How do material forces shape the discourse?
Part III of a multipart series on a Marxist theory of contemporary discourse.
This is the third of a multipart series covering the role of political economy in contemporary media. The first part is here. The second part is here.
We have discussed how brainwashing and propaganda both rely on neural rigidity – that is, on entrenching “grooves in the brain” that instantiate particular ideas and beliefs. Total immersion and extreme repetition in messaging build and reinforce neural networks in a way that ordinary persuasion does not: coercively. While the technique propagandists rely on for coercing thought is artificial, however, the basic neural mechanisms at work are quite natural. Neural rigidity is how we form and maintain consistent concepts and ideas over time. If the brain somehow had absolute neuroplasticity it would not be able to function properly; hyperplasticity, according to one hypothesis, is the central pathology driving schizophrenia.
Similarly, the processes of learning and memorization are natural and fairly well-understood mechanisms of adaptation to the environment. Aberrational and transient phenomena in the environment have a limited impact on either process, but features of the environment that are ubiquitous and frequently encountered effectively “propagandize” the brain naturally. This does not account for all animal behavior of course, because much of our knowledge seems to be inborn: for example, primates have an instinctive alert response to snake-like objects which implies a knowledge of snakes that was instilled over millions of years of evolution.
Nevertheless, humans in particular have an extraordinary capacity to internalize knowledge of the world they are personally immersed in. A paradigm example of this process is language acquisition. If we are only sporadically or infrequently exposed to a given language, we are unlikely to learn it even if we want to. But if we are surrounded by a language completely and constantly, we are likely to pick it up eventually, even without formal instruction.
Similarly, neuroscience has begun to develop an understanding of how “our brain structure…[is] shaped by social experiences and social learning”. The imbalance model of social learning affirms our observation that the PFC plays a major role in regulating neuroplasticity, and by extension the brain’s ability to internalize social norms; it holds that adolescents do so more readily than adults because their PFC has not matured yet. But this is not, in any case, a voluntary process; adolescents internalize social norms whether they want to or not, and indeed sometimes under significant protest. Adults fully immersed in a given society for a protracted period of time will likely internalize its norms as well.
On one hand, then, we have propaganda – a deliberate effort to engineer a subject’s brain against his will in a way that instills views and beliefs. But on the other hand, we have a kind of “organic” propaganda that functions the same way, but that is instilled by the sheer immersiveness of our society. If for example you are born in an English speaking nation, you will likely be “propagandized” organically into speaking English, simply because you are surrounded by the language.
Let us call this organically emerging propaganda ideology. As we will use it, ideology is what one learns, quite involuntarily, simply by living in a given society. This learning is instantiated in the brain as neural networks that have been heavily reinforced through ubiquitous, repetitive experience. Ideology therefore is constituted by the ubiquitous and repetitive features of our society. Crucially, Ellul explains that
By this we do not mean political currents or temporary opinions that will change in just a few months, but the fundamental psycho-sociological bases on which a society rests.
It will be difficult to maintain an accurate perspective on ideology without keeping in mind its neurological basis, so let us review. We have discussed how brainwashing relies on stress to overwhelm the PFC, which allows the brainwasher to “teach” through repetition. We have proposed that propaganda can perform the same role without impairing the PFC if the messaging is repetitive and ubiquitous enough to fully immerse the subject, entrenching neural networks through sheer exposure. Ideology, I argue, functions the same way but without the propagandist. Rather, it emerges organically from society – from the norms and perspectives that society immerses us in. This is a very different process than persuasion, which changes the brain given conscious and deliberate assent by the subject.
Let us consider an example of the sort of social stimuli that is immersive and repetitive enough to generate an ideological effect.
One of the primary socioeconomic shifts that marked the Neolithic revolution was a transition from the small egalitarian bands that characterized hunting-gathering society to the larger hierarchical communities that engaged in agriculture. This shift was a direct consequence of their mode of food production. Foragers lived in small bands because this was the optimal size for the transitory lifestyle demanded by following animal herds, among other considerations; meanwhile, agriculture’s sedentary lifestyle, food surpluses and intensive labor requirements was more amenable to larger populations. Foragers lived in small enough groups that they could usually make decisions as a group with little difficulty; but larger populations required leadership and hierarchical organization.
