Propaganda (Art) Struggle

In the words of Sven Lütticken, “The contemporary should be seen as a contested terrain, as asynchronic coexistence of different contemporalities, ideologies, and social realities.” Sven Lütticken, History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (Sternberg Press, 2013), 25.

Jamie Doward, “Steve Bannon plans foundation to fuel far right in Europe,” The Guardian, July 21, 2018 →.

The term “Nationalist International” comes from an economic policy paper released by the Democracy in Europe 2025 movement. See DiEM25, DiEM25’s European New Deal: A Summary, 2017 →.

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon Books, 1988), named after the chapter “The Manufacture of Consent” in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922).

See further: Jonas Staal, Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2018) →.

The Movement is part of the second, “international” phase of Bannon’s propaganda project. The first phase was the building of a powerful alt-right coalition in the United States; as David Neiwert writes, “the gradual coalescence of the alternative-universe worldviews of conspiracists, Patriots, white supremacists, Tea Partiers, and nativists occurred after the election of the first black president, in 2008. Fueled in no small part by racial animus toward Obama, the Internet and social media became the grounds on which this ‘lethal union’ could finally occur.” David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2017), 231.

Ten years later Bannon would work on another type of biosphere, this time online. In 2005 he became involved in the Hong Kong-based company Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), which sold digital assets to players of the massive multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. These digital goods in the form of gold and weaponry, were obtained by paying Chinese workers extremely low wages to play the game in ongoing rotating shifts. This experience, according to Joshua Green, was critical to Bannon’s later online mobilization of the alt-right during the Trump campaign. See Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (Penguin Press, 2017), 81–83.

The film also embodies Bannon’s ideal of a right-wing Hollywood, with Reagan representing both the creative side (as an actor) and the political side (as president and an anti-communist crusader).

In the words of Strauss and Howe: “Turnings come in cycles of four. Each spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to a hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction.” The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (Broadway Books, 1997), 3.

Nagle’s main target is what she calls “Tumblr-liberalism,” which is preoccupied with “gender fluidity and providing a safe space to explore other concerns like mental ill-health, physical disability, race, cultural identity and ‘intersectionality” (69). Nagle argues that these concerns have resulted in a doctrine of self-flagellation in which “the culture of suffering, weakness, and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics” (73). In Nagle’s view, Tumblr-liberalism not only gave rise to the alt-right; it also alienated the traditional working class. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zero Books, 2017).

The term “cultural Marxism” was originally associated with the Frankfurt School and described the radical critique of standardized and commodified mass culture. The term resonates with Nazi campaign against “cultural Bolshevism” and surfaced in far-right movements in the US from the early nineties onward. The fact that the protagonists of the Frankfurt School were Jewish has made this conspiracy theory particularly popular in alt-right circles, as it encompasses both anti-Semitic and anti-left tropes. See also Sven Lütticken, “Cultural Marxists Like Us,” Afterall 46 (Autumn-Winter): 67–75.

Bannon is not the first to claim that Alinsky’s work serves as a handbook for the radical left-wing takeover of government and society. This conspiracy theory first emerged during Bill Clinton’s presidency, as First Lady Hillary Clinton had written her 1969 college thesis on Alinsky’s work. The theory rests in part on an epigraph in the book the describes the fallen angel Lucifer as “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” For right-wingers, this reveals not only the godless Marxist framework of Alinksy’s book, but its ambition to seize control of the government. See Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (Vintage Books, 1989).

John Patterson, “For haters only: watching Steve Bannon's documentary films,” The Guardian, November 29, 2016 →.

Adam Wren, “What I Learned Binge-Watching Steve Bannon’s Documentaries,” Politico, December 2, 2016 →.

Keith Koffler, Bannon: Always the Rebel (Regnery Publishing, 2017), 48.

Terence McSweeney, The “War on Terror” and American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 10.

Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent, 26–28.

Nagle, Kill All Normies, 40–53.

Of course, this does not mean that The Handmaid’s Tale’s potent symbolism and original narrative cannot simultaneously operate to enable emancipatory politics. In fact, the red cloak and white hood worn by the handmaids in the book and TV series have shown up at protests in defense of women’s reproductive autonomy and gender equality the world over.

See also Mihnea Mircan and Jonas Staal, “Let’s Take Back Control! Of Our Imagination,” Stedelijk Studies 6 (Spring 2018) →.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents (Grand Central Publishing, 2007), 358.

In his four-part documentary series Century of the Self (2002), Curtis suggested that an obsession with individualist “self-actualization” on the part of political progressives paved the way for the resurgence of the right.

“In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable.” Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Transaction Publishers, 1998), 43.

Transcript from HyperNormalisation.

Transcript from HyperNormalisation.

A term borrowed from the work Facebook State (2016), developed by artist Manuel Beltrán and his students.

A partially overlapping critique, but with more depth and greater fidelity to the potentialities of the Occupy movement, is Not an Alternative, “Counter-Power as Common Power: Beyond Horizontalism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Protest 9 (Summer 2014) →.

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, “(Mis)naming the Revolution,” Montréal Review, January 2012 →.

Golomstock goes so far as to credit totalitarianism as an author in and of itself: “Totalitarianism itself carried out the historian’s task of sifting through sources, using the scalpel of the concept of two cultures (Lenin’s thesis calling for revolutionaries to take from each national culture only its democratic and socialist elements –JS), of the struggle between racial and class elements, in order to split apart the living body of national tradition.” Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art (Overlook Press, 1990), 155.

“Prior to the task of educating the workers, peasants, and soldiers, there is the task of learning from them.” Mao Tse-Tung, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” in New World Academy Reader #1: Towards a People’s Culture, eds. Jose Maria Sison and Jonas Staal (BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, 2013), 51.

The claim that this particular case of Maoist art production can be conflated with Stalinist art production is strongly refuted by art historian Christof Büttner, who argues that “it is a work of art that is so convincing that many interpret it to be the simple, unimaginative depiction of a real event and held it in disdain for exactly that reason. That was all the more true when Western art historians labeled it Socialist Realism and, even worse, stigmatized it as propaganda art for the Cultural Revolution.” Christof Büttner, “The Transformations of a Work of Art—Rent Collection Courtyard, 1965–2009,” in Art for the Millions, eds. Esther Schlicht and Max Hollein (Hirmer Verlag, 2009), 38.

Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press, 2018). See also Jonas Staal, “Assemblism,” e-flux journal 80 (March 2017) →.

This is fundamentally different from the propaganda of the Nationalist International discussed earlier, which tells us who we will become once more.