Let’s Understanda Our Own Propaganda

“Propaganda” is thought of as a separate category of information that has as its objective the “systematic, widespread, deliberate” (as Webster’s puts it) spread of some ideology. But—what if there is no such thing as non-propaganda? What if all information is propaganda? Then the whole idea of “propaganda” begins to collapse into meaninglessness. Before that happens, though, I would like to acknowledge that the idea of “propaganda” does represent a matter of emphasis, a question of degree; and we are right to presume that some things are more “propaganda-like” and others less so.

It has been a key principle of leftist thought, from Marx to Gramsci, that all cultural production is a product of underlying economic and social structures—in other words, that pictures and text are always ideologically interpretable. Underneath every art object, every news story, every piece of writing, every videotape, there lies an ideological, economic, social “spin,” conscious or unconscious; and it is part of our duty, as increasingly conscious cultural producers, to figure out how and what ideological messages our own work is in fact supporting.

Now of course, if something is socially or ideologically “interpretable,” that does not mean it is “systematic” or “deliberate” in its ideological spin, does it? —Or does it?

If I could turn for a moment to a much more conservative school of thought, I would like to point out that even the old-fashioned “New Criticism” school of literary analysis put down an author’s “intentions” as impossible to verify, and thus inappropriate to discuss: “What are your ‘intentions’? What are the ‘intentions’ of your work?” —these are questions that another person can never answer for you, first of all; and second, what you say your intentions are doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what your intentions “really” are. Moreover, it doesn’t even matter what your intentions are. For instance, I might build an enormous condom-covered penis in my front yard, with the “intention” of promoting safe sex practices; but my work’s interpretation by my neighbors would overwhelm my “intentions,” as the community would find this object weird and scandalous, and would not find that it had anything much to do with health issues at all, in its effect.

If deliberate personal intentions—even your own—can’t really be taken seriously, and since any cultural work that you make is going to be interpreted by other people, then the adjective “deliberate” loses a lot of its meaning. “Deliberate,” in reference to “propaganda,” could then only refer to a group deliberation, an organized scheme or project to mount a propaganda campaign. But this is still not clear. Some years ago, for instance, the popular critic Tom Wolfe wrote a conservative attack on the art world, claiming as his principal principle that the taste for modern art was a deliberate conspiracy among a set of self-appointed New York cognoscenti and art dealers. That is, he was claiming that modern art (that’s the whole of modern art, we’re talking about here) was a vehicle for “systematic, widespread, deliberate indoctrination”—and that’s Webster’s definition of propaganda. I think that there’s some truth in what Tom Wolfe wrote; on the other hand, any group of creative people contributing to a shared cultural sensibility will fall victim to this same argument. So is all cultural work propaganda, or not?

Perhaps we could save the idea of propaganda from including everything—or at least including every cultural project, group, or work—by dropping the subjective term “deliberate” altogether, and instead by judging “intentions” or “deliberateness” from the results, the impact, and the reception of the work rather than from the statements or actions of the makers. That is what the Reception Theory literary critics tried to do. Of course, in effect this brings us back very close to the leftist view, that cultural values are all determined by social values and, leftists would add, economics.

Ok, you say, but not everything I do is propaganda, because 1) what I do creatively is just what my friends and I naturally like and want to do—because it’s the way I really feel about myself; and 2) the cultural grouping into which my work fits, the “scene” I’m a part of, and the goals of the kind of things I do, are purely artistic, not “ideological” by either intention or deliberation, and they are not supposed to be “propaganda” and are not making any kind of social comment at all; in effect, I am completely ideologically neutral.

Well, these are important claims, and I want to look ‘em over one by one.

1. If you are doing what you “just like” to do, then (as my friend Henry Flynt asked years ago) why does it “just” turn out that what you “just like” to do fits into a pre-established category, like art, or collecting insects, or whatever, with its pre-existing rules, standards, and competitive goals? In fact, saying that this kind of activity is just “you” is exactly the proof you should need to show yourself that the innermost workings of your imaginings and desires have been constructed within you by the society around you, that your own personal consciousness has been induced, in large part, by the formative experiences that have shaped who you are. I think that most people are ready to accept the idea that “environment” has shaped who they are; but most people also reserve a part of themselves for “me,” for the part where “I am making my own decisions and shaping my own life choices,” even though this is completely inconsistent. What is this weird phenomenon that we find so difficult to expel from our thoughts? Answer: It is an ideology of individualism, and ideology that has built itself into us through the effects of the pervasively propagandistic surroundings in which we live. Should I point to one teensy example? When you greet someone by asking “How are you?” you are turning their attention inward, reinforcing their sense of physical and judgmental autonomy, their individual identity, while simultaneously activating one of the basic tactics of hypnotic trance induction: focusing the subject’s attention on their own inner physical sensations. The “How are you?” ritual that is so pervasive among us, and is regarded as supportive of the other individual, is a powerful propagandistic tool for the ideology of individualism.

