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CounterPunch
October
10, 2002
Just Nod, Please
by AMIR BOROOMAND
A bit of history...
Democracy stands and falls with the freedom
of public opinion. In part, this freedom is defined in relation
to established powers, especially political authority. Public
opinion has to be independent. This is how it was understood
at the time of its inception around the middle of the eighteenth
century: it was to be a 'tribunal' that was 'independent of all
powers and respected by all powers.' (Malesherbes) Around one
century earlier, public opinion had the sense of a cluster of
beliefs and attitudes that determine behavior and was taken as
both the basis and material of political authority. In his 'scientific'
construction of state power (which he calls the Leviathan,
the Biblical sea monster) Hobbes had reasoned that political
authority is logically grounded in the consent of the subject,
of the ruled. In his other work Behemoth, one of the early
modern works of political sociology, he observes that 'the power
of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief
of the people.' This is not an abstract deduction like the doctrine
of social contract of the Leviathan but a generalized
observation of how things are, of the real conditions of political
rule. The opinion and belief of the people are the real condition
of power and the state is well advised to reckon with them. So,
the self-understanding of public opinion as an independent and
authoritative tribunal was preceded by its being understood,
from the perspective of state power, as the basis of its authority
and hence something that has to be politically secured. In the
early modern political theory the idea of the subject as a potential
threat to the sovereign power is a pivotal theme. How to deal
with this threat is thus a constant preoccupation of the sixteenth
century legists such as Jean Bodin. From this perspective he
argued that restriction of state jurisdiction not only ensures
the stability of the sovereign power but actually enhances its
authority and thus increases its power to pursue its concrete
aims. In effect, it politically defuses society. 'The less the
power of the sovereign is,' writes Bodin provocatively in his
Republique, 'the more it is assured.' Stability of rule
and effective government are related by Bodin to toleration.
Repression is to be avoided as much as possible; the state is
better served by leaving society to itself unless immediate needs
of the sovereign demand otherwise. Finally, the Federalist,
the founding document of American democracy, argues that the
acquisitive drive has to be encouraged in the people for it keeps
their attention and effort engaged away from politics. Distraction
is the supreme instrument of securing compliance, since it induces
a kind of generalized conformity by default.
Let us now look at the other aspect of
the freedom of public opinion. Here we are faced with a strange
phenomenon: public opinion has nothing to do with 'public opinion'
if this term is straightforwardly taken to mean the opinion of
the people at large. In fact this latter had a specific name
in the 'philosophical' mind of the eighteenth century: prejudice.
Public opinion, on the other hand, was the organ that asserted
the interests of civil society (as these were understood by its
'enlightened' leaders) against the absolutist state. It was formed
in the enlightened circles such as literary clubs and journals
in the course of open discussion and rational debate. There was
to be no limits on either topics or who could participate. Of
course, the type of interaction placed certain constraints on
contribution. Informed judgment, moral responsibility and intellectual
autonomy were the guiding principles in this regard. People at
large, far from being the measure of public opinion, are in the
first place to be educated as to their true interests and enlightened
values, instructed by the philosophes. Nonetheless the
goal of this education is intellectual emancipation. This
cannot be overemphasized. Kant defined the aim of the Enlightenment
as daring to think for oneself or using one's own understanding.
This meant that there was, after all, another dimension to the
criterion of openness of discussion, namely, its 'publicity'
or transparency. All discussions and decisions bearing on public
matters have to be conducted in public. Thus publicity was set
against the secrecy of the (absolutist) state as a morally superior
source of power. In his essay Perpetual Peace Kant writes:
'All actions relating to the rights of other men are wrong, if
the maxims from which they follow are inconsistent with publicity.'
