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.
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The point of thought is not to simplify reality, but to become equal to its complexity. This is not an easy task, but it is a necessary one if the desire is to embrace potential and foster it, rather than triage and discipline it.
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The radicles can be conceived only as being in a state of superposition. This is not a layering one atop the other—that would still have thickness, a remnant of spatiality. Rather, it is an immediate in-each-otherness that preserves differential character. This is not an implosion into indifference. It is the most radical distillation of difference.
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In the intensive dimension, it is what Paul Virilio named endocolonization: the subsumption of more and more intimate dimensions of human bodily, perceptual, and affective life under the capitalist relation, to the point that capital becomes an immanent factor in the ontogenesis of the human— making capitalist power an ontopower.
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The production of human capital through endocolonization has intensified under neoliberalism. Trump’s self-branding is just the peak example. Participation in social media does not just offer the option of self-image curation. It requires it. As avenues for the monetization of one’s presence on social media proliferate, so do the pressures to move from self-curation to self-branding.
Brian Massumi: The Personality of Power, A Theory of Fascism for Anti-fascist Life