“So?” —I can feel you thinking; —“So what! So, I am a part of the world. Duh. And…??? What am I supposed to do about this? Stop making art? Or is this all a lot of bullshit that adds up to nothing, if everything is propaganda; because then nothing is propaganda, since there isn’t any non-propaganda!” Well, the general idea here is that if we could get a “propaganda detector” going, so that the (frequently) hidden ideological baggage of our activities and work could become a part of our conscious thinking, then we might be able to make better choices about what to do, and what we really want. If everything has a propagandistic side, but we often lose track of that side, or ignore it, or it’s hidden, then a “propaganda detector” would help us perceive more accurately the effects of our activities. For example, suppose I “just liked” the idea of putting my arms around a woman and holding her close, then taking off her clothes and having sex with her. I could even be thinking that my “just liking” that idea came to me biologically, and had nothing to do with propaganda. Yet clearly the act of rape itself is propagandistic in nature, because it carries a terribly intense and damaging message of patriarchal domination. Since I understand that fact, and since that fact is echoed in the society around me, I would totally resist that “just liked” idea. Now let’s suppose I “just liked” the idea of making a video to show at Squeaky Wheel that attacked our Buffalo public access cable TV facility because (let’s say) I couldn’t get my show on in a good time slot. “Just” a personal expression, not a political statement or “propaganda”—or is it? In a city as racially polarized as Buffalo, my video would of course be received by the cranky white people in my audience (if there are any that come to Squeaky Wheel) as a reaffirmation of their racist suspicions about the public access station, which is primarily operated by members of the African American community. Any black audience members would have their propaganda antennas up all the way, and would sense a hostility that would reinforce their own doubts about the possibilities of participating in a racially mixed cultural scene. Once again, a sensitivity to the propagandistic or socio-political implications of my idea would help me decide not to realize it.

So far the theory I’ve touched on has all leaned to the left, politically. That doesn’t mean that there’s no understanding of “propaganda” on the right, though; far from it. It’s just that the right tends to be skimpy where it comes to theory. But in practice, the right—which I take as including the corporate world, or at least corporate management—probably has the sharpest propaganda strategists anywhere, and probably launches the most focused and duplicitous propaganda of anybody. Aside from “news,” which is the trickiest propaganda to figure out, the most humongous shitload of propaganda is advertising. Any book that deconstructs advertising is by the same token a propaganda “how to.” The history of advertising, as pictured by astute critics like Stuart Ewen (Captains of Consciousness), reflects conscious “deliberations” aimed at developing a pervasive American “consumer” ideology and a level playing field for marketing. The toolkit of advertisers has embraced the subtlest psychological tactics imaginable, including those I’ve alluded to with the “How are you?” example above. And of course being “systematic” and “widespread” is the avowed aim of advertisers, whose goal in the end is to shape our thinking to their model. So an understanding of advertising offers many tips for us in our efforts to unveil the hidden “propagandistic” (that is, ideological) programs that may reside, latent, in our own work.

2. Now let’s look at some work that is “purely artistic,” and that might easily convince us of its ideological neutrality. As an example, I would like to consider the kind of work that is least likely of all to appear propagandistic, and that to all appearances has a minimal relevance to propaganda: abstract art. By this term, I intend to address all kinds of work in any medium in which formal principles—design, rhythm, fragmentation, process, materials, and decontextualization—provide the dominant effects in the work. Most artists whose work is abstract or formal tend to think of their work as politically neutral, unconcerned with social issues, solely technical, and esthetically rewarding simply in terms of its own inner integrity.

I have made work with this kind of values; I still make work with these values. I won’t try to discount the proven validity of the authentic esthetic experiences that can arise in the presence of abstract work. In fact, what I would like to do is refute the notion that because abstract work does not (in itself) acknowledge its own propagandistic values, that it is then discredited and valueless (or worse).

During the 1980s and 90s (and more recently in Europe, at last!) the culture world roused itself to a persistent wake-up call about its responsibilities concerning issues of social identity. Grudgingly responding at first to feminists and black power advocates, then to many more of us, the dominant culture began to acknowledge diverse voices, and then in fact to insist that these voices, which were effecting a cultural and social revolution, were brought to the fore. In short, an ideological agenda was abroad, was welcomed in many quarters (though far from all!), and provided a measuring stick against which abstract art was generally found abysmally wanting. This was a swing of the “pendulum” away from the 1950s and 60s obsession with abstract art, an obsession that had (conveniently) neglected or ignored the propagandistic elements of abstraction. In the 1950s abstract art had been systematically exploited by corporate America as a propagandistic device for supporting a powerful and “neutral” image of capitalist market culture. Then in the 60s Clement Greenberg was the evangelical theorist of abstraction, distracting the public from the fact that abstraction was distracting the public, and the artists, from the looming social issues that boiled over in the antiwar demonstrations. The “pendulum” swing was a more than welcome corrective! But lately, and inevitably, we have begun to tire of propagandistic hammering on identity politics, a pathos that was increasingly excluding other systems of values, including (but not only) those at the other end of the “swing.”

