Renovating "Culture": Rhythm, Reorientation, and Neoformalist Agency

Tony Conrad (2004)

In this essay, I will explore some connections between the organizational principles of (what the 20th century called) "formal" structures in art, on the one hand, and the communicative/ psychological processes involved with (what the 20th century called) "trance" on the other. This synthesis will point the way toward new approaches to cultural agency in the 21st century climate of Empire.

0. States.

(Read epigram)

The political must also be understood as ontological....

[ T ] he multitude's virtual set of powers is constructed by struggles and consolidated in desire.

                                                --Hardt and Negri, Empire (354, 357)

            Although what we call "trances" arise in a wide range of contexts--among mediums and shamans; in possession states and in dance; and in trance subjects who may be ecstatic and vigorous, or lethargic or even somnolent--the twentieth century began with Freud's disavowal of hypnosis, an apostasy that he conceived as the turning point in his invention of psychoanalysis. Subsequently--and even though both the foremost skeptic of hypnotic trance (Theodore X. Barber) and its greatest master (Milton Erickson) thrived during the twentieth century--a blanket of doubt, cynicism, and disdain was cast over both the investigation of trance and the development of language tools suited to such work. Even though a rash of books on "altered states" appeared during the 1960s in the flush of enthusiasm that came to the industrialized world with the introduction of psychedelic drugs, these volumes served largely to demonstrate the inadequacy of their investigative language in coping with trance, let alone with drug-induced states and mental illness.

1. Photographs.

            Text, pictures, and sounds can accomplish many of the same ends, where it comes to advocacy. If we want to find out what might make an advocacy message most efficacious, we should probably ask what state of receptivity may be negotiated in the receiver. The method of mirroring the reader, viewer, or listener--that is, locating that person's identity and interests within our message--is certainly one key to their receptivity. As Roland Barthes comments in relation to the photographs of political candidates, the "message" may then become a reflexive and empty vessel, albeit all the more effective for assuming this formal social function.

Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an 'ineffable' social whole, it constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away 'politics' (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a 'manner of being', a socio-moral status....

            Electoral photography is therefore above all the acknowledgement of something deep and irrational co-extensive with politics. What is transmitted through the photograph of the candidate are not his plans, but his deep motives, all his family, mental, even erotic circumstances, all this style of life of which he is at once the product, the example and the bait...a photograph is a mirror, what we are asked to read is the familiar, the known; it offers to the voter his own likeness, but clarified, exalted, superbly elevated into a type. (Barthes 1972, 91) [Barthes, Roland (1972), Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang.]

            To go further, to open the suture between the reader, viewer, or listener and their mirror image, one does well to first anesthetize this conscious process; to pry into the region in which unconscious values may be renegotiated; to leave the subject fascinated by their own thoughts, their own absorption, the fascination which their own inner processes bring them to. And this, of course, brings us to the second tool that suits the kit of advocacy--the confounding of consciousness that can come in the form of a trance. Perhaps a very small trance, or a slight and partial trance, but in any event, a moment in which the conscious subject is removed to some distance from our message, and a wakeful and engaged unconscious subject finds itself in parallel with our message, ready and free to absorb from it whatever it can find useable, useful, suited, ideal, measured to fit.   

            It may sound strange to your ears to associate learning, intellectual change, with trance. But bear in mind that I am using the term 'trance' to stand in for that condition in which the wandering attentiveness of the conscious processes is occupied, directed inward, or otherwise recursively oriented, so that the learning processor of the central nervous system--the larger and so-called "unconscious" system that redirects the values and associations underlying what we say and choose to do, the tangle of glial cells that negotiate our synaptic reinforcements, the inner schooling of ourselves that we want and approve--so that this system can be touched effectively with reason, feeling, and story.   

2. Pictures as stories.

            Since I will be using this term, 'trance,' I will elaborate on it a little in so far as to say that my usage derives from the hypnotic and therapeutic understandings of Milton Erickson (1901-80), who was arguably the most accomplished student of hypnotism in the last century. Erickson realized that the classic hypnotic trance is one among many related forms of learned activity; that the hypnotic trance is at one end of a continuum that extends regularly into the everyday, into the balance of conscious and unconscious activities that we are all experiencing all the time. Our conscious awareness can shift easily across the territory of our unconscious sensations, associations, and memories, or it can leave them behind entirely.

            Of course, some people do not believe that they have an "unconscious" at all, even though this is the part of their thoughts that does most of the thinking and takes the best care of them. Right now, for example, there are a hundred things one could turn conscious attention to that are being handled completely competently and gracefully outside of conscious attention. What are you doing with each of your hands or feet? Are they feeling comfortable, too cool or warm, or tight in your shoe? Is the seat about to collapse? Your unconscious can catch you. It can drive you home while you think about something else, make your breakfast or do any other routine activity that you have learned "by heart" while you turn your conscious attention elsewhere.   

            A formal displacement or misdirection of attention provides one route to unconscious processes, but perhaps not the only one. What appears to be a more direct contact with unconscious processes is the habitual trance of storytelling--if you will accept following a story as a kind of trance, as I do. And yet here, too, the occupation of our conscious attention with the formal problems of the story line commonly distracts our conscious attention, leaving it to the unconscious to assimilate the story for us, to fall into the trance of the narrative. This is the absorption of a spellbinding taleteller, of theater, of the narrative cinema.

In the logic of pictures, storytelling is a starkly effective tool. Edward Hopper's 1932 "Room in New York," for example, draws the viewer into an ambiguous relationship between two players. [Hopper, Edward. "Room in New York" (1932), oil on canvas, 29 x 36 in. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; F. M. Hall Collection. In Lyons, Deborah and Adam D. Weinberg, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination . New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and W. W. Norton & Co. (1995), Pl. 2.] (Slide 1) He is reading--but what? and why?--while she turns to plunk at the piano--but why? to annoy? to seduce? As in all storytelling, rhetorical devices, formal structures and relationships, are there to set up our investment in the tale. Here there is the window frame we are peering through, the stark whites and yellows spotlighting the figures, that draw our attention in , while letting us forget that our eye has been caught in the position of a peeping tom: the torsion of the figures away from each other implies their imagined relationship to the voyeur. Only this much, and already we are inside the story, lost in the confusion of the picture.     

            By comparison, the surrealist Rene Magritte, in "L'Invention collective" of 1935, [Magritte, Rene, "L'Invention collective" (1935), private collection, Belgium. In Larkin, David, ed., Magritte . New York: Ballantine Books (1972), Plate 12.] (Slide 2) creates a "distant and accurate relation between two realities" (to invoke Pierre Reverdy's measure for the strength of a surrealist image) by disguising the woman, as a fish; but this image does not tend to invoke a narrative interest. Yet Magritte's work brings us to the brink of trance by absorbing our interest with a metonymical device, and invests this relational formalism in an unsavory and propagandistic patriarchal indulgence.  

