“if the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone…” then what? i guess we’re stuck with bad politics? or anyways, that’s how gramsci would begin a tractate with his outdated but apparently predictive pen. well, zupančič is in many ways a gramscian about the current state of american politics, partially due to the way that she reverts towards a european history as a history that at the very least retained a status quo capable of understanding the movement of history and its contradictions as a stage of progress for civil society rather than a weapon against it.

this central paradox seems tough for a lot of yugoslavian-raised citizens (not people, specifically citizens, who were integrated into the institutional sublayer of balkan society), who see the current crudeness in politics as a decisive breaking point rather than an organic manifestation of media environments (the way the gen z sees it), not just due to the state they were raised in but due to the way in which capital itself reifies our desires and haunts them back with their failed products (a recurring motif in fisher’s ghosts of my life). if media analysts agree on one thing, it’s that trump’s image is a successful reincarnation of a dispossessed drive.

alenka’s article gives us three hinges we can look at her theory through: her extremely conceptually underdeveloped theory of media reality in this very article (nightmares, unrealities, lacanian subversions) that is better seen through emily martin’s writings on unreality, gramsci’s own short thoughts about the interregnum in “state and civil society” (page 271 in the prison notebooks), and the whole trump-related “practical example” zupančič uses, which can be investigated through t.j. clark’s analysis of trump as a figure in the london review of books. the basic idea is concerning clark vs gramsci vs zupančič on the interregnum vs regnum, what constitutes it, and what it means for history. here we go:

clark says the interregnum can be located in the spectacle — “creature and master, emanation and accelerant. he is the image … we manufacture him” — zupančič says it’s in the media image as well, although she claims that this happens through political interests and a centrally subverted (meaning, chaotic and unpredictable) narrative rather than in symbolic politics “lacking any symbolic frame”, whereas gramsci says it’s in the distinction between the civil vs the political government, partially because in his time, the status quo was a question of the blockage of an otherwise natural proletarization since the status quo still was felt as produced by the political rather than civil sphere — “the non-existence of viscous parasitic sedimentations left behind by past phases of history has allowed industry and commerce to develop on a sound basis” — where ideology (the war of position) was a sub-product of developing contradictions rather than a bourgeois artifact for entertainment (as later appeared in barthes).

this war of position is one where the force of the state itself works in the interests of commerce, empire, monopolies of violence, the basic conditions under which labour and trade occur, and various other things. zupančič and clark both take this gramscian imperative as intrinsically true today, even if this is a questionable decision, given that they understand that media spectacle has entirely changed the goals of which resources even should be attained at all. gramsci himself would ask on page 214 “does there exist, in any given country, a widespread social stratum whose economic life and political self-assertion (is a very important element in this classes) bureaucratic career?”

from this he derives the idea that a civil stratum can literally become the reserve coercive apparatus of the ruling class: its “military” character can become consciously cultivated through “private” associations, linked to the general staff, which can be mobilized when necessary. essentially, the will of the ruling class becomes a reflection of the intentions of this bureaucratic substratum only in the instances that the substratum behaves in a way that links with the ruling classes interests. this idea mimics a type of defeatism and intensification of the definition of resisting power and fascist symbolic intensification present in the frankfurt school, the type of associative thought complex that begins to grow its understanding of what culture is to be resisted. but more than that, it can also subtly undermine gramscis own division between the civil and political.

gramsci himself already thought they overlapped, but what he didnt think is that the civil would become the political, and the political would either be relegated to matters that become fully “politically inaccessible” — meaning understood as inevitable, self-actualizing, bureaucratically immanent and so on — which is what clark believes will happen to america when the china-russia allyship takes over the global world order: “the chinese century will come in along its belts and roads at dreadful slow-motion speed, swallowing up the nike slum worlds with an indifference for human suffering that will make nafta and cop29 seem like acts of philanthropy.” clearly, for clark at the very least, china remains entirely in control of the government’s occupation by a primarily political society.

