-Caveat Lector-
II. The Establishment Goes Bolshevik:
"Entertainment" Replaces Art
Before the twentieth century, the distinction between art and
"entertainment" was much more pronounced. One could be
entertained by art, certainly, but the experience was active, not
passive. On the first level, one had to make a conscious choice
to go to a concert, to view a certain art exhibit, to buy a book
or piece of sheet music. It was unlikely that any more than an
infinitesimal fraction of the population would have the
opportunity to see {King Lear} or hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
more than once or twice in a lifetime. Art demanded that one
bring one's full powers of concentration and knowledge of the
subject to bear on each experience, or else the experience were
considered wasted. These were the days when memorization of
poetry and whole plays, and the gathering of friends and family
for a "parlor concert," were the norm, even in rural
households. These were also the days before "music
appreciation"; when one studied music, as many did, they learned
to play it, not appreciate it.
However, the new technologies of radio, film, and recorded
music represented, to use the appropriate Marxist buzz-word, a
dialectical potential. On the one hand, these technologies held
out the possibility of bringing the greatest works of art to
millions of people who would otherwise not have access to them.
On the other, the fact that the experience was infinitely
reproducible could tend to disengage the audience's mind, making
the experience less sacred, thus increasing alienation. Adorno
called this process, "demythologizing." This new passivity,
Adorno hypothesized in a crucial article published in 1938, could
fracture a musical composition into the "entertaining" parts
which would be "fetishized" in the memory of the listener, and
the difficult parts, which would be forgotten. Adorno continues,
The counterpart to the fetishism is a regression of listening.
This does not mean a relapse of the individual listener into an
earlier phase of his own development, nor a decline in the
collective general level, since the millions who are reached
musically for the first time by today's mass communications
cannot be compared with the audiences of the past. Rather, it is
the contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested at the
infantile stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along
with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for
the conscious perception of music .... [t]hey fluctuate between
comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They
listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear, but precisely
in this dissociation they develop certain capacities which accord
less with the traditional concepts of aesthetics than with those
of football or motoring. They are not childlike ... but they are
childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but
that of the {forcibly retarded}.
This conceptual retardation and preconditioning caused by
listening, suggested that programming could determine preference.
The very act of putting, say, a Benny Goodman number next to a
Mozart sonata on the radio, would tend to amalgamate both into
entertaining "music-on-the-radio" in the mind of the listener.
This meant that even new and unpalatable ideas could become
popular by "re-naming" them through the universal homogenizer
of the culture industry. As Benjamin puts it,
"Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the
masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso
painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin
movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct,
intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the
orientation of the expert.... With regard to the screen, the
critical and receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The
decisive reason for this is that the individual reactions are
predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to
produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film."
At the same time, the magic power of the media could be used
to re-define previous ideas. "Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven
will all make films," concluded Benjamin, quoting the French
film pioneer {{Abel Gance}}, "... all legends, all mythologies,
all myths, all founders of religions, and the very religions
themselves ... await their exposed resurrection."
Social Control: The "Radio Project"
Here, then, were some potent theories of social control. The
great possibilities of this Frankfurt School media work were
probably the major contributing factor in the support given the
I.S.R. by the bastions of the Establishment, after the Institute
transferred its operations to America in 1934.
In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding research
into the social effects of new forms of mass media, particularly
radio. Before World War I, radio had been a hobbyist's toy, with
only 125,000 receiving sets in the entire U.S.; twenty years
later, it had become the primary mode of entertainment in the
country; out of 32 million American families in 1937, 27.5
million had radios -- a larger percentage than had telephones,
automobiles, plumbing, or electricity! Yet, almost no systematic
research had been done up to this point. The Rockefeller
Foundation enlisted several universities, and headquartered this
network at the School of Public and International Affairs at
Princeton University. Named the Office of Radio Research,
it was popularly known as "the Radio Project."
The director of the Project was {{Paul Lazersfeld}}, the
foster son of Austrian Marxist economist Rudolph Hilferding, and
a long-time collaborator of the I.S.R. from the early 1930's.