3. Camouflage.

            Perhaps the most stark irruption of formal dominion over content was the development of cubism, when the figure succumbed to reductivist design structures built upon Cezanne's famous cone, sphere, and cylinder. The decade of World War I was also the time when Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915) introduced the discrimination of form and content into analytic discourse. In fact, World War I brought into being the most prominent and widespread usage of design to specifically obscure content, namely camouflage. During the same decade, Max Wertheimer's founding paper of gestalt psychology (1912) provided a disciplinary context for studying the human rendering of content through the perception of form.

            The First World War began in the traditional way, with troops gaudily and recognizably decked out in uniforms. When, however, military engagements became reduced to the trench warfare that was in the end the hallmark of that war, priorities were rapidly reversed: it had become obvious that being conspicuous was deadly; being invisible let one live on to fight another day. This life and death premium on invisibility called upon the military for unanticipated expertise, in the form of a nuanced understanding of visual systems of shape and form recognition--an understanding that had long been the province of artists. Suddenly artists were important and useful. Among the many artists who designed World War I camouflage were Marcel Duchamp's brother, Jacques Villon; the founder of the Maison Cubiste, André Mare; Grant Wood; Thomas Hart Benton; and Charles Burchfield. (Behrens 35, 68, 100) The cubists, who had so systematically created visual interest by unexpectedly fracturing the subject, recognized parallels to their work in camouflage. In his biography of Picasso, Roland Penrose points out that "Harlequin, Cubism and military camouflage had joined hands. The point they had in common was the disruption of their exterior form in a desire to change their too easily recognized identity." (Penrose 205. Quoted in Behrens 71)[Penrose, Roland (1973), Picasso: His Life and Work. New York: Harper & Row.] Gertrude Stein described Picasso's reaction to a camouflaged tank on the streets of Paris. "Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait ça , he said, it is we that have created that. And he was right, he had. From Cezanne through him they had come to that." (Stein, quoted in Behrens 70.)[Stein, Gertrude (1933), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . New York: Random House.]   

             The most startling and inventive approach to camouflage in World War I was called dazzle . Dazzle was an approach to naval camouflage invented by the British artist Norman Wilkinson in 1917. Whereas on land the stationary object can be concealed like a leopard by melting it into the background, at sea ships were in motion against distant and changing backgrounds, and they were getting blasted to the bottom by U-boat torpedoes. Wilkinson

suddenly got the idea that since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer--in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading. (Wilkinson 79) [Wilkinson, Norman (1969), A Brush with Life . London: Seeley Service. Quoted in Behrens 86.][Behrens, Roy R. (2002), False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage . Dysart IA: Bobolink Books.] (Slides 3, 4, 5)   

            This radical inversion forces our attention to the broader question: what is camouflage? Where is it to be positioned among the larger vocabulary of dissimulating tactics--disguise, magic, misdirection, and lies? Dazzle makes it clear that camouflage is not one thing, a figure, but is instead systemic, a paradigm; in this it participates in the linguistic discrimination, metaphor versus metonymy, or paradigm versus syntagm, familiar from the writing of Roman Jakobson. Disguise , the substitution of one face for another, is a metonymic transformation, whereas misdirection , the figural interruption of content, functions on the metaphoric plane: and the formal system of visual signification bears this resemblance to the larger rhetorical structure of language.

However, we are doing more, here, than reduplicating the structuralist understanding of signs. Camouflage is indeed a form of magic --it encompasses misdirection, illusion, the interrogation of issues of completion or incompletion of the object; but beyond these matters (that form the infrastructural support of magic), camouflage also asks us to participate in the psychology of the hunter and the hunted, to examine the structures of control and influence that pin down the prey, that show the hunted how being fascinated can renegotiate the system of authority from the posture of the unarmed.

            Here we arrive at the fascinating place where authority ceases to be limited to authorship, where the forms of language are insufficient to spellbind the prey: this is the moment at which the hypnotic induction becomes the learning experience of trance, where the subject's language moves from the domain of usage into the domain of structure, from conscious to unconscious. At this transition point, which is so unclearly delimited, ideosystemic learning begins and theory ceases. It's easy enough to talk about your pets; you remember them; but how many people learn why their pet is here, now? You can raise your hand?    

            We have learned to despise psychedelic art because of its baseless pretension, its disingenuous adoption of style as a substitute signifier for the very things it claims, for its paradoxical invocation of subjectivities that make psychedelic art unnecessary if you are high and inscrutable if you aren't. Yet curiously psychedelic art bears a striking resemblance to camouflage--both the land confusion and the sea dazzle versions. Again and again, aspects of twentieth century art that eluded the analytical frameworks of their time can be reinterpreted under the terms of the very excess that slopped over the boundaries of discourse at the time, when peered at anew under the dappled light of camouflage.

            A remarkable instance, which submits to the understanding I have suggested for camouflage, is the body art of the German model, Veruschka. Vera Lehndorff had studied art in Hamburg and Florence, and acting with Lee Strasburg, before she became Veruschka. She has written about her body painting that

[c]amouflaging myself...made me feel that the public could not trap me so easily....

My work was...consistent with my conviction that there had to be a coherence between things: the object and the created picture, me and the picture, me and the object, my experience and the picture, my experience and the object, the viewer and the picture, between me and the viewer, the experience of the viewer and the object and the picture. This experience of coherence between us and the world around us is one of well-being; it produces a sense of affinity with whatever it is with which we come into contact. I have always used my self and my body as an instrument to express my ideas, but it has been I myself using myself as an object and I have therefore never felt that I was being used by others. (Lehndorff 145)[Lehndorff, Vera. "Fusing into the Background," in Lehndorff and Trülzsch, pp. 145-46.][Lehndorff, Vera and Holger Trülzsch, 'Veruschka': Trans-figurations . Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (1986).]     

As late as 1986, Susan Sontag dismisses to this strikingly coherent assertion of relational esthetics and the discourse of the body with the comment, "This is not a convincing argument." (Sontag 10)[Sontag, Susan. "Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholy," in Lehndorff and Trülzsch, pp. 6-12.] She struggles to untangle words for addressing the complex of relationships that Lehndorff began constructing in the late 1960s, when as she says, "I thought of painting my head like...stones." (Lehndorff 145) (Slides 6,7)

            Lehndorff's work certainly anticipated body discourse; more than that, it serves as a paradigmatic example of the workings of formal misdirection. She uses the confusion and contrast between a problematic eroticism on the one hand and the problematic social definition of nature, or the paradoxically dysfunctional social stoppages of plumbing (Slide 8) , electrical wiring (Slide 10), walls (Slide 11) , doors (Slide 12) , or windows (Slides 13, 14) on the other hand, to engage and disarm the hunter/enemy/viewer; while her insistent message of the esthetic confluence of the self with the world stirs in the recipient's unconscious.  

            The infant's first wish, or desire, conjoins self-preservation, physical or sexual gratification, and hunger.   Milk fulfills the hunger, but only for a while.   Like other desire, hunger is stilled only temporarily.   Desire is cyclic in the measure of its approach to its object, pleasure.   

