Transcripts For CSPAN2 Nato Thompson Discusses Culture As A Weapon 20170219

Thompson, artistic director the public arts organization, author, editor, curator, and activist. About his brand new book called culture at weapon the art of influence in everyday life. Joining nato in conversation is Christian Viveros andfaune. Join me in welcoming christian and nato. [applause] okay. Hey, thank you. Not exactly the best weather out there to come here. You know what happened . My train this is just a quick anecdote my train dish was on amtrak on my way here and theres no trains going right now. I was stuck on the train and then i was like, mo, hi god, im going to miss my book talk, and i talked to two people next to mow who ran out and we got an uber i level live in philadelphia and i looked on the google mapped thing and it said estimate arrival, 7 00 p. M. Exhibiter got here, holy shit. I have to get that off my chest. An for be here in this very comfy seat next to christian. I want to think the publishing company, my editor ryan and mark. Youre here somewhere. Dennis and valerie, kate and chad and the crew at the pushing. Phenomenal group. Small publisherred are going to heaven, thats for sure. And book stores, too. I want to you have been phenomenal and support and friends and given my a lot of guide departments. Ill do a little talk and then well dig into it. I wrote this book in the haze of depression from occupy. Not that occupy was densing but this is densing but this i written after that and at that time in 2011, me and some folks put together a show called living at form looking at socially engagingeddard or politically emgauged art from around the world, particularly artists blurring the space between art and life, and while working on the show i was very aware of a different schopf show i wasnt do and the show i was doing was people trying to make the world a better place, and the other show was people right to to get their own in the world using culture. And thats a bigger show. I thought of at the b side in the sense of this exhibition. This was. Artists and activists using culture get things done but of course some would say, arent waugh aware that they tea party uses the same thing, or arent you aware that in fact, marketers like red bull are basically doing this all the time. And my answer to all of that is, yeah, i am quite a aware of that and its interesting maybe its something we should dig into. Thats kind of this book in a sense. We can get more into that. I was interested in a few things. One was, i want an art this isnt just for art but i want to put art any conversation with larger cultural phenomena because the art world likes to talk as if ear still in 1929 and modernism is just take offering and language of the arts is still in the sense removed from the other word. Would say most of the lesson of the of van gar have been into branding strategies and the way cities are chained. And the production of how we feel is a very powerful force in the way power expresses itself, which we know. But what was interesting at i started working on this back is the difference often between art and these larger cultural forces is scale. Profound shifts in scale. Mega shifts in scale. Kind of money that we dont talk about unless youre like a rich artist and then you are sort of talking like that. But in general, the oneoff the idea of the one individual painting or one expression, this kind of way that artists think of. Thed, is not the way power expressed itself. Often they think of it in terms of multiple images and counters, impressions, optics. So one of the tasks in this book was to put art into language with that. How do we talk about the one impression verse the illinois illinoises imaged that make thousandsle impressions. Thought about a lot this book christian and i are going to avoid the t word for a while. Him, you know, small him. Because he is just such a black hole of conversation so well try to avoid it for just a bit. Bear with me. Certainly one thing that struck me is a worked on this was historically there have been a long tradition of marxist thinkers being blown abunch the marx rites the chapter where he is trying to understand why in the height of economic depression, the mallses vote masses bring into power and balloon apart and basically side with a dictator as opposed to their own salvation. Sound familiar . And then stewart hall in the 80 sad in london, were trying to understand why did the working class after labor strike goods with thatcher. Sounds familiar. Then thomas frank, a great writer, wrote the book, whats the matter with kansas, trying to understand why the voters ided with the g. O. P. When the gm had been decimating the farmers with agribusiness. The constant kind of lament hat been like, why do people vote this way . Well, i did think of the book standing on the shoulder that basic concern but, rather, i think than having an answer, i think this book is much more appreciating the problem. And those writer is referenced had a very marxist answer which is to say if the people understand their economic interests they would behave differently, which is to just get back to classic marxism. If people nhu what was in their best interest they would behave not like human but i dont want to posit that justette. Want to appreciate how difficult it is for us to appreciate