Recreating the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election TV Coverage

To over-simplify my media research (Cultural Farming, 2004), I ethnographically re-mix (montage) existing video content (bricolage) to illustrate contemporary media production practices... but also, to purposefully challenge, test and extend critical media theories (disambiguation).  Importantly, this broadens well beyond quotidian notions of comedic video mash-up or parody.  Indeed, I am evolving my work toward Jean Baudrillard's most important, yet arguably his least investigated notion: Symbolic Exchange. 

Symbolic Exchange is directly derived from cultural potlatch rituals common amongst many primitive societies, including North American indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.  These rituals were  ceremonial periods of feasting and were importantly accompanied by lavish ‘giving away’ -- often including the public destruction of private goods and property.  Those who most honored ceremonial attendees by giving away or publicly destroying the most personal property also honored most the names of ancestors/descendants and earned the greatest social prestige. 

Anthropologists have described these cyclical ceremonies as a form of “divestments” of private property invoking deeply important elements of economic distribution, social bonding and political processes; all central to the maintenance of a society.  Symbolic Exchange, therefore, is based upon the liberating and sometimes ostentatious and confrontational divestment of property - never its accumulation.  It privileges an immediate, actualized, collective mode of relations via transformative experience and communication through the act of giving back.

The need for these socio-cultural potlatch rituals are typically felt and released during periods of ‘carnival’.  Today, by comparison, these destructive yet liberating occasions are never exchanged between contemporary media industries and their viewership.  In return, citizens have shown little interest in offering an obstructing, reversible, one-upmanship response or media “overthrow” so necessary to our own regenerative cultural enrichment (Bouleversement 2007).  Indeed, it is doubtful that today's social media explosion (YouTube?, MySpace?) could ever become exemplars of this necessary form of Symbolic Exchange overthrow since any potentials within these corporatized venues are instantaneously subsumed, marginalized, and regulated, in lockstep through a variety of means, such as big-media ownership, anti-net-neutrality, pay-to-play, copyright legislation, etc.

For media theorist Jean Baudrillard, there is no liberation or revolution of the media available at all save "restoring the possibility of response".  That is to say, allowing media-speech to "be able to exchange, give back and repay itself"; although paradoxically Baurdillard admits this would require "an upheaval in the entire existing structure of media".  Well, if Baudrillard is correct, how can "overthrow" be attempted?  What does “overthrow” look like?  Baudrillard never gets around to telling us the answer.

But one suggestion within Baudrillard's notion of Symbolic Exchange is to literally turn media "against itself"; to "challenge all fixed, unilateral power relations, to unsettle their single-pole; to reinstitute a cycle of relational speech and response".  In short, to begin making TV against itself.  This way, Symbolic Exchange can be seen as a necessary, responsive, reciprocal (yes sometimes even dangerous) counter-gift to the insidious advance of media content/simulacrum.  Symbolic Exchange thus is never simple parodic comedy; rather it is a higher-order of "destructive, annihilating truth" -- a type of potlatch 'ritual' made purposefully against media's excess of reality and diabolical conformity.

Baudrillard's Blender is, functionally, a media-randomizer-jukebox-website.  Its purpose and scope are to proffer Symbolic Exchange with the 2008 U.S. presidential election TV coverage.  Blender contents consist of approximately 12,000 individual clips (22 total video hours) randomly accessible for replay in innumerable 60 sec. combinations.  12,000 video clips were individually culled (by hand and by me alone) from well over one hundred hours of archived TV coverage broadcast throughout the early primary campaigns, candidate debates, party conventions, post-convention campaigns, presidential candidate debates, and election and post-election periods: 2006-2008. 

This new project (launched: 25 Jan 09) is conceived entirely as a “low-brow”, simple to use, free and open access internet website.  Its actualization is to honor the monumental work of French media theorist Jean Baudrillard (died: 6 March 2007), and importantly to attempt recuperation of his most controversial media premise: Symbolic Exchange -- while simultaneously situating numerous theoretical markers referencing my own video scholarship.

Baudrillard's Blender is a video "randomizer".  To engage the web-project: Select one item from each of the seven drop-down preference selectors to suggest narrowing content aggregation (Theory and Bias selections are accompanied by term definitions- as literature review).  Then, once all seven preferences are selected, visitors click on one of ten "blender speeds".  A small embedded application randomly selects numerous video fillips (totaling approximately 60sec. in length from thousands of pre-ripped selections), and then linearly assembles and replays the groupings as an instantaneous and unique Election '08 mash-up.

    The "point" of Baudrillard's Blender and this brand of surreal media ethnography is to provoke deeper critical media understanding by turning the familiar 'idea' of contemporary TV election coverage into a kind of violent strangeness, and, again turning that strangeness back into its familiar violence.   Honoring Jean Baudrillard, all this, of course, will be made still more ‘symbolic’ since 3 of 7 Blender preference buttons are functionally irrelevant regardless of selection (four functional buttons: Style, Frame, Bias, Theroy).  And, all ten Blender speed buttons function simply as one.

        Indeed, Baudrillard's Blender is not about indexical empiricism or verisimilitude cleverly remixed.   Rather, Baudrillard's Blender is a parodic invitation --a violent seduction-- to meaning-making through the absurd expectancy of theoretical filters; while performatively crushing and re-authoring news (and theoretical) authority into “gifts” of carnavalesque response: Dis-con-struction as ill-communication.  Maybe we can learn something important along the way.