Trump tropes
Donald Trump in London, 6 versions, 13 July 2018
Trope#1
As a sort of finale to any interventionist or proxy war, there is the demand of the people to lay their hands on the body of the demagogue that intervention helped to free them from. The same logic seems to have subliminally sunk into the very centres of the powers of intervention. The lust for the body (of the Leader), at least symbolically, was more than apparent in the masses who greeted Donald Trump in London.
Trump however never appeared in London's public space. But in his absence, the people compensated themselves with self-produced avatars, effigies, and imposters; each one a do-it-yourself trope of Trump. In their mockery of the person, and the person alone, the tropes amalgamated in a carnival of resistance to bare as much about our political horizons, as about Donald Trump.
The carnival is an exposé of collective belief through unmediated popular expression. Its reverie renders visible a shared allegorical space as from the dream state Walter Benjamin suggested we inhabit in modernity and from which we must awaken. We can read the tropes of Donald Trump as naïve expressions in our dream state through the unadulterated language of the street; and as forewarnings of the fate (as Benjamin diagnosed in 30s Germany) that surrendered to a fascism built on the primal pull of a mythic European identity. Yet this carnival by its claim to the one body recalls another aesthetic and imagination. That is the power of the carnivalesqe as from Mikhail Bakhtin's writing where terror is conquered by laughter and the grotesque body becomes the property of the people.
Trope#2
Bakhtin's grotesque body today is of course that of our governance our democracy become demagogue, and from which the people need protection. Writing during the imposition of an official 'socialist realism' during Stalin's rule, Bakhtin found escape through Rabelais and the language of the people, the popular art that mocks and insults the deity. Mockery as a form of the peoples' power. The carnivalesqe and grotesque as their means of dissolving the system; i.e. when enclosed by it, there remained for the people a possibility of living outside it, in a parallel universe of the carnival.
As Bakhtin wrote, carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.
The Carnival is the people's response to the Gargantua, the obscenity of power which in our modern age is the gargantuan alliance of money and governance. An union of democracy and oligarchy that inflicts its excesses on ordinary life on a scale akin to Rabelais' tales of Paris as when, Gargantua drowned in his urine two hundred sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen Parisians.
Yet the people turn the terror of its profligacy into the blind laughter of the carnival. The cosmic catastrophe (of Trump in our case) represented in the material bodily lower stratum is degraded, humanised, and transformed into grotesque monsters – monsters to identify if only to mock with impunity.
Trope#3
The mirror phase of life, as Freud and later Lacan described it, is when a baby comes to recognise itself in the mirror. Which is where Trump is trapped in, in an infantile mirror phase condemned to recognise only himself, his own self as a trope. All of Trump's utterances are read as this, of an exclusory White Eurocentric Maleness.
Against this the carnivalesqe asserts itself through diversity - a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, that combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.
The carnival's contemporary practice in London rejuvenated by the Afro-Caribbean community also crosses a broken bridge to the pre-colonial past of Europe itself. Bakhtin describes how the Renaissance and its latinisers spelt the end of the Rabelesian world and its conception of art and of people. If art and the people were interlinked through folk culture and 'dialects of the incomprehensible', that naive and peaceful coexistence of the dialects came to an end; they began to clarify each other, and their variety was gradually unveiled.
The space by which the auratic power of the folk could exert its public (and vulgar) imagination began narrowing in industrial Europe. Benjamin's saying that Art teaches us to see into things, Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things identifies the inversion in the Western aesthetic order that come to mirror the coming of a modern fascism.
Trope#4
Trump tells us again and again who the nation is for. But in that sense Trump is unknowingly repeating the conundrum of the truism we live in, whether it's through Hegel or Max Weber or Carl Schmitt. That the project of an universal modernity was built on the nation state and language as the bearer of identity, that then demands the making of a people, the volk. In this making lies both the compulsive reason for and the irony of modern nationalism based on a pre-modern racially identikit culturally harmonised people.
But as Bakhtin writes of Rabelais' time, a single national language did not exist as yet; it was being slowly formed. That social life was an intense interorientation (of dialects).
For Benjamin, if our broken history is connective and not progressive as in the Marxist sense, the failure (of history) lies in the capacity to develop technology but not use it to inaugurate a new political outside the old reign of property. Thus the revolutionary potential of film and photograph, mass media (superceded in the digital age by the utopianism of the internet and social media) could have ushered a new social order but instead became tied to the new relation of property, the commodity. Though uncommitted to any conception of communism (whilst Bakhtin lived in its deformed Stalinist version), Benjamin's fear was that in our incapacity to forge the aesthetic and social promise of our technology, other ‘powers of enchantment’ beckon.
Trope #5
The most cyborg and mediatised of all the tropes with the morphed hand and cellphone, perhaps congenitally, this baby Trump bombards us, not with depleted uranium but with rabid memes. Because the success of a meme has little to do with its veracity, in fact the opposite (the greater the falsehood, the greater the viral potential), what matters is quantity not quality. Trump's meme bombardment, analogous to what Benjamin wrote of art in the age of mechanical production, has little to do with values of the past like creativity, genius, eternal value, but deal with concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense.
The trope is reliant on the bodies it settles upon, to tune them to its wavelength as a monolithic volk necessary to Make America Great again, Make Europe Great again, Make Britain Great again.
Trope #6
Mockery, as popular expression, produces its wish images in the idiom of the street. But our digital era creates its own dimensions of (virtual) space and (viral) production. It replicates ad infinitum ad nauseum, with its own dynamics (of mockery and a counter mockery) just as our democratic edifice has in its own hall of mirrors (of fake news and post-truth). Trapped in this viral cycle, the more we are detached and inundated by our own consumption, the more our need for that one single corpus of power and to be able to lay claim to its body. It is also why Bakhtin reminded us that grotesque realism is so opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world. It's rooted in the contradiction between our means (of technology) and the material conditions of our political existence as Benjamin had warned. That an unrequited quest for the transparency of power also leads perversely to the One, a spectacular enactment of the Leader. As the inevitabilities of liberal democracy and viral technology produce more Trumps, the louder the carnival laughter must become - as Bakhtin said in Stalin's time - to redefine life and art for a new condition. It is how carnival laughter can build its own world in opposition to the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.