Under Lazersfeld was {{Frank Stanton}}, a recent Ph.D. in
industrial psychology from Ohio State, who had just been made
research director of Columbia Broadcasting System -- a grand
title but a lowly position. After World War II, Stanton became
president of the CBS News Division, and ultimately president of
CBS at the height of the TV network's power; he also became
Chairman of the Board of the RAND Corporation, and a member of
President Lyndon Johnson's "kitchen cabinet." Among the
Project's researchers were {{Herta Herzog}}, who married
Lazersfeld and became the first director of research for the
Voice of America; and {{Hazel Gaudet}}, who became one of the
nation's leading political pollsters. Theodor Adorno was named
chief of the Project's music section.
Despite the official gloss, the activities of the Radio
Project make it clear that its purpose was to test empirically
the Adorno-Benjamin thesis that the net effect of the mass media
could be to atomize and increase lability -- what people would
later call "brainwashing."
Soap Operas and the Invasion from Mars
The first studies were promising. Herta Herzog produced "On
Borrowed Experiences," the first comprehensive research on soap
operas. The "serial radio drama" format was first used in 1929,
on the inspiration of the old, cliff-hanger "Perils of Pauline"
film serial. Because these little radio plays were highly
melodramatic, they became popularly identified with Italian grand
opera; because they were often sponsored by soap manufacturers,
they ended up with the generic name, "soap opera."
Until Herzog's work, it was thought that the immense
popularity of this format was largely with women of the lowest
socioeconomic status who, in the restricted circumstances of
their lives, needed a helpful escape to exotic places and
romantic situations. A typical article from that period by two
University of Chicago psychologists, "The Radio Day-Time Serial:
Symbol Analysis" published in the {Genetic Psychology
Monographs}, solemnly emphasized the positive, claiming that the
soaps "function very much like the folk tale, expressing the
hopes and fears of its female audience, and on the whole
contribute to the integration of their lives into the world in
which they live."
Herzog found that there was, in fact, no correlation to
socioeconomic status. What is more, there was surprisingly
little correlation to content. The key factor -- as Adorno and
Benjamin's theories suggested it would be -- was the {form}
itself of the serial; women were being effectively addicted to
the format, not so much to be entertained or to escape, but to
"find out what happens next week." In fact, Herzog found, you
could almost double the listenership of a radio play by dividing
it into segments.
Modern readers will immediately recognize that this was not a
lesson lost on the entertainment industry. Nowadays, the serial
format has spread to children's programming and high-budget prime
time shows. The most widely watched shows in the history of
television, remain the "Who Killed JR?" installment of {Dallas},
and the final episode of {M*A*S*H}, both of which were premised
on a "what happens next?" format. Even feature films, like the
{Star Wars} and {Back to the Future} trilogies, are now produced
as serials, in order to lock in a viewership for the later
installments. The humble daytime soap also retains its addictive
qualities in the current age: 70% of all American women over
eighteen now watch at least two of these shows each day, and
there is a fast-growing viewership among men and college students
of both sexes.
The Radio Project's next major study was an investigation into
the effects of {{Orson Welles'}} Halloween 1938 radioplay based
on H.G. Wells' {War of the Worlds}. Six million people heard the
broadcast realistically describing a Martian invasion force
landing in rural New Jersey. Despite repeated and clear
statements that the show was fictional, approximately 25% of
the listeners thought it was real, some panicking outright.
The Radio Project researchers found that a majority of the people
who panicked did not think that men from Mars had invaded; they
actually thought that {the Germans} had invaded.
It happened this way. The listeners had been psychologically
pre-conditioned by radio reports from the Munich crisis earlier
that year. During that crisis, CBS's man in Europe, {{Edward R.
