Political Spectacle

The phrase political spectacle explains how politicians construct a meaning of what is real, how real is defined, if the reality is significant, where the reality occurs, and when the reality will be conveyed to the [Page 1137]public. Each reality culminates in a political spectacle played out and broadcast through the media. The construction of political reality develops within a great many orchestrated components such as dialogue, characters, theater, art, and appearance. Often political characters construct and convey their political reality in vague or complex symbolic language that is often accompanied by ambiguous behaviors and activities. Their goal within this particular symbolic framework is to promote political policies, ideas, doctrines, and causes. In working to explain the construction and uses of social problems, political leaders, political enemies, political news ambiguities, language, and reality, Murray Edelman proposed a theory that he framed as political spectacle.

In a broader scope, the political spectacle is consistent with social psychology and the symbolic interaction theory of social constructionism, which is a study of how social phenomena are formed, institutionalized, and put into practice by human beings. Similarly, Edelman works with social constructions but specifically focuses on the politicizing in symbolic productions that lead into persuasion strategies; that is, persuading the public what is or is not a problem, what is or is not a solution, what is or is not a friend, what is or is not an enemy, and so forth.

Symbolic language or behavior strategically formed into half-truths and incomplete information is termed propaganda. Often propaganda is received by the public as fact through a political spectacle in which the rhetorical power has become manifest in serious consequences such as terrorism or war. Fact is rendered irrelevant because every influential political object and person is a construal that echoes and perpetuates an ideology. The combination brings forth a spectacle that changes with personal social situations and functions as a meaning device that generates viewpoints. The political spectacle is efficiently transmitted through technology and the mass media.

Media technology created after World War II has contributed to the pervasiveness of instant, ever-changing information that promotes political spectacle.

News accounts persistently construct and reconstruct problems, solutions, friends, enemies, and so on while generating a sequence of threats, assurances, hopes, and fantasy. People construct their own meanings of reality drawn from individual experiences and the information that is available to them.

In his work on human interpretation, W. I. Thomas maintains that when persons identify situations as real, the situations become real in their consequences. The Thomas theorem asserts that human beings interpret their own reality and respond according to the interpretations. Political spectacle suggests that politicians construct fantasies that manifest as real to the observer. Applied to a war, for instance, it is the people's beliefs about the wars that influence how the wars themselves, or the subsequent fear and violence, are defined, accounted for, and responded to. If political definers or framers convey that the wars are right and inevitable, that certain groups are friends while others are enemies, that some people must be feared while other are fearful, then the scenario will be framed, accounted for, and treated as such. Political entities strengthen or undermine support for certain ideologies and plans by strategically using certain symbols to publicly make their point through the media.

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