Politics in the era of total visibility: conjunctural observations from the episode The Waldo Moment - of Black Mirror

Abstract

This paper brings an aesthetic-political essay that aims to articulate philosophical categories that allow correlating Black Mirror series’ episode The Waldo Moment with contemporary world political conjuncture, especially taking the case of Donald Trump as a paradigm. In this regard, Waldo’s entry into the scene is taken as a sign that indicates, at the same time and in contradiction, the integral positivization of spectacle and anti-systemic revolt. From Vladimir Safatle’s reading of cynicism, this paper seeks to understand a discourse that distorts the difference between constative and performative and affirms itself through brutal humor, allowing the entry of elements that were previously forbidden into public sphere. Finally, it makes a structural discourse analysis of the oppositions that feed “cultural wars” from total visibility that social networks produce, dissolving the difference between public and private.