I.
Given this day and age, with its acute understanding of birth rates and death rates, crime rates and demographics, it is indeed no surprise that there are such tools as the public service announcement, such tools that are able to so successfully and subtly harness the body and make it governable, discipline the body and regulate it as to form and perpetuate a general welfare, a common well-being, a collective mind, body, and spirit—a body politic whose customs, habits, and health practices are synchronized or synchronizing.
The PSA hails and interpellates: through repetitious doomsday rhetoric and such memorable slogans as "loose lips sink ships," "only you can prevent forest fires," "a mind is a terrible thing to waste," and "this is your brain on drugs," it functions to promote life through life's discipline and regulation and stage dramatic triumphs and tragedies to produce and reproduce subjects. It is one of the means by which the wars of symbolism are declared—against drugs, viruses, gambling, poverty, piracy—and it is also one of the means by which the wars are symbolically won via paraded statistical and demographical triumphs. With the PSA, life and death are encountered and evaded by the same dramatic processes.
And all of these battles, of course, are fought on behalf of the population, for life against death, for the brain of the minority, the lungs of the smoker, and the cervix of the woman. Discipline and regulation have become ends in themselves, privileges of citizenship; the prohibition and the vaccine have become duties. The power of the PSA is inherently productive however apparently restrictive its messages, for it produces the good for the good of the body vis-a-vis the state, and the good for the good of the state vis-a-vis the body. It is a virtue machine that is at once a war machine; a component in a citizen machine: its power, and the power of other apparatuses like it, passes through us as we digest it, forming new understandings of the relationships between self and self, self and other, and self and government—relationships which together form a state ethic, a state culture.
II.
The plans for the project that is the governable body, the civil body, seem to be concealed in plain sight within the PSA. Behind every dramatic pedagogical depiction of domestic violence or vice (smoking, gambling), behind every warning of ecological or nuclear crisis, there is the unwritten anatomo-politics of the human body, a biopolitics of the population that is deployed with an end in mind: the construction of the new[er] citizen, the governed subject that is more governable, that is ecologically aware, that smokes less and buys organic more, that knows the scientific benefit of vaccines and knows the safety behind the "duck and cover" maneuver.
The PSA seems to have become an indispensable ideological asset for the modern state and one of the more salient means of manufacturing consent for the public good. Its language, its discourse, its aesthetic are citizen builders, cogs of governmentality, that contain both the fragments of the dream of the state's model citizen, be he Japan's placid subject or Arabia's pious national, and the civil nightmares of the state undergoing a profound legitimacy crisis.
Where do private interests releasing PSAs fit into your model? Do they attempt to tap into this medium of subtle control, are they attempting to dilute the power of the state, or maybe both?
What I was interested in exploring here can be said to be Chomsky's thesis in "Manufacturing Consent" in reverse. While there he and Herman argue that private interests in the form of news media businesses hegemonise their dishonest/biased/sensationalist discourses to maintain profits in spite of the 'public good,' I am more interested in the following: what is this 'the public good' that is so often taken as 'given'? What is this 'public citizen' that is so typically being pitted against the 'private?' How was he crafted?
These questions certainly aren't easy ones to answer, but what I wanted to get at here was that PSA is one of the many tools, among many other ones (public and private), that serve to create this notion of the public good, this notion of the 'citizen.' Whether or not the PSA is wholly public--whether or not any good or service is truly public, including our foreign policy--is certainly a matter of debate in this "think tank" age, as is the degree of either one's influence on the other's works. But, to get to your question: given our current globalized political climate, I think its safe to say that the public and private are ever-blurred, that the next citizen, the global citizen, is the subject under construction--the subject linked to, be it via his desire, via politics, via capital, transnational corporations and institutions besides the normal national ones. The PSA of today, which is always as public as it is private, already blurs these distinctions; the PSA of tomorrow, perhaps, will be even more blurred and transnational in tone.
Alexander, while I have to commend how well you articulate this position instinctively it makes me cringe, a bit, and I am inclined to reject it. I think that what belies your argument, which perhaps you are unconscious of, is a belief in a big other, a space which is here filled by the state. I don't think this is an attempt to manufacture a notion of the "good." I think we can extend Zizek's notion of belief here. This is how we, as a society, believe. Never directly, always through an other. Santa Clause for example, no one actually believes but we pretend for the sake of the children. Children pretend to believe for the sake of the parent. And thus belief is maintained. Here we have these PSA that do the dirty work of believing for us. While we prescribe drugs to 3 years olds to "calm" them down we have these message establish our opposition to drugs.
But as my formulation is an afterthought to my guttural uncomfort with the argument I am open to change my mind.
I took an electronic news writing course and one of the components was learning to write PSAs. They are supposedly some kind of holy grail of commercial writing: you know you're good if you're approached by the Ad Council to write one.