Assignment: Social Marketing Assignment
LDE299
Chapter1Advertisingawayoflife.pdf
Chapter 1
Advertising – a way of life
Tony Purvis
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Don Draper: Th is is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes? Lee Garner, Jr.: I don’t know. Lee Garner, Sr.: Shame on you. We breed insect repellent tobacco seeds, plant them in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it … Don Draper: Th ere you go. Th ere you go. [Writes on chalkboard and underlines: ‘IT’S TOASTED.’] Lee Garner, Jr.: But everybody’s else’s tobacco is toasted. Don Draper: No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike’s … is toasted. Roger: Well, gentlemen, I don’t think I have to tell you what you just witnessed here. Lee Garner, Jr.: I think you do. Don Draper: Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK. Lee Garner, Sr.: It’s toasted. [Smiles] Lee Garner, Sr.: I get it.
(From: Mad Men (AMC, Lionsgate Television), Season 1, Episode 1 (July, 2007))
Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start. To grow up in that country was to see the shape of a culture, and its modes of change. I could stand on the mountains and look north to the farms and the cathedral, or south to the smoke and the fl are of the blast furnace making a second sunset. To grow up in that family was to see the shaping of minds: the learning of new skills, the shift ing of relationships, the emergence of diff erent language and ideas. … Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. Th e making of a society is the fi nding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.
(Raymond Williams ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Highmore 2002: 92)
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Advertising as Culture
16
Reading culture
Mad Men (2007–)1 is a television drama whose characters people a culture in which every aspect of that culture is read in symbolic ways. Don Draper, lead character in the series, knows that the PR/advertising fi rm Sterling Cooper, if it is to produce eff ective readings of culture via its advertisements, must make the ordinary and mundane seem extraordinary and magical. It does this via a promise of happiness, something Draper himself has yet to fi nd. But Draper knows he needs to make a living. He knows, too, that the ‘mad men’ with whom he works are part of the same culture, the one in which the freedom and consumer choice promised in the advertisements make sense only against the backdrop of capitalism’s production of oppression and dissensus. Whilst most people do live very ordinary lives, the series exposes how the oppression of some groups, most notably those on low incomes, but also women and African-Americans, experience the culture in ways which throw a clearer light on the actual realities of consumer-capitalism’s fantasies of freedom and choice. Nonetheless, Draper’s own life is ordinary; and he is believable because his ordinariness is shared by those others whose stories are told in Mad Men’s narrativisation of the 1960s.
Williams’ observation, that culture is ordinary, is one which refers to the same period as Mad Men. Indeed, his work during this period is written in an attempt to both celebrate this ordinariness and critique the social divisions (based on social class, income distribution, and access to education and housing) which capitalism wrought. Th e 1950s and 1960s were decades in capitalist history that saw consumerism and advertising become more dominant than in all the previous decades of the twentieth century (Fox and Lears 1983). But they are also decades when the wealth and glamour imagined in advertising is also matched by enormous poverty and social inequality. If the identity of the consumer is one which seems universal, so too are the eff ects of a free market which ensures that happiness is not quite so universal. Mad Men invites us to re-read the symbolic spaces of culture and to visualise the ordinary and the obvious as the very sites in which happiness and oppression are lived on a daily basis. Williams’ view of culture also asks us to think about the symbolic dimensions of our lives in a new way. His reading is one which sees in the activities of everyday life the kernel of community. ‘Culture for Williams is not, or should not be, what separates people, but what joins them in community. Culture is not for the discerning few, but for the many. It is characterized by aesthetic and intellectual scarcity only in its alienated, elitist forms’ (Brantlinger 1991: 77).
Th is chapter will examine the ways in which culture, principally in Europe and America, though increasingly Asia and China, continues to be shaped in relation to advertising and advertisements. Central to this discussion is the theory and practice of reading culture. Here, the noun is not intended to signify an activity which is reserved for a privileged few who, equipped with a specifi c education and learning in (high) Culture, thereby possess greater insights into everyday life. Nor does it make assumptions about literacy where the term refers to the teaching of reading and writing in schools or literacy classes. Nor, indeed, is reading necessarily concerned with learning specifi c theories and
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methods by which to read media texts, as sometimes occurs in undergraduate courses dealing with structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics or fi lm analysis. By suggesting that culture can be read, however, the chapter is also proposing that culture is legible but not in ideologically transparent or politically neutral ways. Rather, reading is here used in the sense Paulo Freire deploys the term in his analysis of oppression, and it denotes reading as a critical activity which is always alert to culture’s political and ideological dimensions. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) outlines his call for cultural activism grounded in such reading, and it grows out of his experiences working with the poor on literacy programmes in Brazil.