If a conduct affecting others cannot be publicly admitted, it
is wrong. Public opinion was not just an instrument in the hands
of the rising bourgeoisie in its bid for political power. It
also frames the manner it exercises authority once it holds the
rein. The exercise of power has to be consistent with publicity;
authority has to be legitimized by the public opinion. Ever since,
the bourgeois state has had to cope with this vulnerability,
which only became more acute as it increasingly differentiated
itself from other societal sectors, such as the economy, legal
system, institutions of knowledge, etc. Before long it would
find a way of neutralizing the public opinion, as we will see.
One may call it the authorization of opinion.
Democracy has never operated in accordance
with its authorized image. In classical liberal political thought
democracy is defined as the government of the people by the people
and for the people. Society chooses its government through its
elected representatives, who are accountable not to their direct
electors but to the nation as a whole (the famous ban on binding
mandate is supposed to implement this idea of general accountability).
The operations of the government are controlled by the parliament
and the whole state is supervised by the public opinion whose
task it is to articulate the needs and concerns of the citizens.
Citizens are relatively well informed and able to form rational
judgment about the issues that affect them and thus presumed
to have personal autonomy, i.e., each is the best judge of their
own interests. In this image democracy is not just about constitutional
statutes and procedures but, on top of these, about 'democratic
citizens' for whose sake the former exist. The idea of representative
government as such is based on the intellectual maturity of the
citizens without which it loses its principle of legitimacy.
It turns out, however, that citizens
are not really predisposed to intellectual autonomy, moral responsibility
or rationality. In fact, citizens are not even 'citizens' - except
perhaps during electoral campaigns but the 'masses', who
are irrational, dumb, fickle, and generally not interested in
wasting their time and energy in getting themselves involved
in matters that don't immediately touch their lives. This is
the discovery that took place in the course of the nineteenth
century and culminated after World War I in the behaviorist social
psychology in the United States. In the first half of the nineteenth
century, 'the average man' became the object of a new 'science'.
'Man's free will is effaced and remains without perceptible effect
when observations are extended to a large number of individuals.'
(Quetelet) In studying the average man, Quetelet hoped to be
able to produce a science of the variables and parameters that
influence human behavior and thus help devise implements capable
of regulating the 'disruptive forces' of man that imperil the
stability of society. The 'psychology of the crowd' became in
the middle of the nineteenth century a favorite topic of not
only literary production but also 'scientific research' sponsored
by various state institutions throughout Europe and North America.
As I just mentioned this development came to a head in the 1930s
with the rise in the US of firms specializing in opinions and
attitudes. This was partly in response to the needs of the US
corporations that introduced the revolutionary idea of a business
that organized not just production but the whole process from
procurement of raw material to distribution to sale and even
marketing. Systematic investigation and classification of consumer
behavior, along with perfecting techniques of commercial advertising,
assumed strategic importance. The pioneers of opinion polls,
trained in the behavioral sciences, were mobilized by the advertisers
to develop methods for studying the 'impact' of advertising on
consumers. Along side pollsters, the 'public relations' industry
attended to the task of manufacturing consumer motivations and
desire. Thus a whole constellation of businesses grew around
the goal of organizing economic functions on both ends of supply
and demand. In the 1930s polling techniques for measuring and
analyzing behavior and marketing techniques for implanting desire
were soon brought to bear on electoral processes. Consumer culture
oriented by the logic of the market need not be limited to the
economic sphere. It also embraces the 'political market'. Here,
various political entrepreneurs, with the help of pollsters,
publicity consultants, marketing experts, etc., 'offer' their
wares to the citizen-consumers. Opinion research thus brought
together in a unique context academia, business, political parties
and government agencies, and public relations firms. In 1937
in the US a new journal was launched: Public Opinion Quarterly.
These developments were not lost on democratic
theory and gave rise to the idea of 'pluralist democracy.' The
new theory substantially decreased the burden of legitimacy citizens
had to bear and, hence, lowered the expectations they had to
face as regards their knowledge and competence in public affairs.
Freedom of public opinion is insured by the pluralism (dualism?!)
of aspirants to leadership ('political entrepreneurs') and free
access to the means of mass communication. Citizens as consumers
have free access to various political programmes offered by political
producers and can freely express their preferences at elections.