Today artistic work must retain its awareness of the gains that have been made in the area of cultural diversity, but at the same time we want it to deliver its messages with elegance or flair, and to be well made. The time of a simplistic statement of the problem is past; now the work must be fleshed out in some way, “well done.” But how something is done, the way in which work is executed, is a direct and exact reference to the work’s formal aspects and values. We begin to see that advertising has been there before us: the formal elements in advertising are dominant; that’s why the commercials are separate from the programs! And as one looks back over the historical course of artwork that is recognized and praised for its value as propaganda, we see a startling profusion of formalist approaches—the collages of Heartfield, the constructivist posters of revolutionary Russia, the design-conscious peace posters of Peter Max. How is it, then, that in all propaganda abstract and formalist principles—the apparent antitheses of propaganda—provide so dominant a function?

The answer I have to offer involves areas of psychology that have been more exploited by the right than the left: perceptual and motivational psychology on the one hand, and on the other hand the most recondite region of psychology—not the intellectually turgid theoretical domain of psychoanalysis, but hypnosis research. Many findings of perceptual psychology have of course long been incorporated in design principles, for example the expectation that the moving eye will follow a border or line. And advertising research is plowing up new psychological turf relentlessly, continually exploring the perceptual and motivational advantages of using particular colors, of using a particular schedule of presentation, and so forth. However, what I would like to suggest goes further, toward a more general accounting for “the formalism that sells,” and an explanation of the need to rely on abstract and formal devices for designing “content-oriented” messages—whether they are framed as news, narratives, documentaries, or simply advertising (propaganda pure and simple).

It was a hallmark of the later work of Milton Erickson (1901-80), who for decades was America’s premiere hypnotherapist, that by deliberately puzzling or preoccupying his clients’ conscious attention, he was able to achieve a more direct relationship to their unconscious processes—including the clients’ fundamental sense of self, their habitual behaviors, and certain of their attitudes; in short, he was able to address the places where their psychological problems were seated. Usually, but not always, his “depotentiation” of conscious processes was characterized by a condition he called “trance.” What I’m getting at here is that the most clearly-understood pathway to the seat of our ideological outlooks, our habitual behaviors and attitudes, bypasses our conscious processes—and in particular, it seems that the route is most direct when the rational mind is set aside or directed to other things. The tactics that are used by Ericksonian therapists to depotentiate conscious processes include boredom, distraction, confusion, and interruptions. Some examples will help to show how these tactics are related to classic formal structures in media and other art.

The use of extended durations that is common in structuralist and conceptual media works (which is to say formalist media works) is usually treated as an exploration of an altered sense of temporality or expectation. Said another way, these works are boring; yet boredom is, as these works themselves demonstrate, in fact productive of a renewed orientation toward those fundamental (ideological?) actuators, expectation and the value of passing time.

An example of the distraction technique (cited in Stephen Gilligan’s Therapeutic Trances) is to ask the subject “to count backwards from 1000 to 1 by 3’s, or verbalize the alphabet forwards while visualizing it backwards (i.e., saying “A” while seeing “Z”, saying “B” while seeing “Y”, etc.)….” The similarity here to certain formal/conceptual paintings, films, and even performances is pretty striking.

Erickson himself once used confusion to rattle and destroy his opponent in a debate, simply by deliberately and persistently using sloppy grammar and an incorrect choice of words; that is, he wielded a formal disruption of syntactical and semantic usages as a propagandistic weapon.

The interruption tactic includes introducing meaningful nonsequiturs or rapidly changing the subject—which are stock formal techniques.

And so forth—with repetition, multiple communication modalities, allegorical and figural meanings, confusions of reflexivity, and so on. The wherewithal for distracting and depotentiating conscious mental processes is almost a direct translation of the formalist artist’s toolkit.

What I have to suggest here, then, reflects my own personal ideology. I believe that there is still much significant work to be done in the development and thorough understanding of abstract and formal art making tools, and that these tools have a prominent role to play in the work of any propagandist. And since what we do is bound to be propaganda anyhow, we owe it to ourselves and our friends and collaborators to make sure that we fully grasp the ideological spin that is either overt or hidden in the propaganda we make.

Tony Conrad
Buffalo, August 2003

[Figure title: “Rejected Giant Condom Sculpture Idea”]