A portent that the field may be returning to the faculty psychology days of yore? I give you an excerpt of Mark Frauenfelder’s review of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion:
How is it that door-to-door salespeople, marketers, car dealers, politicians, strangers, con artists, and cult leaders are able to persuade people to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do? That’s the question Robert B. Cialdini asked himself after falling victim to a huckster’s influence one time too many. But instead of shrugging his shoulders, this professor of psychology decided to study the phenomenon and find out if there is a set of common techniques used to convince people to hand over their money or time against their better judgment. And he discovered that indeed there was, and wrote a book about it called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
With all the controversy about the building which will have Islamic prayers on Park Place in New York City (yes, that was very carefully worded), I thought it very pertinent that I pass along this this article from The Huffington Post by Matt Sledge. In it he discusses the use of the term “Ground Zero Mosque” and how it is being used to draw people into a certain way of thinking. An interesting read, to say the least.
The LXD (legion of extraordinary dancers) is a new web series on Hulu. This series endeavors to tell a story comic book style. There is the wise old man who narrates all his wisdom at the beginning of each story and then we see how each person or group came to be included in this “Legion of Extraordinary Dancers” while unraveling the dark and dangerous bad guys at the same time. So, essentially we have this conflict between these two groups of dancers (think hip-hop West Side Story) who we have not yet been seen doing much battle, but a little bit. For example, the webisode “The Uprising Begins:”
This particular use of dancing as combat reminds me of the Zulu Nation, the primarily ’70s/’80s to today hip-hop movement which called for more dance offs, rap offs, and DJ competitions and less gang violence. It’s even in Guitar Hero. If you’ll notice from the following clip, the difference I see is that Zulu Nation used dance and hip-hop as a form of uniting the community:
The LXD specifically creates a chasm between two groups of dancers rather than uniting them in the joy of dance. You can see this in the story line of ”Antigravity Heros.” Two friends find some special warehouse that gives them the ability to dance like no one has danced before. When one friend is invited to the LXD and the other friend’s invite gets stolen, there is jealousy in the “other friend’s” face. The emergence of one of “The Uprising’s” main characters implies that this guy is going down the evil path and will most likely be facing off against his friend at some point.
Now, the series is still going, so I can’t say that it’s foreshadowing because I haven’t seen the entire series, but having seen many a narrative played out, that is my educated guess as to how it’s going to go. Also, at the beginning of this clip, the two friends practice a form of capoeira, which was a form of dance that involved fighting/martial arts type of moves (and let me tell you from personal experience, it is not easy). Choosing a form of dance where these two friends appear to be fighting just tells me that they will be fighting/actually dancing competitively against each other in the future.
So, the idea of dancing rather than fighting is not a new one and the acting in this series is not the best I’ve seen by far, but I find the intent to recreate this idea important. It’s as if we as a society want to express our aggression, struggle, and conflict, but without the permanence of actual death. I’m interested in seeing how this story will play out–will there be the continued trite binaries of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, etc. or will there be unity in a shared enjoyment? Is this purely a simple dancing super hero comic book or an exploration of our own humanistic desires?
There’s a fascinating conversation happening in Britain right now on the rhetorical aspects of being overweight. The BBC just published an article that debates the merits of calling patients “fat” or “obese,” with health professionals evaluating which one will help move patients toward a more healthy weight:
The debate appears to hinge on motivation, with some health professionals advocating for the term “fat” with the argument that it will ostensibly shame them into improved weight management. The flipside, of course, is that the pejorative connotations could reinforce a negative self-image to the extent that is demotivates.
