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.