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Trump and the death of the Image
Author(s) -
Appadurai Arjun
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8322.12610
Subject(s) - sociality , morality , aesthetics , sociology , axiom , feature (linguistics) , social life , image (mathematics) , environmental ethics , social psychology , epistemology , philosophy , psychology , ethnology , artificial intelligence , computer science , ecology , linguistics , geometry , mathematics , biology
We would be wrong to imagine that Trump belongs in the long tradition of American politicians who are deeply concerned with managing their images. The idea of the image as a central feature of American life has been a popular axiom of the last seven decades and has not been adequately rethought. Trump has successfully found a following that likes him unvarnished and unadorned, and thus he has no hesitation to reveal his most repellent moral and social qualities. This indifference to the image is anchored in a deeper indifference to sociality itself and signals both the death of the image and the evacuation of any socially‐grounded morality from public life.