Reponse to Readings

Television primarily allows viewers to indulge in fiction, to accept that a given image or narrative is "false" or "constructed", but nevertheless enjoy it. In order for politicians to even enter this medium, they must invariably fictionalize themselves; you view your candidate of choice on TV the same way you view a melodrama; you accept the narrative it constructs, ridiculous or implausible as it may be, so that you can enjoy the emotional response it drags out of you.

Yet somewhere in Joan Didion's description of a lifeless, plasticized, self-perpetuating and anti-politics political campaign she touches on the existence of people who are sick of what they see on TV; people faintly thirsty for something other than the "consensualist centrist politics" that American democracy proudly produces and American television flamboyantly exacerbates.

The desire-- though often unspoken, inarticulated-- is an inherently radical one, because it is anti-stability, anti-stagnation, and thusly it is inherently political in a more primal sense than we are used to. Conversely, the televised election cycle represents the quest for ultimate immobility through the repitition of distracting noise; it convinces each candidate to appeal to the widest audience possible, and in doing so, render their public policy stances increasingly ambiguous, meaningless, and uncontentious. "Politics" dissapears almost completely from this public performance. As Didion writes, the notion that "the citzen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a 'difference,' is in fact the narrative's most central element, and its most fictive."

Film and video have proved invaluable tools in removing politics from the public sphere; whenever they are used in an attempt to harness the latent desire in people for something besides "politics as usual," it simply transforms this potential energy into more of the same, similar to how Coca-Cola attempts to find the new "cool" and in doing so destroys it. I wonder if there is something inherent in a dominant medium that causes such destruction, or if large media networks can ever be used to promote anything other than mediocrity (in other words, is the "radical" forever confined to the limited venue, or can popular media be transformed?).