19. XI 2016
Post-traumatic subject is a victim who has survived its own death. After the event of symbolic erasure, a new subject emerges and there is no continuity between new and old identity
For more than a year, we couldn’t stop laughing. We laughed until it hurt, knowing all well that nothing consequential could come out of it. On November 8th shortly before midnight the chuckle stopped, suddenly, not allowing our mouths to adjust, leaving behind a frozen smile. It felt like a hazing ritual gone wrong: someone got hurt badly. Shit got real!
Although presidential elections are political events, the election of Donald Trump was something else. November 8, 2016 was really a cultural and anthropological moment, the American cultural G-spot tornado. The long-standing illegible process became instantaneously legible by the sheer power of the event. This was the day of the encounter with the American traumatic Real, revelation of the knowledge that did not know itself. If the 2008 financial crisis was an economic response to the four decades of neoliberalism, this year’s elections, its social counterpart, was the second installment.
I wish Jean Baudrillard were alive today to enjoy the spectacle he so eloquently foretold. He would have had a blast watching the bonfire of neoliberalism: Symbolic erasure in 2008 and its sequel — symbolic resurrection of America in 2016. Baudrillard’s observations on America, as primitive society of the future, are more relevant today than ever before and are the key to unlocking the gates of its collective subconscious:
Like primitive societies of the past, America has no “ancestral territory”—speaking not of land but of symbolic terrain—that has accumulated centuries of meaning and cultivated principles of truth. America lives primarily in the unconscious realm of myths and symbols. America is like a child. It has no roots except in the future and is, therefore, nothing but what it imagines.
Americans lack a robust tradition of the absurd. Their innocence about themselves is a precious cultural commodity by no means reserved only for the unenlightened. America has been carefully protecting this innocence for ages and this protected innocence became its unique cultural dimension. This innocence was lost On November 8th. On this day America came of age and joined the adult world.
Complex emotional response to the election’s outcome goes beyond negative aesthetics, disdain for vulgarity, cultural degradation, and outright physical repulsion of the candidate. It is aligned with a sobering self-realization and beginning of a new self-awareness. Our disappointment and anger are no longer directed at Donald Trump – he was just a catalyst; he won fair and square and against all odds — but is directed inwards. It comes from what we see through our introspection, at what we just discovered America really is. After years of anesthetizing the public discourse with neoliberal narrative and political correctness, we are shocked at what stands before us. We are staring in disbelief at our collective soul and are frightened with what we see, how deeply divided America is and how alarming its split personality has become. Suddenly, reality is heavy, dark and troubling.
The origins of divided America goes back to the crisis of governmentality and the transformation of its culture in the post-1968 world. Its initial conditions are defined by the realization that true democracy is ungovernable. This realization has shaped the constitution of the neoliberal state and its mode of governing in subsequent years. The core of that program has been centered on preventing a formation of a unified voice of discontent and consensus in general. Ideological response to that challenge has been to align people along emotional rather than economic interests, to streamline the emotions defined around various charged issues, making sure that there is a steady inflow of polarizing topics that never gets stale. For this program to work, it was important to nurture perception that we are in each other’s way on the road to happiness and prosperity — the essence of social atomization. The divide had to be permanent and irreconcilable, in other words, cultural. Only then could it be effective. As a consequence, culture no longer acted as an agent of change aimed at building consensus and enlightment, but has functioned as an instrument of seduction, to lure people into the trap in which they become eminently governable.
It is not American history per se or its lack — there is more than four centuries of it — that is so problematic. Rather, it is the way America has dealt with its history, the process that can be characterized as a systematic denial of shit. Most of the troubling past had been reframed and reshelved never allowing it to become a burden, making sure the focus remains on the future.
America has been quite effective in not speaking about its traumatic past: Collective sociopathia — grotesque aggression, an archetypal love of objecthood elevated by obsession of giving up nothing at all; genocide on Native Americans, slavery, Hiroshima, internment camps, misogyny, racism, wasted lives, mass incarceration, general mixophobia, and systemic exclusion. All of this had to be suppressed, its importance marginalized, absolved of any guilt, rationalized and legitimized by reframing it as a necessity of freedom and progress. And this baggage of the past was blended to perfection with the belief that this country is entitled to permanent and unconditional greatness — this is America’s destiny, mission and goal that should be achieved regardless of the consequences. The bizarre cocktail of the two, which resurfaced during the 2016 elections, is the most troubling aspect of the emerging American political landscape.
This is America’s ancestral territory. These are the true initial conditions that define the origin of American cognitive coordinates. This terrain represents everything America so desperately didn’t want to be, everything it refused to know about itself. It represents everything that it taught itself to considers shameful and for which it reproached other nations and cultures, and for whose wrongdoings it had picked up the pieces so many times in the past.
There is no self-reflexive, self-mirroring level, the civilizing level of unhappy consciousness, which comes with history and which places a distance between the symbolic and the real[1]. Accumulation of latent rage, that made itself visible during the presidential campaign, is a result of all those passions Americans were forced to be ashamed of for so long.
The future of post-traumatic America depends on its ability to acknowledge its ancestral territory and metabolize the traumatic realization of its lost innocence. America will have to find itself in the world of adult nations. But, before it could find itself, America first has to lose its way.
[1] Jean Baudrillard, America
notesfromdisgraceland 