Murray Edelman's Constructing the Political Spectacle
Scheuer, Jeffrey
CONSTRUCTING THE POLITICAL SPECTACLE, by Murray Edelman. University of Chicago Press, 1988. 137 pp. $7.95 (paper). Long-time readers of the New Yorker may recall cartoon-style ads for the...
...The conceptual boundaries between individuals, institutions, and ideas are fluid, so that "observers and what they observe construct one another...
...There is a similar quality of urgent and unheeded warning in certain radical critiques of bourgeois society...
...An odd little man in a crowd points in horror at some impending disaster while all around him remain oblivious, absorbed in the Bulletin...
...Although rich in insight, passages such as the following are mindnumbing: [E]ach action or term carries the trace of others, constructing an exploding set of scenes and signs that radiate endlessly, actions and language that defines their meaning evoking still other acts and terms that are supplementary, contradictory, or logically irrelevant...
...It is both a brilliant SPRING • 1990 • 277 Books adaptation of Marxian themes and a specimen of academic turgidity...
...Constructing the Political Spectacle is less a tightly woven argument than an alternative conceptual language: a Marxian amalgam of politics, psychology, and sociology within a unified ideological framework...
...yet concreteness is not what Constructing the Political Spectacle is about...
...According to Edelman, the media don't simply report social reality but "construct" it, creating a world of symbols that tend to "reinforce established power structures and value hierarchies...
...It is largely the framework of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, but with disparate sources and channels, including Orwell, Wittgenstein, and later critical theorists such as Habermas...
...The news media, as the principle vehicles of political language, are a natural focus of discourse analysis, and their role in the political game is at once crucial and elusive...
...It is so broadly gauged—aimed not at this or that political system, but at politics as such—that the likeliest antidote would be a revolution of consciousness among the actors and institutions involved: at the very least, a much more critical public attitude toward the politics of news and information...
...As such, language is not merely a descriptive tool, but a performative instrument...
...A difference, however, is that the very subtlety and sophistication of the radical vision often undermine its message, while the sources of outrage remain invisible to all but their immediate victims and critics...
...Language, the critical theorists argue, is not the rational communication of meaning: it is action...
...Moreover, politics isn't just a game: it's a language game...
...So long as that substructure is expounded in works such as this one, it will remain a trenchant academic alternative to liberal capitalism, but no more...
...Long-time readers of the New Yorker may recall cartoon-style ads for the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin...
...The question is whether they are plausible enough, clear enough, and simple enough to alter public discourse beyond the confines of the scholarly left...
...It is the key to winning votes and loyalties, defining problems and debates, and advancing ideological goals...
...It is a work of such complexity yet also of such thematic profundity that a close reading is a rewarding ordeal...
...To make sense of this critique one must itemize several key assumptions, which, though never stated systematically, recur throughout...
...So thoroughgoing a complaint against the social order implies the need for some concrete remedy...
...The fraudulent pretension of the press to objectivity is merely a symptom of the basic discontinuity between social appearance and reality...
...A related organizing principle is integration: whereas bourgeois culture and classical thought atomize reality and individuals, Marx and critical theory posit a world in constant dialectical flux between fact and value, subject and object, language and reality...
...Language is a shimmering surface, reflecting and concealing at once...
...The complexity of social life is reduced to simple polarities such as praise and blame, fear and hope, threats and reassurances, ally and enemy...
...Issues are invented, defined, and ranked for ideological reasons...
...It is rooted first of all in the idea, central to Marx and to socialism in general, that social life is profoundly influenced by unobservables: subtly concealed or obscured meanings, intentions, values, and relationships...
...Edelman assumes familiarity with a dense theoretical background...
...This radical idea was perfected, of course, by the handlers of George Bush...
...He forgoes the challenge of writing clearly...
...the vast majority are deaf to such wake-up calls...
...278 • DISSENT...
...Its more fluid and intricate conceptual substructure, and its greater moral imagination, set it apart from rival ideologies but also impose political burdens...
...Politics, according to Edelman, is a shell game in which ideology is everywhere, but always concealed as something else...
...The grounding assumptions of Edelman's tome are powerful explanatory tools, acknowledging that information is an elemental medium of power relations in modern society...
...The challenge, for those who act and for those who try to understand, is to recognize the range of meanings and of strategies implicit in each item that emerges from the radiation of signifiers...
...he continually uses, without defining, such trendy academic terms as transaction, construction, condensation symbol, subjectivity, signifier, sign, and value allocation...
...Yet the very abstruseness of Edelman's argument militates against that end, and in this it reflects a basic dilemma of theoretical socialism...
...Murray Edelman's short but very dense analysis of political discourse offers an interesting case in point...
...The task of the left is, in part, to awaken the popular conscience to outrageous social conditions...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
