Père Trump*
HAL FOSTER
When I hear the word Trump, I reach for my . . . critical glossary? That is
pathetic—as if the right term could be a silver bullet. And yet, like so many oth-
ers, I have struggled to find language for our predicament. The problem is, IL
old concepts seem inadequate in the face of Trumpism, voided not only by the
sheer scale of the calamity but also by its weird mix of the buffoonish and the
lethal. If farce comes after tragedy, what comes after farce?
Maybe, Anche se, in order to approach the predicament, we have to pump
up the old concepts, raise them to a higher degree. For example, Alexander
Kluge sees our networked world as a “third nature” that supersedes the “second
nature” of the industrial world described by Georg Lukács a century ago.
Perhaps we now need to think about the “fifth estate” of social media in a relat-
ed way, as a force that trumps the “fourth estate” of journalistic media and there-
by evacuates the last residues of the public sphere that, over fifty years ago,
Jürgen Habermas associated with the advent of print culture. What kinds of
interventions might artists and critics make in the fifth estate?
This past semester I led a seminar on art and politics between the world
wars, and at every turn we encountered parallels with the present, such as the
violence advocated by Georges Sorel as a way to galvanize a political movement
or the decisionism articulated by Carl Schmitt as the very definition of emer-
gency power. Two others, less obvious, also struck me. Nel suo 1927 essay on pho-
tography, Siegfried Kracauer made this famous remark about the new visual cul-
ture of Weimar society: “Never before has an age been so informed about itself. . . .
[E] never before has a period known so little about itself.” This paradox of
information that undermines knowledge also has to be keyed up to match the
effects of our media environment, which overwhelms us with data even as it
deskills us in interpretation, connects us even as it untethers us.1 The other term
that resonated for me, also to do with Weimar, comes from the 1983 tome
*
Politics, Aesthetics, Trumpism” organized by Andrew Weiner.
This talk was delivered on December 10 at an NYU conference titled “Sense of Emergency:
1.
The historians of science Robert Proctor and Jimena Canales have argued that agnotology, O
how it is we do not know—that is, how we are prevented from knowing—is now a necessary comple-
ment to epistemology.
OCTOBER 159, Inverno 2017, pag. 3–6. © 2017 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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OCTOBER
Critique of Cynical Reason by Peter Sloterdijk (written before he became a darling
of the German Right). For Sloterdijk, cynical reason has the structure of fetishis-
tic disavowal: “I know X is not true, but I will believe it, indeed act on it,
nonetheless.” He offered the notion as a way to account for the blind eye turned
to Nazism as it emerged. If we are to comprehend the Trumpist mentality, we
need to raise this notion to a higher power, pure, for cynical reason today doesn’t
care to know, or if it knows, it doesn’t care. (Noncynical unreason, anyone?)
Such is one aspect of the “post-truth” condition.2
“The primal father” is a concept that can’t be pumped up, so outrageous is
it to begin with. You remember that, in Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud derives
the figure from “the primal horde” in Darwin, a great band of brothers ruled by
an all-powerful patriarch. This awful father enjoys all the women in the horde
(that is the only role women have in this wacky tale) and leaves the brothers out
sexually, to the point where they rise up, kill, and devour the tyrant. Yet this act
plunges them into deep guilt, and so they elevate the dead father again, now as a
god, or at least a totem around which taboos are established (the taboos against
murder and incest above all). Così, for Freud, does society begin.
There is a way to read this fable of prehistory historically, as a gloss on the
bourgeois revolutions that overthrew the kings, questo è, as an allegory of democ-
racy, “the transformation of the paternal horde,” as Freud puts it, “into a com-
munity of brothers.” He brings back the primal father several years later in Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), and if Totem and Taboo reflects indi-
rectly on democracy, Group Psychology does the same with Fascism—that is, con
the return, long after the democratic decapitation of the king, of the dictatorial
egocrat. Infatti, for Freud the mass politics of the time induce a regression to
“the group psychology of the horde”: “What is thus awakened,” he writes, “is the
idea of a paramount and dangerous personality toward whom only a passive-
masochistic attitude is possible.” “The leader of the group,” Freud concludes, “is
still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unre-
stricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority.”3
Why recall the primal father in relation to Trump? Of course, it is haz-
ardous to psychologize anyone, let alone millions of voters, to totalize them in
Da questa parte, but there is a psychic dimension to his support that we have to probe.
No doubt many of his voters—and remember that he received 63 percent of the
white-male vote—are sexist and racist, whether secretly or not; certainly, most
2.
porters take him seriously but not literally.
As Corey Lewandowski likes to say, we take Trump literally but not seriously, while his sup-
3.
In 1936, Bataille wrote a short text titled “Toward a Real Revolution,” in which he writes:
“Under autocracy, it is authority which grows intolerable. In democracy, it is the absence of authority”
(ottobre 36 [Primavera 1986], P. 35).
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Père Trump
5
were angry at elites too. But they were also—they were primarily—excited by
Trump, excited to vote for him: There was positive passion here, not just nega-
tive resentment. It may be difficult for people like us to see why, but one way is
to suggest that he tapped into the “erotic tie” that binds the horde to the primal
father. For this figure both embodies the law (he lords it over the brothers) E
performs its transgression (he can grope any woman).4 A potent double identifi-
cation opens up: The brothers submit to the father as authority and envy him as
outlaw. And so we have a celebrity president (“When you’re a star . . . you can do
anything”) as throwback primal father (or maybe just bully-in-chief), and there
are legions of white guys who want to be his “apprentices.”
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4.
For me, there was a strange doubling here with Bill Clinton, as was underscored by the obscene
empaneling of the victims of both men during the first presidential debate. But Bill does not quite qualify
as a primal father: He is not rich enough (not enough luxury kitsch), and he is vulgar in the wrong way
(white trash). Ovviamente, my little analysis leaves out a huge piece of the electoral puzzle—why it is that a
majority of white women also voted for Trump. But then they may also be subject to the “erotic tie” (O,
Piuttosto, subjected to it).
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3
Rachel Harrison. More News: A Situation. 2016.
Installation view at Greene Naftali, New York, April 2016.
Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
Photograph by Jason Mandella.