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ABSTRACT
This article studies Trumponomics as a brand that derives its economic and political purchase from the patterns of affective circulation opened up by the contemporary political economy. Because neoliberalism enables branding to both extract surplus wealth and appropriate surplus affect directly from consumers, it changes the rhetorical terrain. In this new landscape, Trump’s incoherent economic policies fade into the background as the production of his economic brand occupies the foreground. My argument theorizes affect within the labor theory of value, analyzes the Trump brand within that framework, and explores the implications of including affective value within the rhetorical toolbox.
Notes
1. Similarly, if Oprah Winfrey runs for president and wins, it will not be because of the groundswell of support she unleashed in her impassioned Golden Globes speech endorsing #MeToo and other women’s movements. Trump and Winfrey, although stylistically and ideologically so different, converge on the branding structure that undergirds both their economic success and their rhetorical appeal. In other words, this affective structure is not politically partisan.
2. Massumi discusses the politically preemptive role of ontopower at length in Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception and discusses the economically preemptive role of ontopower in The Power at the End of the Economy.
3. Trump serves an “attraction-effect” much like the one theorized in Ron Greene’s analysis of twentieth-century film. In the twenty-first century, this attraction-effect has shifted from mass media to social media, but its function remains the same: to bring people together so as to cultivate subjects primed for predictable responses to political economic stimuli. See his “Y Movies.”
4. See Christian Lundberg’s Lacan in Public and Laura Collins’ “The Second Amendment as Demanding Subject” for explorations of similar dynamics using a psychoanalytic approach to affect.