The Art of the Reel

Governance by attention-seizing: cognitive coercion works in different ways

Firstly, apologies for the delay. It seems ages since I last wrote here, or not that long ago at all. Times have taken on new meanings. And I guess that’s partly the issue: I make the point often that all information manipulation is framed historically, designed to skew perceptions of time. What’s going on right now is meant to rush and panic us, and also meant to drag things out and wear us down. As usual, Liminal Ukraine, at the centre of conflicts over cultural, social, and temporal structures, bears the brunt of these wars. Especially the vertical and the horizontal.

But every night I still watch television. I’ve been thinking more recently about television and its fundamental role as a carrier of manipulating information. I watch television a lot — far too much — but I have long been obsessed by its framing of various stories, its ability to shape imagination. My parents (vertical relationships here are crucial in my current thinking) regulated my viewing time when I was a child, but it still holds my attention, my thinking, and likely my cultural outlooks. Glued to the screen.

My television screen, some time in March

I need to think more about narrativity and how it shapes cultural and political thought. When I was working in government, we adhered to the starting point that television is the most influential media by which societies (especially the Russians) receive their information. In those analyses we looked mainly at news outputs and how the Russian state frames its policies to the public. But government teams have paid scant attention to fiction on television and various series, and how they shape cultural opinions over periods of time. That type of work lies more in academic writings, of which I need to read more (there appear to be many articles, unsurprisingly, on Bakhtin and how the chronotope relates to seriality).

Wider neglect of television entertainment is a big gap in our understanding of Russian media and its role in their society. I think a lot about similarities and differences in Russian media and media in other countries, and have sparred with writers on the theme (the excellent Peter Pomerantsev’s first two books come up against this problem). But I think there are broader issues here that can be applied to how we think about Russia. And our concern, of course, is how Russia and America are converging in their politics and social structures. Television might lie somewhere near the heart of this.

Gangster TV

I am currently rewatching The Sopranos (not only do I watch too much television, I rewatch too much television: glued to the screen (I am also rewatching Servant of the People, but I might go into that at a later time)).

I suspect that The Sopranos helped paved the way to Trump. Not only did it get to the heart of alienation in American society, but the portrayal of how violence is used to reclaim identity must have been influential. As arts critic Matt Hanson has written, the show legitimised violence, ‘gleefully pissing off the libtards’ and deploying boorishness to become successful. Moreover, The Sopranos conditioned Americans to expect that kind of behaviour from their leaders.

Hanson continues:

Evidently, we are living in a reality that has been distorted by television so profoundly that a reality TV star can ascend to the highest office in the land with little more than brashness, attitude, and a charisma that may not appeal to everyone, but is a big hit with his demographic. Whether or not people can tell the difference between reality and fiction is disturbingly up for debate. Trump offers a worldview even less nuanced than that of the mob movies which helped to pave the way for a public that accepts him as more legitimate than he actually is.

What is reassuring to many about Tony Soprano’s behaviour is his ability to reset relations. I need to think about this more and return to Mikhail Epstein’s ideas, but to me the major cultural battle at the moment is between vertical and horizontal relations in society. Movements for equality have tried to reset authoritarian top-down power structures, and replace these with horizontal relationships that focus on equal value and dignity, the transition from the imperative to the subjunctive.

Trump and his acolytes appear intent on reversing the transition to the horizontal, forcing admirers and underlings back into vertical power structures, where traditional hierarchies are restored and strong men can rule again.

Media programmes can legitimise and encourage such cultural thinking, normalising violence and repression. It is possible that Trump and Putin see some kind of likemindedness in their promotion of old worldviews, and no doubt their supporters do. They certainly converge in their loathing and condemnation of Europe, its woke commodification and laws promoting equality. Here again, European governments have failed to understand the fact that hostility is mediated and carried across more than political institutions: they are called culture wars for a reason, and the Europeans have not understood the seriousness of the battle in which they are caught. Ukraine is at the forefront of attempts to resist the reset of culture to the vertical, and the consequences of its potential defeat by Moscow and Washington are unthinkable.

Media is a crucial part of this effort at resubjugation. We have shifted into a mediatised mode of governance, where we are glued to screens that tell us what beliefs we should have. The attention economy paved the way for this, but we have slid into attention-seizing, where we are forced to watch non-stop our leaders affirm their authority, and eventually to succumb. This is a form of cognitive coercion: violence can push you to accept your specific role in society, even when it is only represented digitally. Information manipulation is all about shifting realities, and the best TV people do that effortlessly.

This is why Trump and Musk are desperate to be across our screens, regardless of whether they have good news or bad. Trump can talk about crashing the economy, and Musk can laugh about his rockets crashing: it is only important that we are watching. The leader-screen-audience relationship affirms and sustains the power relationship that these people have over us. They use their uninterrupted repeated television appearances to demonstrate their superiority over us, to put us and keep us in our place, and we obey.

Sorry, sorry, sorry

The return to the patrimonial has brought about it the legitimisation of imperial international relations. Here again these power plays are coordinated and transmitted through the screen.

I wanted to write this time last year on the cult of humiliation that had engulfed Russia, certainly since Nastia Ivleeva’s naked party in Moscow last new year. After reprimanding and fining some of the attendees of that event, Moscow authorities then forced some of the partygoers to apologise publicly, sending some of them to perform concerts to troops in occupied Ukraine.

Sam Greene, annoyingly (for me) but expertly, beat me to returning to this topic in his invariably essential Substack this week just gone. But it is worth considering the ritual apology more seriously as a form of authoritarianism, a public ceremony of humiliation that restores power and reaffirms people’s place and conditions their future conduct. Greene astutely applies this to Trump and Vance’s public attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House a few weeks back. It is bizarre how this crassest and brutal form of behaviour has become the norm in international and domestic politics, and the Russians — who have been trying for years to turn diplomacy into a type of coercive discourse — must have watched on in astonished rapture; but this is part of the new way of forcing people into their supposedly rightful place within structures of power where strength wins.

Putin has used this form of abuse in his dealings before, and the confessional is an important trope in Russian literature and thought. What is new is how the private and public are being forcibly blurred and merged, mediated through the screen. The acceptance of one’s place in the world — one’s humiliation — means nothing unless it is televised for everyone else to witness. Everything has to be filmed and played, again and again and again. It all makes great television. And we are all glued to the screen.

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