Freire’s critique proposes that capitalism’s economic inequalities, which are reproduced in the shape of division and oppression, are made credible because of the way they are legitimised and made to appear tolerable. Reality which becomes oppressive, he argues, ‘results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed. Th e latter … must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it … Functionally, oppression is domesticating’ (Freire 1972: 27–8). Commenting on the naturalisation of domestic culture via popular media and advertising, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies ([1957] 2000) is one of the fi rst major analyses to consider how oppression becomes legitimised in culture. It is not his claims in the name of structuralist methodology which are signifi cant in Mythologies so much as the instances, the settings and routine activities Barthes actually chooses in his reading of culture. Because palpably obvious, and thus oft en ignored, his own ‘starting point’ is the ‘falsely obvious’ and ‘a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which [media] dress up a reality’(11).
Barthes, like Williams, does not bequeath a theoretical method by which students should read texts so much as he brings to the foreground the oppressive, paradoxically pleasurable dimensions of everyday life dressed up by the mass media. Raymond Williams in ‘Advertising: Th e Magic System’ (1980; fi rst written in 1961) shows how the ‘magic system’ of advertising and its glamour can make us overlook the toil and suff ering entailed in all production. When history can pass as nature, assisted by the credible ordinariness of advertisements, and when routines and practices are habituated, so oppression can be legitimised without too much displeasure and remain unaltered. Th e legitimisation process, argues Freire, where oppression is domesticated, is oft en achieved via pedagogy, as opposed to propaganda (1972: 41–44), and usually through the form and content of education but additionally in the culture’s ways of transmitting information (1972: 45–59). Consumer-driven economies use advertising and product branding (Klein 2000) to transmit information in order to manipulate and infl uence demand (and thus the fl ow of money), though it is the impact of schooling which fi rst interests Freire. Focusing on the form and transmission of culture, rather than being overly concerned with its fi nal defi nition, is one of his most important contributions to cultural theory. However, concise summaries of culture and advertising will be useful in this initial mapping.
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Way of life: culture and advertising?
Both terms, whilst open to theoretical contention and dispute, can be summarised with relative ease. Richard Hoggart (1957), Williams (1958; 1961), and more recently Terry Eagleton (2000; 2011), working within the trajectory established by Williams, see culture as a whole way of life. Culture is universal; and although specifi c ways of life are marked by distinct beliefs and values, culture’s universality resides in its closeness to the everyday life (Gardener 2000; Highmore 2010; Sheringham 2006). Yet advertising, too, is arguably universal, close to everyday life, laden with values and ideologies, something brought poignantly to the fore in AMC’ s Mad Men. ‘I give you money, you give me ideas’, advises series lead character Don Draper (Series 4, Episode 7). Here is how the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (the UK’s lead industry-professional body) similarly describe their identity fi ft y years on from Don Draper: ‘Advertising presents the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects for the product or service at the lowest possible cost’ (Gordon 2011: 24–25). It is a defi nition which more exactly appropriates advertising’s impersonality in today’s culture, and one which moves away from the more innocently conceived notion that defi nes advertising as notifi cation, warning and information.
Th e two terms, then, if left to common sense, pass unnoticed. Viewed, however, in the context of oppression, culture as ‘way of life’ is something for which people are prepared to die (e.g. the ‘troubles’ in Iraq and in Afghanistan have been constructed in the media as cultural (Lewis 2005; Miller 2004); and historically, it is advertising, deployed as an apparatus of the state, which has recruited large numbers via an interpellation addressed on behalf of a country (‘We’) which really needs ‘You’. (A recent example of how this ‘we/you’ interpellation, via images and voice-over, is the recruitment video for the Swedish Army: http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/realistic-swedish-army-recruitment-ad).
