What is happening today with American political culture?

On 8 November, Fred Turner was at Sciences Po to speak about American democracy on the eve of the US presidential election.
Professor Turner takes an original view of the relationship between technology, media, art and politics. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, published in 2006, he showed how the culture of the Internet pioneers arose from the improbable encounter between hippy communities and personal computing. His latest book, The Democratic Surround. Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, has just been translated into French.

The title of your book is “The Democratic Surround”. What do you mean by “surround”?

In the 1940s, many Americans feared that one-to-many mass media (films, newspapers, magazines, radio) produced a fascist psychology. They were terribly afraid that if mass media began to use propaganda on American people during World War II, it would produce fascist Americans. And so they turned away from that. A group of intellectuals, about sixty of them, called the Committee for National Morale, redesigned the media. They imagined the media as something that would surround individuals with many images and sound sources. And individuals would then be able to choose the sounds and images with the most meaning from all those available, and that would make them more democratic. This idea and media environment became common in the 1950s on both the propaganda side and on the artistic side, and became the foundation of psychedelic art in the 1960s.

The end of your book is about the birth of counterculture in the 1960s. With Alan Kaprow’s or Andy Warhol’s Happenings, the “democratic surround” changed. The objective was less to create a multimedia representation of the diversity of the country than to encourage individuals to express their feelings and subjectivities. What happened?

In the 1940s, the work of making the surround to produce democratic people was deeply political. The intellectuals promoting the surround wanted people to be less racist, more accepting of sexual diversity—including homosexual diversity; they called for a much more radically accepting, equal world. But while in the 1960s the form of the surround was still in use, the politics had disappeared. Happenings were actually very white, mostly male and mostly heterosexual, and had lost the politics of the 1940s. They had become just a kind of entertainment. They seemed to be liberating the theatre but not liberating the politics. Equality didn’t matter. Politics had become the person itself, only the person. So the idea then was that if I become more creative, if I become more myself, then the world will change. That results in the kind of narcissism that dominates our media landscape.

Do contemporary artists still create “surround”?

They are creating a new aesthetic of the surround. It frequently involves computation and algorithms, and turning computational process into human action. So people act out the informational process. It seems very new and high tech, but in fact it is an extension of an approach that emerged in the 1940s. That approach says that we need to control people not by telling them what to do from the top down, but by creating new situations for them to act in. The only new thing now is the digital situation.

But in Tino Sehgal’s work, for example, there are no objects, no computers, only people and simple, ordinary gestures…

I would be willing to argue that his aesthetic would not make sense if we did not already engage with protocol everywhere else. It’s a protocol.

What is happening today with American political culture? With Donald Trump, have we lost the liberal ideal of the surround?

It’s very interesting to be in France talking about authoritarianism in America. Americans always think of themselves as anti-authoritarians. The irony is that the same push for individualism that was antifascist in the 1940s has given us the new kind of authoritarian individualism that we see in Donald Trump. There is a deep irony here. In turning away from mass media and opening the doors to individualised, personalised media, the people of the 1940s hoped that the human personality would turn out democratic and good. With Donald Trump, we can see that personality retains the range of styles that there were in the 1940s and what is open to democrats is equally open to fascists. And the same kind of persuasive intimacy that Hitler had with radio, Trump has with Twitter now.

Watch the conference with Fred Turner on Livestream

Interview by Dominique Cardon (Médialab, Sciences Po)