(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The 20. January 2017 joins Donald Trump as the 45. President of the United States. What seemed completely inconceivable just six months ago is a reality. President Trump replaces President Obama, the first black president and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (but of course also cash anti-terrorist and avid drone attack user, bank rescuer and avid deportee of illegal immigrants).
Trump's electoral victory states with seven-inch stitches that politics has turned into image politics: that politics today has to do with images, and not just in the way that political content is to be wrapped, but in the sense that politics takes place like pictures. This is not just a subsequent wrapping process, but about politics emerging as pictures, that we are in a picture room, as Walter Benjamin puts it. It's a process that has been going on for a long time – Benjamin described it as early as the 1930s, and Guy Debord tried to get it up to par with the 1960s with his analysis of the spectacular. If Benjamin saw a potential in reproductive technology development, the advent of photography and that the film produced the possibility of a visual self-production where modern man could see himself – then Debord focused on the submission that the new imaging technologies enabled. But they agreed that a shift was taking place in terms of politics as such. Agree that politics became something else as a result of the explosive growth in the number of reproduction technologies and their ability to produce and circulate images in which modern society is not merely cinematically represented and represented, but cinematically produced. That events occur as picture events with material effects.
Television series and politics. Trump's reality presidency appears as a natural continuation of what American politologist Michael Rogin calls "Reagan, the Movie," that is, President Reagan's visual staging, alternating his past as an actor. The key difference is that with Trump it is no longer an actor who later becomes a politician, but about a continuum of mass media self-representation and politics in which Trump plays no other than himself. It doesn't matter – or Trump always is in character. If Reagan used his film roles and disturbingly moved between the two worlds – think of the episode where he calls his dog Lassie – then Trump is always already in a picture room where there is no difference between TV series and politics.
Of course, that is why it does not make sense to appeal to a Habermasian ideal of a communicative rationality confronted by Trump. The contradiction between rational arguments and affect does not work, it is precisely what Trump effectively suspends. The more desperate politicians, experts, journalists and even stand-up comedians try to appeal to political reason, the more they expose the blatantly incoherent or just plain false in Trump's statements – the more they fail in their criticism of Trump's so-called populism. As Benjamin, but also George Bataille already pointed out, confronted with the different fascisms of the 1930s, modern mass politics cannot be reduced to a matter of argument. Political discourse is not a lordship-free rational debate, where opponents are also dialogue partners, orienting themselves to the best argument. Politics is just as much about emotions or pre-individual influences that politicians can mobilize or actively produce. As Benjamin wrote, Hitler was just able to "express the mass", and it was not the Weimar Republican democracy. The mass was aesthetically fictionalized by Nazism, they saw themselves as elements of visual spectacles. As members of the party and as the chosen race, they had a role (to play) in the racist dramaturgy of Nazism.
Democracy rests on a fundamental obscurity, where democracy means both power and governance.
«Demonology.» According to Michael Rogin, American politics has always been characterized by what he calls an anti-insurgency demonology, in which the ruling class constantly produces enemy images (the scalping Indians, the rebellious black slaves, the Muslim terrorist et cetera) who intend to create cohesion through demonization and exclusion (killing) of the second, staged about demons, monsters and evil spirits threatening the nation. This is conceived as a body that is in danger of being contaminated and therefore must be protected by state power, which must defend both the physical body of the subject and the body politics of the nation. A threat to one is a threat to the other, and the state must administer at both the micro and macro levels, safeguard individual bodies and the nation's body as a whole, keep the body healthy. Trump's U.S.-Mexico wall must curb a colored invasion that threatens to contaminate and destroy the United States. Muslims must be denied entry and three million illegal migrants must be deported immediately. Now biopolitics is militarized.
Sovereignty and imperfection. As we know from, among others, the French philosopher Claude Lefort, politics has to do with design, about giving society a shape. The political is the form that society gives itself, the political is about establishing a social space for the actors, staging it as a space, what Lefort speaks of as "mise en scène" and making the actors' trade sense what he speaks of as "Mise en sens". For Lefort, this design process has to do with the radical openness of democracy, the fact that the seat of power becomes empty when the king gets his head cut off in the democratic revolution. In democracy, therefore, no one has a privileged access to power, who, Lefort writes, "is subject to periodic redistribution procedures." According to Lefort, democracy is characterized by a fundamental indeterminacy. Of course, it is this indeterminacy that Trump is trying to cancel with his references to himself as beyond the law. He is not any politician, in fact he is not a politician at all, though self-made businessman getting things done. He is not fatigued by party political harassment and does not worry about silly legal obligations. Trump will do what needs to be done to make the United States great again: "Make America Great Again." With Lefort, we can understand Trump as a sovereign authority, promising to deal with the troubling impossibility of democracy, promising to clean up and re-energize the nation. Trump is something different from all the traditional politicians. His lack of political experience and the gaping knowledge of the world outside the United States is by no means disqualifying, on the contrary. He suspends politics in the general sense. He comes from outside and saves the United States, which is on the brink of collapse. The country is in crisis, there is no control whatsoever, politicians are paralyzed, but Trump can. He promises to re-enter the United States and purify the American body of foreigners, healing the diseased body. Build a wall for Mexico, throw non-Americans out of the country, and leave international collaborations. "This country is in big trouble. We no longer win. We are losing to China. We are losing to Mexico. Both in terms of trade and at the border. We lose to everyone. […] We need strength. We need energy. ” And Trump has the strength he can reverse the development, he can make the "United States" identical to the United States. He has the courage to remove the unwanted elements that threaten the country: Mexicans, Muslims, the politically correct and the feminists. Trump is the sovereign who cancels the basic openness of democracy and forces "the king's two bodies" back together.
