Militarising the Body Politic: New Media as Weapons of Mass ...

Militarising the Body Politic: New Media as Weapons of Mass Instruction
Phil Graham & Allan Luke
University of Queensland

Abstract: As militarisation of bodies politic continues apace the world over, as military
organisations again reveal themselves as primary political, economic and cultural forces
in many societies, we argue that a new form of political economic organisation is
emerging: neo-feudal corporatism. Drawing upon Bourdieu, we theorise bodies politic as
living habitus. Bodies politic are prepared for war and peace through new mediations,
which are also forms of public pedagogy. The process of militarisation requires the
generation of new, antagonistic evaluations of other bodies politic. Such evaluations are
inculcated by means of new mediations, the movement of meanings across time and
space, between histories, places, and cultures. New mediations touch new and different
aspects of the body politic: its eyes, its ears, its organs, but they are consistently
targeted at the formation of dispositions, the prime movers of action.
An early twentieth century prologue
The “war will” of the civilian population is a nation’s second line, and “war will,”
particularly in a democracy, depends upon the degree to which people can be made to
consecrate and concentrate body, soul, and spirit in the supreme effort of service and
sacrifice, giving complete assent to the truth that all business is the nation’s business
and every task a single task for a common purpose … Ask any admiral or general, and
he will admit that propaganda—the fight for public opinion—is as integral a part of any
war machine as ships, guns, and planes. The “mind” of a people must be mobilized as
well as its man-power. —George Creel, 1941
The conscious and systematic study of new media forms in their social contexts
is an intellectual pursuit which first emerged from the study of twentieth century
militarising, propaganda. Lasswell’s (1927/1971) study of the Creel Committee marks a
turning point in the analysis of new media forms in massifying societies. Creel was
charged with ‘preparing’ the United States to enter the First World War through the
Committee on Public Information (hereafter, CPI) (Creel, 1941; Larson & Mock, 1939;
Lasswell, 1927; Lutz, 1933; Steele, 1970). At the time, the US was expressly, if not
actually, an isolationist nation, militarily, economically, and politically. Creel’s success
in galvanising popular support for the US to enter the war in Europe was remarkable, if
only for the reversal of widespread isolationist sentiment. More remarkably, Creel also

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manufactured the first approximation of an American polis unified via a system of mass
mediations—a self-conscious body politic organised around a militarising movement.
Despite the lack of instantaneous electronic mass media, the CPI successfully
reached and influenced a massive cumulative audience, with quantity of production,
distribution and quality assurance substituting for what speed and replicability would
later achieve. The domestic section of the CPI was explicitly a weapon of mass
instruction—it ‘had for its aim the instruction of the public for entering the war and
historical matter of an educational nature’ (Larson & Mock, 1939: 14). This was
achieved largely by volunteer ‘writers, educators, and translators’ who, within only two
years, disseminated ‘more than 75,000,000 pieces of literature’ (Larson & Mock, 1939:
14).1 The CPI enlisted every available communications technology of organising public
opinion: press, film, and theatre; civic organisations such as the Boy Scouts, ‘women’s
organizations, churches, and schools’; cartoonists, photographers, painters, and other
artists; ‘novelists, writers, and professors’; and immigrant organisations comprised of
‘the foreign born’ all became media for the militarising function of the CPI (1939: 12-
16). The messages were staged to very deliberately cut across popular and ‘high
culture’, mass and elite, formal and informal outlets.
The ‘Four-Minute Men’, comprised of 75,000 ‘locally endorsed speakers’, gave
prepared speeches four minutes in length ‘on behalf of war aims at a theatre or other
meeting place’, and in this way reached a total audience in excess of 300 million people
(1939: 14-15). At the same time, in an effort that predated the use of radio, film, and
other mass media in the interwar period (later the object of Horkheimer and Adorno’s
analysis), more than forty films were made in the glorification of the war effort. In this
way, Creel’s approach combined a locally-based, putatively ‘grassroots’ push (local
soapboxes) with centrally developed and replicable apparatus of text production. A

