Recently Published Book Spotlight: How Propaganda Became Public Relations

This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about Cory Wimberly‘s How Propaganda Became Public Relations: Foucault and the Corporate Government of the Public. Cory Wimberly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research primarily focuses on corporate governmentality—analyzing the corporate apparatuses responsible for the guiding and transforming public conduct. Wimberly’s past work has focused on propaganda and public relations and his current work is exploring other areas of corporate governmentality including marketing, advertising, and industrial design.

What is your work about?

How Propaganda Became Public Relations: Foucault and the Corporate Government of the Public is a philosophical investigation into the transformative effect propaganda has on us as individuals, on us as publics, and on society more broadly. I argue that propaganda does far worse than just lie to us: modern propaganda aims to transform us into the kind of subjects who carry out a particular line of conduct freely and as a key part of our identity.  In other words, propaganda aims to transform who we are as individuals and as publics so that we become the kind of subjects who behave as the propagandists’ want as a matter of course and disposition. For example, why does someone spend an exorbitant amount on yoga pants only to wear them around the house?  Or hoard assault rifles? Often, it is because they are convinced that a key aspect of their identity lies in that ownership; those goods have become a necessary extension of their very being. In Foucault’s language, propaganda is an apparatus that governs through subjectification—it directs our conduct through transforming our subjectivity—and it is not just a technique of mass deception as so many assume.

One problem with the existing philosophical literature on propaganda was that it too often started from commonsensical and stipulative definitions of propaganda that tied it almost exclusively to mass deception or ideology. Following Nietzsche, Foucault, and other radically empirical philosophers, I had the sense that it was possible to actually situate the philosophical analysis within the archives of propagandists rather than work from conjecture or commonplaces.  The archival work in this book helps rid it of unnecessarily speculative and stipulative definitions and gives the book the materials for a fresh look at the subject.

What I found in the archives challenged what I thought propaganda was. I, like so many others, started with the presupposition that propaganda was an ahistorical practice that immoral people in all times drew on to manipulate others, a resort to fallacious and deceptive rhetoric on a mass scale to satisfy ambition and greed. What I found instead was that early 20^th century American practitioners—Lee, Bernays, Jones, etc.—developed modern propaganda as a very specific response to rising labor struggles, increasing democratic participation, the urbanization and industrialization of the United States, the growth of the mass media, and the tremendous economic recession of the late 19^th century. Corporations needed a way to govern subjects in their transformative movement from farm to city, from self- to industrial production, from making to consuming, from local to national distribution, and from local to class politics. In the 1920’s, propaganda renamed itself ‘public relations’ and is now an important function of every large business. The collective impact it has in transforming our subjectivity as individuals, publics, and societies is tremendous.

That’s an interesting historical phenomenon. Can you describe some of the tactics propagandists used in the early 20th Century America?

Early 20th century propagandists were very interested in the economics of their practice because their field was untested and unproven—they had to make the benefit of their business proposition clear. Resultantly, their tactics were often guerilla tactics that sought to make use of the forces already governing public opinion. The aim was to coopt or redirect those governing forces in ways that resulted in conduct that better suited for their clients. The idea was that it was much less expensive and a better financial prospect to alter the forces already governing public conduct than to try to create totally new relations of government.

One early example that continues to set a precedent was Edward Bernays’ work for Lucky Strike cigarettes, which aimed to get more women to smoke. It was one of the earliest, if not the first major example of feminist cooptation in advertising and possibly the birth of commodity feminism. In 1928, George Washington Hill came to Bernays and asked for help getting women to smoke since smoking rates were much lower amongst women than men. There were social taboos at the time and even laws forbidding women to smoke, especially publicly. Even in large cosmopolitan cites like New York women could not smoke in public. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, decided that he could market the cigarette to women as a phallus. Following on the back of the suffrage movement, he decided to describe cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’ and market smoking Lucky Strikes in public as a way for women to claim their social, economic, and sexual equality. His tactics were very successful; he targeted the socialites and feminist leaders other women looked to for direction. Once socialites and social leaders were smoking in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, Lucky Strike had their win.

