156 / Sarai Reader 08 : Fear
On the Usefulness of Anxiety
Two Evil Media Stratagems
Matthew Fuller + Andrew Goffey
The following sections of text are stratagems selected from a work-in-progress that aims to
capture the changing nature of power in contemporary media, especially in its increasingly
technosocial aspects, and to distill them into a series of useful ploys or tactics. Drawing its
practical inspiration and modular structure from the writings of Nicolo Machiavelli, Baltasar
Gracian and Arthur Schopenhauer, amongst others, and founded on substantial research into
corporate literature, technical and strategy documents, these stratagems are offered as a
means of working with the many kinds of power articulated through media systems.
Traditional media studies works on power relations in terms of ownership, access, identity,
representation and interpretation. Whilst these have their place, in a context in which media are
increasingly becoming directly operational (as control systems) and biological (in their closer
correlation with the triggering and monitoring of affect and information), and at the same time
are growing more distributed, autonomous and integrated both amongst themselves and with
multiple scales of reality, a pragmatics is required which is capable of recognising the collapsing of the technical into the cultural, social and ecological whilst at the same time being
explicitly cognizant of the opportunities for power that such a situation presents.
This given, the Evil Media approach works with a broad conception of mediality that, whilst
it includes the usual repertoire of systems of signification that can be detached from the
body, also works at scales that are beneath the level of the whole body – on brains, neural
entrainment and physiologically potent chemicals partially handleable as signals.
Alongside these, the approach works extensively with much of contemporary grey media
such as expert systems, workflow, databases, human-computer interaction and the submedia world of leaks, networks and permissions – structures that establish what eventually
appears as conventional media. These systems are now far more widespread and functionally
significant than those which are most often apparent as media. Their relative invisibility,
Unparalysis / 157
or naturalisation through ostensibly neutral technicity, and their fusing of the cultures of
the workplace with those of consumption and policing offer numerous opportunities for
interesting uses.
Machiavelli emphasised that rulers should be feared rather than hated, but first of all,
they should be rulers. Fear is indeed preferable to love in that it carries less unpredictability
and risk of loss. A technics of fear, as something transmissible, calculable and directional,
needs to be supplemented by the cybernetic recognition of feedback. Evil Media approaches
provide this necessary reflexivity.
Invite Everyone into the Spychodrama
In a world of ruse, cunning and manipulation, nothing is unambiguous or unproblematic,
everything is pliable, biddable, suggestible. The question of the tools one uses, the forces
one has at one’s disposal, and the ways in which these can be made to work to one’s
advantage is thus permanently open, despite the sleek façades and seamless, transparent
interfaces which seem to tell another story. In the multiple fields of knowledge production, the
exercise of strategic or stratagematic intelligence requires an attentiveness to what would
otherwise remain irredeemably obscure epistemological discussion, hair-splitting conceptual
distinctions, even throwaway comments and off-the-cuff remarks. Chairman Mao knew this
only too well, pointing out – in the field of politics – that trouble is an excellent thing. Even the
emergence of a controversy in a scientific field can furnish crucial indicators for otherwise
imperceptible shifts, geopolitical impasses and social problems, offering a toehold for the
astute media operative. In this way, the cracks, faults and disturbances marking our mental
universes offer the same kinds of opportunities for exploitation as do bugs in the algorithmic
universes of software, and one stratagem is always in the position of being able to turn
another to its own account.1
The domain of the ‘psy’ disciplines, the once-favoured epistemo-technical resource for
public relations gurus, cold warriors and wizened imperialists, drawn on pell-mell in the development of strategic ambiguity (spychoanalysis would have been a good name for the
fantasised practices of mind control), once again proves a crucial resource for following the
shifting configurations and shadowy actions of mediums.
Part of the genius of psychoanalysis was to have linked what it does as a set of therapeutic
practices to a conception of knowledge and of truth. Its promise to uncover hidden truths, its
use of the concept of transference to break down the unconscious resistances of the patient
and mitigate the possibly distorting effects of suggestion and, more generally, to detect
and disclose things that a patient couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge, has, one must admit,
a certain strategic allure. More refined than the salivating hounds of Soviet behaviourism in
the context of social power and geopolitical conflict, the theatrical mise-en-scène of its conceptual framework – its learned allusions to Ancient Greek culture – gives added value and
a hefty payout of cultural capital with which to speculate and scheme. As with the resonant
connections between counter-intelligence practice and literary criticism,2 mapping furtive
and clandestine dynamics into textual structures and theatrical scripts offers a tasteful sheen
and a somewhat aesthetic ornamentation to the resolution of geopolitical problems.
