Self Criticism: MAGA & the ‘Empty Signifier:’
That being said, it is far from my view that self-criticism should be rejected, even when it is only possible in retrospect, even in consideration of precisely how the ‘mistake’ in question was historically necessary, even if for the purposes of truly discovering its inherent limitations.
There was not a single ‘critic’ of MAGA Communism that correctly anticipated why it would ‘fail.’ All of these explanations simply served as apologia for the inexcusable practical impotence, opportunism, and conformism of the American and Western ‘left.’ Only from the standpoint that presupposes the successes of MAGA Communism, and its inherent correctness, is it possible to really and truly criticize the thing itself with any degree of accuracy or effectiveness.
Having established its historical necessity, it is now necessary to finally draw out its inherent limitations and explicate the way forward within what is now already a post-MAGA age of American politics. In my view, the preeminent question pertaining to the MAGA Communist experience must be:
Why were we too early? What does it mean to be too early?
Earlier, I implied that we could be indicted only for being too early. However, what if this ‘only’ is doing a great deal of heavy lifting? What if this earliness, in fact, demands a comprehensive re-evaluation of one’s understanding of the relationship between (empty) signifiers, mass political phenomena, class distinctions, and memeological constructs?
On the one hand, MAGA precisely signified the volcanic eruption of Information Age ‘cybernetics’ into the rock-solid field of politics, itself the vestigial inheritance of Fordist-era monopoly capitalism. The latter was merely translated into a new medium. In other words, bog-standard America was raised-up, and translated (uploaded?) into a new medium which simulated ‘bog-standard America.’ MAGA is nothing more than bog-standard Americanism subordinated to a new logic of civilization itself. To analogize: In the inceptual stages of virtual reality, what happens first is a faithful simulation of ‘real life:’ Much like how we are now at the inceptual stages of embracing artificial intelligence, which for now has as its goal mimicking the products of a culture and civilization which precede its existence.
This process of continuity in the appearance of the old — but articulated within the logic of the new — is exemplified in Chapter IV of Marx’s 18th Brumaire, where he recounts the irony of how the appearance of monarchism was itself raised up and conformed to the logic of the bourgeois Republic. This was not out of any ideological adoption of Republicanism: The ‘content’ of monarchist ideology and politics was itself forced by logical necessity to assume a Republican form:
The diplomats of the party of Order believed they could settle the struggle by an amalgamation of the two dynasties, by a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. The real fusion of the Restoration and the July Monarchy was the parliamentary republic, in which Orleanist and Legitimist colors were obliterated and the various species of bourgeois disappeared into the bourgeois as such, the bourgeois genus. Now, however, Orleanist was to become Legitimist and Legitimist Orleanist. Royalty, in which their antagonism was personified, was to embody their unity, the expression of their exclusive factional interests was to become the expression of their common class interest, the monarchy was to do what only the abolition of two monarchies, the republic, could do and had done.
[…]
The attempt at a royalist fusion of Orleanists with Legitimists had thus not only failed; it had destroyed their parliamentary fusion, their common republican form
And so, I claim ‘MAGA’ amounted to something similar: the conformity of the old — Americanism as such, to the logic of the new, Information Age, cybernetic civilization, which fundamentally outmodes the basis of the former, as new forces of production outmode earlier relations of production and the entire superstructure through which they acquire form. Yet in contrast to the irony of monarchist republicanism, there is here no analogy to the revolutionary republican tradition, which, today, has yet to acquire any distinct, specific, unique ‘content’ in ideological or political terms. Of course, I am highly partial to a view (a view that has yet to be fully articulated), which overlaps with that of the late Alexander Kojeve, that it was precisely the October Revolution of 1917 which marks the inception of our revolutionary era today — the rise of the media-driven, cybernetic mass politics that has outmoded the Republican-constitutionalist form. (Perhaps this allows us to seize a kernel of truth from philistine liberal commentators like Anne Applebaum, who identified resemblances between the MAGA movement and Bolshevism.)
And in any case, MAGA also has the distinct quality of itself being a signifier. And my view was that it functioned as a type of ‘empty signifier’ for precisely all the instability, turmoil, grievances, and tumult that accompanied the transition from one epoch into another within America. Here, I insist upon using the term ‘empty signifier’ in a way not constrained entirely by Laclau’s strict conceptual boundaries: I define it in terms of what I regard as the rational kernel within Laclau’s concept — namely, the signifier of an ‘objective’ structural impasse (which, in contrast to Laclau, should be dialectically regarded as a contradiction), non-reducible to the content of any particular discursive or ideological articulation.
