A metapsychological exploration of the role of popular media in engineering public belief on planning issues

Abstract

The article considers how planning, in its various dimensions of engagement with popular communication media, plays an important role in helping to ideologically constitute a polity’s desired spatial reality. In doing so it will consider the historical deployment in public relations of psychoanalytical theory to facilitate the construction of public issues and beliefs, as well as to engineer consent for planning and related policy. The article will consider the role of contemporary media in shaping public aspirations as to what is desired for the future of our cities and settlements. The article will conclude that psychoanalytical insight gives us one effective handle from which to begin to understand planning’s ideologically shaping role in the formulation of our desires for our future communities.

Keywords

psychoanalysis media ideology publicity belief knowledge

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Aitken

(2010) A three-dimensional view of public participation in Scottish land-use planning: empowerment or social control? Planning Theory 9(3): 248–64.

Alterman

(2003) What Liberal Media? New York: Basic Books.

Ashworth

Voodg

(1990) Selling the City. London: Belhaven.

Avraham

(2004) Media strategies for improving an unfavorable city image. Cities 21(6): 471–9.

Auster

(1989) Construction of the planning idea: Britain, the USA and Australia 1929–1939. Planning Perspectives 4(2): 207–23.

Barton

(2010) Mark Ford – the invisible autocrat. The New Zealand Herald, 6 March, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10630173 [accessed 2 March 2011]

Baudrillard

(1998 [1970]) The Consumer Society. London: Sage.

Bennett

(2005) Getting the Id to go shopping: psychoanalysis, advertising, barbie dolls, and the invention of the consumer unconscious. Public Culture 17(1): 1–25.

Bernays

(1947) The engineering of consent. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250: 113–20.

10.

Bracher

(1993) Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

11.

Breger

(2000) Freud. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

12.

Bund

(1980) City growth and planning news as civic ideology. Journal of Communicative Inquiry 6(1): 55–64.

13.

Burke

(2008) Primetime spin: media bias and belief confirming information. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 17(3): 633–65.

14.

Butler

Laclau

Žižek

(2000) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. London: Verso.

15.

Calavita

Krumholz

(2003) Capturing the public interest: using newspaper op-eds to promote planning in conservative times. Journal of Planning Education and Research 22(4): 400–06.

16.

Celikates

(2006) From critical social theory to a social theory of critique: on the critique of ideology after the pragmatic turn. Constellations 13(1): 21–40.

17.

Chomsky

(2003) Understanding Power. London: Vintage.

18.

Clifford

(2006) Only a town planner would run a toxic-waste pipe through a recreational area: planning and planners in the British press. Town Planning Review 77(4): 423–54.

19.

Dean

(2002) Publicity’s Secret. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

20.

Dean

(2009a) Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Durham: Duke University Press.

21.

Dean

(2009b) Politics without Politics. parallax 15(3): 20–36.

22.

Dean

(2010) Affective Networks. Media Tropes 11(2): 19–44.

23.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1983) Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

24.

Dovey

Sandercock

(2002) Hype and hope: imagining Melbourne’s docklands. City 6(1): 83–101.

25.

Economist (2010) Rise of the image men. The Economist, 18 December, http://www.economist.com/node/17722733 [accessed 20/12/10].

26.

Edey

Seasons

Whitelaw

(2006) The media, planning and the Oak Ridges Moraine. Planning Practice and Research 21(2): 147–61.

27.

Entman

(2007) Framing bias: media in the distribution of power. Journal of Communications 57(1): 163–73.

28.

Evans

(1996) An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Hove: Brunner-Routledge.

29.

Fine

Sandstrom

(1993) Ideology in action: a pragmatic approach to a contested concept. Sociological Theory 11(1): 21–38.

30.

Flyvbjerg

(1998) Rationality and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

31.

Flyvbjerg

(2001) Making Social Science Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

32.

Forester

(1982) Planning in the face of power. Journal of the American Planning Association 48(1): 67–80.

33.

Foucault

(1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

34.

Foucault

(1991) Governmentality. In: Burchell

. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 87–104.

35.

Freeden

(2003) Ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

36.

Freud

(2002) Civilization and its Discontents. London: Penguin.

37.

Freud

(2006) Interpreting Dreams. London: Penguin.

38.

Fromm

(2002 [1955]) The Sane Society. London: Routledge.

39.

Frosh

(1999) The Politics of Psychoanalysis. New York: New York University Press.

40.

Gamson

Croteau

Hoynes

Sasson

(1992) Media images and the social construction of reality. Annual Review of Sociology 18: 373–93.

41.

Gay

(2006) Freud: A Life For Our Times. London: Max Press.

42.

Gibson

(2004) Covering the world-class downtown: Seattle’s local media and the politics of urban redevelopment. Critical Studies in Media Communications 21(4): 283–304.

43.

Gunder

(2004) Shaping the planner’s ego-ideal: a Lacanian interpretation of planning education. Journal of Planning Education and Research 23(3): 299–311.

44.

Gunder

(2006) Sustainability: planning’s saving grace or road to perdition? Journal of Planning Education and Research 26(2): 208–21.

45.

Gunder

(2010) Planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space. Planning Theory 9(4): 298–314.

46.