158 / Sarai Reader 08 : Fear
The double reference to knowledge and to therapy, in fact, offers a flip-flop that can be
utilised with impunity to avoid unwelcome accusations of trickery and manipulation. On the
one hand, the therapeutic claim – we’re only trying to help alleviate the suffering of psychological disorders – can be used to sanction any manner of improper suggestiveness in
practice. On the other, the knowledge claim – that patients disclose in analysis the truth of
their suffering – can be used to head off the criticism that maybe the analyst puts ideas into
his patient’s head and constructs the problems the analysis then claims to resolve. Unlike
behaviourism, which quite openly acknowledged its debts to the model of reflex action by
siphoning off the excess dribble produced in expectation of reward, the implications of the
suggestive stimulations of reflex action were historically cast to one side on the royal road
to the unconscious.3
Thus, one might say that in spite of the well-meaning, therapeutic intent of analysis, its
appeal to Science offers a cover, an alibi, an air of benevolent neutrality and cultural sophistication, a confident feeling of being in the right, to what others might see as really a
technique of influence.4 We’ve already seen the value of this in the polemical construction of
brainwashing. So when Jung, breaking with Freud, remarks that in transference, that imprimatur of scientificity, the analyst can appear a devil, a god or a sorcerer,5 it’s not difficult to
laugh such things off as the obsessions of a mythomaniac. The archetype? Not a scientific
concept, I’m afraid. But when we add to the balance-sheet the systemic downgrading of fear
in favour of an endogenous logic of anxiety,6 and we factor in the findings of recent work on
the psychology of torture (difficult to attribute those anxieties to the subject in question7), we
can’t help thinking that Jung might have had a point. Could it be that the reconstruction of
the unconscious might have been at the service of forces other than those of pure science
all along? Maintaining plausible deniability for the hex you’ve placed on the terrified libido is
made considerably easier if you can excise in advance any connections that the unconscious
might have with the outside world.
Part of the opposition that psychoanalysts, stalwarts of the Cold War of the psyche, have
towards initiatives developing elsewhere – psychopharmacology, cognitive science and
neurobiology, for example – stems from the complications they bring into the dynamic of
transference (whose operative structural fantasies are rather homologous to brainwashing
and mind control): what strange, active, possibly empowering effects might an anxiolytic or
an anti-depressant have on a patient’s unconscious resistances to the outing of the truth? The
medium of psychoanalysis is speech, but there must be a powerfully motivated forgetting to
make us ignore the possibility that the psyche is constructed through other media too. Irony
fading, the analyst comments that “addiction opens a field where no single word of the subject
is reliable and where he escapes analysis altogether”.8 Fearing the spiking of the psyche, the
analyst insists on the exclusion of any other agents than the medium of language.
What we are getting at is that a certain doctrinal (or theoretical – the difference is slight
here) rigidity renders a practice open to the classic counter-intelligence scam and ruse of
power: the turning of an agent. Given the wilderness of mirrors that analysis finds itself in,
there is the strong possibility of no longer knowing who or what is running who – we can
Unparalysis / 159
ask in all seriousness whether Anna O., right at the inception of the analytic movement, was
humouring Breuer and Freud all along. In any case, the hypothesis that the unconscious
might be simulated in particular situations is one we can’t ignore any longer.9 What becomes
of your intelligence-gathering operations if the other you think you are controlling is ironically
conforming to your demands or imitating you in a game of sly civility?10
One can always find a use for someone or something that so adamantly holds to doctrinal
purity and the universality of its judgements, maintaining a haughty disdain for anything even
moderately pragmatic: the fabrication of a terrain predisposed to certain kinds of affective
configuration (anxiety, a disposition considered to be universal); a willing ignorance of the
myriad other mediators by which an unconscious might be constructed; the belief and expectation that politicians, strategists, marketeers, will respect the autonomy of the scientist.
Analysis, we might say, prepares the ground for depressed, anxiety-prone subjects and
offers a remarkable set of tools for welding subjects to their symptoms. All the misery of the
world, miraculously transformed into the exasperated comments of the parent to the child:
you’ll see, just wait until you’re an adult…
So what was it that Jung glimpsed? Devils, demons, gods, sorcerers – mythic images
going beyond the family, sure, but also something properly frightening. Castration anxiety?
