An incredible haul of human muttering

An “author’s note” at the end of Don DeLillo’s Libra reads: “Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I’ve altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.”

It remains to be seen if the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, comes to constitute an unresolved event of this sort, but it doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps Libra, which is premised on the idea that Oswald was supposed to miss, would never have been conceived if that was actually what had occurred. American culture may have already forgotten Oswald’s name, much the way it has forgotten other failed assassins.

It seems like an exaggeration to say it, but right now I couldn’t tell you the name of the person who shot at Trump without looking it up. I don’t know whether this should be attributed to my idiosyncratic indifference, to more responsible practices on the part of the news media not to fulfill the desires of publicity-seeking murderers, or to a general sense that it wasn’t an event for which the details are especially important. An image, already been declared iconic was distilled from the afternoon’s proceedings — including by Trump himself, who pointed out that “usually you have to die to have an iconic picture” — and that seems to have plumbed the depths of most people’s curiosity. (To wit: Here’s a Vox explainer about it.)

As Nathan Jurgenson pointed out, the “iconic fist-pump” perfectly exemplifies the sort of image he described before as a “deep real” — accepted as genuine despite looking staged, despite looking like what you might expect an image generator to make. Perhaps there are enough cameras on everything that the most ideologically resonant and, in a sense, the most deeply expected image of an incident can always be extracted. The narrative is already pre-established and the photos are selected accordingly, and then we proceed as if the singularity of the images are driving the story, telling us truths. I was in Lake George when the shooting happened and I half-expected to see the “fist-pump” image for sale on a T-shirt, right next to the Hawk Tuah shirts that are available there. I found out what had happened because the endless loop of news coverage was playing silently on one of the TVs at a bar. The patrons were paying as little attention to it as to a documentary about the Yankees that played on several of the other TVs. It was sad what happened to Thurman Munson.

Several people in my various social-media feeds linked to an essay that DeLillo wrote for Rolling Stone in 1983: “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Not a fair comparison, but while I didn’t make it to the end of any news story about Trump in Butler, I read this 8,000-word piece straight through on my phone. Trump’s would-be assassin is reminiscent of how DeLillo describes Arthur Bremer, who shot George Wallace at a campaign event. And DeLillo’s aside about Hinckley’s attempt on Ronald Reagan seemed like it could have been written about the attempt on Trump:

This is a self-referring event. The man who performs the act comments on it at the same time. He knows in advance what our reaction will be. This knowledge and this reaction mysteriously find their way into the act itself. Hinckley makes us feel a particular disgust because he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his moment of violence. His own sense of the crime is based on what he knows the world will say about it. It is a secondhand act, derivative, borrowed, used.

In Hinckley and the media, we find two forces that recognize their affinity at once. Made for each other, even in the way they interpret their actions without reference to the clear and terrible result. In a year-end issue of Life, we find a double-page layout of more than thirty film frames documenting the Reagan shooting, with captions and a small block of print. In the copy we learn that the photographer had been present at other attempts on public figures, that he knew about gunmen walking out of crowds, that he approached the president’s limousine from the street to get a good vantage point — and that, happily, his “prescience and experience paid off.” A photo opportunity. As Hinckley started shooting, the photographer “shot back.” The acts are made to sound like similar responses to an overstimulating environment. The strips of film show sprawled bodies, crouched and bleeding men. Are we meant to congratulate them for being part of the photographic payoff?

Hinckley “lived in the stale air of the media,” DeLillo writes; he was “media-poisoned.” Was that once an unusual condition? That sort of main-character syndrome is commonplace, maybe even normative. The responsibility for any “photographic payoff” is always distributed among the actors, the photographers, and the audience, but those roles are more difficult to differentiate when everyone is used to having a camera on hand at all times, when the media’s “stale air” is our own exhalation.

