the game is on
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
“We’re flooded in shit, and we’re still searching for a way to shovel it out,”
– James Carville
While we are angst full over whether or not we’re in a Constitutional Crisis or not, President Donald J. Trump is just about to declare, unlawfully, a state of Insurrection in Los Angeles, is a stone’s throw from then declaring Martial Law and following that with an Executive Order postponing the Congressional Elections, the game, as Sherlock Holmes would say, is afoot. And then he charges after the Evil Moriarity armed with the certain and infallible methods of deduction.
We’re not so armed, nor does our President have Moriarity’s genius. He’s not on a 4D chessboard of moves so brilliant we can’t keep up. It’s not genius but clinical mania, a callous insouciance. I suggest that where he’s at is where the country is, though we’re shaken by what is in play, traumatized by losing our capacity to refute and shut down, shovel out, our President’s manic destruction of democracy certainly. Deeper though we are desperately angered and unhinged by the destruction of what reality is and the passing of our common grasp of truth.
About 35 years ago I began to teach a course in postmodern thought, not the various movements in the fine arts but its way of knowing, not Enlightenment or 20th Century Modernism but a swerve away from both. I was particularly interested in its impact on politics and so taught a course on radical political thought, focus on the U.S.
In short, I taught courses which the Trump gang is now rabid to excise. If indeed, they exist anywhere.
I want now to write about the intersection of these two courses and the way in which President Trump does politics. I want to once again talk about the game we’re in and the chessboard it’s being played on. Spoiler: it’s bottomless.
I find that the President practices a key tenet of the postmodern and that is the absence of an external point of reference that disputants could be directed to, see and accept as an adjudicating arbiter. It’s that point outside our own arguments that serves as a perfect template compelling acquiesce and so leading to common understanding.
In the absence of that something transcending our words, we have words that are in an interminable crushing battle as to see which hold The Truth. A whirlwind of spin and spectacle. See YouTube.
If the happy Enlightenment view was that Reason would make Truth transparent, and the scary 20thCentury modernist view was that through a glass darkly you could find it, momentarily, the playful postmodernist view was that truth/lies in perception and reception. Ours. Note: The lens of perception may be grinded/grounded in various forces of domination shaping our reasoning. Note: The reception of what is said and represented goes on within historical context which itself has floating or indeterminate or over-determined signification. What this amounts to, in short, is that what is the case depends upon where, when, and to whom the case is being made. It’s all in our camp. We’ll find the truth where we put it.
First then, our President knows that his words cannot be brought to ground but only countered by other words. There is no underlying ground, an instinctual awareness he exploits to the stupefaction of others. Secondly, he knows the battlefield of contesting narratives well enough to trigger a “He’s telling the truth!” response. He pitches anti-Big Government, anti-Legacy Press, anti-intellectuals and their universities, anti-foreigners and people of color, anti-poor, anti-pronoun politics, anti-Liberals and Leftists, and stealth misogyny to those already in those camps. Thirdly, he thoroughly enjoys the circus and pandemonium of lies and bullshit that cannot be shut down, laid to rest and eliminated. Fourthly, he has a mania for creating reality as he wants it because for him reality is up for grabs. Sherlockian deductive skills won’t take you to him.
How then do you launch an attack on the President when that attack will immediately get sucked into a fact/alternative fact spin Americans have lost the talent to get out of? How do you make the case for impeachment, for instance, that presents an overwhelming amount of evidence proving guilt that cannot be discarded in final judgment?
There’s fear and trembling now that this cannot be done. How and where will it be staged? And to whom? Words are attached to meaning on a stage and before an audience at a time. Trump’s saying words and actions are “weaponized” against him doesn’t have impact only because he says this. It has impact because distrust in words and who determines their meaning is already our contemporary staging. Impeachment is therefore “staged” already before it makes its case.
The fact that it is staged both in the U.S. Senate and in an online reality of social media means that modernity’s court of reason is shadowed by postmodernity’s court of words. Not only is the first seriously damaged in our own day but the latter is a court in which Trump wins. Nothing thus far sticks to him because words no longer stick to a commonly shared reality, which might lead to common understanding. Or, a successful impeachment.
What I taught regarding politics in this postmodern clime recognized the friability of truth and reason and the ways in which politics went on. Trump hasn’t created a deconstructive approach to both. What he has done is activate an already existing indeterminacy and so brought what we feared to face to a performative level. This is a man who has run roughshod over not only the protocols and traditions of doing politics but also the Constitutional foundations of a democratic order.
Why then would he not run over our faith that an indisputable chunk of reality lay behind words, that what he said could be shown to be untrue universally? His success lies in this: he knows he can defy and discard meaning, run lies and bullshit right in your face and not be stopped. He can be called out but because his lies and bullshit accommodate a degenerated American Mass Psyche, sufficient to win two presidential elections, he can’t be convicted. 77 million prefer to put his face on Mt. Rushmore.
His success is in attuning himself to these 77 million Americans. What narrative frames support both? In Trump’s case, there is none. Lenin had a plan; Stalin had a lust. Trump has shaken the frame of a 248 year old Constitutional democratic republic asserting his own will to power and money as a challenge. Imagine how far that will go. In the case of the 77 million, they want for many and differing reasons to shake the same frame, trusting that Trump will lead them to a “brave new world.” Imagine how far Trump’s mania will take them to this “brave new world.”
The weight of realities that have been in our U.S. politics flood the presumptions and arrogance of President Trump off the road. I am mindful of Kant’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism: the weight of the world counters illusions. The weight of what a well-honed scientific method has revealed to us since Sir Francis Bacon’s 1620 treatise Novum Organum dismisses Secretary of Health Robet Kennedy Jr’s rejection of CDC’s use of the scientific method.
Our foundation of knowing is a deep register of our own commonly understood and shared constructions. We can eject, reject and refute in the absence of transcendent, universal and absolute guideposts. We always have. The hyperreal we create is brought to ground on this planet Earth’s own ground. It’s not a process but a struggle. Politics is the arena.
Because we as humans have what we say about the world and ourselves but never the world as it is or our selves as we are did not, I told my students, mean that we lived in a turmoil of unknowing and confusion. If I were teaching today, I’d say the floating nature of reality and truth does not make Trump inevitable, does not close down a politics in which we find among challenging narratives meaning that will hold until something unthought brings us back to the search. It’s invigorating, not a cause of fear and trembling. Truth, like a democracy yearning to be egalitarian, is a struggle we tend day by day. Autocrats want to shut down any search for truth because they represent themselves as already having it. The mission of egalitarian democracy is counter to the ambitions of autocracy. But the words of autocracy now fill the air.
The foundations of our democracy are words written by “Founding” Fathers. We can make holy Tablets of them but they remain words written by us. Trump has given us a lesson here. The foundations are friable because they are as mythical as a transcending point of reference. They can fall apart because we are the original manufacturers.
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions.” To catch the profane man of our own day, all that is needed are the real conditions of life which we share with each other, conditions which we ourselves make.
We project trust in the results of our elections, in the peaceful transition of power, in the decisions of our courts, in the deliberations of our legislature, in the Constitutional exercise of executive power, in the imagined community of all Americans, and trust in our communicative networks. We construct the trust we need to have because it is the means of preserving a rule of law in which “no animal is more equal than others.”
It’s possible in this postmodern clime to propagate distrust as if it were a salutary thing to do, this undermining of existing trust. We now know that it is possible to seed that distrust in 77 million minds but what would lead any animal to do that? And what would stop us from stopping him? What the American Revolution did, first of all, was dethrone George III, the “Mad King.”
