Speaking Through Screens – Political Studies (original) (raw)

Anyone who wants to find out about politics, their problems and their staff with the help of television will soon suffer from marmot syndrome.

If you regularly follow the political talk shows, political magazines and news programs either from watching it on smart tv or iptv subscription, you soon have the feeling that you are stuck in a time warp and that you come across the same thing everywhere, the same phrases, the same heads, but also the same forms of reporting that are eternal same pictures and sender signatures.

Who’s to blame? Does public television fuel disenchantment with politics through frozen ritualization? How do you get to grips with a political system through media and analysis that as a “post-metaphysical discourse democracy” actually doesn’t want to know anything about the body of politics? In the past, the king’s body was itself a political issue, physical and therefore real power that was absolutized by courtly power shows.

In our democracy, on the other hand, there must not be a representative shine, but a people’s representative gray, because the people’s representative has a body that should no longer speak, after all, he is elected by the people and not by God. But what does television do with this discursive representation of the people? Doesn’t it seem just as tired of discourse, profane and leaden as the political debates?

TV and politics are in a mediation crisis

The suspicion arises that television and politics are in a mutually dependent crisis of expression and communication, which here and there also has to do with the fixing of quotas, with the leveling of individual ways of speaking and handwriting and with the disembodiment of politics.

It is not about the politician who gets cancer, separates from his wife at the wrong time or takes stimulating drugs, but it is about political bodies, i.e. politicians who take up topics through their media performance, interpret them and enter the public arena wear to politicians who should be sincere and appear authentic, but who – in front of a thousand microphones and cameras – cannot reinvent the world every minute.

These are ordeals, these are everyday action adventures, But television has obviously lost the desire and, in many cases, the competence to tell it.

In the past few weeks there have been a few programs to think about such questions and which show that we need more such documentaries and reports in order to stimulate interest in the democratic process again and again.

Lamby’s film tried its hand at the atmospheric panorama of an entire country, politics, also one of the statements of the film, bothered the bodies, forcing them to tame conflicts habitually and performatively. Much more local, however, was the focus of Klaus Stern’s impressive report “The Mayor-Maker”(ZDF) about a spin doctor in the province. Here it is shown how a consultant designs politicians, how he stages the body, depicts it, how he trains rhetoric and appearance.

Especially here, on site, in the province, it became clear that the citizen is also won over with the physical presence, with the body, which offers competence, but which also has a story, a narrative that must by no means appear staged, at most professionally managed .