J ohannEs V oElz Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance He was, in the vocabulary of students of rhetoric, the perfect mimetic orator, probing his audiences’ deepest fears and passion and articulating those emotions in a language and style they could understand� On paper his speeches were stunningly disconnected, at times incoherent, and always repetitious� But [his] followers reveled in the performance; they never tired of hearing the same lines again and again� (Carter 346, emphasis in original) The orator in question is not Donald Trump but George Wallace, the longtime Alabama Governor, who, between 1964 and 1976, ran for President four consecutive times� While the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates had led to the widely held conviction that election campaigns in the age of television were a matter of carefully scripted, image-savvy self-presentation, Wallace rallies, particularly during the time span between his presidential campaigns of 1964 and 1972, opted for the opposite strategy� Wallace found techniques to raise the level of the affective energies circulating in the venues at which he spoke� He knew how to stoke rage and anger among his audience members, but he also knew how to make them laugh� He routinely railed against the federal government and Washington and East Coast elites, engaged in overt race-baiting (particularly up to 1972, after which point he began publically asking for forgiveness), and denigrated Vietnam protestors and the counter culture at large� His aim was not the projection of suave self-control but the collective loss of order and control� Protests by hecklers, followed by derisive comebacks on the part of Wallace, were a standard element of his mass meetings - as was the violence that broke out between his supporters and the protestors (particularly during the campaign of 1968)� In many - though, significantly, not all - respects, what we have been witnessing at Donald Trump’s rallies since 2015 follows Wallace’s playbook� This article presents the first of two installments of a serial essay in which I will reflect on and theorize Trump’s rallies, drawing on examples from 2015 to shortly before the midterm elections of 2018, and in which I will furthermore compare and contrast Trump’s events with Wallace’s� (Part II will appear in the 2019 issue of REAL�) The reason for turning my attention to the format of the rally is my contention that American right wing populism - a tradition that was largely invented by Wallace, though it draws on earlier populist practices - crucially depends on rally performances� The starting observation of the argument I will develop throughout the two installments of my essay is that while any democratic public makes use of performative practices in order to stage, negotiate, and contest the 204 J ohannEs V oElz relation between representative and represented, the rally is of particular importance for populist movements� 1 This is because populist movements depend on the claim of eliminating the difference between representative and represented. Populism’s “representative claim,” to invoke political theorist Michael Saward, is paradoxical in that it presents representation as nonrepresentation, or, put differently, in that it insists on instantiating a unified and unmediated presence of representative and represented� The performance of the rally comes to carry the burden of making that postulated unmediated presence a felt reality� In other words, while the populist claim to (non-)representation is asserted rhetorically and bolstered ideologically, it hinges on the attempt to be put into practice by way of an assembly of bodies sharing a physical space in a temporally limited performance� In the course of such an assembly, the performance must produce an appearance in which something becomes manifest that can be identified with the populist claim to unity� In that sense, populism depends on an “aesthetics of appearing” (Martin Seel), or, to use the words of Hannah Arendt, a “space of appearance.” As will become clear in the course of this first half of my two-part suite, bringing up Arendt’s concept of the “space of appearance” and Seel’s notion of the “aesthetics of appearing” in the context of the populist rally is intended as a provocation. At first glance at least, populist rallies centered around figures like Wallace and Trump are no less than the antithesis to these normatively charged theoretical concepts� But I claim that these provocative discrepancies are useful, not primarily to engage in a philosophical dispute with Arendt or Seel, but rather to force us to complicate our understanding of the populist rally itself� To do so, it will be necessary to identify the populist aesthetic of appearing/ appearance as it pertains to right-wing (rather than left-wing) populism� I follow John Judis’s terminology in characterizing right-wing populism as “triadic.” While left-wing populism is “dyadic” in the sense that it creates a distinction between “the people” and “the elites” (or “the establishment”), “triadic” populism distinguishes “the people” at once from those perceived as social and political elites and from those perceived to be at the bottom of the social ladder. While the definition of “the people” in dyadic (or leftwing) populism is potentially inclusive (although the elites must remain the 1 For a sound normative argument about the requirement of - ultimately aesthetic - representation for a democratic public, see Juliane Rebentisch, who writes: “If it is true that the self of collective self-government cannot be assumed to be a unified will and that it must first be brought forth by political representation, then this means that the demos of democracy can never exist beyond the separation thereby established between representatives and the represented, producers and receivers, the rulers and the ruled, performers and the audience� … The democratic answer to the problem of sovereign power does not consist in concealing the latter, but in exhibiting it and thus exposing it to an examination of its legitimacy� For it is precisely through this democratically understood “aestheticization of the political” that democracy preserves its openness to the future” (unpaged). Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 205 people’s “other”), in right-wing triadic populism “the people” are structured by a constitutive outside, made up of groups that are included in the national community in the form of the excluded or the illegitimate� The level of specificity of the populist aesthetic is taken a step further if we take into consideration that today, populism is embedded in a media architecture of celebrity politics, in which the allegedly non-representing representative must use techniques of what I will call “performative polarization” in order to appear in public. This, at last, is where present-day populism as carried forth by Donald Trump markedly differs from the earlier populist innovations of George Wallace� Considerations of celebrity politics have so far come in two versions: either as a warning call about the submerging of politics in mere entertainment - Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) is the classic statement of this position - or as an optimistic perspective on enhanced possibilities of participation and relatability. In that second version, the influx of entertainment logics into politics is seen as a force of democratization� (This perspective has been developed must fully by scholars of political communication influenced by British Cultural Studies; see Corner and Pels, Street, Wheeler.) What both accounts share is the assumption that in celebrity politics the source of political appeal, and thus of power, resides in the media-charisma of a candidate rather than in the substance of particular political positions� The argument that I will develop in the second of my two installments suggests, however, that such accounts need to be revised in order to make sense of the ways in which the media techniques and aesthetics of celebrity politics have come to stand in the service of political polarization� Thinking through the role of the populist representative as