Both, Clinton and Zhirinovsky are men of my generation, the baby-boomers. Time worked for us. It'll work against us.
[ image - Oedipus X ]
1. POLITICAL SEMIOTICS
Moscow never liked democracy.[1] (No wonder that her rulers are still behind the Kremlin's walls).[2] The communist founding fathers restored tribal symbols of power -- leader, chief, father (Stalin). There was nothing new about their imitation of the imperial Russia. The double meaning of Tsar's figure made into a super-sign. We all knew that the twelve apostles of the Politburo are the ones who run the country. In America were too many to remember (Congress along is over 500 faces, the closest equivalent of the Central Committee, faceless and unknown). American president is only a head of the single branch of power, CEO. Everything about any Soviet leader was unknown (rumored at the best), everything about an American president has to be reported. In pre-1991 Russia the leader was the image itself. (My secretary spent seven years in prison for using a newspaper with Stalin's portrait for a wrapping paper).
Sign: Photo of a leader (not necessary face?)
Signifier: Name (face?)
Signified: Leader
The fact that an American president is elected by a popular direct vote of the country makes him not a ruler (and ruling of the country a difficult trick). Manager? He is supposed to represent not just a power but the power of the people (not to act on his own). He has to be "one of us" (Steve Forbes is not). Does he signifies the position of power (presidency, White House)?
Sign: Image (persona)
Signifier: Presidential Candidate? (Individual?)
Signified concept: The category "President"
Sign itself is dynamic message (process), a combination of many signs, a summary of signs (syntagm). Signifier brings extra
signs into the sign.
Since the elections are using video (media) all three established kinds of signs are at play. From a sign to a concept -- the way to read meaning of politics.
Presidency signs:
1. Iconic: "looks presidential" -- image of a president (leader). Resemblance of the signified "who"? An impression (look like) as a sign? Bill Clinton as "president Clinton" -- an individual Mr. Clinton is a material for the icon of "president Clinton" (resistance of the material (private person and public persona in a constant contradiction; we have to know an individual behind the icon (knowing = trust), one of us).
Sound and image: dominant.
2. Symbolic: speech and writing "president." The way they "write" movies. 1992 -- "New" as a theme. 1996 -- "Bridge to the Future."
3. Indexical: sings which are inherently connected to the signified. FDR, Kennedy. Shadows of ancestors.
Politician must be reactive, "flexible" (open minded). Actor has no face, i.e. he must be a man without principles. Opportunist.
Political commercials dressed as information. Information age is a shy admission of dominance of ideology. Democracy can't admit its ideology warfare the way Stalinism denied the existence
of political prisoners. By definition (their definition) there were no classes (familiar preposition?) for the very existence of
political organized opposition.
Dramatization -- a fictional representation of an actual event -- each commercial has D. build in.
The more a signifier is constrained by the signified, more "motivated" (constraint) the sign is. Iconic is the highest, symbolic is not motivated (learning is required).
Politics are symbols:
Under the communism everything was political. Politics of education, family. Everything had wrong and right side. Symbols are no less real than the objects they symbolize. Symbol is more real than reality itself within the reality of mind. Politics are nothing but a life of symbols.
Why do we use term "image"?
Symbol is too big? To obvious? Takes time to introduce?
Paradigms are classifications of signs.
"Selling the president" -- not ideas but the image must be sold to us.
A paradigm is a set of associated signs which are all members of some defining category, but in which each sign is significantly different.
Four kinds:
1. Synchronic = based on syntagms existing in THE SAME TIME
2. Diachronic = DIFFERENT TIMES
3. Syntopic = SAME SPACE
4. Diatopic = DIFFERENT SPACE
Marxism treats an individual as a sum of his social functions. As such any presidential candidate has to appear as a man, husband, manager, politician, etc. The president as a sign is a paradigm (set) of such signs. As a political entity we see Clinton synchronic within the limits of the present. Diachronic: his political image in the past (draft, governorship).
I see no other way to "write" (construct) president-as-message besides "30-second-bits" since he is a sign (shot). In many way any extended dialogue with a president contradicts the idea of supreme power (leader has to be not fully know, "the thing-in-itself").
