propaganda [was Re: Vineland]

[Vaska]

At 04:45 PM 5/1/97 BST, Andrew wrote:
>
>Well, I don't think I said the US was fascist and I don't really think
>it's the appropriate term to use. I did say the US had inherited and
>refined propaganda techniques first developed by the Nazis. The
>refinement is not just in the nature of the propaganda itself but also
>in the way the system has avoided the official brutality which is so
>central to fascism. 

A heretical squeak from Toronto: is anyone on this list familiar with the
rhetoric and modes of 19th-century political and commercial advertising, US
way?  This is a bona fide question: I myself don't know enough on the
subject, but my suspicion is that a great deal of contemporary US propaganda
techniques is home-grown stuff, actually.  Shoot me if I'm wrong.

Vaska








Brutality has been so successfully privatised
>under capitalism so that it is average Joe Shmoe US citizens who keep
>other US citizens in their place rather than secret police or storm
>troopers. In the 50s the system depended on whistle blowers like
>Reagan to shop those who harboured un-American ideals. In Pynchon's
>1984 most people just don't have any such ideals. prevailing opinion
>steers most people away from anything so dangerous very early on.
>
>re Chinese propaganda:
>> That, I think, is actually the main thrust of much propaganda: not
>> to convince all of its recipients that all of it is true, but to
>> present a mountain of deception that amounts to intellectual
>> aggression.  Absorbing lies all the time, while dissent and debate
>> are violently suppressed, chips away at intellectual morale.  Lively
>> understanding rarely comes from dictation; it tends to come from
>> exploration, which is stifled in places like China--and which was
>> also stifled in Nazi Germany.  There is much more opportunity for
>> the stuff in the US.
>
>Yes and no. More opportunities may be true, but which opportunities?
>Who dictates what opportunities exist? The US people at large or
>corporations and media moguls? And the point is not that opportunities
>are not there if not for the taking then at least for making. For some
>people there is some limited opportunity to exercise their own
>political and social ideas. We are allowed to discuss our options,
>even have our own ideas of what would be a Utopia, even make our own
>attempts to realise such Utopias. What we are not able to do is i)
>ensure that most people are aware of how rotten things are and ii)
>present radical arguments against the status quo in place of the
>tired, formulaic dichotomies the media recycles whenever any such
>question is raised. The debate is already preprogrammed in the
>intellectual climate of our culture and may only develop along
>sanctioned lines (the UK is no better in this respect - witness the
>political muzak which we have had by way of an election campaign here
>in the last few weeks). Any attempt at an expose or a revision of
>fundamental principles is rapidly rerouted by the media treatment it
>receives into the simplistic and familiar formats of TV news/current
>affairs/commentary, formats which deracinate any radical elements of
>the debate thanks to the self-censorship achieved by by donning such a
>formal strait-jacket, the humdrum monotony which an argument acquires
>when clothed in such media garb. Net result is that one has to live
>within the system with almost no opportunity to change the most
>important determinants of circumstance.
>
>> . . . Now, if I were to look
>> for a precedent for the Nazi system, I might look more quickly at the pre
>> WWII US, and, even moreso, the pre WWI US, and even moreso, the pre Civil
>> War US, and even moreso, the pre US under Great Britain (the amount of
>> advertising declining steadily as the regression into the past continues),
>> but I still think that other governments might provide even better analogs.
>
>I don't deny such blatant propaganda exists in other countries. When I
>singled out the US as the inheritor of the Naxi's legacy my point was
>not that US propaganda was the same as in Nazi Germany. On the
>contrary that US propaganda has taken propaganda one step further in a
>way that say Chinese propaganda (as you describe it) has not.  The US
>media have perfected the use of propaganda to the extent that most of
>its citizens don't regard what they are fed as being propaganda. The
>Nazis were lucky enough to be able to use more primitive techniques to
>achieve the same effect because their population was not
