Propaganda and the Theatre of Cruelty
The Drama of Control
In “The Theatre and Its Double,” (1938), Antonin Artaud tells us the dramatic experience must be one of,
“. . . characters dominated by the total stage picture, governed by outer as well as inner forces they do not understand, wars, plagues, social upheaval.” ( “Affective Athleticism”)
Today, what Artaud wanted to produce in the theater, as a double of the human experience, seems well in place worldwide. Humanity, all of us, can seem dominated by a “total stage picture,” where unseen producers, directors, stage designers, and writers apply “outer” and “inner” forces, a spectacle, for us the consumer of a product. And Artaud was an early proponent of dismantling the “fourth wall” such a common devise in our post-modern world. We are both a voyeur and participate, classed either as a 1st Person Shooter, or a Non-Playable-Character (NPC). Artaud called this “The Theatre of Cruelty.”
The phrase, “Theatre of Cruelty,” was unknown to me until I read D. Bruce Dickson’s “Public Transcripts Expressed in Theatres of Cruelty: the Royal Graves at Ur in Mesopotamia” (2006), research for my novel in progress about the 1st Iraq War (1991), with the working title: Propaganda.
In Dickson’s way of thinking, elites “produce” a “public transcript” that can be “read” as an intentional, dramatic (if intuitively constructed) theatrical production.
“State power united with supernatural authority create. . .powerful ‘sacred or divine kingdoms’; but. . . ‘divine’ kings need continuous contact with the supernatural [as] affirmation of their divinity,” (Dickson, 2006)
The “supernatural connection”, as Dickson seems to see it, lies in the dramatic presentation of power over life and death, the power that used to belong to the workings of Nature, but now belonged to men with the organizational and technological skill to make it happen. Armed with this idea, I began to see a course of intentionality in civilization revealed, as with the Graves at Ur (circa 2300 BCE), in the archeological record. I began to see a vast assortments of cruelty intentionally produced and “sold” to a consuming public by an elite, who reaffirm divine status in these manifestations of power.
When I reviewed the historic record with this idea in mind, I was surprised to see that while manifestations of cruelty were euphemistically noted, as “slavery, ritual sacrifice, pillaging, or manifest destiny,” the explanation for this cruel performance, as a strategy to retain dominance, was omitted. My daughter’s history book, for example, expressed the idea that a terrorized people appreciated the order that terror afforded while “leadership” was lauded or the longevity of its control. Dickson writes, that retaining power necessitated,
“. . . ritual sacrifice to terrorize a restive citizenry and convince themselves and others of their right to rule. Other examples of manifest “state sponsored theatres of cruelty confirm . . . a phenomenon of wider historical generality,” (Dickson, 2006).
Edward Bernays wrote the manual for propaganda called, without irony, Propaganda (1928). He was an outcome oriented man, who in no way questioned the benevolent disposition of the controlling authority. Bernays, Jewish, would be shocked to learn that Joseph Goebbels had Bernays’ own book, “Crystallizing Public Opinion,”(1923) on his bookshelf, and had used it, we might guess, as a manual in the creation of Nazism. Bernays and Goebbels both saw that the “theatre of cruelty” worked to control and move the people toward the objectives of the elite, the “manufacture of consent” on a pathway toward “the greater good.”
Hannah Arendt’s coined the idea of a “banality of evil” and applied it to the tight lipped Adolf Eichmann who managed the infrastructure that took millions of Jews and other victims of propaganda to their deaths. “The banality of evil” would not seem to apply to the gregarious Bernays, and yet, Bernays advanced propagandistic control of the public which leads to Theaters of Cruelty, wars and genocide.
The propagandists, Bernays and Goebbels, many have disagreed about who would be left to enjoy the “greater good,” and who would be omitted, but they agreed that intellectual elites like themselves, “good folks,” must work to produce a “theatre” of experience to overwhelm the parasympathetic nervous system, and thereby control the emotions, and finally, bodies of the “denigrated” masses, the “not-so-good folks.
An intellectual “public relations” professional, and nephew to Sigmund Freud, he had an unquestioning faith in the master he served, the ideology of profit-driven capitalism. We might see a “banality of evil” rooted in the white collar and intellectual elite, adopted without those who can abstract themselves away with language from what might otherwise seem to be evolutionarily “anti-social” behavior, over which they might feel some remorse.
Barneys claimed for himself and his cohort the position of “invisible governors” who “pulled the wires” and “control the public mind.” Antonin Artaud sought the same “total control” of the spectator experience as Producer, Director and Actor in the Theatre of Cruelty. The names change, but the “song remains the same.”
It can seem that propagandistic control of the human-animal has grown from the emotional manipulation implicit in the “drama” of human experience. Propaganda, and Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” move the reader by creating emotional experience that we either flee from, confront, or are overwhelmed by. Language elites, artists, writers, managers, learn these human control functions through manuals like Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics, Cicero’s De Oratorio, Machiavelli’s Prince, through Bernays if they should read him, and in communications courses in the Academy, course work like Richard Perloff’s “The Dynamics of Persuasion” a popular “textbook.”
Scribal elites honed and continue to hone strategies for manipulating a consumer audience. These easy strategies were call “rhetorical fallacies” and created “implicit bias.” Over time, through experimentation “in the field” and in the laboratory, through data collection and analysis, as well as acutely focused psychological and neurological experimentation, human control, it seems to me, has become a knowable science that can be applied with degrees of exactitude for the purpose of manipulating entire populations. Edward Bernays bragged that he’d increased cigarette sales to women through psychological manipulation and made bacon a staple of the American breakfast by implying, with an actor dressed as a doctor, that bacon was good for your health.
Even in 1928, Bernays wrote,
“. . . we can effect some change in public opinion with . . . accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, just as the motorist can manipulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline.” (Propaganda, 1928)
The terrifying overwhelm of the Theatre of Cruelty as a means of human control must, it seems to me, predate writing, 5000 years ago or the advanced weaponry of the Bronze Age (1300–1200 BCE). But with advances in media, organization, and weaponry the Theatre of Cruelty has become more robust and far-reaching. Bernrays used the “signs and symbols” of Frudian Psychology to facilitate the entrance of American in WW1 and the consuption of cigaretts and bacon. The extent of Nazi Germany’s “Theatre of Cruelty” was not possible without communication technologies, advanced bureaucratic structures, chemistry, and the steam engine. The worldwide terror of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) of the Cold War was not possible without Nationalism, anti-Communist Propaganda, and Atomic Energy. Our witness of murder of Black Civilians by Police Professionals is not possible without computerized dispatch, weapons technologies, and handheld video.
Now, almost a 100 years after Bernays publication of Propaganda, and with our advances in communications, weapons, and production technologies, we might imagine our lives within the Theatre of Cruelty to be just as Artaud described it in 1938: as “characters dominated by the total stage picture, governed by outer, as well as inner, forces they do not understand.”
The anxious impulse toward human control by the few over the mass has been the driver of civilization since the invention of the propaganda of “divine kingship.” The historical cycle seems to be consistent: a suppression of the mass by an elite (justified by the “danger of the crowd”), developing mass insurgency, followed by an elitist counter-insurgency.
For me, this fairly, and simply, describes the both a cyclical history and the events of the present day. That “cruelty” should be the vehicle of this control function tells a story of human physiology, where Artaud, in 1938, accurately locates the source of emotional and physical control in the body. I believe too that this behavioral trend is in no way abating, which is very bad news for humanity and our collective suffering.
What I’ve arrived at, after, honestly quite a few years of intensive research, isn’t a rhetorically denigrated “conspiracy theory.” I actaully don’t feel there is a conspiracy. There is a human brain, and that human brain can be manipulated by its environment, conditioned, as psychologists call it. That it can be done means, as in the case of Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels, it is done.
The outcome is a stratified society. There is an elite who produce. They “do unto others.” And there is a subclass of those who consume the product. These are “done unto.” Doing unto others, as we see in “divine kingship” makes the doer of cruelty (and benevolence) feel closer to an imagined God. They are superior to those they manipulate. These are interior feelings of self-esteem and even pride. The “doer’ of deeds think of themselves and even feel themselves as being ‘good folks.’ Because they feel good about what they are doing, it bears to reason that what they accomplish through their acts will also be good, or “the greater good.” In this way, the “good folks” who engage in the “banality of evil,” like Adolph Eichmann, distance themselves from the cruelty they are inflicting upon others.
Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem is widely available. His is not the face of some monstrous “objectified evil, but instead a mirror into the face of any Kafkaesque bureaucrat, manager, or political functionary, the “good folks” who make Theatre of Cruelty possible.
The truth of the Theatre of Cruelty, for me, comes in the all too apparent outcomes of the performance, with speaks to the intentionality of the production. Artaud writes,
It does not matter if a hypothesis is correct. What matters is that it is verifiable.
Its mechanism is not a cabal or conspiracy, but instead the pragmatism of “What works works.” The cruelty of “bread and circuses,”whether in acute violence or the incremental “soft kill” of withholding resources, affects the body of the human-animal. Cruelty, in triggering our neurobiology, works.
Bernays and Antonin Artaud wouldn’t imagine that they agreed with Mussolini who believed his “will was the will of the people.” But Mussolini, Artaud, and Bernays, artist, neoconservative or neoliberal, communist or fascist, all sing the same tune, claimed superiorism, the “will to power” that suggests a grammatical relationship between an elevated, elite-subject “I” and a denigrated, mass-object “it.”
The “I” acts, directs, produces, and the “it” is acted upon, is needfully directed, and even is manufactured by the “I.” The rationalization for this control is the “greater good” which tends to advantage and benefit the elite disproportionately. In Martin Buber’s “I and Thou,” he called this an “I and it” relationship, which is often expanded to include the mass in a project of mass objectification, as in “Us vs. Them.”
Artaud justifies his Theatre of Cruelty by providing a relief from suffering, Aristotelian catharsis, which occurs at the end of the show. This is the same justification for religion, that it provides solace after a life of suffering. It is also found in our stories, in arc of character and the proposition that there is a point of “arrival” and self realization.
The hope for catharsis is the twin of our physiological fear drive and the another primary instrument of propagandistic control. The mass is manipulated into a reconciliation with to cruel treatment in the past and acceptance of cruel treatment in the present in exchange for a future benefit. Our brains are wired too to accept this manipulation in a process described in “cognitive dissonance theory.” Simply put, we can’t believe an authority (the parent, employer, state) could mean us such harm. Psychologically, we don’t want it to be true, and so we adopt a denial of the facts, apparent outcomes.
When deprived of material resources, in the midst of both mental and physical anguish, we need hope. Catharsis is placating but it also keeps us from the depressed state of “learned helplessness.” In the lab, a dog shocked repeatedly no matter what it does simply lies down and accepts the shock treatments. In the world, a labor force might refuse to serve the elite.
Aboard the bandwagon of Social Darwinism, so popular since the publication of Darwin’s work (1859) through the 1920’s and reaching its apotheosis today, Artaud writes,
If the theatre . . .is bloody and inhuman, it is in order to manifest and to root unforgettably in us the idea of a perpetual conflict and a spasm in which life is constantly being cut short. (“The Theatre of Cruelty”)
Artaud saw the theatre as function, one that produces a soul in humankind that does not exist except in the physiology of the body. There, if poked and probed by the spectacle of cruelty, “one can see this specter of the soul as if intoxicated by the cries it produces.”
Propaganda is the Theatre of Cruelty and the Theatre of Cruelty is propaganda. We might see this ever unfolding cruelty everywhere: in the existential threat that our clothes are not at their whitest; that the divine state might select us for ritual execution, in the hospital or on the street; or in the red-hued, vaporous spectacle of human atomization.
“It is a question, therefore, for making the theater. . . a function: something as localized and precise as the circulation of the blood in the arteries, or the apparently chaotic development of dream images in the brain, and this by a powerful linkage, a true enslavement of the attention.” (“The Theatre of Cruelty”)
We are the characters directed through cruelty toward overwhelm, the neurological state of “freeze.” Our repetitive and cyclical experience, actuality and perception, a total stage picture from which we cannot escape, furthers us on an ever narrowing path toward our vanishing point.