Video nature of current election. Only 7% counts for verbal message. The is 1) body language, and 2) para-lingual.
Combinations:
* Synchronic/synoptic (one place, one time: one shot)
* Diachronic/synoptic (same place sequence over time)
* Synchronic/diatopic (different places at same time)
* Diachronic/diatopic (shots related only by theme)
Presidential paradigms could not be viewed without putting them into sentences. "President" isn't a single sign but a statement.
"Your man" -- friend?
Even a boy-friend?
[ image + hyperlinks ]
2. GRAMMAR OF THE PLOT
"President" is a narrative, a story, a plot.
We know Clinton's problems: no continuity (situationalist, populist). They are of syntagmatic nature.
A syntagm is an orderly combination of interacting signs which forms a meaningful whole (sometimes called a 'chain').
What is the order?
In 1996 we vote "generationally," baby-boomers in Russia and America, we re-elect Clinton and Yeltsin, as "our men." The president today represent (representative democracy) our weakness, value, style of living. He is our story which we make into history.
Character must manifest the story.
Story -- Plot: The sequence of events in a play, differs from the "story," which encompasses earlier events (multi-plot stories). NARRATIVE -- The recounting of two or more events (or a
situation and an event) that are logically connected, occur over time, and are linked by a consistent subject into a whole.
[ image-hyperlinks ]
3. LEVELS OF MEANING
Denotation (what a sign stands for): before entering the game any person has to become a sign ("Bob Dole"). Character issue? Personal has to be objectivized.
Connotation (its cultural associations)
In conventional semiotic terms, connotation uses the first sign (signifier and signified) as its signifier and attaches to it an additional signified. Connotations 'derive not from the
sign itself, but from the way the society uses and values both the signifier and the signified' (Fiske & Hartley 1978: 41).
Connotation involves emotional overtones, subjective interpretation, socio-cultural values and ideological assumptions. Trust, power, confidence, intelligence, etc. All abstract categories? Power of Emotions and Impressions.
[ image ]
4. METAPHOR AND METONYMY
The visual language works metaphorically (Metaphor expresses the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar).
....
Metonymy involves the invocation of an idea or object through the use of an associated detail.
How to visualize the national depth? (and why should we want to do it?)
[ image ]
5. CODES AND BARS
Texts also draw on codes deriving from the culture in which the text is produced. Rejecting Metz's framework as underplaying cultural factors, Umberto Eco offered ten fundamental codes as instrumental in shaping images: codes of perception, codes of transmission, codes of recognition, tonal codes, iconic codes, iconographic codes, codes of taste and sensibility, rhetorical codes, stylistic codes and codes of the unconscious (Lapsley & Westlake 1988: 44; Eco 1982: 35-8). In his book S/Z (1974), Roland Barthes itemized five codes utilized in reading:
hermeneutic (narrative turning-points); proairetic (basic narrative actions); cultural (prior social knowledge); semic
(medium-related codes) and symbolic (themes). (Daniel Chandler HP)
American preferred reading. American code: "Like Us."
Digital identification. Numbers instead of forms. Bars in place of faces and finger tips.
[ links to film and theatre semio pages ]
6. INTERTEXTUALITY (FRAMING)
"The mirror in the case of the actor is the audience." Piscator[3]
Texts are always contextual. Obviously, a media text exists in relation to others. In fact, texts owe more to other texts than to their own makers. A politician can't function without opponents.
Links -- "linkaging." A political method incorporated from
the semiotics. The Montage Principle: we place any unrelated
fragment to ditract from an issue, we want to avoid. It's a
matter of shots and cuts. As long as we can produce the sense of
continuety in the spectator's mind. Since my mind is the space of
projection for the screen event, I have no time to evaluate, to
step back and think, I am the main MATERIAL of performance.
"....the audience is fifty percent of the performance." --
Shirley Booth.
The Brecht's Epic Theatre and the Meyerhold's step outside
of the Realism should be seen as preporation for camera (media,
the magic mirror). Both emphisized the political (propaganda)
aspect of performance. After the introduction of tv-camera (an
illusion of instant translation) the Naturalism is restored as a
style. The theatricality is fully absorbed by the
multi-camera-editing. The technique became invisible. We percieve
a screen event as "real" -- we think that we witness the
non-staged reality. The dominance of Realism (film culture) is
possible only because of the complexity of technologies hidden
behind the screen.