a polarizing celebrity figure - whose capacity to polarize requires the attention of the widest possible public - will force us to consider the complex ways in which the populist assembly both consolidates and potentially unsettles the separation of the national community into two opposing factions� Ultimately, the purpose of my inquiry in these two essays will not merely be to consider the aesthetic strategies used to affirm populist claims to unity. The advantage of investigating the aesthetics of populism moreover lies in making us understand the experiential appeals or affordances of the populist assembly� I suggest that by drawing out the aesthetic experience of populism, political aesthetics can add an important dimension to the understanding of populism that has so far received only scant attention� 2 2 The closest to an aesthetics of populism currently available are studies about the “political style” of populist leader figures. See, for instance, Moffitt. These studies, however, rarely try to conceptualize populism as political performance in any comprehensive sense� 206 J ohannEs V oElz I. The Representative Claim In his writings on what he calls the “representative claim,” political scientist Michael Saward has taken important steps in thinking through the performative dimension of political representation� Saward belongs to a number of theorists - along with political theorist Ernesto Laclau, intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit, and political communications scholar John Street, among others - who work against the assumption that the represented are a knowable and given entity whose interests or will politicians will aim to do justice to. “The represented play a role in choosing representatives,” Saward writes, “and representatives ‘choose’ their constituents in the sense of portraying them or framing them in particular, contestable ways” (301-302). For Saward, political representation is not a matter of mimetic duplication, in which the relation between the represented and the representative is one of formal congruence� By formal congruence I mean the equivalence between the interests or will of the people and the actions of the representative who is translating the popular will into law (or at least into the political process of law-making)� On such a view, the representative duplicates the will of her constituency, and by inserting it into the process of negotiation, or by putting it directly into law, the representative simultaneously gives expression to the popular will� Against this (what I call, borrowing Frank Ankersmit’s terms) mimetic and expressive view, Saward insists that representation is a matter of making claims, on the part of the representative, about the representative herself, the constituents, and the world which is shared by both parties� Representation thus takes the form of performative acts, which is also to say that it consists of those very acts� As Saward puts it, “to an important extent, representation is not something external to its performance, but is something generated by the making, the performing, of claims to be representative” (302). These performances thus create the bond of representative and represented - a bond that in the fullest sense lasts only for the duration of the performative act� But performative representation is never productive in any uncomplicated way� It does not simply bring forth a shared world of the political that then becomes a given, uncontestable fact� Representation is a matter of claims rather than of matching or duplicating given, stable forms of will and action� In that sense, we can say with Saward that “no would-be representative can fully achieve ‘representation,’ or be fully representative� Facts may be facts, but claims are contestable and contested; there is no claim to be representative of a certain group that does not leave space for its contestation or rejection by the would-be audience or constituency, or by other political actors” (302). Nonetheless, representational claims do succeed, which means that the space of contestation and rejection is also a space of acceptance� Representative claims are only successful in bringing forth a shared reality with a specific bond between representative and represented if they are acknowledged and approved by the receivers of the claim� But two aspects of the act of reception of a representative claim should be noted here: first, Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 207 approval and disapproval, or acceptance and rejection, sound like cognitive operations, but they may very well play out on the level of affects; second, approval and disapproval, acceptance and rejection, ought not to be conceptualized as binary terms that produce totalized states� In principle, claims remain contestable and the renewal or endurance of approval is never assured. Affectively speaking, the intensity of approval is subject to fluctuation and reversal; from a cognitive perspective, agreement and disagreement are not given single-mindedly. Any “yes” to a representative claim may be followed by a silent “but,” which, on the next occasion, may be uttered as a “no.” Representational success, in other words, is highly unstable and momentary, even in cases where acceptance of the representative claim ends up enduring for a long time through multiple successful renewals� 3 With these thoughts in mind, consider the following description of a George Wallace rally, provided by historian Dan Carter, the author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (1995), from which I already took my opening quotation: As almost every observer sensed, a Wallace rally was an act of communion between the speaker and his audience, for he was one of the last grandmasters of the kind of foot-stomping public speaking that characterized American politics, particularly southern politics, in the age before television� A Wallace speech excited the kind of nonanalytical emotional response that media advisers had always sought to evoke� (345) Carter points to a common perception that assemblies around “grandmasters” produce momentary experiences of communion for everyone involved� In the context of a political rally, these experiences - emerging, as Carter says, from nonanalytical emotional responses - tend to be interpreted, implicitly or explicitly, as the coming together of representative and represented in a union of presence� This interpretation often seeps into the self-description of those participating in populist rallies� In a close analysis of the choreography of a Trump rally in Springfield, Missouri, on September 21, 2018, New York Times reporter Katie Rogers quotes a Trump fan as follows: “If you feel the country is divided, come to one of these rallies. There’s a lot of unity here” (Rogers). When we look at footage from populist rallies, whether those of Wallace or Trump, we often cannot help shuddering at the way in which those assembled in the venue begin to affirm the representative’s claim. Those who are present in the hall seem to take up their role as represented with remarkable abandon� As they cheer on the representative, they seem to merge into an undifferentiated mass� Not only do they seem to give up any capacity for judging the representative claim; they seem to cease to exist as independent 3 Particularly for the study of political affects this entails a warning� For even when we address the affective dimension of representative claims, we should avoid analyzing affects in quasi-behaviorist fashion (as is frequently done in studies based on affect theory)� Representative claims, even when they strongly address the level of affects, ought not to be imagined to work in the manner of mechanical manipulation� For a critique of affect theory along these lines, see Ruth Leys� 208 J ohannEs V oElz subjects altogether� Instead they engage in forms of expression that signal to the senses - to their own and to their observers’ - an overpowering sense of sameness� They chant in rhythmic homogeneity and often make gestures in synchronicity� These moments of the populist assembly have informed the assembly’s theorization and have, by extension, contributed to theories of populism