Political Spectacle Research Articles

Special Guest Contribution: Is Love without Borders Possible?

This article focuses on ‘Love Jihad,’ the neologism that Hindutva, or Hindu Extremism, has invented to incite suspicion and violence against Indian Muslims. I begin with a brief discussion of several characteristics of the Hindutva organisational and ideological apparatus. Then I discuss anti-Love Jihad campaigns as a strategy to assert Hindu extremism in interpersonal relations. I go on to highlight specific episodes of ‘Love Jihad’ attacks by the Hindu Right that have targeted and made a political spectacle of love and marriage across community boundaries. I suggest that Love Jihad campaigns become a mode of producing docile, submissive subjects who will not question regimes of power, be it neoliberalism, religious majoritarianism or social hierarchies and injustice.

Speaking their Mind: Populist Style and Antagonistic Messaging in the Tweets of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Nigel Farage, and Geert Wilders

The authors in this study examined the function and public reception of critical tweeting in online campaigns of four nationalist populist politicians during major national election campaigns. Using a mix of qualitative coding and case study inductive methods, we analyzed the tweets of Narendra Modi, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, and Geert Wilders before the 2014 Indian general elections, the 2016 UK Brexit referendum, the 2016 US presidential election, and the 2017 Dutch general election, respectively. Our data show that Trump is a consistent outlier in terms of using critical language on Twitter when compared to Wilders, Farage, and Modi, but that all four leaders show significant investment in various forms of antagonistic messaging including personal insults, sarcasm, and labeling, and that these are rewarded online by higher retweet rates. Building on the work of Murray Edelman and his notion of a political spectacle, we examined Twitter as a performative space for critical rhetoric within the frame of nationalist politics. We found that cultural and political differences among the four settings also impact how each politician employs these tactics. Our work proposes that studies of social media spaces need to bring normative questions into traditional notions of collaboration. As we show here, political actors may benefit from in-group coalescence around antagonistic messaging, which while serving as a call to arms for online collaboration for those ideologically aligned, may on a societal level lead to greater polarization.

RHETORIC OF KITSCH IN THE POST-TRUTH ERA: ‘MEDIA, LITERATURE & CULTURAL STUDIES’

The current age in its placid reckoning of rib-tickling political spectacle staged on a global scale has been unanimously dubbed the ‘post-truth era’, an adjectival term which has of late gained wide currency and critical sanction in academic spheres of cultural studies, denoting especially a lambasting incline in titillating media buzz, which is blatantly and consciously transferred into the inimical language of caustic ‘kitsch’. As such, the paper at hand as its objective, attempts to theorize and review the petulant phenomenon of kitsch in the post-truth era, by inspecting its varied avatars and inherent complexities from a polemical perspective. In accord, the paper furthermore deems to predicate the cultural bearing of kitsch in the realm of art, aesthetics, politics, media, language, and literature, whereupon the historical origins of the term kitsch has been delineated, i.e. by way of sieving its cultural potency through the following key expressions: ‘bad taste’, ‘bad art’, ‘bad sentiment’.

Theatricality, the Spectacle’s Veil and Allegory-in-Reverse in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

ABSTRACTOur analysis will radicalise the notion of frame, which has been used in the field of the humanities, especially in a semiotic sense but also as a replacement for the often-used term of “context”. Arthur Miller, for one, was framed by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. In response, Miller put his own point forward, the distance point—a point that organises perspective—of a theatrical play (The Crucible) whose power resides in the use of allegory against the political spectacle of its time. Theatre intervened in this case to confront the real life political theatre of the televised trials (a national spectacle) of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The historical narrative and the anecdote of the Salem processes of 1692 in the play simultaneously provide an appropriate metaphorical link and distance from the situation in Miller’s present to strengthen his frame at two different levels.

Heritage as War

The construction of heritage can be a violent process. Authorizing state-sanctioned narratives and the spaces that materialize them are belligerent acts. Crafting and territorializing a singular history out of many entangled ones necessarily relies on the destruction, containment, and/or silencing of the evidentiary terrain—of people, places, and things. In this sense, the construction of the past—to play on Carl von Clausewitz's well-known maxim—is the continuation of war by other means. As networks of knowledge production and transmission, “lieux de mémoire” are everyday sites of violence that embody ongoing social relations and the attendant struggles over power. In times of peace as in war, they are terrains of symbolic and material contestation whose creative destruction can be deployed as political spectacles and projections of power. Examples of such dynamics abound, whether in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North America or Palmyra, Baghdad, and Mecca in the Middle East. In its varied forms, then, heritage is as much a cause for celebration for some as it is a cause of injury for others. Heritage reflects the power to subjugate the past to the politics of the present and to dictate the future, both of which are intrinsic to state and subject formation.

