Kennedy’s death marked television’s coming of age as a mass medium

Evidence

Yet it would be too simple to explain this extraordinary resonance on the basis of Kennedy’s public position. Rather, there are grounds for thinking that his posthumous public meaning is better grasped the other way round, as the projection of a new collective experience of reception. It has often been pointed out, indeed, that Kennedy’s personal popularity and prestige were at a particularly low ebb at the moment of his death; what is less often remarked is that this event was also something like the coming of age of the whole media culture that had been set in place in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Suddenly, and for a brief moment (which lasted, however, several long days), television showed what it could really do and what it really meant — a prodigious new display of synchronicity and a communicational situation that amounted to a dialectical leap over anything hitherto suspected. Later events of this kind were then recontained by sheer mechanical technique (as with the instant playbacks of the Reagan shooting or the Challenger disaster, which, borrowed from commercial sports, expertly emptied these events of their content). Yet this inaugural event (which may not even have had the emotional charge of Robert Kennedy’s death, or that of Martin Luther King, Jr., or of Malcolm X.) gave what we call a Utopian glimpse into some collective communicational “festival” whose ultimate logic and promise is incompatible with our mode of production. The sixties, often taken as the moment of a paradigm shift toward the linguistic and the communicational, can also be said to begin with this death, not because of its loss or the dynamics of collective grief, but because it was the occasion (like May 1968 later on) for the shock of a communicational explosion, which could have no further consequences within this system but which scars the mind with the briefly glimpsed experience of radical difference, to which collective amnesia aimlessly returns in its later forgetfulness, imagining itself to be brooding over trauma where it is in fact seeking to produce a new idea of Utopia. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 762

Categorization

• QUESTION: Jameson claims the Kennedy assassination was the ‘coming of age’ of television culture — worth verifying whether media historians actually date this to the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates or the Kennedy funeral coverage.
• XREF: Connects to Daniel Boorstin’s ‘pseudo-events’ and McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ — the assassination as a media-structural event rather than a personal one.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the inaugural media event ‘scars the mind with the briefly glimpsed experience of radical difference’ while later replays of similar events are ‘recontained by sheer mechanical technique’ is a dense thesis about how ritual violence becomes emptied by repetition — the same structure Jameson uses for the waning of affect.