The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusion of their real childishness.
-Jean Baudrillard
But once the "total fake" is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real. . . . if in the wax museums wax is not flesh, in Disneyland, when rocks are involved, they are rock, and water is water, and a baobab a baobab. When there is a fake--hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea serpent--it is not so much because it wouldn't be possible to have the real equivalent but because the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program. In this sense Disneyland not only produces illusion, but--in confessing it--stimulates the desire for it . . .
-Umberto Eco
There are three stages of media propaganda. In the first, the message is in the foreground. Ads tell you explicitly what they want you to think or do. People quickly become too critical and sophisticated for this approach. It insults our intellectual pride and becomes to easy to mock, as on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The clever people "see through it." In the second stage, the message recedes into the background and becomes embedded in a seemingly unrelated cultural product. The propaganda is no longer in the commercials but in the television program itself. Celebrities don't directly hawk corporate wares in a commercial, but their characters consistently use the same products in a believable fictional world. People eventually get hip to this game, too. In the third stage, propaganda is foregrounded again, but this time ironically. Miraculously, by admitting the propaganda it ceases to be perceived as propaganda. At this point we have reached hyperreality, where people not only do not know what the real is, but do not want to know. As Orwell pointed out in 1984, doublethink actually demands a relatively high level of intelligence and sophistication: simple and naive people can't do it well. The same is true for hyperreal propaganda.
Government propaganda generally lags well behind its "private" corporate counterpart. Most political ads are direct come-ons in the phase one mode. In the Bush era the government progressed to phase two, as reporters were "embedded" with the military and the conservative agenda masqueraded as news. But Barack Obama is the hyperreal president par excellence.
Of course the President of the United States has always been a kind of simulacrum. These are people who act every waking minute of their lives, and if they can't fool all of the people all of the time, they must come as close as possible. If the Emperors and Kings of old were Gods on earth, then the president of a mass democracy (300 plus million people is not a polis nor can it be) must be the ordinary man apotheosized. The POTUS is a myth in Barthes' sense, one which mediates the desires of the Public and the demands of the Ruling Elite. Lincoln is our greatest mythic president. The Democratic myth is FDR, the Republican myth is Ronald Reagan, but Lincoln is admired by both parties. Conveniently, Lincoln signifies all the noble ideals of America for the Public, our "better angels," while for the Ruling Elite his tenure was characterized by a realpolitik which violated principles of Constitutional Republicanism or "Democracy" as it saw fit. The Obama era has accordingly seen a revival of Lincoln which has become associated with the current POTUS in precisely the mythic way Barthes describes. Lincoln was already a quite resonant signifier, around which numerous myths are agglomerated, now become a new signified to which Obama is the sign.
In the post-Freudian era, any good PR man must know that the desires mediated by the POTUS myth are only partially conscious, and have as much to do with hate as love (thanatos and eros, if you insist on Freud's formulation). J.G. Ballard keenly sussed this out when he wrote his piece of Swiftian hyperbole, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." Uncannily, this was in 1967, long before Reagan's apotheosis as the POTUS myth/simulacrum. Written as a report on an experiment where test-subjects are asked to fantasize about and masturbate to the president in different types of scenarios, revealing that "Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender." The results are summarized thus:
The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan’s personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance–the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.
Ballard not only predicts Reagan as the POTUS Simulacrum but as potential assassination victim. He was extrapolating from Kennedy of course. Weirdly, John Hinckley Jr, the realization of Travis Bickle, the assassin who unites eros and thanatos by killing for love, bought his gun on Elm Sreet (A Nightmare on Elm Street) in Dallas, where the Texas School Book Depository building is also located.
J.G. Ballard gave the following description of his inspiration for the story:
"In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan's manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth."
in propaganda's progression from Real to Fake to Hyperreal, Reagan's act is classic Stage Two, where the message is embedded and masked by the reassuring body-language of a trained actor. For an example of a president as pure hyperreality, we have to go to the postmodern prophet, Philip K Dick. In his short story "The Mold of Yancy," (1955) the titular character is the president of an Earth colony on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. Yancy constantly appears on TV and has opinions on everything, and is eagerly followed and imitated by the public. (With his homespun Americana, he also eerily recalls Ronald Reagan.) In fact Yancy not exist, except as an image, created by experts known as "Yance-men." He is hyperreal because he is a copy without an original. PKD sensed the poetic truth that for the mass public the President is nothing but a collection of images anyway.