Beyond left and right?

The end of the left-right divide is something which has been pronounced with growing regularity over the last 30 years or so. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the presidential election and the majority obtained by his party, La République en Marche, in the parliamentary election, would seem to confirm that development. This article analyses, in the first instance, the failure of traditional parties of left and right to adapt to the transformation of their respective electorates and, consequently, the declining appeal of what was on offer politically. It will then examine what the implications are when party vehicles for traditional ideologies disappear and the possible risks this entails. Finally, the article considers whether this ideological vacuum has now been filled by a politics of spectacle and media management, and whether France has become a liberal democracy just like any other.

Protecting Teachers or Protecting Children? Media Representations of Vergara v. California

Over the past five years, the laws governing teachers’ employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts in state courts and elections across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. Drawing on the theory of political spectacle, we conducted a media content analysis of 42 print news media articles published prior to the court’s decision in June 2014. Two aspects of political spectacle, the use of metaphor and the illusion of rationality were the most salient and deployed in ways that were more closely aligned with the student plaintiffs’ claims than the statutes’ defenders. We conclude by highlighting how the framing of these and other similar stories may shape subsequent debates about public education in the United States.

Review of Georgia Cowart. 2008. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle . Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press

The dichotomy between pleasure, frivolity, and spectacle and rationality, profundity, and seriousness has been a major framework for scholarly understanding of Western art music. Traditional narratives of music history lionize composers who appear to eschew superfluous ornament, extravagant showmanship, and dazzling virtuosity in favor of some more pure version of aesthetic truth. Genres designed for unabashed entertainment are often missing from Western art music histories, despite their significance in historical actuality. This is a serious omission not only for the sake of the historical record, but also because, as Georgia Cowart has demonstrated in her new book The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle, aural pleasure and compositional frivolity often disguise serious issues, and spectacle often communicates important messages that contradict the apparent message of accompanying text and discourse.

ПОЛИТИКИ И ЖУРНАЛИСТЫ В ЭПОХУ КОММУНИКАЦИОННОЙ РЕВОЛЮЦИИ

Communication permeates all spheres of public life, to influence politics, the formation of political meanings, images and ideas. In the modern world, politics is done with help of innovative methods of communication. The article examines how the relationship between politics and journalism in France transformed during the Fifth Republic due to change in the political regime and an increasing role of communication in the society. At the beginning of the Fifth Republic, the information policy had been formed by the power of the state; however, this power gradually abandoned a tight control over radio and television. In the new century, politics has been more closely approaching the media. In the era of media politics, politicians successfully master the latest methods of communication with the audience, while journalists focus less on the information content than on commenting and evaluation. Politicians are getting involved in the creation of a “political spectacle” together with journalists to whet the interest of the public. On the basis of interviews conducted by the author of the article, it can be traced how politicians and journalists evaluate their interaction and react to changes in their own social roles. It has been shown that the activities of politicians and journalists are getting closer; these activities obey the logic of “the current situation”, they are characterized by conspicuous behaviors. The number of participants in the process of political communication has been growing; judges and investigators are getting involved. As a result of reforms, the institution of the Presidency has strengthened in France, despite the fact that at the same time, the society underwent a process of de-sacralization of the presidential power. Increasingly, presidents have become objects for journalistic and criminal investigations, while legal ways to protect the privacy of the president are absent. However, media popularity of politicians does not convert into a public trust. Opinion polls of recent years show that the majority of the French population does not trust the political elite. It is not clear if political actors will be able to overcome the limitations brought by the age of revolution in communications and to convert the capital of virtual connections into real interaction with society.

Political Spectacles and the Power of Resentment

There’s a reason why political scientists may find it difficult to answer one of the most central questions in American politics: Why do people who feel passed over by the larger society, and often...

Humor e espetáculo político

Com o avanço dos meios de comunicação de massa, o espetáculo político midiático passou a ocupar um lugar privilegiado na sociedade contemporânea, com repercussões no campo da informação e do entretenimento. A abertura do pedido de impeachment da presidente Dilma Rousseff (PT) ganhou rapidamente os holofotes midiáticos, transformando-se em uma cobertura espetacular. Nesse sentido, o presente artigo tem por objetivo discutir a relação entre mídia e política pela vertente da espetacularização, a partir das peças humorísticas produzidas na web. Memes que retrataram a abertura do processo de impeachment foram selecionados como objeto de estudo, com o intuito de analisar se as peças endossaram o espetáculo político reproduzido em outros meios de comunicação.

