Writing in The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson cleverly explores the postmodern turn in contemporary politics:
[…] it’s become customary for a presidential candidate to “get his message across” by simply announcing that he’s getting his message across. Attending a rally for John Kerry, or watching one of his TV ads, or drifting through his website, a voter will hear the candidate say: “My message isn’t for just part of America, it’s for all of America–a message about how we’re going to put Americans back to work.” The voter will wait in vain for particulars, such as how this message is to be realized and Americans put back to work. (I do know it has something to do with raising taxes on rich people.) Nevertheless, when asked, the voter will tell an inquiring reporter that he “really likes Kerry’s message about jobs.” At a rally for John Edwards a few weeks ago, in South Carolina, I heard the comely Carolinian announce: “Let me tell you something. My message of hope and optimism is resonating all across America.” And the crowd applauded! He might as well have hollered “applause line!” to receive the same reaction. “My message works,” Edwards told an interviewer not long ago. “And it’s going to continue to work.” In South Carolina he said: “My message is optimism. My message is about hope.” Marshall McLuhan was wrong. The medium isn’t the message. The message is the message.
The key to postmodernism is reflexivity, when words no longer seem to refer to anything outside themselves. Reflexivity set the tone for this primary season. In his stump speech, as well as in interviews, Richard Gephardt said he was “energizing the base,” by which he hoped to energize the base. Howard Dean said he would be nominated because he “was bringing new people into the process”–a remark that was designed to bring new people into the process who would then guarantee his nomination. It is an odd experience, watching politicians campaign using the same language their campaign managers use giving a backgrounder to political reporters. But the popularity of this new mode of discourse led several reporters and commentators to say that voters had become “more sophisticated.” What it really showed, though, was that voters were starting to think like political reporters, which is not at all the same thing.
[…]Of course, this year the echo chamber was enlarged to include bloggers, whose primary purpose seems to be self-reference, opinions about opinions, with Instapundit linking to a nugget from gasbag.com, who’s riffing off a comment posted 40 minutes ago by the Bloviator in response to an insight posted 45 minutes ago on TwoWackos.net, which had been quoting Instapundit’s thoughts on Bloviator’s earlier post. The inbreeding has become so commonplace that even bloggers have stopped commenting on each other’s comments about it.
In the pomo primary everybody was thinking like a pundit, especially voters. How else to account for the instant clich
4 Replies to “Intertextual Dialogics. And Howard Dean. Yup.”
Ah, this guy is… you know… making pee pee where he drinks (I don’t want to swear in front of your kid).
He way overanalyzes the “electability” rationale in a manner that I’m sure few of its proponents would agree with.
Ferguson says: “Since the first seeds of self-government sprouted in the Agora, this is surely the strangest rationale yet devised for choosing one candidate over another. Voters voted for someone because they thought voters would vote for him. It is second-order reasoning, a meta-rationale, a judgment about a judgment about a judgment. It will make your head hurt if you think about it too long.”
Okay, Professor Ferguson. Is it really so strange or unique? Remember “ABC… Anybody But Clinton”? The electability reasoning goes like this: “I don’t like Bush. Dean: too purple-faced, can’t win. Edwards: looks 22, can’t win. Kerry: dull, grave, senatorial. He could beat Bush!” Does your head hurt yet?
And what’s this business about “a judgment about a judgment about a judgment”? At most, it’s a judgment (of the individual voter) about a judgment (that other voters are likely to make). But once you take out this dose of steam, there’s not much left of Ferguson’s thesis. Really, it’s like a bad term paper.
’f you say so. But I still think Kucinich had the best line about this when he noted that he’d be elected if all the people who were worried about his electability actually voted for him.
You say Ferguson overanalyzes things, I say the entire piece was tongue-in-cheek and was poking fun at overanalyses. Was the article itself a pomo performative? I dunno. But I enjoyed it.
per adua ad alta
Yeah, maybe you’re right. I made my first comment pre-coffee, when all was gray and bleak.
Ferguson’s piece looks funnier on a little caffeine buzz.