Professor Steve Field, of the Royal College of General Practitioners, makes an insightful remark about the rhetorical consequences of the term obese: “I think the term obese medicalises the state. It makes it a third person issue. I think we need to sometimes be more brutal and honest.” Field’s comment can be applied more broadly, I think, to the host of conditions that are now in the process of “medicalization,” with “disorder” being attached to a wide-range of conditions that not too long ago were tagged with more colloquial descriptors–and perhaps should remain as such. The DSM-IV is replete with new classifications like “personality disorder” and “caffeine intoxification disorder.” This trend toward medicalization is largely a rhetorical process and thus signals the need for understanding it along those lines, I would argue.
Best Friends Animal Society, who runs Dog Town, often refers to these rescued and rehabilitated dogs as “homeless” on their website, which I find a tactful use of syntax. The term “shelter dog” carries an innately negative connotation, because, let’s face it, nobody wants to be in a shelter while “rescue” isn’t entirely appropriate either because the dog still exists in a state of fluxes and hasn’t been found that permanent home yet. The great thing about the word “homeless” in this situation is that it describes the animals’ state of being and reminds you that you could potentially fix that problem. Clever. Very clever.
Five weeks ago I came across a quote by Henry Ford. It has remained close to the fore of my thoughts since then.
Speech is one of man’s most marvelous tools and there is a direct relation between the kind of speech which he uses and the kind of work he does.
A good engineer can tell what language a machine ‘been built in just by looking at it. There are some languages in which a machine cannot be built at all. There are some languages in which it would be impossible to efficiently manage a factory.
Ford’s speech has a distinctive directness to it. It’s quietly militant.
This might not surprise those who know Ford’s capitalist success story of the assembly line. There’s a steadiness to his prose that resembles the production line–just look at the repetitive evenness of the last three sentences.
Ford’s quote shows a remarkable grasp of the relationship between language and reality, between our knowledge and our actions. More specifically, it reveals in no uncertain terms how capitalism is successful in large measure because of our language choices.
Ford no doubt would find dreadful a society without “efficient” factories and engines–though we must understand that “efficient” in this context is heavily colored by a capitalist frame of reference. “Efficient,” for Ford* and many other capitalists, for example, means maximizing the externalization of costs, and minimizing accountability in order to maximize profit. “Efficient” will mean something quite different to a Marxist or an environmentalist.
But what Ford dreads is precisely what many are fighting for: a language that makes a capitalist economic model an impossibility.** The goal is a language which cannot support the flagrant exploitation of labor and environment.
Among those broadcasting this message are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, authors of Empire, Multitude, and most recently, Commonwealth. One of their principle claims is that a language of resistance is an integral part of any successful resistance movement. Of course, they’re not the only ones saying this, but they are perhaps the only ones saying it that have such a large constituency of readers.
I recently had the privilege of hearing Michael Hardt speak at the Nonstop Institute in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was very gracious with his time and answers, always working hard to understand the questions as clearly as possible, while remaining sensitive to the questioner’s desires. In short, I was impressed and appreciative, along with many others.
When the microphone came around to me, there were two questions I had in mind, one that relates directly to Ford’s quote. Hardt and Negri use the phrase “production of subjectivity” to discuss how capitalism influences thought- and action-patterns that benefit its continuation. What I’m curious to know–and what I was lucky enough to ask Michael Hardt–is what happens when the key terms we use to critique capitalism are they same that have served its advancement so well? Production is a term very near-and-dear to the capitalist way of life (see, for instance, how Derrick Jensen defines it–premise #5). Do we reinforce certain lines of capitalist thought, even though we’re trying to critique it? When we say “production of subjectivity” do we invoke a frame a reference that is best (if not only) understood through capitalist means?
Check out the video to hear his answer–roughly around the thirty minute mark. (And please excuse my stumbling questioning.)
I’ll leave you with the same questions, as I don’t have any answers right now. There are pros, cons, and in-betweens to all these choices. What does a language of resistance sound like, read like, feel like? On whose shoulders does it fall to create and sustain this language? Should we be spending our energies elsewhere?
hmmm…
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* Perhaps the most notorious admirer of Ford’s commitment to “efficiency” was Hitler, who told a Detroit News reporter in 1933, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” Indeed he did: a framed picture of Ford hung in Hitler’s office and he’s the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf. This should indicate clearly enough the devastating consequences of a subjectivity that fetishizes a certain type of “efficiency.”
