Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life

There's a line, usually misquoted and often erroneously attributed to either Hermann Goring, Henrich Himmler, or Joseph Goebbels, that goes: 'When I hear the word "culture", I reach for my gun.' (The actual line, from the 1933 play Schlageter by the equally despicable Nazi playwright Hanns Johst, translates to: 'When I hear "Culture"... I release the safety catch on my Browning!') The role of culture in waging ideological warfare is the motivation for curator and art activist Nato Thompson's book Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life, now out in paperback. Thompson asserts that culture is not just contested terrain, it is a tool used by elites to assert and maintain power.

Culture as Weapon is a follow-up to Thompson's 2015 Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century, which surveys the ways in which contemporary artists and activists are confronting power, using a range of tactical interventions and strategic alternatives, such as culture jamming, indy media, and socially engaged art practice. In Seeing Power, Thompson references advertising, public relations, and other forms of communication in 'the production of affect', a media-theory concept that describes how emotions are mobilized to influence human behavior, from what to buy at the grocery store to the most deeply held beliefs. Culture as Weapon offers a history of the development of the techniques of affect production and gives examples of their use in the present day, mapping the landscape within which the tactics and strategies of artists and activists described in Seeing Power are deployed. (Thompson presented some of these tactics in an exhibition he curated at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art titled 'The Interventionists' and showcased strategies in the Creative Time project he organized under the title 'Living as Form'. Both are documented in books with those respective titles published by MIT Press.)

Thompson begins his dissection of the production of affect with a brief history of its development in modern American culture. Fundamental to the story is the work of Ivy Lee, generally credited with being the founder in the late 1800s of modern public relations, whose first major client was the railroad industry with the assignment to promote the interests of management against the burgeoning union movement. Another key figure is George Creel, a former investigative journalist tapped by Woodrow Wilson to head up the Committee on Public Information as part of the effort to muster support for American participation in World War I and vilify its detractors. Arguably the most notable character in the early history of public mind-control is Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who parlayed his relationship to the father of psychoanalysis into a lucrative career manipulating the collective psyche. His clients included Big Tobacco and the nefarious United Fruit Company. Bernays also wrote the 1928 book Propaganda, which married social psychology and early media theory to develop techniques of 'persuasive' communications. (Highly influential at the time of its publication, Propaganda slipped into relative obscurity with the rise of fascism, which cast the term if not the practice into serious disrepute.)

A more overt affect-producing factory is advertising. Here Thompson starts with the culture industry critique by the dour German Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Written during the closing years of the Second World War when the two highbrow academics sought asylum in LA, the collection of essays published under the title Dialectic of Enlightenment expressed their view of the utter degradation of culture under capitalism. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the damnable thing about capitalism is its ability to turn any and all expressions of 'pure' culture into marketable products to be peddled to the unsuspecting masses. The critique was picked up in more virulent form in the 1950s by the Situationist International in France, which distrusted mainstream culture in all of its forms as the tools of a society in which even the most intimate social relations are mediated by spectacles of consumerism and false consciousness. (Ironically, the SI is held in many quarters to be a major influence on punk, an ostensibly anti-establishment social and cultural movement that quickly turned into a highly marketable commodity.)

Thompson calls upon the usual suspects in the form of Mad Men David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, and Bill Bernbach who led the so-called 'creative revolution' in the ad biz in the 1960s by rejecting the previous regime's methods of 'scientific' advertising based on the repetitive exposure of 'unique sales points' to stimulate behavior modification. Instead, these Svengalis of the creative revolution tapped into consumer desire in part by creating iconic campaigns—The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, The Marlboro Man, the Volkswagen Beetle—that are well known to anyone familiar with advertising history.

In the postmodern age, the production of affect has moved from inside the consumer's head into the environment she inhabits. Contemporary consumerism doesn't reside simply in products any more but in experiences, as well. In this regard, Thompson presents case studies of the retail environments of IKEA, the Apple Store, and Starbucks, spaces where social interaction is completely stage-managed to inculcate a mindset ripe for the harvesting of profit.

The production of affect has implications that are broader than marketplace manipulation; it has invaded the public sphere in every way. The result, as Thompson argues in Seeing Power, is a profound distrust of everything, an alienation so deep as to render mass paranoia the default orientation of being in the world. Pervasive distrust now governs the political process to the detriment of democracy itself.