that we live in a society where the production of cultural programming or people producing things to make us feel a certain way is at such an extraordinarily unprecedented historical level, like a constant psychological bombardment that we really need too appreciate sin so many people are spending money get to us to feel sort wees how important or dispels desires and fears and needs to belong and all our intimate personal things are to informing why we do what we do. Rather than reverse, which is saying thats not who we really are. Rather than trying to say things like so, i get into that and well talk about that and i have a lot of fun in the book because i get to talk about the military, i have some fun talking about starbucks and apple stores and akia, all place we all lament and spend too much time in. They certainly work, dont they . Did you know kia was built with the guggenheim museum. The oner with his singaporeest branding walked threw the guggenheim and says this is amazing, feels like youre going somewhere, but a youre not. Eye what is fun if you walk through ikea you get the same feeling, im on a journey of someone else residents design becauseow are. Youre in a sort of beautiful, amazing, middle class swedish design utopia. And its very successful. Largest number one sold book in the world number one printed book in the world is the ikea catalogue. More than the bible. Give you a sense of scale. Nice catalogue. You know its pretty hefty, too. But i digress. This book is full of digressions. We get into the u. S. Military, in particular what is referred to, wonderfully enough, the cultural turn in the mill the cultural turn in the military during the iraq war. Maybe we can harken back to another disastrous period in American History where george bush, after he declared victory, brought in general petraeus, who basically said, were going to turn this war around. Were going to use a method called hearts and mines and they called it the cultural turn in military, and hearts and minds could be considered like a branding, a marketing campaign, but very controversial and i get into that because they also decided to bring in anthropologists to serve as Ground Forces in both iraq and in afghanistan, and so theres that. And also we get into just gaving Broad Strokes here. The class quick conversation people have in new york and thats gentrification. The kind of your juan said to me you still talk about gentrification. Still talking about it. Every day. But certainly one is suspicious of creativity when every ted talk, every tech company, google, every real estate developer, seems like everybody on the planet is embracing the power to be creative. And really in loving, creative cities, you know, really building on the p. T. Barnum of real estate, who sold america on the mixed race, queerfriendly, cap c. A. P. Ist boom that would he has recanted his ways. I dont know if you know that. You know. Richard florida is like i doubt his wrong. Every made all this money on it, its fine. Its fine. But certainly theres a kind of misreading of jay jacobs that happened there to some degree has sold america on not only the arts being something that people do but the arts as lifestyle that must be encouraged to encourage the brand of urban living. Certainly that conflation of the arts and economics and urbanism is certainly very prescient and pertinent to our times were in also shape the world were in. Certainly i work right near st. Marks, and that corner looks very different than it did 20 years ago. But culture has a lot to do with that. And a few other thing is get into. Another chapter is called i forget the name its called oh, thats a nice name sounding the trumpet charity and image of doing good. I was reallying . This thing called cause related marketing where corporations know that the brand of looking like youre doing good for the planet is very powerful, and so philanthropy and also actual good things in the world as an advertisement are extraordinarily huge right now, and in fact, i know that many of you familiar with the month of october, and it incredible color of pink, that comes around, and that is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and everybody wants to get in on it because the biggest market for all consumer goods is women, and so i just read the Israeli Military actually painted one of their fighter jets pink. Not a joke. So, you can have the Israeli Military Breast Cancer Awareness Month jet. Theres also during that month the nfl all wears pink cleats and they do that because the market theyre most desperate to break into, the female market. So Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a profoundly important month for most corporations. Im not trying to be judgmental but it is something to think about, particularly since i work at a nonprofit that thinks of itself as social justice and people like to pay for it to look like its doing good. What do we do . Riddles. Hard to be ethical in this life. And then finally the final chapter also goes into computers. Get at weird about steve jobs. You have heard about him. But what is prophone about steve jobs profound about steve. Not the name of the personal computer. An incredible name. Its more than just like your own computer. The computer is very personal. You think about steve jobs back when everybody was name thing