this divide almost makes it seem as if clark thinks that the civil society itself is integrated as cultural entertainment for a china who believes in political force so much that a spectacle doesn’t need to exist, and that this spectacle occurs in the west because of the rising tensions of historical classes who have very little power to control actual governmental decision making. this idea is reflected in popular sentiment along with the idea that america’s aristocracy today no longer has a proper servitudal class, that management now essentially has no hierarchical or “superior” government, that all questions of government become questions of sustenance when the new global order has something to say about it, so that europe’s idea of democracy (the main thing zupančič seems to believe is dissolving “status quo reality”) naturally needs to be sidelined and told off by american elites.

zupančič claims that the old is coming back historically (meaning, the pre-subverted political classes that have been ideologically emptied of significance still remain in power, but this time they defeat the status quo to reintegrate their own even more shamelessly evil political interests), whereas gramsci says the new (ideology) wont be able to pass through the governmental layer of the old in europe (since in the middle ages, corporations allowed it to pass through corporate history whereas in america ideology is still currently being shaped, so that it could).

gramsci claims that it is an open question whether the u.s can build its own ideological foundations to actually allow for the existence of an integrative rather than a monotonic state complex, even if he believes there is a bourgeois blockage that requires passive revolution, he says “the new cannot be born”, yet still poses an open question: “whether americanism can constitute an historical ‘epoch’”. clark says that trump himself is actually the new in a sense (his main thesis being that hes the first politician to subsume the civil classes frustrations as a vessel for them, or to grow into the image of themselves, so that his oligarchical position is for the first time in history autocratic in so far as he is charismatic rather than the other way around, even if he fundamentally believes he is apolitical.

in “a brief guide to the trump and spectacle”, clark basically says that trump’s republicanism is really because hes apolitical (the real underlying government may not exist, but a fragmented series of civil entities do politics for the american state because what is allowed to be political is still corporate, again, because the us doesn’t actually have a political state yet. this confirms that the post-gramscian reading of hegemony is one that so really clark is exactly opposed to zupančič because she thinks that civility will turn into a spectacular economy that feeds or protects against political orders that overdetermine or create chaos, whereas clark thinks empire will return to crush the cynicism that is currently holding the west together, through a slow economic process that will disintegrate the spectacle mostly through political society.

also subsumption exists because trump is a part of the aristocracy, subsumption doesnt suggest transformation it suggests reintegration. that’s why clark simultaneously calls trump genuinely new and not the new order. he calls him an “early warning signal,” a “phenomenon of transition, only half adjusted to emerging reality.” trump is new as a form of political mediation. but what he protects is extraordinarily old: empire, inequality, the “deep economy.” and what is trump really reintegrating, or what is he making in the image of? well, categorically, clark gives us a number of basic examples that we can systematize as follows:

1. the myth in self-surveillance — where the american public watches trump understand their memetic drive, re-affirm their drive, and ultimately squash their ability to believe that they control how they are watching him — rather than the government being controlled by a spectator class that subtly re-shapes its possibilities — which supplies a backwards libidinality by allowing the big father to perform both humiliating displays of post-force power, and re-integrating this back towards libidinal control
2. residual sociality — which is where clark argues that rallies still occur around trump and the political force of the crowd hasnt disappeared due to platform media but simply has been subsumed by trump’s spectacle and turned into an additional image
3. the myth in cynic repression — “the helsinki summit – how could you have forgotten? – produced zero results on all the ‘issues’ it was supposed to confront” says clark. and these supposed issues are essentially libidinally postponed by a public that enjoys that trump is aware they exist yet is performing — that the government itself is performing anti-governmental rhetoric so that it can satisfy a post-political vision even with obviously political consequences
4. desublimation — “i want subservience, because i’ve never had it, or had enough of it. i want you to grovel, because that’s what my voters want” clark mocks trump. yet, what is trump supposed to be sublimating? apart from the fact that he crushes symbolic class antagonism by reinstating political — nearly monarchical — antagonism, he avoids and entirely abolishes our tendency to, as clark says, “relax for a moment and signal that really, ultimately, we (we members of the political class) don’t mean it, we’re in this together.” which isn’t apolitical or counter-political so much as it is extra-political, in the sense that it reshapes a sovereign center around the idea of governmentality, which is what an asset economy requires, an idea of security that posits itself as primary over the civil society
5. the myth in reactionary politics — the biggest one, one that could ideally be divided in three parts: a) subsumption, b) scapegoating and c) history. subsumption has to do with displaced images, an idea already dealt with in this review, whereas scapegoating has to do with the natural element of contemporary politics, the constant hyper-object centered media discourse that the right fuels by attaching itself paranoically to social and cultural events and creating pointless downstream discourse away from material factors. lost status is of course the classic element of conservatism, the idea that there was a powerful state in the past that lost its own power to a global agenda (one that clark himself seems to, not necessarily believe in, but understand as the central narrative in this discourse itself)

