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  • Robert Topinka — “Back to a Past that Was Futuristic”: The Alt-Right and the Uncanny Form of Racism

    Robert Topinka — “Back to a Past that Was Futuristic”: The Alt-Right and the Uncanny Form of Racism

    Robert Topinka

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    There are reduced expectations for the younger generation, and this is the first time this has happened in American history. Even if there are aspects of Trump that are retro and that seem to be going back to the past, I think a lot of people want to go back to a past that was futuristic—The Jetsons, Star Trek. They’re dated but futuristic.

    —Peter Thiel, quoted in Dowd (2017)

    In the scramble to explain Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, then-campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon’s claim to a Mother Jones reporter that Breitbart under his editorship was a “platform for the alt-right” (Posner 2016) generated widespread attention in mainstream media publications.[1] A rash of alt-right “explainers” appeared that attempted to familiarize the uninitiated with this so-called movement by outlining the obscure intellectual roots of the alt-right’s seemingly inscrutable meme-driven cultural politics. This paper begins from the premise that the alt-right is not a movement but a reactionary ideology, a “bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics,” better understood as an ideological “milieu” rather than a movement (Nagle 2017, 19 & 18). Through an analysis of alt-right meme practice and neoreactionary theory, I will show in what follows that the intellectual innovation of the alt-right and its neoreactionary co-travelers is to attach white identity politics to a critique of modernity that turns postcolonialism on its head. Where the latter attacks racism for compromising the democratic promise, the former attacks democracy for compromising the white race’s promise, which is to accelerate capitalism to the lost Hobbesian future of the CEO-King, a vision implied in Peter Thiel’s words quoted in the epigraph to this article. Neoreactionaries have resurrected nineteenth-century notions of racial degenerationism and race as civilizational index, sutured them to techno-futurism, and deployed this monstrous racist hybrid in the form of what look on the surface like left and postcolonial critiques of modernity. The components of this thinking are familiar, but this precise combination is novel. The intellectual and aesthetic practice of the alt-right can thus be described as uncanny: strange but entirely familiar, a return in the present of a repressed past. In short, the alt-right’s newness is a symptom of its oldness.

    This argument draws on Corey Robin’s (2013) analysis of two key features of reactionary ideology, which, Robin argues, seeks to restore a lost past to a fallen present, and does so precisely by attacking the present on its own terms. This reactionary war against contemporary culture therefore tends to assume the aesthetic form of this culture—an immanent critique from the right that attacks the present culture to restore a past it has lost. Adopting Robin’s framework, I examine the attack on the present in the form of alt-right meme culture and the neoreactionary proposal for restoring a lost past.

    Neoreactionaries have a name for the structure of the fallen present: the “Cathedral,” the term Curtis Yarvin (writing as the blogger Mencius Moldbug) coined to describe the academics and mainstream journalists who preach the official “faith” of political correctness (2008a). The notion bears resemblance to the “propaganda model” (Herman and Chomsky 1988) of mass media, but instead of mainstream media and academia colluding with capital, they are preventing its flourishing. In its broad contours if not in its politics, this “Cathedral” critique resonates with left critiques of identity politics and diversity discourse, both of which are central to what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism,” or the form of capitalism that captures resistance by materializing practices of agency, participation, and diversity in communication technologies (Dean 2002, 2009). Left academics therefore find themselves united with corporate capital around “enthusiasm for diversity, multiplicity, and the agency of consumers” (Dean 2009, 9), a state of affairs that has led many on the left to call for a rejection of identity politics. Hence Nagle, in her important if controversial work on the emerging reactionary ideologies, argues that the alt-right opposes “the new identity politics” of liberal online spaces like the social blogging network Tumblr that normalize “anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric” on the “cultural left” (Nagle 2017, 68).

    I want to suggest here, though, that whatever the merits of identity politics as a scholarly approach or political strategy might be, the alt-right critique of identity politics is only the first reactionary gesture—the immanent critique of the present. The second move—the restoration of the lost past—does far more than violate the terms of diversity discourse; it seeks to install race as an interface that gathers humans in a global frame and sorts them hierarchically. Mobilizing memes as the aesthetic form of reaction, the alt-right popularizes this racial interface. Richard Spencer’s slogan—“race is real, race matters, race is the foundation of identity” (Caldwell 2016)—seeks to formalize racism as a political strategy, appropriating diversity discourse to claim white nationalism as a protected identity formation. Racist exclusion is the fulcrum of the proposed political order.

    The uncanny is a useful figure for analyzing the reactionary attempt to restore a lost past. This formal racism is uncanny in the strict sense Freud (1919) defines the term: the appearance of “something long familiar” that was estranged “only through being repressed” (148).  The appearance of this estranged object motivates ideological attempts to “integrate the uncanny” and “assign it a place” in a fallen present (Dolar 1991, 19). By focusing on the alt-right’s immanent critique of identity politics, we allow the alt-right to direct us to the “place” in the fallen present that needs critiquing, all the while missing the lost past that the alt-right seeks to restore. As a figure of encounter with the present, the uncanny directs us to the formal practice of assigning a place.

    I begin with the first reactionary gesture—immanent critique—by examining the meme as a formal manifestation of what Dean calls communicative capitalism, and therefore as an entirely familiar form, even if the content of alt-right memes is bizarre. I then turn to the second reactionary gesture—the restoration of the lost past—by turning to the intellectual roots of the alt-right, focusing on Bannon’s summer of 2014 speech at a Vatican conference and its resonance with the neoreactionary thinkers Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, whose form of uncanny racism I will describe. The connection extends beyond shared sympathy: Yarvin’s start-up counts the Trump-supporting Thiel as an investor (Pein 2014), and Yarvin reportedly communicated through an intermediary with Bannon while the latter was still Trump’s Chief of Staff (Johnson and Stokols 2017). I conclude by suggesting how attention to ideological form makes it possible to critique reactionary ideology without replicating the first reactionary gesture and arriving at the same place of critique that reactionary ideology selects, a danger that haunts any attempt to contextualize reaction.

    First, a brief note on terminology: the alt-right is a contested term, but is best understood as a shorthand for anti-politically correct reactionary ideology that developed its meme aesthetic in message boards, particularly 4chan (see Nagle 2017, 12 & 19). Neoreactionary thinking is a specific intellectual tradition that influences many alt-right adherents. This paper does not seek to define the alt-right, and indeed such definitional questions tend to impose a misreading of the alt-right as a coherent movement rather than a reactionary ideology. Nor does this paper deny the existence of extreme right organization (Berlet and Lyons 2000; Berlet 2004); rather, it seeks to analyze the “metapolitics” (Lyons 2017) of an ideological “fascist creep” (Ross 2017).

    Memes and the Allegorical Interface

    After Trump’s 2016 victory, alt-right partisans began claiming the election as a turning point in a meme war that most mainstream audiences nevertheless knew little about until mainstream journalists began publishing “explainers” on the subject.  A journalistic genre of recent vintage, the “explainer” responds to the perpetual news and commentary stream by expanding the nut graph into a contextual framework for understanding complex or obscure issues, stories or trends, allowing those who find themselves “out of the loop” to “grasp the whole” of the story (Rosen 2008). The alt-right, with its cornucopia of obscure memes and references—from the mystical “meme magic” of the pseudo-religious Cult of Kek (more on this below) to the infamous Pepe the Frog to racist approximation of African American Vernacular English of “dindu nuffin”—would seem to demand the explainer treatment, particularly for those who discovered the alt-right only after Trump’s hiring of Bannon brought the alt-right to mainstream attention. As I show below, mainstream explainers tend to attempt to uncover the ostensibly obscure symbolism of alt-right memes.

    Before turning to the explainers, though, it is necessary to attend to the meme and its function in reactionary ideology. The critical impulse is to reveal that which ideology conceals, but the alt-right does not conceal its racism; there is no cover (Topinka 2018). Instead, there is an attempt to repurpose the form of communicative capitalism to critique the present. As a form, the meme is ideally suited to such a task. The meme form encourages inclusion, participation, and bricolage—all the tools once associated with emancipatory politics and now absorbed into communicative capitalism. In this sense, the meme offers a perfect reactionary tool: reappropriative in its form, it reacts against the present by repurposing it.

    Indeed, the meme is a privileged form of communicative capitalism; it is an allegory of exchange, where culture exits only to be repurposed, and where the symbolic submits to circulation. Although their content may appear obscure, the form of alt-right memes is entirely familiar; in this sense, they are uncanny allegories of communicative capitalism.  Building on and contesting the media formalism of Lev Manovich and the hard media determinism of Friedrich Kittler, Alexander Galloway’s (2012) recent work on control allegories argues that media cannot be reduced to their technical predicates—storing, transmitting, and processing—or understood as “objects” bearing a set of formal characteristics that afford certain determinant effects. Galloway (2012) proposes the notion of the “interface” to examine media as forms that inaugurate sets of practices. Mediation is therefore a “process-object” (46), a space of flow, transformation, and transition where the “inside” of technical media encounters the “outside” of the social world. This encounter between technical media and social technique is, for Galloway, an allegory of how contemporary power works: technical apparatuses tend to encourage sets of practices that produce a flexible, modular, and endlessly transformable form of power.

    A technical apparatus might encourage a reactionary response as well. Consider Urbit, the “personal sever” created by Curtis Yarvin, also known as Moldbug, the neoreactionary blogger. The Urbit interface inserts an “opaque layer” between the user and the combination of cloud services users rely on (Wolfe-Pauly 2017). Rather than outsourcing computing to cloud services, Urbit offers general purpose personal server that “holds your data; runs your apps; wrangles your connected devices; and defines your secure identity” (Wolfe-Pauley 2017). Urbit seeks to reclaim the sovereignty that Benjamin Bratton (2016) argues has been vested in “the Stack” of computing and cloud services (particularly Facebook, Google, and Amazon) that now comprise planetary-scale computation. As creators Galen Wolfe-Pauly and Yarvin suggest, Urbit restores digital independence and reclaims sovereignty by returning to users exclusive control over their data. Instead of more participatory culture—“toiling on Mark Zuckerberg’s content farm” (Yarvin, quoted in Lecher 2017)—Urbit offers what neoreactionaries call “exit.” It is software as an allegory for the neoreactionary age.

    The meme form relies on participation from users competent in digital remixing. To meme is to participate through reappropriation. Scholars have tended to read this participatory reappropriation as democratizing and politically liberating (Coleman 2014)—even, at times, when meme practice becomes explicitly racist (Phillips 2015, 97).[2] Yet moving too quickly from technique to politics risks misunderstanding both. Amidst the recent attention in mainstream culture given to memes forged on the website 4chan’s message boards, it is also tempting to claim that “4chan invented the meme as we use it today” (Beran 2017). However, the meme form emerges from message board formats rather than any particular community. Börzsei (2013) thus traces the meme’s genealogy to Usenet, where meme use signals familiarity with message board discourse and offers a means of performing digital competence. Memes emerge from a constellation of interfaces—photo editors, image hosting sites, meme generators for image macro memes, and message boards—that encourage exchange, appropriation, and repurposing. As such, the meme is an allegory for communicative capitalism, which does not capture each instance of resistance through cultural reappropriation so much as engulf resistance in its very form.

