The personality of power 2
Édouard Glissant calls them “flash agents” (agents d’éclat).114 The French term combines the connotations of “flashy” or “dazzling,” and “explosive.” Flash agents emit signs that strike: that hit with impact and produce a shock. They are point-sign bombers. They scatter-bomb the media, hoping for a large impact, but most often settling for an accumulation of micro-shocks. The current moniker for them is “social media influencers.” They vie for attention as if it were a rare natural resource, and extract surplus-value from it. p 269
…The personality of power
The digitally connected body
The affectivo-emotive range of the social media is wide and varied. But it continually throws a body off-balance. The digitally connected body is a body on edge—on the paranoid edge. This makes for edgy personalities with a tendency toward intensities of paranoia. That tendency is a constant built into the affective complexion of social media— an unremitting pole around which lives come to oscillate.
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Trump does not utter well-formed statements, carrying truth-value and conveying an ideology. He spews point-signs. He performs media strikes. The strikes are not well-targeted, effectively coordinated attacks. They are hit-and- miss disturbances, designed to continually stir things up.
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Trump, as media figure, is literally, effectively, contagiously a collective person operating in the associated milieu of a paranoid full body.
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A positive notion of a different logic must be constructed.
…thought
‘Thought enwraps us. Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.’
C.S. Peirce
Larissa Sansour
Expositie Rogue Agents of History in Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, nog t/m 27 september 2026. De tentoonstelling toont drie films: het nieuwe in opdracht van Wereldmuseum gemaakte A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed en de films In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain en Familiar Phantoms. Daarnaast zijn er o.a. props die in de films gebruikt zijn, waaronder deze fraaie ‘tijdbommen’ uit In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain.
Deze objecten plus film zouden heel goed in de collectie van het Stedelijk passen bedacht ik ter plaatse.
