Ukraine and Mediatization
The Ukrainians deserve more than being turned into a film for Trump's promotion
Others, like I, might have come across rumours that the US White House wants to film US President Donald Trump’s triumphant conclusion of a peace treaty with Russia over Ukraine, and is currently searching for a media company to record the event.
I was horrified when I read news on this, though not surprised. It has long been clear to me that Trump — essentially an actor who know how to play his roles — is fixated on the mediatization of politics, which is an inherently dangerous thing. Formal processes and institutions have been reduced — at firstly slowly, and then all at once — to performative set-pieces, carefully crafted to detach discourse from meaning and to have a specific impact on audiences.
The gadarene russification of American politics has been staggering to behold. I have long questioned the peculiarities of Russian political discourse, and what aspects of Russian political discourse can be seen in with trends in other countries. I’ve long suspected that some personalised political models — especially the family dynasties ruling Central Asia — provide a model (an ideal) not just for Moscow, but for US President Donald Trump and his acolytes. In these models, politics is not a set of principles to advance a population’s interests, but just a means to keep the ruler out of prison and to protect his family from incarceration or financial retribution.
This pathway is likely very attractive for Trump. There are, in addition, aspects of Russian political discourse that have quickly inundated the United States: the rejection of formal and institutionalised language, the performative function as portrayed through modern media, hyperbole, the hyperpersonal, the deliberate separation of language from its meaning, and the use of ritualised modern messaging as a method of cognitive coercion.
In that, watching the Russian response to Trump’s first weeks, I can only detect a confusion and muddled answer. It is as if the Russians do not know how to assess Trump 2.0, but also that they do not know how to take to the intense russification of American messaging. The Americans have adopted Russian techniques, but have adapted these and maxed them; they are using them back at Moscow in an intense, crazed manner that even the Russians cannot fathom. It is not clear yet how Moscow will respond.
Trump has obviously performed since his inauguration, doing much to mediatise his presidency. Perhaps a classic example of this is the way he threw into the watching crowd, like a rock star, for show, the pens he used to sign a raft of presidential edicts.
This is absurd, but the supposed intent to film the peace negotiations over Ukraine are grotesque. Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed without mercy, and it is bizarre and awful that Washington’s response is to try to turn this into some kind of movie, with, possibly, clips cut out for YouTube short.
This is perhaps the new power: the ability of our leaders to turn us all into media subjects, regardless of whether we consent. It is the inverse of 1984’s intrusion of the public into the private sector sphere (I think Zizek has discussed a version of this somewhere): now the private is to be laid out before the public, whether we like it or not. There are glimpses of this in Meduza’s recent use of a photo of a Ukrainian man, who was mourning his family after they were murdered in a Russian strike, in one of its campaigns. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a finger swiping over a touchscreen showing a screaming human face — for ever.
The very suggestion that Trump might wish to use Ukrainians in his own promotion campaigns possibly indicates his true attitude towards the Ukrainians. They deserve more, and certainly not being coerced into a deal with Moscow that would amount to submission. Freedom and dignity are more than this, and we must support them if they choose to resist.
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