as a whole. This is true for the analyses of such influential political theorists as Nadia Urbinati and Jan-Werner Müller. Müller identifies populism as a “particular moralistic imagination of politics: ” In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist: populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people� Other political competitors are just part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say, while not having power themselves; when in government, they will not recognize anything like a legitimate opposition� The populist core claim also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people to begin with� (unpaged) Without using it as a technical term, Müller singles out the anti-pluralist claim as the defining feature of populism. Not unlike Saward, he considers the “the people” constructed by the claim a fiction. But unlike the position I am trying to develop here, Müller seems to assume that in populism the anti-pluralist claim is heeded in a stable way� The whole question of how the populist claim is received doesn’t even enter into his account� It is not a necessary ingredient to his theory because the presence of the claim and the obvious political success of populist candidates make the reception of the claim seem obvious and thus irrelevant for the analysis� For Müller, it is as if the claim itself constituted an anti-pluralist political community� By contrast, Nadia Urbinati does take the audience reception of the populist claim to representation into consideration, but she bases that reception on the moment of experiential communion that I have sketched above� Quoting from Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), she writes: A populist leader is not properly elected: it is acclaimed� Consequently, Schmitt forcefully wrote that the “will of the people” is the same whether it is expressed in the ballot or by acclamation: “[e]verything depends on how the will of the people is formed.” But then he promptly added that “the will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken for granted, an obvious and unchallenged presence, than through the statistical apparatus” of vote counting. … In a populist assembly there is no need to count votes and acknowledge minorities, because the leader will be a leader of the whole, not simply of the majority� Acclamation is not a form peculiar to representative democracy; moreover, it is antithetical to democracy� (119) By Urbinati’s account, “acclamation” is the activity and sole political function of the crowd of the populist assembly� Though she inverts Schmitt’s political valuation, she leans on his conception of what acclamation is: in acclamation, “something [is] taken for granted” and becomes “an obvious and unchallenged presence.” For Schmitt, that something is the will of the people as it is embodied and expressed by the leader figure. Translated into the vocabulary Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 209 of Michael Saward, acclamation is a total and unwavering approval, on the part of the represented, of the representative claim� In fact, Urbinati suggests that in the populist assembly, the leader’s claim to express “the will of the people” is not simply approved and accepted, but recognized as a presence that cannot be challenged� When a claim is acclaimed, it is reduplicated� If we tie together the descriptions of the rally that point to the feeling of unity and communion with theorizations by Schmitt or Urbinati that see in the assembly the acclamation of something that is obvious and unchallengeable, we can begin to see that a slippage is taking place between two different processes� The fact that people experience and describe the rally as bringing forth moments of communion does not, I suggest, mean that the representative has, in Saward’s phrasing, “fully achieved ‘representation’.” The imaginary experience of unity and communion may be described as a desired effect of the populist rally, but such experiences are momentary effects of dynamic relations which themselves rely on the continuing nonidentity of those involved in the performance� 4 When theorists jump to the conclusion that the populist rally shows how representative and represented truly merge in a unified presence, the performative logic of representation makes way for an expressive logic of representation� Suddenly, representation is regarded as a matter of expressing the people’s will - which is exactly as Schmitt phrases it and Urbinati repeats it� II. Staging the Rally If we want to avoid this slippage, the task is to come to an understanding of the aesthetic experience of unity occasioned by the populist rally� What kind of staging and choreography do populists employ to generate these experiences? If we get a better sense of the performative aesthetics of the populist assembly, we can also begin to grasp the dynamics of representation active therein� Let me sketch a few of the characteristic elements of the staging of Donald Trump’s rallies since 2015� During the 2016 Presidential campaign, literary writers and journalists like Dave Eggers (for The Guardian), George Saunders (for The New Yorker), Matt Taibbi (for Rolling Stone), and Mark Danner (for The New York Review of Books) wrote long-form reportages about Trump rallies, and they all stressed that the event didn’t begin when Trump took the stage, but much earlier, while audience members were waiting outside or inside the venue before Trump had even flown into the respective city. Waiting in line, conversing with fellow rally-goers, slowly walking by merchandise stands, filled with articles bearing slogans of varying degrees of combativeness, 4 This is the case even from the constructionist viewpoint that representative and represented are not preceding entities but come into being as a result of the representative claim� In other words, non-identity does not mean the difference between two preexisting identities� These interacting identities are rather produced in the process of their interaction, through the performative act of the claim� As so often, performative logic here is difficult to square with the temporal order of cause-and-effect. 210 J ohannEs V oElz being exposed to loud music by a range of pop music not necessarily associated with Trump’s political camp (as Eggers reports, Trump’s team chose Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”), engaging in altercations with protestors, mostly verbal, but sometimes physical: all of these, the reporters suggest, are standard pre-show features that have to be seen as an integral part of the event and that are crucial for building up the anticipation of the Trump show� But waiting outside and inside the venue is not just a matter of building up a sense of anticipatory suspense� At stake is also the need to bring to life the physical space of the events� Especially during 2016 campaign, Trump’s rallies often took place in the most nondescript and perfunctory of places, such as airport hangars� Among the reasons for this choice may have been the practical advantages of allowing Trump to fly in on his private Boeing 757, step out of his plane in front of his fans (and thus use the private jetliner as a symbol of his success, wealth, power, and American craftsmanship 5 ), and then fly to the next event immediately after. However, staging rallies in such non-places far exceeds its practical uses� From a performative perspective, the selection of such sites is highly significant. This becomes plausible at once if we compare the airport hangar (or even the more traditional multi-purpose event locations that Trump frequently used in 2017 and 2018) to the rallying grounds built for NSDAP conventions at Nuremberg� Initially, it may seem that the Nuremberg rallies and Trump rallies (or any other Populist rally) serve the same purpose� Consider Hans-Ulrich Thamer’s explanation of the rationale for Nationalist Socialist mass rallies: The principle objective behind these massive spectacles was to offer visual evidence of the German community united behind its leader� The ritualized rally of all National Socialist organizations was carefully stage-managed to present an impressive image of mass support