The point here is that Bernays took the governing desire for equality in many women and coopted it to sell cigarettes. Smoking became an essential part of many women’s identity in that it was part and parcel of how they most essentially understood and conducted themselves: it was tied to their economic, social, gender, and sexual identity. Bernays did not have to create the desire for equality, he just coopted it. This guerilla movement saved Lucky Strike money since they did not have to create a disposition to smoke from scratch but just make a few carefully calculated propaganda strikes to create a point of inflection in many women’s public behavior.

Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?

It was not a single insight I found exciting but the combination of two insights about propaganda that hit me like a heavy left-right combination. The first insight was the idea that propaganda is an apparatus of government that works through subjectification (to put it in Foucault’s language). In other words, propaganda aims to direct our activity through transforming who are such that it is a ‘natural’ part of who we are to carry out the desired activity. Crowd psychologists like Le Bon, Tarde, Freud, and McDougall were big influences on modern propagandists and they took from these psychologists that the aim of propaganda should be to transform the desires of subjects; transforming the desires of subjects meant that the inevitable and regular action of natural human drives would lead the public towards new objects of desire and new activity. When propaganda is most successful, the conduct it seeks to engender appears to the subject as its ownmost desire rather than an external and unwanted imposition.

Second, propaganda is not just the province of rogue nations and immoral actors. In fact, before modern propaganda became associated with the state at all it was first developed in business—beginning in 1900 with the Publicity Bureau of Boston. Propaganda was first systematically incorporated into business practice from the beginning of the 20^th century but only later in the 1920’s did it become prevalent when it was renamed “public relations.” Edward Bernays, one of the two biggest names in the history of propaganda alongside Ivy Lee, said this about his experience doing propaganda for businesses after World War I:

“When I came back to the United States [from World War I], I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And “propaganda” got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words so we found the words “public relations.”

Following World War I, propaganda was renamed public relations and became firmly lodged in the corporation as one of its most important functions.

Combining the deep and fundamental transformations propaganda makes to public subjectivity with the knowledge that it is an incredibly pervasive, well-funded, and key part of business today were the conclusions that together shook me. Many nations on Earth do not have the budget, skill, and well-developed relationships of government that many large corporations do. Those corporations are not democratic or accountable to the public for the government they exercise over them; it’s a deeply troubling situation.

Why did you feel the need to write this work?

Foucault once wrote that, “In political and social analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.” I take it that one important meaning of this line is that power is neither centrally invested in the sovereign nor is power solely juridical and expressed through the limits encoded in the law. Put simply, government is not synonymous with the state and power is not synonymous with the law. Yet, today in social and political philosophy the primary concerns remain the state and the juridical—I remember being asked at a conference how my insights might be codified into a state constitution, as if the point of political philosophy was to corner all politics and power into the edifice of the state and the form of the law. In some ways the situation today is worse than when Foucault wrote that line in the mid-1970’s: too often we are trying to balance the King’s severed head back on his body so we can continue on without measuring the cut Foucault and others have made to our understanding of politics in the intervening fifty years.

Foucault’s notion that we look for government outside of the state and power outside of the law is central to this book. I am investigating apparatuses of government exercised within corporations and they are some of the most pervasive, well-funded, thoroughly rationalized, and highly developed relations of government extant, including the state. To give you a sense of the scale of government operated by corporations, we just need to reflect that only ten nations on Earth have a larger yearly budget than Walmart. Nonetheless, corporate governmentality receives only a tiny fraction of the attention that the state does in philosophy. I grew up in the 1980’s in an era in which everything was branded, almost every surface was covered with advertising—from my clothes, to my food, and even my schoolbooks and supplies—and those advertisements were just a small part of much larger corporate apparatuses designed to transform and direct public conduct. The attention given in political philosophy to the state seems disproportionate to the reality of the situation. I thought that the tools philosophers developed could be applied profitably outside of their narrow contemporary bounds.