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memorable example of the latter was the personification of the militarised US body
politic in James Montogomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam, which first gained recognition in the
‘I want you’ army recruitment poster (Library of Congress, 2002). The poster had a print
run of four million during the 18 months of the CPI’s activities and made such a
successful and lasting impression that it was used throughout WWII for recruitment and
remains a powerful and recognisable icon for the militarised body politic of the US
today.
Creel realised that it was important to delimit was what was not to be said in
public. The CPI coordinated an active and systematic program of censorship ultimately
backed by the US Espionage Bill (passed June 15, 1917). In addition to troop
movements and so on, publicly proscribed topics included ‘possible peace’, ‘differences
of opinion between allies’, and ‘difficulties … with neutral countries’—anything at all
which may have impeded ‘the creation and stimulation of a healthy, ardent national
sentiment’ (Larson & Mock, 1939: 12). While cooperation on censorship was largely
voluntary, the press and other media institutions were more than enthusiastic in assisting
the CPI in curtailing counter-opinion (1939: 11).2 Journalistic and institutional self-
censorship in such matters continues to be largely the case today (Pilger, 2002).
The establishment of a nationally organised and centralised body for the
propagation of warlike attitudes in the US—and, conversely, for the suppression of
pacificism—marks a major turning point in mass mediation strategies. In the space of
two years, without the aid of electronic mass media; through thousands of newspapers,
magazines, periodicals, and civic organisations; in pictures, words, slogans, and
legislative acts; in what Creel called ‘a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in
salesmanship, the world's greatest adventure in advertising’ (as cited in in Allen, 1999),
the CPI created nothing less than a unified, militarised consciousness at the behest of the

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administration of Woodrow Wilson. This was achieved in a far less centralised,
asynchronous, and unruly media blend, where the patterns of corporate ownership, board
and CEO control, media convergence, cross-media marketing and messaging that
permeate today’s world were unimaginable.
The example of Creel tells us a great deal about the institutional precedents,
patterns, and habits which have so visibly endured in the US, especially since the events
of September 11, 2001. Ironically, less than twelve months prior to establishing the CPI,
Wilson narrowly won the 1916 presidential election with the slogan ‘He kept us out of
war’ (Whitehouse, 2002). Creel therefore also successfully launched a mass assault on
public memory, and, through the application of what would later be known as
advertising and public relations techniques, helped construct the most powerful and
potentially destructive militarised body politic in history.
Theorising bodies politic as living habitus
We theorise bodies politic as living habitus to foreground the relationships
between patterns and modes of social organisation, mediations and remediations, the
social systemic attitudes which both emerge from and remake those patterns and modes,
and how they act both durably and flexibly over time. We therefore emphasise the
historical character of bodies politic: they have narrative histories and mnemonic
devices that extend far beyond those of the people that constitute them, often by many
centuries. These histories—which are also intersubjective histories of interactions,
mediations and technologisations—express and sustain the organising principles of
bodies politic.
By bodies politic, we do not confine ourselves here to concepts of the State,
although that is certainly a form of association and affiliation which is most overtly

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political in its constitution. Our basic theoretical stance here is autopoietic. That is, we
view human social systems, like all ‘ecosocial’, bio-environmentally embedded systems,
as living systems (cf. Graham & McKenna, 2000; Lemke, 1995, 2000; Luhmann, 1995;
Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1987; Wilden, 1982). As such, they are neither fully
explicable by the net total of ‘countable’ structures or elements, nor wholly predictable
in their historical remediations (Wilden, 1982). We further assume that human social
systems—identifiable, more or less regular, and recurrent forms of association—have a
political dimension at whichever scale or level they are seen to exist. The political
dimension of human association is that perspective from which the relations,
distribution, and exercise of power are rendered visible. Our definition of a body politic,
then, is a living social system of any type seen in its political aspect.
An autopoietic perspective entails the assumptions that, because they are living
systems, social systems are also knowing and learning systems. It also entails the
assumption that they are resistant to phenomenal or analytic homeostasis—that is to say,
they grow, change, and die according to dynamic principles common to all living
systems—that they have identifiable histories and notional, if not autonomous and
isolable, fully predictable and replicable stages of development. Likewise, they have a
powerful autodidactic element. All such systems are capable of teaching both about
themselves and to themselves about past, present and future; about their relationships
between the ostensive “self” that the body politic constitutes and, as a corollary, its
others. This instruction is the principal means by which nations, nationalities, and bodies
politic of all kinds provide both narrative and expository explanations of their
legitimacy, continually renarrating and rearticulating their histories to explain, explicate,
and justify approaches to their futures (Lyotard, 1981). That is, it is through