Murrow}}, hit upon the idea of breaking into regular programming
to present short news bulletins. For the first time in
broadcasting, news was presented not in longer analytical pieces,
but in short clips -- what we now call "audio bites." At the
height of the crisis, these flashes got so numerous, that, in the
words of Murrow's producer {{Fred Friendly}}, "news bulletins
were interrupting news bulletins." As the listeners thought that
the world was moving to the brink of war, CBS ratings rose
dramatically. When Welles did his fictional broadcast later,
after the crisis had receded, he used this news bulletin
technique to give things verisimilitude: he started the
broadcast by faking a standard dance-music program, which kept
getting interrupted by increasingly terrifying "on the scene
reports" from New Jersey. Listeners who panicked, reacted not to
content, but to format; they heard "We interrupt this program for
an emergency bulletin," and "invasion," and immediately concluded
that Hitler had invaded. The soap opera technique, transposed to
the news, had worked on a vast and unexpected scale.
Little Annie and the "Wagnerian Dream" of TV
In 1939, one of the numbers of the quarterly {Journal of
Applied Psychology} was handed over to Adorno and the Radio
Project to publish some of their findings. Their conclusion was
that Americans had, over the last twenty years, become "radio-
minded," and that their listening had become so fragmented that
repetition of format was the key to popularity. The play list
determined the "hits" -- a truth well known to organized crime,
both then and now -- and repetition could make any form of music
or any performer, even a classical music performer, a "star."
As long as a familiar form or context was retained, almost any
content would become acceptable. "Not only are hit songs,
stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly
invariable types," said Adorno, summarizing this material a few
years later, "but the specific content of the entertainment
itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The
details are interchangeable."
The crowning achievement of the Radio Project was "Little
Annie," officially titled the Stanton-Lazersfeld Program
Analyzer. Radio Project research had shown that all previous
methods of preview polling were ineffectual. Up to that point,
a preview audience listened to a show or watched a film, and then
was asked general questions: did you like the show? what did
you think of so-and-so's performance? The Radio Project realized
that this method did not take into account the test audience's
atomized perception of the subject, and demanded that they make
a rational analysis of what was intended to be an irrational
experience. So, the Project created a device in which each test
audience member was supplied with a type of rheostat on which he
could register the intensity of his likes or dislikes on a
moment-to-moment basis. By comparing the individual graphs
produced by the device, the operators could determine, not if the
audience liked the whole show -- which was irrelevant -- but,
which situations or characters produced a positive, if momentary,
feeling state.
Little Annie transformed radio, film, and ultimately
television programming. CBS still maintains program analyzer
facilities in Hollywood and New York; it is said that results
correlate 85% to ratings. Other networks and film studios have
similar operations. This kind of analysis is responsible for the
uncanny feeling you get when, seeing a new film or TV show, you
think you have seen it all before. You have, many times. If a
program analyzer indicates that, for instance, audiences were
particularly titilated by a short scene in a World War II drama
showing a certain type of actor kissing a certain type of
actress, then that scene format will be worked into dozens of
screenplays -- transposed to the Middle Ages, to outer space,
etc., etc.
The Radio Project also realized that television had the
potential to intensify all of the effects that they had studied.
TV technology had been around for some years, and had been
exhibited at the 1936 World's Fair in New York, but the only
person to attempt serious utilization of the medium had been
Adolf Hitler. The Nazis broadcast events from the 1936 Olympic
Games "live" to communal viewing rooms around Germany; they
were trying to expand on their great success in using radio to
Nazify all aspects of German culture. Further plans for German
TV development were sidetracked by war preparations.
Adorno understood this potential perfectly, writing in 1944:
Television aims at the synthesis of radio and film, and is
held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached
agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and
promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so
drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all
industrial culture products can come triumphantly out in the
open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the
{Gesamtkunstwerk} -- the fusion of all the arts in one work.
The obvious point is this: the profoundly irrational forms of
modern entertainment -- the stupid and eroticized content of most
TV and films, the fact that your local Classical music radio
station programs Stravinsky next to Mozart -- don't have to be
that way. They were designed to be that way. The design was so
successful, that today, no one even questions the reasons or the
origins.
III. Creating "Public Opinion":
The "Authoritarian Personality" Bogeyman and the OSS
The efforts of the Radio Project conspirators to manipulate
the population, spawned the modern pseudoscience of public
opinion polling, in order to gain greater control over the
methods they were developing.
