The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance

CHAPTER THREE: SOUNDING THE NATION

CHAPTER THREE Sounding the Nation For the ‹rst time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics. —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” In the mid-1930s, while Walter Benjamin pondered the effect of mechanical reproduction on the work of art, “Dutch” Reagan was acquiring regional celebrity on the radio and dreaming of Hollywood. Among the myriad consequences of the new techne of mechanical reproduction identi‹ed 85 Photo: President Reagan broadcasts an address to the Soviet people in 1985. Photo © Bettman/Corbis. [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] by Benjamin and mastered by Reagan were the new possibilities they created for the mingling of art and politics. By altering the means and modes of artistic production, mechanical reproduction transformed both the use and the exchange value of the art object. For Benjamin, this meant that the mechanically reproduced image afforded the opportunity for a mimetic reformation; a performative mimesis he anticipated would “emancipate” aesthetic representation. While Benjamin is here primarily concerned with the impact of mechanical reproduction on the work of art, what are the implications for the other term in his equation, the political? How does this new modernist function of aesthetic representation (“based on another practice—politics”) affect political representation? What effect would mechanical reproduction have on the relationship between statecraft and stagecraft? Benjamin offers a partial answer to these questions in a lengthy footnote to his discussion of the similarity between the experience of confronting one’s own image in the mirror and the estrangement felt by the ‹lm actor performing for the camera. Here he contemplates the impact of mechanical reproduction on the “function” of cultural and political performers. Since the innovations of camera and recording equipment make it possible for the orator to become audible and visible to an unlimited number of persons, the presentation of the man of politics before the camera and recording equipment becomes paramount. Parliaments, as much as theaters , are deserted. Radio and ‹lm not only affect the function of the professional actor but likewise the function of those who also exhibit themselves before this mechanical equipment, those who govern. Though their tasks may be different, the change affects equally the actor and the ruler. The trend is toward establishing controllable and transferable skills under certain social conditions. This results in a new selection, a selection before the equipment from which the star and the dictator emerge victorious.1 Benjamin’s account of the imminent danger posed by the evacuation of the public spaces of cultural and political representation (theaters and parliaments ) and the power of radio and movies to create both stars and dictators is a sobering counterpoint to his utopian vision of the decline of the aura of the work of art and the democratizing potential of mass culture. 86 / the president electric While “the selection before the equipment” helps explain the rise of Hitler and Hollywood, Ronald Reagan’s career offers a counternarrative for the effects of mechanical reproduction on the “tasks” of the actor and the politician. In the American context the new modes of performance that circulated through electronic media would, as Henry Adams predicted , remodel social and political habits, ideas, and institutions to such a degree that they would join the actor and ruler together in a more intimate relationship than the one described by Benjamin. While Benjamin was completing his spirited, albeit ambivalent, defense of the industrialization of art, an American work of art designed for reproducibility, and no longer based on the rituals of a few but on a politics for the many, was just emerging from the prairies of the American Midwest. Assessing the culture of performance that formed the backdrop to Reagan’s education and presidency, and the controllable and transferable skills he acquired from the culture industry, it is hard to resist the conclusion that in the United States the tasks...