{"id":1048,"date":"2009-04-02T12:13:52","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T17:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/02\/from-huxley-to-obama-nlp\/"},"modified":"2009-04-02T12:13:52","modified_gmt":"2009-04-02T17:13:52","slug":"from-huxley-to-obama-nlp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/02\/from-huxley-to-obama-nlp\/","title":{"rendered":"from Huxley to Obama & NLP"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve mentioned Aldous Huxley here <\/a>before. This 1958 interview with Mike Wallace<\/a> shows him to be as broad-rangingly perceptive as anyone at the time – with insightful comments on persuasion techniques, Foucauldian surveillance and control (before Foucault wrote a word about the topic), television (which he thought was already <\/strong>“being used too much to distract people all the time”), population growth, mind-altering drugs (which, of course, Huxley thought could be used for good, as he did, and for ill), etc.<\/p>\n

The following line in Sentient Developments<\/a>‘ George Dvorsky’s summary of the interview stopped me in my tracks for a moment:<\/p>\n

“Today’s elections have become very much like this — nothing more than massive advertising campaigns. And whereas Huxley and his contemporaries were worried about subliminal messaging, today we worry that leaders like Barack Obama and other politicians are using novel persuasion techniques like Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Obama and NLP… wow. That must account for the recent terminological shifts Jon Stewart made fun of the other day — Obama’s apparent renaming of the “war on terror” “overseas contingency operations,” etc., and his recent shifts in tone from giddy in the CBS 60 Minutes interview (which the right-wing press went nuts over) to overserious in his public speech on the economy a few days later, etc. (My response is still “give the guy a break.”)<\/p>\n

NLP is<\/strong> useful for thinking about framing and reframing (one of the terms used in NLP discourse), which, if fans of George Lakoff <\/a>are correct, helped Obama win the last election. Lakoff focuses more on metaphors, while the NLPists focus more on visual and gestural cues and such things – the microphysics of framing, you might say – but in fact, in Lakoff and Johnson’s “embodied mind” <\/a>perspective, the two are closely linked, if more generally (language, cognition, and embodiment). (Chet Bowers has an interesting piece <\/a>critiquing the Lakoff\/Johnson model from an ecocritical perspective.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve mentioned Aldous Huxley here before. This 1958 interview with Mike Wallace shows him to be as broad-rangingly perceptive as anyone at the time – with insightful comments on persuasion techniques, Foucauldian surveillance and control (before Foucault wrote a word about the topic), television (which he thought was already “being used too much to distract […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[691215],"tags":[4428,4452,4453,4454],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics_postpolitics","tag-cognition","tag-embodiment","tag-huxley","tag-neuropolitics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-gU","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1009,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/08\/nice-piece-on-huxley\/","url_meta":{"origin":1048,"position":0},"title":"nice piece on Huxley","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Jeffrey Kripal's piece on Aldous Huxley in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education captures a piece of the tug of war (cultural war?) over spirituality since the 1960s. It's interesting that East Europeans are rediscovering Huxley, now that Orwell would seem less relevant. Perhaps there's a correlation between authoritarianism (as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1060,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/16\/lessig-on-the-ecology-of-culture\/","url_meta":{"origin":1048,"position":1},"title":"Lessig on the ecology of culture","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 16, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Thanks to Mediacology for sharing this presentation on \"Green Culture\" by Lawrence Lessig from the recent Green Festival in Seattle. Lessig is the guru of the creative commons movement, and his talk, on what he calls \"cultural environmentalism,\" is really on media ecology, i.e. the \"ecology\" of cultural production and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5729,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/04\/03\/green-countercultures\/","url_meta":{"origin":1048,"position":2},"title":"Green Countercultures","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"An interesting call for papers from Ecozon@... Call for Papers: Ecozon@ Issue 4.1 (Spring 2013) Green Countercultures Guest Editor: Peter Mortensen, Aarhus University From the late 1950s to the early 1970s an extraordinary counterculture emerged among young people in various western countries, opposing the values of mainstream society. The counterculture\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8777,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/05\/31\/interview-autobio\/","url_meta":{"origin":1048,"position":3},"title":"Interview & autobio","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 31, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words. The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which host Matthew O'Connor (of\u00a0Post-Traditional Buddhism) and I talk at length about Buddhism, process-relational metaphysics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Process-relational thought"","block_context":{"text":"Process-relational thought","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/process-relational-thought\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1263,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/05\/15\/vibrant-matter-reading-group\/","url_meta":{"origin":1048,"position":4},"title":"Vibrant Matter reading group","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The previously announced 'Vibrant Matter' reading group will take place across five blogs over five weeks, beginning May 23 and ending June 26. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things is the latest book by Johns Hopkins University political theorist Jane Bennett. Philosophy in a Time of Error has posted\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"41NsaZn0rkL._SL160_.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/05\/41NsaZn0rkL._SL160_.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1300,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/23\/the-postcapitalist-self\/","url_meta":{"origin":1048,"position":5},"title":"the postcapitalist self","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 23, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"(Note: This post was originally called \"Gibson-Graham live on.\") The latest issue of art & theory journal e-flux is on the \"postcapitalist self\", a term taken from J. K. Gibson-Graham's brilliant work on postcapitalist politics. It features an insightful interview with commons theorists Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}