Today, public opinion polls, like the television news, have
been completely integrated into our society. A "scientific
survey" of what people are said to think about an issue can be
produced in less than twenty-four hours. Some campaigns for high
political office are completely shaped by polls; in fact, many
politicians try to create issues which are themselves
meaningless, but which they know will look good in the polls,
purely for the purpose of enhancing their image as "popular."
Important policy decisions are made, even before the actual vote
of the citizenry or the legislature, by poll results. Newspapers
will occasionally write pious editorials calling on people to
think for themselves, even as the newspaper's business agent
sends a check to the local polling organization.
The idea of "public opinion" is not new, of course. Plato
spoke against it in his {Republic} over two millenia ago; Alexis
de Tocqueville wrote at length of its influence over America in
the early nineteenth century. But, nobody thought to {measure}
public opinion before the twentieth century, and nobody before
the 1930's thought to use those measurements for decision-making.
It is useful to pause and reflect on the whole concept. The
belief that public opinion can be a determinant of truth is
philosophically insane. It precludes the idea of the rational
individual mind. Every individual mind contains the divine spark
of reason, and is thus capable of scientific discovery, and
understanding the discoveries of others. The individual mind is
one of the few things that cannot, therefore, be "averaged."
Consider: at the moment of creative discovery, it is possible,
if not probable, that the scientist making the discovery is the
{only} person to hold that opinion about nature, whereas everyone
else has a different opinion, or no opinion. One can only
imagine what a "scientifically-conducted survey" on Kepler's
model of the solar system would have been, shortly after he
published the {Harmony of the World}: 2% for, 48% against,
50% no opinion.
These psychoanalytic survey techniques became standard, not
only for the Frankfurt School, but also throughout American
social science departments, particularly after the I.S.R. arrived
in the United States. The methodology was the basis of the
research piece for which the Frankfurt School is most well known,
the "authoritarian personality" project. In 1942, I.S.R.
director {{Max Horkheimer}} made contact with the American
Jewish Committee, which asked him to set up a Department of
Scientific Research within its organization. The American Jewish
Committee also provided a large grant to study anti-Semitism in
the American population. "Our aim," wrote Horkheimer in the
introduction to the study, "is not merely to describe prejudice,
but to explain it in order to help in its eradication....
Eradication means reeducation scientifically planned on the basis
of understanding scientifically arrived at."
The A-S Scale
Ultimately, five volumes were produced for this study over
the course of the late 1940's; the most important was the last,
{The Authoritarian Personality}, by Adorno, with the help of
three Berkeley, California social psychologists.
In the 1930's Erich Fromm had devised a questionnaire to be
used to analyze German workers pychoanalytically as
"authoritarian," "revolutionary" or "ambivalent." The heart
of Adorno's study was, once again, Fromm's psychoanalytic scale,
but with the positive end changed from a "revolutionary
personality," to a "democratic personality," in order to make
things more palatable for a postwar audience.
Nine personality traits were tested and measured, including:
+ {{conventionalism}} -- rigid adherence to
conventional, middle-class values
+ {{authoritarian aggression}} -- the tendency to
be on the look-out for, to condemn, reject and punish,
people who violate conventional values
+ {{projectivity}} -- the disposition to believe
that wild and dangerous things go on in the world
+ {{sex}} -- exaggerated concern with sexual
goings-on.
From these measurements were constructed several scales:
the E Scale (ethnocentrism), the PEC Scale (poltical and economic
conservatism), the A-S Scale (anti-Semitism), and the F Scale
(fascism). Using Rensis Lickerts's methodology of weighting
results, the authors were able to tease together an empirical
definition of what Adorno called "a new anthropological type,"
the authoritarian personality.
The legerdemain here, as in all psychoanalytic survey work,
is the assumption of a Weberian "type." Once the type has been
statistically determined, all behavior can be explained; if an
anti-Semitic personality does not act in an anti-Semitic way,
then he or she has an ulterior motive for the act, or is being
discontinuous. The idea that a human mind is capable of
transformation, is ignored.
The results of this very study can be interpreted in
diametrically different ways. One could say that the study
proved that the population of the U.S. was generally
conservative, did not want to abandon a capitalist economy,
believed in a strong family and that sexual promiscuity should be
punished, thought that the postwar world was a dangerous place,
and was still suspicious of Jews (and Blacks, Roman Catholics,
Orientals, etc. -- unfortunately true, but correctable in a
social context of economic growth and cultural optimism).