But as Thompson notes: 'We must learn from power even if we do not agree with it.' A crucial point Thompson makes is that there ultimately is no escape from 'the system'. Rather, the point, as Karl Marx proclaims in the 11th Thesis on Feurbach, 'is to change it'. In both Seeing Power and Culture as Weapon, Thompson offers examples of resistance by artists and activists that not only imagine another world, but seek to put their ideas into practice. If culture is a weapon of power, then power can be gained in the production of alternative culture. It is the time-honored function of the artistic and activist vanguards. It is a battle that, quite frankly, never ends.

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Update 13 June 2018: Two articles that engage the question of culture in contested terrain, both of which center on George Orwell, one of which cites Edward Bernays's book Propaganda: "How Orwell Gave Propaganda a Bad Name"; "How George Orwell Predicted the Challenge of Writing Today."

Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) is the first and only woman to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. Even more noteworthy is the reason for which she was so recognized, namely, her work on the commons, collective forms of ownership that challenge the self-interested rational calculations of private ownership upon which mainstream economics is based.

Derek Wall, visiting tutor in political economy at Goldsmith College and International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, wants to position Ostrom as a key thinker for the political left as her work challenges the forces of so-called free-market capital. Wall's book Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States (Pluto 2017) is an introduction to Ostrom's life and work and its relevance to political action in the Age of the Anthropocene. Wall takes his cue from Saul Alinsky's 1971 Rules for Radicals, but the rules in this case are of Wall's devising not Ostrom's, though they were gleaned from a close reading of her work.

Ostrom was born in Los Angeles during the Great Depression and studied political science at UCLA.  She married a fellow student, moved to Boston, and supported him while he attended Harvard Law. They later divorced and she moved back to LA in order to pursue an economics PhD. She was prevented from entering the program at UCLA because she had not taken enough mathematics in high school, a course of study she had been prevented from doing because she was female. She received a doctorate in political science instead.

Elinor Ostrom in 2009 (Photo credit below)

Ostrom's interest in the commons was inspired by her second husband, Vincent Ostrom, whom she met while assisting him with his PhD work, which looked at cooperation among municipalities to manage water resources in Southern California. The galvanizing moment in her development occurred after she and Vincent moved to take up teaching positions at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Elinor attended a lecture Garret Hardin gave at IU based on his influential essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," published in 1968 in the journal Science. An advocate of population control who took his cue from Thomas Malthus and William Foster Lloyd, Hardin argued that shared resources are subject to overuse by unregulated individuals whose self-interest is to maximize those resources for their own personal gain without regard to all others, ultimately leading to the collapse of the resources and the detriment of all. Hardin supposed two solutions to the tragedy of the commons: privatizing them to individual owners who would protect their investment or strict state regulation, a dichotomy Ostrom rejected.

Ostrom had seen the effective use of shared resources as part of her PhD work and set about researching other examples of successful management of the commons. Among her case studies were the communal ownership of grazing meadows in the mountains of Switzerland, community irrigation systems in Spain and the Phillipines, and the management of village commons in Japan. She also looked at examples of failed commons in Nova Scotia, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. These cases informed the work that became her 1990 book Governing the Commons, for which she is best known.

In conducting her research, Ostrom distinguished between common pool resources and common pool property. The former includes forests, fisheries, and other areas from which it is difficult to exclude others and are thus available for collective use. The latter is a legal category that enables collective ownership. Examples of these include: property held on behalf of the public by the state, producer cooperatives, and real estate condominiums.

Among the traits of a sustainable commons are clearly defined boundaries, participatory governance, and nesting within a wider system. These principles informed Ostrom's interest in institutional analysis, direct democracy, and co-production, all of which Wall cites as foundational for a progressive politics. Analyzing and understanding the rules upon which institutional structures are built is the first step in transforming them for the common good. The second two open up pathways for theorizing and implementing models that move beyond conventional economics based on self-interest to those based on sharing.

Wall obviously has enthusiasm for his subject and much of the book is honorific in tone. But he also presents positions Ostrom held that might not square with some of his intended readers on the left. In addition, he lays out arguments against her.

While Ostrom advocated for the commons, she did not embrace them universally. Neither did she rule out the efficacy of markets. Similarly, while she employed a range of methodologies in her work, including ethnography, secondary-literature review, and surveys, she did not reject conventional economic statistical models out of hand. Instead, Ostrom assembled a multi-dimensional toolkit as deemed appropriate for the question under consideration. She also did not propose to overthrow capitalism, but did reject the hegemonic Eurocentric ideologies under which it has evolved.

