Adam Hodges, Anthroplogy News - Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) concept of the carnivalesque provides insight into Trump’s ability to subvert dominant political conventions through humor and chaos, maximizing entertainment value as he flouts presidential norms. But this concept alone cannot do full justice to explaining the ongoing, day-to-day spectacle of Trump’s presidency. To better understand the Trump phenomenon, I suggest we borrow a concept from the world of professional wrestling where hyperreality converges with spectacle to produce the same strange amalgamation of bravado, hyperbole, and exaggeration (and outright lies) that marks Trumpian politics. That concept is kayfabe.
Kayfabe allows Trumpian discourse to create its own internal reality filled with “alternative facts” that are used to determine what is true.
Originating with carnival workers, the term kayfabe passed into the world of wrestling “to mean the illusion of realness” (Smith 2006) or “wrestlers’ adherence to the big lie, the insistence that the unreal is real” (Schoemaker 2013). Kayfabe involves a “willing suspension of disbelief that allows fans to buy into often fictionalized storylines, larger-than-life personalities and match results” (Stodden and Hansen 2015). In other words, as sociologist Nick Rogers (2017) explains, kayfabe is “the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators.” That contract goes like this: “We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.”
Kayfabe ensures that Trumpian political discourse is largely read through what Jane Hill (2000) calls the “discourse of theater” as opposed to the “discourse of truth.” Whereas the discourse of truth relies upon the referential function of language to convey information that can be deemed true or false, the discourse of theater provides a lens for viewing political statements as a type of performance art. Truth and accuracy become less important than the entertainment value of words, gestures, and tweets, and the emotional tone and ideological stance they carry.
But kayfabe is more than just an interpretive framework that privileges the discourse of theater over the discourse of truth. Kayfabe allows Trumpian discourse to create its own internal reality filled with “alternative facts” that are used to determine what is true. In other words, kayfabe ensures that questions of truth and accuracy are not judged according to standards established outside the fourth wall of the theater, but inside the storyworld constructed on the stage or in the wrestling ring—or on the reality-television set of the Trump White House.
Like the drama of professional wrestling, Trumpian politics consists of continually advancing a compelling storyline. The precise content of that storyline matters less than the spectacle it creates. Wrestling characters include “faces” (good guys) and “heels” (bad guys). Matches involve “angles” (scripted feuds) between the characters, and the unfolding storyline contains a number of “swerves” (shocking turns) to elicit “heat” (crowd reactions, especially negative ones). Success in the ring is measured by the amount of heat generated: drawn-out matches are filled with the “spectacle of excess” (Barthes 1957).
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3 comments:
The same rules apply to the duopoly who spend the year posturing and then secretly get together with an omnibus bill to pay for the empire and redirect revenues to their patrons in the billionaire class. Our presidents, as the enemies of democracy and the servants of oligarchy fit in alongside Batman's enemies.
Case in point the Vietnam War which was carefully planned as a ten year war to benefit the MIC and principally Brown-Root. Really having nothing to do with actual people or politics, which relied on Brown's puppets LBJ and Nixon to sell as a holy war against godless communism, the ground having been prepared by Joe McCarthy as John the Baptist to LBJ's real deal.
One swerve that elicited heat- the fiction that Syria used poison gas, permitting Trump to fire missiles that missed. Trump swerves to being presidential without having to kill too many. That's why we have crisis actors. Trump's daily swerves in firings or attacks on minorities or Russiagate. Generating heat. The point of a president is to distract the taxpayers from the masked men making off with their loot.
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