cooperatorred like r749. He named his the apple. And thats a profound shift because that was something that was important which is computers are very personal things. Theyre so private some loving and sexual and hungry and angry, but theyre very different thannure tv. Theyre like answer extension of you. A weird sex machine, and he understood very infewtively this relationship with intuitively that the relation with the computer would be personal, intimate mega phone, you pair that with social networking, and you have such a radical revolution in terms of the ways that subjectivity is produced, particularly in the age where making us feel something or feigning us emotionally affecting us emotionally is such big business and nothing could be a big portal into the intimate than the social computer, and we all know it and understand it, we all know because see everybody on the phones all the time, bumping into each other. But whats going on in our collective headed . Were just feeling roughly . The shift from the tv to the computer, which i try to talk about, is really a beautiful thing to see through in the light of the fact were such ferful, want to be loved social. Creatures who are now very connected through these weird devices. So radical its almost beyond the Printing Press in the way it will shape the world and were just feeling it now. So, thats kind of a broad stroke reading of the book, and now im excited to get into chit cat with christian. Thank you for coming out. Thanks for that, man. So ive got a little built of a setup here and a quote from you before i hit the question. So, like you mentioned before going to try to stick to realtime awareness of the trump core corollariry and as a ongoing discussion goes longer the comparison to hitler. We want to limit discussion to the american commander in chief to the q a. The book is a lot to say about how we got where we are today but the fully appreciate the experimental questions and ideas it put forward, one should pay particular attention to the epic al phenomenon them author place front and center, the underpinnings of what their rhode island like Frederick Jamison called post modernism and then trashed by calling it logic of capitalism and cultural critics called capitalist realism depend on the global actor in short supply in our modern world. The enlightment was the rational subject. It was revved too as an agent that is consistently rational. More recently psychologists, social scientist, r people, statistic human beings understand as in spitetive statisticians whoa both got a internaling the information and judges probabilities. What nato points out the study of kell tour is the rational. Human agency is at least partly a fallacy. Especially so today. A quote from pages three and four of natos introduction. A global strategy developed, at every level, culture has become a profound and ubiquitous weapon and will remain inappreciated how this shift in the techniques of power have become. In particular we continue to read the world also to the it still at one foot solidlily in the realm of rein. It is in our global dna to identify as rational subjectsment but perhaps the enlightment could pause. One of my key hopes is heck co that the democratic is a fallible project resident coracle dependent on a rational subject who quite frankly does not and exist. Really . This book ailing cultural study or examination of why people dont act rationally or a book about culture is increasingly my misused to manipulated people or both. Its kind of boat and to be quite fair to people, i just theres a lot of we expect a lot of ourselves in america. We need to get our heads around Global Climate change, supposed to understand complex financial systems. Were supposed to understand the macnations of governor dr. Mcnations of government how cities work and the americans feel up to the challenge of having answer but a where do we get or information from . Not just media studies. But if we think even more broadly about what actually makes us who we are, north just knowledge like you read a book but how you go to school or where you work, what you do with your weekends, what your personal lives are like. Theres a lot of information coming at it and its not didntal. And i not accidental. Theres a secret think about america would people understood what really makes people do thing and understood it like behavioral economics not awe rational decisions. Penal do things bass they are feeling and southerning their way through the world. And i for me it was helpful as opposed to inactivism you have to believe that people make rational choices because is what the left tradition to appeal to that. For this book im not saying that we cant make we have the womens march that was amazing. Im not saying i do think it is helpful to just let go of that for a second to appreciate just how dramatic the situation is. To appreciate is there a way to sort of consider mobilizing that . Irrationality, for example . Well, there is. Theres total ways to mobilize it. We know a few thing about ourselves that techtive activists use all the time. And that is that fear is the moat most important emotion in the human might. When people say hi is such a manipulative person good and only uses fear, any person in power say why not use the biggest gun in your arsenal if you want to win . The