Wall acknowledges the validity of the Marxist critique of Ostrom's conception of the commons. As he writes:

[T]he commons didn't fail because of a breakdown in trust and cooperation by the commoners but instead the commons were enclosed, stolen and shut down by capitalists, imperialists and various species of the rich and powerful (113).

From this perspective, he points out, the micro political economy of managing the commons at the heart of Ostrom's analysis distracts from the larger considerations of world-historical class struggle. (Wall doesn't say this, but the embrace of the tragedy of the commons itself is but one element, albeit a critical one, of the social imaginary of capital as it emerged from the Second World War, ensconcing rational-choice theory as increasingly hegemonic in all aspects of social, economic, and political life, a story well told in S.M. Amadae's Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism.) Ostrom's position is obviously pragmatist, an argument  for action under conditions where it is deemed possible.

Pragmatism has fallen into disrepute in the eyes of many on the left these days, held to be the province of those, such as New Labor in the UK and the Democratic Leadership Council in the US, who espouse small-bore changes that have essentially left the mechanisms of capitalist power in place. And yet, there are examples of cooperation one may point to—the social and solidarity economy projects in Europe, South America, Africa, and the US (see the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on the Social and Solidarity Economy, as well as the US Solidarity Economy Network). These efforts may be perceived as merely incremental (I would argue that they are more than that). Be that as it may, they do offer avenues for material progress while the millenarians among us wait for the Angel of History to descend.

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Elinor Ostrom photo: © Holger Motzkau 2010, Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons (cc-by-sa-3.0)

Is It Just the Pynchon In Me, or What?

I first published this essay in the UK-based online journal Oomska in 2010. When I recently tried to share the link, I discovered that the website had been deactivated. I reproduce it here for the archive. The essay has its origins in a class on the postmodern turn (AKA "That 70s Class" and alternately "Civilization and Its Disco," h/t to Bethany Ryker and Erica Weitzman, respectively), which I took at The New School with New Yorker contributing writer Luke Menand.

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I first became aware of Thomas Pynchon my senior year at Michigan State. One of my housemates, whom we called Bopper (and still do, actually), was reading Gravity's Rainbow, which at the time had just come out in paperback. One of the first things that caught my eye was the book's dedication to Richard Fariña, the author's friend and classmate at Cornell, who had died too young in a motorcycle accident in 1966. Fariña's name was familiar, as part of a 1960s folk duo whose other half, Mimi, also happened to be Joan Baez's sister. (The three plus Bob Dylan constitute the dramatis personae of David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña.)

But for me it had greater significance as Fariña was the author of a single novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. For years, Fariña's tale of hipster Gnossos Papadopoulis was part of my back-to-school ritual, the last thing I would read before heading back to campus each fall.

I started reading Pynchon with V., however. And I was immediately taken with the crazed plot lines, the even more crazed characters, and the alternate reality in which they existed. It was even cooler than Kerouac, I thought, the same level of delirium but with more erudition. I dug the yo-yos who aimlessly rode the subway from one end of New York City to the other, and also alto saxophonist McLintic Sphere, whom I identified as based on the personas of High Priest of Bop Thelonious Sphere Monk and free-jazz master Ornette Coleman. An art student, I endeavored to execute a performance piece modeled on the character Herbert Stencil in which I vowed to speak of myself in the third person for the rest of my days. (Alas, life imitated art for only a week and a half before I abandoned the project.)

Gravity's Rainbow came later when I was out of school and working an entry-level office job where my responsibilities were such that I could spend half the day reading. The intertextual relationship of V. and Gravity's Rainbow was of course amusing, not to mention self-gratifying in the pleasure gained from knowing winks on the author's part to the cognizant reader. Also engaging were the things that were seemingly bizarre yet based on reality, for example, the covert operation of parapsychologists, gathered under the code-name PISCES, who really did work for British intelligence to undermine the Nazi war effort by counter-posing "white" magic to German occult practices. I was dabbling in the hermetic tradition myself as a source for making art and thus found entry into the book's deeper meaning through that channel.

I re-read Gravity's Rainbow a little more than a decade later when my stepdaughter gave me Steven Weisenberger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion for Christmas, still arguably the best aid to negotiating Pynchon's labyrinthine opus. (Although there is an error that to my knowledge has never been corrected, namely, on page 152 where Weisenberger notes the numerological symbolism of tetragrammaton as signifying the eight-lettered name of God in Judaism when the prefix 'tetra' means four in Greek and refers to the four Hebrew letters Yod-He-Vau-He from which the Old Testament word Yahweh is derived.) But it was on the third time through just a few years ago that I believe I uncovered some heretofore-unnoticed elements of my own.

