reagan portrays (in his own words) a “gay blade”
named Drake McHugh “who cut a swathe among the ladies.” Drake takes up
mulation is the necessary occlusion of the real in the performative act of
surrogation enacted by Reagan’s parable of the recognition scene. The most
intriguing aspect of Reagan’s memory of the event that ultimately transformed
him from the amputated actor to the wholeness of the presidential performer
is that it recalls a scene that never occurs in the movie . In Reagan’s parable of the
scene of recognition, he is the focus of the shot. But as Garry Wills notes:
[T]he movie does not show Reagan coming to full consciousness in a few
seconds. [...] The whole episode is told from [Ann] Sheridan’s point of
view, through her concern. The camera stays with her. [...] Sheridan, “not
in the shot” according to Reagan, was the shot. [...] We have been set up
to experience the moment [of recognition] through Ann Sheridan’s reac-
tion, which is what we get again after the camera shows him (briefly)
shouting in a hoarse voice, “Where’s the rest of me?” (: – )
Where’s the Rest of Me? depicts Ronald Reagan as a seasoned performer
who, in his greatest feat of screen embodiment, discovers that he is incom-
plete, a discontinuous body. Poised on the brink of a run for governor of
California, the unfulfilled actor constructs a surrogate past in the form of a
damaged body that can only be healed by the actor’s performance in the po-
litical sphere. The generative scene of this invented past is a simulacrum (a re-production for which no original exists), that derives its affective force
through the re-membering of an absent original. It is a memory crucially de-
pendent on the inventive possibilities created by forgetting to remember.
By taking the bullet, Reagan and his administration were born
again, baptized in the river of memory and anointed with the
mimetic power to reproduce his own healing on the damaged
body politic.
“Honey, I forgot to duck,” eyewitnesses recount, were the first wordsReagan spoke to his wife after being shot by John Hinckley. They are cited in
numerous accounts of the Reagan presidency as an example of Reagan’s grace
under fire, courage in the face of adversity, humor under stress. They are a
spin doctor’s dream—John Wayne meets Robin Williams in a Western yuck-
’em-up—the perfect sound bite. But they also serve, in a more ironic vein, as
another cautionary reminder that sometimes what is forgotten is more signifi-
cant than what is remembered.
In On Bended Knee , Mark Hertsgaard details the impact of the assassination
attempt, two months after Reagan took office, on the media’s shocking un-
willingness to critically evaluate his first-term policies. Members of Reagan’s
cabinet provide some of the most illuminating testimony. “The March shoot-
ing,” according to communications director David Gergen, “transformed the
whole thing. We had new capital.” It “gave us a second life” (in Hertsgaard
:). Budget director David Stockman suggests that it allowed the ad-ministration to frame the budget debate in “far more politically compelling
and dramatic terms: Are you for Ronald Reagan or against him?” (). Forget-
ting to duck, like forgetting to remember, lent Ronald Reagan vast amounts
of political capital, but it also paradoxically lent him credibility as the caretaker
of public memory. By taking the bullet, Reagan and his administration were
born again, baptized in the river of memory and anointed with the mimetic
power to reproduce his own healing on the damaged body politic.
mortal body created a mystic body, the regenerate Christian community. Six-
teenth-century political leaders sought, like divine kings, to reabsorb that
mystic community into their own personal bodies” (Rogin :).
Ironically, Reagan was elected on a pledge to dismantle large segments of
the very government that in its conception initiated the wholesale demise of
divine kingship by challenging the sovereign’s hegemonic prerogative to em-
body his subjects. In place of sovereign authority the American Constitution
asserted the divine right of the people, the body politic, for self-government.
But, as Rogin points out, in the Age of Reagan the locus of sacred value
completed its westward migration from Washington to Hollywood, from
statesmanship to celebrity. John Hinckley did not shoot Ronald Reagan be-
cause he was president of the United States. Hinckley shot Reagan because he
was acting out the plot of a movie, Taxi Driver , in order to win the heart of
the character played by Jodie Foster. To cement his place in movie history,
Hinckley shot Reagan on the day of the Academy Awards. The celluloid ce-
lebrity sought by Hinckley and deployed by Reagan was underlined by the
theme of that year’s awards: “Movies are forever” (Rogin : – ).
In the Age of Reagan the mystic body of Christian theology assumed the
form of the screen body projected from the sanctified domain of Hollywood.
