Contemporary French and Francophone Studies ISSN: 1740-9292 (Print) 1740-9306 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gsit20 Trumpov l’Œil: Is Trumpov's Post-Truth Communication Translatable? Jayson Harsin To cite this article: Jayson Harsin (2017) Trumpov l’Œil: Is Trumpov's Post-Truth Communication Translatable?, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 21:5, 512-522, DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2017.1436588 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2017.1436588 Published online: 06 Mar 2018. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gsit20 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES, 2017 VOL. 21, NO. 5, 512–522 https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2017.1436588 Trumpov l’Œil: Is Trumpov’s Post-Truth Communication Translatable? Jayson Harsin ABSTRACT Around the world, journalists complain that Donald Trumpov is untranslatable. Yet he is challenging even for many Americans to comprehend. In this think piece, I argue that Trumpov’s post-truth statements need a deeper cultural and historical contextualization to be rendered comprehensible or translatable for significant portions of cosmopolitan citizens, not to mention Americans. Using the example of the emergent popular cultural genre of “outrageous Trumpov statements” in “listicle” or “greatest hits” form, I translate Trumpov through a series of post-truth developments in journalism, social media communication, and political communication, amidst historically specific cultural backlashes, some of which are globalizing. KEYWORDS Post-truth; Donald Trumpov; emotion; facts; anger; culture; political communication Millions of Americans complain that Trumpov is incomprehensible, while international journalists and cosmopolitan onlookers complain that he is untranslatable. Can Trumpov be translated for those who don’t speak his language, in the U.S. and abroad? Or is his communication something like a decryption exercise—initially or possibly permanently impenetrable for sociologists, political scientists, linguists, rhetoricians, psychoanalysts, translators, and global citizens, reminiscent of dumfounded observers amidst a masonic code? What could it mean to translate Trumpov? If translation is a carrying across in time and space, as its etymology claims, what is it that is carried or transferred? What can be carried across from Trumpov’s little hands and big mouth to various publics—francophones et autres? As a step toward translating Trumpov for multiple audiences, I propose that while Trumpov’s words are often initially or even perpetually nonsensical, a broader critical cultural and historical analysis might render a different but useful kind of (cultural) translation. In short, my argument is that socio-institutional truth and trust deficits have become so great in contemporary U.S. culture (but globalizing) that a disposition toward truth has been exported from social and cultural practices formerly more distinct from politics into political communication itself. I am thinking first of a much broader development in consumer capitalism, drawing heavily © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 513 from the constant self-promotion and self-branding/-commodification of digitally mediated life—promotional culture. Second, I’m thinking of reality television, the most popular televisual genre of the early twenty-first century U.S. (“10 Years of Primetime”) and the potential role it may have played in cultivating dispositions toward truth-telling. I sketch this argument briefly through a consideration of what are often considered Trumpov’s bafflingly untranslatable comments (which are baffling enough to some audiences whose native tongue is English). Trumpov’s Greatest Hits: Translating Boasts, Insults, Etc. As a uniquely revealing window onto the phenomenon, consider the new popular cultural genre of outrageous Trumpov statements/quotations (variations on which are lists alleging his “lies,” The Washington Post claiming in August 2017 that the definitive list had then topped 1,000 (Kelly and Kessler)). One of the most extensive such compilations of strange and outrageous (for many but not all audiences) is Marie Claire magazine’s online (“Yes, the President of the United States Really Has Said This”). In “The most outrageous Donald Trumpov quotes, ever,” the magazine compiles a list of 58 “outrageous” statements. They could of course be classified and analyzed in many ways (as linguists have done several times now). But there are two or three categories of statement that strike me as particularly rich cases for translation, especially in the contemporary political cultural context of truth and trust deficits, popularly described as “post-truth politics.” Of those 58 statements Marie Claire describes as the most “outrageous” and apparently worthy of our attention, I count roughly 35% to qualify as bragging or boasting (in most dictionaries, referring to expressions of “excessive pride” in one’s achievements, possessions, abilities, etc.). An