Donald Trump

Bill McKibben writes: "Thursday, while the nation debated the relative size of Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization."

While the size of Trump's appendages might be a distraction, his bid for presidency was not. At a paper talk I went to at SCMS: Jonathan Cohn (University of Alberta), "Not Needing but Wanting: #WomenAgainstFeminism and Postfeminist Phenomenology," a question was asked about the similar problem concerning Donald Trump. Cohn's argument was that the #WomenAgainstFeminism presents a confusion that cannot be clarified. No matter what the response is, it's probably a bad one. Approaching anti-feminism as ignorance is patronizing, ignoring it is dangerous, yet approaching the meme as serious is equally confusing. Within the photographs themselves is a conflict created by the planes of focus, either the face of the female or the words written on paper. The body of the alleged author verifies the writing, whose indexicality is undermined by its presence in a photograph (to use Vismann's argument in her essay about files for the authority of the signature within digital legal documents, as it becomes the signifier of the body of the signer, although Cohn did not use that essay).

All that leads to is that Trump's presidency, much like the antifeminist meme, is both impossible to dismiss, validate, or take seriously. Trump supporters, demographically speaking, are often being white, lower-income and poorly educated, yet there is no means to "prove them wrong" through education, information, or class. That formation of authority is precisely what they are voting against. They do not take him completely at his word, even as he's often said to "tell the truth." The popularity of his presidential candidacy, which ten years ago was actually a joke, is now truth. Sort of. Even now, when his candidacy has to "be taken seriously," it's almost impossible. It's a bind, neither true nor disprovable, bound within a circular argument that claims truth by being untrue.

Trump's unfathomable capacity for destruction, is paradoxically linked to his ability to "proliferate freely," as Guattari writes, "like another species of algae" (43). He proliferates destruction not because people are willingly ignorant, but because the logic of seriousness, where measuring his fingers is the same logic of measuring mercury. Neither account for a state wherein someone like Donald Trump is as difficult to believe as a rapidly changing ecosystem.