Hysterical Bias and Democratic Representations

This chapter offers a general overview of the short history of conservative political documentary and likewise offers a thorough explanation of the relation between political media and the psychoanalytic conception of hysteria and hysterical discourse. In addition to surveying key texts in the psychoanalytic canon concerning the etiology and reproduction of hysterical discourse, I argue in favor of distinguishing two distinct forms of psychic trauma: hysterical complaints (which are singular, contingent, and emergent) and hysterical discourse (which is self-perpetuating). In the case of conservative political media and rhetoric, hysterical discourse magnifies the affective trauma of political complaints for more cynical ends, as a means to forestall change and to keep the hysterical subject at a significant remove from its perceived competitors even as the hysteric’s discourse appears to engage in sustained dialogue.

Policing with Noise

This chapter employs the discourse theory of Jacques Lacan and the political theory of Jacques Rancière to interrogate the conservative simulacrum of political debate. Michael Moore’s early documentaries produced waves of criticism from across the political spectrum, as critics expressed concern, and sometimes shock, in response to Moore’s flamboyant flouting of documentary conventions. Moore’s ironic performances lure his interlocutors into a defense of untenable political ideas and positions; the corresponding nonsense of the latter’s political speech demonstrates the bias or noise (in Rancière’s sense of the term) constitutive of the very status quo that Moore seeks to upend. Conservative films made to counter, critique, or contradict Moore’s earlier works hysterically mimic Moore’s form as the very means to dismiss his political arguments. Through the strictly formal debates in which they engage, conservative documentaries produce aesthetic noise as a spectacular means to drown out Moore’s own political agenda and divest the so-called debate of its explicit political content.

Introduction

Identifying the fact that conservative political media often produces confusion or bewilderment for viewers who encounter it but do not share its ideological assumptions—How could anyone believe this nonsense? is a likely refrain—the Introduction makes clear that incoherence is a constitutive feature of hysterical political discourse. This manner of political discourse seeks to perpetuate a feeling of affective turmoil for its intended audience as a means to deflect attention from more concrete or productive forms of democratic disagreement or exchange. The Introduction likewise argues that hysterical discourse can be understood as an extension of several key terms and concepts taken up in the work of such prominent political theorists as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jodi Dean, and Jacques Rancière.

Paradigmatic Politics

This final chapter examines films distributed by the conservative production company Citizens United, placing special emphasis on the films’ excessive use of stock footage as a substitute for archival images. The stock footage, I claim, functions as an aesthetic correlative for neoliberalism in the era of communicative capitalism and likewise provides the primary aesthetic means by which the hysterical films mimic the conventions of compilation documentaries. The generic, paradigmatic images are paired with the talking points offered by political speakers, thereby implying that the former validates the latter, despite the fact that both modes of presentation bear no direct relationship to the referents they invoke. The simulacrum of more conventional documentary forms and strategies provides the hysterical films with the flexible tools by which to dismiss or erase from view any and all political alternatives, avoiding a substantive debate through the very performance of debate.

Biased Beliefs

This chapter considers the challenges faced by documentary filmmakers who have attempted to expose examples of religious fundamentalism as ideological bias. How does one document fundamentalism objectively without also becoming a means for the very spread of the fundamentalist’s message? If documentary filmmakers rely too heavily on their own biases to frame the subject matter, then they risk trading one ideological position for another, as they well know; yet to simply reproduce on-screen the viewpoints of religious fanatics, without commentary or criticism, may result in documentary films that serve the interests of the same subjects they originally intended to expose; documentaries about evangelical Christianity may become just one additional means for evangelizing the “unsaved,” for instance. Turning to examples of fundamentalist documentary—particularly films intent to prove creationism—the chapter explains how evangelical media understands more intimately the creative potential involved in embracing bias as a means to reconstruct common sense on their own terms.

Economies of Inattention

This chapter considers such conventional documentaries as Primary, Crisis, The War Room, and Feed, films that take viewers behind the scenes of presidencies and presidential political campaigns. The filmmakers’ absent editorial voice leaves room for viewers to decide for themselves how they will interpret the recorded images. Thus, at first glance, direct cinema seems to share little in common with the unhinged, racist, conspiracy theories found throughout the cycle of anti-Obama documentaries central to the chapter. However, as I argue, both cycles of films—direct cinema and the hysterical anti-Obama documentaries—rely on related economies of attention, both of which invite viewers to heed the bare distinctions between privacy and publicity. The conservative films construct irresolvable problems; by leaving any solutions in doubt, and projecting this undecidability onto Obama’s very body and being, the documentaries combine hysteria with racist discourse.

Conclusion

The brief conclusion considers some theoretical accounts of the post-truth era in the context of the book’s broader arguments about hysterical discourse. Post-truth is treated as a form of hysterical complaint, an attempt to maintain allegiance to common sense even at the moment that common sense has been rendered obsolete or inapplicable as a viable term in political debate. The conclusion thereby suggests a more psychoanalytic mode of address to political media and representation, one that seeks to learn from the biases of others, treating such biases as the real or unavoidable effects of political antagonism rather than a failure that could be cured by some so-called return to reason, science, or other conventional notions of truth.