DeLillo details how the ensuing speculation about the JFK assassination only deepened the mysteries surrounding it, clarifying nothing and explaining nothing. It served as the stable factual center that organized all kinds of forays through the mass of entangled empirical information that now could purposefully be gathered and no doubt is still being gathered. He argues that the assassination served as “a natural disaster in the heartland of the real, the comprehensible, the plausible.” It unraveled “the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity, a world totally modern in the way it shades into the century’s ‘emptiest’ literature, the study of what is uncertain and unresolved in our lives, the literature of estrangement and silence.”

It’s tempting to argue the opposite about the attempt on Trump, that it occurred among a population who had no expectation of a shared or coherent reality and were routinely inundated with so much media content that their conscious experience was little more than a unceasing series of ambiguous provocations, apparently random yet also purportedly targeted. Everyone is confronted or engaged in some sort of mild to intense conspiracy theorizing every time they glance at a screen.

“Is all this simply what happens when we expose the most ordinary life to relentless scrutiny, follow each friend, relative, acquaintance into his own roomful of shadows, keep following, keep connecting?” DeLillo asks about the accumulating mysteries of Lee Harvey Oswald, but now it seems more like a question for Mark Zuckerberg, or an ad-tech sales rep. Keep following, keep connecting — but as ends in themselves, not as means to coming to a richer understanding of some occurrence; following and connecting are in a sense the only things that can happen, the only things that matter for the machinery’s operation.

DeLillo’s description of Oswald as “a secret design worked out by men who will never surface – a procedural diagram, a course in fabricated biography” — seems like it could apply to any of us now, even to our own sense of ourselves: I know myself as something I monitor, a series of documents and data points, of traces in networks, more or less “scripted out of doctored photos, tourist cards, change-of-address cards, mail-order forms, visa applications, altered signatures, pseudonyms.” Everyone has disavowal routines and evasive countermeasures to cope with constant reidentification and reinscription, with being algorithmically premeditated — acting “as his own double,” as DeLillo writes of Oswald. “We all go underground to some extent. In an era of the massive codification and storage of data, we are all keepers and yielders of secrets.” Is this what keeps most people from becoming Hinckley?

The world is already understood as an infinite array of data, as information being continually produced and collected in the persistent but self-cancelling hope that something could happen sometime that would make it all meaningful, bring it all to account, but since this implosive event can never occur, or at any rate there could be no vantage from which to assess it, the anxiety of data collection only grows stronger and more insistent: Everything that is captured and processed only seems to emphasize the importance of what hasn’t been pinned down yet — more surveillance! More data! Yet every event, no matter how minor, ripples the networks of networks in fractal patterns that seem like they must be significant, if we keep chasing after them.

The communication network infrastructure connects the world; not the experiences it transmits and prompts us to “share.” The dramatic event is superfluous; we don’t need it to remind us of how we all are caught up in the same web, integrated into the same machinery. “Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies,” DeLillo writes. “Loose ends, dead ends, small mysteries of time and space.” But events aren’t powerful in that way anymore. Rather than a dramatic event suddenly driving the impulse to uncover inconsistencies and invent connections and weave together inferences and links so that we ultimately need everything to explain everything else, there is technology now being imposed on us everywhere that does this automatically, whose entire functionality is premised entirely on relentlessly forcing disparate datapoints into a totality.

No event can trigger a sense that the world makes no sense; instead every event confirms the rickety functioning of the various sense-making machines that sound the algorithmic harmonies and spew out the expected images, narratives, and takes, quickly mapping out the vectors through the established positions in the multidimensional space where there are no mysteries, only probabilities; the space that has replaced “reality” while resolving nothing and unifying nothing. Despair sets in not because of an incident that reveals the world as chaotic and meaningless but because no incident can hope to disrupt the mechanisms now in place to process all experience into media-fed pabulum. “When experience is powerless, all things are the same,” DeLillo writes, a proposition that cries out for chiasmus: When all things are made the same, we know our powerlessness in advance.