4. Freud.

            The structure of time-based forms, such as media, theater, literature, and lecturing, offer a more complex basis for engaging unconscious processes. Temporal extension admits the possibility that we might be able to manipulate the economy of desire through exchanges between eroticism and trance. Is there such an exchange? Freud describes a key episode that occurred while he was still using hypnosis and had not yet developed his theories linking sexuality and neurosis. He was treating one of his "most acquiescent patients," he says,

with whom hypnotism had enabled me to bring about the most marvelous results.... As she woke up on one occasion, she threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the hypnotic treatment should be discontinued. I was modest enough not to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction, and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious element that was at work behind hypnotism. In order to exclude it, or at all events to isolate it, it was necessary to abandon hypnotism. (Freud 1961, 27)[Freud, Sigmund, An Autobiographical Study , in James Strachey (ed.), TheStandard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1961) Vol.XX].

In the background of this portentous scene are the paradoxical sexual outlook of the Victorian nineteenth century as it has been described by Foucault, the question of women's social position and the authority of medicine over women, the occult and suffragist associations of trance, and of course Freud's own difficulties with women. Marianne Krüll has questioned the culture of sexuality in the Freud family.

It is almost inconceivable that Jacob should ever have spoken to his son about his sexual lapses--if they were the reason for his feelings of guilt. Jewish fathers did not discuss their own sexuality with their children; sex was the great taboo, and not even liberal Jews were likely to have broken it. To Sigmund Freud, therefore, this part of his father's life would have been a closed book, all the more important to him if his father felt burdened and guilty about it. (Krüll 101) [Krüll, Marianne (1986), Freud and His Father , trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. NY, London: W.W. Norton & Co.]

            Freud identified the inception of psychoanalysis with his dropping of hypnosis. In so doing, he was cleaving to the heritage of Hermann Helmholtz, whose larger effort had been the colonization of subjectivity through a mechanization of perception. James Strachey comments on Freud's preliminary study for The Interpretation of Dreams that

the essence of Freud's 'Project" lay in the notion of combining into a single whole two theories of different origin. The first of these was derived ultimately from the physiological school of Helmholtz, of which Freud's teacher, the physiologist Brücke, was a principal member. Acording to this theory, neurophysiology, and consequently psychology, was governed by purely chemico-physical laws. (Strachey xvi-xvii, in Freud 1900) [Freud, Sigmund (1900, 1965). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books.]

The second theory was the identification of the "functional unit" of the nervous system as the neuron--a cell that had been so named only in 1891. Buoyed by these ideas, Freud goes so far as to say that "Reflex processes remain the model of every psychical function." (Freud 1900, 576) Freud always aspired to make psychoanalysis an objective science; but in so doing he relinquished a residue that makes possible an alternative interpretation of several fundamental psychological processes. [In spite of this objectivist bias, curiously Freud distanced himself from quantitative speculations; "little or no discussion is to be found upon some of the most fundamental of the concepts of which he makes use: such concepts, for instance, as 'mental energy,' 'sums of excitation,' 'cathexis,' 'quantity,' 'quality,' 'intensity,' and so on." (Strachey xvi, in Freud 1900) ] His abandonment of hypnosis was a political and social act, as well as a way for him to keep sexuality at arms length in his work, while colonizing it, and women's subjectivity in general, as a theoretical territory.

I have alluded to the fact that in the late nineteenth century trance was an empowering system for numbers of American women, among whom suffragists were a significant influence. At mid-century Sprirtualist meetings, as Ann Braude describes them,

Men called the meetings to order, forcefully presiding over gatherings that could number in the thousands. They addressed audiences in a "normal: state.... In contrast, the women at the podium were unconscious. Trance mediums were understood to be passive vehicles, whose physical faculties were used by spirits to express the sentiments of these unseen intelligences. Mediums presented not their own views but those of the spirits who spoke through them.... The essential passivity of women was asserted in a public arena, displayed before thousands of witnesses.... (Braude 85)

Because the trance was viewed as enabling women to speak who were otherwise unqualified to do so, the claim of entrancement became a convention used to support women's right and ability to ascend the public platform. (Braude 89)

The cause of suffrage was not a Spiritualist issue, but it needed these women who had public speaking skills,

the dynamic speaking mediums of the Civil War period [who] transferred their talents to the suffrage cause. Most continued to speak in trance but spoke for suffrage in a conscious state as well.... (193) In Connecticut, New Jersey, Indiana, New York, and Michigan, mediums and their supporters played important roles in state campaigns. Throughout the country, the suffrage movement benefited from Spiritualism's best speakers. (Braude 196) [Braude, Ann (1989), Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press.]

5. Advertising.

            In spite of this association with a progressive political movement, trance itself is a tool, and can be politically powerful but is in itself effectively neutral. While I want to acknowledge the conservative political role that trance may play, and has played in the support of aristocratic regimes through its several anti-political tendencies--first, to absorb individuals in their own experiences; second, to be allied with religious systems of social and political asphyxiation; and third, to invoke absence rather than presence as a criterion for action--I particularly want here to underscore the potential for a political utilization of trance in implementing programs of individual and group persuasion. If the mechanisms of trance induction are applicable to an understanding of the psychology of persuasion, they should be examined by artists and independents as much as by businesspersons and advertisers.

            Many findings of perceptual psychologists have of course long been incorporated into design principles, for example the expectation that the moving eye will follow a border or line, and will seek out eyes and sexual characteristics in figures. 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;" I want to provide an explanation of why and how one should 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.  

            If the greatest early triumph of twentieth century advertising strategists was their success in identifying products with a uniform American lifestyle, the second-greatest triumph was their colonization of the body. By inventing the dangers of halitosis, germs, and body odor, and other social imperatives, advertisers directed their audience's attention inward to their own bodies, invoking what hypnotists call ideosensory awareness--that is, reflexive attention to ones own inner sensations. Of course a hypnotist, rather than using the threatening and direct "Does your breath smell offensive?" might propose, "Your hand is feeling lighter and lighter." Both cases invoke sensory channels--smell and touch, respectively--that turn attention to the body; the first--in its implicit invocation of a future social situation--tends toward the form of posthypnotic suggestion, whereas the second--in problematizing the present moment--tends directly toward trance.  

            It is important to notice this temporal discrimination, which positions social concerns--insecurity, guilt, and sexual desire--in a future tense mode, whereas trance inductions utilize the ideosensory present. This may be seen as consistent with Freud's observation that feelings of attachment, but not of sexual desire per se, are experienced in hypnotic trance. Sexual expression in general may be seen as future-oriented, not only in regard to its role in relationship formation and procreation, but also in the way orgasm may be interpreted as a future-moving self leaving the present behind. The moment of orgasm, in this view, takes place in the phenomenological future. Time is the image completion of desire. Roland Barthes remarks upon this exemption of bliss from the social present--     

The asocial character of bliss: it is the abrupt loss of sociality, and yet there follows no recurrence to the subject (subjectivity), the person, solitude: everything is lost, integrally. (Barthes 1973, 39)[Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1973.]

