How do material forces shape the discourse?
Part II of a multipart series on a Marxist theory of contemporary discourse.
This is the second of a multipart series covering the role of political economy in contemporary media. The first part is here.
Repetition has a long and controversial history in the literature on persuasion, but since I can only recount it in the broadest strokes here I will begin in the 20th century. And like many discussions of propaganda, this will begin with the book by that name written by the founder of public relations Edward Bernays. In Propaganda, Bernays writes about “The old propagandist” whose “reaction psychology” regarded the brain as “merely an individual machine…reacting with mechanical regularity to stimuli.” He continues that
It was one of the doctrines of reaction psychology that a certain stimulus often repeated
would create a habit, or that the mere reiteration of an idea would create a conviction.
Bernays contrasts this with his own approach to propaganda: an approach that relies on the “psychological and emotional currents” of Freudian psychology. This, he argues, is a more sophisticated and effective approach “predicated on sound psychology,” whereas repetition relies on “assaulting…resistance by direct attack”.
This disinterest in repetition did not last long. A decade later, B.F. Skinner published his influential The Behavior of Organisms. On one hand, Behavior advanced a fundamental attack of the depth psychology Bernays privileged, arguing that “it exemplifies the practice of explaining an obvious…fact by appeal to something about which little is known.” On the other hand, Skinner’s experiments on animals demonstrated that “repetition is important with respect to the production of certain stimuli.” In Verbal Behavior he would extend this insight to humans: “The speaker can build confidence or belief…by repetition”.
By the seventies, Skinnerian psychology would itself come under attack. Noam Chomsky, in his Case Against B.F. Skinner, advances multiple arguments. His central argument is that since Skinner only accepts stimuli-response explanations of behavior and rejects theorizing about internal “mental” processes, his concept of “persuasion” is meaningless. He also seems to suggest that persuasion cannot rely on mere repetition since “whether persuasion is effective or not depends on the content of the argument (for a rational person).” This claim, however, crucially distinguishes between persuasion and “coercion”. Elsewhere, Chomsky clarifies that if your intent is coercive “You want just repetition of the propaganda line, the party line” and suggests that “brainwashing” can be “established by endless repetition”.
Similarly, A.M. Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind, voices skepticism of Pavlovian psychology as a useful framework for understanding the effects of repetition on the human mind:
Through a continued repetition of indoctrination…man is expected to become a conditioned reflex machine…At least, such a simplified concept is roaming around in the minds of some of the…scientists.
Nevertheless, like Chomsky, Meerloo acknowledges that the technique has its uses. His elaboration is illuminating. Crucially, the author insists that repetition is not itself intrinsically effective: “Pavlovian strategy in the totalitarian sense means imprinting prescribed reflexes on a mind that has been broken down” by the combination of repetition and “physical pressure, moral pressure, fatigue, hunger,” and so on. It is most effective in an environment that is carefully controlled, both by suppressing interfering stimuli and intensifying rewards and punishments.
This point is constantly misunderstood in popular discourse about persuasion, which routinely suggests that the human mind is susceptible to all sorts of dramatic manipulation through even the most casual and sporadic turns of rhetoric. Discussions about the influence effects of social media, for example, routinely neglect the basic point that while social media use is common, persistent social media use (in terms of frequency and duration) is less common, and exposure to political messaging on social media is even more limited. For instance, while 68% of Americans use the social networking app Facebook, only 35% of Americans report even seeing political content on the site. Meanwhile, less than half (49%) of Americans use Facebook more than once a day. This means that the number of Americans who experience repetitive exposure to political messaging on Facebook could be as low as 17%.
Contemporary neuroscience tends to affirm the role of both repetition and intensity in persuasion. “Strong beliefs are strong because they have been reinforced on many occasions, or by very intense stimuli, or both” Kathleen Taylor writes. Taylor uses the common metaphor of water channels to explain how the neuronal connections that define our beliefs are formed: the more often water flows through them, the deeper the grooves are. Among other things, one of the roles that the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays is to regulate where that water goes, ensuring that it will tend to flow into the deeper grooves. But by tiring out the PFC with stress, one can prevent it from playing the regulatory role effectively, which means that the water will flow into shallower grooves. In other words, the brain will start to reinforce the neurons that define less deeply-held beliefs.
The neuropsychology of the PFC explains why extreme stress is so crucial in Meerloo’s theory of persuasive repetition. None of this implies that persuasion is only possible given tortuous levels of stress. It does, however, suggest that repetition is a far more difficult strategy as long as the PFC is active. To make it work, you’re going to need a lot of repetition.
