Before I proceed to this version of internet-mandated doom, two bits of business:
First, “The Last Avant-Garde,” my review of Dominique Routhier’s solid book on the situationists and cybernetics, is published at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
I will be presenting my paper “In and Against the Dream Machine: Hollywood on Strike” at this November’s Historical Materialism conference in London, as part of a panel on performance and resistance in late-late capitalism. More details here…
American politics has been about image over substance for a long time. Quite possibly, it’s been that way from the beginning. Its present state can’t really be news to anyone. Donald Trump implicitly gets this, and it explains why he may be the most durable political figure in recent memory.
If there is an image that captures this election season, it is that of a defiant, bloodied Trump being ushered offstage by the Secret Service, the Stars and Stripes waving in the background next to his raised fist. You almost have to admire it; he knew exactly what to do in the situation. Of course he did. And the resulting photograph isn’t just the photo of the year, it may be the photo of the decade. I hope whoever snapped it is prepared to retire, because after it’s slapped across every magazine and newspaper in the world, they’ll have made a damned mint.
If a picture’s meaning is shaped by its context, then it is by definition bound to bring other images to mind. In this case, Trump’s resolve conjures cringey memes of a doddering Joe Biden struggling to string a sentence together. It will be what centrists and Democrats think of when they refrain from criticizing Trump lest it come off in “poor taste” (not that those on the right would extend the same courtesy). It will be what people think of when they go to the polls. They will have a simple formula rattling on their head: one of these men can get back up, can act with intent and purpose. It’s not the incumbent. It will be enough to turn them out in droves, sway many an ineffable swing voter, and demoralize even the most steadfast Biden supporter.
This is the logical outcome of politics as spectacle: eventually the issues matter in only passing fashion, secondary to the leader. In fact what matters isn’t even the leader himself but the idea of the leader. Stability, security, the viability of a meaningful future; insofar as these play any role whatsoever in this election cycle, they are embodied in a single person. Jameson famously argued that the postmodern rejection of metanarrative — and the aesthetic leveling that comes with it — stands in for very real power structures and hierarchies. It also provides cover for the de/reconstitutions necessary for power to maintain itself. The convergence between establishment neoliberalism and the far-right has been underway for some time, and has taken some worrying steps forward lately. The American version of this is taking place in a characteristically crude and literal way. Swathes of young people already see it, as it has been the liberals most enthusiastically cheering the vicious crackdown on protests in solidarity with Gaza. Now, with these same centrists essentially handing the moment over to a right that is better mobilized and thoroughly prepared to seize and reshape the mechanisms of power. What was once “unpresidential” becomes the new standard of good government. The new boss will always also be the old boss.
In this sense, it is acutely significant that there is blood streaking Trump’s face. Blood is a highly potent emotive in any political imaginary, but it has played a pointedly grotesque role in the mythos of fascism and the far-right, allowing them to cast themselves as both martyr and honorable guardian. Already you can see it in the outpourings specifically from the Christian right, their insertion of Trump into religious narratives, proof that “God wants Trump to be safe.”
Harrowing as it is, it also tells us something worth remembering: that while images are shaped by context, they also contextualize. Just as this one pulls other images to mind, so will it obscure others. Politicians are expressing more condolence for Trump than they have 40,000 dead Palestinians. The very reasonable insistence that a man who encourages violence should expect it to come back around will be drowned out by accusations of bloodthirst. The fact that the shooter was a registered Republican will be twisted into paranoid proof that the project to Make America Great Again is besieged by enemies on all sides. The urge among liberals and parts of the left to look for false flag conspiracy will simply add to political paralysis.
Whether there is any alternative to this in the immediate term is difficult to see. There can be no denying that the next several years will be very rough, and it may be some time before we can see a way out. Pictures don’t move history by themselves, but the fact that this one and the events that made it close the loop for Trump make it a very difficult one to get around. American politics as aesthetics is taking a massive leap forward. The blood will be chillingly real.
Header image is Hermann Nitsch’s Schüttbild (1983).