Of course, this does not mean that those preferences were formed
freely. According to Plamenatz, for example, the only competence
required of citizens is that they be able to evaluate the relative
merits of the candidates as 'legitimate aspirants' to leadership.
The citizens' incompetence and ignorance can be easily accommodated
by the system itself. In this way democratic citizenship is in
reality reduced to a consumer choice between authorized products,
but is kept as a totemic mask for purposes of democratic legitimacy.
Democracy itself is recast as a kind of procedural byproduct
of a well functioning market in which certain freedoms (such
as legal protection of personal security and private property,
freedom of choice, even freedom from penury, etc.) are respected
as the conditions of market stability and profitability. The
barely noticed suspicion that the range and kind of preferences
are determined in advance (the so-called 'agenda-setting effect')
and that the election is really no more than a ritualistic acclamation
this suspicion, too, is put to rest by adducing contrary
evidence that proves how clever citizen-consumer's voting behavior
is, which is accredited, for example, with such devilish feats
as 'putting' a Republican in the White House while 'delivering'
the Congress to the Democrats, or vice versa, or giving the House
of Representatives to this one and the Senate to the other. Apparently
this way of presenting election outcomes has had a considerable
success, judging by its having become a commonplace of mass-media
commentary as a point of departure for prying into the voter's
political psychology, notwithstanding its utter absurdity. All
for the greater glory of democracy!
A bit of anti-history
'Sense is always the nonsense that one
lets go,' said Marquard, a German philosopher. About a decade
ago, a political theorist observed that 'one of the odd phenomena
we have found to exist in complex societies is that individuals
show an increasing tendency to obey commands from political authority
"for no particular reason".' Perhaps the vocabulary
of 'obey', 'command' and 'political authority' is not the one
best suited for understanding the conditions that prevail in
our society. Aristotle knew that the most banal is the hardest
to explain. The normal is self-explanatory. How to explain the
banal fact that just as with any other consumer item opinion
is produced and distributed for consumption by authorized sources?
What are the effects of mass communication on political behavior?
But this question that inquires about the specifically political
effects of mass-media communication can be placed in proper perspective
only if one first asks the more general question: how do the
techniques, media and agents of mass communication affect and
shape the emotive and cognitive dispositions and capacities of
the public at large?
In 1988 Guy Debord published a little book called Comments
on the Society of the Spectacle, a sequel to his 1967 book
The Society of the Spectacle. Anyone interested in having
a look behind the scene of our 'spectacularized' society must
read these books. Let me just cite the following thesis from
the Comments that succinctly describes the current state
of publicity: 'Formerly one only conspired against an established
order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing
profession.' Debord means this statement to be taken in a sociological
sense with a critical intent, of course. In other words,
it signals a new form of social order (the 'integrated spectacle')
in which the principles and techniques of both intelligence and
entertainment industries are generalized - thanks in large part
to so-called 'information revolution.' The central feature of
this situation is the division between on the one hand the spectators
and on the other back-stage direction, an asymmetric relation
that cannot help effecting a passive frame of mind in the receiver.
Owing to this very structure, aside from everything else that
in part I presently set out, a potentially abusive relation of
power is established. Strategic regulation of the flow of information
is the essence of 'control society'. Information has to be extracted,
kept, released with delay, distorted, made up as the need arises,
leaked, etc., not in order to ideologically indoctrinate
that would alert and invoke resistance, as shown by the Soviet
experience but to seduce, move to pity, to sentimental
outrage, to feel self-righteous or relieve disappointment. No
subjection is as perfect as when the will itself is made captive,
Rousseau said. But this is also consummate freedom: one wants
only what is possible, i.e., authorized, and feels free and satisfied.
