a big supreme effing deal!
Music: Tracy Chapman: Crossroads (1998)
Since graduate school, I have always considered my interests to be in this nebulous thing termed "popular culture." I never thought of myself as a scholar of politics until Nine-eleven, when I was forced to confront my naïveté regarding the political. Historically, the political and the popular have never been separate; entertainment and statecraft, while distinct in their respective ends, have always been intertwined. The conceptions of the political and entertainment have never been stable, of course, but I think in the age of cable news and talk radio, we can safely put the myth of the separation of politics and entertainment---just like its Jeffersonian counterpart---to bed.
In general, I like to think about the political in a fairly traditional way: politics concerns conflicts over space and boundaries (ideational, geographic) and power. I think at its core, politics concerns arguments about the use of force and the right of sovereignty. The scholarship I like to read and do, however, only indirectly engages these arguments; I study "cultural politics," for lack of a better term, which is something like a second order rung of rhetoric that orbits questions of state violence. So, for example, in a forthcoming essay with Tom Frentz, we examine how the film Fight Club stages anxieties over the demise of the father figure in cultural phantasy; this "father trouble" only indirectly implicates traditional politics in that it may help to explain, for example, why certain men are elected president (and not women).
Yesterday's decision by the Supreme Court, however, changed any tidy distinction between cultural politics and presidential politics, or "politics-politics" and popular politics. The reason? As Baudrillard argued decades ago, those who have the most power in the contemporary world are not those who control the means of production, but rather, those who control the means of publicity.
From my understanding (I did not read the decision, only the discussions about it), the ruling finds that: (a) the first amendment doesn't just protect speech, but also speakers; (b) corporations are speakers; and (c) money is speech. Or something like this. Across the "political spectrum"---which we can anchor at one end with greedy capitalists, of course---folks agree that we have just radically transformed politics-politics. Before this decision the installation of politicians by corporations was difficult (but still possible); now it will be commonplace.
What I find astonishing is that no talking head has made the point that all large corporations are de-facto media companies, and among large corporations, media conglomerates reign supreme. I suspect it's only a matter of time before Viacom and Rupe are battling it out over the next presidential candidate. The Supreme Court just eliminated any last remaining whiff of fairness in electoral politics (or perhaps, as Jodi Dean might argue, gave the lie to the illusion of democracy). It's as if we've stepped into a Gibson or Dick novel . . . .
Of course, there is an elephant in the room that folks don't want to talk about: cultural politics displaced politics-politics decades ago. This decision may not matter in the end, since our officials have been elected dishonestly since forever; politics-politics has been premised on a branding model since the 1950s. This decision simply moves us completely from the branding model infrastructure to the celebrity model infrastructure, or as media executives would have it, fully into reality television politics, a complete implosion of the cultural and political-political. 2010 is going to be a very interesting year. Will it be a Duracell or Energizer White House?