Ronell, Benjamin, and Trump
I’m currently working on an article that offers one explanation of the Trump campaign and its success in 2016 by drawing from Benjamin’s work in his essay on Motifs in Baudelaire, as well as the Artwork essay that we read last semester. I think that Benjamin is a good source to turn to because he wrote many of his essays during the Nazi’s rise to power, and today we see a global swing to the hard-right in many countries, not least of all the US. I also think that Benjamin has helpful things to say about how different technologies reconfigure politics.
So far, I’m leaning on Benjamin’s idea of shock-experience (Chockerlebnis) (from the Baudelaire essay) and the idea of Aura (from the Artwork essay.) His concept of shock-experience suggests that consciousness, when experiencing shocks like the repetitive nature of industrial factory work or even the reading of disconnected, isolated stories in a newspaper, defends itself by isolating the event in time and refusing to integrate it into its own fuller sense of experience (Erfahrung.) I plan to argue that the Trump campaign utilized shock, both intentionally (Twitter, violent/racist language at rallies) and unintentionally (”grab ‘em by the p*ssy,” literally any other stupid thing Trump said without thinking) to force the public into a sort of permanent state of shock-experience in which we were unable to connect these isolated events together into a larger narrative about who Trump was and what he represented (and we may still be unable to articulate that narrative.) This shock-tactic was an essentially negative tactic - it prevented, it stopped, it arrested imagination and experience and refused to be clearly and simply articulated because we found ourselves in a perpetual state of shock.
However, the Trump campaign also employed a positive tactic using essentially the same media - namely, Twitter and the rally. Twitter and the rally allow us to make sense of the commonly-held beliefs that Trump “speaks his mind” and “tells it like it is.” Of course these statements were often coded ways of affirming xenophobic, racist, or sexist statements by Trump, but they also attest to an idea that Trump is somehow more immediate (read - not mediated) in his speech. To “tell it like it is” is to speak truthfully and correctly about the world, to have no discrepancy between language and the world, signifier and signified. To always “speak one’s mind” is a similar gesture - Trump always says exactly what he thinks, and again there is no interference between language and thought - language is a clear, honest representation of the man Donald Trump. Of course, in reality, Trump was simply mobilizing a broadly exclusionary ideology that had long been neglected, but his willingness to continue to tweet ridiculous, patently false, sexist, or xenophobic statements which echoed his rally stump-speeches allowed the public to imagine that Donald Trump’s twitter was the man himself, immediate, present, not beholden to anything other than his own thoughts. In essence, the Trump campaign used Twitter to conjure up a Trump Aura, with all its immediacy, uniqueness, and presence that is still very much longed-for.
Reading Ronell, I saw strong connections to the concepts of aura and shock. The difference, of course, is that Ronell wants to shock in order to destablize, not to consolidate power. Making the text difficult to read compromises the authority of the book, preventing us from easily constructing a narrative about what her project is or easily incorporating her thoughts into our experience of other texts. On the question of Aura, I am less certain how to understand Ronell’s book. If I knew more about Heideggar, I might make some bold comparison between Being (Dasein) and Aura, but I don’t feel equipped to do that competently. Clearly she sees the logic of the telephone as disruptive of the connection between the self and the other, and perhaps in mirroring that through the book’s form she wants to emphasize the disconnect between author and reader - this pairing just being another pairing of self and other.
Whatever Ronell’s project might be, she also references many theories that suggest a link between National socialism, fascism, and the idea of immediacy, and is attentive to the political implications of technology, or perhaps even the politics of technology.
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