Populism and democracy. After the election, populism has been a widely used explanation for Trump's victory. Trump is a populist and appeals to the people in a decidedly unfortunate way that allowed Trump to coup the election through the election. The function of populism analysis is to set free the democratic system of criticism: There is a problem we have a challenge, but what we need to do is support the system (that gave us Trump !?). Populism is the bad – the absence of arguments and the mobilization of the worst in the public's soul – while democracy is the good that we must defend.
However, there is no populist, totalitarian or fascist threat if we know it is something that is fundamentally different from democratic normality. The opposition between populism / fascism and democracy, in which anti-fascist mobilization is being answered by Trump, is a short-circuit that excludes alternatives, citing a status quo that has long ago proved to be an exception. As we know from, among others, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, there is a connection between democracy and totalitarianism. Democracy rests on a fundamental ambiguity where democracy means both power and governance, zoe that bios. And democracy is the movement between these two poles. Agamben puts it in the way that democracy is the bearer of a biopolitical class struggle that is constantly threatening to break out. And all the time it does. The so-called refugee crisis in Europe is a good example: the EU and the European nation states have transformed the Mediterranean into a huge mass grave and are doing everything in the world to avoid desperate refugees entering Europe. We sacrifice the others on the altar of national democracy.
Trump has the courage to remove the unwanted elements that threaten the country: Mexicans, Muslims, the politically correct and feminists.
One of the problems with the populism analysis is that it sanctifies representative democracy and instead chooses to blame the "people" who have voted wrong. It is the people it is crazy with, not democracy. But it is the democratic system that creates the people who, in the next moment, face an election (Clinton vs. Trump). Therefore, it is not the people who choose Trump, but the representative national democracy that produces the people as the voting subject. The basic operation of representative democracy is thus not the choice between the various candidates described on a historically handed down, but rather arbitrary scale going from left to right, but the production of the people as the political subject. However, this operation is not really visible. As the people vote and elect one or the other candidate, it appears that this act is the actual political act, as if it is the most important gesture in democracy. But it's not. Prior has gone the production of the people. What can be called an interpellation, a complex operation in which a subject is produced with agent and self-consciousness, which sees itself as the starting point for political action, but which is in fact an effect of a structure. In this case, representative democracy, which is more about the people giving power to an individual or a party than the people having political agents and choosing someone.
Whiteness. Whatever it is, the basic operation of representative national democracy is to produce the people who subsequently cast its votes in favor of one or the other candidate. The electoral action makes it look like the people have the power and elect a president, but it's actually the other way around. In November, the election between Trump and Clinton was the two options (we forget for a moment that there were actually more candidates, not least Jill Stein for the Greens) – a flamboyant billionaire, construction speculator and reality star, and a former First Lady and Foreign Minister. Thus, two candidates who can only be seen as expressions of the American people with great difficulty. So the process is the other way around – the democratic system creates the people. In other words, it is Trump who has effectively produced (a certain representation of) the American people – not the American people who have elected Trump. And they have largely done so in light of the transformation of administration policy that has taken place over the past three decades, where more and more areas have been left to the free ravages of market forces. In the course of political neoliberal emptying, Trump appears to be a different brand, more hard-headed and willing to turn up the racist and protectionist solutions. He makes a difference. But of course there is also a great deal of continuity, in the sense that the United States has always been a white democracy, where whites are equal, but more than any other. In the United States, citizenship is a form of racial privilege – whiteness is an essential characteristic of American citizenship. It fully confirms the election of Trump, and only a showdown with that relationship can create the conditions for an American democracy. Which is probably the same as saying that without a revolution, no democracy.
Also read these in our article series "Trump's USA":
Mikkel Bolt is an amanuensis in cultural history at the University of Copenhagen and has among other things published Emergency crisis. Notes on the ongoing collapse (2013) and The metamorphosis of contemporary art (2016)
mras@hum.ku.dk