** On this end of the spectrum we find yet another spectrum: there are those who argue the factory should be owned by the workers and there are those who argue the factory shouldn’t exist at all, no large-scale production facilities period, as they almost invariably support unsustainable economic models. We literally cannot continue an economic system of ravenous extraction and perpetual growth and sustain the ecosystems that make life possible. The fact of this isn’t up for debate–but what we do in response to it most definitely is.
So, I like ProfHacker. For realsies, it’s one of the few blogs where I read 75% of the posts (it used to be a lot more before they changed their rss feed to only preview the articles). Part of what I like about that blog is that they deal with what I’m going to call, right here, right now, without knowing if there is actually a term out there: counter-persuasion.
It’s like this: our things (supposedly, at least) are made to engage us, but when these things are too engaging we can suffer from the consequences of being distracted from the things we’re supposed to be accomplishing. When I avoid writing because I’m on facebook, it’s because, well, facebook is just so engaging. Or email. Or tv. Or whatever. So, ProfHacker posts such articles as “6 Ways to Avoid Letting Your Computer Distract You.” This article is specifically reporting on programs which aim to reduce or eliminate the technological things that lure you into using them: email, internet, social networking sites, etc. The distracting devices/services/sites cannot persuade you into interacting with them because of these programs which eliminate the distraction altogether. You know where I’m going with this. That’s right, say it with me now: counter-persuasion.
These programs are made specifically to counter act the persuasive temptations that exist with current technology. If you could see the image in my head when I think about this, it looks something like this:
Original photo via Bruce Turner, flickr
But, I digress.
More or less, I like the cyclical idea here that the software itself is persuasive because it’s reducing the temptations and persuasiveness of other softwares; that the use of counter-persuasion is persuasive itself. It’s a bit convoluted, I grant you, but cool nonetheless.
If your friend, co-worker, family member conveniently leaves their facebook open, resist the temptation to mess with said friend, co-worker, or family member by posting odd/offensive/misrepresenting posts or blocking them out of their account. According to Time, a mother was fined for getting into her son’s account and then blocking him out of it. Of course, as with most things, there seems to be more to their relationship than just this instance as the mother “is also no longer allowed to see her son, who has lived with his grandmother for the past five years.”
By this point, you probably understand that I find facebook utterly fascinating. In this instance, she was charged with harassment, but why not fraud? Or defamation of character?
Just to get this part out of the way, I do not believe that having this woman convicted will mean that parents everywhere will have no supervision over their child’s internet activities. This particular case seemed to have a particularlyhigh level of what was determined to be harassment. The actions appeared to be severe and, therefore, the punishment matched. Forbidding a child to use or post certain things in his or her facebook would not be the same thing.
But on to my thought. Wouldn’t inhabiting someone’s profile and misrepresenting them be fraud more than harassment, because your profile is like a synthetic being? There is this thing out there that stands in for you–it tells everyone who you are and connects you to the people you know, but in Invasion of the Body Snatchersstyle, it can be jacked and then suddenly, it does not represent you. It does not communicate what you want it to and you have no control over that. Perhaps the charge should be identity theft?
Of course, yes, in this case, it was harassment, but I certainly see the case for identity theft, but, perhaps, this is just semantics?
How is it that door-to-door salespeople, marketers, car dealers, politicians, strangers, con artists, and cult leaders are able to persuade people to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do? That’s the question Robert B. Cialdini asked himself after falling victim to a huckster’s influence one time too many. But instead of shrugging his shoulders, this professor of psychology decided to study the phenomenon and find out if there is a set of common techniques used to convince people to hand over their money or time against their better judgment. And he discovered that indeed there was, and wrote a book about it called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