Perhaps. To the great benefit of already well-stabilised forces, analysis didn’t really want to
have that much to do with fear – Freud himself sometimes seems to say that by virtue of
its connection with external objects, fear is unanalysable.11 Anxiety, by contrast, is not only
susceptible of analysis, but performs socially useful work in preparing us for the kinds of
shocks that frightening situations create. But if this distinction seems quite uncertain to us,
we cannot ignore the inestimable tactical value of focusing attention on what goes on inside
a subject as part of the more general process by which zones of secrecy, culpability and
shame can be fabricated. Turn the other to your cause; even if, deep down, they are afraid
of you, it’s always good to have people who can keep a secret on your side.12
Speak the Metalanguage of Metabolism
…although she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill...
The invention of psychopharmacology – following the experiments of Loewi in the 1920s,
demonstrating the chemical basis for the transmission of neural messages (whilst not definitively ruling out the previously reigning hypothesis of electrical transmission) – the commercial sale of psychotropic drugs such as chlorpromazine and the invention of benzodiazepines
in the 1950s, along with the publication of manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, have had a powerful effect on the constellation of forces making
up ‘the social’. If the irrational exuberance of psychosurgeons demonstrated that social
relations and the imperatives of the state could sometimes be fabricated with ice picks and
scalpels,13 the mythologisation of mother’s little helper in popular culture not only confirms,
as McLuhan has it, that the medium is the message, but it also acts as an index of complex
shifts in the ecology of media.
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The development of psychopharmacology and its steady infection of the social generate
new media spaces, new media with their own messages. No longer electronic technologies
working at a distance in extended space, but chemical technologies creating distances in intensive space; keying social relations into the bio-chemical strata of organic material; targeting and mobilising populations of neurons – not through the electronic messaging systems of
mass media exactly but through the facilitation of neuronal transmission systems, meshing
with the loops and hits of online connectivity; catalysing circulation through the topologies
of networks linking synapses, minds, emotions, techno-science, geopolitics; creating grey
media for grey matter and vice versa. Whilst there may be no simple, one-to-one mapping
between the use of pharmaceutical substances and widespread patterns of thought, in
matters of mind control, we should at least be receptive to the idea that new substances
generate new stratagems.
Research programmes backing up into the early part of the post-World War II era already
testify to an interest in the manipulative potential of psychopharmaceuticals.14 And the
question marks that still hang over the funding of Timothy Leary’s research, not to mention
the propping up of a charismatic leader (John F. Kennedy) by amphetamines (that famous
smile is holding back the strung-out grinding of teeth), are good indicators of the strange
connections that become possible when active substances become a significant component
of the clandestine relations and alliances of the polity.
Psychopharmacology alters the distribution – and hence balance – of forces political,
technical and chemical, factoring in new agents for consideration in the strategic calculus of
populations. Downplaying the strictly monitored conditions of the séance, the couch, the 50minute hour, in the ongoing battle for hearts and minds, and embracing instead the gaseous
dispersion and nebulous clouding of chemical media, allows for unsupervised processes of
self-medication, permitting the confusion of therapy, governance and pleasure (albeit at the
admitted cost of having to find uses for addictions) and requiring in turn a shift into the multidimensional spaces of non-linear thinking. The slow metabolising of power through a new
alliance with chemistry and a corresponding molecularisation of conflict, where negotiations
are now contracted through the prescriptive regimen of the dose (or the illicit regimen of the
hit), requires an acceptance that bonds (both chemical and social) can be covalent as much
as they can be ionic, in spite of the latter’s oppositional attractions.15 Acceptance, then, of a
troublesome shift in the characteristic operations of domination and control.
At the social level, as much as at the more strictly biochemical level, political talk about
controlled substances16 risks an epistemological blunder of oxymoronic proportions (the
jokey half-admission contained in the corresponding declaration of a war on drugs is actually
more of the order of a strategic ambiguity and a tacit concession to a new ally). After all, if
nature offers the allure of strictly deterministic processes, the scientific realism of something
happening ’whether we like it or not’, then, legal niceties aside, who’s to say who is in control
any longer? Is the confidence of realpolitik in realism misplaced?
The mathematical certainties of the causal chains of physics and the precision engineering
of lock-and-key biological specificity might persuade the untutored that the identification of
Unparalysis / 161
the neuronal apparatus productive of affect could henceforth be played like a keyboard17
(imagine! with everything from do-re-mi to Schoenburg!). But if the hopeful hyping of drug
design plays on a well-entrenched and neatly rationalised model of pharmaceutical practice,
in reality, the chemical orchestration of inhibition and disinhibition and the corresponding
dynamics of control require much greater forms of artfulness. More specifically, they call for
a reckoning with the very great difficulties in making determinism – a useful hypothesis for
the laboratory and a resonant strap line for marketing – scale up and into the variegated
territories of ‘the social’.
