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CHAPTER 1
SHADOWING THE SILENT MAJORITIES
Baudrillard died in March 2007 from cancer, but his work continued to be published a decade after his death. His posthumous publications have been significant in shifting the long-term view of Baudrillard: from a celebrated postmodern theorist (to those who have not read him) to a global scholar with a mature system of thought that made sense of modern banality. A recent posthumous publication (in a new English translation) from the 1980s, The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977–1984,1 shines a light on the politics in France (and elsewhere) from the 1970s and early 1980s. Only French language versions existed during his lifetime. This collection aligns with his illuminating but misunderstood work from the period in which he located ‘the silent majorities’ in books that summon the concept through their title, such as In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.2 He investigated the role of the masses and the “end of the social.” He predicted a moment where a Brexit or Trump could emerge.
Banality refuses to cleanly hook into the hegemonic cloth.3 If scholars or citizens are interested in why the Brexit vote occurred in June 2016 in the UK,4 or why Donald Trump defied electoral odds in the USA, or why Pauline Hanson’s right-wing One Nation party called for a Royal Commission into Islam in Australia,5 then they can locate answers in Baudrillard’s texts from the early 1980s, summoning “the divine left,” “the end of the social,” and “the shadow of the silent majorities.” The chronicle of the years 1977–1984 in Baudrillard’s writings from The Divine Left shows the scale of social, economic, and political change in the years after punk. This is not postmodernism or postmodern theorizing. To cite a Steve Redhead book title, that was not ironic: We have never been postmodern.6 Perry Anderson made a clear meta-realization: “postmodernism emerged as a cultural dominant in unprecendently rich capitalist societies with very high average levels of consumption.”7 Postmodern theory was the Dynasty and Dallas of academic culture: excessive, camp, featuring big shoulder pads, thin ideas, and extreme lip gloss. Now, we require a different rendering of these theories and a re-reading of the scholars dismissed during these blindingly excessive times.
What Trump Studies implements is a punk theory. This is a DIY analysis. This is maker culture. This is a garbage bag dress held together with safety pins. This is dirty, messy, and chaotic theorizing that did not nest well in the 1970s and 1980s through Baudrillard’s rise as the enfant terrible of high theory. But through the gauze of late – and indeed posthumous – Baudrillard, the punk energy of his concepts and paradigms provide an energetic frame to Trump Studies.
Baudrillard’s mature system of thought was already in train by the time the Sex Pistols, Clash, Slits, and the foundation for new wave emerged on the scene in 1976.8 In that year, a key book in the Baudrillard oeuvre was written: Symbolic Exchange and Death.9 It was published in 1976 in French, but not really fully appreciated by English-speaking readers until translated. A 1993 English publication helped reorient readers, but even today his scholarship is deposited into an intellectual dustbin labeled postmodernist. Crucially, Symbolic Exchange and Death contained the theory of reversibility which would become so important to Baudrillard’s writing until his own death. As Sylvere Lotringer, publisher of Semiotext(e) and long-time friend, stated in the introduction to a posthumous Baudrillard book called The Agony of Power,10 “reversibility is the form death takes in a symbolic exchange.”11 In 1976, the year zero of punk in global popular culture, punk’s cultural stirrings were embracing antecedents that Baudrillard shared: the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry and Pere Ubu. In the mid-1970s, a Cleveland punk band emerged with the name Pere Ubu to globally popularize the drama of writer Alfred Jarry from the late nineteenth century which had so fascinated Baudrillard since the 1950s. Baudrillard’s first short book explored Jarry and Pataphysics. Cleveland musician David Thomas in 1975 named his band Pere Ubu after Alfred Jarry’s caricature king because, to Thomas, it added a texture of absolute grotesqueness, a darkness descending over everything within mid-1970s America. In his own lifetime, Baudrillard never declared any awareness of this popular music culture/Ubu connection, though he did once appear in a ‘punk’ costume of his own. He wore a gold lame jacket with mirrored lapels, reading the text of his own self-penned 1980s poem ‘Motel-Suicide’, backed by a rock band at the Chance Event held at Whiskey Pete’s in Las Vegas during November 1996. The only surviving photo shows the short, balding, academic Baudrillard appearing as if he was auditioning for a place in a mid-late 1970s punk band.12
Baudrillard’s attitude to power, law, culture, sovereignty, and politics changed in this mid-1970s ‘punk’ period. The agony of power was as much about the power of agony. In his own agonizing introduction to The Agony of Power, Sylvere Lotringer claims powerfully and correctly, that Baudrillard’s two key ideas throughout his work were that, firstly, reality had disappeared and became replaced by simulacra and secondly that there was a potential symbolic challenge in this disappearance. This mid-1970s period is crucial for understanding Baudrillard’s work for the rest of his life, and especially its political implications for the post-GFC and post-Brexit period, as we enter what Slavoj Zizek has hailed as a “new dark ages” and “trouble in paradise.”13 What can be seen in hindsight as Jean Baudrillard’s ‘post-punk’ work is revealed in The Agony of Power, a book praised from within by Sylvere Lotringer as nothing less than Baudrillard’s “final intellectual testament.”14 The Agony of Power offers a different view of sovereignty and power from the classical legal conception of power often reproduced in major tomes of legal philosophy and sociology of law. Baudrillard’s perspective is a form of the ‘patasociology’ (echoing Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics) hailed by French theorist of ‘the social’ Jacques Donzelot who worked with Baudrillard at the University of Nanterre in France. Whilst there are many intriguing books in the Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers series produced by Routledge,15 the orthodoxy of the ‘critical legal thinkers’ chosen on law, politics, and power contrasts strongly with Baudrillard’s radical late work on these issues, underscored by his idea of integral reality and reversibility. There are books, so far, in the series on Law by Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek, Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Niklas Luhmann, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, but not Jean Baudrillard.
