Dear Ezra Klein: Postmodernism Was Right, Reality is Mediated
In a recent episode, New York Times podcaster and columnist @Ezra Klein offered a long monologue regarding the political problem of “Joe Biden’s age.” Democrats, he argues, should wake up to this reality and convince Biden not to run, and select a candidate from the roster of accomplished Democratic politicians at an open convention this summer. In embarking on this line of argument, Klein — a thoughtful and reflective analyst — foresaw the criticism the piece would engender. In anticipation of this inevitability, he offered a defense — in part a self-defense given his role as a journalist — countering (with a touch of exasperation) the argument that the constant drumbeat about Biden’s age is simply a media narrative. “[T]o say this is a media invention, that people are worried about Biden’s age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden’s age?” he queries. He goes on, “If you have really convinced yourself of that, in your heart of hearts, I almost don’t know what to tell you. In poll after poll, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters are worried about his age. This is not a thing people need the media to see. It is right in front of them, and it is also shaping how Biden and his campaign are acting.”
For Klein, the polling cited is evidence of people’s natural grasp of reality: they can see it right in front of their eyes and ears! The President’s feeble appearance, his halting speech. That is what has driven “70 to 80 percent” of respondents to arrive at their own conclusion, their own concerns. No narrative, media or otherwise, has produced this view. Klein supports this contention by pointing out that because many voters are neither political junkies nor live in the social media eco system, the “reality” and fact of Biden’s age has come to them naturally: an organic offshoot of empirical observation. “Voters believe Biden is too old for the job he seeks,” he adds. In other words, their “beliefs” — that is, their reality — is unmediated.
In a series of posts on X, and followed up on his podcast Offline, podcaster (and former Obama speechwriter), @Jon Favreau, while disagreeing with Klein’s conclusions regarding an open convention — which he maintains presents a danger to democracy — nonetheless agrees with the premise that the “problem” of Biden’s age is not one that is being created by journalists like himself. He and his co-host, Max Fisher, go so far as to heartily laugh at the prospect that their “Twitter debates,” to paraphrase the exchange, have any impact on “undecided voters,” since “It doesn’t fucking matter what me or Ezra or Jon Stewart says”; their mission is just to “listen to voter’s concerns,” and any objections by their critics is simply a “self-soothing” exercise given that politics is “scary” right now. Any criticism amounts to people who just don’t want to have a discussion.
There is, however, a central problem with Klein’s (and Favreau’s) assertions, which a little review of postmodern theory helps illuminate.
One of the most foundational principles of postmodernism is that “representation” does not reflect, but creates reality. Under the conditions of late capitalism — what the French theorist Guy Debord in the 1960s termed the “society of the spectacle” — social relations have come to be experienced through images, creating, he argues a false representation (or ideology). During the ascent of postmodernist theory, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard furthered this premise through his more radical pronouncement that there is no real outside of representation: or rather all of the real has been replaced by signs, a condition he calls “simulacra”. For Baudrillard, Disneyland, to cite one of his examples, exists in order for us to believe there is a “real” America outside its doors, when there is now only simulacra (and simulation).
While the merits of Baudrillard’s model have been hotly debated (including the logical endpoint that no truths or “real” can exist), the meta-point of postmodern theory is that our experiences of the world are prepared by a pre-existing image bank of representations, which don’t merely reflect the real, but shape it. If I visit the Grand Canyon, for example, I do not simply take in the vista with innocent eyes: for there are hundreds if not thousands of pictures and descriptions of the Grand Canyon that I carry around inside of me, unconsciously, that impact how I “see” — and that transform the “natural” site itself. Such representations are not merely visual (although advanced media culture is highly image-saturated, even more so now), but take other forms, including language or text.
“Joe Biden’s age” operates in these terms: it functions as a representation and as such, can be subjected to the types of analysis that art history and related modes of cultural analysis, perform. In this case, by unpacking it as an “image,” it reveals itself to be an ideological construct created for specific political purposes (to give a visual art example, the 18th century painting, Oath of the Horatii by French artist Jacques Louis David is largely interpreted as a means to foment revolutionary fervor). “Joe Biden’s age” is not a neutral statement of fact (Joe Biden is old) or topic for debate; rather it is what linguistic theory calls a performative utterance, whereby the very stating of the speech act represents a form of “doing,” producing a material result.
While predicated upon a simple fact — his chronological years — whether uttered in the form of a statement or question, “Joe Biden’s age” is deployed in order to create a distinct reality (hence my use of scare quotes throughout), one with highly charged ideological weight. Its utterance constitutes a political performative that simultaneously operates as form of propaganda, which implicitly equates age with lack of fitness or ability, regardless of any extenuating factors. It is also — perhaps most significantly — a tool of deflection: intending to turn attention away from the manifestly egregious unfitness of Donald Trump. To the latter, we have reams of factually based evidence — including and beyond his age, mental acuity, and sociopathic tendencies — of his criminality, mendacity, violent rhetoric, and illiberal, anti-constitutional, anti-democratic, proto fascist tendencies. There is also an astonishing record of illegal and immoral behavior both in office and pre-dating his presidency, including the rape (I refuse to soften the crime up through linguistic fiat) for which a jury found him libel and awarded E. Jean Carroll over $83 million.
But none of these facts have been turned into a representation (or a text or a meme). So they gather in the dustbin of Trumpian horribleness, not doing the work of “Joe Biden’s age.”