Putting political spectacle to work: Understanding local resistance to the Common Core

In the fall of 2013, a parents’ group formed to protest the new Common Core based mathematics textbook recently adopted by their school district. Quickly allying with teachers, the new coalition began to, “hammer,” the district to drop the Common Core and return to more traditional texts and pedagogies. They did so by speaking at Governing Board meetings, participating in interviews with local newspapers, appearing on a local radio talk show, and forming social media accounts. This intrinsically motivated case study uses qualitative media analysis to examine the texts produced from these and other public declarations to better understand local policy formation through the mechanics of “political spectacle.” Political spectacle theory suggests that policy may be formed through dramatic public displays and that policy formed from such spectacles often undemocratically reinforces existing inequalities. The study analyzes the parent, teacher and administration policy actors’ use of political spectacle elements such as symbolic language, construction of problems, casting of enemies and allies and distinctions between onstage and backstage drama to understand the adoption, challenge and ultimate rejection of a Common Core based mathematics text in a mid-sized southwestern United States School district.

Budget repair or budget spectacle? The passage of Wisconsin’s Act 10

Strategic planning processes use budgets to implement control and accountability. However, budgets can also be used to generate support for strategic decisions, for example by creating a political spectacle. A political spectacle is a problem engineered to have a specific political impact. This paper investigates politicians’ use of a state budget as a political manoeuvre to defend strategic decisions regarding public employee unions in Wisconsin. The analysis shows how the 2011 state budget in Wisconsin was used to create a political spectacle to generate support for eliminating collective bargaining for public workers, especially public (state) school teachers.

The spectacle of politics: Wendy Davis, abortion, and pink shoes in the Texas ‘fillybuster’

Despite important inroads, women’s marginalization in the public sphere is still very real. From a feminist theoretical perspective, and informed by Guy Debord’s conceptualization of the society of spectacle, this study examines local and national newspaper coverage of Wendy Davis’s filibuster to block an abortion-restricting bill in the Texas State legislature in 2013. Qualitative and quantitative assessments show that gender was particularly encoded and marked in the mediated discourse, with reports focusing on Davis’ personal life and giving her celebrity status. The filibuster became a political spectacle that reified dominant gender values and norms.

Caracas, the city as performance

ABSTRACTDrawing on the painfully complicated political situation in Venezuela and inspired by José Ignacio Cabrujas’ vision of Caracas as the city of ‘in the meantime’, this article describes a long tradition of architectural transformation as political spectacle, juxtaposing Caracas’ public image as told by the government against examples of protests, bold site-specific gestures and street actions, presenting citizens as creators of a counter-spectacle that reveals the city’s deeper identity. The idea of Venezuela’s double reality was echoed in Venezuela’s national pavilion during the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) where photographs from several Venezuelan productions coexisted with an effigy representing a bleeding, recently shot body of a student protestor. The article focuses on urban gestures such as the Torre de David (Tower of David), the world’s tallest vertical slum which housed more than 700 families for years in the city’s financial district; and two city protestors, Franklin Brito and Comet Man, middle-aged Venezuelans fighting for their rights through visible street action, and how their acts impact society from a different point of view. Caracas, the city as performance, interrogates what is true and what is fiction in the second most violent city in the world.

Teacher Education and Social Justice in the 21st Century: Two Contested Concepts //Formación del Profesorado y Justicia Social en el Siglo XXI: Dos Conceptos Controvertidos

In 2016, it seems impossible to stipulate that the basic aim of a thoughtful and engaged citizenry for the United States is shared by all. But irrespective of political spectacle, forces of social and cultural reproduction play out in public schools and universities, and often experiences and realities are located and interpreted to privilege an instrumental, quantitative, and some would say narrow construction of the purpose of schooling. This short essay addresses two tropes within education: teacher education (i.e. the ways in which teachers are prepared) and social justice (i.e. one means to an end for such preparation). The current social and political climate in the United States demands that these respective terms stay salient with regard to the needs of children in public schools. Said another way, both social justice and teacher education have become contested concepts. Are they compatible, or is their consonance an educational chimera?

Publicity, Transparency, and the Circulation Engine

Since the turn of the century, India has witnessed a growing number of entrapment events or media “stings” in which private, secret, and unknown events, relationships, acts, and structures are publicly revealed. Aided by the rapid spread of technological modernity and low-cost media gadgets such as mobile phones, the media sting has been carried out by print, TV, and new media; transparency campaigners; NGOs; political parties; social movements; and ordinary individuals. As entrapment expands from a police technique to a generalized technology of transparency, it has produced great strains in existing control systems and traumatic disruptions at all levels. The video object produced by the sting is part of a circulation engine as it attaches to multiple environments: the political spectacle, the judicial review, and the online archive. I connect debates in infrastructures, media theory, and law to reflect on the implications of these new truth strategies for contemporary thought.

Vigilancia electrónica a gran escala y listas de alerta: ¿Productos de una política paranoica?