In this posthumous work, especially in The Agony of Power, Baudrillard offers a unique theory of power, incorporating what he calls ‘a double refusal,’ by which he means the sovereign’s refusal to dominate as well as the subject’s refusal to be dominated. As he conveys in another posthumous book, Carnival and Cannibal, in a passage repeated from The Agony of Power, the radicalism of his thinking is in the argument that power must to be abolished. For Baudrillard:
it is power itself that has to be abolished – and not just in the refusal to be dominated, which is the essence of all traditional struggles, but equally and as violently in the refusal to dominate. For domination implies both these things, and if there were the same violence or energy in the refusal to dominate, we would long ago have stopped dreaming of revolution. And this tells us why intelligence cannot - and never will be able to – be in power: because it consists precisely in this twofold refusal.16
The refusal to dominate, or to exercise sovereign power according to Sylvere Lotringer, illustrates Baudrillard’s theory at its most banal. It can be seen in the agonies of those involved in the revolts of May 1968 or the activities of the self-proclaimed ‘post-political’ Italian Autonomists in the 1970s, or the failure of the Communist Party and other parts of the left in the late 1970s and early 1980s in France. They were, in Baudrillard’s theory, and enhanced by Lotringer’s interpretation, less than confident in wanting to dominate. They agonized about power, in both their resistance to sovereignty and their unwillingness to become involved in its exercise. Indeed, as Baudrillard has written emphatically, “power itself is an embarrassment and there is no one to assume it truly.”17
Banality is important to our analysis in this book, as is the double refusal. Best revealed in the horror and embarrassment of the successful Brexiteers18 and the snap resignation of David Cameron,19 there is both a refusal to dominate and a refusal to be dominated. The double refusal provides a framework to understand the irrationality – and denial – of power. Brexit and Trump’s victory confirm the change. Brexit and Trump’s election are embarrassing, shameful, banal, and ignorant moments.20 There is something sordid and impotent in these victories. The racism and xenophobia are too overt, distasteful, and grotesque.
What became clear through Theresa May’s aphorism ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was that the repetition of a noun does not increase its clarity. What was also clear was Boris Johnson’s continual repetition of neo-colonial ideology. The rationale for his resignation was that under May’s rendering of Brexit, the UK was “headed for the status of a colony.”21 Therefore, the cleanest and clearest example of the double refusal is the bizarre and catastrophic instability after the Brexit vote. Boris Johnson and David Davis refused to lead a population that refused to be led, and implemented the double refusal with a neo-colonial chaser.
David Frum noted similar tendencies through the Trump presidency. He argued that:
The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of the law, but an accumulating sub version of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.22
This is not a Foucaultian – or even an Althusserian – rendering of power. This is Baudrillard’s double refusal, deploying banality or ‘sub version of norms’ to create instability, confusion, agitation, and a lack of focus. This is an economic system of “non regulation” rather than deregulation.23
The key questions about the instability of the 2010s were founded earlier in 2008. How did an economic system crumbled and humbled by the Global Financial Crisis survive and then continue to maintain momentum and stature? This has not been accidental or incidental. Owen Jones produced a remarkable monograph, The Establishment: And How They Get away with It. He argued that:
Ever since Britain was plunged into economic disaster in September 2008, there has been a concerted attempt to redirect people’s anger – both over their own plight, and that of the nation as a whole – away from the powerful.24
In a nation with universal suffrage, the key question is how the powerful maintain their rule over the instruments and agents of power. One strategy is to deploy Nicos Poulantzas’s theorization of the state, to reveal how small and irrelevant issues25 mask the deep and brutalizing actions of domination.26 These trivial matters then serve to shield and decenter critical questions about the concentration of power, and injustices in housing, health, and education. For example, terrorism becomes a siren’s call that summons and justifies inequality and a restriction of migration and citizenship on the basis of religion and country of origin. Yet minor, banal issues and behaviors routinize and normalize an ideology founded on inaccuracy, error, xenophobia, confusion, and an ig...
