Advertising
THE MANUFACTURE OF WANTING
The Baha'i Faith in North America expanded and consolidated in an advertising age. By the 1890s when the first Baha'is taught in Illinois, advertising had been part of the American way of life for thirty years, since at least the Civil War: 1861-1864. The approach of Christian evangelists, with their emphasis on redemption and the experience of grace, was transferred subtly and not-so-subtlety to the advertising world and its method of sale of patent medicines in the 1870s and 1880s. In the first three decades that the Baha'i Faith expanded in the USA, 1894 to 1924, the population of the USA expanded by twenty-five percent each year. This population was exposed to the magical promises and the philosophy of modern advertising.
By the time the first teaching Plan began in 1937 the golden age of radio had arrived and advertising found a new home in this medium. The same was true of TV where, after WW2, television brought advertising's pictures right into people's homes. In the late 1950s and 1960s advertising moved away from a conformist,sclerotic, mode, some would say military style and tone, to a reliance on the techniques of surprise, cleverness and creativity. The year I became a Baha'i, for example, in 1959, the Volkswagon Company developed an advertising campaign based around 'The Bug.' -Ron Price with thanks to ABC Radio National, "A History of Advertising," 1:00-2:00 pm, 2 August 2001.
Was He trying to block the air-waves,
trying to fog-up their oral/visual worlds,
trying to make it as difficult as possible
for them to get at all near, even close to,
this Most Great Ocean?
An increasingly dark incoherence
spoke across the American landscape,
advertising's endless jingle-jangle
told them again and again
the source of their current disturbances
could be found in the lack
of an equal distribution of wealth
and of indoor plumbing.
Was He simply giving them
ways of learning about
this Great River of Life:
millions of papers,
sounds floating through the air,
pictures right in their noses?
Yes, yes, but what a jungle
of sensation and triviality,
evanescence and idiocy:
the manufacture of wanting
everything but the Voice of Him
Who is the most manifest of the manifest
and the most hidden of the hidden.1
1 Baha'u'llah, Baha'i Prayers, USA, 1985, p.143.
Ron Price
2 August 2001
SINCERITY AND ADVERTISING
Advertising, by flaunting what we don’t have, is a major cause of malaise, argue some social scientists. Some of the most vivid examples come from the research at Duke University’s Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing. Recurrent pitches, for example, have insidious effects: “By saturating the public domain with false sincerity, advertising makes genuine sincerity more difficult.” The hype, the endless play to enthusiasm, brightness and a kind of chirpy interpersonal style, has an affect on social relations often injecting a false enthusiasm into relationships between people, an enthusiasm which is not real. Affluence and the capacity to buy things, some studies have now shown, breeds impatience,” More modest degrees of wealth fostered reciprocity and commitment. Modern marriages are like products purchased at a mall: turn them in if they don’t work out. Using statistics from Nigeria and Lebanon, studies have now shown a link between low incomes and family bonds.
MY LIFE WITH THE PRODUCTS OF THE PRINT AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA
Given the quantity of time in my life in which I have absorbed products from the print and electronic media: films and televisions, radios and newspapers, musak and hi-fi systems, casette tapes and videos, CDs and VCRs, DVDs and on and on goes the litany of sources---I would guesstimate a minimum of one-eighth of all the hours of my life and, perhaps, as much as a quarter---they really deserve a separate study of their own. At this website I give them that study within the limitations of space. This site has some 300 megabites of data and, if I pay more money, I can get another 100 megabites. Perhaps I will in the eighth decade of my life:2014-2024 as I feel the need to expand this site---should my readership grow.
When one sleeps for 8 hours a day that only leaves 16 for other activities: 1/8th of those 16 hours is just 2 hours a day and 1/4 is 4 hours a day. Looking as far back as 1948 and my first memories--I see my guesstimation of 2 to 4 hours on average every day being occupied with these mediums for more than 60 years as a reasonable assessment. Film and video, radio and TV seem to have taken over from the written word in the form of books and journal articles, newspapers and magazines and what might be called serious reading as the preferred narrative and analytical vehicle of our time in most people's lives whom I meet on a monthly basis. Still, I spend much of my own time with the written word, on average 6 to 8 hours most days and many of those I interact with on the internet are in this same category.
