SummaryThis article proceeds from the observation that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—two politicians frequently correlated and compared since Trump’s bid for the Presidency—have been remarkably successful in mobilizing support for their politics and in seemingly immunizing their rhetorics against vernacular critique. To work toward an understanding of this phenomenon, we propose to look at how political communication by and around the two politicians draws on forms and venues of popular culture. Both contexts, we will argue, have developed new strategies for the instrumentalization of popular culture, strategies that, while actualized differently in the two settings, revolve around an ‘invective turn’ in political communication—a radicalization of the familiar nationalist rhetoric of ‘us versus them’ that seems specifically fueled by pop-cultural forms. To explore this traffic between pop and politics, this article puts into conversation two case studies: On the one hand, of Trump’s campaign speeches which, we contend, symbolically organize around the logic of agôn—of the competitive game—as it has coagulated in the reality-tv genre of the gamedoc. On the other hand, we look at (state-controlled) pop music in the Russian genre of
This article approaches HBO’s Veep through the lens of what Dan Hassler-Forest (2014) has described as the meta-genre of ‘Quality TV.’ Against the backdrop of ‘Quality TV’s’ conspicuous investment in masculinity, I ask how Veep actualizes the meta-genre’s conventions of moral ambiguity and sensationalist storytelling around a female protagonist and in the genre of comedy. I focus on one key strategy I see the show employ in this actualization, a strategy I conceptualize as invective spectacle. In Veep, invective spectacle translates ‘Quality TV’s’ characteristic transgressiveness into the conventions of comedy and, in the process, constructs the figure of a morally ambiguous antiheroine. The dynamics of invective spectacle – as a poetics that appears to be booming in contemporary television culture – structure the show’s elaboration of a complex female protagonist as a morally flawed woman of power.
The following article outlines a way to conceptualize invective form in popular culture that is particularly interested in accommodating the range, fluidity, and slipperiness that define pop-cultural invectivity. It is an approach that draws on one very well-established concept of formal criticism – that of mode – and one concept that has recently been brought to the fold of formalist inquiry – that of affordance. I will argue that conceiving of invective form in popular culture as a mode and as an affordance allows to address the diversity and range of external forms by which pop-cultural invectivity operates. In addition, it brings into focus the fluidity that marks the repertoire of invective popular culture, its paradoxical tendency to gravitate toward routinization in more set conventions, only to conspicuously push against these conventions’ boundaries. Finally, to conceive of the invective valence of the mode’s repertoire not as a fixed property but as an affordance helps talk about the volatility and dynamism of invective performances in popular culture, the way in which their invective effects are contingent on the social positionality from and for which they realized, and the way in which their invective valence is open for resignification.
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