The Statue and the Veil: Postcritique in the Age of Trump

After the white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Donald Trump notoriously equivocated over the ethics of the protestors, claiming he was "not putting anybody on a moral plane," as "there were very fine people on both sides."1 Using slippery-slope logic, Trump defended the value of Confederate monuments: "I wonder, is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? Where does it stop?" Refusing to place responsibility for the ensuing violence at the feet of the alt-right, he challenged: "Define alt-right to me. You define it. Define it for me. Come on. Let's go."

Trump's response mixes equal parts paranoia and evasion. He raises the specter of a focused leftist effort to erase national history, even as he gestures towards an amorphous alt-right who cannot be held responsible, since they cannot be defined. Yet "alt-right" has a clear definition: Richard Spencer coined the term in a 2008 opinion piece to describe a traditionalist, nationalist, anti-global, "paleo-conservative" subset of the political right who would advocate for white interests in America.2

Paranoia and evasion appear, in the age of Trump, as distorted reflections of two major traditions of critical interpretation in the twentieth century: a hermeneutic model of so-called "paranoid reading," which seeks out a deeper, systemic meaning behind the surfaces of the world, and a poststructuralist, rhizomatic model of what we might term "evasive reading," which finds the play of meaning among those surfaces so diffuse as to defy interpretation. Trump's debased iteration of these modes of critique is neither a deliberate deployment nor the occasion for the wholesale condemnation of their logic. Yet the far right's knack for turning these discourses against themselves stresses the contradiction inherent to critique in the age of Trump: an unending stream of information is said to mean either too much or nothing at all. The recent proliferation of right-wing conspiracy theories, from Pizzagate to "crisis actors," by which paranoia makes language and information mean too much, works to render all forms of change suspicious, serving extant power structures. At the same time, opacities like "alternative facts" and "locker room talk," by which evasion makes language and information mean nothing at all, have contributed to a consensus about our "post-fact" age.

The oft-cited difficulty of critique in the era of Trump is that such a multitude of outrageous events are happening so quickly that it is impossible to analyze them through traditional critical lenses, which require time and introspection. Time is both quickened, an endless series of "events," and slowed, packed with the numina of crises. Yet given that every word is meticulously reported, recorded, and timestamped for us to visit and revisit, we can try to make some sense of things, as I shall argue here, through a new, postcritical mode of reading. In the age of Trump, rather than searching for meaning behind appearances or among an endless play of data, we should analyze culture as an activity upon those surfaces. If hatred, fear, and rage are tattooed into the skin of the nation, they should be read as they are, not for a supposed meaning behind or beneath them, nor as temporary features that might simply be wiped from the surface.

By locating sinister meaning behind innocuous appearances and by clouding over Trump's own taped words as "locker room talk," the far right replaces the literal and the patent with a shroud of the mysterious and the theurgic. I use the language of theology here intentionally. When James Baldwin characterizes those who "believe themselves to be white," he names racism as an article of faith, a "genocidal lie" whose tellers "have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion, because they think they are white."3 As a belief, whiteness requires both paranoia and evasion to survive. It meditates, fixedly, on fears of an external threat, even as it blocks out any consideration of the suffering caused by that exclusion. Whiteness is naïve in its paranoia and perverse in its evasion: "Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety," Baldwin writes, yet they deny the price of their whiteness, for "they, themselves, would not have liked to pay it."4 Whiteness is a corporeal faith; in order to believe they are white, they have "opted for safety instead of life," they have "abandoned their children to the things white men could buy," and they have "debased and defamed themselves," even as they sought to debase and defame others.5

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My contention for how we ought to read in the age of Trump draws from two pieces of transformative criticism published in the last decade. The first is Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus' 2009 manifesto on "surface reading," whose prescient call away from hermeneutics seems all the more relevant now. Written at the close of the Bush era, it claims: "The assumption that domination can only do its work when veiled, which may once have sounded almost paranoid, now has a nostalgic, even utopian ring to it." As Best and Marcus remind us, "not all situations require the subtle ingenuity associated with symptomatic reading... alongside nascent fascism there might be better ways of thinking and being simply there for the taking."