The movies I have seen are entertaining but not real. They are what some theorists call secondary reality. They are surreal, hyperreal, colourful, stimulating, but not life as I live it. The various forms of art are not life; they imitate life; they analyse life; they are things to occupy our time in the context of our life. What I am writing about here raises the question: "what is life?" The reality of life, as I say in many places at this site, is thought. This idea is strongly influenced by a verse in the Bible from the Book of Proverbs chapter 23 verse 7, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” The full passage, taken from the King James Version, is as follows: "Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats: For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee. The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words."
THE SEMBLANCE OF REALITY
Consequently, I am plunged into and forged by a sea of signifiers which, while stimulating my sensory and intellectual emporium, ultimately signify something approaching nothing. So much of life is like a vapour in the desert which the thirsty dreams to be water but, when he comes upon it and tries to drink of it, he finds it to be mere illusion. I am conscious of body image, but I get little sense of identity, little that I am aware of anyway, from my body. My psyche, to the extent that it is filled with electronic media products, is a void because that environment of media seems, as I gaze back on its consumption over nearly 70 years, like an abyss. My inner life, my inner world of thought and feeling, my inner narration, my inner introspection, which is created in part by that outer world, is---as Socrates said some 2500 years ago---what is worth living. For it is the examined life. The stuff on the outside of life must be sifted through the matrix of inner thought to find out if what is taking place there is "worth living and doing." So much of it, this outside stuff is, although entertaining and occupies our time pleasantly, is like that vapour in the dsert which only looks like water, but is, in reality, depleted of significance and depth. I do not measure my life in terms of movies consumed, documentaries viewed, clothes and food purchased, although they are all part of my external life. They bring pleasure and learning, but they do not represent landmarks, turning points, significations. In a strange, somewhat sad, way, they represent points, episodes in time which occupy time, and which rest my spirit and body, provide a recoup, a retank, so that I can get on with living as I define it. We each define our lives in different ways. I do not expect all those who read this to define their lives the way I do here. To each their own---to end this theme here.
LIFE AND FOOD
I’ve never had an obsession with food, but it certainly has been a central way for me to socialize with others, to comfort friends and family and strangers, as I’m sure is the case for millions of others. I don’t want to get into the hundreds of possible stories about food: my favorites, its role in my marriages and in the Baha’i community, its preparation, inter alia. As much as I enjoy food it is not my desire to occupy this narrative with the subject of food. Recently on television one can watch, in the average year should one want to, literally hundreds of programs about food. Advertising plays a big part in determing people's eating over their life-narrative and, at a future time, i will say more on that subject here.
I would, though, like to make a very general comment on that great institution 'the family meal.' The family meal could be given an essay all to itself. But I will say one or two things about it in my life. Eating together in my family died by insensible degrees in the years before I went north of Capricorn in 1982. I have memories of the family meal for some 30 years: 1952-1982. After that time TV provided the matrix, the milieux, for eating. By 2002, the nest was empty and only my wife and I ate together and it was with the television providing a strong element of the social context. By the time I was 60 I had come to prefer the TV as context for most of my meals.
THE CAFE
"When I enter a cafe," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, "the first thing I perceive are implements. Not things, not raw matter, but utensils: tables, seats, mirrors, glasses and saucers. Taken as a whole, they belong to an obvious order. The meaning of this ordering is an end---an end that is myself, or rather, the man in me, the consumer that I am. Such is the surface appearance of the human world." Sartre then went on to describe the cafe topsy-turvy.-Ron Price with thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre in The Café Irreal, Issue 20.
"When I enter a café, as I do several cafes once a month; and when I enter chemists, bakeries, hair-dressers, delis and a wide assortment of commercial and business establishments also on a monthly basis, the first thing I perceive is a very general scene, not things but some arrangement, some order, a sort of framework of colour and form--taken as a whole. The end of the exercise that entering these establishments is a part of is not myself, is not a consumer wanting to buy an item in the shop but, rather, a connection with the shop-keeper or shop-assistant in such a way that they accept from me a poster. The surface appearance of the human world, as it exists when I am putting up my posters, is like a dream, a computer game, a vapour in the desert, an illusion of material forms, through which I move and which I could describe in detail, somewhat topsy-turvy should I desire.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 November 2006
There's a topsy-turvyness to it all.