The invention of cheap printing changed the cultural base of Europe from largely oral to largely literate. This shift, around the beginning of the seventeenth century, corresponds to the difference proposed by Foucault between a renaissance and a classical epist?m? . [Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences .(London: Tavistock Publications, Ltd., 1974)] Similarly, a redirection of sensory modalities, as happens in situations where attention is drawn inward upon the body, can affect our thinking profoundly. Even a momentary shift of emphasis, as in the aroma of Proust's famous cup of tea, can destabilize established conscious routines and permit the emergence of new patterns of thinking.

The cultural turn toward ideosensory modalities that was foregrounded in the kind of advertising that emerged after World War I was also reflected in other cultural changes. Before the War, one survey showed that only 26% of Americans cared for their teeth; by 1926, after millions of soldiers had found out about toothbrushes, the figure rose to 40%. [Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. New York: Random House, 1985.](99-100) The advertisers' shift toward body cleanliness was not only motivated by the profits to be made marketing new products, it also represented a conservative political spin. In the 1920s there were three Republican presidents;

drastic congressional limits and quotas on immigration; the Rotarian sensibility of the Saturday Evening Post ; the founding of Reader's Digest , and such political/racial reactions as the Red Scare, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and a rampant Ku Klux Klan. Amid these varied nativist impulses, advertising's discovery of the body made perfect sense. It projected a WASP vision of a tasteless, colorless, odorless, sweatless world. (Fox 101)     

            Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, founded the counseling profession in public relations, which he called "Engineering of Consent." However, if Freud's work influenced advertising strategies, it was certainly not through the deliberate utilization of trance induction techniques. It was only much later, around 1980, that the sophisticated twentieth-century hypnotic induction techniques of Milton Erickson were carefully analyzed and applied to a business application called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). The research on Ericksonian trance methods that led to the development of NLP was based on an intensive study of Erickson's methods by Richard Bandler, a psychologist with a background in mathematics, and John Grinder, whose other work is in transformational linguistics. Transformational grammar, which has developed out of Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking work in the 1950s and '60s, is the most formal and symbol-based school of contemporary linguistics. It is not surprising, then, that NLP was designed as a formal scheme for analyzing and controlling human behavior. Though from the outset Bandler and Grinder insistently distance their approach from the quantitative methods of behavioral science, they nevertheless claim that

NLP is concerned with form, not content, [so] strategies for effective and appropriate behaviors may be drawn from any model and applied to any other model of our choice. For example, the creative strategy of an artist may be appropriately transferred to an uninspired aerodynamic engineer faced with a challenging design problem. Or, the operational motivation strategy of a highly efficient business organization may be adapted to a sluggish government department. (13) [Dilts, Robert, John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Leslie C. Bandler, and Judith DeLozier (1980), Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume 1 / The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience. Cupertino CA: Meta Publications.]       

Beginning from simple psychological templates, for example the pacing of a client's behavior and the subsequent leading of the client's actions in a desired direction, and closely fitting their linguistic analyses to these structures, Bandler and Grinder build a framework within which the simple formulaic processes of traditional trance induction can be encompassed, but which are radically expanded and loosened from earlier hypnotic practices.

Let me offer a small example of how the inward redirection of conscious attention can serve ideological or cultural interests. 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 you are activating one of the basic methodologies of hypnotic trance induction: focusing the subject's attention inward, on their own inner physical sensations . The "How are you?" ritual that is so pervasive among us, and is commonly regarded as supportive of the other individual , is a powerful propagandistic tool in support of the Western ideology of individualism.

The history of advertisers, as pictured by astute critics like Stuart Ewen, the author of Captains of Consciousness , [Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture . McGraw-Hill (18r976).] reflects conscious deliberations by advertising strategists, 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.

            Are these techniques, and NLP, tools that are powerful enough to be suitable for social control applications? Perhaps; however, getting results from them is not easy. The focus of concentration and the understanding of behavioral structures required for NLP to function are beyond the capacities of most people to absorb except with a great deal of training and dedication. To the extent that the techniques of NLP do work, though, they indicate that there is indeed a structure to be found in Erickson's trance induction that may be less apparent than the formulaic induction procedures of classical hypnosis, and that this structure, like the traditional methods, is subject to formal analysis and description.

6. Repetition.

            Rhetoric, which according to Aristotle was the art of persuasion, was in a sense a strategic nuclear weapon in ancient Greek and Roman politics. Effective public speaking was the key to social and political effectiveness; so the regulation of common people's access to rhetoric was the barrier that sustained the aristocracy. Upper class education in Europe centered on rhetoric for the next 2,000 years, into the nineteenth century. In Greece, the sophist movement, which beginning in the fifth century BCE promoted general social access to rhetoric on a pay-as-you-go basis, and consequently served the interests of effective direct democracy, was attacked with the total cultural resources of oligarchic Greece. Plato's assault on Gorgias of Lentini, regarded by the ancients as the inventor of figures of speech, pins him as a rhetorician, not as a philosopher. Gorgias was the leading sophist of his day; he was so able as a rhetoritician that he was actually able to convincingly defend the proposition that nothing exists .

            In the classic book on rhetoric that was long attributed to Cicero, and which is "the oldest extant formal study of figures" of speech, (Cicero xx) [Cicero, Ad C. Herennium Libri IV: De Ratione Dicendi ( Rhetorica ad Herennium )(1977), trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge MA and London: Loeb Classical Library 403.] the author begins his study of figures with repetitio , which he praises for its "impressiveness and vigor," and urges "that it ought to be used for both the embellishment and the amplification of style." (Cicero 277) A "complete theory of Repetition" (Cicero 314n b ) follows in the Greek text. In a modern literary dictionary, repetition is defined as:

An essential unifying element in nearly all poetry and much prose. It may consist of sounds, particular syllables and words, phrases, stanzas, metrical patterns, ideas, allusions and shapes. Thus refrain, assonance, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia are frequent in repetition. (Cuddon 552, s.v. repetition ) [Cuddon, J.A. (1977), A Dictionary of Literary Terms . Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co.]

What may be said of repetition in poetry applies in every particular to song and dance as well. What has not been said, though, is how or why repetition should have the impact it does, and consequently why it should be so central in the sociocultural mechanics of education and persuasion. However, we can form a broader picture of repetition by drawing upon an experiential understanding of hypnotic trance.

My understanding of hypnosis and usage of the term 'trance' draws, as I have said, from the work of Milton Erickson, who saw trance as a condition in which conscious processes were suspended to a certain degree, and unconscious processes, largely seen as benign and teachable, could be released. As in most schools of hypnosis, Ericksonian trance is commonly induced by occupying the subject's conscious attention with internal mental or bodily events. The hypnotic induction reorients the subject's perceptual focus, commonly shifting it to a posture of systemic self-reference. This happens when the subject is enabled to reflect upon a range of questions such as whether she or he will soon go into a trance, or when; or whether an arm feels cooler or warmer, or whether something that I just said makes any sense at all, or whether the feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, pressure, brightness, or whatever can be a little greater or lesser from moment to moment.

