Images and Propaganda

August 10, 2014

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Words are spectral – they present what is not present, they slide and deceive and are defined by their power of deferral. While there has always been power in the persuasion of words, somehow their very symbolic nature cannot conceal their character as media: we are always aware that they conceal as much as they reveal. Yet images hit us with the force of reality, as Christian Metz tells us, “the impression of reality is the reality of the impression”. The image resonates with our very identity. The character of our own subjectivity is, in the terms of Jacques Lacan, an image of itself, a reflection. Yet from the start this ‘truth’ is misrecognition and fantasy. This capacity for images to construct us, places them prior to our acquisition of language and in a direct connection to our understanding and framing of the world. Images envelope us, they dazzle us, they make us – but they also deceive. From Plato’s cave to Descartes’ evil demon, the deceiving image is a powerful icon precisely because, try as we might, it’s hard to disbelieve them.

Modernity’s most influential picturing of the deceiving image is perhaps that of Karl Marx with his observation that, “in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura”. This understanding of an inverted world is followed through into one of the most powerful critiques of the image, that of the Situationists. Here the deceiving image has become the totalising spectacle of capitalism, in the words of Guy Debord: “In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

It seems obvious in this context why the image is such a well-used and powerful tool of the propagandist. Propaganda, as defined by Theodor Adorno “does not employ discursive logic but is rather…an organized flight of ideas. The relation between premises and inferences is replaced by a linking-up of ideas resting on mere similarity”. We can see this as a kind of psychic trickery in which an audience is lulled into a sense of having knowledge, but which is based on nothing but drilled association. This provokes what Adorno describes as “The loosening of self-control, the merging of one’s impulses with a ritual scheme is closely related to the universal psychological weakening of the self-contained individual”.

Images are able to combine disparate elements effortlessly. There does not need to be a ‘bending’ of logic or a ‘distortion’ of language – images make meaning precisely through the combination of elements. In the world of advertising the practice, that nobody who has ever seen an advert is fooled by, is to put something people desire in proximity to something that its viewers are being encouraged to desire. Such ‘montage by attraction’ works because they see through it: they feel it.

Because of this character images make great memes. Memes, as defined by Limor Shifman, are singular combinatory ideas that circulate freely and voluntarily, but which consist of multiple elements, blended together to be iterable, variable and simple. The combinations do not necessarily form propositions or logical claims; indeed this is characteristic of them – the more jarring and unexpected the juxtaposition the better – they are designed to produce attention: the underpinning commodity of the society of the spectacle. In the digital age memes are the mode of instant communication, the messages of an accelerated age aimed deep into the amygdala.

So it is that in the digital age the mode of transmission of the spectacle has increasingly become the meme. Memes capture, compress and reproduce dominant meanings and understanding, and perhaps the ultimate variation of the commodity form of the spectacle: the brand logo. Unsurprisingly one of the main avenues of resistance to the spectacle has become the counter-meme or, what Adbusters refer to as the ‘subvertisement’. The ‘subverted’ images are supposed to make us think, they are supposed to operate in the way of ideology critique, to expose the contradictions in the image’s ideology, and to some extent in the way that it reproduces the logos of late capitalism, in that it functions by an attempt to reverse the dominant logic as such – but the spectacle does not care. Altering and circulating such images in a world merely turns it right side up, but in the world of the spectacle right side up is the wrong way around – as such it is always already an inter-passive exchange. We are inaugurated in the age of the selfie, the active production of the self as circulating image-commodity.

Is the answer then to disavow the spectacle, to promote a digital era iconoclastic Beeldenstorm, smashing the cameras, screens and networks that carry the memes? This does not seem either likely or desirable.

Here is a modest two-pronged proposal. Not breaking up, mocking or smashing images but mobilising them. Firstly, taking a concept from hacker culture, of the exploit (that is a flaw or a weakness, a crack, that can be worked open to redirect, re-task or recombine to produce a new thing), we need to find ways to expand and complicate, not to repackage an image with a convenient constricted and inverted meaning. If images are to proliferate then perhaps it is best not to invert or negate, but expand, re-articulate and recombine. This is a form hypertrophy, an acceleration that takes an exploit and unfolds it – that finds its truth in extraction and dislocation – not to destroy or tear apart but to create new meanings through a new syntax. Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio undertook such an approach in their ‘Face To Facebook’ art project, harvesting a million Facebook profiles and recombining them in a faux dating website. This is not a counter-meme but the articulation of a strategy of ongoing recombination and complication. That approach constitutes the seeds of the second prong, a fidelity to the exploit – that is to build a strategy out of it.

One of the great propagandists, Edward Bernays, offers a prolonged rationalisation for propaganda. While his rationale is deeply problematic his methods have something to tell us still in the production of digital counter propaganda. Bernays tells us, “The engineering of consent…depends on interlocking all phases and elements of the proposed strategy”. As such, the imperative for digital age counter-propaganda is to triangulate exploit-based action, with a strategic seeding of new connections and recombination in and between movements, this means building complete pictures, not just images, of concerted positions that can then meaningfully interlock. If we see a picture, as WTJ Mitchell suggests, as “the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance,” then by picturing the world in a way that has fidelity to the exploit, we at least stand a chance of escaping the inter-passivity that plagues the strategy of meme-making as critical practice. The image must form part of a picture that enables the power to bond, to inspire and mobilise.

By Joss Hands | @josshands | www.josshands.net