Community Organizer from chicago was not against using fear and quite frankly issue think the biggest benefit we have right now is that he who will not be named generates so much fear, there will be such a profound backlash, and fear and hate rather than being like this liberal minded thing where fear and hate are bad. Im like fear and hate seem to work really well, and its like if you hit someone with fear, the knee goes like this. You want to instrumentallize emotions fear is a good one. For whatever purpose i say that, too, because we get into this a bit but it can be very profound. The videos that tend to circulate to the most and get the most traction are the videos of cops betting the crap out of kids. Or the opposite where someone is getting smacked. Like protest porn, but that seems to be the language of that we all trade in. And, like, even in black lives matter, profoundly important Historical Movement gained so much social media traction from the most horrific videos of Police Violence against people. Why daytona that make it to the theorists on paper . Why isnt that sort of why isnt that echoed, for example, in theory or in publication or in strategy . I guess its with black lives matter, but im sort of mystified why there isnt much of an approach towards the irrational, the except for from the left. The tricky thing because i feel like this this isnts in the book. Alister crawly, magician guy. He that thissing, black magic and white magic, and black magic was basically using signs and symbols to make someone do something. Mythology, and white magic was to not. Basically not instrumentallize. Well in a kind of crass way i feel like many of us tread in black magic in a very basic level, whether its to be more simple about it, to become really classic, your facebook beige you Online Presence is a really good way to get at. Your somewhat always caught between the image of yourself and your instrumentallizing of your own image of yourself. Does that make since . You understand basic rules of advertising and branding, and that the way we even have to construct our own identities is caught up within this language of being effective with culture. Your Second Chapter is titled the persuaders want to give us some idea what those people do and or have done . Sure. Theres i quote a lot from an incredible book by stewart ewan called pr. And funny enough we should also mention adam curtis, whose film century of the self informed a big part of the beginning of this book. Are you familiar with that . He that in fact we were joking earlier we talk about that yesterday. Seems like a few different roads i went done to find adam temperaturety the end of the cull culdesac. Strikes early on really understood what we take for granted politics now but was the spin and how to use it in a profound way for a lot of the groundwork in terms of that. So thats fitting into that early understanding of the thesis of showmanship and production. Production. Listen, you said about said e following in a recent conversation. A lot of social movements did themselves a disservice to. What did you mean by that . Do you want to try this one out . Okay. The problem with analyzing capitalism because it is everywhere you think you have the answer for everything. Of course that is happening. Its capitalism. Its simultaneously believe that the. Playing the classic line and that being said thats why most marxist philosophers can get right but there is a revolution marx clearly got it wrong he insisted ultimately at this point they answered the only agents to push back on capitalism. But i think theres just not a profound respect for how deeply intimate we are with activism and we dont have answers that is my guts from activism in general, and that also there is a real its not to say that i dont believe the basic activist things like healthcare and social justice. We can get into some basic policy things that would be helpful to both people. A couple of things out there with this new Michael Finley book about those psychologists. I see you are running towards it and that makes me interested. The other part of it to Say Something about the work in the arts. Theres a few things to this. I used to people being art is inherently good and that drives me nuts because i think that it is clearly untrue. That isnt even how i mean it. There is a lot of pressure for all of us to be very interesting self expressive people. They are held up in american capitalism like the most important thing there is. They have ads and people are ripping up the papers and cubicles and i am free. I am an individual. Just get out there and do it. The way to save the arts. It also means that we have to language on the way that we talked about art. Three of the late people talk about advertising isnt the way they talk about art and yet we are talking about the cultural phenomena in place. As we got it right we are deeply emotional and sensitive people that want to help each other. And the connections youve made in the book and mentioned in the introduction, you know, the guggenheim and i mean, those are allegiance. When they go to was interesting about those is hes trying to imagine, i mean it is so what he experienced, we all know so well. We dont think it is remarkable but whathat what he experienceds basically hes looking at these things like they are really trying