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autodidactics that such systems self-reproduce and maintain their intergenerational
durability.
In respect of such a view of social systemic learning, Bourdieu’s (1990) concept
of habitus steps beyond constraining debates over whether and how a social systemic
perspective might preclude individual agency:
The conditioning associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce
habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate
and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their
outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of
the operations necessary in order to attain them. […]. Overriding the spurious
opposition between the forces inscribed in an earlier state of the system, outside the
body, and the internal forces arising instantaneously as motivations springing from free
will, the internal dispositions – the internalization of externality – enable the external
forces to exert themselves, but in accordance with the specific logic of the organisms in
which they are incorporated, i.e. in a durable, systematic and non-mechanical way. As
an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the free
production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions in the particular conditions of
its production – and only those. … [T]he habitus is an infinite capacity for creating
products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions – whose limits are set by the
historically and socially situated conditions of its production … (Bourdieu, 1980: 53-5)
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is formulated to bridge the theoretical gap between the
phenomenology of individual persons and the phenomena of bodies politic in which
individuals are embedded. One of its overlooked virtues is that it provides grounds for a
social theory of acquisition and learning: it has the potential to model the uptake of the
kinds of public pedagogies – the technologies of mass instruction and discipline –
described above. The phenomenological link we are proposing here is not the obvious
one between the individual and social system, but of social units which are scalable in
terms of time and space, and which are political and economic in character (Lemke,
2000). Thus our notion of “bodies” here does not refer to individual persons, but to
‘third-order’ autopoietic systems, or social systems more generally, and to the
relationship between those systems and the environments in which they are embedded
(cf. Graham & McKenna, 2000). It is, we might say, the habitus of habitus to which we

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refer—‘the system/environment relation’ which is the context for social systemic
processes of (re)production (Luhmann, 1995: 200).
To exist as such, social systems ‘require corresponding resources and
corresponding information, and they must be able correspondingly to condition the
scope of behaviour within them’ (1995: 201). It is this ability to remediate - to maintain
the reflexivity and open-endness of the possible transformative processes in
relationships within and between bodies politic - the scope of possible behaviours within
social systems which delimits the system’s very existence as a political entity. This
“conditioning”, or, more precisely, constraining, function can be seen as the production
of expectations which, in turn, are given operational force in the production,
manipulation and contestation of social systemic values:
On the highest attainable level of establishing expectations, one must … renounce all
claims to establishing the correctness of specific actions. One works only with—or
talks only about—values. Values are general, individually symbolized perspectives
which allow one to prefer certain states or events. Even actions can be assessed this
way—for example, as promoting peace, as just, as polluting the environment, as an
expression of solidarity, as the willingness to help, as race hatred, and so forth.
(Luhmann, 1995: 317-8)
Thus, the resources and information which constrain what might be conceptualised as
possible in human social systems are political economic resources—they partake in and
mediate the relationships between the distribution and exercise of power within and
between social systems (the political), and ways in which values are produced and
exchanged within and between those systems (the economic). Specifically, we are
concerned here with the production and distribution of symbolic values (Bourdieu,
1991a), expressed in what Jay Lemke (1995, 1998) calls the Attitudinal (or
Orientational) dimension of meaning.

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Values, evaluation, Attitudinal meaning, and collective action
In Lemke’s schema, ‘Attitudinal’ meaning stands in contradistinction to the
‘Presentational’ and ‘Organisational’ aspects of meaning (Lemke, 1995: 41-2).3
Presentational meaning refers to the way members of a social system construe things in
the natural or social domains by their ‘explicit descriptions as participants, processes,
relations and circumstances standing in particular semantic relations to one another’
(Lemke, 1995: 41). The Organisational aspect of meaning can be read, roughly, as the
way meanings derive their coherence within specific social systemic contexts—the
social relational properties and potentials of any given social system. Attitudinal
meaning is the aspect of meaning by which a social system can be seen to orient itself to
others’ meanings, and to the Presentational content of its own meanings (1995: 41). In
this sense it is something akin to the late 19th century concept of apperception – it
constitutes a system of schematic and embodied predispositions to particular patterns of
representation and social relations.
Attitudinal meanings also enable ‘position takings’, acts of self-location within a
field of meanings and relations (Bourdieu, 1998). So when we refer to Attitudinal
meaning, we refer to an active terminology, the constant taking and retaking of stances
towards aspects of the world. We call these acts of evaluation. The terms, values and
attitudes, which have gained widespread familiarity in such instruments as opinion polls
and psychological tests, tend to reify the historical and biographical dynamics of bodies
politic and their Attitudinal meanings. Social systemically conditioned patterns of
evaluation are never quite stable; they are always generative, primarily and particularly
in the spheres of political economic force, where the mass media, the state, and their
hosts of interrelated institutions engage with and attempt to “write upon” the collective
habitus.