The second is Rita Felski's 2015 book The Limits of Critique, which sketches out a turn to the "postcritical," initiated, Felski writes, by Paul Ricouer, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's call to "reparative reading" in 2003, Best and Marcus' own manifesto of 2009, and Heather Love's argument for "close but not deep" reading in 2010. Collecting and expanding upon these sources, Felski argues for the postcritical as a way of enriching and adding to the disaffected stances of both paranoid hermeneutics ("digging down") and evasive poststructuralism ("standing back"). Given that critique's skepticism is reproduced in populist, paranoid conspiracy theories as well as factual evasions, Felski asks, "What is the use of demystifying ideology when many people no longer subscribe to coherent ideologies?"6

The most popular recrimination leveled at postcritique is that it is a passive, navel-gazing, and apolitical posture. On the contrary, postcritique is uniquely positioned to help us read and resist in our current political milieu. Given the alt-right co-optation of both "digging down" and "standing back," it is perhaps unsurprising that hermeneutics struggles against fascism's raw, unabashed, and amoral expressions of power, while poststructuralism succumbs to its ongoing and contradictory information overload. Rather than try to demystify what is "behind" language or resign ourselves to an overwhelming mass of data, postcritique asks us to read differently. Calling upon Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, which terms the social "a type of connection between things that are themselves not social," the postcritical locates the nodes at which similar and dissimilar actors might be linked.7

The postcritical works against the logic of the far right in several ways. First, it reclaims affect as an integral part of intellect, revealing the supposedly "objective" pose of detachment as itself an affectively charged stance. The far right's insistent rejection of empathy and ethics shrouds their own emotional investment in the traditional power structures of white masculinity. Interpretation is never purely detached, and critique is, for Felski, "a less muscular and macho affair than it is often made out to be...we do not need to throw out interpretation but to revitalize and reimagine it."8 If reason and emotion are related, if affect and intellect are inextricably bound, we deal a blow to the efficacy of the right's "snowflake" insult, to that idealized and overdetermined imaginary white male reader, and to the prevailing illogic of supremacy itself.

Second, postcritique counters fascism's ahistorical tendency to see its values as eternal, traditional, and unchanging, even as it claims that the world's linear fall into degeneracy justifies its violent proposals. A postcritical reading considers events and ideas diachronically, in deep time, tracking the ruptures in fascism's fabricated history. White supremacy depends upon its adherents imagining themselves as part of a pure, unbroken, and sacrosanct racial lineage in crisis, justifying its pursuit of the immediate, local, and short-term needs of its own in-group first. The alt-right can only normalize this tribal logic of defense if they can render time linear and space seamless. The postcritical, by contrast, locates surprising linkages and discontinuities across the time and space of the social, refusing telos and resisting immediacy.

Third, the postcritical allows us to trace connections and alliances between shifting, even seemingly contradictory groups and statements and to hold them accountable to the same underlying networks of belief. As long as false equivalence allows "both sides" to be considered moral equals, as long as obfuscation permits that the far right cannot be defined, we will fail to connect the different factions invested in supremacy, which operate both separately and in collaboration. Approaching them not as a unified front with a singular purpose behind them, nor as an impossibly diffuse and indeterminate mob, but as a set of phenomena, beliefs, and groups that are socially in touch with but not identical to one another makes them legible. As Latour puts it, when we stop "trying to keep one frame stable," we find "a way to float on data, not drown in them."9

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The image of the text as a veiled object, concealing some hypostatic meaning, is woven into the orthodoxy of close reading, as Best and Marcus attest. In the second version of "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin writes of Goethe's elective affinities, "The beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object, but rather the object in its veil."10 These words appear in the midst of Benjamin's essay about the treacherous, catalytic effect of mass-produced art on fascist politics, encapsulated in his assertion that "the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life."11 For Benjamin, it is the statue, of all artistic media, that most evinces aura, since a statue cannot be easily moved or visually reproduced. Mass production withers aura; no longer a singular object of magic, "the work of art becomes a construct," not so much eternal as eternally malleable and improvable.12