to get my attention. Theyve got these references to greek mythology over there. They are trying to get my attention. But what is amazing for me, there is a novel experience that he is looking into the crystal ball of our world. They have the socialist values and at the most descriptively capitalist organizations. We are not actually a social democracy. Please i need a little bit of the socialism idea. It is a Service Providing world. Its coming into your own home. Thinking about this do you use uber . I did from philadelphia to hear. I became a shareholder on this trip. Before we run out of time, i want to get to the chapter that i remember you called it fear machines. In the chapter on fear machines coming you referred to an infrastructure of fear, and that sounds like the title of the movie. What is the infrastructure of fear . The most classic example is prisons. The Industrial Complex would make you believe the reason the prisons are made as to make money. The reason in my opinion prisons are made is because you can get a lot of power out of people being afraid of someone. And people being afraid of someone whether it is the innercity ghetto or during the drug war which is when they went skyrocketing under Ronald Reagan and bush have mostly clinton. The fear of the innercity black male became a calling card for every politician to get a cheap political point. And through that over the course of a decade built the biggest infrastructure of fear. Theres no reason for being there. It doesnt even make sense. It is just an aggregate of the chief uses of fear. In an interview you said hope is not the opposite of fear. What did you mean by that . I dont think fuhr has an opposite. I dont think if you said im going to give you something to hope for someone would say holy shit there is a man behind you with a knife, run. Ron. I dont think we are programmed with beautiful dreams. Also, we can get into obama. But that was such a branded campaign. And again, as much as i am super antitrump, i feel like all the lessons that were learned under obama about the complexities of neoliberalism and the fact that there are fractures in the Democratic Party about the class analysis getting swept rapidly under the rug against this total demand which is reasonable, but we are once again being mobilized out of antipathy and indignation has got to be the ultimate number one in motion of all americans. When you point to them and say they are such mean people, but we are all mean people right now. We are all sharing information, all sending beard pictures of trump. We are cranky little annoying people in america because that is just how we communicate. I found a great quote when liberals send their outrage only benefits the corporation did was to likeminded people, you know that is pretty true and involves all of us. Google tells you do no evil. I think we should probably take some questions. Raised her hand i can hand you a microphone and we will all be able to hear. Thank you. Thank you so much for your talk. Every couple of months i have to see a first world fantasy of moving off the grid because i think inevitably we are all sort of participants whether you have a credit card, facebook and i havent yet read your book that im wondering if you were interested in exploring it all, examples of possible strategies for living outside of the branches of culture whether or not that is a possibility at all reflect the branches of culture or somehow remove yourself because it is so allconsuming. I think that is a great idea for another book. I certainly dont like the analysis where it says everything is the same. Certainly people have different relationships to the cultural machinations that are out there than others. Quite frankly if you didnt grow up with no computer or tv around you for 20 years, you would be really different than other people, just simply put. How you live in forms how you are and some people are more intangible. Very problematic. That said it does read as strangely in its deep desire to unplug and the deep sensibility in the dramatic effort to get out of the Network World that we are in a. I wouldnt be surprised in the future and i think the tighter the web the more dramatic people desire to get out from it. It. It. I take amtrak back to philadelphia and i used to love it because the internet was so bad that i could actually focus. They would never advertise we have bad internet but it was a real salesman jimmy. Anybody else . Other questions . If culture in america is left wing and if so. If its the leftwing culture interpreted as a weapon in real america. I dont differentiate them in this book and somebody out here where do you stand in the culture and i try not to get specific about that site also guiltso i alsoguilty about it i. Certainly there are different cultures how we associate ourselves in fact. I would say if you look at the red state blue state, clearly geography and the association play a profound role in the way you understand who you are. It appears you were going to think radically different than someone in the city. That is empirical facts and says a profound amount about how powerful the forces are and it shouldnt give us pause about our own selfcongratulatory way of thinking about ourselves. In your book you talk about how corporations, political groups etc. Use culture as a weapon and