Instead of embedded messages, people are directly told what to think and how to act by Yancy. A good description from the Wikipedia article on the story is that the public is "de-politicized and homogonized by the messages of Yancy." The interesting thing about the story is that instead of going the gnostic route we expect of revealing Yancy as a simulacrum, an experiment is tried in which Yancy's propagandistic image becomes more sophisticated.
"All of Yancy's beliefs are insipid. The key is thinness. Every part of his ideology is diluted: nothing excessive. We've come as close as possible to no beliefs . . . All aspects of personality have to be controlled; we want the total person. So a specific attitude has to exist for each concrete question. In every respect, our rule is: Yancy believes the least troublesome possibility. The most shallow. The simple, effortless view, the view that fails to go deep enough to stir any real thought. . . . [But] What if Yancy sat down in the evening with his wife and grandson, and played a nice lively six-hour game of Kriegspiel? Suppose his favorite piece of music was Bach's Art of the Fugue, not My Old Kentucky Home?"
In the end they have Yancy extolling the virtues of Hieronymous Bosch. Coming out of the bland, homogeneous, white-bread consumerism of the 1950's, Dick indulges in the common liberal fantasy of an "intellectual" president, deep and cultured and yet still a man of the people. Dick can't yet imagine our own multicultural postmodern consumerism, in which one can express extreme or at least idiosyncratic opinions and behaviors. None of it matters anyway, because none of it strikes the root of the global corporate state. Sophistication and diversity can co-exist with a depoliticized populace. The Frankfurt School got this wrong, too. At one time it was thought that liberation was possible by making people less "one-dimensional."
What if the president was cool? What if his name wan't Joe Smith or Edward Johnson but something totally foreign seeming to the average Anglo-Saxon. What if he could appear on a hip comedy show and fit right in? What if he were promoted by street artists? He'd have to be black, because the (imagined, fantasized) black male is the fountainhead of American cool.
Hyperreality is not easy to explain or understand. All of the definitions given by the Wikipedia article employ a paradox:
1. "A real without origin or reality." -Jean Baudrillard
2. "The authentic fake." -Umberto Eco
3. "The virtual irreality." -Pater Sparrow
Suffice it to say that the hyperreal calls the real/fake dichotomy into question by being a simulacrum which seems more real than the real thing. It's the uncanny feeling expressed by A Clockwork Orange's Alex when he says, "It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen." At this point it's pretty safe to say that pornography is hypperreal sex. The fictions of movies and television are an integral part of the reality of modern life, which would cease to be "real" without them.
These descriptors don't precisely apply to political or ideological statements, almost all of which fall under the category of doxa ("to seem") anyway. The more relevant categories are seriousness or meaning (in the sense of "to mean what you say"). The layering of irony has a hyperreal effect because it calls those binaries of serious/joking and meaningful/nonsensical into question.
Hyperreal propaganda therefore employs irony and camp, and is most at home amid the lying truths and truthful lies of the comedy genre, the best vehicle for The Revelation of the Method (itself a hyperreal phrase, since it was made up by a conspiracy researcher and supposed to be an actual occult doctrine, though it does in fact describe a form communication between hegemonic elites and their subalterns), and can be clearly seen on the Barack Obama edition of Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns. (I had to put a link because, being Stage Three and not Stage Two propaganda, the video could not be embedded.)
All of the messages are direct here. Barack Obama is playing "Barack Obama," and the quotation marks allow the messages to be processed both as serious and not serious. The POTUS is here to plug the ACA and Healthcare.gov, a message that is framed ironically by the host: "Okay, let's get this out of the way. What'd you come here to plug?" The most controversial issue of Obama's presidency, summary execution via flying robot, is made into a punchline ("Is this what they mean by 'drones'?"), which is a familiar Obama routine. The issue of his birth certificate is raised and avoided. I'm not a "birther," but I do find it interesting that the question of the POTUS' origin and its documentation has become a hot topic, given the nature of the hyperreal as a copy without an original. The more naive and simpleminded conservatives have latched on to this question as the crux of Obama's presidency, while the sophisticated liberals find it laughable, less because those who raise the issue are wrong than because it's an irrelevant question. The conservatives are responding to a feeling that there's something fake about the president. The liberals do not care because he fits their fantasies too precisely. Finally, have the piece de resistance, or the coup de grace if you prefer, of the POTUS pressing a button which drops a curtain revealing that the show is being broadcast directly from the White House. (It has always been broadcasted from the White House, a continuity with the Bush Administration.) Not really, though. Not "really." Really, though? Really? Seriously? Srsly guise?
Man, I don't even know anymore.