>propaganda-savvy.   But that is not how it works now. Everyone is
>media-savvy these days. Except in reality everyone just thinks they
>are media-savvy. But TV still manages to run rings round people no
>matter how much they think they are in control. This is the real
>battle, not conning people about particular matters of fact but
>conning them about the quality of the information sources they rely on
>to the point that they no longer question (know how to question) the
>validity, coherence and completeness of the information and opinions
>on which they are asked to base their judgements. You don't need bars
>when people lock the doors in their own minds.
>
>re whether advertising and TV have won the war:
>
>> I guess I mostly take issue with the remark that the war's over.  I think
>> that's your opinion about what's going on in the US, but not what's in
>> Vineland, which I think is more concerned with pondering the state of the
>> war.  I think there's some humility in Vineland (and Pynchon in general)
>> regarding the ability to state accurately and authoritatively "how things
>> are" or even "how things were."  Pynchon does a great job of visualizing
>> history, but it's significant that he does so through a fiction that is
>> full of distortions and questions.
>
>If you question whether the war is won consider the number of hours
>people watch television, the lack of control people exercise over what
>they watch, the lack of alternative sources of information and
>commentary, the dramatic behavioural shifts which people undergo when
>viewing, the frightening passivity with which people absorb TV and
>advertising input, its terrible effectiveness in selling product from
>politicians to perfume to life-styles.
>
>Pynchon may have been making a joke when he had Hector humming the
>Flintstones theme on the run from tubal detox but it was also a
>palpable hit at TV. You may consider the use of TV images all the way
>through to be nothing more than a riff on the kute kliches of TV
>plotting, character and setting. Ditto for the film borrowings in
>GR. But to me such a deliberate pastiche (yes, I do mean pastiche,
>John) suggests that there is a critical comment wrapped up in this
>(re)presentation.
>
>But ignoring questions of the book's form let's consider two examples
>where TV images are commented on explicitly. Recall Zoyd in his 50th
>floor Hawaiian hotel room after his arguiment with Frenesi on the
>balcony. The only thing stopping him from jumping is the thought of
>Steve Lord arriving on the scene and saying "Book him, Danno, suicide
>one". The other example is Hector meeting Frenesi at the airport
>trying to sell her the idea for his blockbuster movie/TV series (I
>forget which). In both cases these are poeple in extremis. They are
>cracking up, breaking apart. And in both cases TV, the glitz and
>glamour of TV, TV characters and locations, the possibility of
>entering into TV's fairyland world have become central to the
>character's worldview, have begun to seem more real than their `real'
>world, have begun to invade not just their fantasies but their
>decision making processes and desires. TV has become their touchstone
>of familiarity, security, wisdom and justice, presents the paradigms
>which they aspire to and judge by. (Other examples are Frenesi
>masturbating with submissive delight in front of her her favourite TV
>fascist fantasy or Prairie displaying herself for Zoyd in her mind's
>eye in all the lace-clad glory advertising can muster)
>
>> > Yes America is different. It's the same old story - the rich
>> > using their wealth to deny opportunity to the poor - only in the US it
>> > has been refined and refined to the point where it is a pushover.
>
>> Is that it?  Is that the whole story?  That's what I'd call a short short
>> short story.  I think it's worth at least a couple of sentences more. 
>> Pynchon himself has written over a thousand pages on it so far.  Would he
>> have bothered if it were that simple?
>
>No, of course it's not the whole story. But propaganda is a central
>plank in American capitalism's success. And the power of propaganda
>*is* a definite theme in Pynchon's work, in GR as much as in Vineland.
>Much as Pynchon's acknowledges that a worm has room to turn even when
>trapped within the core of a rotten apple my reading is that he
>expects most worms to stay right where they are, eating shit.
>
>
>Andrew Dinn
>-----------
>And though Earthliness forget you,
>To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
>To the rushing water speak:  I am.
>
>----------geoboundary--
>