ABSTRACT
The semantic cluster that informs the analysis is that of community, immunity, and contagion – particularly contagion of a viral sort, with the virus as an agent that not only sickens but transforms its host at the genetic level in order to replicate itself. Contagion encodes the contradiction between a "received consciousness" that elevates total self-sufficiency through immunitary "ownership," on one hand, and the "lived experience" of that ownership in its necessarily indebted and precarious nature, as well as the aforementioned costs and risks to existential security. Donald J. Trump's immunitary aura appeals to a cultural imaginary in which the "crisis of the proper" is configured in terms of a global, pervasive and inescapable contagion. The "resonance machine" depends for its effectiveness less on any discursive consistency than on a synthesis of frequencies – political, ideological, symbolic, affective – that combine the cognitive, the aesthetic, the experiential, and the discursive in a plausible, common-sense rendering of the known social world.
