The morning after Donald Trump got elected as the new POTUS, my close friend and roommate Juan Manuel told me: “Por primera vez los gringos entenderán lo que es tener un payaso ridículo al mando.” Juan Manuel, a Venezuelan exile, was right. As a Venezuelan and a Mexican we were used to extremely cartoonish political figures. Presidents of the United States, no matter how evil, racist, or ridiculous they were, always had a ring of protection which manifested itself as experts in political PR and communications. In a strange manipulation of his own image, Trump appears to shed that ring of protection for his own handling of his presentation, which is mostly distributed via television and social media. This week’s readings highlight the way new media shapes our social and cultural political landscape. From Trump’s tweets to his theatrical expressions, to online social mobilizations, to the reconceptualization of citizenship via selfies into what Poster defines as netizenship.
In many ways I was moved by Taylor’s text, given that my own politics of passion are deeply entangled with the subject matter. As a fourteen-year old at the time of AMLO’s mobilization, I mostly observed the “animatives” that were activated in the city as an external actor. Animatives are described by taylor as “part movement as in animation, part identity, being, or soul as in anima or life. The term captures the fundamental movement that is life (breathe life into) or that animates embodied practice. Its affective dimensions include being lively, engaged, and ‘moved.’” (Taylor) For me, it wasn’t until the following election in 2012 (my first time ever voting), that those animatives interpolated my own body. Seeing how the media had protected and enhanced the image of then political candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, which included the attempt to de-legitimize a student protest against him which happened in Universidad Iberoamericana. The protest had happened when EPN visited the private university to give a conference. Students protested his presence and questioned him on the murders and rapes that happened in Atenco, a massacre he authored in 2006. Frightened EPN hid in the bathroom. The following day the media claimed the protestors were not students but pawns from other parties. Thus, the students who were present began circulating a video in which each one of them presented their student ID on camera. Asserting their presence and their actions against the candidate of the PRI party. One hundred and thirty one students showed up in the video, unleashing the student movement #YoSoy132. Echoing previous movements we marched amongst many routes from Tlatelolco to el Zócalo.
Edward’s understanding of “The selfie determination of nations” (Edwards, 28) resonates in a very particular way with how this movement started. As it began with an assertion of singularity within a collective practice, and it happened via each of the students action of self-taping and sharing of another form of individual identification which was their student ID. As borders, media, technology, neo-liberal economies shift so does the concept of the citizen. Consumption thus has transformed into a form that quantifies and qualifies our relation to the state and to the body politic. Particularly helpful perhaps is Poster’s invitation to call into question the term citizen in and of itself, as well as the way this term has come to denote a “sign of the democratizing subject”: “Does the term citizen carry with it a baggage of connotations from Western history that render it parochial in the globalized present? (Poster, 76).
These readings invite us to disrupt, question, and imagine, even if there ́s an impending threat of failure. For “even in failure, if we measure failure by the absence of a plan for a future society, insurgencies will have had a measure of success (Arditi)” We must find, in this disruption the potential where new digital economies can open up new political landscapes. Potential is not in the way they subscribe to a specific future but in their demand for a change, a transition, in the way the present demands the potential of a future, even if that future is not specifically outlined.