Glenn Beck's Scatological Imagination

Although Ebola has effectively receded from the American Terror Consciousness©, after cleaning out some old files on my computer this week I was reminded of the media tactics employed last year when the virus ostensibly threatened to spread to the United States. I remember witnessing one of the most fascinating exhibitions of this sort on Glenn Beck's program on The Blaze, to which a folder of screen shots entitled "Beck Feces" attests to both the bizarre nature of this particular display and my remaining fascination.

In a show that aired on October 15, 2014, Beck and his Blaze team members attempted to reveal apparent inadequacies in the CDC's protective protocol for doctors treating patients with full-blown ebola, and thus prove how easily ebola will spread internationally. But what this argument really provided was a flimsy pretext which allowed the host and his fellow Blazers with an opportunity to engage in one of the most obscenely regressive spectacles I have witnessed on cable television. To demonstrate the problems with the CDC's protective measures, Beck dresses in a smock and face mask while his helpers shower him in mixture of spaghetti and chocolate in attempt to stimulate the "projective vomiting and explosive diarrhea" that characterized the clinical conditions in Nigeria and other disease-stricken locations.

What I find most interesting about this performance is, first, its demonstration of the desire of Beck (and the far Right more generally) to return to a utopian, pre-Oedipal state before the law-of-the-father (participation in the symbolic economy) and its attendant social prohibitions (control of bodily fluids), which prohibit such aberrant and infantile behavior. While before the entrance into language, the subject participates in a fluid symbiosis with the mother in which the subject-object "cut" has not yet occurred, after the initiation into discourse, the subject must abandon this fluidity to enter the phallic symbolic economy, with its emphasis on the division between subject and object and the discrete, unitary (non-fluid) structure of language. 

Thus from this analysis, the far Right's resistance to discourse--as exhibited on such media outlets Fox News and The Blaze--emerges not simply as some superficial ideological manipulation by Murdoch and cronies, but as a deep-seated infantile desire to return to a pre-discursive, maternal intersubjective space in which the pressures of language and phallic law do not exist. This desire is certainly evinced in political discourse by the frequent invocation of the Edenic years of the 50s or the Reagan long 80s.

The second aspect I find fascinating by this display is its all too obvious relationship to a preceding transgressive visual culture of both performance art and popular images of torture. To the first point, Beck's performance is reminiscent of a salient tradition in Western performance art which explores the political body by employing paint, bodily fluids, and animal blood. The forerunner for this tradition is of course the Viennese Actionists. In ritualistic displays of extreme bodily states (often involving the self-laceration), artists of this movement (including Otto Mühl, Günter Brus, and Hermann Nitsch) explored the permeable boundaries of the body and the inter-corporeal relationship between multiple members of an artistic project. Below are images from performances by Mühl and Nitsch, respectively.

This second image, from Nitsch's "Orgies Mysteries Theater," brings me to my second point--the relationship between Beck's scatalogical explorations and images of torture. What I have in mind here is particularly those images that emerged during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that came to light in 2003. Below is an infamous picture of DETAINEE-25, a prisoner who had been known to suffer from mental disabilities, and appears here covered in mud and feces.

What the homologies between these images (particularly that between Beck and DETAINEE-25) suggest is that rather than being a humorous diversion and thus an anomaly, Beck's performance last year actually reveals the law of the Right-wing American psyche. Instead of being "isolated" incidents, the rituals on Beck's program and those staged at Abu Ghraib actually constitute the fundamental iterative performances that reveal, in a horrifying visual display, the regression and infantilization (the need for "good guys and bad guys") that actually underpins the desires of the radical American Right. Thus, while we typically associate American conservatism with hyper-masculinity, this performance of masculinity is better understood as a supplement or mask to hide the primordial desire to return to a maternal symbiosis.