Does the "average American voter" exist?

Given that in my previous post, I tried to suggest that Baudrillard's idea of the hyperreal---the idea that contemporary American culture is, at least partially, under the sway of something that no longer adheres to the real-imaginary binary---cannot simply be dismissed, the obvious answer to my question would seem to be "yes," followed by a Clintonian, "but it all depends on what 'exist' means."

Perhaps a better way to frame the question then would be to ask, "Is the 'average American voter' an instance of the real or the hyperreal?"

Let's go back to the David Brooks commentaries one more time. Brooks repeatedly refers to something called "voters" who, he claims, "[f]airly or not,...look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry windsurfing or John Edwards's haircut as clues about shared values." He goes on to say that these same "voters" also look to things like Obama's choice of pastor or his bowling score (a 37) in forming judgments about him as a candidate.

Clearly for Brooks, these "voters"---whose decision-making processes and concern for "shared values" he has just described---exist, but what does "exist" here mean?

Let me try to make this a bit more clear. One critique of Brooks' claims would argue that his invocation of such "voters" lacks reference to anything outside it. The strong version of this argument would be that Brooks' "voters" belong more to the order of a radical form of poiesis---one that has broken entirely with the representational order---than to mimesis. In other words, their existence is more like that of Lemuel Gulliver or the Lilliputians than that of the people whose faces stare back at you from a Walker Evans photo (see above).

A simpler form of this would be that the "voters" to whom Brooks and his fellow commentators refer don't exist somewhere prior to media commentary---they are not, in other words, the particles of some sturdy, empirical ground from which pundits draw in order to make their claims. Rather their existence emerges and obtains in and through this discourse. (And here we're moving into Foucauldian Archaeology of Knowledge territory).

But then what are we to do with David Rivkin of Jamaica, Queens, the writer of one of this week's letters to the editor of the New York Times? Rivkin writes in support of the relevance of the questions posed by Gibson and Stephanopoulos, which raises the questions: "Does David Rivkin not exist? Or is he merely a discursive effect of writers like David Brooks?" (a revelation that might come as a surprise to his kids, if he has them)

I'll return to this issue in another post, but for now I want to let those questions hang and reverberate for a while.

The territory no longer precedes the map...

"Something has disappeared." That's Baudrillard from 2 decades ago---admittedly never one of my favorite theorists, but someone who I nevertheless find myself thinking about as I begin this blog.

The disappearance Baudrillard was describing and perhaps even lamenting---and I think it is probably worth considering the possibility that on one level Simulacra and Simulation can be read as a work of mourning---is the disappearance of what he calls the "sovereign difference" between map and territory, the concept and the real. Into the space formed by the collapse of this difference steps the hyperreal, a thing Baudrillard describes as "no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance...[and as] a hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any difference between the real and the imaginary."

Strange as it may seem, what turned my thoughts to Baudrillard was the recent furor that erupted over ABC's handling of the Democratic presidential debate that took place in Philadelphia. In the aftermath of the debate, scores of bloggers as well as a fair number of mainstream journalists quickly siezed the opportunity to heap scorn and the proverbial burning coals on the heads of the moderators, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.

Amid the various allegations that the moderators displayed clear political bias, general incompetence or simple laziness, a clear narrative thread emerged: the first 50 minutes of the debate---devoted to a reiteration of familiar questions about Barack Obama's character based on certain of his associations (with his pastor, Louis Farrakhan, and ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers) and certain of his personal habits (his failure to wear a flag-pin on his lapel, for example)---were devoid of substance, a useless distraction from the real issues confronting the country.

"What's going on here?", I thought. "Haven't at least some of these people read Baudrillard? How can they so easily and so naively invoke the real, as if its status weren't immensely problematic?" And yet here they were, insisting that the moderators had some professional responsibility to address the "real world concerns of American voters."

To make matters even more interesting, New York Times columnist David Brooks swam against the tsunami of criticism, giving ABC an A for its coverage and claiming that "issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall." A day later, Brooks was at it again, insisting that voters look to issues such as Obama's attendance at "a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology" or his "comments about working-class voters" when they cast their votes.

On the one hand then we have a chorus of critics asserting that the debate studiously avoided any engagement with the real, and on the other a well-placed columnist essentially saying it confronted issues that really will matter in the fall.

At issue here is the very thing Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation addresses: the status of the real. Like the critics, I want to critique the debate for what I regard as its prolonged evasion of anything of real substance, but the question remains how precisely to do this in a situation in which some measure of hyperreality obtains.

What I am trying to say here is that it seems somehow insufficient to assert that the debate in Philadelphia lacked reality. For a critic like Brooks (and he's far from alone), the very things the critics place in scare quotes and label as manufactured (i.e. inauthentic/unreal) "issues" are for him both real and important. Moreover, since they can presumably be shown to have real effects (or what I am tempted to call "effects of reality"), these issues cannot be simply dismissed as airy fantasies.

Their status seems both more complex and more troublesome. While I would want to insist that these "issues" emerge as part of a logic that defies traditional notions of representation and mimesis, they nevertheless appear capable---at least potentially---of doing many of the things we'd want to ascribe to real issues: galvanizing, organizing and mobilizing groups of people; influencing electoral outcomes, and all the rest.

If that's the case, then how do we distinguish them from the real? What frames of reference do we use to assess them?

As I look back on the public discourse that surrounded ABC's handling of the Clinton-Obama debate, what stands out is the way U.S. politics is still very much defined by a struggle over the real.

Addendum: Saturday's NYT letters to the editor (particularly the last two) show this struggle quite clearly.