On modern propaganda and its origins in the pre-digital era

On propaganda, pt. 3

I thought we might look back a little bit to try and get our bearings on the current situation.

As I’ve alluded to in other texts, propaganda is a basic condition of modern mass society. It’s nothing new, and ought to be regarded as a tool of governance and control that’s inherent to the set of political and mediatic technologies which emerged with industrialization and the modern capitalist economy.

In other words, propaganda is rather the norm than anything aberrant or unusual.

We generally fail to see this, because the concept “propaganda” mostly calls to mind simplistic agitprop from the WW2 era or caricatures of North Korean or Chinese political culture. All with little obvious connection to the daily grind of actual narrative production taking place in our own mass media. In the “news”.

But on any reasonable definition of propaganda as minimally the concerted effort to engender action or attachment (emotional, libidinal) by acting on a population through mass communication, we’re steeped in the stuff.

Yet we should stop here for a minute and try to establish a more specific characterization. A common question I get is whether I think “everything” is propaganda, if every act of communication in technological society isn’t reducible to “propaganda”, and why the concept in that case doesn’t become entirely trivial and useless.

So no, I don’t believe that every act of intentional communication with the purpose of convincing you is propaganda.

The basic attributes of propaganda is that it seeks to mold and shape people’s thoughts and behaviour:

1. by addressing their sub-rational nature and drives

2. primarily as part of a crowd or a mob rather than as individuals

3. and with a connection to some form of mass communication (that facilitates the one-way propagation of the message to the crowd).

This model narrows things down a bit and gives us a workable tool of analysis. It also anchors the discussion in the social and technological realities of modern industrial societies and actual discernible processes of influence, which is preferable to overly abstract definitions of propaganda as a concept.

An immediate observation to be made here is that propaganda, contrary to the popular assumption, does not necessarily convey a false message. It doesn’t have to be a lie. The point is its function towards engineering behaviour or modes of thought in a receptive population, which is actually rather hindered than helped by building on too obvious falsehoods and the cognitive dissonance this creates (even if this is rarely an absolute obstacle).

While this definition above precludes any sort of reductive approach to all communication in technological society, there is indeed some truth to the notion that “everything is propaganda”. Almost everything in our society is penetrated and immersed by this phenomenon and to a certain extent reflects and reproduces it.

But does propaganda then have to be irrational? Not quite.

Something like a text that primarily addresses itself to the rational judgment of the person as an individual cannot properly function as propaganda in the above sense, since the power of this set of techniques for governance chiefly lie in their effects on crowds and the sub-rational aspects of human beings. But that naturally doesn’t preclude propaganda from also making use of actual arguments or coherent statements in support of this total effect, nor rational exposition from being used as a political tool.

Anyhow, the news media (as opposed to actual journalism) of the last century or so is an excellent example of “classical” propaganda that’s not explicitly a-rational in the sense of ritualistic Nazi party rallies, yet which at the same time clearly fits the description of propaganda above. The general effect of the news media is to establish the dominant narratives of a certain society, and so to accordingly generate a conformism of thought and behaviour by the repetition of charged symbols, poignant headlines and emotionally weighted accounts and experiences.

This doesn’t mean that news media is entirely devoid of meaningful arguments and rational exposition. Only that this isn’t its main function, and that it rather operates by enticing our baser desires and emotions, or at least by invoking the dominant myths of our society. That’s how it sells. That’s how the news media generates demand on a competetive market structurally dominated by the communicative form of sensational visual entertainment.

The news media as such really fully emerges in the wake of the telegraph, when decontextualized and sensational information suddenly becomes a marketable commodity. It had clear precursors in the periodicals of the early-modern period, but these were too much like books and had an insufficient distribution to really approach the character of contemporary mediatic propaganda. England’s very first newspaper, The Daily Courant (1702-1735), was for instance a single page of summarized recent international events, and coyly omitted commentary since the reader was supposed reasonable enough to infer their own conclusions.

Nonetheless, these mass-printed publications were used as public relations tools from very early on. The Sun was originally launched in the UK as a right-wing PR project by the Tories in 1792, secretly funded by government operatives to counter the emerging radical press.

And on that note, this early type of news media was always a double-edged sword. It had space for actual journalism, and since it always to some degree moved in the sphere of rational exposition, arguments still mattered. You ran the risk of actually being proved wrong.

Moreover, dissemination couldn’t be effectively centralized, and content not streamlined.

This all changed when the mass communications networks of the early 1800s emerged.

This coincidentally took place with the appearance of the first international news bureaus. AFP was formed in 1835 as Agence Havas. AP was founded in the US ten years later, and Reuters in the UK in 1851. These organizations quickly monopolized telegraph communications and are still the arbiters of content in the global news media today.