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Bourdieu provides a useful link between the production of symbolic values,
evaluations, habitus, and collective action at the level of the living social system:
The “real” class, if it ever has “really” existed, is nothing but the realized class, that is,
the mobilized class, a result of the struggle of classifications which is properly
symbolic (or political) struggle to impose a vision of the social world, or, better, a way
to construct that world, in perception and reality, and to construct classes in accordance
with which this social world can be divided. (1998: 11)
Bourdieu is describing here what he calls in earlier writings ‘class habitus’, which
‘functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions’, all of
which, in turn, are functions of social situatedness—historically, politically,
economically, culturally, and so on (1977: 81-3). The link between class habitus – the
structuring principles of bodies politic – and collective action is primarily political; it is
a function of political evaluations: the simultaneous valorisation of one group and
corollary devaluation of another in political divisions of the social world. Habitus can
thus be construed in almost taxonomic terms, as a classificatory but dynamic schemata
which situates ways of knowing and being in particular hierarchical fields and relations
of power. As a basis for understanding social class, the concept of habitus thus is anti-
essentialist. First, and crucial for our purposes here, we can construe class as at least in
part paticipation in a system of meanings, mediations, and remediations, as well as a
categorical yet dynamic relationship not only to the means of production, but
significantly to the modes and means of representation by and through which class
position is produced and reproduced. Second, class becomes blended, hybrid, and
multiple; it is written and construed in relation to a variable and (theoretically) infinite
blend of ‘tastes’, dispositions, and bodily trainings (Luke & Luke, 1999).
Their formal or taxonomic qualities notwithstanding, meaning systems in bodies
politic are, according to Bourdieu, systems of ‘economic exchange’ in which meanings
derive their value in ‘relation to a market’ (1991a: 66-7). In turn, the value of meanings

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derives social force from established relations of power and the field-variable
expectations (and, indeed attitudes) through which these relations of power are
articulated (1991a: 67). The meaning systems of bodies politic are expressions of a
‘whole class habitus’ (1991a: 83). In this context, we can view political meanings as
specialised knowledge registers that aim ‘to produce and impose representations
(mental, verbal, visual or theatrical) of the social which may be capable of acting on this
world by acting on agents’ representations of it’—they function ‘to make or unmake
groups … by producing, reproducing or destroying the respresentations that make
groups visible for themselves and for others’ (1991a: 127).
In this regard, the production of political meanings is yet another autodidactic
function of the state and its corporate and institutional agents – a formal self-justification
of the body politic to its sovereign subjects. The body politic, by definition, must engage
in forms of ‘public pedagogy’ (Luke, 1996) that broadcast not only preferred
representations (in an Orwellian sense), but also, to recall Lemke’s categories, set out
preferred intersubjective relations and attitudinal predispositions towards critique,
categories of inclusion, and towards its Others (Luke, in press). Hence in the current
context the creation of ‘unpeople’, and of more or less valuable people, becomes a
function of mass-mediated political meanings (Pilger, 2002: 9).
With the current political trend towards reducing all values to expressions of
price, the crudest of evaluations become possible: ‘Some people are more valuable than
others’ (American Broadcasting Corporation, 1978, as cited in Bagdikian, 1997: 114).
This is nowhere more evident than in the screen-to-screen media saturation on the first
“anniversary” of the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001. The deaths of
2,882 people commanded almost two weeks of global media attention, culminating in a
24-hour global media blitz on September 11, 2002. While the deaths are undoubtedly

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