for the new regime� The rally site formed the stage for the production of a Führer-cult� Hitler was not only leading actor and point of reference for both the architecture and the processions; he was also director and high-priest of the event, symbolically bringing the people together in an emotionally elating, communal experience� (172-173) As in the populist rally of our contemporary period, the purpose of the event was to demonstrate unity in the joint affirmation of a leading figure. But the architecture of the Führer cult was built for a type of performance that radically differs from a Trump rally� National Socialist decision makers consciously decided to build the rallying grounds as a single-purpose site� It was designed for a carefully planned political festival (lasting four, then seven, 5 See Dave Eggers’ description of a rally in Sacramento, California, on June 1, 2016: “‘You like that airplane? ’ he said, jabbing a thumb behind him. ‘It’s good, right? Made in America� Made in America� Boeing�’ The crowd roared and looked at the plane� On closer examination, there was something strange about the plane� It looked like it had come from another decade� And that decade was the 1980s� Trump’s name was emblazoned on it in a font called Akzidenz-Grotesk, a typeface popular 30 years ago� Its tail bore a giant ‘T’, rendered in a way that implied it had been striped by high winds� This was another design motif from the 80s, usually used on children’s basketball shoes” (Eggers, unpaged)� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 211 and finally eight days [see Thamer 176]) that followed a strict political liturgy, in which there was supposed to be no room for any contingencies� Indeed, the detailed liturgical plan for the NSDAP rallies served a dual purpose: it conveyed an atmosphere of the politically sacred, which was assisted by the monumental architecture - the National Socialist church of political theology - and it moreover set the rally free from any dependence on Hitler’s personal charisma� As Thamer explains: Albert Speer, co-creator and executor of this concept, informed us that it was Hitler’s aim to restrict the significance of the single personality of the head of State or Party leader within the ritual, and to put in its place a course of events which in itself was capable of impressing the masses� This idea arose from his observation that, in all probability, his successor would not be person with the same mass appeal� Therefore, the ritual had to predominate and a system be installed where even a “small political goblin” would be able to bring a certain fascination to bear on the masses� (178) The idea, then, was not to derive the emotional power of the rally from the singular presence of the leader, but rather from the totality that made up the Gesamtkunstwerk of the rally� The leader had a particular role to play that was integrated into, and subservient to, the overall effect� As George Mosse puts it, the aim was to bring “the audiences into contact with the supposedly immutable forces outside the course of everyday life” (qtd. in Thamer 178). Whereas Nazi rallies were intended to point to immutable forces, a Trump rally highlights mutability� The hangar’s nondescriptness points to the fact that it will serve a different purpose after the event� Rather than stressing eternity, it produces a visceral sense of “now.” In contemporary parlance of event-shopping, we might think of the hangar as a “pop-up venue”: its ephemerality stresses the urgency not to miss out on the now� Put differently, the sense of presence to be achieved through the Trump rally is linked to a particular spatio-temporality of architecture� Whereas for the “Thousand- Year Reich” the materiality of the rally site had to appear as timeless - to last longer than it materially (not to mention politically) could - for Trump’s populist campaign the venue has to suggest that its existence as a social site with a particular purpose will disappear before its material demise� Needless to say, the emphasis on the present moment is not intended to suggest that Trump’s power will be short-lived� The function of the dialectic of presence-in-the-now and vanishing is rather to facilitate an experience marked by the participatory unfolding of the present, and ultimately, of a sense of presence intended to be understood as the overcoming of representation� Trump’s performative style is perfectly calibrated to this end� III. Trump’s Performative Style Trump routinely boasts that he doesn’t use scripts� When he is forced to make presidential-sounding statements in the wake of tragedies, he subtly signals to his audiences that he has to set aside his habit of unscripted speaking for 212 J ohannEs V oElz a minute to placate the rest of the country� Thus, even when reading from script does he manage to affirm that the true Trump is the unscripted Trump. And he clearly isn’t just boasting: Trump really does seem to riff from talking point to talking point, with the riffing being at least as important as the talking points themselves� Katy Waldman has noted in Slate with only some exaggeration that like Obama or Clinton, Trump uses discourse markers to project folksiness or spontaneous feeling. (“Honestly, she should be locked up.”) In his mouth, though, these tokens hedge and redirect of their own volition, as if no one is driving the conversational car� … Regardless of his familiarity with the topic at hand, Trump will luxuriate in all the “let me tell you”s he can possibly throw into his sentences to draw attention to the fact that he’s talking� Of course he employs a ton of discourse markers: Trump as a political force is all discourse marker, no discourse� (unpaged) Indeed, Trump seems to derive narcissistic pleasure from the sheer act of talking - from being spoken by language, as it were - but because that pleasure is derived from language itself rather than from the speaking subject, his performance extends an invitation to his hearers to take up a share of his narcissism� 6 However, one of the reasons why letting language itself “drive the conversational car” provides a shared payoff of pleasure has less to do with some narcissistic sense of affirmation derived from being integrated into the symbolic order than it does with the sense of openness, of potentiality, produced by such semi-volitional discourse� In letting go rhetorically, Trump makes available to the senses an experience of the openness and contingency, not just of the future, but of the present� This moment can be theorized with an altered version of what philosopher Martin Seel calls “the aesthetics of appearing.” In discussing sports events - which share certain features with a Trump rally - Seel describes the aesthetics of appearing as leading to a pleasurable experience of the indeterminacy of the present� For Seel, appearance denotes the complete set of the phenomenal properties attributed to any object, whereas appearing designates the selective subjective perception of these properties, or, as he puts it, “the phenomenal simultaneity of the aspects sensitively perceivable in an object” (46). According to Seel, when we take up an aesthetic attitude toward an object we create the possibility of moving the appearing of appearances to the foreground of our consciousness� The result, Seel argues, has the capacity to be liberating: Much as consciousness of the fact of an extensive cognitive and practical indeterminateness and of an indeterminacy of the world can be crippling in many contexts, it can also be liberating� It is liberating when it emerges as consciousness 6 My account of narcissism here is admittedly non-technical� A more rigorous approach to this aspect would have to take into account Freud’s idea (developed in his “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 1914) that the narcissistic, self-loving individual develops her appeal precisely because she is self-sufficiently enamored with herself (the feminine pronoun here reflects Freud’s own focus). For a cogent, though not yet fully fleshed out, analysis of the appeal of Trump’s narcissism (based on Heinz Kohut rather than Freud), see Lunbeck� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 