For international news, the agencies pooled their resources, so that Havas, for example, covered the French Empire, South America and the Balkans and shared the news with the other national agencies. In France the typical contract with Havas provided a provincial newspaper with 1800 lines of telegraphed text daily, for an annual subscription rate of 10,000 francs. Other agencies provided features and fiction for their subscribers (Wikipedia, “news agency”).

And then, the process was rapid. Already in the 1910s, G. K. Chesterton remarked that this sector of society that once could function as a tool for strengthening the agency and awareness of the common man now had been reduced to an institution for behavioural control:

The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called. It is not the "popular Press." It is not the public Press. It is not an organ of public opinion. It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires, all sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great nation (to which we belong) may know about itself and its friends and enemies. The ring is not quite complete; there are old-fashioned and honest papers: but it is sufficiently near to completion to produce on the ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and a monopoly. He receives all his political information and all his political marching orders from what is by this time a sort of half-conscious secret society, with very few members, but a great deal of money (Chesterton, 1917).

He further reflects on how journalism now essentially had become marketing. News media had more or less merged with advertising and adopted the same discourses and modes of communication. News media were now more or less selling an experience of being “in the know”, while actually limiting the people’s access to information by strategically pushing that which the ruling elite preferred us to occupy our minds with.

I guess this is tantamount to the emergence of Debord’s spectacle. The commodification of the mediatic system’s own propaganda, culminating in the act of consuming the mere images of products. The cult of the brand. Epitomized by these weirdly popular TV docusoaps where we follow people performing the rituals of the marketplace, where we vicariously consume the reproduced image of other people’s acts of consumption.

(image from The Daily Mail)

Returning to our model for propaganda as outlined above, we must finally add some remarks relating to “the mass”. This is a huge topic by itself, which will be addressed in detail in future pieces, but we can at least add that the mass proper really is another phenomenon created by the technological and cultural conditions of industrialization and the modern capitalist economy.

Of course, crowds and their peculiar behaviour and psychology is a staple of the human condition as such, but the modern situation heavily emphasizes this type of social formation and establishes it as a sort of cognitive default for the human person. Then, through the application of mass media, it’s drawn out into an artificial social institution where isolated individuals in the “lonely crowd” cognitively responds as though they were part of a large group while actually lacking much of the harmonizing contact with other human beings. Think of the comparatively isolated Western nuclear family of the 1940s and onwards that only periodically engages with their larger social network, which on the other hand made up everyday life of the rural village.

(image from The Economist)

The mass is for various reasons key to classical propaganda and behavioural engineering. They stand in a reciprocal relationship, since the mass is both generated by propaganda and a precondition for its effectiveness. In the mass’ displacement of real human relations, it exacerbates the individual’s vulnerability to every form of manipulation, while simultaneously emphasizing behaviours and experiences typical to crowd participation. This is a significant reason as to why rational deliberation in what passes for public debate in mass society is replaced with symbolic signalling based in authority or identity, just like how ice hockey fan clubs aren’t really engaging in reasoned debate when they’re attending their teams playing the finals.

However, in the currently emerging digital dystopia, the basis for the mass is also much more ephemeral than it ever was during the 20th century. It has almost no connection to actual lived realities anymore. We’re incomparably more isolated than ever before, especially since event covid began. There are no periodical interactions with large extended families; nobody’s going to church potlucks; there are no party rallies or popular social movements anymore &c. In the town where I live, there used to be a dozen sports clubs back in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a three-piece band in every block and everyone went out dancing on the weekends. Nowadays, people scarcely walk their dogs.

My point is that since the actual connection to anything akin to the crowd has become so very tenuous, so does in a way the spectacular reproduction of the mass. There’s no real space for the system to appropriate our herd instincts since we never actually congregate in that way anymore.

Lacking any actual crowds to serve as an organic and constant reinforcement, the mass becomes almost wholly artificial. We just sit and stare at screens, and there are no actual crowds upon which to project the simulacrum of the spectacular mass. There are no longer any tangible products upon which to tack the brand.

And I think this amounts to a significant weakness of the modern technological system’s propaganda apparatus. The illusion cannot survive entirely on its own. And here, in the natural and healthy needs of the human being, slumbering beneath the surface of it all, is a space for rebuilding genuine relationships and networks.

In our fragile yet immutable unmet human need to belong, there lies an obvious opportunity to reconnect with the world and each other, to learn once again how to actually think together, sprouting like tender weeds through asphalt.

All we have to do is really kindle this desire and cultivate it as best we can.

References

Chesterton, G. K., Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, New York: Liveright 1917