Temporal Constraints
Publicity, and why Trump cannot escape the present
More than any other art form, the Bourgeois produce what John Berger called “the publicity image.” It is what we recognize as advertising: Public art produced for the sake of drawing attention to a commodity or service—the fuel of capitalist social class relations.
This art is all around us; in urban areas we are inundated by publicity, from billboards to magazine covers to leafleteers to video screens. Times Square is actually a museum of Bourgeois art. Not the kind they are known for collecting, but the kind they commission, to be publicly exhibited.
Forced upon the public, some might say.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs. — Banksy.
Berger notes there is a temporal element to publicity—it only works when focusing on the future. It cannot live in the present. When public events become so compelling as to force a collective focus on the present, publicity stops working. Thrice in American history, we have seen the mass, temporary suspension of publicity. It meant no television commercials for a few days.
Publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just as far as nothing else is happening. For publicity all real events are exceptional and only happen to strangers…
Publicity, situated in a future continually deferred, excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it. All that happens, happens outside it.The fact that publicity is eventless would be immediately obvious if it did not use a language which makes of tangibility an event in itself. Everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition. The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses. (Berger, 153).
An era that calls for the mass production of publicity would become one dominated in some respects by salespeople. I have addressed the phenomenon of how the major tech companies relied more on pitchmen than on products, in prior writings:
The internet pioneers share a characteristic in common—they are salesmen (and they are virtually all men). They are not the best programmers or the best manufacturers, they are seldom the CEO’s of the companies built around them—but at a key time in their company’s development they were able to convince venture capitalists and wealthy individuals to put money behind them.
Therein lies their talent.
Donald Trump is caught in the present, which does not bode well for a salesman. We are entering the second full week of Jeffrey Epstein stickiness, and despite efforts to rally the troops, MAGA remains divided over Put Up or Shut Up.
Podcasters such as Tim Poole and Charlie Kirk have been brought back into the fold, and are now throwing out companion conspiracy theories—Poole went so far as to say Trump has to keep the Epstein files secret because he knows “they” would kill him if the contents were revealed. On the other hand, I did a spit-take yesterday (Monday) when this came across my feeds:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, right powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down ever enemy of The People.
If not.
The base will turn and there’s no going back.
Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies.
They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.
Trump is currently incapable of selling his way out of the Epstein Files, because no matter how he has tried to get people to look to the future, it has not worked. Trump has a “in two weeks” trope he uses when he wants to kill questions on an issue—nothing changes over those two weeks, other than other issues have taken precedence in the silence about the other. But Pam Bondi said there was no list, so there can be no future revelation if we just wait and forget.
Trump tried suing the Wall Street Journal for publishing his birthday wishes for Epstein, referring to “a secret,” accompanied by a line drawing of a female figure, and signed by Trump on the pubis. Trump has no case, and the suit will be dropped prior to full discovery—this is in keeping with how to effectively kill a story. However, the general association between Trump and Epstein, with ample photographic and testimonial evidence, does not need a bawdy birthday card as icing on the cake.
Trump claimed to be bringing cane sugar back to U.S. Coca-Cola (the company denied it was). One commentator’s response was, “He learned how much better it tasted with cane sugar when he was visiting his friend’s Caribbean island. He liked it so much, he kept flying back there for more!” Yesterday, he called for two companies in particular to change their d/b/a’s back to ones the owners decided to no longer use.
The response:
I suspect bringing back “HER EMAILS” into the picture is a stab at going back to a time when Epstein was still alive and Trump had yet to become president the first time. A clean slate, so to speak. I do not think it’s going to work. It will continue to make him look ineffective. Why didn’t he prosecute her, the first time around?
Pam Bondi’s definitive declaration and obvious lie cut off the future and locked this matter into an eternal present that will not be resolved by simply telling people to pay attention to something else. Reports are she assigned scads of FBI agents to flag documents in the Epstein files that mention Trump. Whatever will be presented will be for the sake of holding MAGA together, but not convincing the general public of anything.