Violence is Still a Quest for Identity
There has been much talk about MAGA as a cult, along with its members, its managers, and its leader. But how much talk has been about what spurs on its growth and movement, let alone that of any other cult? If you watched the video above (and if you did not, then do so), Marshall McLuhan will say that all of these people lack an identity, and when you do not have an identity, you turn to violence, whatever that violence may be.
However, it is not just the absence of identity or any actual action against it that only matters, but also the mere threat against it: the looming image of the horizon and the distant echoes of (in)difference. All three affect us, and in today’s age, realistically speaking, it has been through globalization: the total exchangeability of everything implodes identity, acts against identity, and incessantly threatens identity. For “when things happen very quickly, there’s very little time to adjust to new situations at the speed of light, there’s very little time to get adjusted to anything.”
Indeed, we are always being told of “what’s coming up next.” In drastic terms, “Next up on tomorrow’s program, total human obsolescence!” “Next up, everything you have and think you want does not matter, and neither will your reactions to this because they will suffer the same fate as well!” Yes, then advertisements will then roll on about what you can do about this and that, or simply cope.
This also runs in reverse. If one recalls Baudrillard and his example1 of Patrick Le Lay from The Agony of Power, these programs massage you through not just pleasantries but also fearmongering in order for you to accept—to become accessible to—these advertisements and their products. (Spoiler Alert—even rioting and insurrections are used to soften folks up, along with becoming products themselves.)
But upon the digital frontier, not unlike the old frontier, where “you have to prove that you are somebody,” that proof is no longer derived and confirmed through the person against the environment (the known and the unknown), but rather through the formal dynamics of Surveillance Capitalism. As McLuhan partially details in the clip, “We now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance,” and that “It has become one of the main occupations of mankind; just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on.”
Yet people are not just records of their goings-on: the person is a constellation of configurations of pieces of data and subsequent pieces of information through the prediction products of Surveillance Capitalism. These ultimately hope to be equal to guaranteed outcomes. For, the extension of its Instrumentarian Power involves engineering one’s behavior for total certainty, thus total harmonization with “one’s” behaviorally engineered environment: the totally known, the totally certain—in success and failure, in happiness and misfortune. The records of goings-on have transformed into scripts of goings-to-happen.
These people minus identity want “to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.” If this is the case, then there is no bigger nobody than Donald Trump, for he insatiably craves to be noticed and covered more than anyone in the world. (And what does that say of audiences and apparatuses?) This paradox is a problem for him, whether he knows it or not, because while he admits that he is the most watched person in the world, this also means he suffers from a lack of identity most of all. Identity is all that matters to him. He, more than anyone, must be as “tough,” “stubborn,” “aggressive,” “indifferent,” etc., as possible. While emergent from family matters and extended by the family business, Donald Trump the man transformed through television and has been a pure image since the 1980s.
We need to keep in mind that when McLuhan says, “When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body; you’re just an image on the air,” Trump’s entire televisual image has been commandeered by the outrage algorithms of Surveillance Capitalism, where the more coverage he gets across whatever medium also entails the liquidation of himself, not to mention his managers and followers, for they are all images as well. They all end up dispossessed of individual agency, thus identity, for Instrumentarian Power’s “methods reduce individuals to the lowest common denominator of sameness—an organism among organisms—despite all the vital ways in which we are not the same.”2
Indeed, they are just “organisms that behave.” They are just a part of the automated circulation of images. Their individuality becomes obsolesced because “Everybody tries to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light—it’s called being Mass Man.” Trump is the image of success? Whether or not he ever was, he is now the image of liquidation—liquidation of meaning, value(s), identity, etc.
This means the MAGA Cult is all the same as “Mass Man” too, because Trump is a sign-vehicle of nostalgia and all the grievances that come with it. (Is this even a cult anymore? After all, the algorithms merely bootstrap off him: there is only the feedback loop, not actual leadership, just circuits and switches…) And “When you don’t have a physical body, you are a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you.” Yes, and the world—the one behaviorally engineered through Surveillance Capitalism—also has a different relation to you. Formally, this is what they are making their outrage dollars and total certainties from; the image and the liquidation of social relations.
Social media is a cooler constellation of media than television3 itself; its screens invite more participation than television could ever dream of. “Recommended for you: insurrection,” in which the targets of the form then grieve, gossip, plot, and perform “amongst themselves,” where those folks “amongst themselves” are really just extensions of the prediction products guaranteeing such exchanges. If the user is the content, then the form plays with its nested dynamics. Indeed, as McLuhan says, “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”
In the end, however, we live in Hegemony, of which Surveillance Capitalism is subordinate. We live with the total realization of the world through Integral Reality, thus its liquidation. Those who extend global power and those who refuse it lack an identity, for there is now only the simultaneity of the frontier of the Good (the domination of networks) in the former and the radical antagonism of the latter.
Thus, in a way, every group is a cult because of this, and the faith in them continues to run deep, all of which will succumb to the intelligence of evil, of reversibility, of the irreducible disunity of things in the face of attempted unity, to the fatality of the seduction of the object.
“Let’s be realistic: the job of TF1 is to help Coca-Cola sell its products. For an advertising campaign to work properly, the viewer’s brains have to be accessible. The goal of our programs is to make them available, by entertaining them, relaxing them between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is relaxed-brains time… Nothing is harder than getting them to open up.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, p. 37-8.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 377.
And that is even if televisual content takes up the most space apropos discourse. As McLuhan says, “Hypertrophy is the mark of obsolescence.”