How is your work relevant to historical ideas?

Of course, other people had realized the power of the industrial apparatus to reconcile people to its hegemony. Marx obviously with his notion of ideology, followed by many of the critical theorists including Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, and many more loosely related theorists like Chomsky and Hall. In addition, a whole literature out of the liberal analytic school also took propaganda up as a threat to the unity and cogency of the rational and autonomous individual that was assumed as the ideal and normal citizen of democratic polities; Jason Stanley’s book on propaganda is notable in this regard.

What I thought was missing from the broadly Marxist and the liberal responses was real grappling with the idea that corporate governmentality could transform their publics. The line of ideological critique from Marx through Marcuse and Chomsky holds that the real human and its real needs endures under the yoke of capitalist domination, waiting to be restored. Likewise, liberals like Stanley and also Habermas, hold out an idealized version of rationality and deliberation which needs to be restored and even extended in the face of a corporate assault. The ameliorative end of critique for these two very different political analyses was the same in the sense that they both aimed to liberate those who had been repressed but not fundamentally altered by corporate interests.

What I wondered was whether an argument could be advanced that corporate governmentality had transformed subjectivity, maybe even produced new subjects? This seemed reasonable to me: for instance, just before the civil war Americans produced 95% of what they needed for themselves but by 1930 these numbers were reversed. Large, almost impossible, changes had swept through the publics and my hypothesis was that business had a direct hand in orchestrating those changes to its advantage. Undoubtedly, we are complex and multifaceted beings but I wanted to grapple with the reality that our corporate disseminated identities as consumers, laborers, managers, and as pro-corporate voters was not a false ideological skin we wore but just as truly as much of who we essentially are as anything else.

I decided to explore the archives of people working in public relations—those people whose job it was to govern a corporation’s relationships with its publics like Hamilton, Lee, Bernays, Hill, and others—and see what they did and how they thought about their work. In short, I found a lot of evidence in the archive that propagandists’ work is better thought of as governing the public through the transformation of their subjectivity than it is to think of them as weavers of mystification or fallacious lines of thought. The highest aim of public relations is to craft the kind of publics who naturally and freely carry out the kind of conduct most beneficial to their corporate clients and, in contrast, deceiving the public is thought of as an unstable and unreliable solution that is risky enough that it should be avoided.

What’s next for you?

I would like to step back half a step and see how all the diverse apparatuses that corporations have for governing the public hang together. There are a diversity of divisions and departments within corporations that all deal in some way with governing public conduct—marketing, advertising, public relations, industrial design, industrial engineering, etc.—and I am interested in how they relate to one another, their governmental mission, and the other parts of the corporation. I plan on investigating not just their own insular rationalizations but also how they bridge the diversity of apparatuses within the corporation. Right now, I am working my way through the history of marketing and I want to thank my friends in the field, Fuat Firat, Mohammadali Zolfagharian, Nikhilesh Dholakia, and Alladi Venkatesh for their patience and help—I am like a PhD student but with no course release!  

What I am finding is already challenging my assumptions about what business is and how it operates to transform public sensibility. It is too early to draw any firm conclusions but I am amazed at how marketing serves as a matrix for the formulation of governmental imperatives out of such a diverse array of interests. In marketing they engage with problems of economics (with profitability fore among them), sociology (in respect to understanding the diverse groups the corporation treats with), psychology (understanding why groups behave as they do and how those behaviors might be changed), politics (which impacts public opinion and drives the legislative agenda), right (the legal environment is obviously important), and security (the problem of the stability of the corporation in relation to possible short term gains and threats). What has me fascinated about marketing is how in the last analysis it is about changing behavior—especially consumer behavior—but it has to negotiate problems at very different levels of analysis in order to carry out a line of government that is responsible to them all.

Hopefully, in a few years I will be able to create out of all this research a coherent line of analysis that gives a more comprehensive genealogy of corporate governmentality than I have yet been able to make.

The issue of propaganda and contemporary corporate culture is an important one that almost no one from corporate media channels discusses (for obvious reasons). Does your research in this book suggest any possible ways corporate propaganda might evolve in the near future?