    Memes function through deixis: they signal location in a culture, relying on in-group agreement for understanding.  The meme operates through the digital media aesthetics of the “stream” (Lovink 2016), where the signaling of links in circulatory networks replaces symbolic representation. This accounts for the uncanny familiarity of alt-right memes, since their obscurity requires laborious explanation to “understand;” that is, of course, unless one already knows the references. But the obscurity to outsiders is a basic function of the meme form itself. Consider the “Most Interesting Man in the World” meme, an example of the image macro, which in turn provides the basic grammar for the meme: an image, typically drawn from popular culture, is overlaid with text, which itself typically references popular culture or tropes from internet culture (the image might be also be drawn from a viral video, but, as Shiffman (2011) argues, something that “goes viral” does not become a meme unless it becomes the subject of imitation and transformation).

    most interesting man internet explorer meme

    This meme imitates the performed cultural sophistication of the “most interesting man” but transforms it to apply to internet culture, where no geek would be caught using Internet Explorer. Even such a banal meme as this requires some familiarity with a range of cultural discourses and figures: the “Silver Fox,” the Latin lover, and geek culture. This meme is as strange as any alt-right meme, and equally void of symbolism. It is a tethering of cultural domains, the formal manifestation of the reappropriation that dominates internet culture and communicative capitalism. By ignoring the meme form, the explainers approach the alt-right as inscrutable, when in fact the alt-right practices a vernacular aesthetic form. To be sure, alt-right memes rely on a relatively esoteric referential repertoire, but the form in which this repertoire appears—the meme, an allegorical form of communicative capitalism—is entirely familiar.

    The Alt-Right Explainer

    Capitalizing on Breitbart’s connection to Trump through Bannon, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopolous (2016) published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” on Breitbart, an article that helped establish the generic conventions for the alt-right explainer: ride the momentum of the tenuous links between the alt-right and Donald Trump, identify the intellectual base (including neoreactionaries, especially Moldbug), point up the contrast with two of the main wings of mainstream American conservatism (anti-globalization, anti-theocracy), and demystify “meme magic” by explaining what memes—especially Pepe the Frog—mean. Similar explainers soon echoed in the nave of the “Cathedral.” The Daily Wire, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Vox, and The New York Times published explainers following Breitbart’s pattern, as did the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer. Citing the left’s purported culture war victory, the Weekly Standard claims that the alt-right’s racism is merely a rhetorical response to the “left’s moralism” (Welton 2015), and the New York Times explainer (an op-ed by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard) emphasizes that alt-right racism is partly a result of the undue expansion of what it means to be “racist” (Caldwell 2016), an expansion Caldwell redresses by carefully distinguishing malignant white supremacists from the purportedly more benign white nationalists. In the face of such prevarication, the Daily Stormer’s “Normies’ guide to the alt-right” makes for bracing reading (Anglin 2016). Although it follows the generic conventions Breitbart established, it rejects the latter as a latecomer, claims racism as the fundamental fulcrum of alt-right ideology, and calls racist trolling a form of “culture-jamming” directed against so-called “normie” culture (Anglin 2016). The Daily Stormer, unfortunately, sees things more clearly than the “Cathedral” on this score. This racist trolling takes form in the meme, which becomes a mechanism of ideological assault and community-building.  

    Hillary Clinton’s campaign famously responded to one such meme—shared most prominently by Donald Trump, Jr. and Roger Stone—that featured a photoshopped film poster for The Expendables, retitled as “The Deplorables,” with the original actors’ heads replaced with a number of prominent Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign: Roger Stone, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Eric Trump, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Jr., Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopolous. Trump is the central figure in the image. Hovering over his left soldier, Pepe the Frog looks smugly on, his red-blond hair coiffed in Trump’s signature style (Chan 2016). The photoshopping is clumsy, and the film referenced is archetypical Hollywood mediocrity, but to explain this meme is to marvel at the range of discourses it summons: from the visual and textual pun on The Expendables—which is in turn a play on Clinton’s dismissal of Trump supporters as belonging in the “basket of deplorables”—to the visual enrollment in Trump’s campaign of Pepe the Frog himself, whose bizarre internet career has by now been thoroughly chronicled.[3] The meme sutures a complex intertextual tissue, with each reference signaled on the aesthetic surface of the meme.

    The explainer genre encourages a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970) that seeks to wrest some underlying meaning from the meme. The Clinton campaign formalizes its explainer of this meme as a question-and-answer session between the innocent and the knowing: “Who is that frog standing directly behind Trump? / That’s Pepe. He’s a symbol associated with white supremacy.  / Wait. Really? White supremacy?” (Chan 2016). The dialogue falls into the trap of attempting to demystify Pepe. The Clinton campaign approaches the meme with a surface-depth aesthetic model, asking what the meme symbolizes, and this representational reading misrecognizes the meme form. As a result, the explainers fail to reckon with the uncanny familiarity of these ostensibly obscure aesthetic forms. As is often the case in critical theory, the explainer positions the audience as the innocent questioner in the Clinton campaign’s explainer—What? Really? A white supremacist frog? The alt-right is truly esoteric! Hence the headline of the New York Times explainer: “What the Alt-Right Really Means” (Caldwell 2016). Or the Vox headline for its explainer: “The Alt-Right Is Way More Than Warmed-Over White Supremacy. It’s That, but Way Way Weirder” (Matthews 2016). Or from the Huffington Post: “My Journey to the Center of the Alt-right” (O’Brien 2016). These headlines suggest that the alt-right’s racist ideology is obscure (even though it has always been a feature of American politics) and that its aesthetic practices are inscrutable (even though the meme is a primary aesthetic form of participatory media). Thus the Weekly Standard blames the alt-right on the “left’s moralism” and the New York Times diagnoses the undue expansion of the meaning of “racist” as the cause of the alt-right’s reactionary politics. By failing to reckon with aesthetics of the meme form, these “explainers” unwittingly redeem “meme magic” and its racist politics as something obscure and inscrutable rather than familiar and intractable.

    As an allegorical form of communicative capitalism and the aesthetics of the “stream” (Lovink 2016), the meme operates by signaling links—including to racist subcultural formations—rather than by encoding symbolic representation. Updating for the digital age Richard Dawkins’s 1972 notion of memes as the genetic expression, selection, and variation of cultural units, Limor Shifman (2012) offers a rigorous definition of memes as “building blocks” of complex cultures that propagate quickly, reproducing through imitation and transformation (189). A form of Henry Jenkins’s “spreadable media” (Jenkins et al 2013), memes exist in circulation, transforming through “remixes” (Wiggins and Bowers 2015) that blend cultural domains and generate the meme’s circulatory momentum. This remixing and repurposing wrenches objects from their cultural domain, creating a new, thickly referential memetic context. The meme is thus a form that transforms in circulation. To “get” the meme, one has to recognize both the cultural domain the meme references and how the meme is dislocating that cultural domain. Although memes are thickly referential, with dizzyingly complex circulatory histories, they are not typically rich hermeneutic texts. They signal and enact cultural convergence, but they do not symbolize it. Hence the awkwardness of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” the Clinton campaign brings to Pepe. Those who use Pepe in white supremacist memes do not smuggle him in as a covert symbol. His appearance signals a trajectory of transformation in circulation, not a symbolic repertoire. The Clinton campaign is thus right to associate Pepe with white supremacy but wrong about the meme, which signals circulation without symbolizing.

    By “unmasking” political correctness as the true cause of racism, mainstream explainers follow the first reactionary gesture, repeating the contours of the reactionary immanent critique. In a widely shared Medium post, Dale Beran claims that Pepe, the “grotesque, frowning, sleepy eyed, out of shape, swamp dweller, peeing with his pants pulled down because-it-feels-good-man frog” represents in an ideology that “steers into the skid of its own patheticness. Pepe symbolizes embracing your loserdom, owning it” (Beran 2017). This attempt at a hermeneutics of Pepe ignores that the alt-right does not make memes out of the “feels good man” Pepe; the alt-right Pepe wears a smug smile, openly declaring his troll status. Such a pathos-laden reading of “steering into the skid” shares with Laurie Penny’s (2017) reading of Yiannopolous’s followers as duped “Lost Boys” a tendency to position the “loser” status of the geek (the archetypal perpetual virgin housed in his parents’ basement) as an alibi for misogyny and white nationalism. Indeed, Beran claims the left’s “radical idea of sexual-difference-as-illusion,” which is “meant to solve the deplorables’ problem” by “dispelling it as a cloud of pure ideas” is in fact an “Orwellian” declaration to “these powerless men” that “‘There’s no such thing as your problem!’” (Beran 2017). Beran’s critique here echoes Nagle’s criticism of the “anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric” on the “cultural left” (Nagle 2017, 68). It is certainly possible to criticize such rhetoric, and reflexivity is surely a crucial political practice. But it is also notable that these critiques replicate the reactionary gesture: the left has won the culture war, diversity is ascendant, and the straight cisgender white male has lost his position—political correctness is everywhere run amok. The left therefore becomes the cause of the alt-right, and alt-right’s reactionary thinking becomes justified, if misguided. Indeed, these “Lost Boys,” dispossessed by the regime of political correctness, have also lost agency, and their hateful meme magic is a mere symptom of this fall. The critical impulse is to unmask the discourse by assigning it a context, but this is precisely its weakness in its approach to reactionary ideology. The alt-right’s blatantly racist discourse offers little to unmask. Its esoteric memes turn out to be banal cultural references. Unmasking its discourse tend to replicate the first reactionary gesture by arriving at the same place—the same cultural context—to be targeted for immanent critique.

    Reactionary Critical Theory

    I turn now to the second reactionary gesture—the restoration of the lost past. Alt-right and neoreactionary racism is uncanny—old and out of place, yet entirely familiar. Attending to the uncanny as a figure of ideology—an attempt to assign a place to that which is out of place—allows an approach to reactionary ideology that does not replicate the gesture of its immanent critique.

    Neoreactionary ideology tends to adopt the form and style of critical theory. Of course, neoreactionary thinker Nick Land was once a celebrated academic critical theorist, particularly in the UK, where he became something of a cult figure for his “dark Deleuzian” capitalist accelerationism and experimental theory-fiction, which he developed as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s.[4] The infamous reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug also offers a critical genealogy of modernity on his Unqualified Reservations blog, particularly in the fourteen-part “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” (2000a-d &c). Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” text attempts to formalize Moldbug’s prolific if rambling blogposts into a neoreactionary theory of capitalist acceleration grounded in a despotic sovereign political order. Moldbug and Land follow the form of a left and postcolonial critique of modernity, but turn the critique on its head: the modern promise of equality and democracy was not compromised (by slavery, colonialism, and capitalism); the promise is itself the compromise that prevents capitalism’s flourishing. Modern notions of equality legitimate any grievance as oppression, and democracy compels the state to recompense any grievance claim. Democracy and equality therefore combine to promote personal failure. Neoreaction seeks to replace democratic voice with exit, or the right to leave any polity at any time, and to restore sovereignty in the figure of a CEO-King who seeks only to maximize value and therefore to accelerate capitalism. Race serves a crucial function in this theory: ministered to by the “Cathedral,” race mediates between citizens and state, sanctioning grievance claims and incentivizing dysfunction. However, by properly reprogramming race through neo-eugenics rather than modern notions of equality, it could become the accelerationist motor capable of restoring the lost future of capitalist sovereignty before its corruption through enforced diversity.