On the evening he was shot, Reagan was scheduled to address the Academy
from the White House. “Film is forever,” the president was to tell the Acad-emy. “It is the motion picture that shows all of us not only how we look and
sound but—more important—how we feel” (in Rogin :). In the church
of the motion picture, how we feel is who we are, and who we are is shafts of
light projected on a blank screen, immaterial bodies cleaving to the celluloid
rock. In the Age of Reagan how we felt was an indice of how invested we
were in what was on that screen, and whether we believed it reflected our au-
thentic feelings, or produced them for us.
The Dead Body
“The kind of body which the current society needs” for the exercise of
power in the hagiographic mode of remembering is a dead one.
—Paige Baty ( : )
Ronald Reagan’s favorite habitation was the silent body, the body that can-
not speak but must be spoken for. In endless photo-ops and sound bites,
Ronald Reagan played more memorials than any president in living memory,
and it is perhaps here, in these silent places, speaking to and for the dead, that
his rememberings were most inventive.
Hagiography traditionally refers to the study or writing of the lives of the
saints. But in the postmodern state all manner of subjects are represented
hagiographically. Ronald Reagan’s favorite hagiographic narrative was what I
will call the parable of the hagioplebe. In this parable, which he evoked in
various forms in numerous presidential performances, an “average” American
embodies an idealized America through a heroic act of self-sacrifice. This in-
dividual is almost always male, and usually dead or fictive. The appeal to the
uncommon virtue of the common man is a hallowed tradition in American
politics, but in Reagan’s employment it takes on the visage of a primary nar-
cissism. The figure in the parable is always Reagan’s own: Zelig Unbound.
In the peroration of his inaugural address, Reagan describes the
mythic domain that he is entering. For the first time in history, Reagan re-
minds his audience, an inaugural ceremony was being performed on the West
Front of the Capitol. “Standing here one faces a magnificent vista,” Reagan
intoned, “[a]t the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on
whose shoulders we stand.” With the adjectives “monumental,” “stately,” and
“dignified” he pays homage to the memory of Washington, Jefferson, and
Lincoln respectively. This is the traditional inaugural tipping of the hat to the
founding fathers, shrewdly staged here to encourage the maximum televisual
connection between Reagan and his illustrious predecessors. But this staging
allows Reagan to make an even more innovative geographic and hagiographic
leap. Beyond these “monuments to heroism,” across the Potomac River “on
the far shore” is Arlington National Cemetery, “with its row upon row of
simple white markers.” Across the river from the giants of American history
lie its unsung heroes, anonymous bodies lost in battle.
Reagan’s inaugural address assumes the form of a eulogy in
which he invokes the power of the performer and the corpse
to summon an imagined community into being.
In the final act of his inaugural address, Reagan takes up the body of one of
Arlington’s denizens, Martin Treptow, “a small town barber” killed in WorldWar I. “We’re told,” Reagan tells us, “that on his body was found a diary. On
the flyleaf under the heading ‘My Pledge,’ he had written these words:
‘America must win this war. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice,
I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the
whole struggle depended on me alone” (: – ; emphasis mine).
Treptow’s words are a condensation of Reagan’s credo as expressed in the
body of his address, and enacted during his tenure as president. Reagan liter-
ally reads his credo off Treptow’s body in a commemorative act of incorpora-
tion and embodiment. By taking up Treptow’s body, Reagan casts himself
simultaneously as the rightful heir to Treptow’s legacy and the incarnation of
his pledge. Reagan’s vision for America, outlined earlier in the address, is au-
thoritatively situated in an authentic lineage from both sides of the river—the
stately monuments and the simple white markers. Reagan’s inaugural address
assumes the form of a eulogy in which he invokes the power of the performer and the corpse to summon an imagined community into being.
In discussing the significance of the funeral of the British actor Thomas
Betterton in , Joseph Roach points to “the stimulus of restored behavior
to the production of cultural memory” (:). He suggests that the
hagiographic accounts of Betterton’s life and, most pointedly, his death, enact
a process of surrogation by which Betterton assumes the role of the mimetic
double of the sovereign—a “shadow king, a visible effigy signifying the dual
nature of sovereignty, it’s division between an immortal and an abject body.”
As the shadow king of the “mimic state” of the London stage, Betterton func-
tions as a “performed effigy” interred amidst the royal dead in Westminster
Abbey, whose funeral enacts “the memorial constitution of the body politic.”
