In his work Jacques Ellul makes an interesting point about propaganda. He claims that the basic mechanism by which it operates is not to change specific subjective dispositions like beliefs and opinions but by connecting existing subjective dispositions with actions it wants us to perform. It does not manipulate desire but proposes an object to it. For example Reagan and Thathcher did not teach people to be dissatisfied with the existing society, rather they addressed the already existing discontent with its rigidity, uniformity, undemocratic nature, where more and more decisions become the prerogative of trained experts, and managed to present themsleves as the solution to these problems. This means that the way we commonly think about propaganda is wrong, or at least unproductive, and another path should be explored. When looking for the effects of propaganda, we should focus on changes to the structure of the individual psyche rather than specific changes in its contents, and how propaganda changes the way individuals are integrated into society. In the abscence of propaganda the mechanism by which subjective dispositions are transformed into actions remains a psychological one: the individual experiences a certain emotion, or drive, holds a certain opinion etc. and then acts on it in regard to objects they encounter in their surroundings. In a propagandized society this link becomes socialized: the individual acts because propaganda has proposed a certain object to them and in a way that propaganda suggests.
To the propagandist - not the individual propagandist, but the collective propagandist of society - this poses two problems. The first is the one that propaganda research has commonly been concerned with: it is how to effectively propose objects to individuals so that they will in deed act in a way beneficial to the propagandist. The other is trickier and has been neglected in the study of propaganda. It arises from the fact that the propagandist moves people to action on his own and not on their terms. The solutions propaganda proposes are not solutions for its victims, the satisfactions propaganda provides are necessarily partial: they may fulfill some desires to a certain extent when it suits the propagandist, but those that are of no use are ignored. If propaganda were to propose solutions that would truly satisfy desires, it would cease to be effective. Making propaganda is like walking a tight rope: you must never disapoint your victioms, but neither can you satisfy them. The second problem is therefore the management of free-floating desires.
Under capitalism propagana becomes the main mechanism through which individuals are integrated into society. To the degree that markets become the universal mediating principle of society economic propaganda becomes the face society presents to individuals. As the political system behaves in a similar manner, propaganda is also its predominant way of relating to "voters". As propaganda becomes dominant it severs the ties between subjective dispositions and action: individuals become less capable of autonomous action and are reliant on propaganda to supply objects to which their desire might attach itself. But what to do with desires for which propaganda has no use, let's call them unprofitable desires? If capitalist society is to persevere it must find a way to manage them lest they become a destructive force - all unchecked desire is disruptive, as Freud well knew - and that way is romanticism. I don't mean romanticism in the narrow historical sense, in this context I refer to romanticism as management of unprofitable desires in a way that cuts them off both from their causes and from action.
The emotionalism of the eighteenth century as manifested in Greuze's paintings, Hoggarth's prints or Richardson's novels was of a very instrumental sort: it aimed to move the audience in order to impart some moral lesson. The feelings it presented in its characters were therefore always rooted in action: whether it was virtuous action rewarded according to the maxim of poetic justice or virtue persevering through adversity in order to strengthen the audience in its own pursuit of virtue. Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise heralds a new age, the age of spontaneity and authenticity. Feeling becomes severed from action and reason, becoming an end of poetic creation in itself. Soon a new social institution will have been born, that of autonomous art, which takes on the task of managing unprofitable desires. The new creed as proclaimed by Wordsworth or Schiller is that of giving satisfaction to an utterly abstract individual. Adorno and Marcuse are quite correct in noticing that autonomous art is a repository for unprofitable desires, yet they fail to grasp the significance of this fact. In his aversion to the historical avant-garde Adorno failed to see the contradictions of autonomy that the historical avant-garde exposed. The culture industry is not a negation of autonomous art, rather it is the proper capitalist way of fulfilling the same function: management of unprofitable desires, only that it does it in a profitable way. Only through autonomy has art become fully integrated into propaganda. Resistance to propaganda can therefore never occur from the standpoint of autonomy. It must be from the standpoint of social practice.
The underground current of philosophical pornography that was quite strong in the eighteenth century but is nowadays hardly ever remembered - the name of the Marquis de Sade is sometimes mentioned only as a grotesque curiosity - perhaps offers the possibility of a different path. You should not be fooled by the term philosophical, these were hardcore books full of precise and vivid descriptions, they were books one read "with one hand" (I have found this description attributed both to Rousseau and Diderot respectively). And you should not be fooled by their pornographical nature, philosophy was as central to them as the arousal of sexual desire. Its creed was the supremacy of desire and it was communicated through desire itself. There is no task better suited to emancipatory art: the organisation of unprofitable desire in a way that affirms its supremacy.