-Jean Baudrillard
But once the "total fake" is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real. . . . if in the wax museums wax is not flesh, in Disneyland, when rocks are involved, they are rock, and water is water, and a baobab a baobab. When there is a fake--hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea serpent--it is not so much because it wouldn't be possible to have the real equivalent but because the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program. In this sense Disneyland not only produces illusion, but--in confessing it--stimulates the desire for it . . .
-Umberto Eco
There are three stages of media propaganda. In the first, the message is in the foreground. Ads tell you explicitly what they want you to think or do. People quickly become too critical and sophisticated for this approach. It insults our intellectual pride and becomes to easy to mock, as on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The clever people "see through it." In the second stage, the message recedes into the background and becomes embedded in a seemingly unrelated cultural product. The propaganda is no longer in the commercials but in the television program itself. Celebrities don't directly hawk corporate wares in a commercial, but their characters consistently use the same products in a believable fictional world. People eventually get hip to this game, too. In the third stage, propaganda is foregrounded again, but this time ironically. Miraculously, by admitting the propaganda it ceases to be perceived as propaganda. At this point we have reached hyperreality, where people not only do not know what the real is, but do not want to know. As Orwell pointed out in 1984, doublethink actually demands a relatively high level of intelligence and sophistication: simple and naive people can't do it well. The same is true for hyperreal propaganda.
Government propaganda generally lags well behind its "private" corporate counterpart. Most political ads are direct come-ons in the phase one mode. In the Bush era the government progressed to phase two, as reporters were "embedded" with the military and the conservative agenda masqueraded as news. But Barack Obama is the hyperreal president par excellence.
Of course the President of the United States has always been a kind of simulacrum. These are people who act every waking minute of their lives, and if they can't fool all of the people all of the time, they must come as close as possible. If the Emperors and Kings of old were Gods on earth, then the president of a mass democracy (300 plus million people is not a polis nor can it be) must be the ordinary man apotheosized. The POTUS is a myth in Barthes' sense, one which mediates the desires of the Public and the demands of the Ruling Elite. Lincoln is our greatest mythic president. The Democratic myth is FDR, the Republican myth is Ronald Reagan, but Lincoln is admired by both parties. Conveniently, Lincoln signifies all the noble ideals of America for the Public, our "better angels," while for the Ruling Elite his tenure was characterized by a realpolitik which violated principles of Constitutional Republicanism or "Democracy" as it saw fit. The Obama era has accordingly seen a revival of Lincoln which has become associated with the current POTUS in precisely the mythic way Barthes describes. Lincoln was already a quite resonant signifier, around which numerous myths are agglomerated, now become a new signified to which Obama is the sign.
In the post-Freudian era, any good PR man must know that the desires mediated by the POTUS myth are only partially conscious, and have as much to do with hate as love (thanatos and eros, if you insist on Freud's formulation). J.G. Ballard keenly sussed this out when he wrote his piece of Swiftian hyperbole, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." Uncannily, this was in 1967, long before Reagan's apotheosis as the POTUS myth/simulacrum. Written as a report on an experiment where test-subjects are asked to fantasize about and masturbate to the president in different types of scenarios, revealing that "Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender." The results are summarized thus:
The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan’s personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance–the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.
Ballard not only predicts Reagan as the POTUS Simulacrum but as potential assassination victim. He was extrapolating from Kennedy of course. Weirdly, John Hinckley Jr, the realization of Travis Bickle, the assassin who unites eros and thanatos by killing for love, bought his gun on Elm Sreet (A Nightmare on Elm Street) in Dallas, where the Texas School Book Depository building is also located.
J.G. Ballard gave the following description of his inspiration for the story:
"In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan's manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth."
in propaganda's progression from Real to Fake to Hyperreal, Reagan's act is classic Stage Two, where the message is embedded and masked by the reassuring body-language of a trained actor. For an example of a president as pure hyperreality, we have to go to the postmodern prophet, Philip K Dick. In his short story "The Mold of Yancy," (1955) the titular character is the president of an Earth colony on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. Yancy constantly appears on TV and has opinions on everything, and is eagerly followed and imitated by the public. (With his homespun Americana, he also eerily recalls Ronald Reagan.) In fact Yancy not exist, except as an image, created by experts known as "Yance-men." He is hyperreal because he is a copy without an original. PKD sensed the poetic truth that for the mass public the President is nothing but a collection of images anyway.
Instead of embedded messages, people are directly told what to think and how to act by Yancy. A good description from the Wikipedia article on the story is that the public is "de-politicized and homogonized by the messages of Yancy." The interesting thing about the story is that instead of going the gnostic route we expect of revealing Yancy as a simulacrum, an experiment is tried in which Yancy's propagandistic image becomes more sophisticated.