Verisimilitude refers to the extent to which the drama
appears to copy the offstage reality.
7. DICTIONARY OF SOME SEMIOLOGICAL TERMS
Actor = a performer who developed in himself "the art of
inner and outer mimicry and incarnation." (Richard Boleslavsky).
Apparatus -- The system of mechanism (physical and
psychological) which inform the work being undertaken (Foucault's
Panopticon).
Connotation -- sign's cultural associations, the
expressive/evaluative meaning.
Deconstruction -- Calling attention to the figurative and
constructive gestures of text. Deconstruction breaks apart
binaries to recognize the contradictory logics that maintain
binary oppositions. By breaking apart binaries (Man/Woman,
Black/White) one can disrupt the priority that inevitably
surrounds one side of the binary.
Denaturalization -- The scrutinizing of social and artistic
productions in order to discern the cultural and ideological
codes operative within them.
Denotation -- The proper or literal meaning of a word (sign)
(Roland Barthes). Denotation -- objective, conceptual meaning.
Desire -- The symbolic circulation of unconscious wishes
through signs bound to our earliest forms of infantile
satisfaction.
Diegesis -- The world of what is told and reported directly
to the audience and subject. The sequence of events constructed
by the translator of the text.
Difference -- According to Derrida, "the systematic play of
differences, of traces of differences of the spacing by which
elements relate to one another. This spacing is the production,
simultaneously active and passive, of intervals without which the
full terms could not signify. could not function. Differance
combines the English verbs, "to differ" and "to defer."
Discourse -- The set of elements that reveal the apparatus,
ideology, and the materiality of image production. Points to
parts of text which are critical, evaluative and questioning. As
opposed to story, which focuses on flow, continuity and naming.
Ego -- the spectator's acting space.
Ellipsis -- typically used as a film term. Ellipsis refers
to time passing in the story while no time elapses in the
discourse.
Equivocation -- Used in conjunction with Hermeneutic Code as
a mode of mingling the narrative. Equivocation problematizes the
relation between the truth and the deliberate envasion of the
truth. It thus focuses attention on the confusion, thus serving
to redouble the confoundment of the story.
Fantasmatic -- A term used by Freud and Lacan to suggest a
hallucination. To use Freud's example, a child has a fantasmatic
relationship to milk, for the child yearns for the sexual and
biological fulfillment of suckling from the mother's breast. When
crying for milk, the child is crying for more than just hunger.
Hermeneutic Code -- The code of mechanisms along which a
story can be problematized and solved. A text employs hermeneutic
code when it poses questions, studies its discourse, or contains
opaque decisions which need to be solved logically.
Fetishism -- The investment in a commodity of worth beyond
its use-value.
Identification -- abilities to replace my ego with the life
of character. Overcoming the Mirror Phase -- The period in a
child's life when they are gaining their identity. The child
looks into the mirror for the first time and sees herself as
whole, much like the complete people she sees around her. This
wholeness forms the foundation for an [1]ego and an identity.
Ideology -- method of organizing history (social
environment). According to Barthes, Ideology is a secondary
system of connotations which is built over a system of
denotations.
Interpellation -- According to Althusser, [1]ideology works
through interpellation. Interpellation is the social practices
and structures which hail individuals so as to endow them with
social identity constituting them as subjects who unthinkingly
accept their role within the system of production relations.
Logocentrism -- The tradition which assigns the origins of
truth to the logos -- whether the spoken self-present word, or
the voice of rationality, or God -- as reflective of an
internally coherent and originally truth.
The "Other" -- According to Terry Eagleton, the "other" is
that which like language is always interior to us and will always
escape us, that which brought us into being, as subjects in the
first place but which always outruns our grasp... We desire that
what others -- our parents, for instance -- unconsciously desire
for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in
linguistic, sexual and social relations -- the whole field of the
"Other" which generate it.