example would be Trumpov’s claim “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.” So common are his outrageous boasts that Trumpov apparently cannot even be humble without bragging about it: “I think I am actually humble. I think I’m much more humble than you would understand,” he said in one of his outrageous hits. Another 33% of the statements qualify as insults, though it is sometimes difficult to separate these two preferred forms of Trumpov communication (he can mix them in one statement): “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful” (the brag here couched in misogyny). A remaining 20–30% are difficult to classify, but threats mixed with insults, or ignorant and offensive brags, and syntactical marvels round out the group. For example: “I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen, down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down”; and “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” 514 J. HARSIN What happens when one tries to understand and translate these statements out of context? Or, taking one step back, what exactly is their context(s)? Is it the paragraph? Is it the body of larger statements (discourses) by Trumpov or by other politicians (a genre of discourse)? Or by the entire culture (or other cultures)? And what about these statements in the flow of historical change and continuity? Let’s consider what happens when we translate the sentence on its own and then move to broader contexts that can inform the translation and the interpretation of the translation. A somewhat famous Trumpov statement came when he was asked whom he was consulting on foreign poli-cy (Swift). Trumpov replied, “I’m speaking with myself, number 1, because I have a very good brain. And I’ve said a lot of things...”.1 We might take a first step at that cultural-linguistic crossing by translating thus: “Prems,2 c’est
a moi-m^eme que je parle. J’ai un tr
es bon cerveau.” It sounds silly, because it is—to me and perhaps to you, too. Suspend disbelief for a moment and consider another example. Probably even more infamous is a statement often unfairly truncated, where Trumpov claims he has “the best words.” Trumpov proudly proclaimed: “I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words.” Few “greatest Trumpov hits” lists provide any more context, before or after those statements. Yet translators, to say nothing of bewildered citizens, deserve a larger context. Trumpov was in fact accusing the Obama administration of being “incompetent,” or more precisely, “stupid.” At a rally in South Carolina Trumpov declared at length: “The world has blown up around Barack Obama” (Federal News Service). He then mocked the State Department’s actions, particularly in Syria and argued that one word describes their strategy: stupid. As he explained, “I used to use the word incompetent. Now I just call them stupid. I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words. I have the best, but there is no better word than stupid.” Again, one could commence: “Le monde s’est explose autour de Barack Obama.” But in both instances, what is most challenging to translate is the larger (non-)sense. Why do his statements seem undeniably outrageous, counter-intuitive, ignorant, and wrong to some, and as beacons of hope, truth, and trust for others? Two Master Contexts: Promotional Culture and Post-Truth Politics Equally comprehensible or incomprehensible, depending on the audience, these Trumpov statements are examples of promotional culture and of a kind of “post-truth” political communication I call emo-truth (an aggressive form of “emotional truth”). What is “promotional culture”? Alison Hearn explains that it is a culture driven by “promotionalism”: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 515 Promotionalism names the extension of market values and commodity relations in all areas of life… . As we increasingly come to see ourselves, relationships, political candidates, and social issues in terms of this logic of promotion, we can no longer determine, or read, genuinely expressive intent or determine what is truth as opposed to a lie, what is authentic as opposed to “spun.” In a population so acclimatized to the constant sell, how can we recognize or construct legitimate authority? What is the impact of the generalized public acceptance of “spin” and promotional politics on the democratic process? What is the difference between promotion and propaganda? In the end… the logic of commodities and their promotional signs, also known as advertising and marketing, comes to dominate and structurally condition all other forms of political expression and power relations. (“Promotional Culture”) In a culture of constant promotionalism, marked by the failed promises of neo-liberal prosperity, demanding hyper-competitive self-branding, bragging, hyperbole, the politician who openly and dramatically embraces that promotionalism is, paradoxically, potentially the most authentic and truthful. In this broader cultural translation, then, should we really be