In the common trance induction that requires the subject to count backwards, the subject is being required to focus internally on a string of learned associations that must be revisited consciously to "get it right." Any problem that refocuses attention internally on learned associations, such as reading, thinking about something else as you drive, daydreaming, watching TV, and so forth, involves the sort of repositioning of conscious attention that can make trances and access to unconscious processes possible. Where did the time go? How could I have not been paying attention to my pain? or my bills? or whatever. Even listening to a talk can provide this sort of redirection of attention. If anyone here went into a trance, you could too.

Trance makes greater focus possible because it is simply the regulation of attention. Since repetition redistributes focus to its previous point, repetition is an effective mechanism for introjective absorption of conscious processes. All mammals are habitually attuned to orienting themselves, or as we might also describe it, to learning ; and humans are particularly facile at this. Repetitive processes invoke a related mechanism. Neurophysiology describes learning as a process in which the repeated activation of certain neuronal connections establishes a chemically habituated system that we call a memory. In this process, we can understand the repetition as an orientation of internal psychological organization through an internal comparison process, so that this orientation is inevitably accompanied by some measure of reflexive attention to the fact of repetition itself and a concomitant reduction of other sensory input.

            The earliest and most common way that we change our thinking--that is, that we learn --is through repetition. An eminent experimental psychologist, Ulrich Neisser, comments on this.

The simplest memory device available to five-to-six-year-olds is the simple repetition of the message after the experimenter.... The children themselves become quickly aware of this device, and often mention it when asked how they were able to remember the message. Thus, for example, Dima S. (five years, seven months) gave the following answer: "I repeated the list in a whisper" (Record No. 57). Another subject answered: "I repeated it to myself and I remembered it" (Record No. 67). Repetition, as a memory device, has two forms. In the first, the child repeats the message, aloud or to himself, after the experimenter. This form appears earliest. In this case repetition simply accompanies the "reception" of the message. Its function is merely to cement retention of the experimenter's words.

            Later, repetition assumes another form and function. The child repeats the message after, not as, it is heard. Objectively, this type of repetition functions as recollective repetition. (Neisser 361)[Neisser, Ulrich. Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1982.]

"Of course," we think, "repeating something helps to learn it." But why? And is this true in every kind of repetition? Repetition is a common experience, but also a very strange one. As Roland Barthes comments,

repetition itself creates bliss. There are many ethnographic examples: obsessive rhythms, incantatory music, litanies, rites, and Buddhist nembutsu, etc.; to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified. But: in order for repetition to be erotic, it must be formal, literal, and in our culture his flaunted (excessive) repetition reverts to eccentricity, thrust toward various marginal regions of music. (Barthes 1973, 41)

It is impossible not to notice that (suddenly!) Barthes's examples here are almost all from music and speech.  

             The relationship between desire, or bliss, and repetition is familiar and deep. An infant's first wish, or desire, conjoins self-preservation, physical or sexual gratification, and hunger.   Milk sates the hunger, but only for a while.   Like other desire, hunger is stilled only temporarily.   Desire is cyclic in the measure of its approach to its object: pleasure. Judith Butler comments, "desire emerges, but only in relation to need (which cannot appear in language) and to demand (the symbolic effort to order the subject according to law)."  

Desire is the site in which demand [that is, societal regulation] and need are never reconciled, and this makes of desire a permanently vexed affair.   Further, desire is never fulfilled, for its fulfillment would entail a full return to that primary pleasure, and that return would dissolve the very subject which is the condition of desire itself. Hence, the fulfillment of desire would be its radical self-cancellation.   Desire thus emerges at an infinite distance from pleasure, indeed, always at the cost of pleasure, but also always at the cost of a conformity to the symbolic law." (Butler 380-81) [Butler, Judith. "Desire." In Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms For Literary Study. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (1990, 1995), pp. 369-86.]

In speaking of children's "peculiar pleasure in constant repetition," (Freud 1960, 226) [Freud, Sigmund   (1960). Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.] Freud mentions that during play "they come across pleasurable effects, which arise from a repetition of what is similar, a rediscovery of what is familiar, similarity of sound, etc., and which are to be explained as unsuspected economies in psychical expenditure." (128) This is almost Freud's only pronouncement on repetition, which is surprising, considering the evidently quantifiable and conspicuous role that repetition plays in all kinds of learning and indeed in experience in general.  

            Freud did not understand hypnotic trance as a learned behavior, as Erickson however did. Freud saw hypnosis as

a group formation with two members. Hypnosis is not a good object for comparison with a group formation, because it is truer to say that it is identical with it. Out of the complicated fabric of the group it isolates one element for us--the behaviour of the individual to the leader. Hypnosis is distinguished from a group formation by this limitation of number, just as it is distinguished from being in love by the absence of directly sexual trends. In this respect it occupies a middle position between the two. (Freud 1921, 47)

[Freud, Sigmund (1921, 1959). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.]

This fascinating but brief remark shows that even in 1921 Freud saw hypnotic trance as primarily (if not solely) a relation of affection. Also, like everyone of his day he saw trance as a system involving "the relation between someone with superior power and someone who is without power and helpless...." (Freud 1921, 47) He goes on to suggest that a group with a leader, but without other structure than its relation to this leader, is bonded by a "libidinal constitution" comparable to the nonspecifically sexual emotional ties that he locates in trance. " A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego ." (Freud 1921, 48, emphasis in original) He seems to be suggesting that when the subject identifies with an ego ideal outside the network of consciousness, hypnotic conditions result.

            My inclination is to reverse Freud's logic here. Whether repetitive movement is dance, factory work, or marching, it has strong implications for social bonding, and for the possibility of organized leadership--the subject's identification with an ego ideal, in Freud's terms. Repetitive movements in themselves do not necessarily facilitate social bonding. On the other hand, repetitive movements can be powerful instruments of group formation, and can also certainly instrumentalize subservience to authority. Here is Roland Barthes again:

encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. Confronting it, the New is bliss (Freud: "In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm"). (Barthes 1973, 40-41)

7. Repetition.

Whatever the space of time between them, each instance of a repeated psychokinetic experience is a reorientation, a reinstatement of a prior circumstance. In this respect psychokinetic repetition is the intersection common to two elements, neither of which is usually the subject of serious discourse: rote learning and conscious awareness. Concerning rote learning, repetition as reorientation is an overdetermination of experiential inscription that shapes our later repertoire of recall; as to conscious awareness, in the sense that all cognition is re-cognition, cognition is built upon recall, and (in a recursive formulation) upon the capacity which recall affords us for re-orientation.

