I did say I wasn't going to track this kind of tropery anymore - but couldn't resist reactivating for this beaut of a phrase "performative imperialism", in re. Trump's annexatory theatrics toward Canada, Greenland, Panana, renaming Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America....
From an Atlantic piece by Jonathan Chait:
"Since winning a second presidential term, Donald Trump has made a curious pivot to a kind of performative imperialism.... When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario..... [But] we cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.
"An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones....A second reason is that Trump uses his international bullying as fan service for his base. The actual, concrete policy agenda of Trump’s presidency consists largely of boring regulatory and tax favors to wealthy donors and business interests—priorities that most of his voters don’t care about. Trump seems to grasp the need for public dramas to entertain the MAGA base.
"Spectacles of domination play an important role in Trump’s political style. “Build the wall” is the classic example: Trump never did build his “big, beautiful wall” along the length of the southern border, yet his fans don’t hold that against him, because the physical manifestation of a barrier on the southern border was beside the point. They thrilled instead to the idea of a wall as an expression of strength and defiance. When Trump would respond to criticism by saying, “The wall just got 10 feet higher,” he was performing dominance. The real wall was the threats he made along the way."
"There is little evidence that Trump is interested in any kind of practical deal [with Greenland]. He wants to menace allies.... Renaming the Gulf of Mexico isn’t even plausibly related to any economic or territorial objective. It’s pure symbolic bluster."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
So, kind of talk LOUDLY and carry no stick at all?
I am amazed that nowhere in the analysis or commentary on this subject that I've seen has the word "lebensraum" come up.
My completely uninformed take on Trump's bellicosity
1/ Putin-pleasing push to crack apart NATO
2/ Gets people used to the idea that bigger countries have a "natural" right - in the Hobbesian state of nature that is geopolitics - to dominate or outright absorb adjacent countries. Which would instill acceptance of Russia's designs on Ukraine and probably the Baltic States, prepare people for US non-pushback to China taking Taiwan...
3/ Part of Trump's late-19th-Century cos-play - tariffs, trade wars, protectionism... the Gilded Age and robber barons ... Manifest Destiny and the explicitly imperial expansionism (Hawaii et al) of the USA when it emerged into superpower status, as opposed to the covert imperialism and soft-power manipulations of the post-WW2 era.
And then of course as others have said, it's a distraction from the coming failure to improve things on a kitchen-table level, the back-tracking from other unrealisable promises.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Follow up piece by Chait on shameless rationalizations of Trumpy bluster by former conservative non-interventionist American First type
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Talking of "spectacles of domination" as referenced by Chait in the first of the pieces... here's an essay by T.J. Clark in the LRB entitled "A Brief Guide To Trump and the Spectacle". Clark being a former member of the British chapter of the Situationist International and associate of King Mob - and also, in his later role as head of the Department of Fine Art at Leeds University, a mentor / influence to Gang of Four, the Mekons et al. So he knows whereof he speaks on the subject of the society of the spectacle.
I quite liked the anti-trope "marionette theatres of ‘democracy’" but overall didn't get a whole lot out of this essay. Yet another addition to the heaping mound of high-flown eloquence, undereath the floweriness for the most part things we've read before many times on this subject of Trump as dark magus of media, things we've worked out for ourselves or just viscerally grasped.
This bit is quite interesting - on Trump not being a larger-than-life figure:
But all of these previous technics of persuasion spoke or shone down from a distance. They addressed an audience, they made a totality. Of course, the demagogue pretended to identity with his demos, but the technology did not exist to do the complete lying job. The affix ‘-agogue’ admits as much: the demagogue was still a magician, a mystagogue, a bearer of charisma. And Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size.
Trump, being extremely old, is attached to the old-fashioned pageantry of spectacular power - rallies, parades, inaugurations and other ceremonies attendant to high office. All that Billy Fisher as President of Ambrosia stuff - marching at the head of regiments, addressing rapt crowds in stadiums through tannoy systems. He is famously obsessed with crowd sizes, etc. But he's not any good at oratory, he's a leaden speaker when given a high-flown pre-written speech to read off a teleprompter. Can't summon a grand cadence or soaring climax to save his life. His forte is the rambling inner monologue conducted in public, aka the weave. Which if not as cogent as a tweet certainly seems to have more in common with the driveling rants and quickfire riposte of , message boards, text messages, influencers, social media, blogs even. That sense of unguarded exposure... "being yourself" but with an audience... like a webcam YouTuber. A rhetoric-free mode, not anti-theatrical but un-threatrical
The relaxedness of his appearances on manosphere podcasts and the like is said to have played a role in his reaching young men - see this Kieran Press-Reynolds feature - the candidate just shooting the shit, one of us. Unlike other pols, Trump doesn't have talking-points, he has obsessions and antagonisms that erupt regularly and endlessly as organic leitmotifs... less slogans or catchphrases as mental tics.... the kind of self-image bolstering or anxiety-warding catchphrases, mantras and affirmation that go through anybody's head, except he's doing it aloud, in front of a microphone. Trump doesn't go off script, there is no script - it's unscripted entertainment ("unscripted television" being the genre in which reality TV among other things is classified in the biz). There's no ad libbing because it's all ad libbing.
So Clark is right insofar as this is not Spectacle 1.0 where there's distance traversed by awe, a superheroic figure on a dais, grand gestures. It's not "all eyes on me", it's more like an abject bleed-through, a ghastly intimacy.... (for his fans) he-is-us-and-we-are-he... a commingling of id impulses.
(For sure, throwbacks paint those beyond-kitsch paintings of him as a military leader, muscley fighter/vigilante, saviour etc But I don't think this is the bulk of his magnetism. The fantasy is "wish I could be that full of myself, that honest about my prejudices and paranoias, that openly and unashamedly base".
It's a different kind of identification, going far beyond the older ideas of representative politics.
We're not looking at a show, we're pulled into his show... it's the inner fantasy of Ambrosia leaking out abjectly to cover the entire surface of reality, displacing and supplanting and absorbing it.
I think this why instinctively a lot of anti-MAGAs people are tuning out, rationing their following of the news, keeping off of Twitter... it's Baudrillardian recalcitrance, an attention-economy boycott, a refusal to be conscripted into the unscripted entertainment..... perhaps a kind of tonic immobility....
No comments:
Post a Comment