    The obsession with restoring lost ethnic sovereignty links the more abstruse neoreactionary thinkers with populists such as Bannon, who also adopt the form of left critique to advance reactionary thinking. Although Bannon’s status as a political star did not long outlive his tenure in Trump’s White House, which ended on August 18, 2017, he remains a pivotal figure for his role in linking the openly fascist politics of figures like Aleksander Dugin and Julius Evola with mainstream political discourse. In his 2014 speech to a conference in the Vatican, Bannon channels left critical theory, citing Marx in a critique of the “Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” which seeks to “make people commodities, to objectify people” (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Identifying a “crisis in the underpinnings of capitalism,” he diagnoses the post-crash bailout as symptomatic of a system that favors elites over the working classes (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). As a reactionary, though, Bannon proposes to rescue the future by restoring the past. Bannon praises Vladimir Putin, and his “advisor [Aleksander Dugin] who harkens back to Julius Evola” for “standing up for traditional institutions” and national sovereignty (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Acknowledging Evola’s fascism, Bannon nevertheless argues that “people want to see sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism” and a return to the time of America’s founding when “freedoms were controlled at a local level” rather than by elites in global command centers such as New York, London, and Berlin (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Bannon’s thinking here precisely follows the reactionary paradigm Robin outlines: Bannon develops a withering critique of the present order—one that overlaps in places with left critiques of finance capital—and offers as a solution the restoration of a fallen order.[5] Although they distance themselves from populist fascists like Bannon, Land and Moldbug share the same reactionary preoccupation. Land’s systematization of Moldbug sketches a program for fulfilling Bannon’s desire for sovereignty. This program relies on race as a formal explanatory category—a mode of immanent critique—and an interface that ran reconfigure the political order, assigning a place for the lost future of the CEO-King.

    The Cathedral and History

    As I have argued, following Robin (2013), reactionary politics combines two gestures: first, an immanent critique of the present, and second, a call to restore a lost past. This impulse surfaces in racist meme culture, but it receives a more rigorous treatment in Land and Moldbug, both of whom wage a critique of the present in service of a resurrection of the past. I turn now to the neoreactionary “Cathedral” critique—the first reactionary gesture—in order to show how it sanctions a call for a return in the present to neo-Victorian racism—the second reactionary gesture.

    Land and Moldbug are profoundly lapsarian thinkers. For them, progressivism—the conspiracy the “Cathedral” sustains—is the fall that obscures and indeed encourages the degeneration of the races. Land (2013) argues that the progressive Enlightenment follows the “logical perversity” of “Hegel’s dialectic,” enforcing the “egalitarian moral ideal” through progressivism’s sustaining formula: “tolerance is tolerable” and “intolerance is intolerable.” This formal structure guarantees a “positive right to be tolerated, defined ever more expansively as substantial entitlement” (Land 2013). If progressivism is the fall, tolerance is the juggernaut that tramples any attempt at ascent. For Land, the American Civil War is a moment of original sin that that “cross-coded the practical question of the Leviathan with (black/white) racial dialectics” (Land 2013). Of the Civil War, Land writes:

    The moral coherence of the Union cause required that the founders were reconceived as politically illegitimate white patriarchal slave-owners, and American history combusted in progressive education and the culture wars. If independence is the ideology of the slave-holders, emancipation requires the programmatic destruction of independence. Within a cross-coded history, the realization of freedom is indistinguishable from its abolition. (Land 2013)

    The Civil War thus installs a “cross-coded” history running on parallel historical tracks between progressive and dark enlightenments, emancipation and independence, voice and exit. This genealogy allows Land to identify a formal mechanism that propels the “only tolerance is tolerable” formula of the Progressive Enlightenment. The anachronistic insertion of “progressive education” and the “culture wars” into the stakes of the Civil War does not trouble Land because his analysis is formal rather than historical: the “cross-coded” history leads inexorably to progressivism, which in turn functions as a transhistorical epistemological and ontological force. Hence Moldbug claims, bizarrely, that Harvard’s “progressive” curriculum has not changed in 200 years, that British politics has been moving steadily left for 150 years, and that progressives—among whom he includes all mainstream Western politicians—have no enemies to the left (Moldbug 2008a).

    The “Cathedral” conspiracy therefore assigns a context for reaction. If neoreactionary thinking appears to be out of place, it is only because of the long reign of progressive dogma. The reactionary desire for a lost past follows close behind. Moldbug thus routinely cites the pre-1922 texts available on Google Books to pierce the “Cathedral” veil, approvingly linking, for example, to Nehemiah Adams’ 1854 account of his trip to the south, where he found himself surprised to find the slaves “were all in good humor, and some of them in a broad laugh” and charmed by the “unbought” friendliness of slaves (Adams 1854). Elaborating on the dubious claim that the “neat thing about primary sources is that often, it only takes one to prove your point,” Moldbug brags that high school students “won’t be assigned the primary sources I just linked to” (Moldbug 2008d). He cites the same source in a post defending and indeed advocating Thomas Carlyle’s view on slavery, suggesting that those who view slavery as “intrinsically evil” would “quickly change their tunes if forced,” like Adams, “to function in an actual slave society” (Moldbug 2009). The “Cathedral” conspiracy excuses Moldbug from evaluating Adams’ account, or from consulting the numerous contemporary accounts of slavery’s evils. If high school students wouldn’t be assigned it, that’s only because it violates “Cathedral” dogma. And since Adams’ account predates the Civil War (though not Enlightenment itself), it is therefore more likely to see the truth before the fall. Piercing the mists of this transhistorical progressivism, we see that “Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery” (Moldbug 2009). To take the measure of these aptitudes, Moldbug turns to an uncanny form of racism that functions as an interface for gathering and sorting human populations.

    Race as Interface

    Land and Moldbug accept race as a means of categorizing human aptitude within a global hierarchy. This notion of race plays a crucial role in their thinking, which describes the following racial dynamic: Insofar as progressivism incentivizes inaptitude, it also encourages racial degeneration. This is race as a technology, as Wendy Chun (2009) has described: race has particular affordances for enframing human populations, and this enframing shapes the contours of social and political orders. Extending Galloway, this is race as interface, as a form that gathers humans into a global frame and sorts them hierarchically (see also Weheliye 2014).

    Land and Moldbug’s uncanny racism resurrects a notion of race as an interface for gathering and sorting global populations first deployed in late Victorian eugenics. Like the eugenicists, Land and Moldbug rely on race as a mean of categorizing humans based on their biologically determined aptitude.  In 1869, Francis Galton called this aptitude “hereditary genius,” and offered it as a scientific explanation for the advance of certain civilizations over others, with Europeans, of course, at the apex of racial hierarchy (Galton 1869). Land and Moldbug adopt a range of figures (although no trained geneticists) in articulating a new version of race science called “human biodiversity,” which includes the relatively banal argument that humans are not neurologically uniform coupled with the dubious and insidious claim that this “biodiversity” can be best measured by plotting genetically-determined racial categories to IQ distribution.[6] Yarvin makes this argument without his typical circumlocution in a Medium post (which he later deleted) that attempted to persuade delegates at the LambdaConf functional programming conference against boycotting his presence because of his slavery apologetics (Breitbart sympathetically chronicled Yarvin’s plight).[7] Yarvin insists he does not equate “anatomical traits” with “moral superiority” but makes the explicit argument for a genetically determined racial hierarchy as measured by IQ in the comments section of the Medium post (Yarvin 2016). Here Yarvin is trying to speak to what Moldbug would call the “Cathedral,” defending himself from committing the moral sin of racism as the bad ideology of individual viewpoints. He also criticizes mass incarceration—the first reactionary gesture. Yet Yarvin also summons race in its uncanny neo-eugenicist form to suggest that “Malik cannot be magically turned into a Jewish math nerd” (Yarvin 2016). This is the second gesture, a proposal that neo-eugenicist racism can explain and resolve the problem of mass incarceration and “the destruction of African American society” (Yarvin 2016).

    Another crucial connection between neoreaction and Victorian racism is the use of race not only to categorize humans by aptitude, but also to plot the potential for civilizational achievement. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty offers a canonical description of Victorian Liberal conceptions of the hierarchy of races, which Mill leverages to justify violent repression in India: savages cannot “practise the forebearance” that “civilized society” demands, and they therefore require “despotic” governance to restore sovereignty and subdue passions (209). Land’s claim that Europeans are genetically predisposed to “low time preference” is formally indistinguishable from Mill’s preoccupation with forbearance. However, neoreaction reverses the racial trajectory. For liberal Victorian racial theorists, exposure to Enlightenment civilization could advance a given race beyond savagery. Land’s neoreaction reverses this trajectory: the exposure to Enlightenment formula that “only tolerance is tolerable” encourages further dysfunction in the lower races. This argument adopts another strain of Victorian racism: racial degenerationism, or the notion that races could devolve to be increasingly ill suited to civilization. Racial degenerationism found practical application in criminal atavism, the theory that criminals resembled “prehistoric man” and behaved “in a way that would be appropriate to savage societies” (Ellis 1890, 208). Adopting a similar assumption, Land suggests that “barbarism has been normalized,” in “lethally menacing” cities where “civilization has fundamentally collapsed” (Land 2013). Indulging in racist moral panic about urban decay—another anachronism in this age of urban “revitalization”—Moldbug argues that most American cities would benefit from martial law, and Land (2013) identifies white flight as the “spontaneous impulse of the dark enlightenment”: it is all exit and no voice. Land’s investment in white flight is also a libidinal investment in the fear of violently virile black bodies, which finds its parallel in the alt-right’s obsession with cuckoldry and “cucking” racialized as a white man watching his white wife dominated by a “black bull.” The purposefully excessive “cuck” discourse offers a means of indulging the fear of the black body while at the same time enjoying the act of violating tenets of “Cathedral” faith. The crucial point, though, is that “cuck” discourse not only operates to critique political correctness; it also signals an understanding of race as interface for governance, that which promotes degeneration but also—properly reprogrammed—promises acceleration to a lost future.

    Conclusion

    Before an antifa (anti-fascist) protestor sucker-punched Richard Spencer in the face in Washington, D.C. on Trump’s inauguration day—a moment that quickly achieved meme status—a bystander asked Spencer if he liked black people. Spencer smirked, shrugged, and said, “Sure” (Burris 2017). Identity politics poses a double trap for approaching the alt-right: Criticize the alt-right for bad identity politics, and they can easily dodge the accusation by parroting mainstream acceptance of diversity discourse, or point to the fact that political correctness is mainstream and therefore part of the power structure that so clearly needs dismantling. Criticize identity politics, and cede to the alt-right the choice of battleground. I have argued here that alt-right critics tend to make just such a concession. By focusing on the first gesture—the immanent critique—we risk missing the form of reactionary ideology, which includes a call for restoring a lost past. Spencer attempts to distill this call into a slogan: “race is real, race matters, race is the foundation of identity.” This slogan adapts Land and Moldbug’s racial formalism, but instead of an exit from grievance democracy, it argues for inclusion within grievance status. Hence Moldbug’s (2007) coy refusal of white nationalism: “I’m not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he writes, but white nationalists only recognize the symptom, missing the cure. The critique of “cucks” and the obsession with “red-pilling” offers a more nakedly libidinal, pop cultural take on the “Cathedral,” but, according to Moldbug, the alt-right fails to recognize that the entitlement state cannot expand to include white nationalist grievance, because to do so would violate “Cathedral” dogma. Bannon’s strong sovereignty more closely approaches the cure, but insofar as nationalism entails protectionism, he fails to follow techno-futurism back to the futuristic past that neoreactionaries desire.

    Land proposes as a formal fix “hyper-racism,” his vision for accelerating the “explicitly superior” and already “genetically self-filtering elite” through a system of “assortative mating” that would offer a “class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector toward neo-speciation” (Land 2014). This is eugenics as a program for exit, not only from the progressive Enlightenment but also from the limits of humanity. Despite its contemporary jargon, this hyper-racism is indistinguishable in its form from late Victorian eugenics, which also recommended a program of “assortative mating.” Of course, now eugenics places us on a vector toward neo-speciation; so it’s back to the past, but now it’s futuristic.