213 of unexplored, undetermined, open possibilities that exist here and now� This consciousness emerges when something is perceived in its sensuous particularity and for the sake of its particularity� This consciousness becomes aware that it is not the future but the present that is radically indeterminable� In a certain sense, of course, the future is much less determinable than anything that occurs in the present or occurred in the past� But the future is too indeterminable to be experienced in the repleteness of its indeterminacy, which is the privilege of the ephemeral present� (138, emphases in original) In making the aesthetics of appearing dependent upon the perception of an object’s sensuous particularity for the sake of its particularity, Seel discloses his normative orientation toward art as the proper place of aesthetics� He suggests that no matter whether we are in a sports arena or in a museum, we have to make a conscious effort to take up an aesthetic attitude and leave behind any regard for the pragmatic aspects about the object in question� In a sports arena, this would mean no longer caring about who wins� Only when we focus, if only for a second, purely on the athlete’s movements can we experience the present in “the repleteness of its indeterminacy.” On that condition, a political rally-goer would have to be able to zoom herself out of the heated social context and enter into a kind of disinterested pleasure - a highly unlikely situation, which, even if it were to happen, would tell us little about how a rally works� Though adherents of Kantian aesthetics would strongly disagree, there is ultimately little reason why we should only speak of a truly aesthetic attitude if it has been purified of any pragmatic admixture. In order to sense the openness of the present, attendees of a Trump rally do not need to change their attitude in such a way that they listen to Trump as if he were a language poet� In fact, they must not� The aesthetic pleasure to be derived from his performance very much hinges on his style, but style is only effective as a particular way in which something is done� If Trump’s talk were perceived as mere babbling - as sound emptied of ideological meaning and extracted from the pragmatics of the situation of speech - he would be incapable of evoking a strong sense of the ephemeral present� It is only because he is addressing his audience in his particular role and style - making use of language that veers from the protocols of political speech without ceasing to be just that - that the contingency of the present moment can be made to appear� 7 The core of this aesthetic experience of appearing is not the repleteness of an object that can be perceived only in a contemplative spirit and that requires bracketing all pragmatic considerations� Put differently, the sense of liberation does not come from the fact that we realize that our object of concern reveals unlimited aspects if only we approach it through the senses, outside of the strictures of concepts� It rather comes from the fact that once 7 See in this context Erika Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics of performance, which starts from the assumption that performances create communities through the “fusion of the aesthetic and the social� The community is based on aesthetic principles but its members experience it as a social reality - even if uninvolved spectators might perceive it as purely aesthetic” (55). 214 J ohannEs V oElz language itself “is driving the conversational car” of the political rally, each moment, each word, each sound presents a surprise, i�e�, a deviation from what is expected� It is a surprise that is not primarily future-oriented - we don’t expect the next word with anticipatory suspense - but that affects the present moment and charges it with a sense of presence� In deviating from the expected, the present moment displays its contingency and thus draws attention to its very now-ness� To say that language itself is driving the conversational car is no doubt hyperbolic and in a sense also beside the point� It isn’t quite true that Trump has given up all control� What matters is that he is an improvisational performer, that words and gestures are determined on the spot (whether by him or by some system of language is ultimately irrelevant)� For the audience members, this creates the sense that they are all equally part of a process of an unfolding present� This helps specifying the precise way in which the experience of his performance can be said to be “liberating”: If not even Trump can foretell how things will develop, being located jointly in the indeterminate present takes on an equalizing force� In that sense, unscripted, improvisational performance makes available an experience that can well be described as democratizing� More importantly, however, it is an experience that creates a sense of unity: everyone present is sharing in the same unfolding present� This is always the case when people inhabit the same space, but only through aesthetic strategies - in this case through Trump’s improvisational style - can this shared unfolding present be said to be sensed as appearing� And only in its appearing can it be experienced as shared� IV. Improvisational Interaction But the communion-effect of a Trump rally emerges not merely from the display of the unscripted, processual nature of Trump’s discourse� As in any improvisation-based art form, improvisational political performance is particularly suited for interaction� It doesn’t go too far to say that Trump’s style is made for interactivity with the participants of his rallies� In exploiting the possibilities of unscripted (which doesn’t mean unrehearsed) verbal and physical gestures, he creates invitations for audience input and can furthermore react spontaneously to that input� Before we look at particular examples to see how this process works, it should be noted that even the media-visual and architectural set-up of his rallies are designed to highlight this dynamic back-and-forth� Whereas some Republican contenders in the 2016 primaries, like Ted Cruz, still used (at least occasionally) the traditional stage set-up in which the politician is up on a podium facing the audience, Trump rallies architecturally create the impression as if he were positioned in midst of his supporters� To this end, so-called V�I�P� seats, rising up steeply from stage level, are installed behind the podium� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 215 These V�I�P� seats are limited in number, but on the images recorded by the cameras positioned in the back, they create the impression of an endless mass of supporters� They exceed, if not by far, the frame of the on-camera area� As The New York Times reports, attendees visible in that area are often “super-fans” who follow Trump from rally to rally. Alternatively, they are chosen by local organizers, get access thanks to having arrived early, or, in some cases, are chosen by chance (Mervosh, unpaged)� But as Jennifer Cunningham of SKDKnickerbocker, a political consulting firm that has worked on presidential campaigns, explains, “The rule is that you vet everything and everyone so there are no surprises” (Mervosh, unpaged). Indeed, it is remarkable that V�I�P� audiences tend to be composed of similar subsets from rally to rally� In the 2018 midterm rallies, among them were families with pre-teen children, groups of women in pink shirts carrying signs that read “Women for Trump,” and a few persons of color� The aim of showing this spectrum of cheerful faces, it seems, is to fight the impression that Trump attracts a fan base that looks backward in resentment� But if concerns with identity play into the composition of the V�I�P� group, those concerns are a tribute to a sphere of existence which the very phrase “V.I.P.” - in its resignified meaning of the rally - is meant to push to the background� The usage of the phrase by rally organizers suggests how two social realities - that of everyday life and that of the rally - are exchanged for one another. For what qualifies these people as “very important” has nothing to do with their social standing (here the rally differs from