Are you being played when you know you’re being played—and you like it?
The question is rhetorical, of course, because the expected answer pertains to the performance of a once and future president whose name I will not mention but whom I will refer to as King Ubu, after the eponymous anti-hero of Alfred Jarry’s norm-shattering theater piece of 1896, Ubu Roi.
The connection between the two figures is immediately obvious in opening words of the play, when the repulsive monarch shouts the French word for shit, adding an extra and dramatically rolled “r” (Merdre!) to the profanity. “Shitrrr” would be the imperfect translation. Ubu Roi so violently divided its audience with its vulgarity and profane mockery of bourgeois conventions that it sparked a riot and was closed on the night of its Paris opening and moved to a lesser theater. Viewing the spectacle, which literary historians later saw as a precursor to such movements as Dada and the Theater of the Absurd, the poet W.B. Yeats noted in his memoir that he felt obliged to join the party of artistic innovation in cheering for the play, even while privately worrying about its dark, nihilistic implications. To the question he put to himself—“...what more is possible?”—Yeats provided his own answer: “After us the Savage God.”
What more is possible with, and after, our own King Ubu, whose style of mockery, mendacity, and menace has suffused and indeed taken over what was once considered the party of respectable conservatism in the United States? What to make, for example, of a figure whose infantile imitations of politicians acting “presidential” brought roars of approval from his adoring fans? A man who had fashioned a ribald remark about the menstrual period of a journalist who had dared to ask him a sharp question? And that was just a warm-up round, a testing of the waters, as our Ubu went on to elevate invective and insult into features of a transgressive performance so captivating that it made even his most bald-faced lies and apocalyptic threats seem, at the very least, plausible to his followers.
To be sure, there are matters of policy woven into the show, most reflecting a nativist populism that is playing well not just in America but other parts of the Western world. There is the promised completion of a “beautiful” border wall, mass deportations of immigrants (whether illegal or in legal limbo), staggeringly steep tariffs on imported goods, the dismantling and politicizing of the civil service, the rounding up and silencing of the “enemies within,” and even more rewards to the already super-rich. But other politicians (think Pat Buchanan!) have advanced similar schemes to make America great again. Their success was, at best, limited.
No, what makes our Ubu stand out is his embrace of outrageousness in all forms, behavior and language that his cult-like following finds—tick any of the following, whether individually or collectively—amusing, authentic, uncensored, and even, despite the steady stream of lies, truthful. Nor can it be denied or ignored that this outrageousness plays extremely well in a time of hyper-censoriousness, when the so-called progressive elites have embraced the prim proprieties of correct speech and correct thought at the expense of both true liberal tolerance and any real progressive concern about economic and social equality.
But far more than his assaults on the shibboleths of the progressive clerisy, what draws the admiring hordes to our Ubu is his uninhibited display of pure Id, his strutting and highly corporeal enactment of the Uncensored Self. And judging by his enduring, and possibly even growing, popularity, this performance resonates deeply with many Americans. Why?
While the reasons are many, the more salient ones could easily be adduced from the critique set forth in a new book by the French social theorist Olivier Roy. An astute analyst of the complicated workings of religion in the modern world, notably in such books as Globalized Islam and Is Europe Christian?, Roy titled his new work The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, but it could have just as easily, and perhaps more aptly, been named “The Dissolution of Culture and the Triumph of the Sovereign Individual.” As Roy asserts some thirty pages into the text, “My argument is that, rather than a mere crisis of culture, what we are now witnessing is the ‘deculturation of cultures’: a dissolution of the content of the cultural canon, an obliteration of anthropological cultures, and the paradoxical promotion (through globalization) of ‘subcultures’ that are autonomous from the dominant culture within which they were embedded but are now reduced to codes of communication disconnected from real cultures.”
That is certainly a broad and a bold declaration. Yet in the pages leading to it, Roy masterfully explicates the confluence of factors—none of which he asserts is the independent or determinative variable, but all of which interact in mutually reinforcing ways—that in the roughly forty years between 1960 and 2000 brought about a “civilizational rupture.” Describing them as “sequences” rather than causes, he names four in brief before elaborating: “1) the transformation of values with the individualist and hedonist revolution of the 1960s; 2) the Internet revolution; 3) neoliberal financial globalization; 4) the globalization of space and the movement of human beings, in other words deterritorialization.”
Each and all of these have encouraged and enabled the achievement of the fully autonomous and fully liberated individual. Yet this individual was not the one envisioned by Kant or most Enlightenment thinkers, a necessarily restrained individual guided by moral dictates derived by reason from the categorical imperative, but, instead, the appetitive self guided by the fulfillment of his or her desires. In the regime of emancipatory individualism unleashed in the 1960s, Roy writes, “the culture of the desiring individual has become dominant” and indeed fully “enshrined in the laws and mores of Western societies, whatever the political orientation of those in power in the medium term.”
The clashes of the recent and widespread culture wars have merely created, in Roy’s telling, a vast fog of war shrouding a civilizational break in which the implicit norms embedded within the world’s many cultures, and reinforced by their more explicit cultural canons (of art, philosophy, religion, etc.), have been eroded and progressively replaced by the “dissemination of a series of codes” keyed to the fulfillment and protection of individuals asserting and demanding full rights and recognition within and through whatever group they identify with. By identity politics, in other words, carried to the nth and absurd degree. So even the conservative backlash to the hedonic eruptions of the 1960s has not, in Roy’s view, “involved a return to traditional values, but has occurred within the Sixties paradigm and in the name of its ideals of individualism and freedom.”
Whether of the Left or the Right, reactions to emancipatory individualism strive “to return either to the republican pact (the social contract within the nation-state compact) or the grounding of culture in transcendence, which may be religious or understood as an exalted, intangible human nature.” Both Left and Right are doomed to failure, Roy holds, because any victory “not founded on a shared imaginary [that is to say, a true culture with implicit norms and meanings] can only be imposed by an authority or the hypothetical conversion of the majority of the population, which would be nothing short of miraculous.”
Whether one accepts the details or broad sweep of Roy’s analysis—and my short precis cannot do it justice—it helps illuminate the success of a figure like our King Ubu, who bestrides the collapse of culture, or cultures, as, at once, a fully appetitive creature unrestrained in his libidinous pursuits, a flawed master (because repeatedly bailed out by his stern yet indulgent daddy) of our highly financialized and globalized neoliberal economy, a skilled adept of the semi-literate communication style of our digital media, and a virtuoso player upon the fears excited by our increasingly borderless, deterritorialized world (who, of course, has been a major profiteer from the movements of capital and people across it).
Our Ubu is the Savage God who embodies the worst of us—our complete capitulation to selfishness even while pretending allegiance to the institutions, ideals, and beliefs that once formed and restrained us. To embrace our Ubu is to embrace a master celebrant of the demise of culture and the triumph of pure Id. And because we understand and like this show—and cannot seem to get enough of it—we can never say that we are dupes who have been played by its master.