Summary & Comments on "Endless Propaganda" reading

This article devotes much it's attention to defining the terms "Public good" & "Propaganda", both difficult to pin down since they are abused so regularly in the political domain. Here's what he came up with:

Public Goods:
-non-deductible
-non-rival
-non-excludable
-a means to a generally esteemed and mutually beneficial end (here we see how the definition of what constitutes a public good is clearly subjective)


Propaganda
- is intentional and sponsored message
-tries to determine happenings in the public sphere
-symbolic practice that seeks to persuade the body public
-any institution or organization is a potential vehicle or sources of propaganda
-usually presumes or confirms hierarchy

The bulk of the article is spent proving how any advertisement of a public good can be labeled propaganda. He goes through how it functions and

It is the last page where the author makes his essential arguments that:

-Public advocacy has paved the way for marketing in public space.
-Propaganda is the egg from which Public goods are born.
-the result of all of these "promotional signs" has been to redraw the lines between public and private and in the process distort the ideals of "liberal democracy"

In the second last paragraph, he uses Pierce's model of the sign to demonstrate the self-affirming nature of propaganda. The signifiers of the advertisement is what superficially create the public good, it does not exist independent of it.

The argument I think he is getting at is that goods are public by nature, they do not need be branded as such by propaganda. this myth is what market capitalism depends on in order to lay claim to the natural resources of the land. It's for this reason that the sign structure of the "promotional sign" is without a referent. The referent to which it's sign points is itself an empty myth of market capitalism.

To demonstrate this idea, lets plug a familiar real life example into this structural equation. Imagine a 30 second television spot encouraging viewers to have their leaky facets repaired to preserve the public water supply. Our signifier in this case would be the audiovisual material and text of the television advertisement (images of a leaky facet at a sinister low angle and the thunderous splash of each drop). The concept is the message being conveyed, that is, water should not be wasted because it belongs everyone. The referent therefore would be water. But by the power of the promotional sign, that water is now imbued with the idea that it is a public good.

PSA are necessary to reinforce the greatest myth of market capitalism, that natural resources belong to the individuals who control them. Public goods operate by branding their materials the opposite of their (mythical) natural state.

His final statement claims that "the PSAs, the political commercials, the corporate ads and all the rest, together constitute one formation that has worked not only to build public truths but to reshape liberal democracy.


This new "liberal democracy" that he is talking about is one defined by a mediated relationship between citizen's and their parliamentary representatives. The PSA's are responsible for dictating an ideal public sphere, since the day to day processes of government are otherwise all but hidden from the general public. The danger of this kind of detached attitude from public life is that it creates a sense of entitlement, as if paying taxes and voting every fours years is enough to make the system run. What I think is becoming clear is that there is more to democracy than this, it requires a engaged public willing to participate otherwise the focus becomes mediating, rather than acting.

"public advocacy is a sort of theatre to make it look like action is being taken."

It helped me to think through the argument by using water as a public good to find the empty referent the author was talking about. It might be helpful if anyone else has other public goods to plug in the equation outlined on page 16 and post here.

Please excuse the fragmented nature of this entry, i'm writing between calls at work!
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