I remember the first time back in,
what was it, '64, '65 or even '66?
That's forty years of running about
from shop to shop and mail-box to
mail-box. There'll be no celebration,
no party for the 40 years, no one
will pat me on the back, but they
might think me a bit odd, curious.
One does a lot of walking and talking
going in and out, along and around.
Conversations get struck-up like the
drop of a hat and words fall like rain
all over town.....I tell you---it creates
quite a storm once a month: hundreds
of dollars worth of advertising for free.
There must be 10,000 posters & fliers
spread across two continents in the
first half century of the tenth stage
of history in which I have lived, and
moved and had my being in my young,
middle and late adulthood: a thread of
growing old & leaving traces which shall
last forever: I trust, so I believe, such is
my assumption as I pass this way-Earth.
Ron Price
29 November 2006 to 22 December 2011
ADVERTISING AND OUR PERSONAL LIFE-NARRATIVES
Writing in the mid-1990s, Smith and Watson(1) address the prevalence of personal narratives in everyday life. Advertising aims to get inside our personal narratives, to become part of our personal life stories. The products of adverting are communicated via diverse means: on the body, on the air, in music, in print and electronic media, at meetings: the venues have become multiple. While emphasizing that occasions for confessional storytelling are multiple, Smith and Watson argue that narrators create historically specific personal histories by assembling fragments of the identities and narrative forms that the culture makes available. Smith and Watson concentrate on how consumers from all strata of American culture are eager both to construct their own narratives and to learn about the life stories that other people tell. Smith and Watson argue that postmodern America is culturally obsessed with getting a life, with sharing it and advertising it to others, with consuming the lives of others.
The lives we consume from the print and electronic media and from other people we know in our personal lives, these writers argue, are translated into our own lives, into story, into some personal narrative that is our own. One of the characteristics of much of postmodern literature, and this is certainly true of this autobiographical piece I am writing here, is the complex relationship between the author and his/her main character. Readers, therefore, who want to translate this work into their own lives may find the process somewhat complex.
Smith and Watson also discuss the contrast between ‘official’ autobiographies and ‘personal’ versions that subvert or contradict the authorized versions. This enables consumers, say Smith and Watson, "to align the privatized consciousness” of autobiographers, conveyed in those narratives with the identities of those same autobiographers created and experienced in the public sphere. These disparate personal histories with their contradictions and misalignments are part of the storyteller's attempt to "get a life,” part of autobiographical narrators positioning themselves as the agents of the stories they tell. Post-modernism in its various forms developed in the last century tends to ask: "What is the point of trying to decipher the book of life when there is no longer any authorised version? Who needs to set out on life’s journey if the very idea of progress has already been shown up as a fraud? How much easier it is to select an off the identity-peg from your local cultural supermarket, than undergo the laborious task of learning a new role or writing a new script." I think we are all caught up in this movement of post-modernism. The Baha'i does have some identity-pegs to give him or her a broad framework and the notion of progress is certainly central to any authorized version of life.
THE INTEGRATION OF OUR LIFE-NARRATIVE
The canonical form of the post-modernist life story is the TV chat show or even radio interview. The subjects' achievements are briefly summarised and a few flattering and sometimes unflattering questions are asked. The personality in question takes centre stage to hold forth about their latest projects and the meaning of life in a lot of well-chosen sometimes clichéd phrases, sometimes entertaining words, sometimes quite amazing lives. This is do-it-yourself-hagiography inflated for a mass audience, with the interviewer as a willing accomplice. Even the This is Your Life programme with its genuflections towards the book of life and a bildungsroman follows essentially the same lines.