Repetition, in all its forms, is a stimulus to reorientation, to a capturing of our fascination with how to understand where we are in the process of events and the meaning of our senses. Repetition snaps the reorientation mechanism into a loop, and tends to capture our conscious processes, unless we redirect our attention elsewhere. This is why repetitive events can make us forget what time it is, even where we are or why we are doing what we are doing. Time, in particular, is subject to reorientation with repetition; but the greatest introjective absorption of our conscious processes probably comes from repetitive events that direct our orientating focus toward our own bodies. Repetitive body movements or vocalizations, as in factory work, chanting, or dance, are each powerfully associated with trance induction. You can pay as much attention as you wish to, and begin doing this as soon as you decide it would be appropriate for you.

            The fundamental measure of our experience is the scale from same to different : are two things, events, perceptions, or actions similar or not, and in what way(s), and to what degree? We habitually orient ourselves by making comparisons like this. The appetite we have for similarity often produces startling effects, as when we suddenly recognize a face, or experience a deja vu , or discover a hidden relationship to solve a problem. Completely unfamiliar situations, in which we are disoriented, make us feel anxious; completely familiar situations lead us to boredom. Then there is the mixed situation, in which elements of similarity and difference are balanced in one way or another. Two things may be figurally related, yet differentiable. If the conditions of similarity are pronounced, the relationship may be described as a reorientation, a situation that invites the subject to be positioned in an ambiguous way, so that elements of the one experience may be conferred upon the other. When this condition is repeated, we experience a pattern or rhythm. In this respect, a rhythm is implicitly a repeated ambiguous orientation.   

Repetition, in its link to reorientation, comprises an internal process that can be thought of as a reductive schema, in associational terms. That is, by recirculating an orientation, perception, or event, one both reinscribes that event as a memory and simultaneously superimposes the interim experiences of each loop. If I go to the store and buy the newspaper every day, and then I buy all kinds of different things at the store while I'm there, I will develop a strong memory of going there and getting the paper, but all the other individual things I bought will probably be forgotten. When a person in a trance is reoriented to the same conversation they were involved in when the trance was induced, there is a great likelihood that the whole trance experience will be spontaneously forgotten. Erickson used this method frequently to invoke amnesia for the interventions he had suggested during a client's trance, or amnesia for the entire therapeutic trance, in order to remove doubts the subject might have had about if or how to pursue his suggestions. Erickson would do this without any direct instruction to the subject,

by the simple expedient of making a few remarks as the subject emerged from the trance which related to or continued a conversation begun prior to the induction. The reorientation thus required takes subjects back to the beginning of trance and sets the trance experience off as a separate, encapsulated, dissociative phenomenon which they then have difficulty remembering. (Havens 211)

[Havens, Ronald A. The Wisdom of Milton H. Erickson: Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy . New York: Paragon House and Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1985.]

            Amnesia is a distinctive feature of hypnotic trance, and one that bears a significant relationship to the unconscious. That is, from both psychoanalytic and hypnotic perspectives, forgotten experiences are still present and registered by the subject. Amnesia for specific items may occur when the subject is engaged first in some through-line of thought that is interrupted when the items are presented; after which the through-line is resumed. Milton Erickson describes this as "reorientation in time."

[R]eorientation in time by reawakening trains of thought and associations preceding trance inductions...is far more effective in introducing posthypnotic amnesia than direct, forceful suggestions for its development. One merely makes dominant the previous thought patterns and idea associations.

[Erickson, Milton H. "The 'Surprise' and 'My Friend John' Techniques of Hypnosis: Minimal Cues and Natural Field Experimentation." In Erickson, M.H. The Nature of Hypnosis and Suggestion: The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis, Volume I , ed. Ernest L. Rossi. New York: Irvington Publishers, 1980. Pp. 340-59.][348]

Structured amnesia is accomplished by making something which is to be forgotten occur in the midst of other material which has been suddenly interrupted. Strategically, a story or poem may be started and suddenly suspended without completion. In the middle of this otherwise "whole" unit, instructions, metaphors, and other therapeutic material can be inserted. When this inserted material is completed, amnesia is facilitated by a sudden returning to and completion of the story or poem that was left suspended. Transition between the original story and the material placed in the middle is of no importance. Making no associative links to the portion sandwiched in the middle facilitates amnesia. Since this structure is inherent in the multiple embedded metaphor, spontaneous amnesia for much of a session can be expected from a large percentage of clients receiving such treatment.

[Lankton, Stephen R. and Carol H. Lankton. The Answer Within: A Clinical Framework of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy . New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers, 1983.][218-19]

You ask a question, and then before an answer can be given, you say a lot of meaningful things, and then you go back to the original question. You've thereby drawn a blanket over the meaningful material; you've put a parenthesis around it. This is a very important principle of producing hypnotic amnesia in order to prevent the patient's consciousness from negating meaningful questions.

[Erickson, M.H. & Rossi, E.L. Experiencing Hypnosis . New York: Irvington Publishers, 1981, p. 101]

8. Epoch.

            In the period following the French Revolution, the new leaders wanted to start everything over. A new calendar, among other things, would restart France as a revolutionary society. To do this, though, required a temporal marker, an epoch ; what one deputy called "a fixed point to which all other events might henceforth be related." ( Articles complémentaires de la Constitution , proposed by P. F. Charrel, deputy for the département of the Isère, in the National Convention (Paris: Imp. nat., Year III). In Ozouf 159.) The solution was to have a festival. Mona Ozouf has studied the function of festivals as social markers that served the new French calendar. [Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP, 1988.]

The festival is a victory over rationality, over space,... and over time. It is an effortless victory, to the accompaniment of singing. (17)

            Furthermore, the festival was a tangible guarantee against unreality. Throughout the eighteenth century, thinkers from Locke to Hume had maintained that belief must be constantly given new impetus by the force of present impressions; by linking the memory of the great events of the Revolution to periodic spectacles, it was believed that those events could be saved from gradually lapsing into unbelief. Furthermore, by dint of repetition, the sacred, beneficent atmosphere of mythical times could be resuscitated. Through contemplation, recitation, or, better, by a miming of the glorious days that were the Revolution's age of innocence, faith would be rekindled through contact with heroism. By transporting the past into the present, the historical rite conferred the virtues of the former upon the latter. (167)

            I once taught a film class in which I demonstrated time intervals of various sizes. A few seconds, a few minutes, an hour--these are very useful intervals to know and explore, and they are very common in filmmaking. It gets harder with intervals that are much shorter or longer. A frame of film--a thirtieth of a second--almost freezes our sensorium. And a day, or a year--but I wanted to realize a fifty-year lab, too. How do you notice a fifty-year time interval? It was all I could do to create a celebration big enough, memorable enough, for the interval to be marked at all, to remain accessible to consciousness. A festival.

            We think of an epoch as a marked period of time; etymologically, though, the epoch? is the event that marks the onset of this period, as one might speak of the epoch of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Time in general has this mysterious feature, that it must be marked by events for us to orient ourselves with it. So familiar is this truth that we do not even think of our temporal relationship to events as an orientation of self , an ideostructural ordering; we instead think of the space-time continuum as an ideal outside "reality"--unless the temporal orientation process is somehow dismantled.

