Distraction and the void

.....or how do fantasies fill the void? And how do these fantasies function as distractions?
We have been trying to make sense of our social and political context for a long time. We are both psychotherapists who invariably return to the problem we have in trying to think about and think through something that invariably seems to resist our paltry efforts. Trump and all that the name now represents, has amplified this resistance to thinking. So we go round in circles and in so doing forget our original starting point. IN which case the image is not of a circle but a spiral or some such so as we move we end up somewhere that seems a long way from our starting point.
The other day I wanted to name this sense of resolute difficulty and resistance to any conclusion. I thought of a void. That somewhere in our social imagining there seemed to be a void that also could be posited as something, symbolically, that seemed to reside in our democratic society. And now I remember the French political theorist Claude Lefort. He does not use the word void, but something linked. For him the centre is empty. He writes in the 'Logic of Totalitarianism' about democracy as follows:
".....power emanates from the people; on the other hand, it is the power of nobody." And he writes, "If the place of power appears...as really empty, then those who exercise it are perceived as mere ordinary individuals..."
This is society which lacks at its centre, absolute power and authority or ground. In which case there is a void that is both the strength of democracy and weakness.

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Pattern seeking

For the last few months all discussions between Ron and Ken have not surprisingly centred on Trump. Yesterday our conversation moved in a slightly different direction.
Is chaos the absence of a pattern? Or is chaos the absence of an observed pattern? For some Trump represents chaos, but what if the chaos is intentional? In which case chaos here hides something. What it has to hide is a pattern. That's to say something has been thought out here, not just on the surface but, so to speak, underneath as well.
So we intend to seek the pattern(s) in what appears to be our chaotic world, at the moment, symbolised by Trump.
If we consider Trump as not just a man-child fool; if we consider that he like anyone else is controlled by both his unconscious and outside forces then we can begin to look for connections. If we look at what he does rather than ponder what he says then a pattern emerges. We can begin to join the many dots. To begin with, what he has said can be seen as a distraction, both during the election campaign and subsequently.
A distraction against his political naiveté, his diminished place in the Washington community, and his subservience to the coal and oil lobby which prompted his withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
Maybe, but maybe not. The pattern that can be discerned in his various pronouncements may be perceived as the truth according to him.   It possibly is the media class that is distracted. They don't take seriously enough the network, the crisscrosses between the right wing gun and fossil fuel lobbies on the one hand, and the out of work men in the rust belt towns, the working class families that feel disenfranchised and diminished by poor health and poverty on the other.     It is not hard to imagine how this latter disparate grouping might construct a fantasy of a 'strong man' who will express for them their anger and resentment and direct it at the very groups they mistrust, the East Coast elites and Washington.    In which case, the constant deprecation of Trump in the media only serves to strengthen the disconnect between the middle class intellectual elite media culture and this large disparate group which believes it lacks any representation except that offered by the angry father figure; someone like Trump.
But is this the pattern we are seeking?
It is of course possible to regard the daily articles on the Trump regime, Brexit and so on as distractions. That it is the distraction which is part of a pattern, that obfuscates and takes attention away from something else. The something else is the breakdown or collapse of neo-liberalism.  There is no side in the present political firmament that is able to deal with this.

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