Gunder

(2011) Fake it until you make it, and then… Planning Theory 10(3), in press.

47.

Gunder

Hillier

(2009) Planning in Ten Words or Less. Farnham: Ashgate.

48.

Habermas

(1989) The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press.

49.

Haughton

McManus

(2011) Neoliberal experiments with urban infrastructure: the Cross City Tunnel, Sydney. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Early View, DOI: 10.1111/j.1468–2427.2011.01019.x10.1111/j.1468–2427.2011.01019.x

50.

Higgs

(2008) The complex course of ideological change. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 67(4): 547–65.

51.

Hillier

Gunder

(2005) Not over your dead bodies! A Lacanian interpretation of planning discourse and practice. Environment and Planning: A 37(6): 1049–66.

52.

Hoch

(2006) Emotions and planning. Planning Theory & Practice 7(4); 367–82.

53.

Innes

(1998) Information in communicative planning. Journal of the American Planning Association 64(1): 52–63.

54.

Jameson

(2003) Imaginary and symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, psychoanalytic criticism, and the problem of the subject. In: Žižek

(ed.) Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume III. London: Routledge, 3–43.

55.

Jansson

(2005) Re-encoding the spectacle: urban fatefulness and mediated stigmatisation in the ‘City of Tomorrow’. Urban Studies 42(10): 1671–91.

56.

Jensen

(2007) Culture stories: understanding cultural urban branding. Planning Theory 6(3): 211–36.

57.

Johnston

(2009) Affective life between signifiers and jouis-sens: Lacan’s senti-ments and affectuations. Filozofski vestnik 30(2): 113–41.

58.

Kingsbury

(2008) Did somebody say jouissance? On Slavok Žižek, consumption, and nationalism. Emotion, Space and Society 1(1): 48–55.

59.

Lacan

(1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX, Encore. London: Norton.

60.

Lacan

(2006) Ecrits. London: Norton.

61.

Lacan

(2007) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII. London: Norton.

62.

Lash

(2007) Power after hegemony: cultural studies in mutation? Theory, Culture & Society 24(3): 55–78.

63.

Lou

(2010) Chinatown transformed: ideology, power, and resources in narrative place-making. Discourse Studies 12(5): 625–47.

64.

Lukes

(2005) Power: a radical view. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

65.

MacCannell

(2007) The city at the ‘end of history’. In: BAVO (ed.) Urban Politics Now. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 162–180.

66.

Marcuse

(1991 [1964]) One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge.

67.

McCann

(2002) The cultural politics of local economic development: meaning-making, place-making and the urban policy process. Geoforum 33(3): 385–98.

68.

McLuhan

(1951) The Mechanical Bride. Boston: Beacon.

69.

Nelson

(2008) The Hidden Persuaders: then and now. Journal of Advertising 37(1): 113–26.

70.

New Zealand Herald (2011) Kiwis still flocking to Australia for jobs, 14 February http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10706203 [accessed 20 March 2011].

71.

Newman

(2007) Anarchism, poststructuralism and the future of radical politics. SubStance 113, 36(2): 3–19.

72.

Olasky

(1984) Reception of Edward Bernays’ Doctrine of ‘Manipulating Public Opinion’. Paper presented to the Public Relations Division Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Convention, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, August 6.

73.

Packard

(1957) The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David McKay.

74.

Pløger

(2008) Foucault’s dispositif and the city. Planning Theory 7(1): 51–70.

75.

Rancière

(1999) Dis-agreement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

76.

Sharpe

(2006) The ‘Revolution’ in advertising and university discourse. In: Clemens

Grigg

(eds) Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham: Duke University Press.

77.

Sandercock

(2010) From the campfire to the computer: an epistemology of multiplicity and the story turn in planning. In: Sandercock

Attili

(eds) Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and Planning. Dordrecht: Springer, 17–37.

78.

Schwarzkopf

(2007) ‘Culture’ and the limits of innovation in marketing: Ernest Dichter, motivation studies and psychoanalytical consumer research in Great Britain, 1950s—1970s. Management & Organizational History 2(3): 219–36.

79.

Stavrakakis

(2000) On the critique of advertising discourse. Third Text 14(51): 85–90.

80.

Stavrakakis

(2007) The Lacanian Left. Albany: SUNY Press.

81.

Stavrakakis

(2010) Discourse, affect, jouissance: psychoanalysis, political theory and artistic practices. Art & Desire Seminars, Istanbul, June 2010.

82.

Stern

(2004) The importance of being Ernest: commemorating Dichter’s contribution to advertising research. Journal of Advertising Research 44(2): 165–69.

83.

Talvitie

(2009) Theoryless Planning. Planning Theory 8(2): 166–90.

84.

Thoburn

(2007) Patterns of production: cultural studies after hegemony. Theory, Culture & Society 24(3): 79–94.

85.

Žižek

(1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

86.

Žižek

(1993) Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

87.

Žižek

(1997) The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.

88.

Žižek

(1999) The spectre of ideology. In: Wright

Wright

(eds) The Žižek Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 53–86.

89.

Žižek

(2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.

90.

Žižek

(2005) Interrogating the Real. London: Continuum.

91.

Žižek

(2006a) How to Read Lacan. London: Norton.

92.

Žižek

(2006b) The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press.