            For instance, the structure, the pattern of time is corrupted in the undifferentiated, epoch-less circumstances of prison. The unchanging routine of daily prison life creates a daily reorientation to the same point in time. Michael Hardt writes that in retrospect, "[i]nmates commonly refer to the time they spend in prison as qualitatively different from time outside.... The time is empty because of the repetitiveness of the prison schedule and routine . Time stretches out and collapses in a kind of optical illusion .... Time spent seems to have no duration, no substance, because of the precise repetition of its component parts, the homogeneity, the lack of novelty." (Hardt 1997, 65; emphasis added.)[Hardt, Michael. "Prison Time." Yale French Studies 91 (1997), 64-79.] This impression of temporal collapse is a very familiar report among hypnosis subjects as well, which lends credence to the sense that "prison time" (as Hardt terms it) [Michael Hardt approaches punishment as the exercise of "power over our time." (Hardt 1997, 65) "Prison time is the obvious form of punishment in our world. Freedom, that is, the control of our time, is conceived as the keystone and the most coveted possession in modern society, equal to all." (Hardt 1997, 64)] has a kinship to trance.

            I am suggesting, then, that temporal orientation hovers at some formally positioned yet consciously indeterminate level within us, that temporality is precariously sensitive to becoming entangled with the self-absorptive processes of conscious thought, and that when we find ourselves repeatedly reoriented in time some disruption of conscious processes can easily occur.    

            Recall, now, the repetitiousness mentioned by Barthes--"obsessive rhythms, incantatory music, litanies, rites, and Buddhist nembutsu, etc." If one beat serves as an epoch? , "obsessive rhythms" enact a system of temporal reorientation that repetitively references itself, like having a holiday every day, and loses itself in its own process. Not only does the significance of each beat as the "first beat" vanish, but an overall collapse of orientational process begins; unless there is a renewal of conscious attentiveness to events outside the repetitive system, there is a lapse toward trance--the trance of the march, of the whirling dervish, the ecstatic dance, the reverie of repetitious prayer. When have we ever understood the similarities among these events so clearly?

9. Orientation.

             Our tropism toward continually reorienting ourselves in our surroundings reaches its most sophisticated form in the human capacity for finding order, for perceiving and recognizing the system within which a rhythm or pattern is embedded. In the Wooster Group's recent production, Poor Theater , Scott Shepherd instructs the audience that humans have an ingrained tendency to detect order in things, but that once a pattern is perceived, their attention lapses. Little clues , he tells us , that there is an underlying pattern to things , will attract and sustain our interest.

            The extent to which discerning patterned order is a uniquely human capability is underscored by CAPTCHAs, or "completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart," the software that is used to distort a computer image so that only a person, and not another computer program, can recognize it. (show CAPTCHA slide) "These Turing tests for Internet bots are a cognitive puzzle that can be solved by humans but not by computers," writes Lee Bruno in Scientific American. ["Baffling the Bots," Scientific American (November 2003), 36, 38. A "bot" is a "rogue" computer program that skims along the internet pretending to be a person, meanwhile collecting information, generating spam, and invading chat rooms.] A good CAPTCHA "leverages Gestalt psychology, or a human's innate ability to infer the whole picture of an image from only partial information (something machines can't do)." No one expects computers to stay this ignorant for long; nevertheless, the CAPTCHA principle does reinforce the accuracy of Scott Shepherd's remark.  

            There are two ways to understand what CAPTCHAs are doing. On the one hand, they are superimposing a formal transformation on the content that the human is asked to perceive as a "pattern." This way of looking at it makes it evident that a "pattern," in this sense, comprises neither form nor content wholly, but is a "gestalt" that shares aspects of both form and content. On the other hand, CAPTCHAs can be seen as introducing confusion , of using a confusion technique, to displace or misdirect attention. This is what magicians do; and so it might be said that CAPTCHAs are magicians for bots--which have no unconscious.

            I am interested in the problematics of CAPTCHAs because they pinpoint a connection between on the one hand formal transformations and the perception of content, and on the other hand confusion and misdirection.

10. Music.

            Repetition makes a conspicuous appearance in seven presumably distinct types of activity: music, dance, rhetoric, ritual, pedagogy, military training, and hypnosis. Remarkably, the first two of these, music and dance, arose in ancient Greece from a common source, mousik? (the art of the muses)--a term that denoted the conflated disciplines of poetry, dance, and music, and from which arose Greek theater. This conflation may be extended to rhetoric as well, with the recognition that in early democratic Greece the law--whence rhetoric was said to have sprung--was founded in the nómoi and the tradition of Homeric recitation.

The three of these activities that can be used most productively in understanding regular repetitive psychokinetic activities are music, ritual, and hypnotic trance. Music has a tight connection with psychokinetic repetition, but has rarely offered much explanatory power. On the other hand, all repetitive psychokinetic activity can be understood in terms of ritual, and analyzed from this angle as a social transaction. Also, and this is of particular interest to me, we might expect that some understandings having to do with hypnotic trance would apply to music, since music, repetitive activity, and trance phenomena overlap in significant ways.

We know, for example, that repetition, like confusion, can displace conscious mental processes and abet trance. We also know that trance induction is facilitated by reorientation to the physical, social, and emotional circumstances in which trance induction occurred previously. These facts alone might encourage us to treat musical rhythm in terms of trance--or at least in terms of micro-repetitions and sequential micro-temporal reorientations, which would then be susceptible to interpretation as waves of micro-trance-inducing events that the listener may learn to accumulate within a fuller hypnotic trance condition.

Music (like much momentary experience) involves re-cognition and repetition over several temporal ranges. That is, music deals with meter and rhythm, beat and ictus; it has regular repetitive features that are articulated at the time scale of a footstep, word, or heartbeat. It also has repetitive features that recur over the course of a minute, and which correspond to the time scale of melody, stanza, sentence, or action. Finally, and quite different from these, there is the longer-term re-cognition of memory: the tune that is remembered or the melody that you hear inside your head, and the sequence of words that ties the music to a scene or scenario. Each of these temporal ranges of recognition finds its way into our experience of music, through rhythm, melody, and strophic structure.

This model begins to organize other more readily perceived affinities between music and trance--the "transporting" qualities of music, the "evocative" experiences of music both as "mimesis" and as a stimulus to memories of other times and places, and several other aspects of remembering in music--the "favorite tune," the song that you "can't get out of your head," and other fixated experiences of musical sonority and words. Music can carry you back.... And simply remembering the tune and remembering the words are important components of the experience of music--along with the Beat, the flow of the sound.

