by Christopher Hall
“In 2025, during an event to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute to the crowd.” This is a sentence which, circa 2005, would have made for a rather overblown introduction for a YA dystopian novel. But here we are, and it did happen. It did happen – right? No, calling this a Nazi salute was leftist cancel culture in action. No, Elon is just very socially awkward and/or autistic. No, even the Anti-Defamation League says it wasn’t a Nazi salute. In many corners of the media, the message was simple: don’t believe your lying eyes.
What is inescapable is the sense of the ludicrous – you either think it’s ludicrous that we’re debating at all what was clearly a fascist gesture, or that there are people who think so, because it clearly wasn’t. The interpretational gambits being played here are both nettlesome and exhausting. And it isn’t solved by simply dismissing Musk as a troll. The strange loop of trolling, where we’re moving forward but we somehow end up at the beginning, usually involves the question of intention, always daring you to think both that he really means it and that it’s all a joke. And so maybe Musk’s gesture was innocent and maybe it wasn’t – but that’s all part of the troll. How can you take such a thing so seriously? (How can you not?) An arm raised at roughly a 45 degree angle – that’s what upsets you? (It’s literal Nazism, so of course it does!) But his hand was raised at a slightly higher angle – isn’t that just a wave? (Oh, stop bothering me and go read your Trump Bible.) It may be that Kekistan is long past its expiration date (the half-life of memes being pretty short), but the spirit remains intact and present. Trolling is a language game, and you lose if you react to it at all.
Trolling is also, as is frequently said, an art, and as perverse as it may sound, I want to look for a moment at The Gesture as a work of performance art.
Both art and criticism can, as Rita Felski notes, “demystify, destabilize, denaturalise.” We associate this act of critique with method in the humanities as both art and criticism seek to uncover what is hidden, to “interrogate” and “problematize” the literal world of social reality. But what happens when the problematizing is being conducted in bad faith? As if he had duct taped a banana to a wall in an art gallery, look here, says Musk, The Gesture is a just a gesture. It only means what you invest in it. The uncovering is meant to reveal that the symbol is meaningless and thus harmless.
The Gesture, and the reaction to it, are reminders that critique can serve both the purposes of clarity and obfuscation. What we are seeing here is what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion, which seeks for meanings which a “surface” reading cannot find and which may even lie outside the bounds of the author’s intention. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were the masters of this form of interpretation, always finding behind every text they studied, whether it be the economy, the mind, or religion, the hidden, “real” structure. The use of suspicion in literary studies has often seemed absurd overdetermination to outsiders (sometimes “the curtains are blue” means that the author wishes to covey the idea of blue curtains and nothing else), and there is also surely a point where this suspicion becomes good old American paranoia in academic form. But as we examine this mode of interpretation, it must be remembered that suspicion doesn’t necessarily lift the shroud – it sometimes spreads it. To this we may add a moral dimension. In literary study, suspicion is most often used to find the subtexts of oppression, but to the degree that suspicion is merely doubt, we can also suspect our way into thinking that something which is obviously oppressive on its surface ought to be subject to some other level of interpretation. If the right is indeed adopting some of the modes of postmodern thinking about truth and meaning, the attempt to tell us that Musk wasn’t doing what he was doing seems consonant with that.
Part of the tragedy of the current moment is how perilous doubt seems. In the past few years I have often called to mind Judge Danforth’s words in The Crucible:
This is a sharp time, now, a precise time – we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it.
Precise times are dangerous times. The banishment of doubt makes for a short road to either the gibbet or the Congressional committee, depending on the timeframe. But uncertainty when the worst men are acting with both certainty and passionate intensity is likewise not appealing. There must be some other route.
Felski also notes that art can “recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception.” In outlining the hermeneutics of suspicion, Ricoeur also presents a countermovement, called the hermeneutics of faith. Where suspicion seeks to uncover, faith seeks to restore, to see the meaning plainly revealed and to reckon with it without interrogation. And, in the face of an entire administration where katagelasticism has become policy, we could do with a bit of restoration. Trolling empties out symbols, and mocks the desire to place meaning in them. Symbols are arbitrary, and there is nothing about placing a set of perpendicular lines together so that they form a swastika which is inherently evil. The bottom of suspicion may be to find there is no such thing as meaning at all; perhaps all critique is a critique of meaning itself. When 4chan claimed the “thumbs up” sign as a symbol of white power, the intent was at least in part to mock the notion of symbolisation itself. The symbols of evil need to be emptied out, so that we may be made comfortable with them again. Nihilism is a brief stop on the road to terror. First comes irony, then dark sincerity.
Perhaps there was a crucial subtext to The Gesture. Perhaps Musk intended something else; but his intentions are, in the end, not entirely relevant. The text was plain to see, and the context is inescapable. It was, literally, just an arm upraised at an angle. But attempting to negate the gesture is half the point. Authoritarianism, whatever form it continues to take in 21st century America and the world at large, will adopt the old symbols of the eldest human impulse – to dominate one another – just as they will create new ones. The only reasonable response is to recognise our surroundings, and this act of recognition is fundamentally an act of restoration – see the symbols for what they are, see what is happening for what it is. And this is also an act of recontextualization – a man with his arm raised, wielding great economic and political power, in this place and this moment. This can, obviously, take us down the road to alarmism; but the pull of denialism – It Can’t Happen Here – is likewise strong. American news is supremely enervating, but I am trying to maintain the modes of recognition which, if I refuse them, will lead to willful blindness. It not an act of certainty, but rather an act of faith, and one that is difficult. But in dangerous moments, keeping faith may be all we have.
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