Telling Propaganda from Legitimate Political Persuasion (original) (raw)
Related papers
Propaganda: More Than Flawed Messaging
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2023
Most of the recent work on propaganda in philosophy has come from a narrowly epistemological standpoint that sees it as flawed messaging that negatively impacts public reasonableness and deliberation. This article posits two problems with this approach: first, it obscures the full range of propaganda's activities; and second, it prevents effective ameliorative measures by offering an overly truncated assessment of the problems to be addressed. Following Ellul and Hyska, I argue that propaganda aims at shaping actions and not just beliefs, and that the propaganda activities that shape action include modifying beliefs but also much more. Examining this larger set of activities results in a shift in how we conceptualize the way that propaganda works. In particular, I add a novel argument that propaganda works by creating and reshaping publics, transforming who they are and their characteristic action. This article concludes that a more complete philosophical account of propaganda cannot just draw on epistemology but must also call on the tools of social ontology and political philosophy to create a more robust critical account.
This conference provides a forum for researchers who seek to analyze, challenge, and (re)think the concept and the practice of propaganda in the light of contemporary forms of discourse and communication across the ideological spectrum. We invite authors to examine the relationship between concepts such as propaganda, ideology, hegemony and discourse in today’s digital environment. Both empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome. The notion of propaganda was seminal to the field of communication studies in the beginning of the 20th century. It derives its negative connotations from the way mass media have been intentionally used by state and corporate actors for partisan interests. Even though the term ‘propaganda’ may have grown out of fashion – both inside and outside of academia – its practices have not. Notions such as ‘public relations’, ‘advertising’, ‘political marketing’, ‘public diplomacy’, ‘political marketing’ and ‘advocacy’ have now transplanted propaganda even though they often refer to similar discursive strategies of persuasion or (dis)information. As the term ‘propaganda’ grew less popular new terms emerged in order to label similar communication strategies that shape contemporary discourse and communication until this day. Many critical approaches in discourse studies have treated propagandistic modes of communication through the lenses of ‘ideology’, ‘hegemony’, ‘discourse’ and ‘power’. However, whereas all propaganda is ideological, not all ideology manifests itself as propaganda. Likewise, whereas all propaganda operates through discourse and communication, not all discourse or communication performs the function of propaganda. Different forms of critical discourse studies have paid attention to ideological phenomena, but the term propaganda is remarkably absent from this field of inquiry. This may be explained with reference to underlying theoretical premises of specific discourse theoretical and discourse analytical approaches, a hypothesis that may also be explored at this conference. In a global context marked by ‘a return of the political’, by an intensification of political debates across the political spectrum, and by a (re-)articulation of old and new political fault lines crossing local, regional, national and/or transnational contexts, the seemingly outdated notion of propaganda may provide a useful entry point for examining the (partially) strategic modes of communication practiced by activists on all sides of the ideological spectrum. If propaganda is no longer associated exclusively with traditional institutional actors such as the state or corporations, the political and communicative strategies of social and political actors such as eco-activists, AltRight trolls, neoliberal think tanks or the peace movement may be (re)thought in terms of propaganda. This brings us back to the old question whether (specific forms of) propaganda hinder or facilitate democracy. It also leads us to explore uses of digital and algorithmic propaganda in contemporary populist projects. Regardless of the question whether and how the term propaganda is used, ‘strategies’ of white, black and grey propaganda are practiced on an everyday basis while new ways of doing propaganda continue to be developed. In fact, propaganda practices are constantly being adapted to specific social, political and technological developments. As new technologies become available, the range of actors able to practice propaganda expands. We welcome contributions that focus on the multimodal propaganda strategies and material (text, images, video, digital content, digital education, algorithms, Virtual Reality) of states, political parties, and corporate actors. We equally welcome contributions focusing on the communicative activities of social movements, think tanks, algorithms, advertising agencies, social media and public relations counselors. All abstracts fitting one or more of the following themes will be considered but we also leave space for interesting contributions that may not be that easy to classify: • Theme 1: Conceptual and methodological issues for studying activism and propaganda • Theme 2: Historical and contemporary transformations in activism and/or propaganda • Theme 3: Democratic and anti-democratic modes of discourse, communication and ideology • Theme 4: Digital and multimodal forms of activism, persuasion and disinformation • Theme 5: Transdisciplinary dialogues on discourse and communication as propaganda and/or activism • … We especially welcome papers that rethink the notions of propaganda and activism in relation to key concepts in discourse studies. Such notions include power, subjectivity, reflexivity, critique, identity, context, language use and multimodal communication. Papers may also focus on the ethical problems that come with propagandistic activities. For instance, what does propaganda mean for notions such as knowledge, political correctness, freedom of speech or critical awareness? As the field of discourse studies is inherently transdisciplinary, we welcome authors from disciplines as varied as communication science, psychology, sociology, philosophy, literature, media studies and linguistics. Likewise, we seek to provide a forum for all methodological and theoretical orientations provided that the authors connect with the themes outlined in this call for papers.