It is here that the trials and tribulations of the weaponisation of chemical agents help
demonstrate some of the new possibilities, risks and limits of control. Of course, the cartoon
capers of government agents and scientists finding ways to break down enemy combatants
using cigarettes laced with marijuana are one thing (as are the bigger budget giggles of the
exploding cigar as highly targeted assassination device),18 but developing precise delivery
systems for chemical weapons is quite another: the Moscow Theatre siege in 2002, for
example, was not a well-orchestrated, precision-controlled military operation. Calibrating the
impact of something which has to be dispersed by aerosol, as a mist in the atmosphere
or through thermal bomblets (the case with BZ19), plays havoc with attempts to make the
determinist logic of linear causality – which material intervention at the level of grey matter
was supposed to offer – work at the supra-organic level. Doping up or doping down neuronal
receptors is a tricky proposition once the subject is out in the open and there is both a
blood-brain barrier and a targeted recipient problem to overcome. In an interrogation room,
you can strap a suspect down and tease up a tender vein, but for battlefield ops and crowd
control (CS gas and lacrimogens – don’t forget your soft contact lenses – notwithstanding), the aerosol effect disperses chemicals either too quickly or too indiscriminately. This
creates obvious public relations problems and makes the development of tried and tested
battlefield doctrine a complex task.20 The propensity of unstable and unpredictable mediators to generate uncontrollable forms of blowback here21 presents a world- and possibly
bio-historical challenge for crisis management and may or may not commend some chemical
agents to a lengthy entry in any future manual of psy ops. Or spy ops for that matter.
However psychopharmacology is not exactly chemical warfare (even if pharmaceutical
companies willingly play on both sides of the military-civilian divide), and the displacements
that pharmaceutical products accomplish in the ongoing production of the psyche still offer a
latitude for manoeuvre worth exploiting. It may just be that psychopharmacology – especially
in the grey area between (failed) covert military and (successful) overt civilian guises – offers
the possibility of a more intelligently negotiated alliance with chemical agents. The use of pill
technology for self-administered domestic consumption, for example, as opposed to the unpredictable mediations of weaponisation, or the complex, localised institutional apparatuses
of lobotomy or ECT [electroconvulsive therapy], allows for more accurate delivery (even if
it does depend upon a less tightly controlled chain of mediators). A pill embodies a strategy
with much more tangible reliability than the shaky practices of quacks, headshrinks and other
shamans, to say nothing of the eye-watering intrusiveness of the icepick.
162 / Sarai Reader 08 : Fear
The definite preference that the psychopharmacological machine displays for the production of short-term effects is as critical here as is the media form and can be of great
value, especially if tied in to other apparatuses reliant on the up-down, high-low movements
typical of machinic junkiedom (even the stock exchange needs a stimulus package from time
to time).22
Whilst the poor adaptation of double-blind clinical tests – which allow for the marketisation
of drugs – to the evaluation of long-term effects may compound the problems of blowback
over time, the molecules upon which such tests are focused are actually highly effective
recruitment devices. Kingmakers of a new kind, they sealed the ascendancy of a new macropolitical actor – the pharmaceutical giant – and, while they may not possess the diagnostic
power of a good doctor or psychoanalyst, in a highly pragmatic way, they don’t require that a
new recruit reveal the truth about him or her self. The massive success of diazepam (from the
family of benzodiazepines) – according to some sources, the most widely prescribed drug in
the United States between 1962 and 1981 – is exemplary in this regard. Whilst the curative
effects of such a substance might blur the difference between a symptom and a cause, it
has no real need for secrecy, guilt or shame. Look how quickly user groups set themselves
up on the Internet – doctor-patient confidentiality doesn’t enter the equation. Anyway, anxiety
offers a useful cover story for dealing with harmful or fearful incursions from the outside world
and, in the worse case scenario, under conditions of addiction (or influence, but for different
reasons), as we saw elsewhere, the subject is easily discredited as an unreliable witness.
More significantly, perhaps, one of the invaluable side-effects of benzodiazepines, cyclopyrrolones, dopamines, and SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Fluoxetine, i.e. Prozac] is to have accelerated the process of reforming and recomposing the very
field in which and on which they operated. From an initial position where they complemented
the medium of speech in the talking cure, pharmaceuticals end up taking over completely.