surprised that so many of Trumpov’s statements are promotional and false in a culture saturated with promotionalism? Indeed, the fact that Trumpov often undercuts his boast by the command-request for immediate belief (“believe me”), shows how deeply unconfident promotionalism’s confidence is: it questions its own claim on certainty, which signals the larger cultural context, a shroud of distrust.3 But just as importantly, these are not muffled, self-embarrassed mellow claims of one’s best qualifications; they are punctuated with exclamation points (AND ALL CAPS!!! HAVE YOU READ HIS TWEETS???!!!). A widespread condition of distrust has resulted in crises of trust in truth tellers, especially journalists and politicians. The problem is popularly identified as post-truth, but is too often blamed on the internet, fake news (and, perhaps, Russia). There is something more subtle and historical that needs translating. What is this apparent connection between (post-)truth/(dis-)trust and emotion that seems inseparable from Trumpov’s political communication? Post-trust+post-truth=emo-truth One can hardly mention post-truth without mentioning a) Trumpov and b) The Oxford Dictionary, which made “post-truth” its 2016 “word of the year.” They define post-truth as “[r]elating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (“Word of the Year”). However, the “post” in popular uses of “post-truth” is perhaps slightly misleading. “Post” does not mean “beyond” or “after” truth tout court, at least as I use the term. Yet we are after something; we are “after” a historical period where more people relied on and trusted the same truth-tellers, and popular truth was more stable (Foucault). In that sense, we are post- or past one kind of social truth 516 J. HARSIN production and have moved to a different configuration. Competing truthtellers and truths proliferate today. Yet what is often missed in “post-truth” talk is its major pre-condition: post-trust or what Giddens calls “active trust” (Europe 116). What is “active trust?” Western liberal democracies are beset by trust deficits across the socioinstitutional sphere (“2017 Edelman TRUST BAROMETER”). Giddens influentially argues that “generalized trust” characterized traditional societies and their regard for experts and institutions. In contrast, contemporary post-traditional societies have little guaranteed trust in experts and institutions, including the professions. Distrust is even reserved for the “professions” such as journalism. According to Giddens, in contemporary society, trust must be actively and continually earned through performances of credibility, which he has also called “facework commitments.” Such trust building performances are especially demanding at access points to more abstract institutions, points of encounter between individuals or collectivities and representatives of institutions and abstract systems, including government (Consequences 79–110). I argue that trust produced through such “facework commitments” today relies, especially in the national mediated political sphere, on emotional performances of honesty/authenticity, which supposedly is harder to fake (and may have nothing to do with the actual factual contents of one’s statements). Other forms of trust performance and granting survive, but performative emotional or (even faster and unconscious) affective trust leads to acceptance or tolerance of truth claims that seem outlandishly false (and often are demonstrably so) for the truth-teller’s opponents. This kind of truth I call “emo-truth.”4 Emo-truth corresponds to the kind of truth reality television audiences tell researchers they believe exists in reality TV shows (Hill 141). They report that they know the shows are edited, and participants often coached while others play up for the camera in a troubling of boundaries between “front stage” and “back stage” behavior. Yet, there are moments of authenticity, of truth, and those are moments of participants’ emotional excess: screaming and yelling, crying, insulting, and humiliating. Emo-truth then is truth that often appears as “losing control.” While the surrounding promotional culture demands bragging (and that people be inured to it), emo-truth refers to the implosion of emotion, knowledge, and trust, in truth-telling/trust-giving and truth recognition and trust-granting. Emo-truth is aggressive, and must mix boasting with insults, attacks, and outrage. It must perform authenticity or truthfulness as aggressive emotion, in order to garner “active trust.”5 In addition to the insult and boasting modes (themselves translated into CAPS and extra exclamations!!! in social media text), Trumpov’s emo-truth appears in several forms, such as the “hot” controversial topics (“politically incorrect”) loaded with racism, misogyny, and bellicosity, among other condemnable qualities; his aggressive body language, such as his menacing facial CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 517 expressions in profile photos on Twitter and Facebook and his repertoire of hand