Chapter 22 - War and the Personality of Power

Summary

The tenure of Donald Trump as US president has been characterized by a double movement. One, centripetal, is toward an extreme personalization of the office of the presidency; the other, centrifugal, is toward a heightened diffusion through the social media of constant affective agitations emanating from the White House. The hold Trump maintains on his supporters and the negative fascination he exerts on his opponents is often analyzed in traditional terms of identification (and disidentification) with a charismatic leader. This flattens the account onto an interior psychological dimension, obscuring the fact that Trump is as much a corporate brand and a platform-phenomenon as he is a psychological subject. In fact, his subjectivity is symbiotic with, if not utterly dependent upon, the externalization, circulation, and feedback effects of media-borne affective agitations that rebound throughout the social field: more an affective node in a transindividual assemblage than an individual subject as traditionally understood. This chapter examines what concept of the "person" might apply to such an assemblage, and what the term "the personality of power" might mean in the internet age.