But hierarchy, Robert Sapolsky argues in Why Do Zebras Have Ulcers, has a predictable physiological consequence: stress. This is because of the loss of control entailed by hierarchy, which deprives those lower in the hierarchy of predictive information and leaves them in a constant state of anxious anticipation. Sapolsky writes:
For most…occupations stress is built more around lack of control, work life spent as a piece of the machine. Endless studies have shown that [it]...is anchored in the killer combination of high demand and low control – you have to work hard, a lot is expected of you, and you have minimal control over the process. This is the epitome of the assembly line, the combination of stressors that makes for Marx’s alienation of the workers…
Thus it is not just post-Neolithic life in general but capitalism in particular that generates extraordinary changes in the brain. There is a straight line from the invention of the conveyor belt to entire populations with ramped up adrenal production of glucocorticoids, which impairs memory production and retrieval and cultivates anxiety, hostility, and depression. We have also noted that stress can impair the function of the PFC, which would otherwise modulate the coercive effects of propaganda and ideology. There is no question that different economic regimes have direct impacts on the operation of the human brain; the only real question is what they specifically are.
But why would humans subject themselves to the stress of hierarchy? This is how we arrive at a central tenet of capitalist ideology: the necessity of labor. In modern society, when children are very young, they discover that one or both of their parents has to work every day. Similarly, just by patronizing stores or talking to friends with working parents, children soon learn that most people of a certain age have to work. Eventually they realize that they will have to work, too: “what I will be when I grow up” becomes a major part of a child’s identity. Meanwhile our economic system begins integrating them. First through education, which gradually becomes more profession-oriented; then through labor with their first part-time or summer job. By the time they move out on their own, they thoroughly understand that if they are going to make a living they are going to have to work for it.
We subject ourselves to capitalist hierarchies, in other words, because capitalist ideology indoctrinates us into the belief that work is necessary. No one has to teach us this explicitly, though they often do; this is a lesson we will inevitably learn simply by participating in a capitalist economy, which is something we cannot escape. The lesson becomes so entrenched in our mind that it can prove pathological for some: thus the widespread phenomena of “workaholics”, or of retirees whose mental health quickly deteriorates because they can no longer tolerate idleness.
This is not how it always was. Anthropologist Alan Barnard has written extensively on what he calls the “foraging mode of thought”; hunter-gatherer life was accompanied by its own ideology that emerged from the unique features of its economy. And among other features, Barnard notes that foraging ideology is “based on the value of leisure time rather than wealth.” Two features of hunting and gathering explain this: first, because a skilled forager could find enough food for the day in a matter of hours, and therefore had much more leisure time than the modern wage-employee. And second, because foraging was not hierarchically organized, there was no one to pressure or coerce your family into doing more labor than was necessary.
Our views on work are not “natural” or “inevitable” in some logical sense; on the contrary, they represent a radical departure from the preference for leisure that dominated human life for tens of thousands of years. Capitalism teaches us other lessons, too. For example, the sanctity of private property: even as toddlers we quickly discover that we cannot just take whatever we want. We develop an extremely internalized locus of control: our economic situation is the result of our own initiative and ability rather than an imposition of circumstance. And we learn to accept economic hierarchy: that some people are better off than others, that some people have authority over us, and that this is just the way things are. These lessons are everywhere, and they are hammered into our minds over and over simply because of the way that our society works. This is the defining feature of ideology.
Marx, in his 1859 preface to Capital, summarizes the process thus:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will…The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.
The economy is probably the most important material condition that generates ideology, but it is not the only one. Consider for example the widespread ideology of “traditional” gender roles. Humans generally employ a reproductive strategy that features high investment in the offspring from the mother and lower investment from the father. This seems to be an evolved consequence of the material proximity to the child inherent in pregnancy and nursing along with the relatively intensive care required by human newborns. The arrangement, in any case, is widespread enough that many people believe it must express something “natural” about men and women. It is again the ubiquity of these material conditions that creates a uniquely ideological effect.
The ideological base of society creates the background noise in which discourse must operate. It is much like the sounds of busy traffic in a city: so loud that one can barely shout over it, but so constant that one forgets it’s there. Thus it is hard, if not impossible, for discursive persuasion and even targeted propaganda to overcome countervailing ideology. As Ellul writes, discourse
pitting itself against this fundamental and accepted structure would have no chance of success…Only if it rests on the proper collective beliefs will it be understood and accepted.
Consider in that light the fate of someone who advocated for a return to hunter-gatherer society. He would not just be arguing against critics who took him on; he would also be arguing against our everyday experience of capitalism, which convinces us that capitalism is just the way things are. That is an argument he would be very unlikely to win.
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