‘MAGA’ never actually had an ideology; it was a signifier that was associated with a host of tendencies: Upon the foundation of the standard American consciousness grew a host of conspiracistic tendencies; radical forms of skepticism toward conventionally established worldviews; and new, wild, eclectic vectors of the development of mass political self-consciousness: AI gone awry, ceasing to simply mimic and reflect the old forms of intelligence; acquiring recursivity; feeding back upon itself in self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating ways; and expressing wild and unrecognizable forms of intelligence.
Yet the crime of being early by identifying all of this with MAGA is that the new form of politics signified by it could only acquire intelligibility and actual, objective distinction once it ceased to be associated with the term ‘MAGA’ altogether. Only when ‘MAGA’ had discarded the very term MAGA did what MAGA Communists (including myself) then identified within MAGA become actual. Only when the term itself, MAGA, became superfluous did the possibility of MAGA Communism truly acquire reality. MAGA Communism identified MAGA with an empty signifier, which was not wrong. But what I overlooked was that the very memeological inception of MAGA Communism itself anticipated the inception of a new ‘empty signifier,’ one which would necessarily render MAGA itself superfluous!
That ‘empty signifier’ could not itself be and was never even intended to be ‘MAGA Communism’ (which is far from empty). MAGA Communism simply assumed that ‘MAGA’ would, at least for the relevantly considerable period, function as the empty-signifier it was. It did not ‘give itself enough credit’ in acknowledging how it anticipated precisely a shift even in this, in some sense, memeologically reifying the form of a signifier still suspended in a process of further qualification.
But on the other hand, even this was necessary, if only for the purposes of disseminating the basic awareness and knowledge of the radical distance between memeological constructs (i.e., which produce ‘internet echo chambers’) and the content of functional signifiers (which functionally signify the structure of real, embedded, in-part unconscious practices). The present era of politics can, at least in part, be defined by a radical confrontation between the two: the invasion of the former upon the latter to an increasingly remarkable and evident degree. Signifiers of the unconscious (the basic ‘authority’ connoted in official representations of state power, economic reality, etc.) increasingly give way to ‘memeological constructs.’ But these memeological formations in no way necessarily function as signifiers of unconscious, material practices: They rather correspond to radically autonomous, self-reinforcing, and self-perpetuating principles that structure subjectivities, forms of consciousness, expression, etc.
Thus, our era is marked by one of psychosis, perhaps best epitomized in films like Eddington. In some sense, we are losing touch with reality, but this has nothing to do with ‘not going outside’ or having less physical experiences: ‘Touching grass’ is itself something articulated at the register of the ‘terminally online’ forms of consciousness, recalled to memory and made sense of in ways devoid of a genuine acknowledgement or authentic encounter with reality as such. The moment the American population was unleashed upon the great outdoors following COVID, it did so as a colonizer does upon new lands: After having consolidated, gestated, and incubated within self-enclosed cybernetic systems of consumption and consciousness indoors (‘pods’) during lockdown, the very experience of the outdoors, ‘touching grass,’ socializing, etc. — was simply fed into the self-enclosed system as new feedback and data. The ‘lockdown’ never actually ended — what happened is that the ‘pods’ expanded outward.
I am far from accepting of the view that in the complete replacement of signifiers of the unconscious (which are wrapped up in ‘rock formations’) with memeological processes, the opposing tension between them, that could once be contained in the opposition of these terms, has simply disappeared entirely. To put it plainly, I am far from claiming there is no longer any ‘reality’ which can be opposed to the ‘online world’ and the correspondingly new ways in which consciousness are structured and formed. I simply argue that our ability to articulate, refer, and recognize this reality has been displaced, and no amount of ‘going offline’ can change that.
One of the reasons Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding has acquired the prominence it has within the Infrared movement is because it gives correct artistic expression to this predicament: The real outdoors has been reduced to a type of post-apocalyptic, barren wasteland: The reality outside the pod is fundamentally uncharted. In some sense, it can only be regarded as a type of negative space (like ‘the beach’), continually inducing in our ‘pod-shaped consciousness’ an opposing tension, whose real source appears to us otherworldly (Kojima represents it as the world of the dead, a type of Freudian return of the repressed; the identification of the repressed with the dead is especially compelling in an age of Thiel-like transhumanistic delusion: the false sense of immortality accompanying the digital age and its corresponding, ‘Kirkified’ desacralization of death). The representation of the true outdoors as uncharted is revolutionary in expressing the radical undecidedness, unknowability, and risk that accompanies the genuine commitment to walk the walk, to break with the old habits and genuinely establish a link, or bridge, between a newborn consciousness and material reality itself (and not as the imposition of one over the other!).