Betterton’s funeral, Roach argues, “constitutes an epitomizing event in the
early development of a particular kind of secular devotion” in which:
performers become the caretakers of memory through many kinds of
public action. […] A fiction like “Betterton” defines a cultural trend in
which the body of an actor serves as a medium—an effigy […] — in the
secular rituals through which a modernizing society communicates with
In a stunning inversion of Roach’s description of how surrogation functions
in a modernizing society, Ronald Reagan, the president, assumes his legiti-
mating authority as the caretaker of cultural memory as the “performed ef-
figy” of Ronald Reagan the actor. The parable of the hagioplebe illustrates
how, in the postmodern state, the techniques of the performer, through the
revisionary deployment of the technologies of restored behavior, supersede
the absolutist claims of the sovereign. The sovereign/president is reconstituted
as the actor/president, the performative medium through which the past
speaks to the present. The actor/president mimetically reproduces a surrogate
past utilizing the techniques and technologies absorbed through years of acting
and living in movies.
The story of Martin Treptow was Reagan’s contribution to the inaugural
address. He felt that Treptow’s words had an almost cinematic quality that
“brought tears to his eyes and that he knew he could use to bring tears to the
eyes of his audience” (Cannon :). To utilize Treptow’s story, however,
it was not enough to have dug it up. It would also require burying the body
anew. Martin Treptow, it turns out, had not been interred under a white
marker at Arlington but beneath a gray granite headstone , miles away in
Bloomer, Wisconsin. When this was revealed to Reagan before the inaugural
he was undeterred. According to Ken Khachigian, who scripted the inaugural
address, “Ronald Reagan has a sense of theatre that propels him to tell storiesin their most theatrically imposing manner. […] He knew it would break up
the story to say that Treptow was buried in Wisconsin” (in Cannon : –
). On January , Martin Treptow was buried at Arlington National
Cemetery by Ronald Wilson Reagan. The old actor staged a funeral for the
old soldier, and a presidency began.
The Mimetic Body
The real skill of the practitioner lies not in skilled concealment but in the
skilled revelation of skilled concealment.
—Michael Taussig ( : )
In the foreword to a collection of his speeches published the year he
stepped down as president, Ronald Reagan downplayed the importance of the techniques of the actor in his performance as president:
Some of my critics over the years have said that I became president be-
cause I was an actor who knew how to give a good speech. I suppose
that’s not too far wrong. Because an actor knows two important things—
to be honest in what he’s doing and to be in touch with the audience.
[...] I don’t believe my speeches took me as far as they did merely be-
cause of my rhetoric or delivery. [...] What I said simply made sense to
the guy on the street, and it’s the guy on the street who elects presidents
of the United States.
And that’s exactly what happened to me. (:)
Reagan suggests that it is not the technical skills (“rhetoric or delivery”) ac-
quired as an actor that brought him success in politics. Instead, he asserts, it isthe actor’s ability “to be honest in what he’s doing and to be in touch with
the audience” in a performance that “made sense to the guy on the street”
that made him a credible performer as the president of the United States. As
in his taking up of Treptow’s corporeal diary, the actor is the medium for the
message of the imagined community through the embodied transmission of
. For questions regarding the role Reagan’s advisers may have played in negotiating the
timing of the hostage’s release see October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Elec-
tion of Ronald Reagan by Gary Sick ().
. For an account of how this shift in analytical criteria occurred in the print and broad-
cast media see On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency by Mark Hertsgaard
().
. Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, writes of capitalism’s “massive subordination of
cognitive statements to the finality of the best possible performance” (:).
. Although the claim smacks of a delusional self-aggrandizement when assessing his film
career in toto, Garry Wills points out that if the test of Hollywood stardom is salaried
income, then King’s Row qualified Reagan who in , the year it was released,
earned just a little less than Errol Flynn, and more than Rita Hayworth (:).
. Many of the preceding quotations from Where’s the Rest of Me? are cited in Michael
Rogin’s Ronald Reagan, the Movie (), to which this section owes much.
. Zelig, a character portrayed by Woody Allen in the film of the same name, is a
plebeian everyman who is a screen on which others project their personal and historical
memories, fantasies, identity.
. The Treptow story was related to Reagan in a letter from Preston Hotchkiss, the chief
executive officer of the Bixby Ranch in Saugus, California (Cannon :). . Microphone checks before speeches often proved particularly adventurous, providing
infamous improvisations such as, “In three minutes we begin bombing Russia,” or,
preceding his address on the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut, “Boy, I saw Rambo lastnight. Now I know what to do the next time this happens.”
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