'The spectacle has brought the secret to victory, and must be
more and more controlled by specialists in secrecy.' The
division of stage/back-stage is thus crucial to it. The conspiracy
to order, to a specific order, is not a plan of a diabolical
mastermind but of a particular division, and the oligarchies
that are sheltered by it and benefit from it. If there is any
collusion between these oligarchic cliques, whether economic
or political, it is the implicit complicity that perforce emerges
between agents who have a common interest in a specific system.
In other words, their calculations could be as sophisticated
as one would like, but the logic is not theirs, and in fact mobilizes
them, induces their values and anxieties, makes their riches
and brings their ruin. 'When an instrument has been perfected
it must be used, and its use will reinforce the very conditions
that favor this use.' (Debord)
Spectator politics is only one aspect
of a logic that rules not just economic calculations but the
entirety of social imagination in the broadest sense of
the term imagination. It is a simple logic but abundantly seminal
in its consequences: unlimited expansion of production and consumerism.
One would probably have to add to it: 'at all cost' (not forgetting
how at the first Earth Summit in Rio the then president George
Bush Senior declared that the 'American way of life is non-negotiable').
In the sectors of the market that are driving the growth in advanced
capitalist economies (high value-added 'luxury items', e.g.,
high-tech gadgets, and 'leisure services') consumer demand cannot
be taken for granted, and success is not simply a question of
edging over rival producers. Rather, demand itself has to be
produced and sustained. With the expansion of production both
the absolute and the relative size of these sectors grow. The
American historian Ewen has shown in his 1976 book (Captains
of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer
Culture) on the social genesis of 'consumer culture' and
advertising how this process has transformed the 'captains of
industry' into 'captains of consciousness' and how as a result
'the center of gravity of social control' has been displaced
from work to entertainment, from discipline to desire. Products
of high technology and entertainment services of all sorts are
now socially integrated in everyday life of rich countries and
no longer considered 'luxury'. But these products and services
are not in the first place (i.e., when they first appear on the
market) utilitarian objects. Rather they are the desire-filled
embodiments of dream-images that are conjured up by the promise
of a fulfilled and pleasurable life. Automatisation of every
single kitchen activity no matter how trivial is a perverse fulfillment
of a life freed from hardship and toil. What is delivered, or
so purported, is the idea of a life in which the power
of technology is fully harnessed to human needs. Thus arises
the need to put these dream-images to 'work'. As we saw, a whole
industry, mobilizing science and academia no less than advertising
and public relations firms, was created from 1920s onward in
the United States to meet this need. The ascendancy of the spectacle
industry is nothing less than a specific regime of social integration.
In other words, it defines the norms and functions of social
cohesion, from norms of self-identification and social behavior
to absorption of disappointments and creation of symbolic substitutes
for direct experience. In fact the mass media have made the spectacle
into the all but unitary context of reference for all
personal experience. In this way the extreme plasticity of human
desire is turned to account; as if between two facing mirrors,
desire is caught in the infinite to and fro of its own reflections.
The techniques and media of mass communication
on the one hand and the needs of the spectacle industry on the
other have accommodated each other and produced a unique set
of protocols that strongly favor a passive mental disposition,
obsessed with self-gratification. The message is conveyed by
the image, suggestion and repetition: it
has to be short and simple. The star is a vicarious self in its
glorious uniqueness, an imaginary self through which one is powerful.
The more one is crushed under the banality and impotence of everyday
life, the more intense becomes the need to find relief in vicarious
self-enthronement. The image is magical, in the ethnological
sense of conjuring and wielding hidden dimensions and powers.
