The people no longer exist, or not yet … the people are missing.
Giles Deleuze
In Jose Saramago’s novel The Cave he tells the story of Cipriano Algor, a traditional potter who lives an otherwise quiet life in the countryside and sells his artistry directly to a megaplex — a housing complex, shopping mall, and planned city all rolled into one — called The Center. After having developed a long-term but frustrating business relationship with The Center, its buying department informs Cipriano that they are no longer in need of his pottery; that the market has changed and consumers are not interested in purchasing folk pottery such as his any longer. Facing an impending financial crisis because he will be unable to carry on in his life as a potter without his principal buyer, Cipriano is reluctantly forced to move from his rustic countryside home into a small apartment in The Center with his daughter and son-in-law. But not long after moving to The Center and hearing rumors about a secretive dig occurring beneath its foundation, Cipriano decides to take it upon himself to investigate the subterranean situation. And what he discovers buried deep beneath The Center is none other than Plato’s Cave itself. Saramago plays with numerous themes throughout his work: the country versus the city; contemporary consumerism versus traditional artistry; and the ongoing collapse of the family structure and local sensibility in the face of an abstract, impersonal way of life that is represented by The Center. But all of these interrelated themes ultimately point toward a singular realization at the novel’s conclusion: that humanity has now found itself living within a globalized version of Plato’s Cave. Entranced by the proliferation and multiplication of digital content, blinded by the ideological axioms of neoliberalism, and transformed into apolitical bodies versus active and engaged citizens, humanity has become like the prisoners chained to the wall in Plato’s allegory: unable to see the world clearly any longer, we instead mistake shadows for reality and fleeting representations for the actuality of the world.93 We now think of ourselves as the vanguards of the human race — the cumulative result of a highly progressive and dynamic biological and cultural evolution that has mastered the sciences, arts, and applied technologies — when in truth it rather seems we are descending into a new kind of barbarism and collective ignorance.
Was not the election of Donald Trump symbolic of this very same scenario? A political moment in which we elected a digital shadow, a virtual avatar to lead us into an uncertain future, and then adamantly refused to take any real responsibility for its causation; to refuse to see the chains that now entrap us?
But what is it exactly about our inability to coherently analyze political and social life that is now produced amidst the seemingly absolute horizon of social media feeds and a capitalist logic? Are we simply just in a process of losing touch with reality, as in the prisoners of Plato’s Cave, and descending into a world of fantasy, “alternative facts,” and click bait internet sites? On a certain level, this is certainly what it seems like: the now pervasive and eerie sense that reality itself is in the process of decomposing before our eyes into a sea of advertising images, corporate branding, fake news, and meaningless slogans.
But on a different level, what we are also losing today is not simply the cold, hard “reality” of our lived experience, but also the collapse of the symbolic order itself.94 In other words, what we are now seeing emerge in the new global order is an increasingly rapid descent into aggressive, pseudo-Darwinian behavior that is ideologically reshaping the planet into one big “dog eat dog” world: a cold, hard reality of economic logic and technological mediation absent of the protection of social norms, cultural narratives, local communities, and the symbolic efficiency that has always been responsible for maintaining at least the appearance of civil human relations. Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is just mirroring the world we now live in: brutally “real” commentary on everything and anything that corresponds to a purely egocentric economic expression designed to get likes and shares, absent of any awareness that one is part of a social-symbolic order. This is precisely what the late theorist Mark Fisher said in his reference to the contemporary world order being akin to “Capitalist Realism” — the only game in town — in the following passage:
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and relics.95
Donald Trump is not the President of a country full of citizens who are aware of their mutual history, who feel part of both a unique local community and a broader global community, or who see themselves as simply small components of a much larger collective story taking place. On the far contrary, he is the President of a country full of individuated “consumer-spectators” — a collection of traumatized and disconnected individuals who see themselves and their small lives as supremely important, a national population that has been progressively severed from both their local communities and sense of shared national history, and a country that has been stripped from its economic autonomy and public resources by a globalized system that is now entirely focused on unbridled innovation and private competition. As Fisher notes above, what we now have in common is only our — whether we are aware of it or not — mutual participation, our full immersion, in a global capitalist marketplace. And we are now paying the consequences.
But even with this ongoing descent into the neoliberal abyss, I would nevertheless like to end here with a message of hope; a message that seeks to view Donald Trump’s political ascension as that of an opportunity to reflect on our past, challenge our fixed assumptions, and perhaps even to open up the possibility for a new kind of politics to come forth in both American and global society. Such possibilities are, potentially, the true meaning of Trump: a proverbial “message from the gods” prompting us to open our eyes and take a clear look at the world we live in so to change our ways before we are simply overwhelmed to the point of no return from the now rapidly developing integration of computational technologies and globalized capitalism. In other words, we should adamantly resist the now pervasive call “to look within ourselves” so to only transform our individual psychic terrains and personal stereotypes. We must instead use this raw material within our collective psyche to “look without” and begin to actually address the economic and social systems that are now deteriorating before our eyes.
Zizek has often used throughout his writing the line from the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett so to explain the eternal dream for justice and equality, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
What is only clear today after reading the above line and reflecting on our current political dynamic is simply that we have failed, utterly, as a country in the most egregious of ways in both our political and civic duties. We have failed to protect our local communities and local cultures. We have failed to offer any real hope of a decent and dignified life to a whole new generation of young Americans. And perhaps most importantly we have failed to speak truth to Power, and to live in truth in our own lives.
So now, it seems what we must do as Americans, to follow Beckett via Zizek, is simply to “fail better.” The solution is no longer to run into the future with a blind faith in the enduring goodness of progress. Now it seems the task is to rather look back and remedy our wrongs, correct the past as best we can, and speak again about a renewed America, and a new kind of global society. We will undoubtedly fail again in our quest, this is most certain. But we can fail better than we have before, we can strive to make slow and steady improvements; and we can struggle together before it’s too late.
About the author
Brian Francis Culkin is a writer and film director. His previous books include Postscript on Boxing, There is no such thing as Boston, and Conversations on Gentrification. He has also written and directed two documentary films — The Mission and Voices. He graduated from Skidmore College in New York with a degree in American Studies and was a standout student-athlete, graduating as the all-time leading scorer in the basketball program. He is currently working on several projects including his first novel.