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Paper short abstract

This talk analyzes the 2025 White House publication of an ASMR video. It poses it as announcing the intensification of fascist, racist and colonial violence in the USA. The talk shows how its political meaning cannot be conceived without taking into account its formal aesthetics.

Paper long abstract

In early February 2025, The White House, probably one of the most powerful institutions on Earth, published an ASMR-style video of deportation. Taking place a month after Donald Trump’s second inauguration as President of the United States, this video was part of a massive communication campaign announcing mass deportations of migrants. Since then, the Trump administration has unleashed thousands of newly-hired ICE agents on communities all over the US territory and claims that nearly 3 million of those “illegal aliens” have left the country, of which almost 700 000 would have been so by force. In this talk, I intend to analyze the ASMR video as a preparation to the 2025 intensification of fascist, racist and colonial violence in the US. To do so, I will rely on online research undertaken in the months after the publication of the video. I have analyzed discourse of people self-identifying as right-wing and as Trump supporters regarding this White House video. I will show that even if that visual material has generated uneasiness amongst far-right supporters, this does not concern the display of suffering. Rather, it has to do with its formal aesthetics. Relying on Walter Benjamin’s thought, I will argue that, by subverting the care economy of ASMR, the video implies a form of digital discursivity that, paradoxically, dehumanizes through excessive visibility. The talk will put forward that is that formal violence that is deemed unacceptable by far-right supporters.