Last Monday, US President Trump addressed Congress with the message "On the situation in the country" where he stated the following.
"As part of the development of the Armed Forces, the US is developing the most advanced missile defense system".
For Americans, it should sound optimistic — the most advanced missile defense system. But does this mean that Trump means creating an effective missile defense system? No. Otherwise, he'd have said so. But Trump didn't talk about the effectiveness of the missile defense system being developed with big money. He doesn't mention it because it's impossible in principle to create an effective missile defense system which can compete with Russian hypersonic rockets with a "mad fly" trajectory. They shouldn't delude themselves.
Then, Trump confirmed the US's withdrawal from the INF Treaty with Russia and added: "Perhaps, we'll manage to sign another agreement, with China and other countries joining it. Perhaps, we can't".
It's impossible to assess this statement in terms of common sense. We'll manage to sign, or perhaps, we can't. In any case, the US isn't negotiating arms limitation with either Russia or China. On the contrary, they're terminating previously signed contracts.
But on the other hand, Trump can be culturally decoded. The nature of his thinking, psychology, speech, tweets is metamodern. Metamodernism appeared in the last decade to replace postmodernism. If postmodernism says that there's no truth, one can do one thing or another, there's nothing concrete, just continuous irony and variability, then metamodernism is the fluctuation of sincerity. And the fluctuation is what matters here. Here's how the essence of metamodern culture is explained by the Dutch philosophers Vermeulen and Acker, who devised the term "metamodern".
"Metamodernism has no destination, it moves for the movement itself. It tries, despite the inevitable failure, endlessly seeking truth, which it never expects to find. If you forgive us for such a banal metaphor, metamodernism deliberately adopts a double message, like "carrot and a donkey". Like a donkey, it pursues a carrot that it'll never eat because the carrot is always out of reach. But due to the fact that it can't eat a carrot, it never ceases to pursue it".
That's clear. But in this case, metamodernism doesn't imply a result. Metamodern is fluctuations, or oscillations. The word "oscillations" has the same root as "oscilloscope", a term from physics, a synonym for fluctuations, which is also popular among metamodernists. And the meaning itself is in oscillations, but the sincere ones. They can be fluctuations between digital copies of oneself and the corporeality of the body, between the real and the virtual. This is the case for Trump. Then everything is clear.
And the modern world and modern technologies boost metamodernism. At the beginning of our century in America, for example, they invented hunting via the internet. Somewhere in Texas, there's a movable tripod with a camera and a loaded gun. Being in any place of the world, you can connect, and for decent money, hunt for game released in the field: a wild boar, deer, or roe deer. Sitting in your own kitchen or on the lawn, looking at your laptop, you take an animal at gunpoint and pull the trigger. Then, the horns, or the whole carcass, as you wish, will be sent to your home in the proper packaging. Why is it not metamodern? Animal defenders, humanists, and even uncultured hunters themselves spoke out against this method of remote murder.
But everyone is silent about military combat UAVs which are remotely controlled by people in exactly the same way, by virtual but living pilots — those who every day, come to work, sit down in an easy chair and, with breaks for coffee, kill people somewhere on other continents. Such is the modern metamodern-style war — in oscillations between the virtual and the real.
There are already several such bases in America. There are such bases in California and Texas, for example. There are such bases in Great Britain. On one of them in Lincolnshire; our colleagues from BBC even made a report once.
Metamodernism seems to be fun, but it also blunts fear. It blunts personal responsibility, but what's more important, it doesn't take you closer to the truth. It prevents one from reaching serious results in politics. In the case of Trump, it makes America and all of the mankind hostage to vibes. Perhaps that is why there are constant personnel changes in the White House. Not every person is able to live and resonate with Trump's oscillations.
For example, this is how prominent American journalist, Bob Woodward, describes the motives behind the resignation of one of the people closest to Trump, John Dowd, a lawyer, in his latest bestseller about life inside the White House.
"But in Trump, as a person and president, Dowd saw one tragic flaw. In all of those political squabbles, dodges, denials, endless tweets, violent attacks on fake news, outbursts of indignation, there was one main problem that Dowd knew, but couldn't pull himself to tell it to the president face to face. "You are a terrible liar".
However, we can also look at Trump and what's happening in the world from the lens of postmodernism. No one has canceled it yet, right? If so, then in postmodernism, context is more important than text. If so, no matter what Trump says, it doesn't change the context of his words. The world is full of weapons. Their speed and destructiveness are growing rapidly. But there aren't any negotiations on deterrence of the arms race. They aren't planned.
Maybe we should culturally march backward to the good old classics and start negotiations, saving everyone? Putin asked not to initiate them but to wait until our partners are ready. We're waiting.