Two of them relate to Gravity's Rainbow's major theme of what sociologist Max Weber terms the "disenchantment of the world" by modernity, the supplanting of religious cosmological systems by technological apparatus under the rule of rationalism. These are revealed when the episodes are arranged in cumulative order.

The first is the eleventh episode of Part Three, which cumulatively is the fortieth episode. Placed at the center of the book, the apogee of its trajectory, it is also the longest. While the episode opens on or about July 9, 1945, much of the narrative is a genealogy of the German rocket program back to its origins in the Society for Space Travel. But, the episode is more importantly an allegory, which doubles the narrative onto American history a generation later. In Judeo-Christian symbolism, the number 40 is one of fulfillment: The Great Flood lasted for forty days and forty nights, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years after escaping Egypt, and Christ's temptation lasted for forty days. And so it is that Episode 40 of Gravity's Rainbow is also one of fulfillment—of the landing on the moon by Apollo 11 in July 1969 in fulfillment of the dream of the Society for Space Travel.

In explaining the dream to his daughter, Ilse, the rocket scientist Franz Pökler uses a map of the moon to help her visualize it. Ilse chooses a spot in the Sea of Tranquility where she would like to live when people are able to go to the moon. And it was a spot near the crater Makelyne B in the Sea of Tranquility where the Lunar Expeditionary Module set down when Neil Armstrong took his historic "giant leap for mankind." (It's also significant to note, as Weisenberger does, that the author of Gravity's Rainbow's opening epigraph, Werner von Braun, directed both the Apollo 11 project and the German rocket works at Peenemunde where Pökler is stationed.)

The other episode that gains resonance in this manner is Episode 21 of Part Three, cumulatively Episode 50. Fifty is the number of days after Easter that the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ's disciples. The Pentecost, also known as "whitsunday" or White Sunday, is an important date to Gravity's Rainbow's narrative. In 1945, Pentecost fell on May 8, which was V-E Day, and also the anniversary of the death of occulist Madame Helena Blavatsky plus the birthday of US President Harry S. Truman. It was Pynchon's own eighth birthday as well. Thus, the date is an harmonic convergence of narrative trajectories: the end of the war in Europe, the occultic other of Judeo-Christianity, the opening of the door to the Atomic Age, and the author who would tie it all together.

But, the fiftieth episode is also a kind of worldly Pentecost for the character Enzian the Herero. In the spirit of the giving of tongues, Pynchon writes: "There doesn't exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you're afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away—there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding." In the pages that follow, Enzian articulates the grammar of War and Technology, which are the lingua franca of global capital unto the present day.

While these two examples show how a cumulative reading of the episodes can amplify an existing understanding of Gravity's Rainbow, there's another trope that flows through the text to which I believe the novel's dedication provides a clue.

Weisenberger takes note of the importance of the number 9 to Gravity's Rainbow's narrative development, in particular as a number of incompletion—the interrupted countdown of the rocket launch, the lack closure of the book's nine-month-long narrative, etc. In addition to setting the time span in months of the narrative overall, nine is the number of days that transpire during the novel's first part. The first nine episodes are a unit when the structure of Episodes 1 and 9 are compared: Both episodes begin with their main characters dreaming. Both begin and end with rocket attacks. Their openings are similar in terms of meter and have virtually the same number of syllables. This Gnostic cosmology of world inside world, like the layers of an onion, inaugurates a narrative thread that unfolds in Gravity's Rainbow through factors of the number 9, beginning with the tenth episode.

The tenth episode seems to come out of nowhere. To be sure, Weisenberger refers the time of Episode 10 as "unspecified" and characterizes it as "grossly surreal." However, a trope is introduced in Episode 10 that carries throughout the book and constitutes an essential subtext to the novel. To see this, we must go outside the text, but not very far. As noted earlier, Gravity's Rainbow is dedicated to Pynchon's friend from his college days. And I would argue that the reference is as much an elegy for the unfulfilled spirit of 1960s counterculture as it is for the bright young man who tragically died before his time during that decade. In Episode 10, the Dionysian impulse of the 1960s, a charismatic eruption against the Apollonian demiurge of rationalist society, is unleashed. In the episode, Tyrone Slothrop journeys down a toilet in search of a lost harmonica. In the 1960s, soldiers in Vietnam referred to the battlefield as being "in the shit." The 1960s are further personified in the figures of Malcom X (the bathroom attendant, Red, encountered by Slothrop) and JFK (referred to as "Jack Kennedy, the ambassador's son"), both of whom were assassinated in the 1960s. This eruption of the carnivalesque, the counterculture of the 1960s, was very much a factor in the political and cultural landscape of the time of Gravity's Rainbow's writing, ultimately leading to what Pynchon elsewhere terms the "Nixonian repression." This theme runs through Pynchon's later, underappreciated novel, Vineland, where speaking of the character Brock Vond he writes: "Any sudden attempt to change things would be answered by an immediate misoneistic backlash not only from the State but from the people themselves—Nixon's election in '68 seeming to Brock a perfect example of this."