Industrial strength propaganda
The challenge of propagandizing an entire population outside of the carefully controlled environment of a torture chamber is formidable. Jacques Ellul, in his classic study Propaganda, lays it out:
Propaganda must be continuous…in that it must not leave any gaps, but fill the citizens’ whole day and all his days…The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself… It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, once from which he never emerges.
In this light, the popular habit of referring to particular messages as propaganda makes as much sense as referring to a single molecule of H2O as water. The defining features that we associate with water – its fluidity, its freezing point, its ability to make things damp – are not present in a single molecule. These properties are emergent in the way that trillions of H20 molecules interact with each other. Similarly, the coercive power of propaganda has little do with the features of any particular article or video clip. Devious turns of phrase and manipulative rhetoric cannot in isolation build and reinforce the neural networks in your brain that embody belief. What is required is exposure, and lots of it, through ubiquity and repetition.
In the industrialized world we can generally distinguish between two kinds of propaganda: targeted, and total. Targeted propaganda is intentionally limited in audience and/or duration; it is relatively common, and there will be more to say about it in another chapter.
Total propaganda, on the other hand, is historically rare. This is simply because the task is so difficult: it aims to propagandize entire populations for the foreseeable future. Granted, states have always engaged in messaging campaigns meant to persuade the population; but returning to Chomsky’s distinction, these are exercises in persuasion, not coercion. Propaganda seeks to go around the intellectual mechanisms of evaluation and consent and inscribe belief into the brain through the brute force of immersive exposure. Facilitating that is an enormous task of social engineering that premodern states simply were not capable of, which is one reason why Ellul situates the emergence of total propaganda at the turn of the 19th century.
Once we understand total propaganda as coercive, intentional, immersive, national in scale and indeterminate in duration, we can begin to develop several broad categories of total propaganda in modern American history. First, though, a note of clarification: it is true that government propaganda targeting domestic audiences was formally illegal between 1948 and 2012 per the Smith–Mundt Act. After that, the Obama Administration effectively gutted the law with a new law exempting the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the State Department from the ban. Even when Smith-Mundt was in effect, however, government programs routinely carried out de facto propaganda campaigns that simply weren’t classified as such.
Consider as an example of a typical propaganda program that existed despite the federal ban the “public information” campaigns run by the Office of Civil Defense during the Cold War. The OCD was a controversial organization in the 1960s by their own admission. As one OCD analysis put it,
Over two thousand organizations in the country claim to be "peace organizations”… Many have linked programs of civil defense to militarism, to war-mongering, to aggressiveness, and have sought to promulgate an unfavorable image of civil defense.
Despite the controversy, the OCD continued efforts “to inform the public of civil defense, to gain and maintain support”. In 1962, the OCD invested $6,914,000 into “training, education, and public information” along with $3,479,000 into “communications and control.” Their annual report from that year gives a good overview of the diversity and scope of a typical US propaganda program:
Through news releases, periodicals, trade journals, special publications, films, radio and television scripts, speeches, photographs, exhibits, and personal contacts, OCD told the civil defense story to both general and specialized audiences…
Though much of their public communications budget went towards seemingly practical publications, even those were ideologically loaded. For instance, in their manual Fallout Protection: What To Know and Do About Nuclear Attack, we find passages like this:
The foreign and defense policies of your Government make [a nuclear] attack highly unlikely, and to keep it unlikely is their most important aim.
This, again, was directly at odds with the peace movement’s critique that the OCD – and other government measures like its nuclear buildup – were making a nuclear attack more likely. But here we can see that the peace movement was hopelessly outgunned; against the shoestring budgets and volunteer labor of often tiny organizations scattered all across the country, the federal government pit a highly organized $10m influence operation designed to saturate the country with as much pro-OCD messaging as possible.
And this, of course, was just one program in the government’s broader Cold War messaging efforts. Multiple other agencies – such as the State Department, the Pentagon, and the United States Information Service – engaged in their own domestic operations. The cumulative effect was to completely saturate American culture with anti-Soviet and anti-communist messaging. “The national fetish with anti-Communism pervaded American society,” Stephen Whitfield writes. “Few could escape or miss the message.”
This was not, of course, the only time the US government unleashed total propaganda on its population. Every US conflict significant enough to require popular assent has been accompanied by a total propaganda campaign. At its peak in the 1980s, the so-called War on Drugs arguably reached the level of a total propaganda campaign. Masking and vaccination advocacy programs during the Covid pandemic were a reminder that total propaganda is not necessarily malevolent. The War on Terror, though integrated with the Iraq and Afghanistan wartime propaganda campaigns, had its own independent life as a project. None of these efforts were particularly subtle or subliminal; on the contrary, they were often widely recognized as propaganda at the time. Nevertheless, none of these other campaigns matched in intensity or duration the total propaganda of the Cold War.
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