>>The ruling class own the means of ideological production (like the mass
>>media), whereas we don't. We have small presses, leaflets, and meetings in
>>church basements, not because we think "small is beautiful," but because we
>>simply do not have the same resources at hand. That is why we cannot
>>employ the same means as the bourgeoisie.
>
>No but you have to know how they work, and how to fight them. The
>bourgeoisie have a theory and practice of mass political psychology,
>but Carrol's radical particularism makes it impossible to come up
>with a countertheory.
By all means - we must study how the bourgeoisie has developed a theory and practice of mass political psychology. There is a really interesting article written by Catherine Lutz: "Epistemology of the Bunker: The Brainwashed and Other New Subjects of Permanent War," _Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America_, eds. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997). Lutz argues that professional and popular psychological discourses began to grow massively with the emergence of the Cold War. Having examined how the political economy and culture of permanent war used and shaped psychological discourses, Lutz argues: "Taken on to the project of covert warfare and deterrence, the discipline helped construct a new more vigilant self, a self not so much explicitly disciplined as suspicious of itself" (245). She calls this discipline "an epistemology of the bunker" (245). She pays close attention to how an epistemology of the bunker worked to create a new more vigilant self in "debates about the 'brainwashing' of prisoners of war during the Korean War" (245).
The anticommunist rhetoric of the Cold War, first of all, "hinged on the newly politicized "individual" - positing him/her as perhaps the key marker of difference between U.S. and Soviet societies. The American favored psychological analysis, popular discourse had it, while the Reds used a debased social analysis. So the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs could say they had committed a crime 'worse than murder [which is] denial of the sanctity of the individual.' In this context, psychology could only ascend to a more hegemonic position" (246). This at the same time as an ever more invasive surveillance upon not just actions but more importantly the *feelings* of loyalty came to make America a Panopticon.
The political economy of the Cold War developed a variety of psychological research programs. Direct and indirect funding by the National Security State was available for such research programs as follows: CIA funding at the University of Maryland on the psychology of prisoner "interrogation" (cf., Louis Gottschalk's _Use of Drugs in Information-Seeking Interviews_ [1958]; Albert Biderman's "Social-psychological needs and 'involuntary' behavior as illustrated by compliance in interrogation" [1960]); a Prinston research into foreign and domestic public opinion (directed by Hadley Cantril, funded by the CIA via the Rockefeller Foundation); a study of brainwashing and propaganda at the Center for International Studies at the MIT (also funded by the CIA, this time via the Ford Foundation). The Department of Defense, military industrial firms like Lockheed, think tanks like the RAND corporation and the Human Resources Research Office, etc. all conducted extensive psychological research; in 1952, the Group Psychological Branch of the Office of Naval Research alone had "contracts funding 158 graduate students," directing their research interest (247).
Not only on the subjects of industrial psychology for personnel management (which helped the military recruit & discipline soldiers) and opinion-making (especially to mobilize public support for military spending and international engagement), studies focused also on the psychology of warfare itself, examining such issues as stress, vigilance, trauma, and other battle-relevant capacities. Researchers worked on, for instance, the "development of behavior modification techniques to make soldiers less averse to killing" (250).
Lutz points out the role played by the political construction of the "unconscious" in the militarization of psychology and subjectivity: "The possibility was soon raised that a person might be unaware of his or her own indoctrination by Communist agents" (253). In other words, the "unconscious" was politically constructed by the anticommunist rhetoric in such a way that any and every American would have to fear the accusation of being an unwitting "dupe" of Communists, therefore having to police their "psyche" and invent a "new more vigilant self." The political birth of pop hermeneutics of anticommunist suspicion, a ritual of vigilance against unconscious complicity.
According to Lutz, it is the Korean War that provides a key illustration of the epistemology of the bunker: "That war destroyed more than four million lives, devastated rice fields and cities, and left in its wake the world's most militarized peninsula. By the end of the warŠ, however, the horrors of napalm, millions of refugees, and physically maimed veterans receded before another question. As the POWs were released, twenty-three American men refused repatriation, and the prison camp behavior of many more came under intense scrutiny," for it was said that they must have been submitted to "brainwashing" (255). Openness to Communism (among not only the POWs but also the general public) was treated as a mental disorder, a flaw in personality, probably with "a background of family instability and poor school experience" (260). Soldiers' "softness" was often attributed to women's influence. Several POWs were tried for their camp behavior. In 1955, President Eisenhower signed a new code of conduct for the armed forces, requiring that the soldier "never surrender of [his] own free willŠnever forget [he is] responsible for [his] actions" (256). Thus Americans were compelled en masse to become psychological and Kantian _at the same time_ (the gestalt of late modern philosophy avant la lettre). You don't know what you are doing, but you are still personally responsible for not fulfilling your duty in your ignorance! Beware of your symptoms! _The Manchurian Candidate_, anyone?
Yoshie