What the post-modernisers are in fact proposing is not so much life as a movie, but as a TV soap opera. In the soap opera we have a number of highly condensed narratives which develop simultaneously and are only externally and contingently related by the dramatic unities of place and time. The model points us towards a life world composed of a shifting mosaic of fragmentary selves linked by ever-changing and transient configurations of meaning. However tragic the situations or outcomes the conflicts which engender them are only temporality resolved because there is never any ending. There is no basis, no code, from which the disparate elements of a life history could be integrated, evaluated or measured, except some broad plurlaisitic and humanistic secularism. We are presented with an image of life as a series of loose ends, but only to tantalise us and tie us in knots around the expectation of a final denouement which never comes. The message at the end of every episode is simply to be continued next week. The show, like life, must go on.
FRAMING MY LIFE-NARRATIVE
There is an element of personal control that often appeals to speakers who have stories to share, but would be impossible to convey, would be considered culturally unspeakable, for a host of reasons. In the telling of unrecited and unrecitable narratives such as histories of child abuse, spouse battering, interracial marriage, homosexuality, alcoholism, mental illness, and disability, inter alia, the narrators, as witnesses, reframe what is regarded as unspeakable or simply too difficult to speak about and open up new ways to speak about their personal battles.
Autobiographical narrators, whatever their stories, often connect with others in new ways as well, especially when their stories resonate with the stories of people in a comparable and compatible group or what might be called a “community of secret knowers.” In these ways, Smith and Watson contend, narratives provide a way to intervene in postmodern life, and the narrators "can facilitate changes in the mapping of knowledge and ignorance, of what is speakable or unspeakable, of what is disclosed or masked, alienating or communally bonding.” Perhaps we need to look as closely as we can at the sheer variety of ways lives are told and lived.
The most important accomplishments, the saddest or most tragic experiences, the happiest periods in my life, the how I survived stories, the most revealing sequences, the most funny anecdotes, all of these litter the pages of autobiographies, some like trophies, some like confessionals, some to entertain. I’m not sure I could list any of my experiences in the top ten. I think what surprises me most about it all is that I am here to tell the story. What surprises me, too, because I forget its reality is that we do not have direct access to the thoughts of other people. We have to infer the working of other minds from surface phenomena such as speech, body language, behavior, and action. R. D. Laing put the point vividly: “your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience is man’s invisibility to man.” Autobiography takes down the wall of invisibility, at least partly.
(1) Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.
THE SENSE OF CERTITUDE
By the time I graduated from university in 1966 at the age of 21 I owned two LP albums. One was given to me by my mother after my father’s death in May 1965. The LP was Handel ’s Messiah. That LP was symbolic of the classical music influences from my parents in the years of my life from 1944 to 1966. The other LP I bought in the late summer of 1965 or early autumn, the first weeks of my final year at university in an honours sociology course. The album was Barrie McGuire’s The Eve of Destruction. On 25 September 1965 the song went to #1 on the charts while the LP topped at #37.
Tonight, in the last hour of the year 2007, I heard some of this song as part of an ABC TV special California Dreamin’: The Songs of the Mamas and the Papas. I got a hit of nostalgia or perhaps more accurately an excitation of the nerves, a movement, an awakening, an increase of feelings in my heart1 and so wrote this prose-poem. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV: 10:50-11:45 p.m. 31/12/’07, California Dreamin’: The Songs of the Mamas and the Papas; and 1Shoghi Effendi, Letter to an Individual Believer,” 4 November 1937 in Baha’i Writings on Music: A Compilation, Baha’i Publishing Trust, Oakham, England.
All these songs lingered
on the edges of my life
and even penetrated into
the core from time to time
from those halcyon days
of the fifties to the seventies.
Clive James and Peter Porter, in their discussion of 'books of the forties and fifties,’ talked about music, classical and other, taking over from literature in the last half of the twentieth century in providing that sense of certitude, although irrational and essentially appealing to the emotions, that people felt a need for in their lives. Among the many topics they talked about relevant to music and poetry--my own interests--was the decline of ideology after WW2 and into the 1950s as well as the role that Alexander Solzenitsyn's books played in the fifties, sixties and seventies in providing an important ingredient in the residue of ideology insofar as the Left was concerned, as fascism had done insofar as the Right was concerned in the two previous decades.