    The “Cathedral” conspiracy justifies and motivates this recuperation of uncanny racism. Clearly, the “Cathedral” conspiracy shares much in common with rudimentary applications of Gramscian notions of hegemony or Hermann and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda model. Ideology critique and reactionary critique tend to mirror one another. This is because both attempt to assign the uncanny object to a place, to contextualize it, whether as a justified response to the “Cathedral” or as a misguided response to left moralism. Reactionary thinking tends to fully indulge the critical impulse. Behind every veil, it finds the “Cathedral.”  This libidinal investment in unveiling resonates in the alt-right obsession with “red-pilling” and cuckoldry. Just as neoreactionaries fear that the “Cathedral” faith promotes black dysfunction, the alt-right fears “blue-pilling” as a form of penetration by the Other.

    To those of us reared in the “Cathedral’s” halls, this is all repugnant. It is also uncanny: Haven’t we moved beyond this racism?  Of course, the alt-right has a memetic response to this critique: “I mean, come on people, it’s [current year].” The alt-right has fully anticipated critical unmasking and absorbed it into the meme form, which refuses symbolic decoding and provides a formal interface for the participatory reappropriation and bricolage that characterize media practice in this age of communicative capitalism. Ideology critique and reactionary critique are similar in form: both attempt to recuperate the uncanny, to assign it a place. It is therefore crucial to attend to the uncanny form of reactionary ideology, which develops an immanent critique of the present in order to find a place in which to restore a lost past. Rather than following the alt-right to the purported excesses of identity politics, it is crucial to reckon with reactionary racism as the fulcrum of a proposed political order. This is not just a call to examine “structural racism,” because neoreactionary racism and alt-right racism have yet to harden into structure. It is instead a form, an interface between certain technical predicates (race as a gathering and sorting mechanism) and the social (the lost white future of the CEO-King). Reactionary ideology attempts to recuperate this uncanny racism; ideology critique must do more than cite the desire for this recuperation.

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    Robert Topinka is Lecturer in Transnational Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is currently working on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project entitled “Politics, Ideology, and Rhetoric in the 21st Century: The Case of the Alt-Right.”

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] This work was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for “Political Ideology, Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the ‘Alt-Right,’” (AH/R001197/1).

    [2] As Nagle (2017) documents, Gabriella Coleman (2014) continued to write approvingly of 4chan as late as 2014, when the forum was dominated by extreme racism and misogyny, and she also celebrated the hacker “weev” despite his open Nazism (102-105). In her book on trolling, Whitney Phillips (2015) argues for the redeeming qualities of “racist statements forwarded by people whose stated goal is to be as racist and upsetting as possible” because, unlike more subtle racists, “at least trolls advertise” (97). Although Phillips is right to argue that there is no value in simply condemning trolls, it is similarly difficult to see the value in well-advertised racism. The history of celebratory studies of participatory culture weighs heavily on such accounts.

    [3] The explainers cited in this paper all recount a version of Pepe’s history. For an academic treatment, see Marwick and Lewis (2017: 36).

    [4] On “Dark Deleuze,” see Culp (2016). For a succinct account and critique of Land’s accelerationism see Noys (2014: 54-58). For more on the controversy surrounding Nick Land’s planned 2016 appearance at the London art gallery LD50 and the seminar series he offered in 2017 at the New Centre for Research and Practice, see Shutdown LD50 (2017) and “Against Nick Land and the Reactive Left” (2017).

    [5] This contradictory impulse to restore the past in the future is a key feature of fascism. In an analysis of National Socialism, Jeffrey Herf (1981) calls this “reactionary modernism.”

    [6] On HBD, Land and Moldbug’s sources include prolific eugenicist bloggers such as “hbd chick” and Steve Sailer, controversial popular genetics writers including Charles Murray and Nicholas Wade, and the physicist Stephen Hsu, whose recent interest in the genetics of intelligence has generated controversy (see Flaherty 2013). Galton, Land, and Moldbug share a similar strategy of racial typing. Galton adopted Quetelet’s use of the Gauss-Laplace distribution to identify physical generations in human populations, which Galton sought to index with racial categories (Galton 1869: xi, and Wozniak 1999).

    [7] Breitbart lists four articles under the “Curtis Yarvin” tag as of May 3, 2019. For the first defense of Yarvin’s presence at LambdaConf, which, incidentally, was published the same day as Breitbart’s alt-right explainer, see Bokhari (2016).

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    Works Cited

  • Olivier Jutel – Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power

    Olivier Jutel – Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power

    by Olivier Jutel

    ~

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board. 

    Introduction

    The emergence of Donald Trump as president of the United States has defied all normative liberal notions of politics and meritocracy. The decorum of American politics has been shattered by a rhetorical recklessness that includes overt racism, misogyny, conspiracy and support for political violence. Where the Republican Party, Fox News, Beltway think-tanks and the Koch brothers have managed their populist base through dog-whistling and culture wars, Trump promises his supporters the chance to destroy the elite who prevent them from going to the end in their fantasies. He has catapulted into the national discourse a mixture of paleo-conservatism and white nationalism recently sequestered to the fringes of American politics or to regional populisms. Attempts by journalists and politicians during the campaign to fact-check, debunk and shame Trump proved utterly futile or counter-productive. He revels in transgressing the rules of the game and is immune to the discipline of his party, the establishment and journalistic notions of truth-telling. Trump destabilizes the values of journalism as it is torn between covering the ratings bonanza of his spectacle and re-articulating its role in defence of liberal democracy. I argue here that Trump epitomizes the populist politics of enjoyment. Additionally liberalism and its institutions, such as journalism, are libidinally entangled in this populist muck. Trump is not simply a media-savvy showman: he embodies the centrality of affect and enjoyment to contemporary political identity and media consumption. He wields affective media power, drawing on an audience movement of free labour and affective intensity to defy the strictures of professional fields.

    Populism is here understood in psychoanalytic terms as a politics of antagonism and enjoyment. The rhetorical division of society between an organic people and its enemy is a defining feature of theoretical accounts of populism (Canovan 1999). Trump invokes a universal American people besieged by a rapacious enemy. His appeals to “America” function as a fantasy of social wholeness in which the country exists free of the menace of globalists, terrorists and political correctness. This antagonism is not simply a matter of rhetorical style but a necessary precondition for the Lacanian political “subject of enjoyment” (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008: 257). Trump is an agent of obscene transgressive enjoyment, what Lacan calls jouissance, whether in vilifying immigrants, humiliating Jeb Bush, showing off his garish lifestyle or disparaging women. The ideological content of Trump’s program is secondary to its libidinal rewards or may function as one and the same. It is in this way that Trump can play the contradictory roles of blood-thirsty isolationist and tax-dodging populist billionaire.

    Psychoanalytic theory differs from pathology critiques of populism in treating it as a symptom of contemporary liberal democracy rather than simply a deviation from its normative principles. Drawing on the work of Laclau (2005), Mouffe (2005) and Žižek (2008), Trump’s populism is understood as the ontologically necessary return of antagonism, whether experienced in racial, nationalist or economic terms, in response to contemporary liberalism’s technocratic turn. The political and journalistic class’s exaltation of compromise, depoliticization and policy-wonks are met with Trump promises to ‘fire’ elites and his professed ‘love’ of the ‘poorly educated’. Trump’s attacks on the liberal class enmeshes them in a libidinal deadlock in that both require the other to enjoy. Trump animates the negative anti-fascism that the liberal professional classes enjoy as their identity while simultaneously creating the professional class solidarity which animates populist fantasies of the puppet-masters’ globalist conspiracy. In response to Trump’s improbable successes the Clinton campaign and liberal journalism appealed to rationalism, facts and process in order to reaffirm a sense of identity in this traumatic confrontation with populism.

    Trump’s ability to harness the political and libidinal energies of enjoyment and antagonism is not simply the result of some political acumen but of his embodiment of the values of affective media. The affective and emotional labour of audiences and users is central to all media in today’s “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2009). Media prosumption, or the sharing and production of content/data, is dependent upon new media discourses of empowerment, entrepreneurialism and critical political potential. Fox News and the Tea Party were early exemplars of the way in which corporate media can utilize affective and politicized social media spaces for branding (Jutel 2013). Trump is an affective media entrepreneur par excellence able to wrest these energies of enjoyment and antagonism from Fox and the Republican party. He operates across the field whether narcissistically tweeting, appearing on Meet the Press in his private jet or as a guest on Alex Jones’ Info Wars. Trump is a product of “mediatiaztion” (Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011), that is the increasing importance of media across politics and all social fields but the diminution of liberal journalism’s cultural authority and values. As an engrossing spectacle Trump pulls the liberal field of journalism to its economic pole of valorization (Benson 1999) leaving its cultural values of a universal public or truth-telling isolated as elitist. In wielding this affective media power against the traditional disciplines of journalism and politics, he is analogous to the ego-ideal of communicative capitalism. He publicly performs a brand identity of enjoyment and opportunism for indeterminate economic and political ends.

    The success of Trump has not simply revealed the frailties of journalism and liberal political institutions, it undermines popular and academic discourses about the political potential of social/affective media. The optimism around new forms of social media range from the liberal fetishization of data and process, to left theories in which affect can reconstitute a democratic public (Papacharissi 2015). Where the political impact of social media was once synonymous with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and direct democracy we must now add Donald Trump’s populism and the so-called ‘alt-right’. While Trump’s politics are thoroughly retrograde, his campaign embodies what is ‘new’ in the formulation of new media politics. Trump’s campaign was based on a thoroughly mediatized constituency with very little ground game or traditional political machinery, relying on free media coverage and the labour of social media users. Trump’s campaign is fuelled by ‘the lulz’ which translates as the jouissance of hacker nerd culture synonymous with the “weird Internet” of Twitter, 4-Chan and message boards. For Trump’s online alt-right army he is a paternal figure of enjoyment, “Daddy Trump” (Yiannopoulos 2016), elevating ritualized transgression to the highest reaches of politics. Trump’s populism is a pure politics of jouissance realized in and through the affective media.

    Populism and Enjoyment

    The value of an obscene figure like Donald Trump is that he demonstrates a libidinal truth about right wing populist identity. It has become a media cliché to describe Donald Trump as the id of the Republican party. And while Trump is a uniquely outrageous figure of sexual insecurity, vulgarity and perversion, the insights of psychoanalytic theory extend far beyond his personal pathologies.[1] It should be stated that this psychoanalytic reading is not a singular explanation for Trump’s electoral success over and above racism, Clinton’s shockingly poor performance (Dovere 2016), a depressed Democratic turnout, voter suppression and the electoral college. Rather this is an analysis which considers how Trump’s incoherence and vulgarity, which are anathema to normative liberal politics, ‘work’ at the level of symbolic efficiency.

    The election of Trump has seemingly universalized a liberal struggle against the backward forces of populism. What this ‘crisis of liberalism’ elides is the manner in which populism and liberalism are libidinally entangled. Psychoanalytic political theory holds that the populist logics of antagonism, enjoyment and jouissance are not the pathological outside of democracy but its repressed symptoms, what Arditi borrowing from Freud calls “internal foreign territory” (2005: 89). The explosion of emotion and anger which has accompanied Trump and other Republican populists is a return of antagonism suppressed in neoliberalism’s “post-political vision” (Mouffe 2005: 48). In response to the politics of consensus, rationalism and technocracy, embodied by Barack Obama and Clinton, populism expresses the ontological necessity of antagonism in political identity (Laclau 2005). Whether in left formulations of the people vs the 1% or the nationalism of right wing populism, the act of defining an exceptional people against an enemy represents “political logic tout court” (Laclau: 229). The opposition of a people against its enemy is not just a rhetorical strategy commonly defined as the populist style (Moffitt 2016), it is part of the libidinal reward structure of populism.