To think postcritically and transhistorically is to contemplate another veil too, one central to W.E.B. Du Bois' concept of "double-consciousness," penned some three decades before Benjamin's essay, which shifts and enriches the links between art and politics. For Du Bois, to be Black in America—to live inside the veil—is "to be a problem," to live in two worlds, "like a wheel within a wheel."13 The veil is both artificial and real; though race is nebulous and skin-deep, DuBois writes of himself, "I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil."14 Or, as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it for our own era, "They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people...on the one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real."15 Coates' essay title, "Between the World and Me," itself draws upon the image of that "vast veil," which DuBois describes as drawn "between me and that other world."16 And Coates' words, which have pulsed steadily through racial discourse in America these last few years, are bound to Baldwin's, sounding in phrases like "the people who must believe they are white."17

This arc within Black American intellectualism offers one manifestation of postcritique's potential, in part because the vast web of racism has been a constant, yet dynamic, feature of our national life. Whiteness is knotted up in our deepest history, but it is also, and of necessity, constantly being remade. What these authors trace are the threads of continuity, even as they are picked out of and woven anew into the weft of supremacy. Like Baldwin, Coates asks us to look at the losses of Black America head-on, to see them as "mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white."18 To believe in whiteness is always to sense the grasp on that dominion slipping away. If whiteness is "a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power," then "the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."19

The right relies on our twin propensities: to search for a singular and hidden meaning or to resign ourselves to indecision in the face of overwhelming data. The effort on the part of the alt-right to justify, mystify, and preserve Confederate monuments is one of politics aestheticized—an effort to veil the statue, to shroud what is clearly and simply supremacy in the aura of something abstract and enigmatic. Supremacists enjoyed an instantiation of this mystique when, for six months after Heather Heyer's death, the bronze statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville was shrouded in black fabric. To read postcritically is to refuse to be enchanted by that veil. The Confederate statues the alt-right wishes to preserve are, almost without exception, statues without aura, borne of the mass technological reproduction that withers aesthetic value.

About 1500 Confederate statues and monuments remain in America, scattered across public spaces in 31 states, but concentrated in the South. Many of them were cheaply mass-produced by Northern foundries, soldered together of multiple pieces of zinc, finished with a coating to cover the seams, and tenuously attached to their pedestals. This makes them easy to tear down, as one crowd of protestors did in Durham, North Carolina in the days following the Charlottesville rallies, passing a yellow cable, like a noose, around the statue's neck and pulling it to the ground, where it crumpled. The foundries used the same molds for limbs and faces to create iterations of both Confederate and Union soldiers, a series of near-identical, prefabricated men sculpted in contradictory memory. In the twentieth century, as the Civil Rights movement intensified, a second and then a third wave of Confederate monuments were quickly produced and erected to serve as a visual reminder of white supremacy in public space. From their commission to their manufacture, Confederate statues are replicas—not art, but propaganda, bent to fascist purposes with ease.

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Whiteness is a network of threads, neither a solid thing nor a mere set of signs. It hides in plain sight, a thinly laid trap, as fragile and full of holes as it is strong and contractible. Postcritique takes up the task of reading with open attention to what is there and how it is being made—a weaving, a seine of fibers, which, when tugged, tightens the whole. To be postcritical, we must rethink context, beginning with the transhistorical connections between texts and their readers, rather than a detachable "timelessness" or a delimited temporal specificity. We must enact readings that bind our inevitable emotional attachments to our practices of intellectual rigor, positing reader and text as actors in a larger network of legible social nodes. We must seek neither to overpower nor to bow down to texts, but to become "energetic cofactors and vital partners in an equal encounter."20

How might this work in practice in the age of Trump? On the furthest right, we see a numbered population of openly authoritarian neo-Nazis who prioritize a white ethnostate predicated upon the violent removal of "the other." Adjacent to them are white "separatists" who claim they oppose violence, but hold a "reasonable" fear of the erasure of their own race and culture in nations where they believe they are "entitled" to remain the majority. Beside them stand far right libertarians, who assert that people ought to voluntarily sort themselves into self-governing, like-minded communities in place of a federal government. One step further to the center are conservatives who advocate "personal responsibility," deny the lasting effects of historical oppression, detest the redistribution of wealth by federal taxation, and bemoan the loss of a dominant "shared culture" of their own kind. These models proffer different levels of sequestration by language, values, culture, religion, economy, and skin color, but they have in common a set of intersecting exclusionary and supremacist values. We can trace how these ideas and groups are enmeshed, not as socially identical phenomena, but as the formation of the social itself, forged through active connections between those ideas and factions.