Episode 10 also begins a mathematical formula that ties seemingly unrelated episodes of Gravity's Rainbow together. This can be expressed in the formula, "E = N x 9 + 1" with "N" functioning as a geometric progression. (10 = 1 x 9 +1, adding an "isotrope," as it were, to the molecular structure of incompletion.)

The next episode to pick up the trope is Episode 19 in Part One (19 = 2 x 9 + 1). Set in pre-Hitler Berlin, the episode is ostensibly concerned with Franz and Leni Pökler's discussion of Western science. The narrative's focus is more on Leni, making the second expression of the trope feminine. (In numerology, the number 2 is feminine.) This episode is permeated with language of the 1960s and early 1970s, which is anachronistic in the context of a narrative that until then has been consciously periodized. (The extensive research Pynchon undertook into period slang and colloquial usage of the 1940s in writing Gravity's Rainbow is well documented.) The first is the term "detente," which began to be used during the Nixon administration to describe its policy toward the Soviet Union. Next is the reference to a fictional leftist magazine, Die Faust Hoch ("the raised fist"), a reference to the controversial incident in the 1972 Munich Olympics in which American athletes were stripped of their medals for raising their black-gloved fists in salute to Black Power during the award ceremonies. There is reference to the "Revolution" and the fact that "AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN." The "President" is quoted as saying, "I'm sending all the soldiers home," which was Nixon's second-term campaign pledge. Finally, the utopian image of the 1960s Dionysian release is set against the vision of "a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority."

The trope is again picked up in Part Three, Episode 8, or Episode 37 (37 = 4 x 9 + 1). This episode also appears to interrupt the narrative flow and concerns a group of Argentine anarchists who plan to make a film of the epic poem Martin Fierro. The scene takes place in a harmonica factory, recalling the action of Episode 10. There is a western film being shown, and in the film, the horse Snake appears, the same mount of Crutchfield the Westerner who also first appeared in Episode 10. Pynchon mentions a character, Shetzline, which refers to David Shetlzine, a contemporary American novelist and friend of Pynchon and Fariña from Cornell. In the epic of Martin Fierro, the protagonist gaucho initially resists colonial control of the pampas but ultimately sells out, a metaphor of the demotic thrust of the 1960s counterculture, which even by the time of Gravity's Rainbow was being commercially co-opted. But, the most compelling reference closes the episode: "It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, finally: what will it take to drive you out of your soup kettle?" By the time of Gravity's Rainbow's publication, The New York Times had published the Pentagon papers and The Washington Post had broken the Watergate scandal, which eventually concluded with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

The trope culminates along with the novel in Part Four, Episode 12, or Episode 73 by the cumulative measure (73 = 8 x 9 + 1). Contemporaneous references include the cryptic statement in Weissman's Tarot: "If you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisors, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. Look high, not low," an obvious allusion to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The figure of Nixon is again evoked, this time by the character Richard M. Zhlubb, "fiftyish and jowled, with a permanent five-o'clock shadow (the worst by far of all the Hourly Shadows) and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted 'peace sign.'"

When set against the circular structure Weisenberger erects for Gravity's Rainbow's plot line, the cyclical time of the ancients, the formula of countercultural references can be seen as a offering up a cautionary tale of resistance to modernity in general, which though defeated for the time being might hold out the hope of eternal return. The notion of progress shatters in Gravity's Rainbow as the narrative splinters into fragments, an index of the differentiation of social forms in rational society as understood by Weber, fellow sociologist Emile Durkheim, and others. Like a rocket it explodes in a charismatic festival to revert to the cycle of time immemorial (the multiplier 8 of the last episode in the formula is the numerological sign of eternity). Weissman's Tarot presents The World as his future card; the number of The World in the Major Arcana is 21, which is the number episodes in Part One of Gravity's Rainbow, bringing the end back to the beginning.

Hence another thread of meaning is woven into the fabric of Gravity's Rainbow. Or is Carducci just being paranoid?