    The relationship between antagonism and enjoyment is central to the psychoanalytic political theory approach to populism employed by Laclau, Žižek, Stavrakakis and Mouffe. The populist subject is the psychoanalytic “subject of enjoyment” (Glynos & Stavrakakis:  257) shaped by trauma, irrational drives and desires. Populist ontology is analogous to Lacanian “symbolic castration” in which the child’s failure to fulfill a phallic role for the mother “allows the subject to enter the symbolic order” (Žižek 1997: 17). Populism embodies this fundamental antagonism and sense of lost enjoyment. Populist identity and discourse are the perpetually incomplete process of recapturing this primordial wholeness of mother’s breast and child. It is in this way that Trump’s ‘America’ and the quest to ‘Make America Great Again’ is not a political project built on policy, but an affective and libidinal appeal to the lost enjoyment of a wholly reconciled America. America stands in as an empty signifier able to embody a sub-urban community ideal, military strength or the melding of Christianity and capitalism, depending upon the affective investments of followers.

    In the populist politics of lost enjoyment there is a full libidinal identification with the lost object (America/breast) that produces jouissance. Jouissance can be thought of as a visceral enjoyment which that defies language as in Barthes’ (1973) notion of jouissance as bliss. It is distinct from a discrete pleasure as it represents an “ecstatic release” and transgressive “absolute pleasure undiluted” by the compromises with societal constraints (Johnston 2002). Jouissance is an unstable excess, it cannot exist without already being lost. ‘America’ as imagined by Trump has never existed and “can only incarnate enjoyment insofar as it is lacking; as soon we get hold of it all its mystique evaporates!” (Stavrakakis 2007: 78). However this very failure produces an incessant drive and “desire structured around the unending quest for the lost, impossible jouissance” (Glynos and Stavrakakis: 261). Donald Trump may have won the White House but it is unclear whether American greatness has been restored, delayed or thwarted, as is the nature jouissance. The Trump campaign and presidency embodies jouissance as “pleasure in displeasure, satisfaction in dissatisfaction” (Stavrakakis: 78). With a dismal approval rating and disinterest in governing Trump has taken to staging rallies in order to rekindle this politics of jouissance. However the pleasure generated during the campaign has been lost. Matt Taibbi described the diminishing returns of jouissance among even his most devoted followers who turn out “for the old standards” like “lock her [Clinton] up” (2017) and are instead subjected to a narcissistic litany of personal grievances.

    The coalescence of libidinal energy into a populist movement depends on what Laclau calls an affective investment (2005) in a ‘people’ whose enjoyment is threatened. The shared affective experience of enjoyment in being part of the people is more important than any essential ideological content. In populist ontology ‘the people’ is a potent signifier for an organic virtue and political subjectivity that is seemingly pure. From Thomas Jefferson’s ode to the yeoman farmer, the Tea Party’s invocation of the producerist tradition and the humanism of Bernie Sanders[2] there is a belief in the people as the redeemer of politics. However for Laclau this people is always negatively defined by an antagonistic enemy, whether “mobs in the city” (Jefferson 1975: 216), liberal government, Wall Street or ‘Globalists.’ Trump’s promise to make America great again is at once destiny by virtue of the people’s greatness, but is continually threatened by the hand of some corrupting and typically racialized agent (the liberal media, George Soros, China or Black Lives Matter). In this way Trump supporters ‘enjoy’ their failure in that it secures an embattled identity, allows them to transgress civic norms and preserve the illusory promise of America.

    Within the field of Lacanian political theory there is rift between a post-Marxist anti-essentialism (Lacalau, 2005, Mouffe, 2005) which simply sees populism as the face of the political, and a Lacanian Marxism which retains a left-political ethic as the horizon of emancipatory politics (Žižek, 2008, Dean, 2009). With the ascent of populism from the margins to the highest seat of power it is essential to recognize what Žižek describes as the ultimate proto-fascist logic of populism (Žižek, 2008). In order to enjoy being of the people, the enemy of populism is libidinally constructed and “reified into a positive ontological entity…whose annihilation would restore balance and justice” (Žižek 2008: 278). At its zenith populism’s enemy is analogous to the construct of the Jew in anti-semitism as a rapacious, contradictory, over-determined evil that is defined by excessive enjoyment. Following Lacan’s thesis that enjoyment always belongs to the other, populist identity requires a rapacious other “who is stealing social jouissance from us” (Žižek 1997: 43). This might be the excessive enjoyment of the Davos, Bohemian Grove and ‘limousine-liberal’ elite, or the welfare recipients, from bankers, immigrants and the poor, who ‘enjoy’ the people’s hard earned tax dollars. For the populists enjoyment is a sense of being besieged which licenses a brutal dehumanization of the enemy and throws the populist into an self-fecund conspiratorial drive to discover and enjoy the enemy’s depravity. Alex Jones and Glenn Beck have been key figures on the populist right (Jutel 2017) in channelling this drive and reproducing the tropes of anti-semitism in uncovering the ‘globalist’ plot. In classic paranoid style (Hofstader 1965), this elite is often depicted as occultist[3] and in league with the lumpen-proletariat to destroy the people’s order.

    Trump brings a people into being around his brand and successful presidential in personifying this populist jouissance. He is able to overcome his innumerable contradictions and pull together disparate strands of the populist right, from libertarians, evangelicals, and paleo-conservatives to white nationalists, through the logic of jouissance. The historically high levels at which evangelicals supported the libertine Trump (Bailey 2016) were ideologically incongruous. However the structure of belief and enjoyment; a virtuous people threatened by the excessive enjoyment of transgender rights, abortion and gay marriage, is analogous. The libidinal truth of their beliefs is the ability to enjoy losing the culture wars and lash out at the enemy. Trump is able to rail against the elite not in spite of his gaudy billionaire lifestyle but because of it. As Mudde explains, populism is not a left politics of reflexivity and transformation aimed at “chang[ing] the people themselves, but rather their status within the political system” (2004: 547). He speaks to the libidinal truth of oligarchy and allows his followers to imagine themselves wielding the power of the system against the elite (as also suggested by Grusin 2017, especially 91-92, on Trump’s “evil mediation”). When he appeared on stage with his Republican rivals and declared that he had given all of them campaign contributions as an investment, it was not an admission of culpability but a display of potency. There is a vicarious enjoyment when he boasts as the people’s plutocrat “when they [politicians] call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them…I call them, and they are there for me” (Fang 2016).

    Populist politics is not a means to a specific policy vision but enjoyment as its own end, even if Trump’s avarice runs counter to the people’s rational self-interest. The lashing out at women and immigrants, the humiliation of Jeb Bush, telling Chris Christie to ‘get on the plane’, the call to imprison Hillary Clinton, all offer a release of jouissance and the promise to claim state power in the name of jouissance. When he attacks Fox News, the Republican party and its donors he is betraying powerful ideological allies for the principle of jouissance and the people’s ability to go to the end in their enjoyment. The cascading scandals that marked his campaign (boasting of sexual assault, tax-dodging etc) and provoked endless outrage among political and media elites, function in a similar way. Whatever moral failings it marks him as unrestrained by the prohibitions that govern social and political behaviour.

    In this sense Trump’s supporters are invested in him as the ego-ideal of the people, who will ‘Make America Great Again’ by licensing jouissance and whose corruption is on behalf of the people. In his classic study of authoritarianism and crowds, Freud describes the people as having elevated “the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (1949: 80). Trump functions in this role not simply as a figure of obscene opulence and licentiousness but in a paternalistic role among his followers. His speeches are suffused with both intolerance and professions of love and solidarity with the populist trope of the forgotten man, however disingenuous (Parenti 2016). Freud’s theory of the leader has rightly been criticized as reducing the indeterminacy of crowds to simply a singular Oedipal relation (Dean 2016). However against Freud’s original formulation Trump is not the primordial father ruling a group “that wishes to be governed by unrestricted force” (Freud: 99) but rather he is the neoliberal super-ego of enjoyment “enjoining us to go right to the end” (Žižek 2006: 310) in our desires. This libidinal underside is the truth of what Lakoff (2016) identifies as the “strict father” archetype of conservatism. Rather than the rigid moral frame Lakoff suggests subjects, this obscene father allows unrestrained transgression allowing one to “say things prohibited by political correctness, even hate, fight, kill and rape” (Žižek 1999: 6). Milo Yiannopolous’ designation of Trump as the ‘Daddy’ of the alt-right perfectly captures his role as the permissive paternal agent of jouissance.

    In an individuated polity Trump’s movement sans party achieves what can be described as a coalescence of individual affective investments. Where Freud supposes a totalizing paternal figure, Trump does not require full identification and a subsumption of ego to function as a super-ego ideal. This is the way to understand Trump’s free-form braggadocio on the campaign trail. He offers followers a range of affective points of identification allowing them to cling to nuggets of xenophobia, isolationism, misogyny, militarism, racism and/or anti-elitism. One can disregard the contradictions and accept his hypocrisies, prejudices, poor impulse control and moral failings so long as one is faithful to enjoyment as a political principle.

    The Liberal/Populist Libidinal Entanglement

    In order to understand the libidinal entanglement of liberalism and populism, as embodied in the contest between Trump and Clinton, it is necessary to consider liberalism’s conception of the political. Historical contingency has made liberalism a confused term in American political discourse simultaneously representing the classical liberalism of America’s founding, progressive-era reformism, New Deal social-democracy, the New Left and Third Way neo-liberalism. The term embodies the contradiction of liberalism identified by CB MacPherson as between the progressive fight to expand civil rights and simply the limited democracy of a capitalist market society (1977). The conflation of liberalism and the left has occurred in the absence of a US labour party and it has allowed Third Way neo-liberals to efface the contribution of 19th century populists, social-democrats and communists to progressive victories. The fractious nature of the 2016 Democratic primary process where the Democratic Party machinery and liberal media organs overwhelming supported Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders and a youthful base openly identifying as “socialist”, has laid bare the conflation of liberalism and the left. In this way it makes sense to speak of liberalism and neoliberalism interchangeably in contemporary American politics.

    Liberal politics disavows the central premise of psychoanalytic theory, that political identity is based on antagonism and enjoyment. Mouffe (2005) describes its vision of politics as process-oriented with dialogue and rational deliberation between self-interested parties in search of true consensus. And while the process may not be seemly there are no ontological obstacles to consensus merely empirical blockages. One can see this in Hillary Clinton’s elevation of the ‘national conversation’ as an end in and of itself (McWhorter 2016). While this may contribute to a democratic culture which foregrounds journalism and ‘the discourse’, it presents politics, not as the antagonistic struggle to distribute power, access and resources, but simply as the process of gaining understanding through rational dialogue. This was demonstrable in the Clinton campaign’s strategy to rebuff Trump’s rhetorical recklessness with an appeal to facts, moderation[4] and compromise. With the neoliberal diminution of collective identities and mass vehicles for politics, the role of politics becomes technocratic administration to expand individual rights as broadly as possible. Antagonism is replaced with “a multiplicity of ‘sub-political’ struggles about a variety of ‘life issues’ which can dealt with through dialogue” (Mouffe: 50). It is in this way that we can understand Clinton’s performance of progressive identity politics, particularly on social media,[5] while being buttressed by finance capital and Silicon Valley.

