Pleased to learn of publication of my anti-Trump poem “Plan B” in Lana Turner, I took the magazine’s offer of a free download of Lana Turner 11 (the digital version of Lana Turner 12 is not yet out) as an anticipation of things to come. The website also links to Lana Turner 10, where I published a poem written after the 2004 election, “Blue States (After Fearing),” and indeed there is a connection to the present “Plan B,” written in November 2016. (The paywall is still up for Lana Turner 10, and readers should get the entire issue, but I will provide a .pdf of the poem here). In that poem, I tracked the psychological state I was in after the 2004 election—where George W. Bush achieved his first popular majority, thought he had a mandate, had earned capital and was going to spend it by demolishing Social Security, only to fail spectacularly to do so. At the time, my serious interest in the emergence of fascist imaginaries in American democracy began, and I would spend the next dozen years interrogating their present and past history, through my research, teaching, and travels in Germany. “Plan B” is a culmination of this effort, a poem registering the psychological state of the 2016 election through the perversion of public discourse that, in Adorno’s words from The Authoritarian Personality, indicate a “readiness” to accept anti-democratic forms of government. Adorno links these psychological preconditions of “readiness” to an ensemble of personality traits in and as “ideology”:

What the individual consistently says in public, what he says when he feels safe from criticism, what he thinks but will not say at all, what he thinks but will not admit to himself, what he is disposed to think or to do when various kinds of appeal are made to him—all these phenomena may be conceived of as constituting a single structure. The structure may not be integrated, it may contain contradictions as well as consistencies, but it is organized in the sense that the constituent parts are related in psychologically meaningful ways. . . . These persisting forces of personality help to determine response in various situations, and it is thus largely to them that consistency of behavior—whether verbal or physical—is attributable. But behavior, however consistent, is not the same thing as personality; personality lies behind behavior and within the individual. The forces of personality are not responses but readiness for response; whether or not a readiness will issue in overt expression depends not only upon the situation of the moment but upon what other readinesses stand in opposition to it. Personality forces which are inhibited are on a deeper level than those which immediately and consistently express themselves in overt behavior. (5)

In writing on the 2004 election, I was tracking a primary condition of the political imaginary as conditioned by unreason: the splitting into red states and blue states, associating the depressive position (after Melanie Klein) with the “blue states.” Lana Turner picked up this theme with their section heading: “Blue Year 2017” after the 2016 election. But things truly advanced from 2004 to 2016: the intersection of digital technology with public discourse had created the state of unreality that produces “fake news” as a discourse, and that shields the proto-fascist core of populist ideology behind a screen of dissociated language. It was this condition that I attempted to channel, to mimic, and to objectify in “Plan B”; readers will see if I am successful (or if I only succeeded in producing another unreliable discourse, which can be interpreted as “meaning anything” in its own right).

The link to the download of Lana Turner 11 is this: feeling in solidarity with the journal—and why not, in troubled times—I printed out and read Alain Badiou’s “Lacan and Politics as a Hole.” My skepticism for Badiou can be considerable, particularly his Maoism but also sentences such as “Lacan is well aware that philosophy’s temptation is the temptation of the One—what Heidegger calls the enframing of being by the One . . .” and so on and so forth. Keep me away from “the One” as a concept, or even a deconstruction of it. The topic, in any case, was not “the One” but Jacques Lacan’s “un-division” of philosophy (from “the One”), making Lacan a radical particularist who withholds any totalizing vision. One way of reframing this question comes with Freud’s “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” which states that all analytic knowing exists in a suspension of closure, so there can never be a “One” achieved in the dialogic framework of the transference. Reading on, I found the following remarkable paragraph, which in spite of my skepticism seemed to directly comment on the politics of “Plan B”:

Politics makes a hole inasmuch as it sweeps up all discourse effect into the group effect, “the effect of a consolidated group, at the expense of the discourse effect,” and as for Freud, he permitted “the psychoanalytic group to win out over discourse.” So what is at stake here in terms of politics—the group as such—makes a hole when it makes glue [colle] or School-glue [Écolle], in other words, precisely when the group wins out over discourse. This maxim, “it makes a hole when the group wins out over discourse,” is a very important one. Why? Because we understand from it how philosophy can plug the hole. It will plug it by turning the fact that the group wins out over discourse into a discourse. This is what will be attributed to philosophy in terms of its relationship to politics: when the group wins out over discourse, you have a kind of imaginary hole in the real of Capital, and that’s all you have. In this sense, we shouldn’t think that political philosophy or philosophy dealing with politics only plugs something that’s lacking. [. . . ] It’s when philosophy calls “politics” the fact that the group wins out over discourse and turns this into a discourse that it’s playing its role as hole-plugger of politics, whereas it should leave the hole open so that we can see in it that the group wins out over discourse and that, as a result, it’s the imaginary breach or collapse of the pure glue effect. (281)

This pure glue effect has to be a thumbnail for ideology in all its incapacitation, as we live it. Politics “makes a hole” in this discourse—but does Badiou mean all politics, including Trump’s, Brexit’s, and Xi Jinpin’s, or just “our” politics as counter-discourse, the good analytic kind? It is possible that “politics” here means both—and that it is nonidentical to the “pure glue effect” of the ideological. Pursuing a politics, then, involves a group consensus over the nature of the political, what Freud anatomized in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (and which Lacan foregrounds in his work on the transference), and what Ernesto Laclau would go on to see as the political itself, the “empty signifier” of “the people” as pseudo-universal. But this group consensus has no positive consistency—rather, it “creates a hole in discourse,” which philosophy, according to Badiou, rushes in to close. Keeping it open, then, is a politics—in fact, it is the politics—but a politics of what kind? For Badiou, “you have a kind of imaginary hole in the real of Capital, and that’s all you have.” But there is no discursive answer here—hole-plugging, seeking a positive term for the hole that has been opened, only further conceals the pure glue effect of ideology. It is a conundrum, all right, but also an opportunity to see into the inner workings of politics as “a hole in discourse” that “Plan B” attempts. In a manner similar to what Adorno saw in the “personality”: not any positive discourse of politics, but a “readiness for response” that is laid bare in the workings of the language traces that form personality as the “pure glue effect” of ideology. Personality, then, is a “hole that must be kept open”—and it is; our current politics offers us no alternative but to painfully negotiate that Ozone Hole.

Image: Spencer Finch, Color Test (576), 2017 (Rhona Hoffman Gallery)