Logics of Propaganda
Logics of Propaganda

Part One. Populism and Propaganda: Dangerous Liaisons and Family Resemblance

Summary/Abstract: On the basis of empirical data from the collective study on Anti- Democratic Propaganda in Bulgaria. News Websites and Print Media: 2013 – 2016 and reframing a cluster of already existing post-Wittgensteinian theoretical approaches, this text aims to outline the logics of propaganda on two levels, describing, in Part One, some more general typological features of the propaganda uses of language (i.e. propaganda’s ‘general’ practical logics) and, in Part Two, the particular conspiratorial grammar and typical vocabulary of the recent populist, anti-liberal and national-sovereignist propaganda (from Putin through Orbán to Trump), i.e. its specific practical logics. Here, in Part One, based on a comparison with the scientific and every- day-life modes of speech, some more general features of the propaganda uses of language (common both to commercial advertising and to political propaganda) are outlined: - We can speak of propaganda if there is strategic dissemination and repetition of stereotypified messages (cliches); the strategic goal of such repetitive dissemination is to transform those clichés into meta-clichés: into a depth grammar that frames articulations for a multitude of individuals. In this aspect propaganda resembles education but it also differs from scientifically informed education by other features: - Propaganda works in a regime of totalization of discourse, where the specific modalities of the separate messages lose their significance: the peculiar task of propaganda is to create an overgeneralized discursive horizon that enables the fusion of modalities and hence a free play of associations between messages. Being overgeneralized, propaganda discourses resemble scientific discourses and differ from everyday-life discourses; being freed from any strict sense (from any strict modalization), propaganda differs from science and resembles ordinary bullshitting (in Harry Frankfurt’s sense). Propaganda usually does not lie about the facts but it lies through modal extensions (or modal reductions) of the meanings of selected facts. - Propaganda works in a regime of metonymy: it layers utterances upon one another in such a way that the modal differences between them disappear and, instead, a metonymical chain appears: ultimately, it looks as if every utterance substitutes the other, as if their meanings are the same. This metonymical propaganda operation is conditioned by the overgeneralized and fused discursive horizon but it also produces this very horizon: there is a circular productive relationship between them. Through metonymy, propaganda simulates coherence but such coherence is false because every modal concordance between the terms and the utterances is disrupted in advance.Beyond the ‘general’ logics of propaganda, another distinction has been made: between populist uses of language and propaganda uses that are parasitic in relation to populism and operate with the opposition between ‘we, the people’ and ‘they, the elites’. We agree with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that in the spontaneous populist movements ‘the people’ comes into being as an empty signifier springing from metaphors and catachreses. The practical unfolding of the relevant discourse, however – with everyday-life metonymies from below or with strategic propaganda metonymies from above – inevitably fills the empty signifiers of populism with one or other specific meaning and transforms them into half-empty signifiers. In a specific populist-propaganda operation, such half-empty signifiers (as ‘the people’ and ‘its enemies’) are totalized and used as propaganda epithets: as devices for discursive terror.

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