War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Elections are Democracy
We've all heard the story about the 1960 debates between the Presidential candidates and how those who listened on the radio thought that Nixon won, but those who watched on television thought that the much dreamier Kennedy had won.
This anecdote gets pressed into all kinds of ideological service. Nixon apologists use it. Critics of our culture's obsession with youth and beauty use it.
What's startling to me is the realization that I cannot remember (and can scarcely imagine) a time when debates had an autonomous reality. It was once the case that electoral campaigns were waged and the media recorded them. The reporters, cameramen, and, later, the tv crews used to follow the campaign. Literally. They were structurally secondary to the reality of the debates or stump speeches.
This relationship has been inverted. Campaign activities are now held for the cameras, organized around when and where the media can cover it.
This inversion is neither incidental nor trivial. It follows the logic of what the late Jean Baudrillard called "hyperreality," wherein we mistake symbols for reality and begin to live in a world of signification that is severed from any signified. The relationship between election campaigns and participatory democracy is dangerously attenuated. The referential structure is weighted so heavily toward the sign that it becomes almost exclusively self-referential. The campaigns bear as much relationship to democracy as reality tv does to reality. It is pure representation--it is its own simulacral flickerings that are made re-present, not a preexisting reality.
I think it is no coincidence that this inversion of the reality/representation model has been attended by an increase in the length of the campaign "season." Rather than "perpetual war," we have "prepetual elections." These perpetual elections tap into what we believe is the narrative of our nation: that of democratic choice. But this meta-narrative is reproduced for us so insistently as to consume any meaning it might ever have had. It has become merely its own legitimation discourse.
Rather than engaging in a process of self-determining governance, we are fetishizing the construction of symbols that offer us a substitution for reality to distract us from how power is being wielded.
Rest in Peace, Jean Baudrillard. 1929-2007.
This anecdote gets pressed into all kinds of ideological service. Nixon apologists use it. Critics of our culture's obsession with youth and beauty use it.
What's startling to me is the realization that I cannot remember (and can scarcely imagine) a time when debates had an autonomous reality. It was once the case that electoral campaigns were waged and the media recorded them. The reporters, cameramen, and, later, the tv crews used to follow the campaign. Literally. They were structurally secondary to the reality of the debates or stump speeches.
This relationship has been inverted. Campaign activities are now held for the cameras, organized around when and where the media can cover it.
This inversion is neither incidental nor trivial. It follows the logic of what the late Jean Baudrillard called "hyperreality," wherein we mistake symbols for reality and begin to live in a world of signification that is severed from any signified. The relationship between election campaigns and participatory democracy is dangerously attenuated. The referential structure is weighted so heavily toward the sign that it becomes almost exclusively self-referential. The campaigns bear as much relationship to democracy as reality tv does to reality. It is pure representation--it is its own simulacral flickerings that are made re-present, not a preexisting reality.
I think it is no coincidence that this inversion of the reality/representation model has been attended by an increase in the length of the campaign "season." Rather than "perpetual war," we have "prepetual elections." These perpetual elections tap into what we believe is the narrative of our nation: that of democratic choice. But this meta-narrative is reproduced for us so insistently as to consume any meaning it might ever have had. It has become merely its own legitimation discourse.
Rather than engaging in a process of self-determining governance, we are fetishizing the construction of symbols that offer us a substitution for reality to distract us from how power is being wielded.
Rest in Peace, Jean Baudrillard. 1929-2007.
posted by Feemus at
7:41 PM
2 Comments:
I've been reading Simulation and Simulcra for the past couple of months as it relates so much to this feeling of not just disconnect but replacement of real for unreal, super real or hyper real that I've been 'feeling' lately, as well as that it's a key proponent/question that lies at the structural basement of my novel. But I've not yet seen anybody 'use it in a sentence' so to speak, the way you've done here.
Of course, I agree with your sentiments, just as the cognitive dissonance needed to be an average american who supports the troops, the administration AND the war is nothing short of legendary.
Color me impressed as I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
What does it mean that a campaign goes onto a simulated world to do it's campaigning (John Edwards via Second Life)? Is that hyper reality simulating something even lower? Or higher? Or is that still part of the system? And I didnt know Beaudrillard passed this year. That sucks.
Benticore
Out
By
Benticore, at 8:27 PM
Yeah, he died March 6th. Bummer, huh?
I didn't always agree with him (I liked him better when he was a Marxist, natch!), but what a neat guy.
That's interesting about Second Life. I didn't even know that Edwards was "campaigning" there--that's deeply deeply creepy. Is he doing well?
Second Life freaks me out. People spending money on consumer goods for unreal people. It's like we've tipped into a Philip K. Dick novel.
In fact, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch there are little simulacral worlds that people buy furniture and clothes and real estate for. Of course, these worlds are vitalized by drugs not pixels, but same principle.
In some ways netroots organizations seem like a way OUT of the logic of the simulacrum, but since it's all done virtually maybe it's all just a hop skip and a jump away from Second Life. Hmmm...let me know if you come up with an answer!!
I'm very intrigued about your novel. It sounds pretty cool.
By
Feemus, at 1:43 PM
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