While Trump's cultivation of the national taste for conspiracy recalls, for some, the political paranoia of the 1960s, his autocratic tendencies, exclusionist rhetoric, indulgence in optics, and manipulation of mass media have also invited (at times bathetic) comparisons to twentieth-century fascism. The contemporary alt-right shares with Nazism, at the very least, an emphasis on branding. As Lutz Peter Koepnick observes, Nazism was "a highly incoherent political ideology" that "relied on advance marketing strategies" and "the spectacle of modern consumer culture" to succeed.21 The auratic power of fascist spectacle walks hand-in-hand with promises of consumption, "drown[ing] doubts about ideological inconsistencies in an unprecedented surplus of signs and symbols."22 Indeed, among the most notable organizational features of the Charlottesville rally was the preponderance of alt-right signs and symbols, each representing an organization with its own uniform, banner, and "brand," and each designed to appeal to a semi-distinct subset of potential followers. The Southern Poverty Law Center and The Washington Post even published guides like "Deconstructing the symbols and slogans spotted in Charlottesville," which seem to call for a public demystification of signs.23

As it turns out, the symbols require very little "deconstruction"; each correlates to one or two specific brands, rather than meanings, of white nationalism.24 Just as consumerist products splice together bastardized Latinate roots and English syllables to form copyrightable names, the list of participant parties in Charlottesville reads as a series of Anglicized Nazi portmanteaus and bad pop culture puns: The Nationalist Front, The Right Stuff, Radical Agenda, The Daily Stormer, Red Ice, the Ku Klux Klan, Vanguard America, The Traditionalist Workers Party, the National Socialist Movement, Identity Evropa, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, the Detroit Right Wings. In this way, the symbolic pluralism of the rally preserved the factionalism of the right (evasion) while emphasizing the power of those factions coming together (paranoia). By marching in unison, the alt-right flexed its strength, but by remaining factional, it denied any shared political goals.

These arrayed symbols generate a sense of allegory and mythos, masquerading as the textual signs in a narrative that white supremacy desperately wants to write. An ideology that insists on the "historical fact" and "natural order" of such nebulous constructs as the nuclear family, the white race, and the gender binary, and which combines modern concepts of individualism with a fictionally white American "folk," represents an ahistorical, neoliberal iteration of fascism, mimicking its style, but cut off from it in time. Like the Nazis, who reached back to elevate the volk by assigning a symbolic mythology, statues and flags underscore the expression of affective cohesion, even as the political platforms of the alt-right are fiercely and materially individualistic. By resurrecting the pagan symbols associated with Nazis and various crosses derived from the Crusades, the alt-right attempts to replenish the branches of a broken genealogy with the auratic leaves of myth.

The self-described "red-pilled" mentality of the alt-right clearly insists on a paranoid reading of the world, one in which there is always another, harsher truth that lies behind the pleasing surface, if only you take the pill that opens your eyes.25 As a form of branding, "red-pilling" purports to strip away appearances to reveal what is beneath: a global Jewish financial conspiracy, a white genocide, a feminist supremacy, a queer agenda of degeneracy. At the same time, "red-pilling" styles itself as a faith, as a brand, and as an aesthetic, evading the violent implications of its ideology by detailing a diffuse and proliferating range of "fashy" recipes, books, clothing, design, and haircuts.26 Its proponents may be "traditionalist" Christians, pagans, or atheists; they have peeled their values away from any particular religion and reinscribed them into their skins. Their unifying faith is the belief that they are white. The preservation of the mystique of monuments and symbols is a pretense, a ritual act of devotion—to the god of whiteness, called by any other name.

Three months after Charlottesville, The New York Times received widespread backlash for publishing "A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland," a glossy features piece by Richard Fausset that amounted to a series of anodyne factual statements about a neo-Nazi and co-founder of the Traditionalist Workers Party in central Ohio. "Tony and Maria Hovater," it begins, "were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer."27 Ms. Hovater, Fausset continues cheekily, "was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist." Unable to pinpoint the source of Hovater's radicalization, Fossett lists a series of familiar conservative talking points: "He believes the federal government is too big, the news media is biased, and that affirmative action programs for minorities are fundamentally unfair. He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist.... Online it is uglier."