Resumen A partir de los artículos de Richard Hofstadter, sabemos que un estilo defensivo y hasta paranoico ha impregnado de vez en cuando a la política norteamericana. Murray Edelman y Michael Rogin han desplazado la postura psicológica de esta terminología hacia una de tono político, enfocándose en cómo la noción de la construcción de un espectáculo político puede incitar histeria y paranoia para atraer la atención pública y, al hacerlo, construir una securitización que expanda los poderes ejecutivos del Estado. Rogin describió cómo el discurso político norteamericano ha enfatizado estrategias antisubversivas en la construcción de enemigos: por ejemplo, contra pueblos indígenas, comunistas y la URSS y, más recientemente, migrantes ilegales y terroristas quienes han infiltrado, supuestamente, el país. Sin embargo, las implicaciones de estas políticas han sido raramente expandidas a la política trasnacional o internacional. El objetivo amplio de este artículo es conectar la configuración de la política mundial contemporánea con ramas interesantes de la investigación sociológica que provienen del estudio crítico de la política norteamericana. Más específicamente, el autor argumenta que la compilación de listas de alerta a partir de bases de datos trasnacionales construye la criminalización de los viajeros como migrantes ilegales y peligrosos, mientras que afecta también a todo aquel que use servicios informáticos en la nube. Los Estados usan un estilo paranoico para oponer la soberanía nacional contra sus obligaciones internacionales. Las prácticas de cada país en este aspecto constituyen una variación distintiva de la tendencia hacia la Vigilancia Global Preventiva (GPS por sus siglas en inglés) que, según la mirada del autor, se ha convertido en una forma contemporánea de un proceso trasnacional de (in)seguridad, es decir, un proceso que entrega inseguridad a través de herramientas tecnológicas destinadas a proveer seguridad. Para sostener este argumento, el artículo muestra cómo la emergencia de listas globales de alerta está reorientando a las tecnologías de bases de datos para servir a los fines de la vigilancia electrónica masiva. Los gobiernos justifican la vigilancia masiva, a pesar de su estatus ilegal en muchos países, alegando que si todo el mundo lo está haciendo, no puede ser ilegítimo. Una deformación paranoica de la política trasnacional basada en el malestar y el miedo es entonces instrumentalizada en el nombre de la soberanía, la seguridad, la ciudadanía y la identidad nacional. Las listas de alerta, en la visión del autor, son una manifestación concreta del desarrollo, por profesionales de la seguridad, de un intercambio trasnacional de acciones de miedo, que pretende enfocarse en migrantes y controles fronterizos pero que tiene mucho más que ver con fomentar estrategias antisubversivas domésticas que con servir como una respuesta efectiva frente a las amenazas.

Thatcherism, and the Spectacle of Politics: Hanif Kureishi’s Theatre

This article focuses on the impact of Thatcherism, especially of Margaret Thatcher’s ideological construction of politics in images, on the British cultural and artistic context of the end of the ‘70s and beginning of the ‘80s. Specifically, the article aims at showing the way in which thatcherite policies and ideas, which were for the most part hated by the intellectual circles, were opposed through forms of open political dissent such as fringe theatre. The ‘fringe’ had the purpose not only to represent politics, but also to turn the recurrent – and thatcherite – trope of ‘politics-as-performance’ into ‘performance-as-politics’, and thus to become a means of social transformation. As an example, this study analyses Hanif Kureishi’s 1983 drama Birds of Passage. In the work controversial issues such as Thatcher’s repressive policies about immigrants, the welfare state, and social protests are the focal points of a discussion which stems from an understanding of popular culture, and of theatre, as a contested terrain. Within the theoretical framework of Cultural Studies – whose methodological approach is mainly adopted in this study – theatre is in fact conceived by Kureishi as a place of negotiation and defiance of hegemonic paradigms and meanings.

Re-conceptualising Political Alienation - On Spectators, Spectacles and Public Protests

Politics usually takes the form of brawls ranging from the verbal and civilised, to the physical and savage, if not deadly encounters. These public engagements are political spectacles projecting narratives that are attractive to people who share the sentiments made public in these spectacles, and a following of spectators that, in sustaining their spectatorship, keeps the spectacle in its status. I note that spectators are attached and concerned with the narratives (i.e.from the causes and actors involved to the eventual results) behind and projected by such spectacles, and that this attachment in turn defines and sustains their spectatorship. Political alienation is a condition shared by both the apathetic and spectators. However the case of spectators is more complex and merits closer analysis in order to attain an encompassing understanding of political alienation. In this article, I will argue and illustrate that political alienation must be understood as a sustainable process constituted and driven by sustained spectatorship (i.e.sustained relationship between spectators and a political spectacle) made possible by a habitus of disempowerment in everyday life.