that theyve taken it to this whole terrible realm. To what extent do you think the world will belong to write here may be the one that gave them the idea in the first place and has been peddling the same level of politics and so on and so on. To what extent were we the ones that created that and id be a different stratosphere sound the eco of the arts. We all have a sense of that. I think the paper much more influential in the beginning. A. I think branding and marketing and stuff like that took off and became a bigger machine in the mid20 century. The big advertising firms i think once in a while borrow from the worlborrowedfrom the ws they are not and there is this guy in the agency that they will do things that artists would never do. For example, there was a yellow envelope of things he scribbled down cold corny language and he was obsessed with like midwestern kind of corniness. And they are often trying to be outrageous and wide over standout, whereas the strategy was much more to blend in and disappear, to fade into the familiar. That is something he came up with through advertising. Economically, its a different thing because i think we need to delve into what we need to be participating in the economy. The arts actually benefit greatly has been the war i are e kind of luxury economy. Its april 1 relationship. More questions. I have a question about the storytelling. There are two quotes that are perfect in your persuaders chapter. You have george creel has an investigative journalist and says they live mostly by catchphrases. The venue of waterloo and tamika Walter Lippman say that they create pictures in their head so we have the idea of storytelling which is probably obviously with culture does. And im trying to see this between storytelling and fear and nationality because again we are talking about somebody that listens to a different story and is convinced of it. What do you make of that and how do you reconcile that . Thats the funny thing to go to these, we all benefit greater when there is a simple story to tell. Its harder to rally people around the global nationalism. I was talking to the filmmaker that did citizen for and i was asking her does it bother you as a filmmaker to make a film because ultimately they have to reduce all abstract political phenomena in the storytelling and she said that its just how we have for so long gotten our information is through stories and it is so true that there are limits because we become very dependent on good guys and bad guys and we like to have a certain dark. We like to obey the rules of storytelling in th and the polil analysis. And i find myself victim to that constantly. My partner and i were at a Creative Time conference and walked away really jazzed and then november happened so im curious about your opinions especially people working in the luxury class how has the responsibility of artists changed because of what happened happened . The funny thing is i think activism if one only cared about activism its going to do great in the next four years. I think that the womens march was just the beginning of what might be the biggest social movement the country has seen that may even eclipse vietnam quite frankly. There are so many people galvanized. For all the reasons i kind of articulate on why the culture is problematic i would say it is the same reason this movement will do well. I think many people are mobilized in the country because of trump and ultimately on a different level it is in so much as social networking has radically opened up the space of what is a political discussion in a profound way. The fact you put your finger in the water and the fact Bernie Sanders can see the word socialism without a problem in the same way trump can basically be a nazi racist without much of a problem just shows you how wideopen the space of political discourse is today and i think that is very well for the activists movements and artists and all kinds of incredible creative productions. My only caveat is that it doesnt necessarily untangle us from the complex culture that is out there and i think most of the social movements will be supported by google and red bull and every corporation right noww that thinks of itself as kind of hipster branded and right on your side so untangling how this fits together i think there is work to be done. Success in life or politics. Im all for it. Lets just get it out of. [laughter] obviously. But i think there is a breach that has to be jumped over from protesting. Im a big supporter of social progress. Theres tons of work that is nothing but social practice. That would be very boring. We have time for one more question. Unless there are no more questions. Everyone is already selling products and would that be instrumental ultimately america is a nation of hipsters and so much we get bored of things that are popular very fast. I dont put activism and social justice in a different category than other phenomena. That said, it is a big movement and there are real issues so it will grow but i think it will struggle with a certain kind of all movements struggle like occupied wall street was already in the third month that it was getting the attention of who owns the name occupy. Different companies were starting to use it and this movement was going to last much longer. Thank you for the buck. Thank you. [applause]