Jarrett Fuller

The most recent episode of Scratching the Surface is with design researcher Noemi Biasetton, whose book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Information Age brought together an area I’ve been increasingly interested in over the last five years: the triangulation of graphic design, media studies, and political theory. Since I arrived at NC State, I’ve been teaching a class in the Spring I created called “Publishing and Distribution.” As the class has evolved, it’s become a way for me to explore these intersections in an attempt, I hope, to find design’s role in this current media and political moment.

If I can summarize my thesis for the class — and also the conversation Noemi and I have — it’d be this: politics (and especially national politics) has become a fully mediated activity. It’s something we experience and participate in, almost entirely, through media.

With this in mind, I’ve wanted to spend more time thinking about the aesthetics of politics. By aesthetics, I don’t mean campaign branding, but the actualizing, visually and culturally, of a political ideology. For example I’d been fascinated by the rise of the “tradwife” on Instagram and had wanted to write about how the aesthetics of the tradwife may be connected to rightwing extremism. Thankfully someone much smarter than me, the essayist and New York Times Opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, wrote just such a piece:

Tradwives are the social-media generation’s iteration of the 1950s white, suburban, middle-class housewife. They glorify domestic labor and the wealth that makes a single-income nuclear family seem like a respite from the paid labor market for women. With clear, if implicit, echoes of the Make America Great Again movement, a big part of the fantasy tradwives sell is that women can once again enjoy the trappings of upper-class consumption without the dangerous density of urban life or the hard labor of rural life.

The idyllic, impeccably groomed stay-at-home mom is an enduring symbol of the 1950s economy. It is also a fairy tale. As numerous feminist texts have detailed, the few women who did have access to that life were often miserable.

If, indeed, politics is downstream from culture, than the conservative movement is winning. They seem to have figured out how to turn their ideology into a set of cultural codes, aesthetics, and visuals that can harness and empower their movement. This is why, I think, some of the best writing to understand Donald Trump over the last decade has come not from political writers but cultural critics. Again in the New York Times, I think of television critic James Ponewozik’s writing on Trump since he came down that golden escalator. Or take this other NYT example, published last week from A.O. Scott:

On Election Day, Elon Musk posted a video on X, his social media platform, presenting himself as an avatar of “Dark MAGA.” A blizzard of pop-culture memes evoking anime, comic books and action movies, the two-minute supercut bristles with a familiar chaotic energy. Donald Trump, in his trademark blue suit and red tie, strides across the frame in broad daylight, while Musk, in a black cap and T-shirt, cuts a gleefully diabolical figure. To date, the video has garnered 91.4 million views.

A visitor from outer space, versed in the semiotics of the internet but ignorant of the political context, might have guessed that the two men were adversaries rather than allies: hero and villain. Whatever archetype actually describes Musk’s relationship to Trump — minion, sidekick, wartime consigliere, “first buddy” — there is no question that he radiates supervillain energy. In his own way, Trump does too.

Let me be very clear: I mean this not as a moral judgment but as the description of an aesthetic, a matter of style rather than content. To observe that Trump’s opponents and Musk’s critics see them as villains would hardly count as much of an insight. What is interesting is that many of their admirers see them that way. More than that, the supervillain persona — world-dominatingly ambitious, wildly unpredictable, unbound by norms or rules — is one that both the president-elect and the richest man in the world have cultivated.

A person who understood this early was Steve Bannon who famously said the Trump campaign’s goal in 2016 was to “flood the zone with shit”. Bannon saw their adversary not so much the Democrats but the media. And the media was something they could more easily conquer, by taking it over and filling it with a new type of content. In her book, Biasetton introduced me to a 2018 exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut called Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective, curated by artist Jonas Staal. Staal looks at the cultural work of Bannon — as film director, as CEO of Biosphere, as editor of Brietbart — to understand how propaganda works and redefine Bannon as a “propaganda artist”. “In Staal’s perspective, Bannon’s work serves as a crucial example of the major impact of propaganda art on contemporary democratic societies, and one that is not exclusive to the United States,” reads the exhibition description. “The ambition of Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective is to present a vision of the effects of the visual and ideological architecture of the alt-right to a broader audience in order to open spaces and opportunities for critique and resistance.”

Most interesting to me, here’s Staal in the introduction to the accompanying publication:

The world around us is changing at an increasingly fast rate, and architecture, design, and digital culture are a framework through which we can read and participate in it. Shaped by the volume and speed at which information circulates and by which dominant narratives are construed, this deceiving territory demands a visual literacy; a competence in reading images, spaces, and objects. Cultural institutions are principal actors in these processes, and have the responsibility to debate forms of representation and reality construction. The exhibition proposes to unpack the design of images, the formation of visual vocabularies, the establishment of virtual environments, and the construction of scenographies through which Trumpism has conveyed messages of hate and polarization.

I hope this becomes a rigorous and important field of study within the design fields. It’s where I want to focus a lot of my thinking — both inside the classroom and outside — over the next year or so. Without an increased interest in media studies and literacy and an understanding of political econonmy, I think design will continue to fall behind and fail to meet the political moment.