America Deserta

Letters

Vol. 11 No. 7 · 30 March 1989

From Paul Sawyer

Richard Poirier’s review of Jean Baudrillard’s America (LRB, 16 February) employs the usual stance of conservative American academics in dealing with French Post-Structuralism – the stance of the reasonable pragmatist with a long historical perspective. It is the stance of Johnson refuting Berkeley. Poirier argues that Baudrillard’s critique of media manipulation in America is ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘hyperbolic’, because anyone with good sense can correctly interpret what he or she sees on television. But good sense is easier to talk about than to exemplify, as Poirier shows by offering a seemingly commonsensical interpretation of his own – one that inadvertently raises the crucial issue not directly faced in his review.

Poirier’s example comes from last fall’s televised Presidential debate, in which Michael Dukakis answered the question of how he would feel about capital punishment if his own wife were raped and murdered: ‘Dukakis gave an answer worthy of a mechanical mouse. He was rightly judged on this occasion as someone who in a crisis probably could not bring to his decisions a trustworthy range of human feelings … [George Bush] won because he appeared – quite accurately, I think – as marginally the better of two weak candidates.’ Now the argument of the critics of media manipulation (Post-Structuralists and others) is not simply that what one perceives on television is a kind of optical illusion (as in the Doonesbury figure of Ron Headrest, a brilliant caricature of the notion of a ‘pseudo-event’): the argument, more importantly, is that television may be used to restrict the terms of political debate to what can be managed and represented on a video screen. The media specialists who now conduct American political campaigns have made this restriction explicit. For example, the adman who ran Bush’s successful Congressional campaign in 1966 maintained in a report that ‘issues would not have to be involved in the campaign. There was no issue when it came to selling Ford automobiles; there were only the product, the competition and the advertising. He saw no reason why politics should be any different’ (the paraphrase is by Joe McGinniss in The Selling of the President). Media specialists attempt to replace argument with ‘impressions’, which excite instinctive responses in the viewer. The most important of these responses is the pair ‘warm/cool’.

How would you convince the majority of the American electorate that a right-wing plutocrat and former director of the CIA represents their own interests, and not just the interests of the tiny, wealthy minority who would benefit from his stated economic policies? You would present him in a series of controlled appearances as part of an issueless campaign, and convince people that they could make informed judgments on this basis. With luck, you would find a Democratic opponent who played into your hands by insisting that the ‘issue’ was competence. But how do you ‘see’ competence? In his interpretation of Dukakis, the Poirieran viewer (by which I mean the unspecified collective agent of such passive verbs as ‘was judged’) unwittingly acts out the agenda of the media handlers. He silently reinterprets ‘competence‘ to mean ‘competence in front of a camera’; then he forms an impression – in this case, the impression ‘cool – unlikeable’ – which he converts into several assumptions: that Dukakis’s response at that moment means that he is a cold man; that coldness disqualifies him from handling grave national security situations, and so forth – the false logic that converts the subrational impression ‘warm/cool’ into the dominant criterion of political choice. The beauty of the example is that the Poirieran viewer responds as Bush’s handlers would have him respond, not in this case to one of their own photo effects but to their opponent. In the view of Baudrillard, the present commodity system appears as a system of endlessly proliferating signs that refer not to realities but to other signs (that is to say, they ‘make sense’ only in comparison with other signs like them). One might bring together the language of Madison Avenue and the language of the Left Bank this way: what the Poirieran viewer ‘saw’ was not Dukakis but the sign ‘cold’, and which contrasts with the sign ‘warm’ attached to Bush. Baudrillard’s language may indeed strike English readers as hyperbolic and extravagant – I myself prefer John Berger’s earlier account: but both are infinitely preferable to the common-sense world of Poirier’s viewer, who believes he can see all he needs to see on the television screen. What’s left out in Poirier’s example is the fact that opposition to capital punishment is, after all, a political position that divides the two candidates, and that this position is profoundly related to hotly-contested attitudes and beliefs about race, class, the control of crime, the obligations of government, the place of violence in a civilised community.

What’s left out, in a word – this is still more true in America than in Great Britain – is anything that used to count as an important political issue. Class conflict in particular does not represent well on the screen; and that, obviously, is the reason why media management is not simply an ideologically-neutral stupefaction of the democratic body public. It favours the Right, because the Right cannot advertise its essential function as the representative of a privileged minority. The handlers then tend to be anti-intellectual: voters (and consumers) are thought to be irrational by nature, they are bored by politics. What reasonable person could be gulled by this flimflam? If Poirier’s analysis of what is really there on the television screen is typical of American political consciousness, then the handlers may already have achieved more than we thought.

Paul Sawyer
Cornell University

Vol. 11 No. 11 · 1 June 1989

From Cushing Strout

Richard Poirier would not recognise either his books or his editorial career under Paul Sawyer’s perjorative labels of ‘a conservative academic’ and ‘a reasonable pragmatist with a long historical perspective’ (Letters, 30 March). But any knowledgable and empirically-minded reader ought to recognise the accuracy of Poirier’s criticism of Baudrillard’s mythologising America. The Parisian journalist Diana Pinto, reviewing it in La Revue Tocqueville, offered it as the best example of L’Amérique dans les têtes, proof of ‘the extent to which America is a figment of the French imagination light years away from any concrete national reality. Americans reading the book can only wonder what society he is describing.’

My colleague Sawyer makes far too much of Poirier’s single brief reference to George Bush’s campaign and implausibly assumes that we need French Post-Structuralism in order to criticise the media’s reduction of political argument to ‘impressions’ – a point Sawyer himself derives from Joe McGinnis’s The Selling of the President. The Frenchman’s exaggeration of the media’s influence makes it impossible to understand why some 46 per cent of the voters chose the ‘cool’ candidate rather than the ‘warm’ one supposedly favoured by the media. Whatever Sawyer’s abstraction ‘the American political consciousness’ means, it must take account as well of the complaint so many of the winners made about the low level of their candidate’s campaign. The important, unhappy and neglected fact, moreover, is that nearly half the electorate (in spite of the media’s wooing) did not vote at all because both candidates seemed weak, as Poirier recognised. Many of us who voted with reservations for Dukakis think he bungled his early lead, not least because for most of the campaign he shunned ‘liberalism’ as if it were a malignity. His philosophical bedfellows on this score, ironically enough, are the rigorously anti-liberal French Post-Structuralists to whom Sawyer misguidedly urges us to turn for political enlightenment.

Cushing Strout
Cornell University