Theoretical Times by Redhead Steve;

Author:Redhead, Steve;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

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THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP

Donald Trump, in his first few days in office, established a governing style of President as demagogue, tweeting from @realDonald Trump as his personal account as well as POTUS (President of the United States) even if other aspects of new and social media passed him by. The subcultural style is President as social media celebrity to go with his long-term role in the Reality TV show The Apprentice (Johnson, 2016; Wead, 2017). Literally, it is The President Show. Alt. facts to go with the alt.right in the post-truth age. Indeed to emphasise our post-factual age, the word ‘post-truth’ was acclaimed as word of the year in 2016, the year of Trump’s election and an ominous cloud descending on the world as the event sank in. For Slavoj Žižek it was veritably a ‘year of acting dangerously’ (2017b). Like the 1941 parable play by Bertolt Brecht (Williams, 2015, pp. 214–234) entitled The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, we now have an emblematic leading figure for the history and politics of the age however long he lasts in power. Arturo Ui, though, was a thinly disguised commentary of Hitler and the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Time will tell what are the long-term effects of Trump being President of the United States (Johnston, 2016) in the really really hyperreal world we now inhabit.

Hyperreality and the disappearance of culture are now crucial aspects of our lives today (Smith & Clarke, 2017). Jean Baudrillard sees all this in terms of ‘telemorphosis’ applying his concept to the French early Reality TV show Loft Story but it all fits so well with the rise and rise of Donald Trump. Baudrillard himself as we have seen, alongside other global theorists mentioned in this book, became captured by hyperreality and its apparatus however much he wriggled in terms of celebrity intellectual culture. Celebrity intellectual culture has a long history. But since Andy Warhol’s 1960s prediction that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, the global game has changed. Theorists today have in some ways displaced disciplines entirely and become part of a Reality TV show occupied in parallel by the multiple demagogues of this modern world. Baudrillard brilliantly analysed this phenomenon as ‘hyperreality’ which sets up its own ‘disappearance’ (Smith & Clarke, 2015, 2017). This chapter showcases a number of other global theorists and cultural figures who have been caught up in hyperreality. This chapter shows also how the specifically selected theorists for the book like Baudrillard, Virilio, Badiou and Žižek have become part of this often pernicious social formation and assesses what effect it has had on the production of theory especially mature global theory like transcendental materialism. The current watershed for theory is shown to be the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, a global mega event, a radical political rupture, an event of the kind envisaged by Žižek. But all is not what it seems. For Žižek (2017b), challenging the global consensus, Donald Trump is merely a centrist-liberal,

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