- Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Red Hen Restaurant, and Who Deserves a Place at the Table | The New Yorker – The table as a site of civility – for the civil. – (socialpractices trump rhetoric_of_action )
Tag Archives: rhetoric_of_action
Validating the Spectacle
On the occasion of transcripts released:
From Society of the Spectacle, Debord
Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. …
The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.
Trump’s clandestine business discourse is out of place on the social stage of politics. The result is that it unmasks both discourses as spectacle. It calls attention to the construction of the spectacular. Trump’s attempts to create change are shown everyday to be attempts to control message. In the spectacle, changing message is changing reality. It’s all that’s needed for a win.
The spectacle trickles down. Trump’s daily (Daily. He’s working hard) unmasking of the national administrative political spectacle also unmasks the discourse of other administrative contexts and calls them into his crisis of credibility. So that, locally, university administrators lose their agency as Trump reveals that their actions are attempts to shape the message rather than administrate real change. Declare a win, and you’ve won. That is simulation.
And, yes, annotation has a lot to do with it. Annotation becomes curation.
What I’m reading 1 Apr 2017 through 9 Apr 2017
- Why are liberals now cheerleading a warmongering Trump? | Owen Jones | Opinion | The Guardian – Handing over the keys?
> History shows that war presents the ideal opportunity for the authoritarian-minded to amass, consolidate and concentrate power. Dissent can be more easily portrayed as treachery; jingoism sweeps the nation, boosting the popularity of the ruler; critics fall into line; constitutional norms can be disregarded at a time of national crisis. – (polemic politics rhetoric_of_action trump )
- Melania Trump and the politics of airbrushing – The Washington Post – Fashion meets politics in the open media, with some semiotics chucked in to start the discussion. "Mahaux has given the public a two-dimensional version of Trump: just the gloss, just the facade. Trump is the fantasy, the dream." – (visualrhetoric semiotics politics )
- Iain Sinclair · The Last London · LRB 30 March 2017 – Everybody's city becomes someone else's. – (london psychogeography )