Modern propaganda has been evolving since its start alongside demography and the collection of statistics about public opinion. As the data and the picture it draws have become finer grained, so too has propaganda activity. For instance, in early propaganda there was a drive to carefully target a particular public but they just did not have the data to do so in many cases—there was little talk of specific age groups because there was no data breaking out public opinion by age.  Today, we are familiar with how the public is broken down by age groups into 18-34, 35-45, etc.

My guess is that as big data gets operationalized and demographic data explodes propaganda will continue to market to increasingly smaller and more narrow publics. One bottleneck will be the ability of propagandists to write an increasing number of appeals to the increasing multiplicity of small publics that propaganda is aimed at. Artificial intelligence is already being used in simple ways to allow algorithms to modify propaganda appeals according to the psychological, economic, racial, gender, sexual, age data they have about a public. It seems very likely that this development will expand and become more important. In this way, propaganda can follow the data and be increasingly customized. Propagandists will increasingly count coders and artificial intelligences amongst their ranks.

However, I think there is a limit to this process in that I don’t think propaganda will ever be individual. One of the main ways that propaganda works is by directing its audience to think of itself as a mass or group—it uses that group psychology extensively in how it alters conduct. The challenge will be to create increasingly specialized and narrow publics without erasing the sense amongst their target publics that they are publics—groups of people joined by some shared qualities that makes many individuals a whole. One of the most effective ways propaganda has for mobilizing our conduct are the psychological qualities of groups: the joys of shared work, the fear of exclusion, the feelings of power that come from broad unity, etc.

One final comment on the future: Going all the way back to the guerilla roots of propaganda in the early 20th century, modern propagandists have always tried to coopt existing desires rather than to fabricate them from scratch. It is easier to tweak a desire a public already has than to try build desire ex nihilo. What is new today is who is the agent coopting public desire. In the past, the propagandists devised the images, symbols, and phrases used to coopt desire and transform public conduct but today they are increasingly relying on the public to do this heavy lifting themselves. For example, today propagandists prowl Instagram looking for people who are able to shape and mold trends. They then put their goods, services, brand identities, etc. into these people’s (“influencers”) hands and look for the influencers to devise the means of reaching their audiences and altering their conduct. The propagandists have relinquished much of the work formulating a propaganda strategy into the hands of the Influencers and other such people; increasingly, the propagandist’s job is to recruit the right influencers, the ones who can mold public opinion.

While there is a lot that is troublesome about this, there is also some room for hope. Increasingly, the government of the public of our largest and most wealthy institutions (corporations) is farmed out to people outside of their institutions over whom they have much less direct control. This opens the possibility for insurrection and the possibility of turning the tools corporations have developed over the last century and a quarter against them. While it is unlikely Kylie Jenner will turn her platform to revolutionary uses, there are tens of thousands of other people who have gained far less, have much to lose, but still have a sizeable platform cultivated to influence public conduct.

You can ask Cory Wimberly questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.

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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.

Cory Wimberly

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Cory Wimberly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research primarily focuses on corporate governmentality—analyzing the corporate apparatuses responsible for the guiding and transforming public conduct. Wimberly’s past work has focused on propaganda and public relations and his current work is exploring other areas of corporate governmentality including marketing, advertising, and industrial design.

Nathan Eckstrand

Nathan Eckstrand is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at Fort Hays State University and Marian University, and before that a Merton Teaching Fellow at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA.  Nathan previously served as editor-in-chief of the APA Blog, where he has worked since 2017. His dissertation, written under Fred Evans and defended in September 2014, is called “The Event of Revolution: Theorizing the Relationship between the State and Radical Change” and studies concepts of revolution from the Early Modern period to the present day.  Nathan is also co-editor of Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Essays from this Widening Gyre, and has published articles on Deleuze, Foucault, Fanon, and Said. His most recent book, Liberating Revolution: Emancipating Radical Change from the State, is now available from SUNY Press.