On the other hand, one could take the same results and prove that
anti-Jewish pogroms and Nuremburg rallies were simmering just
under the surface, waiting for a new Hitler to ignite them.
Which of the two interpretations you accept is a political,
not a scientific, decision.
Horkheimer and Adorno firmly believed that all religions,
Judaism included, were "the opiate of the masses." Their goal
was not the protection of Jews from prejudice, but the creation
of a definition of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism which could
be exploited to force the "scientifically planned reeducation"
of Americans and Europeans away from the principles of Judeo-
Christian civilization, which the Frankfurt School despised. In
their theoretical writings of this period, Horkheimer and Adorno
pushed the thesis to its most paranoid: just as capitalism was
inherently fascistic, the philosophy of Christianity itself is
the source of anti-Semitism. As Horkheimer and Adorno jointly
wrote in their 1947 "Elements of Anti-Semitism":
Christ, the spirit become flesh, is the deified sorcerer.
Man's self-reflection in the absolute, the humanization of God
by Christ, is the {proton pseudos} [original falsehood].
Progress beyond Judaism is coupled with the assumption that the
man Jesus has become God. The reflective aspect of Christianity,
the intellectualization of magic, is the root of evil.
At the same time, Horkheimer could write in a more-popularized
article titled "Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease," that "at
present, the only country where there does not seem to be any
kind of anti-Semitism is Russia"[!].
This self-serving attempt to maximize paranoia was further
aided by Hannah Arendt, who popularized the authoritarian
personality research in her widely-read {Origins of
Totalitarianism}. Arendt also added the famous rhetorical
flourish about the "banality of evil" in her later {Eichmann in
Jerusalem}: even a simple, shopkeeper-type like Eichmann can
turn into a Nazi beast under the right psychological
circumstances -- every Gentile is suspect, psychoanalytically.
It is Arendt's extreme version of the authoritarian
personality thesis which is the operant philosophy of today's
Cult Awareness Network (CAN), a group which works with the U.S.
Justice Department and the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai
B'rith, among others. Using standard Frankfurt School method,
CAN identifies political and religious groups which are its
political enemies, then re-labels them as a "cult," in order to
justify operations against them. (See box.)
The Public Opinion Explosion
Despite its unprovable central thesis of "psychoanalytic
types," the interpretive survey methodology of the Frankfurt
School became dominant in the social sciences, and essentially
remains so today. In fact, the adoption of these new, supposedly
scientific techniques in the 1930's brought about an explosion in
public-opinion survey use, much of it funded by Madison Avenue.
The major pollsters of today -- {{A.C. Neilsen, George Gallup,
Elmo Roper}} -- started in the mid-1930's, and began using the
I.S.R. methods, especially given the success of the
Stanton-Lazersfeld Program Analyzer. By 1936, polling activity
had become sufficiently widespread to justify a trade
association, the American Academy of Public Opinion Research at
Princeton, headed by Lazersfeld; at the same time, the University
of Chicago created the National Opinion Research Center. In
1940, the Office of Radio Research was turned into the Bureau of
Applied Social Research, a division of Columbia University, with
the indefatigable Lazersfeld as director.
After World War II, Lazersfeld especially pioneered the use of
surveys to psychoanalyze American voting behavior, and by the
1952 Presidential election, Madison Avenue advertising agencies
were firmly in control of Dwight Eisenhower's campaign, utilizing
Lazersfeld's work. Nineteen fifty-two was also the first
election under the influence of television, which, as Adorno had
predicted eight years earlier, had grown to incredible influence
in a very short time. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne -- the
fabled "BBD&O" ad agency -- designed Ike's campaign appearances
entirely for the TV cameras, and as carefully as Hitler's
Nuremberg rallies; one-minute "spot" advertisements were
pioneered to cater to the survey-determined needs of the voters.
