Trump’s crusade against PC played a key role in his political rhetoric and resonated well among his supporters, yet his notion of PC differed greatly in meaning from earlier uses of the term and was used to denounce a much wider range of socio-political behaviors. Based on a systematic analysis of Trump’s use of this notion, I identified five main normative propositions organizing Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric. Viewed together, these propositions add up to a rehabilitation of White working-class culture but also (...) outline an emerging late-modern version of the authenticity ethic, whose power extends far beyond the working class. This ethic (as manifested in Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric) transforms the role of morality and the sacred in political drama and in symbolic struggles over social worth. Rather than presenting his commitment to moral values, ideals, and allegedly-universal rules, Trump used anti-PC rhetoric to expose and criticize the symbolic self-interests of others who speak on behalf of these values, rules, and ideals to claim superiority (and thus ironically mimicked the sociological critique of symbolic violence to legitimize bigotry). Yet, the sacred is not completely banished from political drama: authenticity as a principle of worth guiding moral evaluation and argumentation is revealed as a sacred in denial. The case of Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric thus allows theorizing the implications of the authenticity ethic for the dynamics of social struggles over recognized worth and for the role of ideals in the presentation of self in politics and beyond. (shrink)

The article discusses a set of emerging techno-social practices that transform interpersonal interactions into acts of production of valuable, durable objects such as SNS-posts and videos. These practices rely on (and enhance) a new attentiveness towards the world (including social interactions, communication and quasi-autotelic activities) as Bestand/resource, from which value may be extracted. The rise of these practices and modes of attention obviously relies on new production and dissemination of technological infrastructures, but it also relies on and contributes to the (...) evolution of hyperrational subjectivity, which is compatible with the demands of late-modern economies. Like corporations, ordinary people come to view leisure time interpersonal interactions as sites for the extraction of (often non-monetary) value through their objectification. The article demonstrates how the objectification and productivization of events remoulds both common everyday practices and extreme forms of criminality, all sharing a common cultural logic. (shrink)

Choice has played a key role in late-modern economy, society, culture and politics, but recently predictive algorithms are decentring choice and replacing many of its instantiations, offering an alternative way to match individuals with information, cultural goods, and consumer products – and to govern people. This article has two contributions: first, it contextualizes the decentring of choice within the history of capitalism, showing how it emerged once psychological and economics knowledge transformed the meaning of choice from an economic engine into (...) a problem (‘friction’ or ‘overload’). Second, it explores the wider significance and cultural-cum-political implications of this transformation. Algorithmic ‘individuation without choice’ challenges the role of choice in neoliberal subjectification. Choice is increasingly marginalized in everyday practice while retaining its role in justification (as predictions are construed as what actors would have chosen). As the decentring of choice expands from social media and consumption towards governance, it may pose a threat to democracy. (shrink)