the V�I�P� lounges of sports events) and everything with their function for the rally itself� Capturing rally-goers on camera is a technique that was not invented by the Trump campaign, but for his performances this visual convention acquires heightened importance� It allows television and Internet viewers to see both parties to the interaction at once� Indeed, it is the interaction itself that becomes a crucial element of the televised content of the rally� The ramifications of this staging go even further: V.I.P. attendees interact with both Trump and their fellow audience members, but they do so in the awareness of being filmed, and thus of performing before the camera. This awareness is heightened by Trump’s frequent comments about the ways in which television teams will cover - or, as he has it, fail to cover adequately - the audience� Trump’s obsession with the size of his audience during his inauguration gains a new dimension of meaning in this light: turning the coverage of his audience into a public debate is in line with his interactive aesthetics of putting the audience itself at the center of attention� Because individual Trump audiences are invited to identify as belonging to a larger “movement,” turning the inauguration audience into a talking point at rallies becomes conflatable with talking about the audience present at a given rally. The attention which both Trump and his supporters collectively pay to their own coverage during the event also complicates the nature of the rally itself� On one level, rallies derive their character as performative events from the assembly of physical bodies in a physical space� “The bodily co-presence of actors and spectators [is] the basis for a community between them,” argues 216 J ohannEs V oElz drama theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte (60)� Only the interaction of embodied minds - that is, of beings who are conscious of themselves as bodily beings - allows a performance to produce what is perceived by the participants as “a temporary social reality” (55). On another level, however, these rallies are media events, and their existence as mediated realities is woven into the creation of the short-lived community of embodied performance: all participants of the rally consciously co-perform a media production� Even more, we can assume that the media appearance of the event is not merely discussed during the event but visually imagined by those involved in creating the temporary community of physical bodies� Thus the behavior at the rally - interactive and spontaneous though it might be - is informed by the model of the Trump rally made familiar on TV or the Internet� In short, in the rally, mediality and physicality are nested inside one another� For the analyst who relies on filmed coverage of Trump rallies, this requires taking into consideration that even when we watch the events in their full length, the co-constructedness of physical embodiment and mediality must be reconstructed from the mass-mediated material� This methodological complication notwithstanding, the available footage does convey a sense of the rhythm in which the interactive dynamic of the performance plays out� The interaction is marked by fluctuating intensities of affective involvement, which becomes visible with greatest clarity on the faces of the attendees in the V�I�P� stands (though those facial expressions, it should be noted, do not always fully correspond to the audible cheering and booing from the part of the venue not on camera)� Trump’s speeches do not excite the same level of audience engagement all the way through, although almost every one of Trump’s utterances, by featuring multiple repetitions of short phrases and various discourse markers, invites his audiences to respond� As a rule, the energy level drops whenever Trump announces policies at any level of detail or when he tells an extended story about himself without rhetorically involving the audience� For whole stretches of time, the camera captures V�I�P� members who seem uncertain of how to behave, who display low levels of attentiveness, or who outright yawn� Trump overcomes these low-energy passages by suddenly changing the topic to one of his (and his audience’s) boogey men� In these situations, he frequently provides cues for one of the well-known three-syllable chants - “Lock her up! ,” “Drain the Swamp,” “Build the Wall,” “U-S-A,” etc. - or he leaves a pause and lets the audience decide on its own which chant to choose (which sometimes leads to simultaneous, competing chants)� For a paradigmatic example, I will analyze a few moments from a rally held in Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 26, 2018, the day Cesar Sayoc, the suspect behind the mail bombs sent to several prominent Trump critics, was arrested� Approximately six minutes into the rally, Trump addresses the mail bombs and quickly comes to blame the media� Thereafter, he talks about his unfair treatment by journalists, his success in preventing a World War with North Korea, his proud identification as a nationalist, his plans for a tax Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 217 cut for the middle class, and the doom that awaits America should Nancy Pelosi become Speaker of the House� From here, he switches to his initiative to force down the price of prescription drugs� What follows is my attempt at a transcription of the ensuing two minutes and ten seconds (minutes 17: 50 to 20: 00) that captures his words, some of his gestures, as well as the V�I�P� audience response� Following my transcript, I include select screen shots that capture the different levels of audience engagement throughout the sequence: And yesterday, which got very, very little print - very little ink by these [pointing to the back] great gentleman, and ladies [he pauses, interspersed laughter and some boos in the audience], by the [another pause] fake news [boos and excited screaming simultaneously] - yesterday, yesterday - [he pauses to mark the insertion of a phrase which he then cuts short] - it really did, it’s a very imp… - we signed a bill: Prescription drug prices are going to come tumbling down! [He highlights this last phrase with a downward gesture of his right arm and lowers the pitch of his voice to mimic the movement of prices; the audience cheers enthusiastically, with individual V�I�P�s holding up their signs�] You know we have other countries [he pauses to wait until the applause from the previous sentence settles down], we have other countries that, for the same pill, from the same company, made in the saaaame plant [pause] - wherever the hell it’s made [some audience members break out in laughter] - you go and you see that saaaame pill, same box, same everything, selling for ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent of what Americans are forced to pay. That’s all ending, folks, that’s all ending, ok? [Mild cheers]� Hopefully you don’t need prescription drugs, but if you do, you’re gonna get them a hell of a lot cheaper, because it’s going this way [points downward with his right hand; the cheering is noticeably quieter than in the previous iteration of this point]� But the middlemen - and the drug companies - but the middle men are not thrilled with me right now� [Mild cheers�] They’re not thrilled with me� These are very rich people, they are not thrilled! They are not thrilled with Donald Trump right now� [Cocks his head as if to invite audience response; the cheering stays mild]� And the Democrats [pauses] want to invite [another pause] caravan after caravan of illegal aliens [loud booing] into our country [booing gets louder] and they wanna sign them up for free healthcare, free welfare, free education, for the right to vote, they want to sign them, for the right to vote [booing reaches a climax], what’s that all about! [He looks around askance� Then walks away from the microphone, facing the V.I.P.s. Some scream “Donald Trump! ,” some “Build that wall! ” In the course of chanting, their faces begin to lighten up. He raises his hand and turns back around to the microphone]� The right to vote - you ever hear that one! 218 J ohannEs V oElz Figure 1: “And yesterday…” Wavering attention in the audience. Figure 2: “by the fake news! ” Booing turns into excited cheering as Trump uses his signature phrase� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 219 Figure 3: “…tumbling down! ” The next level of excitement signaled by applause and the raising of signs� Figure 4: “…made in the saaaame plant.” Some audience members are drifting off, others seem to be awaiting the next cue, which will ensue in the following sentence: “wherever the hell it’s made” will be one of the comic high points of the sequence. 