    The Trump presidency does not simply obliterate post-politics, it demonstrates how populism, liberalism and the journalistic field are libidinally entangled. They require one another as the other in order to make enjoyment in political identity possible. The journalist Thomas Frank has identified in the Democrats a shift in the mid-1970s, from a party of labour to highly-educated professionals and with it a fetishization of complexity and process (2016a). The lauding of expertise as depoliticized rational progress produces a self-replicating drive and enjoyment as one can always have more facts, compromise and dialogue. In this reverence for process the neoliberal democrats can imagine and enjoy the transcendence of the political. Liberal journalism’s new turn to data and wonk-centric didacticism, embodied in the work of Nate Silver and in the online publication Vox, represents this notion of post-politics and process as enjoyment. Process then becomes the “attempt to cover over [a] constitutive lack…through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity” (Glynos and Stavrakakis: 261). For neo-liberal Democrats process is a fetish object through which they are fulfilled in their identity.

    However try as they might liberals cannot escape their opponent and the political as a result of the inter-subjective dimensions of enjoyment. Those outside the dialogic process are seen as “old-fashioned ‘traditionalists’ or, more worryingly, the ‘fundamentalists’ fighting a backward struggle against the forces of progress” (Mouffe: 50). Where liberalism sees Trump as a dangerous xenophobe/fundamentalist, Bernie Sanders functions as a traditionalist clinging to an antagonistic political discourse and a universalist project (social democracy). Sanders’ universalism was widely criticized as undermining particular identity struggles with Clinton chiding him that ‘Breaking up the banks won’t end racism’. Thomas Frank systematically tracked the response of the Washington Post editorial page to the Sanders campaign for Harper’s Magazine and detailed a near unanimous “chorus of denunciation” of Sanders’ social democracy as politically “inadmissible” (2016b).

    The extent of the liberal/populist co-dependency was revealed in a Clinton campaign memo outlining the “Pied-Piper” strategy to elevate Trump during the Republican primary as it was assumed that he would be easier to beat than moderates Rubio and Bush (Debenedetti 2016). For liberalism these retrograde forces of the political provide enjoyment, virtue and an identity of opposing radicals from all sides, even as populism continues to make dramatic advances. The contradiction of this libidinal entanglement is that the more populism surges the more democrats are able to enjoy this negative and reactive identity of both principled anti-fascism and a cultural sophistication in mocking the traditionalists. The genre of Daily Show late night comedy, which has been widely praised as a new journalistic ideal (Baym 2010), typifies this liberal enjoyment[6] with populists called out for hypocrisy or ‘eviscerated’ by this hybrid of comedy and rational exposition. Notably John Oliver’s show launched the ‘Drumpf’ meme which was meant to both mock Trump’s grandiosity and point out the hypocrisy of his xenophobia. What the nightly ‘skewering’ of Trump by SNL, The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s Tonight Show achieves is the incessant reproduction of identity, widely shared on social media and other liberals sites like Huffington Post, that allows liberals an enjoyment of cultural sophistication in defeat.

    Immediately after the election of Trump SNL made a bizarre admission of this liberal over-identification with its negative identity. Kate McKinnon, who impersonated Hillary Clinton on SNL, began the show in character as Clinton while performing the late Leonard Cohen’s sombre ballad ‘Hallelujah’. Here the satirical character meant to provide the enjoyment of an ironic distance from political reality speaks for an overwrought full identification with liberalism through the cultural politics of late night comedy providing liberals what Rolling Stone called ‘catharsis after an emotionally exhausting’ election (Kreps 2016). Writer and comedian Matt Christman has described this as an elevation of comedians analogous to the conservative fetish of ‘The Troops’ (Menaker 2016). There is a fantasy of political potency and virtue embodied in what Žižek might call these ‘subjects supposed to eviscerate’ who wield power in our place.

    In the 2016 US Presidential elections, liberalism failed spectacularly to understand the political and to confront its own libidinal investments. While the Clinton campaign did manage to bring certain national security Republicans and moderates to her side in the name of consensus, this reproduced the populist imaginary of a class solidarity of the learned undermining The People’s natural order. Hillary Clinton’s vision of meritocracy included a diverse Silicon Valley cabinet (Healy 2016) and the leadership of “real billionaires.”[7] Meanwhile Trump spoke of the economy in antagonistic terms, using China and the globalist conspiracy to channel a sense of lost community and invert the energies of class conflict. Trump, the vulgar tax-dodging billionaire, is preferable to a section of working class voters than a rational meritocracy where their class position is deserved and their fate to learn code or be swept away by the global economy. Friedrich von Hayek wrote that the virtue of the market as a form of justice is that it relies on “chance and good luck” (1941: 105) and not simply merit. However erroneous this formulation of class power, it allows people to accept inequality as based on chance rather than an objective measure of their value. In contrast to Clinton’s humiliating meritocracy, Trump’s charlatanism, multiple bankruptcies and steak infomercials reinscribe this principle of luck and its corollary enjoyment.

    The comprehensive failure of liberal post-politics did not simply extend from the disavowal of antagonism but the fetishization of process. The party’s lockstep support of the neoliberal Clinton in the primary against the left-wing or ‘traditionalist’ Sanders created an insular culture ranging from self-satisfied complacency to corruption. The revelations that the party tampered with the process and coordinated media attacks on Sanders’ religious identity (Biddle 2016) fundamentally threatened liberal political identity and enjoyment. This crisis of legitimacy necessitated another, more threatening dark political remnant of history in order to restore the fetish of process. Since this moment liberals, in politics and the media, have relied on Russia as an omnipotent security threat, coordinating the global resurgence of populism and xenophobia and utilizing Trump as a Manchurian candidate and Sanders as a useful idiot.[8] This precisely demonstrates the logic of fetishist disavowal, liberals know very well that process has been corrupted but nevertheless “they feel satisfied in their [fetish], they experience no need to be rid of [it]” (Žižek 2009: 68). For the liberal political and media class it is easier to believe in a Russian conspiracy of “post-truth politics” than it is to confront one’s own libidinal investments in rationalism and consensus in politics.

    Affective Media Power and Jouissance

    The success of Trump was at once a display of journalistic powerlessness, as he defied predictions and expectations of presidential political behaviour, and affective media power as he used access to the field to disrupt the disciplines of professional politics. The campaigns of Clinton and Trump brought into relief the battle over the political meaning of new and affective media. For Clinton’s well-funded team of media strategists and professional campaigners data would be the means by which they could perfect the politics of rationalism and consensus. Trump’s seemingly chaotic, personality driven campaign was staked on the politics of jouissance, or ‘the lulz’, and affective identification. Trump represented a fundamental attack on the professional media and political class’ notions of merit and the discourse. And while his politics of reaction and prejudice are thoroughly retrograde, he is completely modern in embodying the values of affective media in eliciting the libidinal energies of his audience.

    By affective media I am not simply referring to new and social media but the increasingly universal logic of affect at the heart of media. From the labour of promoting brands, celebrities and politicians on social media to the consumption of traditional content on personalized devices and feeds, consumption and production rely upon an emotional investment, sense of user agency, critical knowingness and social connectivity. In this sense we can talk about the convergence of affect as a political economic logic of free labour, self-surveillance and performativity, and the libidinal logic of affective investment, antagonism and enjoyment. Donald Trump is therefore a fitting president for what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism (2009) in which capital subsumes personalized affective drives in circuits of capital. He exemplifies the super-ego ideal of communicative capitalism and its individuating effects as a narcissist who publicly ‘enjoys’ life and leverages his fame and media stakes to whatever end whether real estate, media contract negotiations or the presidency.

    The success of Trump’s populism and the contradictory responses he drew from establishment media must be understood in terms of the shifts of media political economy and the concurrent transformation of journalistic values. Journalism has staked its autonomy and cultural capital as a profession on the principle that it is above the fray of politics, providing objective universal truths for a public “assumed to be engaged in a rational process of seeking information” (Baym 2010: 32). Journalism is key to the liberal belief in process, serving a technocratic gatekeeping role to the public sphere. These values are libidinal in the sense that they disavow the reality of the political, are perpetually frustrated by the economic logic of the field, but nevertheless serve as the desired ideal. Bourdieu describes the field of journalism as split between this enlightened liberalism and the economic logic of a “populist spontaneism and demagogic capitulation to popular tastes” (Bourdieu 1998: 48). This was neatly demonstrated in the 2016 election when CBS Chairman Les Moonves spoke of Trump’s campaign to investors; “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” (Collins 2016). The Trump campaign and presidency conform to the commercial values of the field, providing the volatility and spectacle of reality television, and extraordinary ratings for cheap-to-produce content. Faced with these contradictions journalists have oscillated between Edward R. Murrow-esque posturing and a normalization of this spectacle.

    Further to this internal split in the field between liberal values and the economic logic of the Trump spectacle, the process of “mediatization” (Strömbäck and Dimitrova, 2011) explains the centrality of affective media to public political life. With neo-liberal post-politics and the diminution of traditional political vehicles and identities, media is the key public space for the autonomous neoliberal subject/media user. The media is ubiquitous in “producing a convergence among all the fields [business, politics, academia] and pulling them closer to the commercial pole in the larger field of power” (Benson 1999: 471). In this way media produces symbolic capital, or affective media power, with which media entrepreneurs can make an end-run around the strictures of professional fields. Trump is exemplary in this regard as all of his ventures, whether in real-estate, broadcasting, social media or in politics, rely upon this affective media power which contradicts the traditional values of the field. The inability of the journalistic and political fields to discipline him owes to both his transcendence of those fields and the indeterminacy of his actions. Trump’s run may well have been simply a matter of opportunism in an attempt to accrue media capital for his other ventures, whether in renegotiating his NBC contract or putting pressure on the Republican party as he has done previously.

    The logic of Trump is analogous to the individuated subject of communicative capitalism and the injunction to throw yourself into circulation through tweets and posts, craft your brand and identity, expand your reach, become and object of desire and enjoy. He exemplifies mediatized life as “a non-stop entrepreneurial adventure involving the pursuit of multiple revenue streams predicated on the savvy deployment of virtuosic communicative and image skills” (Hearn 2016: 657). Trump is able to bypass the meritocratic constraints of professional fields through the affective identification of a loyal audience in his enjoyment and brand. His long tenure on national television as host of The Apprentice created precisely the template by which Trump could emerge as a populist ego-ideal in communicative capitalism. He is a model of success and the all-powerful and volatile arbiter of success (luck) in a contest between ‘street-smart’ Horatio Algers and aspiring professionals with impeccable Ivy-League resumes. The conceit of the show, which enjoyed great success during some of America’s most troubled economic times, was the release of populist enjoyment though Trump’s wielding of class power. With the simple phrase ‘you’re fired’ he seemingly punishes the people’s enemy and stifles the meritocracy by humiliating upwardly mobile, well-educated social climbers.