The distraction that it effects is not an empty distraction but
one that transports into an inverted world in which all that
is forbidden and unattainable in this one is permitted. A righteous
hero that kills but is never killed in a world clearly divided
between good and evil, a master of sex and technology
Television favors the image, as opposed
to argument. Television-based communication of information is
regimented by the general interests of oligarchic circles to
which the mass-media corporations obviously belong. What percentage
of American citizens knew what President Clinton apologized for
during his trip to Guatemala? The exercise of power as has been
observed involves preventing items from getting to the public
agenda to a much higher degree than winning the 'debate' regarding
those which find their way there. Problems that 'endanger the
stability of political system are tacitly removed from the channels
of political decision.' (Zolo) The gentle, persuasive power of
designation and vocabulary, for example, is incessantly brought
to bear on 'controversial' issues, which are thus pretty much
decided before they are put up for reflection or discussion,
if in fact this phase is ever reached. Occupied Territories become
'so-called Occupied Territories' before slipping into 'disputed
territories'. Designating a made-up enemy as evil and stirring
up irrational fear are simple and effective tools of a politics
that has become accustomed to operating in a public narcotized
by television. But what finds its way to the television screen
is further sifted according to the criteria of 'newsworthiness'.
Spectacular and irruptive events with high visual and emotional
impact are favored, and presented as self-contained 'little narratives'
without any attempt at making them intelligible or amenable to
rational and critical assessment by putting them in their historical
and social contexts. These image-like stories are specifically
packaged for consumption, but the unwitting effect on the consumer
of this bombardment of symbolized information is a mad, chaotic
world in which things just happen with no intelligible patterns
and reasons, a world of mad peoples ruled by incomprehensible
passions and marred with catastrophes. The 'likely effect will
be psychological and cognitive overload rendering the spectator
immune to every stirring of conscience. He feels incompetent
and powerless; he curls up into a ball and switches off.' (Enzensberger)
The abundance of information and freedom
of communication have not helped create a more rational, critical
and interested public opinion; to the contrary, they have managed
to turn their consumers into sentimental and docile subjects.
A prominent political theorist and defender of 'pluralist democracy'
(i.e., American democracy) has noted the 'paradox of American
public opinion' whereby the United States is 'the country that
bows most to public opinion, and yet the country that has probably
less public opinion worthy of the name than any other Western
democracy.' (Sartori) Infantilization of public opinion organized
by the spectacle industry is certainly one way of reducing the
complexity of environment, which as a general rule is the condition
of possibility of decision and action for any political system.
But every reduction of complexity necessarily entails an increase
in contingency, eliminating a possible source of system-relevant
information. Thus care must be taken in this matter, otherwise
the system would move in the direction of becoming insensitive
to all communication save those that confirm its current state.
Environmental blindness has always been the prelude to self-destruction.
The redundant defense (a la Krauthammer and Co.) of an existing
constellation of power that operates under conditions of closure
serves no one, except perhaps the short-term interests of the
defenders themselves. The Bush administration illustrates the
outcome of 'teledemocracy', of a long process of mass-media narcotization
of public opinion. It may yet turn out to be nothing less than
Dr. Strangelove in power. Zolo has argued that 'the political
effects of mass communication are closely linked with the tendencies
towards conformity, apathy and political "silence"
which stem not so much from what is said as from what is unsaid
the political integration of information-based societies comes
about far more through tacit reduction in the complexity of the
topics of political communication than through any positive selection
or discussion of them'. Open intimidation of all criticism, demagoguery,
opportunistic use of the motives of security and protection,
manipulation of anxiety and fear, and hence immunization against
alternative views, have been the Bush administration's stock-in-trade
tools of 'rallying public opinion'. In all this the mass media
has prepared the ground by making a 'public opinion' in its own
image, a conformist public that is reduced to silence when it
runs out of television-produced, stereotypical interests, explanations
and expressions. Dr. Strangelove dreams of the day when the public
has no other role than to nod.
'At a Chinese executioners' competition,
the story goes, the second of two finalists found himself in
an uncomfortable predicament. His opponent had just completed
an exquisitely precise and unmatchable beheading, which he now
had to outdo. The suspense was overwhelming. With his keen-edged
sword, the second executioner performed his stroke. However,
the head of the victim failed to drop, and the delinquent, to
all appearances untouched, gave the executioner a surprised and
questioning look. To which the executioner's response was: "Just
nod, please".'
Amir Boroomand
can be reached at: amir_boroomand@msn.com
Today's Features
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