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American Populism, Glenn Beck and Affective Media Production

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American Populism, Glenn Beck and Affective Media Production ICS0010.1177/1367877916688273International Journal of Cultural StudiesJutel 688273research-article2017 International Journal of Cultural Studies 1 –18 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877916688273 10.1177/1367877916688273 journals.sagepub.com/home/ics Article American populism, Glenn Beck and affective media production Olivier Jutel University of the South Pacific, Fiji Abstract This article examines the centrality of affective media production to contemporary American populism with a case study of the right-wing broadcaster Glenn Beck. The rise of far-right media and Donald Trump in social media spaces demonstrates the convergence of the economic and political logic of affect. In soliciting the affective and collaborative labour of users, affective media necessarily deploys discourses of social transformation, autonomy and critical knowingness. Beck’s show exemplifies this logic with Beck functioning as a leader of the Tea Party movement who perform ‘free labour’ for Fox News and Beck’s own media empire, while experiencing this as a form of revolutionary education. Where this audience movement speaks to the political ontology of affective media is in the return of a fetishistic ‘symbolic efficiency’. In foreshadowing Trump, Beck articulates an antagonistic division of the social with a populist community of jouissance and individuation both threatened and constituted by the rapacious enemy. Keywords affect, fetishism, jouissance, parrhesia, populism, Donald Trump The rise of conservative populism in the US in the last decade, from the Tea Party to Donald Trump’s presidency, has demonstrated the subsumption of politics to the logic of affective media production. While the politics of this strain of populism is thoroughly retrograde, it speaks to the centrality of desire, enjoyment and antagonism in the increasingly universal nexus of affective media and politics. From online conservative Corresponding author: Olivier Jutel, School of Language, Arts and Media, University of the South Pacific, Laucala Bay Rd, Suva, Fiji. Email: [email protected] 2 International Journal of Cultural Studies social media, Fox News and Trump’s political-media spectacle, the logic of affect is central to connecting with an audience or movement that will perform labour in the ser- vice media brands, celebrities and political parties. One of the early leaders of the Tea Party movement and an entrepreneur in melding brand, affect and protest was Fox News’s Glenn Beck. A cross between Network’s Howard Beale, Father Caughlin and Oprah, Beck’s Fox New persona was not simply that of another right-wing populist pundit whose outrage reset with each news cycle. Rather he engaged in seeming revolutionary exposition in consecrating a populist community across media space, unified by a transgressive dehu- manization of its enemy. It’s hard to overstate the radical break from convention pre- sented by Beck as his Fox News programme, which ran from January 2009 to June 2011, ranged from deep apocalypticism to the warmth of a prayer meeting. Beck’s shtick was the befuddled everyman who, reacting to a crisis-stricken America, is emotionally wracked by the burden of being the messenger of this reality. Delivering 20-minute mon- ologues about the global caliphate or communists in the academy, Beck manoeuvres between fear, anger, sarcasm, intellectualism and tranquillity, while gesticulating or cry- ing. Tears are Beck’s affective currency, not simply because they are good television but in the affective solicitation to the populist fetish of the Tea Party. This article looks at the Glenn Beck Program as an example of affective media pro- duction. In a media environment where cats, self-expressive modes of discourse and ‘inspirational response to bully’ videos drive media consumption and internet traffic, affect functions as a central political and economic logic. The principal economic logic is the audience commodity performing affective labour. Beck’s viewers produce the spectacle of Tea Party protest for Fox and consume Beck’s programme, reading list and end-times commodities as part of revolutionary preparedness (Jutel, 2013). This is simul- taneously a question of political ontology as affective media draws us into social and libidinal circuits of desire. The rise of Beck, fellow conspiracy-monger Alex Jones and alt-right media spaces can be explained by the incessant desire to uncover a radical truth, which is a product of one’s own libidinal investments. Accounts of affective labour and media produsage make universal claims echoing Hardt and Negri’s teleology of the mul- titude: the social nature of affective media