    Trump’s ability to channel enjoyment and “the people” of populism relies upon capturing the political and economic logic of affect which runs through contemporary media prosumption (Bruns 2007). From the superfluousness of clickbait, news of celebrity deaths and the irreverent second-person headline writing of Huffington Post, affect is central to eliciting the sharing, posting and production of content and user data as “free labour” (Terranova 2004). Trump’s adherence to the logic of affective media, combined with a willing audience of affective labour, is what allowed him to defy the disciplines of the field and party, secure disproportionate air-time and overcome a 4-to-1 advertising deficit to the Clinton campaign (Murray 2016). The Trump campaign had a keen sense of the centrality of affect in producing the spectacle of a mass movement, often employing ‘rent-a-crowd’ tactics, to using his staff as a cheer squad during public events. In a manner similar to the relationship between the Tea Party and Fox News (Jutel 2013) the performance of large crowds produced the spectacle that secured his populist authenticity. While Fox effectively brought the Tea Party into the fold of traditional movement conservatism, through lobbying groups such as Freedom Works, Trump has connected his mainstream media brand with the online fringes of Brietbart, Info Wars and the so-called ‘alt-right’. It is from this space of politicized affective intensity that users perform free labour for Trump in sharing conspiracies, memes and personal testimony all to fill the empty signifier ‘Make America Great Again’ with meaning. Trump’s penchant for entertaining wild conspiracies has the effect of sending his online movement into a frenzied “epistemological drive” (Lacan 2007: 106) to uncover the depths of the enemy’s treachery.

    Where the Trump campaign understood the media field as a space to tap antagonism and enjoyment, for Hillary Clinton the promise of new media and its analogue ‘big data’ were a means to perfect communication and post-politics. Clinton was hailed by  journalists for assembling “Silicon Valley’s finest” into the “largest” and “smartest” tech team in campaign history (Lapowsky 2016). Where Clinton employed over 60 mathematicians using computer algorithms to direct all campaign spending, “Trump invested virtually nothing in data analytics” seemingly imperilling the future of the Republican party (Goldmacher 2016). The election of Trump did not simply embarrass the New York Times and others who made confident data-driven projections of a Clinton win (Katz 2016), it fundamentally undermined the liberal “technology fetish” (Dean 2009: 31) of new media in communicative capitalism. Where new media enthusiasts view our tweets and posts as communicative processes which empowers and expands democracy, the reality is a hyper-activity masks the trauma and “larger lack of left solidarity” (Dean 2009: 36). Trump is not simply the libidinal excess born of new forms of communication and participation, he realizes the economic logic and incentives of new media prosumption. The affective labour of Trump supporters share a connective tissue with the clickfarm workers purchased for page likes, the piece-meal digital workers designing promotional material or the Macedonian teenagers who circulate fake news on Facebook for fractions of a penny per click (Casilli 2016). Trump reveals both an libidinal and political economic truth nestled in the promise of new mediatized and affective forms of politics.

    The clearest demonstration of affective media as a space of enjoyment and antagonism, as opposed to liberal-democratic rationalism, is the rise of the so-called ‘alt-right’ under Trump. In journalistic and academic discourses, new media cultures defined by collaboration and playful transgression are seen as the inheritance of liberalism and the left. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, affect is deemed central to enabling new democratizing public formations (Grusin 2010, Papacharissi 2016). The hacker and nerd cultures which proliferate in the so-called ‘weird internet’ of Twitter, Reddit and 4chan have been characterized as “a force for good in the world” (Coleman 2014: 50). Deleuzian affect theory plays a key role here in rejecting the traumatic and inter-subjective dimensions of enjoyment for a notion of affect, whose transmission between mediatizaed bodies, is seen as creating ‘rational goals and political effects’ (Stoehrel and Lindgren 2014: 240). Affect is the subcultural currency of this realm with ‘lulz’ (jouissance) gained through memes, vulgarity and trolling.

    However as the alt-right claim the culture of the “youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos 2016) it is apparent that a politics of affective media is not easily sublimated for anything other than the circular logic of jouissance. It was in fact the troll ‘weev’, profiled in Coleman’s book on Anonymous as the archetypal troll, who claims to have launched ‘Operation Pepe’ to turn the Pepe the frog meme into a ubiquitous form of alt-right enjoyment as a prelude to race war (Sklar 2016). Trolling defines the alt-right and exemplifies the intractability of the other in enjoyment. Alt-righters might enjoy brutally dehumanizing their opponents in the purest terms of racism, anti-semitism and misogyny, but this is coupled with an obsessive focus on ‘political correctness’ on college campuses, through to pure fascist and racist nightmares of miscegenation and the other’s enjoyment. It should be clear that we are in the realm of pathological enjoyment and violent libidinal frustration particularly as the alt-right overlaps with the “manosphere” of unbridled misogyny and obsession with sexual hierarchies (Nagle 2017). The term “cuckseravtive” has become a prominent signifier of derision and enjoyment marking establishment conservatives as cuckolded or impotent, clearly placing libidinal power at the centre of identity. But it is also self-consciously referencing the genre of inter-racial ‘cuckold’ pornography in which the racial other’s virility is a direct threat to their own potency (Heer 2016). With the rise of the alt-right to prominence within internet subcultures and the public discourse it should be clear that affect offers no shortcuts to a latent humanism but populism and the logic of jouissance.

    Conclusion

    The election of Donald Trump, an ill-tempered narcissist uniquely unqualified for the role of US President, does not simply highlight a breakdown of the political centre, professional politics and the fourth estate. Trump’s populism speaks to the centrality of the libidinal, that is antagonism and enjoyment, to political identity. His vulgarity, scandals and outbursts were not a political liability for Trump but what marked him as an antagonistic agent of jouissance able to bring a people into being around his candidacy. In his paeans to lost American greatness he elicits fantasy, lost enjoyment and the antagonistic jouissance of vilifying those who have stolen “America” as an object of enjoyment. Trump’s own volatility and corruption are not political failings but what give the populist the fantasy of wielding unrestrained power. This overriding principle of jouissance is what allows disparate strains of conservatism, from evangelicals, paleo-conservatives and the alt-right, to coalesce around his candidacy.

    The centrality of Trump to the emergence of a people echoes Freud’s classic study of the leader and crowd psychology. He is a paternal super-ego, referred to as ‘Daddy’ by the alt-right, around which his followers can identify in themselves and each other. However rather than a figure of domination he embodies the neoliberal injunction to enjoy. In a political space of mediatized individuation Trump provides followers with different points of affective identification rather than subsumption to his paternal authority.  His own improbable run to the presidency personified the neo-liberal ethic to publicly enjoy, become an object of desire and ruthlessly maximise new opportunities.

    The response to Trump by the liberal political and media class demonstrates the libidinal entanglement between populism and neo-liberal post-politics. The more Trump defies political norms of decency the more he defined the negative liberal identity of urgent anti-fascism. The ascendance of reactionary populism from Fox News, the Tea Party and Trump has been meet in the media sphere with new liberal forms of enjoyment from Daily Show-style comedy to new authoritative data-driven forms of journalism. The affinity between Hillary Clinton and elite media circles owes to a solidarity of professionals. There is a belief in process, data and consensus which is only strengthened by the menace of Trump. The retreat to data functions as an endless circular process and fetish object which shields them from the trauma of the political and liberalism’s failure. It is from this space that the media could fail to consider both the prospects of a Trump presidency and their own libidinal investment in technocratic post-politics. When the unthinkable occurred it became necessary to attribute to Trump an over-determined evil encompassing the spectre of Russia and domestic fifth columnists responsible for a ‘post-facts’ political environment.

    Affective media power was central to Trump’s ascendance. Where journalists and the Clinton campaign imagined the new media field as a space for rationalism and process, Trump understood its economic and political logic. His connection to an audience movement, invested in him as an ego-ideal, allowed him to access the heights of the media and political fields without conforming to the disciplines of either. He at once defines the field through his celebrity and performances which generated outrageous, cheap-to-produce content with each news cycle, while opening this space to the pure affective intensity of the alt-right. It is the free labour of his followers which produced the spectacle of Trump and filled the empty signifier of American greatness with personal testimonies and affective investments.

    Trump’s pandering to conspiracy and his unyielding defiance of decorum allowed him to function as a paternal figure of enjoyment in affective media spaces. Where new media affect theory has posited a latent humanist potential, the emergence of Trump underlines the primacy of jouissance. In the alt-right the subcultural practices of trolling and ‘the lulz’ function as a circular jouissance comprised of the most base dehumanization and the concomitant racial and sexual terror. New media have been characterized as spaces of playful transgression however in the alt-right we find a jouissance for its own end that clearly cannot be sublimated into emancipatory politics as it remains stuck within the inter-subjective dimensions of enjoyment. Jodi Dean has described the effects of communicative capitalism as producing a ‘decline of symbolic efficiency’ (2010: 5), with new communicative technologies failing to overcome neoliberal individuation. Left attempts to organize around the principles of affective media, such as Occupy, remain stuck within discursive loops of misrecognition. Trump’s pure jouissance is precisely the return of symbolic efficiency that is most possible through a politics of affective media.

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    Olivier Jutel (@OJutel) is a lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. His research is concerned with populism, American politics, cyberlibertarianism, psychoanalysis and critical theory. He is a frequent contributor to Overland literary journal .

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] While one should avoid constructing Trump as an enemy of pure jouissance, analogous to the enemy of populism, the barefaced boasts of sexual predation are truly horrific (see Stuart 2016).

    [2] While Laclau holds that all political ruptures have the structure of populism I believe it is important to distinguish between a populism, which constructs an overdetermined enemy and a fetishized people, against a politics which delineates an enemy in ethico-political terms. Bernie Sanders clearly deploys populist discourse however the identification of finance capital and oligarchy as impersonal objective forces place him in solidly in social-democratic politics.

    [3] The most widely circulated conspiracy to emerge from the campaign was ‘Pizzagate’. Fed by Drudge Report, Info Wars and a flurry of online activity the conspiracy is based on the belief that the Wikileaks dump of emails from Clinton campaign chairman revealed his complicity in a satanic paedophilia ring run out of Comet Pizzeria in Washington D.C. A YouGov/Economist poll found that 53% of Trump voters believed in the conspiracy (Frankovic 2016).

    [4] Having secured a primary victory against the left-wing Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s general election tact consisted principally of appealing to moderate Republicans. Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer explained the strategy; “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin” (Geraghty 2016). While a ruinous strategy it appealed to notions of a virtuous, rational political centre.

    [5] In the build-up to the Michigan primary contest, and with the Flint water crisis foregrounded, Clinton’s twitter account posted a network diagram which typifies the tech-rationalist notion of progressive politics. The text written by staffers stated “We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges. We need solutions and real plans for all of them” (Clinton 2016). The diagram pictured interrelated concepts such as “Accountable Leadership”, “Environmental Protection”, “Investment in Communities of Color”. The conflation of intersectional discourse with network-speak is instructive. Politics is not question of ideology or power but managing social complexity through expert-driven policy solutions.

    [6] This form of satire is well within the confines of the contemporary liberal conception of the political. John Stewart’s pseudo political event “The Rally to Restore to Sanity” is instructive here as it sought primarily to mock right-wing populists but also those on the left who hold passionate political convictions (Ames, 2010). What is more important here than defeating the retrograde politics of the far-right is maintaining civility in the discourse.

    [7] At a campaign stop in Palm Beach, Florida Clinton stated that “I love having the support of real billionaires. Donald gives a bad name to billionaires” (Kleinberg 2016)

    [8] The Russia narrative was aggressively pushed by the Clinton campaign in the aftermath of the shock defeat. In Allen and Parnes’ behind the scenes book of the campaign they describe a failure to take responsibility with “Russian hacking…the centre piece of her argument” (2017: 238). While Russia is certainly an autocratic state with competing interests and a capable cyber-espionage apparatus, claims of Russia hacking the US election are both thin and ascribed far too much explanatory power. They rely upon the analysis of the DNC’s private cyber security firm Crowdstrike and a report from the Director of National Intelligence that was widely been panned by Russian Studies scholars (Gessen 2017; Mickiewicz 2017). Subsequent scandals concerning the Trump administration have far more to do with their sheer incompetence and recklessness than a conspiracy to subvert American democracy.