And there wouldn’t be any CBT [cognitive behaviour therapy] without the reorganising effects
of drugs on psychology.23 Liquidating the ‘dependency on authority’ effects characteristic of
therapeutic speech, the bio-chemical end of deference creates an ambiguous situation. For
whilst existential dramas of anxiety are replaced by effects of disinhibition that can, it is true,
minimise the lacerating effects of the group superego (a distinct advantage when trying to
operate in the amoral zone of strategy), there is a complete shift of affective investments,
with group identities forming round the molecule.24 Harnessing complex metabolic patterns
and turning agents when the theatrical tragedy of the primal scene has been vapourised
becomes a multimedia operation, and in the peculiarly interstitial spaces that are created
when linearity doesn’t scale up, negotiation, ruse and cunning are open even to the most
hardened of addicts.25
Unparalysis / 163
Notes
1. We aren’t trying to make a point about science ‘in general’ here, just observing that the psy disciplines are a
fascinating resource and topic for explorations in the (ab)use of power. See, for example, Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques Vol. 7: Pour en finir avec la tolérance (La Decouverte, 1997, Paris).
2. Michael James. Jesus Angleton Holzman: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, Amhurst). Also see the review by Terence Hawkes, “William Empson’s Influence on the CIA” in The Times Literary Supplement, 10 June 2009.
3. See Marcel Gauchet. L’inconscient cérébral (Seuil, 1992, Paris).
4. Stengers, op. cit.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus (Minnesota University Press, 1983, Minnesota), p. 46.
6. See, for example, Freud’s comments in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. In (ed.) James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 (Hogarth Press, 1955,
London), ch. 2.
7. Francoise Sironi. Bourreaux et victimes (Odile Jacob, 1992, Paris).
8. Jacques Lacan. Cited in Avital Ronell, Crack Wars (University of Nebraska Press, 1992, Lincoln), p. 53.
9. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. “L’inconscient simulé”. In (ed.) Tobie Nathan, La guerre des psys (Les Empêcheurs
de Penser en Rond, 2006, Paris).
10. Jean Baudrillard. In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities (Semiotext(e), 1983, New York). Homi K. Bhabha. “Sly Civility”. In October 34 (1985), pp. 71-80.
11. See Freud, op. cit.
12. Vinciane Despret. “Le secret est une dimension politique de la thérapie”. In Nathan, op. cit.
13. In the words of Walter Freeman, the intent was to turn “taxeaters” into “taxpayers”. See Jack Pressman, The
Last Resort: Pyschosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 1998, Cambridge).
14. The ARTICHOKE programme, for example. See Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton, The Mind Manipulators (Paddington Press, 1978, London), and Dominic Streatfeild, Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind
Control (Hodder, 2006, London).
15. cf. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).
16. The Controlled Substances Act was passed in the USA in 1970. Nixon declared his war on drugs in 1971.
17. As in the scenario imagined by Alfred Hitchcock and relayed by Slavoj Žižek. See the brief discussion of
this in Philippe Pignarre, Les malheurs des psys (La Découverte, 2006, Paris), pp. 44-45. On specificity, see
Jean-Jacques Kupiec and Pierre Sonigo, Ni dieu ni gêne (Seuil, 2000, Paris), pp. 17-60.
18. See Streatfeild, op. cit., pp. 44-49.
19. Reid Kirby. “Paradise Lost: The Psycho Agents”. In The Quarterly Journal of the Harvard Sussex Program on CBW Armament and Arms Limitation 71 (May 2006), p. 1.
20. ibid., p. 4.
21. cf. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback (Holt Paperbacks, 2004, New York).
22. See Félix Guattari, “Machinic Junkies” in Soft Subversions (Semiotext(e), 1996, New York). See also Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language (Semiotext(e), 2008, New York), on the short-term movements of credulity
inherent in the financial markets.
23. The full argument is developed in Philippe Pignarre, Les malheurs des psys, op. cit. Pignarre’s Comment
la dépression est devenue une épidémie (La Découverte, 2001, Paris) is a crucial text for following the logic
of recruitment in the pharmaceutical industry.
24. See Sylvie Le Poulichet, Toxicomanies et psychanalyse: Les narcoses du désir (PUF, 1987, Paris), on
the fate of ‘transference’ in addiction, Pignarre, op. cit., and Tobie Nathan, A qui j’appartiens? (Seuil, 2007,
Paris), on new complexes of attachments in psychology, and Carole Rivière, “Le lien de dépendance addictive à Internet: Une nouvelle forme d’addiction?” Available at: http://www.omnsh.org/article.php3?id_article=94
(accessed 2 September 2009), for an analytic approach to new media.
25. Emilie Gomart. “Surprised by Methadone: In Praise of Drug Substitution Treatment in a French Clinic”. In
Body and Society 10 (2-3), pp. 85-110.