Tools of Explicit Propaganda: Cognitive Underpinnings
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 2020
The article aims to account for the impact of explicit political propaganda by way of divulging the cognitive mechanisms of its main tools. This is a case study of 600 fake news narratives about the political and military crisis in and around Ukraine in 2015-2018 enlisted and analyzed as such on the website EU versus Disinfo. In the analysis, I depart from the basic principles of cogni-tive linguistics and consider the tools of explicit propaganda divided accordingly. The rationale of the first and the second groups of tools is a balance of the logical (like joint attention) and the emotional in human perception. The third group of tools explores the pivotal role of language (in particular, its lexical units and conceptual structures as their underpinning) in construing the world. Considering the third group of tools, I also pinpoint various semi-otic codes (verbal and visual) in their combination as a factor that has a great potential for influencing human cognition.
THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science
We are surrounded by communication of many kinds whose aim is to persuade rather to convince, to manipulate rather than to reason. We are being constantly manipulated into forming beliefs or attitudes, or to have feelings of certain kinds; or beliefs and attitudes we already have, but ought to criticize and perhaps reject, are instead being reinforced rather than questioned. Advertising and much public discourse is like this. How should we react to this fact? Perhaps even more importantly, how should we understand it? What does it mean that this is so?Not all persuasion is regrettable or to be disapproved. Our feelings as well as our rational judgment are part of our humanity; emotions even constitute an essential part of our rational capacities themselves. Not all persuasion is propaganda. And perhaps not even all propaganda is necessarily bad.This last point was the focus of a controversy between W. E. B. Du Bois, who held that propaganda could be used for good, and Alain Locke, w...
Logics of Propaganda Part One. Populism and Propaganda: Dangerous Liaisons and Family Resemblances On the basis of empirical data from the collective study on Anti-Democratic Propaganda in Bulgaria. News Websites and Print Media: 2013 – 2016 and reframing a cluster of already existing post-Wittgensteinian theoretical approaches, this text aims to outline the logics of propaganda on two levels, describing, in Part One, some more general typological features of the propaganda uses of language (i.e. propaganda’s ‘general’ practical logics) and, in Part Two, the particular conspiratorial grammar and typical vocabulary of the recent populist, anti-liberal and national-sovereignist propaganda (from Putin through Orbán to Trump), i.e. its specific practical logics. Here, in Part One, based on a comparison with the scientific and everyday-life modes of speech, some more general features of the propaganda uses of language (common both to commercial advertising and to political propaganda) are outlined: - We can speak of propaganda if there is strategic dissemination and repetition of stereotypified messages (clichés); the strategic goal of such repetitive dissemination is to transform those clichés into meta-clichés: into a depth grammar that frames articulations for a multitude of individuals. In this aspect propaganda resembles education but it also differs from scientifically informed education by other features: - Propaganda works in a regime of totalization of discourse, where the specific modalities of the separate messages lose their significance: the peculiar task of propaganda is to create an overgeneralized discursive horizon that enables the fusion of modalities and hence a free play of associations between messages. Being overgeneralized, propaganda discourses resemble scientific discourses and differ from everyday-life discourses; being freed from any strict sense (from any strict modalization), propaganda differs from science and resembles ordinary bullshitting (in Harry Frankfurt’s sense). Propaganda usually does not lie about the facts but it lies through modal extensions (or modal reductions) of the meanings of selected facts. - Propaganda works in a regime of metonymy: it layers utterances upon one another in such a way that the modal differences between them disappear and, instead, a metonymical chain appears: ultimately, it looks as if every utterance substitutes the other, as if their meanings are the same. This metonymical propaganda operation is conditioned by the overgeneralized and fused discursive horizon but it also produces this very horizon: there is a circular productive relationship between them. Through metonymy, propaganda simulates coherence but such coherence is false because every modal concordance between the terms and the utterances is disrupted in advance. Beyond the ‘general’ logics of propaganda, another distinction has been made: between populist uses of language and propaganda uses that are parasitic in relation to populism and operate with the opposition between ‘we, the people’ and ‘they, the elites’. We agree with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that in the spontaneous populist movements ‘the people’ comes into being as an empty signifier springing from metaphors and catachreses. The practical unfolding of the relevant discourse, however – with everyday-life metonymies from below or with strategic propaganda metonymies from above – inevitably fills the empty signifiers of populism with one or other specific meaning and transforms them into half-empty signifiers. In a specific populist-propaganda operation, such half-empty signifiers (as ‘the people’ and ‘its enemies’) are totalized and used as propaganda epithets: as devices for discursive terror. Keywords: propaganda, logics, grammar, clichés, metonymy, modalization, generalization, empty signifiers, propaganda epithets.