Trump’s is literally a “crime family,” the Trump Organization — privately held, run by the former President and his adult children — was found liable in a NYC court of massive fraud and ordered to pay close to a half a billion dollars. But by virtue of a representation — “Joe Biden’s age,” this reality fades away or is dramatically underplayed, so that the REAL concern is, well, Joe Biden’s age, setting the terms of the debate. This situation has now moved well beyond false equivalence (Biden’s and Trump’s respective ages, which are close), as it is an entirely overweighted towards “Joe Biden’s age,” whose underlying truth (I am not denying this, nor am I an expert in the physiology of ageing brains) is far outstripped by the dangers of Trump, which are no construct of the postmodern imagination. We have in front of us all the evidence in the world: in addition to his actual words that he is seeking office for retribution, and to suspend the Constitution, and also to overturn the federal cases against him to stay out of prison. This is all far more worrisome than “Joe Biden’s age.”
Nonetheless, it is “Joe Biden’s age” that exists as a political problem. It does so because it has been created as one, not because people simply “believe” it to be true. This is the reason that some (like me) are up in arms over the constant refrain about “Joe Biden’s age” in the media: not because we are in denial or are fatalists; not because we are against debate or discussion: it’s that smart people like Ezra Klein, despite their intelligence and erudition (to be clear, I have enormous respect for Klein, and religiously listen to his podcast) unwittingly continue to play the other side’s game, while denying their participation. While denying how meaning is created.
But postmodernism was right: all reality is mediated.
Significantly, these constructs operate in extra-individual terms: they are products of the social sphere, and gain power from repetition. To believe that there are a certain group or class of people that, by virtue of being uninterested in contemporary politics, are immune from these larger cultural forces–their autonomy and agency intact — especially in the context of advanced neoliberal, digital economy, is laughable at best, and sorely naïve at worst. Failure to recognize this is one reason that Republicans have been so successful in manipulating the discourse — from “the death tax” to “the border,” and everything between: despite being ideologically conservative or reactionary (and thus putatively far from the leftist critiques of postmodern theory), they understood, almost intuitively, the power of representation, and did so early on (case in point, Republican operative Frank Luntz, author of aforementioned “death tax” which was coined in the 1990s and sounds far worse — death is taxed? — than the estate tax). In turn, their language is repeated in the media-sphere, so that one party’s propaganda simply becomes part of the cultural lexicon.
Here, Baudrillard’s Disney example is useful: journalists like Klein and Favreau incessantly invoke the existence of the “real” world outside the media ecosphere, and they are just reporting on what’s “on people’s minds” (by implication, “real” people, who apparently only eat in diners). They peer outside of the proverbial Disneyland, not understanding that the latter was created in order for them to be convinced of the existence “real” America, where “Joe Biden’s age” is, according to them, a constant preoccupation that is self-generated.
The nature of the digital communicative environment has only upped the postmodern ante: we have “Hilary Clinton’s emails”, “Hunter Biden’s laptop” — and the aforementioned “the border”: a gift that never stops giving, As performatives, these phrases are materially active, manufacturing crises in the public consciousness by virtue of their repetition. To use contemporary parlance memes, regardless of where they started — go viral. Mitigating factors (being cleared of wrongdoing, the role of Russian state actors, exaggeration of conditions, blocking the very legislation that would solve the problem) don’t matter, as the message only need to be repeated. So when the pollster asks about “”the emails” during the 2016 election, the utterance of the question itself has already performed the ideological work: echoing the terms of the debate that were set by the other side. It was never neutral. Ditto queries if voters are “concerned” about Joe Biden’s age. To act as if the poll is simply an objective device to “measure” rather than create public opinion defies credulity, given how acts of repetition and circulation produce an outcome.
That is how digital communication operates; it travels. Moreover, it is the basic nature of virality that negative reactions garner the most “engagement,” and that “spread” and “reach” trump truth. If the latter were not the case, Joe Biden’s age would not be a political problem. Donald Trump’s authoritarianism and criminality would.
Importantly, one does not need to be “on” Twitter to be affected by their virality (I am not and never have been): as Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok or any social media platform exceed the permeable boundaries of online spaces or any specific media environment: moving into the public sphere of discourse, impacting the political system. Virality creates seepage. In my 2020 book, I call this condition the “digitization of everyday life,” arguing that “digitization” refers not simply to material technologies, but to a historical and social process, where the lines between off and online are blurred or dissolved. Due to the concentration of economic, social and political power — in what @Shoshana Zuboff calls a system of surveillance capitalism — a handful of private corporate actors (the Big Tech five) have spread an ideology of digitization well beyond the actual devices or technologies. Algorithms are the stuff of life, and the public sphere of discourse has been dramatically transformed by the habits and business models (say privacy anyone?) they have built. We inhabit the digital media eco-sphere regardless where we live or vote (or don’t vote), whether we are “on line” or not.
Case in point: there was no need to be “on Twitter” to have experienced Twitter while Trump occupied the White House: the social media platform’s impacts were made manifest every day and everywhere — leading in one terrible instance to the January 6 and insurrection, which we all experienced and whose effects are still playing out. We live in the shadows of Twitter, which no longer even exists (or is now X), where for a sizable portion of “believers” the 2020 election was “stolen.” How about the QAnon Shaman, one of the more infamous rioters: is he a real human being? Yes, a physical body, but that comes directly from the fetid depths of Internet trolling on sites like 4Chan.The parallel reality of the rioters’ disinformation universe was presaged by Baudrillard’s simulacra. While detractors criticized the philosopher for his abdication of material reality (as an apolitical move), the digital media environment has validated a system in which what counts, what matters is circulation, overtaking the actual content of messages: content is just “content.”
“Joe Biden’s age” operates in a similar manner. In some ways, it has become a meme (although humor is not part of its remit) It moves in and out of different media spheres and spaces with symbolic heft, distracting from reality while generating a certain reality. One does not need to listen to Ezra Klein, Jon Favreau, read the New York Times or watch Jon Stewart in order for the impact of their meme-ification to be felt. Because reality is mediated. Denying the power of this condition–and their role in it — is to deny reality itself.
