Abstract
While postmodernism and deconstruction proved valuable in dismantling the hypocrisies of Nixonian doublespeak, irony, satire, and parody seem to have lost their effect as tools of dissent in a post-truth age. American mainstream culture, and particularly its political Right, have appropriated (foreshortened) poststructuralist modes of Critique, traditionally the resort of the Left. This has led to a derealization and aestheticization of political and cultural discourses and subsequently the generalized skepticism of the ‘Fake-News’ discourse that find their latest and most clear-cut example in the alternative-facts ideology of Trumpism, in which digitization and the burgeoning notion of a neoliberal marketplace of ideas have further eroded the connection between signifier and signified. Where reality becomes equivalent to reality TV, terms like truth or untruth no longer appear to hold. This chapter looks back to American literature of the New Sincerity, in particular David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, and the possibility of a return to moral responsibility. Breaking with the poststructuralist ‘Death of the Author,’ The Pale King reestablishes an author-reader-text relationship by viewing (literary) communication as a Wittgensteinian public language game. By thus redefining reading as a reciprocal interaction between author and reader, literature and language recovers its ethically meaningful potential, an analysis that can also be applied to the language game of contemporary American politics.
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Notes
- 1.
For comparison, only nine years earlier, the German President Horst Köhler had to resign in 2010 after insinuating that “in an emergency, military deployment, too, is necessary if we are to protect our interests such as ensuring free trade routes or preventing regional instabilities which are also certain to negatively impact our ability to safeguard trade, jobs and income” (Ricke 2010).
- 2.
Henceforth, all parenthetical references to Wallace’s The Pale King (2012) are abbreviated as TPK.
- 3.
Hence, the political Right’s (illiterate) rejection of ‘postmodernism’ is little surprising despite its foundation, as is argued here, in this very perspective. New Sincerity and contemporary Alt-right discourse alike construct a ‘pomo-strawman’ against which to define themselves, a pomo-postmodernism that upon closer inspection has little to do with historical postmodernism.
- 4.
Like Trump, whose electoral campaign ran on the promise that as a successful businessman he would lead the United States like a business, The Pale King’s ‘Service’ is to turn from a reciprocal interaction serving and composed of the people into a corporation. As Godden and Szalay remark, The Pale King can be read as a “study in the neoliberal transformation of American governance” (Godden and Szalay 2014, 1274).
- 5.
Perhaps a short example is necessary here to illustrate this shift from moral to corporate, that is, the role of the object body in Wittgenstein’s public language games as opposed to private ostensive definitions: If you were to see me right now, a pen between my teeth, scratching my head, losing hair, sitting in my office, and I told you “I am thinking really hard about a good example because this will be very important further on with regard to how Wallace reads neoliberalist corporations through Wittgenstein’s philosophy,” you would probably believe that what I am saying is true, that I am thinking hard. However, if you were asked “What does ‘thinking really hard’ mean?” you would most likely not respond “It means if you lose a lot of hair,” or, “sitting in office 412 at the University of Mannheim,” etc. What my body is doing (and this includes ‘firing electrons through my synapses’) does not mean what I am doing. Nevertheless, if that person were then to ask you “How do you know that Dominik was thinking?” you would probably respond with something like “because I saw him scratch his head, chew on his pen, etc. and he told me he is thinking really hard.” Whereas you therefore need the behavior of my body (and this includes my vocal cords vibrating to emit speech sounds) to know what I am doing, what you (and I) mean is not the body, nor is it something hidden, privately, in my ‘mind’. This is what Wittgenstein means when he says meaning in “language […] is founded on convention,” for there is no inherent substance of think-ness in the recesses of chewing on one’s pen, nor is there a complete list that defines this activity; and these conventions are always communal. Meaning can only occur if there is some community whose rules of usage I can be in compliance with.
- 6.
Note the hermeneutics of suspicion at play in the very metaphor of a Deep State.
- 7.
Tellingly, Trump establishes a personality cult around himself in which his business ventures, always containing the ‘Trump’ moniker, become synonymous with his own name, forming a corporate identity. The dependence of a supposed Trumpist private language on the (object body) image as reality would also explain the pathological anxieties over supposed inadequacies of his body that could for example be seen in his, incomprehensible, outrage at being said to have small hands. Only a PLU who is existentially concerned with his image could care enough.
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Steinhilber, D. (2022). “The office could be any office”: Toward a New Sincerity in the Age of Trumpism. In: Resano, D. (eds) American Literature in the Era of Trumpism. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73858-7_2
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