SNOW PLOWS, COOKIES: AND THE FORMATION OF IDEOLOGIZED CONSCIOUSNESS

Browsing through Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks recently, I came across some intriguing passages about the formation of consciousness — something that greatly preoccupied Gramsci as he wrestled with the role of ideology in different social and historical contexts. These passages occur in the chapter on "The Study of Philosophy":

The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity. . . . One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses . . . one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.

The "man of the people"

has no concrete memory of the reasons [for his convictions] and could not repeat them, but he knows that reasons exist, because he has heard them expounded, and was convinced by them. The fact of having once suddenly seen the light and been convinced is the permanent reason for his reasons persisting, even if the arguments in its favour cannot be readily produced. (Antonio Gramsci, Excerpts from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, 1971, 333, 338.)

This sense of past consciousness and experience shaping and controlling present consciousness suggests an analogy, with cookies — not the edible kind, but rather the little packets of information created by internet web servers and placed on a user's computer, without that user's knowledge or consent.¹ A cookie combines demographic data with a record of the user's internet activity: what sites she has visited, items downloaded or ordered, etc. The mercantile predator behind the web server then locates particularly susceptible prey, and sends appropriate messages to computers with the right cookies on them. In this way, your past activity subtly dictates and shapes your present experience.

The analogy with ideologized² consciousness formation is not exact. An event or experience acquires an ideological character, by virtue of the political context in which it occurs. It is then "planted" in people's minds, where it lies dormant awaiting activation by subsequent stimuli. Instead of flagging a promising target to receive a particular input, the cookie is a filter that takes inputs received generally and shapes them to a particular purpose. The cumulative effect is creation of a mindset; a systematic ideological filtering system through which accruing information is sorted and censored, and made to serve an underlying political function. One result of this is that people will believe remarkably impossible things, and pass those beliefs along to others, even when they might readily agree, if confronted outside of the ideological system of cookies planted in their consciousness, that the beliefs in question are indeed utterly absurd.

This clearly calls for illustration by means of an extended example. The one I have in mind is a quarter of a century old, and I am glad to finally have an opportunity to report it in print.

In 1978, I presented a paper at the annual conference of the Atlantic Economic Society, held in Washington, D.C. On the panel with me was a Professor of Economics from Florida, who was an associate of the State Department and whose work reflected the positions of the State Department of that time. His paper was on "Soviet International Trade," and at one point during its delivery he stated (this is an approximate rendering, from memory): "Soviet foreign trade is unbelievably inefficient. The Soviet Union sent a consignment of snow plows to Ghana. Apparently no one told them that it doesn't snow in Ghana." This remark drew a wave of appreciative laughter from the audience — an audience of highly educated professionals, be it noted, who were nevertheless apparently willing to believe that the Soviet government was unaware of Ghana's location in tropical, sub-Saharan Africa, or that the Soviet government would just "send" something to a country without talking to someone from that country first.³

On relating this experience (my report is still unfolding; please be patient) to left audiences over the years, I encountered any number of people who informed me that they had heard the snow plow story, and, in many cases, had believed it. The story was, of course, highly functional for the anti-Soviet enterprise, so it had "made the rounds" of the academic circuit and the popular press. This media magnification process is how a "news" item is turned into a cookie.

I had apparently tracked this particular cookie to its source. At the time, however, I was skeptical, since my political inclinations made me somewhat more resistant to the snow plow story. After the session I approached the State Department professor, expressed interest in the snow plow episode, and asked whether he could point me toward his own sources of information, so that I might follow up on the details. What follows is, to the best of my recollection, the conversation that ensued.

"I am my source of information. I saw them myself."

"You saw Soviet snow plows in Ghana?"

"Yes. When I arrived at the airport in Accra, in 1967, I saw them on the tarmac as I was leaving the plane. An entire fleet of Soviet snow plows, parked not too far from the runway."

"How did you know they were snow plows?"

"Snow plows are pretty obvious things. Wheeled vehicles, like tractors, with rectangular blades mounted at the front."

"How did you know they were Soviet?"

"The markings. They had 'CCCP' stenciled on them, along with identification codes, letters and numbers, and the letters were Cyrillic. There can be no doubt. These were Soviet snow plows."

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1. Information on cookies was researched and provided by Antony Klugman.

2. I apologize (again! See "Editorial Perspectives," Spring 2004, and "stadial") for this neologism, but again existing words do not quite convey the meaning I intend. It is the implanting of political ideology into consciousness, not merely identification of one category of consciousness, as would be suggested by "ideological consciousness." Here I am, of course, using "ideology" in the sense of false consciousness associated with the imperatives of class rule, and not simply a systematization of ideas.

3. In the 1960s right-wing movie, Manchurian Candidate, the Soviet Union brainwashes captured U. S. soldiers, and eventually controls the mind of the President, in a conspiracy to take over the United States from within. Considering the threshold of what people can be made to believe — even in a Hollywood film — the movie depicts brainwashing all right, but the brainwashing in question is being done to the movie-going public.

At this writing (May, 2004), and after the preceding paragraph was written, I became aware of the fact that a new version of Manchurian Candidate is being released! We will see whether the movie-going public has learned anything over the last four decades.

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