"All of Yancy's beliefs are insipid. The key is thinness. Every part of his ideology is diluted: nothing excessive. We've come as close as possible to no beliefs . . . All aspects of personality have to be controlled; we want the total person. So a specific attitude has to exist for each concrete question. In every respect, our rule is: Yancy believes the least troublesome possibility. The most shallow. The simple, effortless view, the view that fails to go deep enough to stir any real thought. . . . [But] What if Yancy sat down in the evening with his wife and grandson, and played a nice lively six-hour game of Kriegspiel? Suppose his favorite piece of music was Bach's Art of the Fugue, not My Old Kentucky Home?"
In the end they have Yancy extolling the virtues of Hieronymous Bosch. Coming out of the bland, homogeneous, white-bread consumerism of the 1950's, Dick indulges in the common liberal fantasy of an "intellectual" president, deep and cultured and yet still a man of the people. Dick can't yet imagine our own multicultural postmodern consumerism, in which one can express extreme or at least idiosyncratic opinions and behaviors. None of it matters anyway, because none of it strikes the root of the global corporate state. Sophistication and diversity can co-exist with a depoliticized populace. The Frankfurt School got this wrong, too. At one time it was thought that liberation was possible by making people less "one-dimensional."
What if the president was cool? What if his name wan't Joe Smith or Edward Johnson but something totally foreign seeming to the average Anglo-Saxon. What if he could appear on a hip comedy show and fit right in? What if he were promoted by street artists? He'd have to be black, because the (imagined, fantasized) black male is the fountainhead of American cool.
Hyperreality is not easy to explain or understand. All of the definitions given by the Wikipedia article employ a paradox:
1. "A real without origin or reality." -Jean Baudrillard
2. "The authentic fake." -Umberto Eco
3. "The virtual irreality." -Pater Sparrow
Suffice it to say that the hyperreal calls the real/fake dichotomy into question by being a simulacrum which seems more real than the real thing. It's the uncanny feeling expressed by A Clockwork Orange's Alex when he says, "It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen." At this point it's pretty safe to say that pornography is hypperreal sex. The fictions of movies and television are an integral part of the reality of modern life, which would cease to be "real" without them.
These descriptors don't precisely apply to political or ideological statements, almost all of which fall under the category of doxa ("to seem") anyway. The more relevant categories are seriousness or meaning (in the sense of "to mean what you say"). The layering of irony has a hyperreal effect because it calls those binaries of serious/joking and meaningful/nonsensical into question.
Hyperreal propaganda therefore employs irony and camp, and is most at home amid the lying truths and truthful lies of the comedy genre, the best vehicle for The Revelation of the Method (itself a hyperreal phrase, since it was made up by a conspiracy researcher and supposed to be an actual occult doctrine, though it does in fact describe a form communication between hegemonic elites and their subalterns), and can be clearly seen on the Barack Obama edition of Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns. (I had to put a link because, being Stage Three and not Stage Two propaganda, the video could not be embedded.)
All of the messages are direct here. Barack Obama is playing "Barack Obama," and the quotation marks allow the messages to be processed both as serious and not serious. The POTUS is here to plug the ACA and Healthcare.gov, a message that is framed ironically by the host: "Okay, let's get this out of the way. What'd you come here to plug?" The most controversial issue of Obama's presidency, summary execution via flying robot, is made into a punchline ("Is this what they mean by 'drones'?"), which is a familiar Obama routine. The issue of his birth certificate is raised and avoided. I'm not a "birther," but I do find it interesting that the question of the POTUS' origin and its documentation has become a hot topic, given the nature of the hyperreal as a copy without an original. The more naive and simpleminded conservatives have latched on to this question as the crux of Obama's presidency, while the sophisticated liberals find it laughable, less because those who raise the issue are wrong than because it's an irrelevant question. The conservatives are responding to a feeling that there's something fake about the president. The liberals do not care because he fits their fantasies too precisely. Finally, have the piece de resistance, or the coup de grace if you prefer, of the POTUS pressing a button which drops a curtain revealing that the show is being broadcast directly from the White House. (It has always been broadcasted from the White House, a continuity with the Bush Administration.) Not really, though. Not "really." Really, though? Really? Seriously? Srsly guise?
Man, I don't even know anymore.
Between Two Ferns is classic stage three. It's not about revealing the man behind the curtain pulling the lever. It's about being the ONE who pulls the curtain open for all to see, and then steering the narrative. That's what Obama does best.
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