Remembering, which in this way of thinking can be seen as nothing more or less than reorientation of the self in time--or age regression, as it is called by the hypnotist--either is, or is always accompanied by, trance. Memorization "techniques" even sound very much like hypnotic inductions. For example, the ancient "method of loci," whereby one imagines moving through a familiar series of spaces, recovering images where one had "left them" earlier, is homologous with a common authoritarian hypnotic induction tactic called picture visualization, in which the subject is told to traverse imagined spaces via a tunnel, boat ride, or such, and at each spot is given trance-deepening images or suggestions. Another memory technique that also involves a visualization approach uses composite associations, usually bearing a metonymic relation to the "memory," to build up an image. For example, one might memorize the name 'Kasperek' by associating it with an image of Casper the Friendly Ghost having a car accident, or "wreck;" or one might use an image of a chuckwagon (hash van) to remember the term 'Heshvan.' Here the structure of unconscious processes, which coincide with trance, is marked by punning and the other processes of displacement and condensation that Freud himself first associated with word play. All of this is to say that if the structure of the unconscious is the structure of language, per Lacan, then trance is the condition of access to "memory" and language.

Similarly, forgetting--that is, amnesia, or repression--frequently marks the partitioning of the different trances that comprise the continuum of experience. We habitually mark off the continuum of our experience into separate trance spaces by using reorientation experiences as junctures. Rhythm, then, and repetitive events in general, are a stimulus to the attentional machinery that articulates the trance structure of experience; [This will receive theoretical elaboration in a subsequent paper.] and music, which is largely built around structural repetition and deviation, is a playground for the "attentional machine."

            New media forms are able to draw upon the temporal rhetoric of music to create relational structures that multiply the confusion and displacement of conscious attention, while incorporating images of excess, suggestion, associational complexity, and perceptual ambiguity that speak more directly to unconscious interests. An instance is the 1968 twelve minute film T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G by the American artist Paul Sharits (1943-93). Understood at the time as a largely abstract film of predominantly formal interest, in the present context T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G can be read very differently; in effect it is a blueprint for the communication model that I have been describing. (Project T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G.)

In the twentieth century, abstract art--that is, work in which formal principles such as design, rhythm, fragmentation, process, materials, and decontextualization provide the dominant effects in the work--inherited and elaborated the generally idealistic esthetics of Western representational art. Most twentieth century artists whose work was abstract or formal tended to think of their work as politically neutral, possibly spiritual or metaphysical in meaning, unconcerned with social issues, solely technical, and esthetically rewarding simply in terms of its own inner integrity. They tended toward a view in which art was primarily seen as a representation of an ideal, of an idea, or of itself. Nevertheless, in the 1950s abstract art was systematically exploited by corporate America as a propagandistic device for supporting a powerful and "neutral" image of capitalist market culture. America's industry saw more clearly than its artists how formal devices could function directly as ideological delivery systems. Then in the 1960s, evangelical theorists of abstraction distracted the public from the fact that abstraction was distracting the public, and the artists, from the looming social issues that shortly boiled over in the civil rights marches and antiwar demonstrations.

            However, there has always been a relational component, however relegated to the background, in Western art as well. By this term I intend the social and political aspects of the work--its relation to the social position of its subject, to the situational context of the work itself at the point of its presentation, and to the authority that the presence of the work imposes upon its viewership. These are issues that were brought to the fore in social critiques and within art making itself, by many people--John Berger and Hans Haacke, to mention only two. Early in the twentieth century, surrealism--to the degree that it followed the maxim of Reverdy, that the more distant and accurate the relation of two realities the stronger the image--conveyed a different, subjective relational approach, one that seemed on the face of it to have little connection to social issues, in spite of the outspoken and sometimes radical social pronouncements of Andre Breton and other surrealist theorists. The social and subjective elements that are disjunctive in surrealism began to coalesce in the "relational aesthetics," to use Nicolas Bourriaud's term, of 1990s artists. Bourriaud's views, though, as represented in his books Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction , take a snapshot from too close up to let him expose how the relational approach can lift the blinders of theory from our stare toward work like that of Paul Sharits, that was left behind in history because it was colored outside the lines.

            Today an artist's work must retain its awareness of the gains that have been made in the understanding of cultural diversity, but at the same time we require that it must deliver its messages with elegance or flair, and 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, even 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?  

11. Propaganda.

Just as a stage hypnotist utilizes the social pressure of the audience to overwhelm the willing subject quickly into a trance, so inter personal group experiences heighten the trance-inducing capacity of rhythm, as in group dancing, marching, and chanting. Moreover, the attentional aspect which is the central characteristic of hypnotic trance is responsible for the fact, often utilized by Milton Erickson, that onlookers, envisioning the experience of a trance subject, themselves frequently also go into trances. This "onlooker" phenomenon, which transfers trances through the attention of the onlooker [Can the Medusa myth and the tale of Lot and his wife be echoes of this phenomenon?], also of course transmits music trances to "dancers" and "marchers" who are merely envisioning the dance or the march. Listeners, audiences, performers, and those who hear the sounds in their heads are each attaining characteristic trances. Just as ALL music in the end is "microtonal," all music is "trance music."

            It was a hallmark of the later work of Milton Erickson that by deliberately puzzling or confusing 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 "trance." What I have been getting at here is simply 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. But let's get down to brass tacks, and take a look at some methods. 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.

•  First, boredom . 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.

•  Second, distraction . Consider one example of the distraction technique, cited in Stephen Gilligan's book Therapeutic Trances. The subject is asked "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.

•  Third, confusion . Erickson has described how he once used confusion to rattle and destroy his opponent in a professional 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.

•  And fourth , interruption . The interruption tactic in trance induction 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. 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.

            The new understanding of the connection between messages and receivers that I have outlined here offers no assurance that there is an efficacious way for messages, even messages that change people's minds, to have a substantive impact on conditions in general. In a subsequent article, I will develop the relationship between community and representation , to suggest that community formation is intimately connected with--indeed, identical with--the process by which a group has access to, and control over, its own representation. What that representation is, and what form it assumes, comprises the communication structure that is that community. This perspective will provide an understanding of problems like why the community formation offered by American television is extrinsic to any accepted sense of local "community." By blocking the channels through which local community formation could occur, American television actively dismantles geographically local communities. If we understand better how advocacy messages can work, will it then be possible to implement oppositional communities of interest, in the global world of the twenty-first century? Knowing what we do about the emerging global system, what can we say about the opportunities for advocacy, in terms of community formation? Adopting Hardt and Negri's Empire as a point of departure, we might follow Saskia Sassen in asking, "Can the global be conceived, constituted, and enacted only on the self-evident global scale? Or is the global actually multiscalar in that it can also be constituted and engaged at the subnational scale--the locality, or particular national state institutions that look national but have in fact ceased to be so?" (Sassen 176)[Sassen, Saskia (2004), "The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics." In Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, ed. Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean. New York and London: Routledge (2004), pp. 175-98.] Hardt and Negri themselves, in Empire , distance themselves from the "old analyses of imperialism" and say, "We need to identify a theoretical schema that puts the subjectivity of the social movements of the proletariat at center stage in the process of globalization and the constitution of global order." (Hardt and Negri 235, quoted in Sassen 178-79.) Perhaps my efforts to tie communications analysis to the psychology of trance can be considered a small step in this direction.

Buffalo, NY

March, 2004.

Sections of this article appeared previously in The Squealer , Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo.