As proclaimed by General Maxwell Taylor: „The lesson of Vietnam was that we were too late in recognizing the extent of the subversive threat. Every young, emerging country must be constantly on alert, watching for those symptoms which, if allowed to develop unrestrained, may grow into a disastrous situation.
„We have learned the need for a strong police force and a strong police intelligence organization to assist in identifying…the symptoms of an incipient subversive situation.“
Corporations and government joined to fund a flock of propaganda and surveillance agencies involved in trade and espionage. **A divided Berlin was the hot focus for these agencies.
It was part of a national policy of cultural-propaganda that began with the Monroe Doctrine and moved into high gear during the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt.
The enlightenment ideals of freedom and the self-made man were conflated to form a singular ideology of the self-determining state, with a manifest destiny to lead the world into the bright future of laissez-faire capitalism and democracy.
When this angry man confronted me in Bangkok, during the democracy riots of 1992, I realised that US policies during the Sarit and Plaek regimes had led inexorably to the army turning their M-16s on the people that night in front of the Royal Hotel in Bangkok.
A week before, Afro-Americans had rioted in Los Angeles over the verdict of the Rodney King trial, revealing that American policies abroad were related to American policies at home.
These policies included the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art in New York by the Rockefellers in 1939. A number of MOMA’s administrators and directors also worked with the US. Office of Strategic Affairs, and the CIA.
The Museum of Modern Art and the CIA worked together to organize foreign exhibitions of American art, and the avant-garde helped promote the American Way of Life abroad, an effort that merged with Eisenhower’s Cold War „psychological warfare“ project and Kennedy’s anti-communism agenda. The idea was to produce a cultural model based on the image of individual freedom, economic advancement and a comfortable consummerist lifestyle, known as „the American Way of Life“ to counter the Soviet image of collectivism and personal sacrifice for the well-being of the State.
In the words of one senator, „If other people understood us, they would like us, and if they liked us, they would do what we wanted them to do.“
The **working class and middle class in Europe and Asia-Pacific posed little resistance to US propaganda initiatives, but the intelligentsia had to be won over, and this required resources and a strategy.
Such agencies as South East Asian Treaty Organization, the US Information Agency, the Fulbright Foundation, the Peace Corps, **the University of Hawaii East-West Center, the Asia Council and the Asia Society were used to reinforce adoption of America’s anti-communist agenda by transmitting developmental humanism to the intellectual elite of strategically significant countries.
But since the end of the cold war, the type of work produced by American avant-garde artists was viewed suspiciously by both the US congress and our new conservative allies, the emerging capitalist states in Asia, Eastern Europe, South America and Africa.
**As the Minister of Information and the Arts in Singapore put it in 1994:
**(The government) “… is concerned that new art forms such as performance art and forum theatre – which have no script and encourage spontaneous participation – pose dangers to public order, security and decency….“
The conservative Congress in the US. agrees. Avant-garde art, particularly feminist art, gay art, art from the political left, and performance art on the surface do not appear to be good propaganda for the American Way of Life.
But, in fact, the Method and PIM demonstrate that performance art can effectively transmit the very values of global laissez-fare capitalism that our most conservative allies endorse.
Performance Art can transmit the tried and true colonial ideology of „progress through reform“…specifically the reformation of those traditions in society that hinder the globalisation of the economy.
**But, let’s be frank: „progress through reform“ also produced an information system built on Third World exploitation and the extravagant consumption of the earth’s resources, spawning a new information class. Now information itself has become the means of deployment.
This „information class“ is now globally distributed. It includes all of the people in this room. You are all part of an elite class of information consumers. The Werkleitz Gessellshcaft is a centre for information **dissemination and consumption.
Like it or not, with information consumption comes an ideological matrix that consciously or not, you have also consumed. And this matrix is protected by the shell of an advanced propaganda system, which brings us, finally, to the stage of Totalization.
TOTALIZATION
In this stage, the body of the individuated and informed consumer becomes the commodity, as seen in the sitcom, docu-drama or ad of your choice.
