I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
clear that this event was made on, through and for social media....
[...lots of other very cogent observations here...]
I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.
It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come, yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.
The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the world of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we left behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged in political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits posturing from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from the rhetorical playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s. But then the play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out by crude, stupid and very obviously manipulated people. They were directly incited by the highest powers, via social media for sure, and television, and radio, and print journalism, and above all by the hottest channel of all: live rallies. The theater had consequences. The possible became real. And so a choice between conflicting realities could finally occur.
Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk, there was no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented the uprising also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious planning for collective violence. Instead the entire country got a close look at an inchoate, yet very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid and delusional. Sure, we had seen these folks already, many times. Yet this time there was no equivocation as to who was leading. When Pence and McConnell took their last-minute stand in favor of the Constitution, Trump sent his thugs to oppose them. And with their actions, Trump's people - the real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally lanced the boil of Trumpism.
When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle and San Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that climate change was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at the Capitol, it became obvious that a politics based on staged and calculated insurrectionary rhetoric leads to real violence and institutional breakdown.
Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it would be realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total social fact." The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective ritual in which the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with the charismatic or magical _expression_ of values. For Mauss this is a dynamic ritual with all the density, complexity and precarity of lived experience. It is a real force because it tests out the validity of social fictions. It is a total fact because it upholds, but to some extent also transforms, a society's core affective and cognitive assumptions about what the world is and how it works.
The pragmatic function of yesterday's certification ritual was to confirm the peaceful transferral of state power. Yet what it became, dynamically, was a challenge to and subsequent re-affirmation of all the procedures, values and aspirations attached to the society-wide practice of democracy. This was not a monolithic, mythical, predetermined ceremony, even though that was what everyone was fearfully hoping it would be. Instead it was dynamic, open-ended, touch and go, extremely vulnerable. And look at what it actually did.
It reconfirmed, in the evening, the about-face of political power that had occured in the morning, when the results from Georgia came through. In this way, it opened up the possibility for a Democratic administration to actually legislate: to move transformative laws through both the House and the Senate. Not just Trump, but three decades of Republican mendacity and opportunism were pushed aside. And that event did not merely happen over social media, or on talk radio, or on the Hannity show. It was not just another piece of calculated political theater. It was a society-wide event: a total social fact.
Not only that, but from the media-theoretic viewpoint, something extremely interesting did occur: Twitter censored Trump and blocked his communications for 12 hours. The anarcho-capitalist media took one giant step towards accepting their integration in the overall political process.
So we dodged a bullet yesterday, for sure. And something a lot more important may potentially have happened.
There comes a point where you have to be counter-factual, you have to engage in what Mauss calls "magical thinking." You have to take a role in a theater that really does have consequences. That tipping-point is now. I will participate in the collective actions of a society that starts to reverse the tremendous harms it has been committing for decades and centuries. I will help to transform the pragmatic administration of social functions.
all the best, Brian
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