A reservoir of skepticism in the west, and especially in England, returned the centre of poetry to the individual and away from its expression and interest in the general society in those same years. I have often thought with some other analysts of poetry that advertising and sociology became in the post-WW2 period new forms of poetry. -Ron Price with thanks to "Clive James and Peter Porter," Sunday Special, ABC Radio, 5:30-6:00 p.m., 2 December, 2001.
As ideology wound down in the fifties,
the sixties and seventies, we began to
grow and grow all over, unobtrusively.
So it is that I've spent my adult life
with people who have no ideology,
plenty of convictions and passionate
intensity all too much of it, but no
ideological centre—the centre did
not hold and that mere anarchy was
loosed upon the land as well as that
blood-dimmed tide drowning that1
ceremony of innocence, if innocence
it was, if innocence it be, back then.
People made homes for their minds—
reading novels, listening to music,
watching TV, working in the garden,
absolutely no interest in going to meetings--
except to learn macrame, lead lighting and--
inevitable work-associated special planning
sessions at 8 p.m. or 8 am or noon instead of
lunch--or a new course, or something at uni,
or a movie, or a volunteer job where ideology
was not desired, contemplated or required.
For ideology did not grab anyone anymore
and religious ideology became the no-no
among no-no's--amidst endless subjectivity.
Superficial and not-so-superficial pragmatism
had made everyone into practical realists,
enjoying as far as they were able the complex
juxtapositions of pleasures and disenchantments
thrown up on the shore of their life-worlds.
And slowly, yes slowly, a new ideology,
a new dogma, grew until it came to manifest
an attractive form, a gentle beauty all around
the world with holy dust at the centre--and
a slow greening of people from that desolate
garden of arid and unholy disenchantment.2
1 From a poem by W. B. Yeats quoted in thousands of places.
2 The Baha'i Faith spread slowly, unobtrusively around the world as Barry McGuire and The Mamas and the Papas grew to young adulthood and finally into old age. Music helped, as Peter Porter and Clive James pointed out above in their discussion. I immensely enjoyed these musical artists; they enriched my centre—but they, nor music as an art form, were never the centre. Music, it seems to me, is essentially non-ideological. Of course, it can be used by ideology for its purposes and has been for millennia.
Ron Price
2 December 2001
Updated 1/1/08.
FOUR BOOKS IN FOUR EPOCHS: ALL IN 1962.
The year I began my travelling-pioneering life and the year before I took my first course in sociology with its complex theories----sociologist and culture theorist, Jürgen Habermas published his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere(1962). Habermas was, then, a student of the Frankfurt School of Social Research-which since the 1930s had been advancing a Marxist critique of western capitalism and its discontents. Habermas wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) to explore the status of public opinion in the practice of representative government in Western Europe. Habermas defined the public sphere as a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space. In its ideal form, the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state.” -Ron Price with appreciation to Jurgen Habermas, op.cit., p.176.
Through acts of assembly and dialogue, the public sphere generates opinions and attitudes which serve to affirm or challenge and, therefore to guide, the affairs of state. In ideal terms, the public sphere is the source of public opinion needed to "legitimate authority in any functioning democracy" -Ron Price with thanks to Paul Rutherford, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Good, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2000, p.18.
1962 WAS A BIG YEAR
In that same year, 1962, I was 18 and my family moved to a nearby town. I did my matriculation studies and Jacques Ellul echoed Habermas' concern in his Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes(1962). Ellul's term "the propaganda of integration" included biased newscasts, misinformation and political education which worked over time to shape the individual to suit the needs of social mechanisms. Ellul argued that propaganda is necessary in a democracy, even though it can create zombies of its citizens. "Propaganda is needed in the exercise of power for the simple reason that the masses have come to participate in political affairs."
In 1962 Herbert Marcuse was finishing his One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. This book analyzed the new "voice of command" used by managers, educators, experts, and politicians. This style of address, appropriated from advertising, had a hypnotic effect, argued Marcuse. The syntax of this speech and writing is abridged and condensed, giving the language more directness and assertiveness; it uses an emphatic concreteness, constant use of "you" and "your," and endlessly repeats images to fix them in people's minds. This style of rhetoric in Marcuse's terms creates the "one-dimensional" citizen, incapable of protest or refusal. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 7th 2006.