Propaganda: The Dark Side of Persuasion
Propaganda: The Dark Side of Persuasion, 2023
So, what is propaganda? Think of it as the dark side of persuasion and a distorted opposite of censorship. Where Persuasion is about sharing a belief or set of beliefs to bring people around to your thinking, Censorship is the act of restricting and banning information and ideas, Propaganda publicizes specific information. Mimetically, propaganda represents not just rhetoric but some degree of dishonesty. Hence, not so much an attempt to persuade but to deceive; not an attempt to inform but to inflame.
Beyond Persuasion: Rhetoric as a Tool of Political Motivation
The Journal of Politics, 2021
The revival of scholarly interest in political rhetoric is salutary, but has unnecessarily focused on defending only the kind of rhetoric whose end is to persuade listeners to change their judgments. In this article, I explore an additional style of rhetoric that has another aim: that of motivating or inspiriting listeners to support with vigorous action a judgment already made. Such rhetoric is not simply a species of persuasive rhetoric, and therefore must be justified on its own terms. I argue that motivational rhetoric is fundamentally linked to a particular psychological phenomenon: akrasia, or weakness of will. Through an examination of classical theorists of rhetoric, as well as contemporary debates and empirical research, I attempt to distinguish motivational rhetoric from its persuasive counterpart and make a preliminary defense for it as a legitimate mode of political speech.
What is Propaganda, and What Exactly is Wrong with It?
Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 11, 1997. pp. 383-413.
The purpose of this essay is to offer criteria for the identification of propaganda as a type of discourse, and for the analysis and evaluation of argumentation used in propaganda.1 Ten essential characteristics (as well as several other typical properties) of propaganda as an identifiable type of discourse are given.
Fake News as a Weapon of Persuasion
Society Register
Our study is qualitative research. It is a content analysis of more than 2,500 European and American posters of war propaganda identifying modern principles of persuasion and forms of discourse. The analysis of the themes demonstrates that the techniques used one hundred years ago to convince civilians to enlist had enormous potential for development to such a degree that they were adopted by modern political and commercial persuasion. Therefore, we can consider the propagandists of the Great War as modern spin doctors. The idea evolved after reading Propaganda (1928) by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. This is an astonishing book; it provides illuminating interpretations both for understanding of war propaganda – not just for the Great War – and for the commercial discourse of which Bernays became a promoting agent. During the Great War the propagandists used emotional and rational stratagems to convince volunteers to leave to the front. Among these, the fake news playe...
A Participatory Propaganda Model SM.pdf
Social Media & Social Order, Culture Conflict 2.0, 2017
Existing research on aspects of propaganda in a digital age tend to focus on isolated techniques or phenomena, such as fake news, trolls, memes, or botnets. Providing invaluable insight on the evolving human-technology interaction in creating new formats of persuasive messaging, these studies lend to an enriched understanding of modern propaganda methods. At the same time, the true effects and magnitude of successful influencing of large audiences in the digital age can only be understood if target audiences are perceived not only as 'objects' of influence, but as 'subjects' of persuasive communications as well. Drawing from vast available research, as well as original social network and content analyses conducted during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, this paper presents a new, qualitatively enhanced, model of modern propaganda-"participatory propaganda"-and discusses its effects on modern democratic societies.