Fausset's writing observes Hovater in flat, neutral terms. It cannot detect a meaning behind the surfaces, nor can it add up the myriad details of those surfaces to mean anything. In his effort to appear detached, unbiased, and objective, Fausset is paralyzed; like so many of us, he ceases to do the work of analysis altogether. "There is a hole at the heart of my story," Fausset acknowledges. "Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader... I decided that the unfilled hole would have to serve as both feature and defect. What I had were quotidian details, though to be honest, I'm not even sure what these add up to."28 The piece represents not just a failure of close reading, but specifically the foundering of our most trusted modes of interpretation at an urgent political moment. Fausset's detachment renders the neo-Nazi singular, human, even mysterious in his beliefs, making room, by extension, for the contemplation of his politics. Fausset fingers the veil, fascinated by the way it falls over the object, not obscuring it, but screening the harshness of its angles. We know the object beneath, but we are enchanted by its appearance through the veil.

What is at issue is not, as Fausset has it, the shape of a Nazi's soul, but the overlap between his statements and those of mainstream American voters, as well as his imbrication in a network of far-right activists with tangible, if distant, ties to the GOP. A few hundred white nationalists in Charlottesville are less the issue than a president who defends them because of their social ties—to the moguls who own the very media his voters consume, to the religious leaders who endorse his agenda, and to the alt-right cabinet members who advise him. To say this is not to advocate a paranoid search for one vast, coordinated, supremacist purpose behind appearances, but rather to trace the ties that would render whiteness more visible to us as readers. Our mistake is to see only the most emboldened and extreme proponents of white supremacy as supremacists, when the interests of supremacy are already woven into the representation of the American right, and while concessions to their worldview are increasing.

The failure to read in the age of Trump has been the failure to see whiteness, along with other "default" traits like masculinity and heterosexuality, not just as the attributes of people who hold certain values, but as the values themselves. While the "liberal media" has gone to great pains to draw a halo of excuses over the white working class, whiteness itself was the greatest predictor of Trump's voters, regardless of class. The salary of the average Trump voter was significantly higher than that of the average Clinton voter, and Trump won the white vote at every economic stratum; as Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, "This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one."29

Against their storied economic woes, a substantial majority of white men and a slim majority of white women at every income level voted for Trump. This requires no decoding. To lend credence to the narrative of poverty, at the exclusion of whiteness, is to veil the surface of our nation from ourselves, ennobling the narrative, belied by evidence, which fascists wish to write about white victimhood. The "dog-whistles" of the far right are ever more open forms of admission and they have moved further into normative public discourse. Our resistance to seeing whiteness as a net value allows two misguided beliefs to flourish and coexist: the idea that "white culture" is extricable from, rather than enmeshed with, the cultures it has actively dominated, colonized, assimilated, and robbed, and the idea that "white supremacy" is either a paranoid fable or an endless set of surface signs that, per Donald Trump, cannot be "defined." In response, the postcritical detects a net, its ties constantly being made and unmade across the surfaces of the world.

We cannot give ourselves over to rarefied versions of paranoia, nor must we be resigned to floating in a tide of illegible data. Even as I write this, I am slowed by new evidence and new analyses. It is enough to make one feel that critique can never be completed, that a position can never be held. And, in a sense, it cannot. Things must constantly be added, subtracted, and rearranged. Most optimistically, this is the work of "bricolage," an assembly that recalls an ongoing summons to intersectionality, which Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson envision as "a patchwork of overlapping alliances" among identities of race, class, age, ability, gender, and sexuality.30 The postcritical extends, expands, and adapts our more familiar modes of hermeneutic and rhizomatic reading, enabling us to net the mass of data that comes our way while still deriving both pleasure and praxis from the task.

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Kathryn Fleishman is a doctoral candidate in English and Film & Media Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation argues for a new mode of reading the postmodern aesthetic in American fictions since 1945.  

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