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    Works Cited

     

  • Zachary Loeb — Who Moderates the Moderators? On the Facebook Files

    Zachary Loeb — Who Moderates the Moderators? On the Facebook Files

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    Speculative fiction is littered with fantastical tales warning of the dangers that arise when things get, to put it amusingly, too big. A researcher loses control of their experiment! A giant lizard menaces a city! Massive computer networks decide to wipe out humanity! A horrifying blob metastasizes as it incorporates all that it touches into its gelatinous self!

    Such stories generally contain at least a faint hint of the absurd. Nevertheless, silly stories can still contain important lessons, and some of the morals that one can pull from such tales are: that big things keep getting bigger, that big things can be very dangerous, and that sometimes things that get very big very fast wind up doing a fair amount of damage as what appears to be controlled growth is revealed to actually be far from managed. It may not necessarily always be a case of too big, as in size, but speculative fiction features no shortage of tragic characters who accidentally unleash some form of horror upon an unsuspecting populace because things were too big for that sorry individual to control. The mad scientist has a sad corollary in the figure of the earnest scientist who wails “I meant well” while watching their creation slip free from their grasp.

    Granted, if you want to see such a tale of the dangers of things getting too big and the desperate attempts to maintain some sort of control you don’t need to go looking for speculative fiction.

    You can just look at Facebook.

    With its publication of The Facebook Files, The Guardian has pried back the smiling façade of Zuckerberg’s monster to reveal a creature that an overwhelmed staff is desperately trying to contain with less than clear insight into how best to keep things under control. Parsing through a host of presentations and guidelines that are given to Facebook’s mysterious legion of content moderators, The Facebook Files provides insight into how the company determines what is and is not permitted on the website. It’s a tale that is littered with details about the desperate attempt to screen things that are being uploaded at a furious rate, with moderators often only having a matter of seconds in which they can make a decision as to whether or not something is permitted. It is a set of leaks that are definitely worth considering, as they provide an exposé of the guidelines Facebook moderators use when considering whether things truly qualify as revenge porn, child abuse, animal abuse, self-harm, unacceptable violence, and more. At the very least, the Facebook Files are yet another reminder of the continuing validity of Erich Fromm’s wise observation:

    What we use is not ours simply because we use it. (Fromm 2001, 225)

    In considering the Facebook Files it is worthwhile to recognize that the moderators are special figures in this story – they are not really the villains. The people working as actual Facebook moderators are likely not the same people who truly developed these guidelines. In truth, they likely weren’t even consulted. Furthermore, the moderators are almost certainly not the high-profile Facebook executives espousing techno-utopian ideologies in front of packed auditoriums. To put it plainly, Mark Zuckerberg is not checking to see if the thousands of photos being uploaded every second fit within the guidelines. In other words, having a measure of sympathy for the Facebook moderators who spend their days judging a mountain of (often disturbing) content is not the same thing as having any sympathy for Facebook (the company) or for its figureheads. Furthermore, Facebook has already automated a fair amount of the moderating process, and it is more than likely that Facebook would love to be able to ditch all of its human moderators in favor of an algorithm. Given the rate at which it expects them to work it seems that Facebook already thinks of its moderators as being little more than cogs in its vast apparatus.

    That last part helps point to one of the reasons why the Facebook Files are so interesting – because they provide a very revealing glimpse of the type of morality that a machine might be programmed to follow. The Facebook Files – indeed the very idea of Facebook moderators – is a massive hammer that smashes to bits the idea that technological systems are somehow neutral, for it puts into clear relief the ways in which people are involved in shaping the moral guidelines to which the technological system adheres. The case of what is and is not allowed on Facebook is a story playing out in real time of a company (staffed by real live humans) trying to structure the morality of a technological space. Even once all of this moderating is turned over to an algorithm, these Files will serve as a reminder that the system is acting in accordance with a set of values and views that were programmed into it by people. And this whole tale of Facebook’s attempts to moderate sensitive/disturbing content points to the fact that morality can often be quite tricky. And the truth of the matter, as many a trained ethicist will attest, is that moral matters are often rather complex – which is a challenge for Facebook as algorithms tend to do better with “yes” and “no” than they do with matters that devolve into a lot of complex philosophical argumentation.

    Thus, while a blanket “zero nudity” policy might be crude, prudish, and simplistic – it still represents a fairly easy way to separate allowed content from forbidden content. Similarly, a “zero violence” policy runs the risk of hiding the consequences of violence, masking the gruesome realities of war, and covering up a lot of important history – but it makes it easy to say “no videos of killings or self-harm are allowed at all.” Likewise, a strong “absolutely no threats of any sort policy” would make it so that “someone shoot [specific political figure” and “let’s beat up people with fedoras” would both be banned. By trying to parse these things Facebook has placed its moderators in tricky territory – and the guidelines it provides them with are not necessarily the clearest. Had Facebook maintained a strict “black and white” version of what’s permitted and not permitted it could have avoided the swamp through which it is now trudging with mixed results. Again, it is fair to have some measure of sympathy for the moderators here – they did not set the rules, but they will certainly be blamed, shamed, and likely fired for any failures to adhere to the letter of Facebook’s confusing law.

    Part of the problem that Facebook has to contend with is clearly the matter of free speech. There are certainly some who will cry foul at any attempt by Facebook to moderate content – crying out that such things are censorship. While still others will scoff at the idea of free speech as applied to Facebook seeing as it is a corporate platform and therefore all speech that takes place on the site already exists in a controlled space. A person may live in a country where they have a government protected right to free speech – but Facebook has no such obligation to its users. There is nothing preventing Facebook from radically changing its policies about what is permissible. If Facebook decided tomorrow that no content related to, for example, cookies was to be permitted, it could make and enforce that decision. And the company could make that decision regarding things much less absurd than cookies – if Facebook wanted to ban any content related to a given protest movement it would be within its rights to do so (which is not to say that would be good, but to say that it would be possible). In short, if you use Facebook you use it in accordance with its rules, the company does not particularly care what you think. And if you run afoul of one of its moderators you may well find your account suspended – you can cry “free speech” but Facebook will retort with “you agreed to our terms of use, Facebook is a private online space.” Here, though, a person may try to fire back at Facebook that in the 21st century, to a large extent, social media platforms like Facebook have become a sort of new public square.

    And, yet again, that is part of the reason why this is all so tricky.

    Facebook clearly wants to be the new “public square” – it wants to be the space where people debate politics, where candidates have forums, and where activists organize. Yet it wants all of these “public” affairs to take place within its own enclosed “private” space. There is no real democratic control of Facebook, the company may try to train its moderators to respect various local norms but the people from those localities don’t get to have a voice in determining what is and isn’t acceptable. Facebook is trying desperately to have it all ways – it wants to be the key space of the public sphere while simultaneously pushing back against any attempts to regulate it or subject it to increased public oversight. As lackluster and problematic as the guidelines revealed by the Facebook Files are, they still demonstrate that Facebook is trying (with mixed results) to regulate itself so that it can avoid being subject to further regulation. Thus, free speech is both a sword and a shield for Facebook – it allows the company to hide from the accusations that the site is filled with misogyny and xenophobia behind the shield of “free speech” even as the site can pull out its massive terms of service agreement (updated frequently) to slash users with the blade that on the social network there is no free speech only Facebook speech. The speech that Facebook is most concerned with is its own, and it will say and do what it needs to say and do, to protect itself from constraints.

    Yet, to bring it back to the points with which this piece began, many of the issues that the Facebook Files reveal have a lot to do with scale. Sorting out the nuance of an image or a video can take longer than the paltry few seconds most moderators are able to allot to each image/video. And it further seems that some of the judgments that Facebook is asking its moderators to make have less to do with morality or policies than they have to do with huge questions regarding how the moderator can possibly know if something is in accordance with the policies or not. How does a moderator not based in a community really know if something is up to a community’s standard? Facebook is hardly some niche site with a small user base and devoted cadre of moderators committed to keeping the peace – its moderators are overworked members of the cybertariat (a term borrowed from Ursula Huws), the community they serve is Facebook not those from whence the users hail. Furthermore, some of the more permissive policies – such as allowing images of animal abuse – couched under the premise that they may help to alert the authorities seems like more of an excuse than an admission of responsibility. Facebook has grown quite large, and it continues to grow. What it is experiencing is not so much a case of “growing pains” as it is a case of the pains that are inflicted on a society when something is allowed to grow out of control. Every week it seems that Facebook becomes more and more of a monopoly – but there seems to be little chance that it will be broken up (and it is unclear what that would mean or look like).

    Facebook is the science project of the researcher which is always about to get too big and slip out of control, and the Facebook Files reveal the company’s frantic attempt to keep the beast from throwing off its shackles altogether. And the danger there, from Facebook’s stance, is that – as in all works where something gets too big and gets out of control – the point when it loses control is the point where governments step in to try to restore order. What that would look like in this case is quite unclear, and while the point is not to romanticize regulation the Facebook Files help raise the question of who is currently doing the regulating and how are they doing it? That Facebook is having such a hard time moderating content on the site is actually a pretty convincing argument that when a site gets too big, the task of carefully moderating things becomes nearly impossible.

    To deny that Facebook has significant power and influence is to deny reality. While it’s true that Facebook can only set the policy for the fiefdoms it controls, it is worth recognizing that many people spend a heck of a lot of time ensconced within those fiefdoms. The Facebook Files are not exactly a shocking revelation showing a company that desperately needs some serious societal oversight – rather what is shocking about them is that they reveal that Facebook has been allowed to become so big and so powerful without any serious societal oversight. The Guardian’s article leading into the Facebook Files quotes Monika Bickert, ‎Facebook’s head of global policy management, as saying that Facebook is:

    “not a traditional technology company. It’s not a traditional media company. We build technology, and we feel responsible for how it’s used.”

    But a question lingers as to whether or not these policies are really reflective of responsibility in any meaningful sense. Facebook may not be a “traditional” company in many respects, but one area in which it remains quite hitched to tradition is in holding to a value system where what matters most is the preservation of the corporate brand. To put it slightly differently, there are few things more “traditional” than the monopolistic vision of total technological control reified in Facebook’s every move. In his classic work on the politics of technology, The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner emphasized the need to seriously consider the type of world that technological systems were helping to construct. As he put it:

    We should try to imagine and seek to build technical regimes compatible with freedom, social justice, and other key political ends…If it is clear that the social contract implicitly created by implementing a particular generic variety of technology is incompatible with the kind of society we deliberately choose—that is, if we are confronted with an inherently political technology of an unfriendly sort—then that kind of device or system ought to be excluded from society altogether. (Winner 1989, 55)

    The Facebook Files reveal the type of world that Facebook is working tirelessly to build. It is a world where Facebook is even larger and even more powerful – a world in which Facebook sets the rules and regulations. In which Facebook says “trust us” and people are expected to obediently go along.

    Yes, Facebook needs content moderators, but it also seems that it is long-past due for there to be people who moderate Facebook. And those people should not be cogs in the Facebook machine.

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    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently working towards a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ideologies that develop in response to technological change, and the ways in which technology factors into ethical philosophy – particularly in regards of the way in which Jewish philosophers have written about ethics and technology. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck, where an earlier version of this post first appeared, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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    Works Cited

    • Fromm, Erich. 2001. The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge Classics.
    • Winner, Langdon. 1989. The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.