production eludes capitalist control and opens new spaces for radical democracy. Beck and the Tea Party problematize humanist assumptions of such affective labour theory. Instead of the emancipatory multitude we have a populism which is insular and fetishistic. Beck’s ability to unite Tea Party members as an audience community rests upon his affective invitation to the populist lifeworld. The unhinged emotional range and appeal to the Tea Party signifier functions as an affective solicitation connected to the viewers’ own inner libidinal investments. Beck’s audience defines the populist political logic of ‘affective investment in a partial object’ (Laclau, 2005: 116): the signifier ‘Tea Party’ becomes a placeholder for republican virtue, free-market capitalism and Christianity (Jutel, 2012). This partial object, or objet petit a, is the basis for a Tea Party hegemonic chain of equivalence dividing the social space between a people and its enemy. This affective investment takes a properly fetishistic turn (Žižek, 2008) by constructing the people’s enemy. The enemy is overdetermined by contradictory evils projected upon it, necessary for experiencing an obscene jouissance in participating in the movement. Jutel 3 This article identifies the political, economic and libidinal logic of affective media before turning to an analysis of Beck’s affective performance at the level of text. Beck personally embodies the turmoil of the populist dichotomy; whether in viciously dehu- manizing the enemy or consecrating his community in warmth and reciprocity. The ‘9/12’ project launched on his program shifts seamlessly from innumerable threats to the audience’s self-realization as universal agents of American history. Beck and his audi- ence share tears, jokes and affirmations as if in group therapy. From this sanctum of affective fraternity, the enemy becomes an obsessive object of study, forever threatening the people’s jouissance through their own rapacious enjoyment. The enemy is con- structed in anti-Semitic terms, omnipotent yet overcome by carnal desires, from George Soros’s addiction to financial manipulation to Barack Obama’s college transgressions and the unrestrained avarice of the urban poor. Where Beck speaks to the broader implications of affective media production is the manner in which affect is elevated as a radical, universal truth claim. The obscene jouis- sance of obsessively ridiculing the enemy is framed in the highest values of journalistic rationalism and ‘truth-telling’. Beck’s audience have exclusive access to critical ‘truth,’ making them ‘people of a special mould … [as the] direct embodiment of the will of his- tory’ (Žižek, 1991: 252). It’s the emancipatory promise of populist exceptionalism that informs Beck’s pseudo-intellectual apparatus of chalkboard expositions, book-hawking and the ‘Beck University’ lecture series. The apogee of this affective media logic is Beck’s role as ‘Parrhesiaste’ (Foucault, 2001), that is, speaking truth to power despite danger. The emotional work of affective investment becomes wedded to universal truth. Beck’s populist authenticity, inner turmoil and belief that Soros is trying to kill him all function as validity claims. Affective media production’s ability to engender collabora- tion is premised upon investment in the fetish and seeming critical media practices which entail the incessant ‘epistemological drive’ (Lacan, 2007: 105) to understand the Other’s depravity. Affective media’s social logic thus does not produce emancipatory politics, but instead a populism that claims radical discourses of horizontalism and truth-telling against the fetishized enemy. Affective media production ‘Affective media production’ borrows from Hardt and Negri, who identify affective and immaterial forms of labour as increasingly hegemonic in all spheres of production. My variant of the affective labour thesis limits itself to identifying the centrality of media- tized forms of affect to the fields of journalism and media as a political economic logic. Where Hardt and Negri speak of the general condition of capital to harness ‘networks based on communication, collaboration and affective relationships’ (2004: 66) my con- cern focuses on media production. While arguments can be made about the extent to which the exploitation of affective labour in service industries represents a new reality of capital, media production and consumption has demonstrably changed. Journalism and news media have always relied upon the ‘affective encounter of bodies across space’ (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: xvi), but journalistic ideals of self-reflexivity and rationalism have been superseded by affective validation. The emergence of mobile devices as the new terrain for market expansion has transformed ‘traditional’ content and 4 International
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