Performance -- "Not I, not not-I": A condition of double
negativity that characterizes the state of actor's self in
relation to the role the actor plays. The performance event is
the embodiment or enactment of the text--usually a collaborative
endeavor involving one or more performers, text, audience,
context.
Persona -- from the Latin for "mask." The psychological
image of the character that is created, especially in
relationship to other levels of reality. Personality instead of
individuality.
Post-Modernism -- Post-modernism can be defined as the
rejection of the modernist -project of critique by simply
tinkering with structures. Post modernism negates totalization ,
teleology, and the faith in a utopian solution.
Post-Structuralism -- A movement towards a mode of enquiry
which critiques the fundamental structures which form the
foundation of art and analysis. A radical skepticism about the
possibility of constructing a meta-language which might position,
stabilize or explain all of the other discourses, since the signs
of the meta-language are themselves subject to slippage an
indeterminacy.
Semiology -- shows what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.
Semiotics -- the science of signs.
Sign -- In Semiology, the basic unit of signification composed of the signifier (which carries the meaning) and the signified (which is the concept or thing signified).
Subject -- Refers to a concept related to -- but not
equivalent with -- the individual, and suggests a whole range of
determinations (social, political, linguistic, ideological,
psychological) that intersect to define it. Refusing the notion
of self as a stable entity, the subject implies a process of
construction by signifying practices that are both unconscious
and culturally specific.
Suture -- The process whereby the subject is stitched into
the chain of discourse which both defines and is defined by the
work of the unconscious.
Symbol -- 1. In the Peirce/Wollen system, a sign that
demands neither resemblance to its object nor any existential
bond with it, but operates by pure convention. [See INDEX, ICON.]
2. More generally, something that represent something else by
resemblance, association, or convention.
Unpleasure -- A text resisting the habitual pleasures of
coherence, suspense and identification.
SIDE NOTES:
1. Yuri Lotman on Russian aristocracy social behavior. We're
members of high society now (equality in electronic no-space
space), or pretend to be. Politics-before were a work (like
anything else), we even had a special professional class for
governing. Showing and viewing as work (Jonathan Beller _Cinema_)
2. We, the Russians, had two great school of theatre. One,
theatre as theatre (on stage), another (which gave the born to
Russian theatre) was Russian aristocracy with highly theatralized
social forms (this class survived in Russia longer than ion the
rest of Europe). {1-2. Soviet life was post-modern in its
origins.} The old Russian political tradition: act for the West
(to show and show off).
3. American government today isn't "of the people, by the
people, for the people." There are no "people" anymore. The New
Americans are not necessarily American citizens. The whole world
is viewing American spectacle and this act of watching is making
American politics. We have no "world government" but we do have
"global village."
4. A signifier (the material form of the sign) is
"president" and the signified (the concept its represents) is
"president" too! Is there such a thing as "president"? Or it's
our invention? I = president (signifier), and I =/= president
(signified). Both statements are true.
5. Ten fundamental codes instrumental in shaping images
(Umberto Eco):
codes of transmission -- TV
codes of recognition -- how Russians recognize her leaders?
tonal codes (nationalism?)
iconic codes: mafia faces, including the neck, can't fake it
-- power, strength, force.
The iconographic codes: Stalin's, Mao jacket, but orange!
(all codes are interconnected). Restored tricolor and two-headed
eagle.
codes of taste and sensibility: several different social
groups must be satisfied in one candidate
The rhetoric codes; the name of the country ("Russia" or
"America")
stylistic codes;
codes of the unconscious; most powerful.
Five codes utilized in reading (Ronald Barthes):
hermeneutic (narrative turning-points)
proairetic (basic narrative actions)
cultural (prior social knowledge)
semic (medium-related codes)
symbolic (themes)
6. PM social texts are super-hypertexts, collective messages
even if expressed by one (president). (see Martin Ryder).
*Performance* is a text which doesn't exit without spectatorship.
There were kings without kingdoms but a president couldn't be
elected without a nation. He is a national "text," an image
(representation) of nation.
....
NOTES
I do not know if many of my texts will ever be finished. This is one of them.
... 
I wrote my notes during the last presidential compaign. Four years later, Year 2000. Even the Republicans now play the game of "compassionate conservatism"! How far we went in being politically correct!