yet, one feature not well synthesized by clark is that trump’s state already became occupied by an executive power (the american industrial-military-technological complex, funded by billionaires) that did reshape the material factors of the nation by essentially removing the power of the civil society (known in the united states as the federal state) directly. this is partially because of the time gap between his article written in early 2025 and the advancements that have occurred since summer of 2026.

as is well known, about three hundred thousand federal employees were essentially kicked out of their jobs, and an additional eight thousand policy influencing career positions. furthermore, the trump admin sought presidential supervision over independent agencies, reconciliated tax provisions for border barriers and spent billions on personnel and military, and successfully attempted to temporarily bypass the law around the suggestion of implementing an additional sixty tariffs.

of course, by the time the tariffs rolled in, clark had to write a second short post of five hundred words, fully in trump’s voice, just making sure we understood that he understands that the spectacle can be political, even if he never writes on why (and in his words even in the first article, we apparently already know why, so no material analysis really needed): “so you thought the spectacle was just smoke and mirrors? is that why you’re shocked? you didn’t think I would do anything? how can I have allowed something as boring as a tariff war to take over your screens” — a brilliant analysis, clearly.

and what does zupančič have to say on this? well, nothing really, because for her american politics is already a spectacularized distraction, except she’s oriented around what we’re supposed to do about it, or how we can form any sort of retributive inner bubble to shield ourselves from an unreality. speaking of unreality, in the sum journal, emily martin helps us understand what zupančič would have meant by nightmare, if anyone except lacan actually explained that concept for her:

perhaps the simplest way to put it is this: in an age of algorithms and generative artificial intelligence, we are undergoing nothing less than a close encounter, a mass abduction conducted through the circuitry of screens, an initiation into an order of reality that is not our own and was never meant for us. it is here, in the prehensive encounters with the algorithmic media technologies that seemingly dictate our realities, that an ages-old ufo protocol persists, reconfigured.

yet, to speak about unreality first requires us to isolate what is political in zupančič, so that the political can be re-understood through the field of the symbolic, even if not through lacan himself (reasons being — his illusive and absent nature from her own article). zupančič says: “we know that the system is flawed and has not always functioned, but the very existence of international law as the supreme instance, and the maintenance of the appearance of its functioning, have been crucial for the so-called global world order.” yet, the crucial question is, what is international order protecting in its own sovereignty, when the desublimation that clark notices in trump is actually present in every global state or institution? the answer cannot just be that it’s caused by “the collapse of the world order based on the idea of international law as existing beyond and above individual states and their interests,” as zupančič says it is.

rather, far more deliberately, we can even burrow and vulgarize a laruellian concept or two here, or rather, mess with their meanings: determined-in-the-last-instance and auto-position. in adkins, auto-position is the “highest formal act of philosophical decision through which philosophical faith in the real allows it to be posited as the real in a hallucinatory way”. this is to say, in less schizo words, that every philosophical aesthetic language or syntactical conceptual grammar allows itself to believe the concepts it posits correspond to a transcendental inquiry into the terms themselves as if they actually announced a real philosophical position rather than the manifestation of a false latent drive through language, so to say. this isnt exactly how laruelle would have it, but close enough to what we need.