This snowball has not stopped rolling since. The entire
development of television and advertising in the 1950's and
1960's was pioneered by men and women who were trained in the
Frankfurt School's techniques of mass alienation. Frank Stanton
went directly from the Radio Project to become the single most-
important leader of modern television. Stanton's chief rival in
the formative period of TV was NBC's {{Sylvester "Pat" Weaver}};
after a Ph.D. in "listening behavior," Weaver worked with the
Program Analyzer in the late 1930's, before becoming a Young &
Rubicam vice-president, then NBC's director of programming, and
ultimately the network's president. Stanton and Weaver's stories
are typical.
Today, the men and women who run the networks, the ad
agencies, and the polling organizations, even if they have never
heard of Theodor Adorno, firmly believe in Adorno's theory that
the media can, and should, turn all they touch into "football."
Coverage of the 1991 Gulf War should make that clear.
The technique of mass media and advertising developed by the
Frankfurt School now effectively controls American political
campaigning. Campaigns are no longer based on political
programs, but actually on alienation. Petty gripes and
irrational fears are identified by psychoanalytic survey, to be
transmogrified into "issues" to be catered to; the "Willy Horton"
ads of the 1988 Presidential campaign, and the "flag-burning
amendment," are but two recent examples. Issues that will
determine the future of our civilization, are scrupulously
reduced to photo opportunities and audio bites -- like Ed
Murrow's original 1930's radio reports -- where the dramatic
effect is maximized, and the idea content is zero.
Who Is the Enemy?
Part of the influence of the authoritarian personality hoax
in our own day also derives from the fact that, incredibly, the
Frankfurt School and its theories were officially accepted by the
U.S. government during World War II, and these Cominternists were
responsible for determining who were America's wartime, {and
postwar}, enemies.
In 1942, the Office of Strategic Services, America's
hastily-constructed espionage and covert operations unit, asked
former Harvard president James Baxter to form a Research and
Analysis (R&A) Branch under the group's Intelligence Division.
By 1944, the R&A Branch had collected such a large and
prestigeous group of emigre scholars that H. Stuart Hughes, then
a young Ph. D., said that working for it was "a second graduate
education" at government expense. The Central European Section
was headed by historian {{Carl Schorske}}; under him, in the
all-important Germany/Austria Section, was {{Franz Neumann}}, as
section chief, with {{Herbert Marcuse, Paul Baran}}, and {{Otto
Kirchheimer}}, all I.S.R. veterans. {{Leo Lowenthal}} headed the
German-language section of the Office of War Information;
{{Sophie Marcuse}}, Marcuse's wife, worked at the Office of
Naval Intelligence. Also at the R&A Branch were: {{Siegfried
Kracauer}}, Adorno's old Kant instructor, now a film theorist;
{{Norman O. Brown}}, who would become famous in the 1960's by
combining Marcuse's hedonism theory with {{Wilhelm Reich's}}
orgone therapy to popularize "polymorphous perversity";
{{Barrington Moore, Jr.}}, later a philosophy professor who would
co-author a book with Marcuse; {{Gregory Bateson}}, the husband
of anthropologist {{Margaret Mead}} (who wrote for the Frankfurt
School's journal), and {{Arthur Schlesinger}}, the historian who
joined the Kennedy Administration.
Marcuse's first assignment was to head a team to identify
both those who would be tried as war criminals after the war, and
also those who were potential leaders of postwar Germany. In
1944, Marcuse, Neumann, and Kirchheimer wrote the {Denazification
Guide}, which was later issued to officers of the U.S. Armed
Forces occupying Germany, to help them identify and suppress
pro-Nazi behaviors. After the armistice, the R&A Branch sent
representatives to work as intelligence liaisons with the various
occupying powers; Marcuse was assigned the U.S. Zone, Kirchheimer
the French, and Barrington Moore the Soviet. In the summer of
1945, Neumann left to become chief of research for the Nuremburg
Tribunal. Marcuse remained in and around U.S. intelligence into
the early 1950's, rising to the chief of the Central European
Branch of the State Department's Office of Intelligence Research,
an office formally charged with "planning and implementing a
program of positive-intelligence research ... to meet the
intelligence requirements of the Central Intelligence Agency and
other authorized agencies."
.
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