That final phrase is a reference to Learning From Vegas, a 1972 book by Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour that critiqued “heroic” modern architecture and instead sought to “gain insight from the commonplace,” specifically by analyzing the Las Vegas Strip. Trump,
as a real estate developer, was certainly willing to “learn from Las
Vegas,” as he proved with his vulgar, now-shuttered Taj Mahal casino.
But there’s a deeper symmetry between Trump and the account of
postmodern society found in Jameson’s work (not just Postmodernism but subsequent volumes like The Seeds of Time and A Singular Modernity) and in the work of his fellow travelers, like Baudrillard and Debord.
These writers describe a world where the visual has triumphed over the
literary, where fragmented sound bites have replaced linear thinking,
where nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”) has replaced historical
consciousness or felt experiences of the past, where simulacra is
indistinguishable from reality, where an aesthetic of pastiche and
kitsch (Trump Tower) replaces modernism’s striving for purity and
elitism, and where a shared plebeian culture of vulgarity papers over
intensifying class disparities. In virtually every detail, Trump seems
like the perfect manifestation of postmodernism.
For
Baudrillard, “the perfect crime” was the murder of reality, which has
been covered up with decoys (“virtual reality” and “reality shows”) that
are mistaken for what has been destroyed. “Our culture of meaning is
collapsing beneath our excess of meaning, the culture of reality
collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture
collapsing beneath the excess of information—the sign and reality
sharing a single shroud,” Baudrillard wrote in The Perfect Crime
(1995). The Trump era is rich in such unreality. The president is not
only a former reality-show star, but one whose fame is based more on
performance than reality—on the idea that he’s a successful
businessman. Although his real estate and gambling empire suffered
massive losses in the early 1990s, and Trump’s “finances went into a tailspin,” he survived thanks to the superficial value of his brand, which he propped up though media manipulation.
In
Baudrillard’s terms, Trump is a simulacra businessman, a copy of a
reality that has no real existence. All sorts of simulacrum and decoy
realities now flourish. Consider the popularity of conspiracy theories,
evidence of a culture where it’s easy for fictional and semi-fictional
narratives to spread like wildfire through social media. Trump loves spreading conspiracy theories about his enemies, and his enemies love spreading conspiracy theories about him. This propagation of fictions makes it difficult to build a convincing case against him. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow revealed Thursday that a supposedly classified document
containing bombshells about Russia was sent anonymously to her show’s
tipline. Her team eventually determined the document was fake. “Somebody
out there is shopping carefully forged documents to try to discredit
news agencies reporting on the Russian attack on our election,” she
said, “and specifically on the possibility that the Trump campaign
coordinated with the Russians in mounting that attack.”
Another
recent example shows how easy it is to fall into a farrago of absurdity
when reporting on Trump. Last weekend, the president tweeted a
wrestling video showing him pummeling a man who had a CNN logo
superimposed on his face. A Reddit user named HanAssholeSolo, who has a history of racist and anti-Semitic posts, took credit for the clip. CNN discovered the user’s true identity, but decided not to name him, though added, “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity.” This sentence gave the false impression of blackmail, and HanAssholeSolo suddenly became a free speech martyr to the right. As
often happens in political battles of the Trump era, his supporters
took a few random facts at the margins of the story and constructed an
alternative reality, so that the story became not about the president’s
endorsement of a threatening video created by a political extremist, but
about a powerful news network harassing a private citizen. The entire
spectacle shows we’re living in a Baudrillardian funhouse where the firm
ground of reality has slipped away.
Postmodernism
brings with it the erasure of older distinctions not just between
reality and fiction, but between elite and popular culture. In his 1998
book The Origins of Postmodernity,
the historian Perry Anderson called attention to the theme of
plebeianization first developed by Jameson: the collapse of old
bourgeois norms among the rich and powerful, even as class hierarchy
remained strong (if not more entrenched than ever). “More widely, in the
public sphere democratization of manners and disinhibition of mores
advanced together,” Anderson argued, citing the antics of Princess Diana and President Bill Clinton. “For long, sociologists had debated the embourgeoisement
of the working-class in the West—never a very happy term for the
processes at issue. By the nineties, however, the more striking
phenomenon was a general encanaillement”—or slumming—“of
the possessing classes—as it were: starlet princesses and sleazeball
presidents, beds for rent in the official residence and bribes for
killer ads, disneyfication of protocols and tarantinization of
practices, the avid corteges of the nocturnal underpass or the
gubernatorial troop. In scenes like these lies much of the social
backdrop of the postmodern.” Trump, the wealthy president who brags
about grabbing women by the genitals and tweets out abuse of female
journalists, embodies this “encanaillement of the possessing classes” even better than Diana or Clinton.
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