220 J ohannEs V oElz Figure 5: “It’s going down.” Repeat of “tumbling down” elicits hardly a reaction. Figure 6: “They are not thrilled [with Donald Trump right now]! ” Third iteration of the phrase, but the audience isn’t very thrilled either� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 221 Figure 7: “Caravan after caravan.” Audience is with Trump again, booing frenetically. Figure 8: Trump steps aside to let the audience take over� Some are still booing, some are chanting “Build that Wall! ” Hence there are thumbs up and thumbs down simultaneously� 222 J ohannEs V oElz What this sequence shows is that the temporary community emanating from the back and forth between Trump and his audience is by no means a stable entity� With every sentence, Trump risks disrupting what Fischer-Lichte calls “the autopoietic feedback loop [that] is generated and kept in motion not just through visible and audible actions and attitudes of actors and spectators but also through the energy circulating between them” (59). Thematically, this is one of the more challenging sections of the rally for Trump, as he is trying to address - or rather to celebrate - his policy measure about drug prices� Although bringing down prices for prescription drugs has great populist potential in that it addresses the problems of the common man in economic terms, its relative technicality makes the issue a challenge for the arousal of sustained emotion� There is a prolonged lull in this section which begins when Trump repeats his - initially popular - bit about declining prices. While in the first round he builds up the point to great effect (figure 3), in its second iteration the audience hardly responds at all (figure 5). Trump attempts to get the audience back by another typically populist move: he puts himself in opposition to pharmaceutical executives and lobbyists, who here come to embody the elites� But although he is pulling all the performative tricks he can muster - he repeats his punch line three times - the audience does not come back alive (figure 6). His solution is a sudden veering to a different boogey man: Democrats who are in cahoots with “caravan after caravan” of illegal immigrants. Only when Trump replaces his initial villain - the managerial elites of the pharmaceuticals - with a new villain made up of a combination of his political Figure 9: Audience fully activated, rhythmically chanting “Build that Wall! ” Facial expressions border on the ecstatic� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 223 opponents and the racially othered illegal immigrants does he succeed in eliciting a strong reaction� And a strong reaction it is, indeed: having incited their rage, he leaves the stage to his followers (figures 8 and 9). United in their aversion to the dual enemy (corresponding to Judis’s notion of “triadic populism”), Trump initiates what Fischer-Lichte describes as “role reversal”: “Role reversal … can be understood as an interplay of disempowerment and empowerment which applies to both artists and spectators� The artists relinquish their powerful positions as the performance’s sole creators; they agree to share - to varying degrees, of course - their authorship and authority with the audience” (50). Remarkably, the empowerment of the audience brings about an affective alteration that gets increasingly severed from the initial emotion. While figure 8 shows the overlapping of joy and rage, a few moments later the audience, fully engaged in rhythmic chanting, has reached something like a state of rapture (figure 9). It is the position of “authorship and authority” that transforms the initially negative emotions into enthusiasm� V. The Community of Judgment and the Populist Space of Appearance Trump’s rallies produce a constant string of occasions for judgment that play out in the medium of audience responsiveness: judgment is not expressed by the alternatives of booing and cheering, but by the very intensity of the response� In that sense, booing and cheering are interchangeable forms of responsiveness that must be contrasted with silence, boredom and yawning� I started my discussion by making use of Michael Saward’s notion of the “representative claim.” In that context, judgment takes the form of an “acceptance.” In Saward’s theory, acceptance does not refer to political proposals of the representative, nor to the bid of a would-be representative to be elected� Acceptance rather refers to the “political reality” (Ankersmit 47) produced by the act of representation, i�e�, by the framing and shaping of representative, represented, and the world shared by them� Though Saward doesn’t use the phrase, acceptance of the political reality at least in part takes the form of aesthetic judgments� The question this raises - and which I will address in this final passage - is how to conceptualize the relation between aesthetic judgment and acceptance (or affirmation). When interacting with the attendees of his rallies, Trump himself is stunningly candid about the aesthetic nature of their judgment (though he would not frame the issue in these terms)� Consider the following sequence from a rally in Golden, Colorado, held shortly before the Presidential election on October 29, 2016� The passage begins 43 minutes and 32 seconds into the recording: I want the entire corrupt Washington establishment to hear and hear, and I mean big-league hear [pause and cheering] the words of us - not me, it’s ussss - when we win on November 8th [pause and cheering] we are going [switching his voice to a growl] to Washington, D�C� [pause, cheering, and continued growling voice thereafter] WE WILL [long pause, in which he lifts up his hand to conduct 224 J ohannEs V oElz the audience, which picks up the cue and collectively chants: ] DRAIN - THE - SWAMP! [Cheering] I tell people I hated that expression� Started a week ago� I didn’t like it� I said, Ugh, that’s corny� [He spreads his arms, pauses, the audience laughs�] I said� And then I went, I said it, half-heartedly said it, the place went crazy. [Cheering.] You know, Frank Sinatra didn’t love “My Way.” And then he sang it, and he saw what was happening� And then it became the biggest [sic], and he ended up loving it like crazy, but: That was a very interesting thing - Drain the swamp [cheering] - very accurate� Let’s take Trump at face value here� He initially dismisses one of his signature slogans on aesthetic grounds - it is “corny” - and then compares his predicament as a political candidate with that of a popular musician� At issue is the aesthetic judgment of the performer in comparison to that of the audience� If the fans concur in their judgment, then clearly the performer must recognize that he has erred� No doubt, in Trump’s logic - yes, just like in Kant’s and Arendt’s - aesthetic judgments can be argued about� As Trump makes clear to his audience, any individual’s judgment is fallible, which also means that it is not purely subjective� Trump, of course, is not a real Kantian but an aesthetician brought forth by the culture industry: for him, authority lies with the criterion of quantity� The masses know best because they are they majority� They cannot misjudge collectively� What do we make of this self-conscious aestheticization of politics by a right-wing populist? The aesthetics of appearing, I argued earlier, admixes aesthetics and sociality� We can now see that this admixture produces a double reference for the judgments of his audience� First, in taking up their part of the improvisational interaction, rally-goers judge Trump’s input in reference to the social and political world� They judge whether they agree with his propositions, but more importantly, they