so then in our context, does the state, and more totally, the entire international order, auto-position its form of sovereignty, or determine it in its own last instance? you may say, following zupančič, that rubio wants europe to stop auto-positioning itself. or you may say, of course the american ideology, even if according to gramsci does not yet have a real ideological core since it remains historically underdetermined, still cannot be said to be self-determining precisely because its form of sovereignty cannot suddenly be reduced to an aristocratic simulacrum that quite simply does not depend on foreign interest or geopolitical development to change its understanding of its own governmental principles. whatever the case may be, it is absurd for zupančič to state that “what is coming to an end is not simply a particular geopolitical arrangement but the symbolic coordinates that made that arrangement appear natural and self-evident.”

if it is now evident that back then it wasn’t evident but appeared natural, then isn’t the western-international order (the nato-sphere) clearly selling the status quo-as-evidention? is it not producing the artifact of global policy as a part of it’s market force? because if it suddenly buys back its rights to go from auto-positioning itself to determining itself in its last instance, then it isnt so much that its geopolitical tactic changed due to foreign developments, but that it’s entire strategy has been to fabricate a simulacrum under which a global order existed. did a global order exist, or did a nightmare already exist that carried with it a latent global order, just for better positioning?

when rubio tells europe that it needs to change its geopolitical strategy, that isn’t exactly a real belief in political contradiction or development, but the same exact spectacular flooding that markets create. rubio, essentially posteriori, invents a geopolitical divide by finding-in-the-last-instance a disagreement with europe. of course, this disagreement is bureaucratic and material before it is symbolic or cultural, but what is crucial here is that the ability to recognize that this is the case is only ever a spectacle to begin with, a headline, the ability to discern, to distinguish forces within a political field.

apart from the clear gramscianism that zupančič presents in this text (even if at times, far more lucid about our political reality than clark), she does allow us some conceptual leeway too, a distinction between nightmares-dreams and realities-chaocities. essentially, zupančič already partially understands the critique of sublimation and position we just went through, and it actually mimics gramsci’s “war on position”, which becomes a meta-territorial claim.

but zupančič relegates this to the symbolic instead of the political sphere, she calls it “no outside”, or in other terms, the nightmare is the only reality available and the problem becomes which part of this contradictory reality one invests in. “the more pertinent question is whether a “we” can emerge from a shared practical relation to an impossibility.” zupančič says this of course, because, reality is only defined in starkhood to the ability of “temporarily escaping into a more intense yet less consequential world that manages but also overcomes this one, yet becomes superior to this one” or something along those lines.

the beginning of martin’s article actually begins with a shirley quote: “no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”. martin ends the article with “the surface is enough. the screen, the image, the text. the surface is the dream.”, mimicking a zupančič idea — “in this sense, it would be possible to say that it is precisely in a nightmare that we are fully awake, as awake as it gets.” the central contradiction, stated basically nowhere in all four of the works covered, is how come a sphere that increasingly seems detached, seems both relevant to our attachments, yet detached from the efforts that can produce it. or in other terms, that the more virtual systems get, the more they seem to impact the way we make sense of something, our responsibility in making sense of it, and the way in which it makes sense of the world for us. or that, as troubles increase, their direct individual relevance decreases, a paradox not just of modernity but more specifically of genocide, or characteristic of political force in general.

the biggest problems in zupančič’s article are that she never defines monsterhood, or dreamhood, more than she tries to salvage a common participator in all of them so as to vanquish the status quo machine from having any obligations to platformic modernity, along with the fact that the gramscianism diverts responsibility away from defining the material limits of force, or the limits of desire inside of the virtual, which can only ever remain separated under a lacanian lense. at the same time, integral reality (the real baudrillardian locus behind the hyper-reality she keeps mentioning — the overly real absolute experience of the world, the ever-increasing synthesis) never actually makes a debut in her article, because it is somewhere stuck in between geopolitics and desire