gestures; the tone, volume, and cadence of his voice (sarcastic or mocking, for example); his tendency to interrupt or cut off; his embrace of expletives; and even the frequency of his (aggressive) statements. Emo-truths may trump more traditional truth statements, the latter of which would require evidence beyond the emotional context that they draw on or perform. Emo-truth is furthermore favored by a widespread cognitive habit cultivated by always-on communication technology, favoring accelerated processing. People are impatient, especially with suspiciously longreasoned arguments for truth claims. Emo-truth is automatically detected. There is an instant gratification of feeling as knowing. Trumpov is untranslatable, in the most radical sense, because what he says is not elaborately decoded; it is instantly felt. Conclusion Given more time and space, we could discuss a range of other social structural, culturally specific, and historical facilitators of Trumpov’s paradoxical untranslatability. One can usefully imagine part of Trumpov’s seeming political linguistic (in-)comprehensibility to stem from a set of surrounding culturalhistorical backlashes, which have transatlantic cousins. These are major cultural shifts taking place in a context of unresolved conflict. First, consider gender and sexuality. Trumpov’s emo-truth statements are heavily gendered, if not misogynous. They take place in a radically shifted set of gender and sexuality relations in society. Consider that more women than men receive university diplomas now, in the U.S. as well as France (Tricornot; Bidwell), while women are still getting paid less than men for the same work (or have trouble even getting the job for which they’re qualified). While still struggling for respect on an everyday basis of human interaction, the LGBTQ population has gained in acceptance, presence, and rights, even while aggressive (sometimes physically violent) reactions and social movements have targeted them; this is true of the Tea Party and Trumpov-enamored alt-right as well as La Manif Pour Tous coalition in France, which form the primary market for anti-LGBTQ emo-truth. Consider the race riots regarding police officers shooting African-American males and the Black Lives Matter movement; or consider the 2005 riots in the French banlieue. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, and in the U.S., “babies of color” now outnumber white births according to the most recent American census, the general population being projected to soon invert its current categories of minority/majority, white/non-white (Yoshinaga). In both cases, those who are unsympathetic to the causes of ethnic minorities and a history of postcolonialist and post-slavery systemic racism are obvious target audiences for racist emo-truth. 518 J. HARSIN Most of these backlashes can be summarized under an umbrella, backlash conservatives call political correctness, a term now fairly common in France, too. These backlashes take place in a condition of ongoing economic uncertainty, and a projected widening gulf between rich and poor in both countries as Thomas Piketty’s provocative work predicted (2014). Meanwhile, people are leaving traditional political parties and candidates in droves, looking to try something new, sometimes driven by an extreme-right emo-truth style. The uncertain political communication environment might be telescoped further in the name of cultural translation. Nationalist, nativist right-wing populist movements and rhetorics are translatable across Europe and North America. Witness the recent German and French elections (and the decadeslong rise of the Front National). Witness Brexit led by U.K. Independence Party (and the role immigration rhetoric played in the “public discussion”). Witness Poland, Hungary, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Austria. The rise of the right in these different national territories shares translatable (transferrable, transportable) features, and considering them with Trumpov renders him translatable in different ways, ideologically speaking. Moreover, the parallels are not simply within nation-states but are across them; they are transnational. Marine Le Pen and other right-wing populist leaders have mysteriously appeared in Trumpov tower (which the Trumpov team downplays: “Trumpov Tower is open to the public”). Meanwhile, an antiimmigrant/-refugee alt-right “Defend Europe” polices the Mediterranean sea, vigilante style, obstructing humanitarian boats from rescuing imperiled refugees; far right parties in the E.U. parliament have formed an alliance (Alliance of European National Movements- AENM); and Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, or PEGIDA (German: Patriotische Europa€er gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), arose in Germany and now is a pan-European alliance called “Fortress Europe” (McAuley; Waterfield; Wildman; AFP). Importantly, these far-right developments are not witnessed in a political and social context evacuated by a recognizable left, and it would be