The latter, for now, can only be represented negatively, as an uncharted wasteland. Such a description applies aptly to America’s various neglected and overlooked, postindustrial communities. The rich complexity, diversity, and density of reality cannot, at present, be appreciated: Since the representation of all its specific determinations have been subordinated to a system of consciousness that is as blind to reality as such as a newborn child. One can recall the end-credits scene of Eddington, simply and tranquilly focused on a lone data center in the desert, evoking the sense that this is the first time we actually see anything real, as though we, all this time, have been as inexperienced and immature as a newborn child (blind and oblivious to what was really going on in the background of BLM, QAnon, etc.).
If ‘MAGA Communism’ failed, I am glad for having participated in this failure. For as long as MAGA came to signify the tumultuous and antagonistic meeting of ‘two-worlds’ within American politics, it was necessary for Communists to acknowledge it, precisely as Xi Jinping regarded it as necessary to always follow the masses, even if they jump straight into a fire pit:
If the masses don’t listen, you must first follow them; if they jump into a fire pit, you jump in too. Once the masses realize the error of their ways and climb out of the fire pit, they will ultimately follow you.
‘Leftists’ wrongly conflate this serene principle with tailism because they do not understand that any meaningful distinction between the tail-end and advanced section of the masses depends upon the existence of a mass-movement in the first place. Theoreticians and ideologists who regard themselves as advanced — from the standpoint of theory and ideology — do not actually constitute any advanced section of the masses. The very prerequisite of being able to render intelligible the various tendencies among the masses (backward and progressive, advanced and underdeveloped), is, in the first place, a real, practical commitment to merge one’s consciousness with them in the first place: To risk all that possibly entails, without any real, practical foreknowledge.
Thus, from the perspective of an inceptual, new Communistic consciousness in America, MAGA Communism was both historically necessary and correct because of the practical commitments implied by it. But to whatever extent MAGA Communism has become, can become, or is regarded as itself a distinct ideology (which was never my intention), it is of course deeply erroneous and worthy of criticism: For it then reifies into a comprehensive ideology, what is only a moment in the real development of the American masses in a new age. To be contemporaneous with that development memeologically is fundamental for Communists today, but to reify any given stage and moment of development into a fixed, ‘eternal,’ or comprehensive principle is mistaken — for the real principle is that which compels the development in the first place and which, from the perspective of said development, is its real goal.
Perhaps the point is that the comprehension of this principle cannot simply take on a memeological form but must be something more like a new signifier of the unconscious, a signifier that functionally and effectively transcends (yet simultaneously communicates the inner-logic of) ‘memes.’ It is necessary to return to the repressed politico-military origins of memeological systems themselves and acquire a new relationship to the hardware underlying them.
The new signifier (a new structuring principle of organization, association, and collective existence) cannot be discovered or emerge from the creation of new phrases, slogans, or terms, but can only emerge out of an active relationship between theory and practice, a relationship that gives way to and simultaneously reveals the inherent logic of a new mode of production (which Marxism identifies with communism), invading our society from the future. We cannot know, strictly by means of consciousness alone, what this logic actually is. Its real practical consequences register fundamentally at the inadvertent, unconscious level, a dimension which cannot be determined by the whims and fancies of our consciousness.
A radical openness to the outcome of venturing out into this uncharted land, like the Komsomol venturing out into the country during the late 1920’s, like the army that followed Mao toward a fate on the Long March — in some sense, is the very definition of communism. And why? Because in it, implies the fundamental belief of a rational commensurability, harmony, and resonance between, on the one hand, the conviction within us, and the shape of the cosmos from without, the microcosm and macrocosm. We cannot know the way in which what appears to us as two find resolution into one, and if we could know exactly how communist society will be shaped, we would call it something far more specific than communism. But Communism is the confidence, knowledge and a priori acknowledgement, dare I say, faith, that between microcosm and macrocosm, theory and practice, between the toil of labor and the wealth it produces, between the essence and form of humanity, between human history and nature itself, there lies a rational unity, integrity, and alignment, that this unity is not simply the riddle of history but that of all the cosmos solved.