Life itself became the propaganda tool of the 1950s and 1960’s **and is still so today. The proscenium stage, the frame, the canvas, the heroic icons of the New York school and Pop were no longer necessary, when life itself could do just as well. Happenings and Life-Like Art marked the moment of the Totalization of our ideological system. Totalized propaganda is the information-commodity spectacle of the body and the self as ideology.
The indoctrination system has reached a level of effectiveness that totalitarian regimes could never hope to attain. We no longer distinguish ourselves from our methods of propaganda. We are self-perfecting, self-cannibalizing propaganda agents.
In light of your policies of acquiescence and accommodation toward atrocities in the Balkans, military dictatorship in Burma, Chinese imperialism in Tibet, Malaysian logging and continued French and American colonialism in the Pacific, and your 25 year active financial support for Indonesian imperialism in East Timor, Acheh, Irian Jaya …all these actions indicate your fundamental agreement with even the most imperialist and neo-colonialist aspects of global capitalism.
We recognize in you a willing (if critical and competitive) partner.
You have adopted the theology of the new millennium being forged today by cultural agents here and in other countries: manifesting and performing your lives as high level, individuated information purveyor/consumers, endlessly consuming the spectacle of your freedom to consume.
The dialectic of industrial production has been reversed: no longer is your level of consumption determined by your capacity to produce. Now you are free to produce only at the level of your capacity to consume.
This is the legacy of the IMF and the World Bank. Their initiatives in this region represent simply the latest realignment of errant economies with the matrix of global consummerism that has been under construction since the colonial era.
We are all agents for this new world culture, and we count you among our strongest partners, working together to perfect the dominant world ideology and its performative propaganda model, precisely by criticizing it…. helping to create the future culture by criticizing the present Method. It is one of the paramount strengths of the system that we are not afraid to criticize the products of our „critical capitalism“. The more stinging your critique, the more transparent and effective our propaganda system becomes. Gemainzam in die zukunft!
LEE ON VIDEO:
I am the latest in a series of Langenbach’s whipping boys. You see, Ray Langenbach loves to be publicly criticized—and he will assimilate and appropriate each and every criticism. So if you really want to get at him, you should shower him with approval—but I digress.
You will, I trust, run into Langenbach during the Performance Art Symposium. See if you can notice that he is dyslexic. His dyslexia, I should tell you, is not just a physical condition, but it is an ideological one. This explains the internal incoherencies in his discourse which you will surely notice. I trust you will become familiar with his performance/lecture.
Langenbach will discourse on the Performative Indoctrination Model—PIM. Leave it to a dyslexic to spell the acronym in code. I, being less subtle, would have stated it as: the Performative Indoctrination Model of Propaganda—PIMP!
A pimp—that’s what Langenbach is, and that’s what you all are—you’re all a bunch of pimps, you’re all pimping for American cultural hegemony—and some of you don’t even know it. Or even if you know it, you’re in denial—Langenbach knowingly is.
Langenbach’s entire enterprise is to absolve himself of his imperialist, colonialist, racist, sexist guilt and complicity by trying to pass as a liberal performance artist. By constructing a totalised theory and methodology of performance as propaganda, Langenbach attempts to expose himself completely in order to hide what he truly is. Langenbach attempts to supersede the possibility of criticism by criticizing himself before anyone else, by anticipating any possible analysis and appropriating it before anyone else from outside his discourse can take such a position. His project of self-reflection, however, betrays an underlying hysteria of fitting exactly what he proclaims he is doing.
While he, rightly in my view, tries his utmost to totalize performance as propaganda, Langenbach—unable to expunge the irrelevant humanist liberalism of his upbringing—still clings on to a secret hope that he will not be able to do so.
What allows Langenbach to cling on to the last vestiges his liberalism is his dyslexia. Without this defect he would indeed believe that perfecting the Performative Indoctrination Model of Propaganda really is possible.
