Eat Your Candidates

Yesterday I found myself slightly disturbed by McCain’s recent surge in the polls. Or maybe I was in panic mode for a bit. I can’t really tell… But as we lead into the final days of the election I’ve started to think more broadly about this “choice” we have. Who is qualified? Who’s bundle of experience trumps the other’s? Who’s plan is more sound? The signals are all very clear. And while it’s no surprise that the numbers tighten as we approach election day, it still baffles me why McBush/Bible Spice support would continue to rise at this point, under such clear signals.

In this country we’ve been given a choice for quite a long time. It’s been institutionalized, and a discrete network has developed among people in the business of promoting candidates, managing their campaigns, etc. Masses of voters approach this system with their own commodified yardsticks of judgment too (what Lyotard might call the “debasement” of information or knowledge), and the intersection of these two groups is much like a market; people who bring candidates to market and those who choose among them.

Not that everything can be boiled down to a common denominator of market theory — quite the contrary, in fact!

When given a choice between a few or more commodities, we look to qualities that distinguish between them. As more options are presented to us [as the choice becomes more competitive], we begin to accept what is homogenous across all of our options as given. That is to say: the basic homogenous good is institutionalized, expected from each option on the market, accepted as truth. Often these criteria are the basic the utilitarian functions of the good in question. Enter tastes, preferences, and aesthetics. Not so market theory now, eh?

What has been institutionalized is also an act of performativity: the act of consuming itself. Colin Campbell, in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987), comments on members of Western societies who have become affluent enough in recent decades to epitomize this practice, not of deriving satisfaction from the commodity itself, but from semantic meanings associated with them, resulting in a “self-illusory experience” that consumers enjoy:

The essential activity of consumption is thus not the actual selection, purchase or use of products, but the imaginative pleasure-seeking to which the product image lends itself.

The word image here haunts me… maybe even more than McCain’s energy proposal. It recalls Walter Benjamin’s theory of wish image, the commodity’s embodiment of the consumer’s hopes and dreams. In staple Benjaminian fashion the wish image is waiting to be realized (distinguished from and pitted against fetishized, mythic phantasmagoria in their ability to be realized) and encapsulated in the commodity, onto which the consumer projects the hopes and ends of modern capitalism. So by their nature, wish images are symbolic.

We have now the stark image of candidates in a general election as symbolic goods, to be “consumed” by voters. You might think this is a mere restatement of what is already obvious about how Americans choose their leaders — that people take advantage of the choices they’re given, often making ill-informed decisions, or that they base these decisions on trite criteria — but there is more to it. The mechanism that puts willing candidates before us, in primaries and so on, is assumed to withstand a market test; we assume these candidates already have some “prerequisite” qualifications for the job because this ethereal market mechanism already determined it for us.

This opens up debate halls for discussions of more viable distinguishing criteria; those elements that candidates compete on “above and beyond” the homogenous prerequisites that must have taken them this far already. If you look at most presidential elections in U.S. history, you’ll find an array of competitions over personal traits that have little or nothing to do with the complex policy-making the office implies. Voters are automatically distanced from the enormity of those questions (because the market mechanism already determined it for them). Voters get to compare their candidates on limited information and on many cushy issues that will have very little impact on a presidency; consumers project their own personal hopes and goals onto the candidates themselves.

A candidate is thus a “hero” for embodying [at least enough of] those personal traits that individuals cast their ballots for. In this sense, the candidate for public office is simultaneously wish image and symbolic good for the consumer (voter). Campbell’s view of Western modernist values include pleasure as an end in and of itself:

Romanticism provided the philosophy of “recreation” necessary for a dynamic consumerism: a philosophy which legitimates the search for pleasure as good in itself and not merely of value because it restores the individual to an optimum efficiency.

How then is choosing your candidates for public office any different than your choice between other symbolic goods such as clothing, housing, cuisine, furniture, or as for many people, music?

~ by gnarlybuttons on 2 November 2008.