Beatriz Sarlo on Politics in Argentina

Change in Politics

While it's not possible to dream of a nostalgic return to the forms of politics
that existed prior to the mass-mediatized cultural revolution, it's difficult to
accept that politics is only built within the framework that the media
impose. One can imagine changes in the politics of the media. Without a
doubt, not all TV news is as unanimously bad as it is in Argentina; not all
television correspondents have to be sensationalist agitators. There is no
destiny inscribed in television from which it is impossible to escape.

The identity of politicians is not fashioned only in the media. We can hope
that politicians will remain true to their calling: expressing a will broader
than their own even while working to form that will. Today politics needs
the properly intellectual moment as well as the mediatized one. It needs
ideas as well as images. The aesthetic of audio-visual media tends to expel
those discourses that have an argumentative logic of an intellectual cast.
This conflict is part of a relationship that has already been deeply
engrained and--what is worse--has been accepted by intellectuals and
politicians alike.

With few exceptions, politicians, intellectuals and newscasters take a

"descriptive" and neutral position with respect to the consequences of the
mass-mediatized hegemony of the symbolic dimension of the social world.
Some argue that television doesn't matter because the public recodes
television messages and produces new meanings. They forget, however,
that the public's freedom to construct those hypothetical new meanings is
limited because people must work with the materials that television offers
them. Naturally, the intellectual defenders of this position don't propose
major changes in the use of the media, nor do they worry that the private
interests of media owners are the true shapers of public opinion.

Opposite this position, which is characterized by its optimism with respect

to the products of the capitalist marketplace, one can place perspectives of
critique and reform. Intellectuals--especially Left intellectuals--can play a
decisive role in producing new ideas about how the media can be used in a
democratic, reflexive, imaginative and transparent manner. Certainly, these
new ideas would confront an enormously concentrated power. New
ideological-cultural perspectives can, however, find a reasonable echo in
the media precisely because the media are obliged to incorporate
everything that has some public significance.

Sarlo, Beatriz. "Argentina under Menem: the Aesthetics of Domination."

NACLA Report on the Americas, v28, n2 (Sept-Oct 1994): 33

The Military Pardon in Argentina

The trial and conviction of those responsible for unleashing the most
ferocious repression that Argentina has ever known was a tremendously
important moment in the restoration of an ideal of justice, and in the
construction of a public memory of the events of the dictatorship. But the
abrupt interruption of the hundreds of trials and, above all, the pardon of
military officers who had been convicted and were in jail, placed the
subject of human rights violations in a past that Menem wanted to put
behind him. He thus initiated an operation of "forgetting" which benefited
the military. On the one hand, this closure imposed by the government--
which broke with any idea of justice--helped solve the problem of instability
in military-state relations. But, on the other, it dulled the memory of what
had occurred in the last decade. The military pardon closed a subject that
is not only juridical or political, but that is decisively moral and cultural.

Sarlo, Beatriz. "Argentina under Menem: the Aesthetics of Domination."

NACLA Report on the Americas, v28, n2 (Sept-Oct 1994): 33

President Menem

In a country with a strong presidency like Argentina, the head of state plays
a decisive role in setting the tone of public life. Menem's style is perfectly
mass-mediatized: he disdains ideas; he tends to shut off more complex
questions; he follows recipes for a simple solution; he disdains the
deliberative and discursive forms of policy-making; and he cynically rejects
those values, found in the Peronist tradition, which are grounded in the
ideal of a just society. This style has an important weight in the present
cultural-political conjuncture.
The consequences are serious because today, only deliberative policy-
making, the independence of the three branches of government, and the full
functioning of political institutions can counter a presidential will perfectly
aligned with the interests of the powerful. By means of mass-mediatized
morals, aesthetics and culture, the base-line values of a just, equal and
cooperative society have been replaced by a market Darwinism that has
left profound marks in a new individualist, anti-cooperative culture.

Sarlo, Beatriz. "Argentina under Menem: the Aesthetics of Domination."

NACLA Report on the Americas, v28, n2 (Sept-Oct 1994): 33

Television and Political Culture

One feature of the current clash between politics and society is the
weakening of public culture. As political discussion, parliamentary
representation and other forms of collective participation have become
less relevant, the mass media--especially television--have come to occupy a
decisive place in the construction of the public sphere.

Today it is impossible to think of politics without television. This feature,

common throughout the West, has distinct manifestations and
consequences in Argentina where an educational crisis and a rising rate of
illiteracy converge with an audiovisual hegemony over the symbolic
dimension of social life. This process is spearheaded by privately owned
television channels that choose their strategies according to the laws of
profit maximization. A strong counterweight to private capitalism does not
exist in Argentine television: the lone state channel is in the iron grip of the
government, and no large public channel exists at all. Today the market
completely defines the character, aesthetic and ideology of the audiovisual
sphere.

Politics and political culture are formed in a televised space that responds
only to the shifts and interests of the capitalist market of symbolic goods,
without counterweights or balances. The public sphere has been mass-
mediatized, and the political scene is increasingly an electronic one. Mass-
mediatized politics pays tribute to the image of a common culture that
unites actors whose symbolic and material power are very different. This
may assure a minimum of cultural cohesion, but not the type of cohesion
that reflects a true sense of community.
Mass-media discourse compacts society, projecting an image of a unified
cultural scene, a common place where oppositions dissolve into a
polyglotism of many voices which are never necessarily speaking to one
another. It's not that media are more democratic; it's simply that they need
to incorporate all the discourses in order to present a universal sphere.
Politics defers to the media aesthetic. It accepts the media as
representative of the universal. And it frequently adopts the formal and
rhetorical limits that the media impose: speed, variety, volubility--qualities
that often call to mind the emergence of a political show or a U.S.-style
sound bite.

Persuaded of the importance of the media in the construction of the public

sphere, politicians accept the assumption that the discussion of ideas, the
great debates, complicated postulates, and the presentation of
sophisticated positions are "anti-television." They cultivate a media image
based upon the reduction of the complexity of their message, and in the
illusion of closeness and familiarity: "We are the same as you; we represent
you at the same time as we mingle with television celebrities. We represent
the people in that which the people have closest at hand: the television set
in their living room or their kitchen." The mass-mediatized operation thus
concludes in a poverty of meanings, in a thinning of the growing complexity
of problems, and in a visual flow where the "now" is built on top of oblivion.
To exist, politicians--classic mediators between the citizenry and
institutions--need television to be the Great Universal Mediator. They are
captives of the mass media.

The mass-mediatization of politics is an almost irresistible phenomenon.

Policy is built by the newscasters; television news sets the order of the day.
Trustworthiness is taken away from political leaders; it is now administered
by the heads of the mass media. The culture of discussion has been
superseded by a political simulacrum which does not thrive in political
institutions, and feels more at home in the realm of television. Politics in
the mass media is subordinated to the laws that regulate the audiovisual
flow: high impact, large quantities of undifferentiated visual information,
and arbitrary and binary syntax that is better suited to a matinee
melodrama than to the public arena.

Sarlo, Beatriz. "Argentina under Menem: the Aesthetics of Domination."

NACLA Report on the Americas, v28, n2 (Sept-Oct 1994): 33