POWER, APPEARANCE, AND OBSCENITY: FIVE REFLECTIONS
The obscene public space that is emerging today changes the way the opposition between appearance and rumor works. It is not that appearances no longer matter since obscenity reigns directly; it is, rather, that spreading obscene rumors or acting obscenely paradoxically sustain the appearance of power. Things are in a way similar to what happened in the last decades with the figure of detective in crime fiction: he or she can be crippled, half-crazy, or whatever, but his/her authority as the infallible detective remains untouched. In the same way, a political leader can act in undignified ways, make obscene gestures, etc., but all this, by contrast, strengthens his position of a master.
It is similar with Trump who surprises us again and again with how far he is ready to go with his vulgar obscenities. As a climax of Trump’s attacks on the ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, at a Minneapolis rally in October 2019, he performed a mock re-enactment of her texts with Mr Strzok, her ex-lover, as though the couple were in the middle of sexual act, imitating her orgasmic throes. Lisa Page understandably exploded with rage. But the same story seems to repeat itself: Trump survives yet again what his enemies consider the final straw, which will destroy him.
We are here at the opposite end of Stalinism where the figure of the Leader should be kept unblemished at any price. While the Stalinist leader fears that even a minor indecency or imperfection would destroy his position, our new leaders are ready to go pretty far in renouncing dignity. Their wager is that this renunciation will work somewhat like the short note on the back cover of a book by a famous contemporary writer, the note intended to demonstrate that the author is also an ordinary human being like us (“in X’s free time, X likes collecting butterflies”). Far from undermining the greatness of the author, such a note strengthens it by way of contrast (“you see, even such a great person has ridiculous hobbies…”). We are fascinated by such notes, precisely and only because he or she is a great author; if such a note was about an average ordinary person, we would be indifferent towards it (“who cares what a nobody like that is doing in free time”).
The difference is, nonetheless, that these kinds of leaders are like the Kim Kardashians of politics. We are fascinated by Kim because she is famous, but she is famous just for being famous; she is not doing anything significant apart from ordinary things. In a similar way, Trump is famous not despite his obscenities but on account of them. In the old royal courts, a king often had a clown whose function was to destroy the noble appearance with sarcastic jokes and dirty remarks (thereby confirming by contrast the king’s dignity). Trump doesn’t need a clown; he already is his own clown, and no wonder that his acts are sometimes more funny or tasteless than the performances of his comic imitators. The standard situation is thus inverted: Trump is not a dignified person about whom obscene rumors circulate; he is an (openly) obscene person who wants his obscenity to appear as a mask of his dignity. Alenka Zupančič elaborated the contrast between this logic and the classic logic of domination in which
“the smear of the king’s image is simultaneously the smear of the king himself and as such inadmissible. The new logic is: let the image be castrated in all possible ways while I can do more or less everything I want. Even more, I can do what I want precisely because of and with the help of this new image.”[1]
This, again, is how Trump functions: his public image is smeared in all possible ways, people are surprised at how he again and again manages to shock them by reaching a new depth of obscenity, but at the same time he governs in the full sense of the term, imposing presidential decrees, etc. – castration is here turned around in an unheard-of way. The basic fact of what Lacan calls “symbolic castration” is the gap that separates me, my (ultimately miserable) psychic and social reality, from my symbolic mandate (identity): I am a king not because of my immanent features but because I occupy a certain place in the socio-symbolic edifice, i.e., because others treat me like a king. With today’s obscene master, “castration” is displaced onto his public image. Trump makes fun of himself and deprives himself of almost the last vestiges of dignity, he mocks his opponents with shocking vulgarity, but this self-depreciation not only in no way affects the efficiency of his administrative acts; it even allows him to perform these acts with utmost brutality, as if openly assuming the “castration” of the public image (renouncing the insignia of dignity) enables the full “non-castrated” display of actual political power. It is crucial to see how the “castration” of the public image is not just a signal that this image doesn’t matter, that it is only actual administrative power that counts. Rather, the full deployment of administrative power, of enforcing measures, is only possible when the public image is “castrated.”
But what about a politician who acts like an efficient no-nonsense administrator and also publicly assumes such an image (“a matter-of-fact guy who despises empty rituals and is only interested in results…”)? The gap between public image and actual person is still at work in such an identity, so that one can easily detect the difference between a really efficient administrator and the one who plays this role. But more important is the fact that assuming the image of an efficient administrator seriously constrains the space of what I am able to do in reality, of how I can exercise my power: I have to obey certain rules. Why, then, do I have to renounce the dignity of my power-role in order to exercise full power? Trump’s exercise of presidential power involves three and not just two elements: his ruthless exercise of power itself (enforcing decrees), his clownish-obscene public image, AND the symbolic site of power. Although this site is emptied of its positive content (dignity), it remains fully operative, and it is precisely its emptiness that enables Trump to exercise fully his administrative power.
-Slavoj Zizek
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