judge to which degree his propositions (principal agreement to which is largely taken for granted) resonate affectively with the world they aim to co-create, with him and their fellow attendees, in the performance� Secondly, they also judge the aesthetic qualities of his - and their - performative propositions in and of themselves� Collective chants are no longer appreciated solely or primarily for their content but for their recognizable power as chants� Chants become chant-alongs, and they are self-reflexively greeted as such. In Trump’s world, comparing “Drain the Swamp” to “My Way” doesn’t pose the slightest risk of a shock of recognition about the reduction of politics to aesthetics� The affective judgment of cheering is about the aesthetic quality of the cheer, and consciously, affirmatively so. One has to ask the perverse question, then, whether a Trump rally might not be the fulfillment of Hannah Arendt’s highly idealistic concept of “the space of appearance.” My answer will be in the negative, but the fact that this question can be asked with at least a sliver of plausibility already goes a long way in challenging the idea that a populist rally can be characterized appropriately as the acclamation of some pre-existing popular will, that it is the successful (if regrettably totalitarian) expression and materialization of unity� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 225 Arendt developed the idea of the space of appearance most fully in the late 1950s, in essays such as “What is Freedom? ” and “The Crisis in Culture” (both included in Between the Past and the Future, 1961), and in The Human Condition (1958)� The concept of the space of appearance can be thought of as Arendt’s understanding of the ideal democratic public, modeled after the Greek polis� The space of appearance does not automatically exist by way of the co-presence of human beings in the same place� For the space of appearance to come into existence, persons liberated from having to worry about reproducing their material lives (because they have delegated these tasks to slaves, wife, and other dependents) must come together to exercise their freedom in speech and action� For Arendt, freedom in speech and action does not denote the attainment of particular practical goals but rather an intersubjective constellation of mutual sensuous perception (and ultimately recognition)� When free people perceive other free people in their appearance, and when they mutually appear to others, they bring forth the appearance of a shared world to which they can now relate as an object of shared concern� If perceiving others in their appearance, and being perceived by others in this manner, is a particular type of their interaction that brings forth a shared, common world, then that world has a built-in multiplicity of perspectives: everyone looks at the world from a slightly different perspective� The result is not subjectivism or solipsism� Rather, the multiplicity of perspectives is what enables the creation of a shared world� A shared world is a world that is accessible to each of its members in its appearance and that appears to each member from a different perspective� But if the perception of appearances is to create a shared world, staying at the purely receptive level of perceiving appearances will not suffice, since sheer perception is not communicable� This is why Arendt, in “The Crisis in Culture,” begins to consider the importance of judgment - more precisely, pre-conceptual, aesthetic judgment required for the processing of sensuous appearances - as a core activity in the creation of a shared public world� That the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant, namely, the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present; even that judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient himself in the public realm, in the common world - these are insights that are virtually as old as articulated political experience. (“Crisis” 221) For a shared world to exist as a plural world, it is not enough for every participant to be aware that she takes up a particular perspective� These particular perspectives must be regarded as generalizable - i�e�, they must be presupposed to be shared in principle by every other member - and at the same time as fallible (otherwise other perspectives would be ruled out)� They must adopt a position which Kant, in paragraph 40 of his Critique of Judgment, calls “broadened mind” (“erweiterte Denkungsart”), which is achieved, much like Arendt paraphrases in the above quote, “if he [the individual] detaches himself from the subjective personal conditions of his judgment, which cramp 226 J ohannEs V oElz the minds of so many others, and reflects upon his own judgment from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by shifting his ground to the standpoint of others)” (Kant 124-125). Precisely because aesthetic judgment is non-conceptual, it must be formed - if it isn’t to end in solipsism - with the hypothetical way in mind in which others might form their judgment� In order to be communicable, non-conceptual, aesthetic judgment requires an inner deliberation that anticipates the position of others, and it is because of this requirement that aesthetic judgment is crucial for generating a shared world from the perception of appearances� This, in a nutshell, is Arendt’s rationale for calling Kant’s Third Critique his political philosophy� Arendt was a whole-hearted pessimist when it came to the question whether this ideal public could be realized in the modern age� In “The Crisis in Culture” she blamed the consumptive spirit of mass society for the impossibility to create a political space of freedom in which people could approach a public world as a matter of appearances to be judged with a broadened mind� And in line with that pessimism, it is quite obvious in which ways a Trump rally, as I have analyzed it in this essay, falls short of Arendt’s high requirements� It might, indeed, serve as an epitome of her worst fears� Most immediately, attendees of a Trump rally will not ask themselves how they ought to judge a particular element of the shared public world based on the question of how other attendees might judge it� That question is moot since judgment in the Trump rally is an open question only regarding its intensity, but the intensity of the response will hardly be determined by the anticipated judgment of others� Moreover, while the rally constitutes a space of appearance of sorts, it is a space of appearance in which the plurality of perspectives hardly seems to matter if the assumption is that everyone will chant along in unison� I believe both of these statements are true to some extent, but curiously, it remains possible to interpret the rally in ways that meet - against her spirit - some of Arendt’s more forbidding formal criteria (if we neglect her sweeping historical argument that society has infiltrated politics in such a way that political freedom has become unavailable altogether)� To take the two points I just made: isn’t the fact that aesthetic judgments in a Trump rally concern affective intensities (rather than judgments about aesthetic categories like beauty) an indication that the broadened mind of anticipating others’ judgments plays a particularly important role? For is not the jubilance of a chanting crowd the release of the joyful anticipation that a hit like “Drain the Swamp” will be chanted with full-fledged conviction by (nearly) everyone present? Likewise, is the rally in actuality not a space of plurality, quite simply because the improvisational interaction thrives on the risk of failure? Isn’t failure to elicit the desired response on the part of Trump already an experience of plurality? Indeed, is it not plausible to argue that the Trump rally creates moments of unity out of the improbability of the crowd coming together in a Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 227 synchronous experience of appearing? In other words, is the temporally and spatially bounded performance of agreement, acceptance, or affirmation not energized by the overpowering likelihood of disagreement? 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