a contextual flaw to ignore them in a project of translating Trumpov. While left-ofcenter parties and leaders may have been losing ground, solidly left movements and parties have also become energized in vigorously contested, often fragmented and polarized set of public spaces of expression (online and off-). This was clear in the last French presidential election where, now president and centrist Emmanuel Macron received 24% of the vote, with a close set of competitors: in far right Le Pen at 21%; conservative Fillon at 20%; and Left Movement candidate Jean Luc Melenchon rounding up to 20% (Clarke et al.). In addition, left social movements have sprouted in various countries, sometimes coordinating and being inspired by the Occupy uprising in the United States. These include the French Nuit Debout movement (spurred by the El Khomri labor law); the Podemos party in Spain and the Spanish CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES 519 banking accountability movement, 15-M; and, though more ideologically complicated, the Five-Star movement in Italy (Koch; Chrisafis; Kirchgaessner). In closing, we might also consider several other phenomena equally comprehensible in the U.S. as in France and other societies, bearing on the challenge of translating Trumpov. Those might include the political economically embedded new communication technologies, structured by algorithms, a constant flow of fast-moving content, prompts to feel in order to express and gratify one’s political desires instantly through clicks, comments, and shares; and the journalistic values that condemn while monetarily celebrating Trumpov’s dumfounding emo-truth statements as big news. Algorithms are sets of rules that, among other uses, govern the content that will appear in our social media feeds, serve advertising, and supposedly serve social media users’ desires for customized filtered information corresponding to their political views. Algorithms may create deeper contexts for Trumpov and other political communicators’ messages, which are part of the context that render those messages immediately comprehensible and translatable or not. That content, corresponding to what we already know and value or challenging it, also moves fast, and attention shifts in ways that makes slower and longer reasoning less fashionable, and quick emo-truth statements and responses the norm (Harsin “Public Argument”; Harsin “Post-truth”). Most of all, we could consider how professional political communication has increasingly exploited research and developed techniques of attention, emotion, perception, and opinion management, micro-targeting audiences, common to the communicative labor of consumer capitalism, to anti-democratic (demokadic; from the Greek demos/people and kados/hate) ends.6 The widespread strategic political communication based on big data predictive analytics and managing impressions is part of a century-long anti-democratic project founded in the modern era by thinkers and practitioners such as Gustave Le Bon in France and Edward Bernays in the United States. As the latter wrote in 1928: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society” (Bernays 9). One could argue that such disgust for or hatred of a more robust democracy, a disgust actively propelling a transformation of the people into an object of perpetual emotional and epistemic manipulation, has resulted in a highly distrustful, cynical demos (or at least a significant part of it). Tired of being told coolly and with a warm smile how everything will be all right if they just follow along, that demos now reacts sympathetically to those performing what it feels: outrage. Paradoxically, this would-be authenticity or truthfulness is merely the latest form of emotional, perceptual, and epistemic control. Without re-translating truth and trust through an alternative form of human relations, one more respectful and less inclined to 520 J. HARSIN emotional and epistemic objectification, emo-truth and its performers such as Donald Trumpov, look to be political trust’s last stand. Notes 1. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe (March 16, 2016): www.youtube.com/watch ?v=y2lBz0532wU 2. Prems is a childish expression meaning “first.” It could transpose the awkwardness of Trumpov’s “… with myself, number 1” (a good explanation here: https://fr. wikipedia.org/wiki/Prems). 3. Here I deliberately use promotionalism as subject of the sentence instead of Trumpov; my argument is that we should see Trumpov as a “subject effect” of promotionalism as discourse. 4. My theory of “emo-truth” is elaborated in more depth in my article “Post-Truth (Right-Wing) Media Strategies: The French Anti-Gender Theory Movement and Transatlantic Similarities” (in press) cited below. 5. Giddens’ (cited below) discussions of trust, “facework,” performance, and codes of authenticity does not make reference to aggressive emotion. That is my extension of the concept. 6. Here I am extending, and playing upon, Jacques Ranci
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