Culture’s universality, oft en because of mass media, is today experienced in local ways before it is realised geographically or transnationally. Advertising, moreover, is not so much a system used in order to inform or provide notice as it is origin and source of information per se, something which, as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 shows, disturbingly legitimises warfare. People wage war in culture; yet advertising is so inescapably linked to the domain of the political economy as to be in a more uncannily magical position of infl uence and determination than Williams conceived in his important critique of advertising in 1961.
It was during the 1960s and 1970s that defi nitions of and relations between culture and advertising were being considered in some detail. Although the work of F. R. Leavis (Leavis and Th ompson 1942), and Horkheimer and Adorno (1947), had earlier added to the competing theories of culture and advertising, it was the sheer size of the advertising industry from the 1950s that propelled critical attention. It is also during this period that culture is ambivalently conceived as problem (and thus as cause of modernity’s moral decline), and solution (where it is imagined as a way of achieving modernity) (Eagleton 2000). Th omas Merton, Roman Catholic monk and social critic, comments on advertising’s power under
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capitalism and captures something of its contradictory sacred-secular status, comparing it to transubstantiation. In the way that the bread and wine during the mass are transformed, becoming for the faithful ‘the body and blood of Christ’, so it is with advertising. Merton contends that advertising ‘treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments’ (Merton [1965] 2009: 232). His comments are insightful and draw attention to form and content together, central also to the work of Marshall McLuhan (1964) and also Freire. Merton writes how the form and content of technological innovation, something which is potentially ‘de-humanising and destructive’ (Hall 2011: 34), serve to alienate people ‘while at the same time summoning them to cooperate in the work of their own alienation. Th e machinery of alienation is then tightened up, and social control becomes more and more arbitrary’ (Merton, op. cit.: 257).
Vance Packard’s Th e Hidden Persuaders (1957) makes similar claims, and it becomes seminal in the emerging anti-advertisement discourse which infl uenced American cultural criticism during the 1960s. Some of Packard’s account is retraced in Ivan Preston’s Th e Great American Blow-Up: Puff ery in Advertising (1975) which examines how the exaggerated and deceptive content of some advertisements is received in American law and the litigation culture which ensues. More recently, Rosemary Hennessy’s Profi t and Pleasure (2000) adds to the corpus of work which critiques media, culture and advertising. She examines particularly the strategies of visibility and visualisation at work in advertising and consumer culture and which, in Hennessy’s analysis, operate as forms of oppression. She comments how we read, see and perceive is ‘historically produced cultural knowledge’ (95) and that how we read and see should not be severed from the ‘social relationships of labor and power commodity capitalism is premised on’.
Across much of this criticism, Hennessy rightly comments that Williams’ own reading of culture remains seminal. Culture is common and its materiality is ‘ordinary’, Williams contends. It is, suggests Eagleton, important to us in similar ways to ‘personal dignity and security, [and] freedom from pain, suff ering and oppression’ (2000: 100). Williams and Eagleton stress culture’s earthiness and the sense of belonging people have to the land and to each other. ‘Culture is something we live for’, something associated with ‘aff ection, relationship, memory, kinship, place’ (Eagleton 2000: 131). Williams and Eagleton are of course alert to the qualitative and aesthetic judgements which have beset discussion of culture and which has oft en been heavily infl ected by Matthew Arnold’s discussion of culture, civilisation and anarchy (Arnold [1869] 1960). Eagleton retraces how ‘Culture’ has been perceived as an answer and mass culture as a problem. Associated with permissiveness and anarchy, popular-media culture is read in terms of its defi cit status, and a return to ‘Culture’ (more closely aligned with Western-European Civilisation) is the way out of the mess associated with modernity and, today, postmodernity. Historically associated with Leavis, whose specifi c contribution is frequently misrepresented, the popular culture-as-defi cit legacy is alive and well. Th e hugely popular American drama from the 1980s, Little House on the Prairie (1974–83, NBC; and since 2008, rerun by the Christian-based network CTS), exemplifi es how the past is recast as more civilised than America’s postmodern, fractured
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present. Two popular dramatisations with a more nuanced logic of past-present informing their narratives, and which directly reference advertising, are to be found in Channel 4’s (UK) series Shameless (2004–) and AMC’s Mad Men (2007–), which is explored in more detail later in the chapter. Advertising, moreover, is itself alert to the power of old- and new-world imagery in its campaigns. ‘Even the word “new” is charged with extra meaning: however well your old widget performs, a new one MUST be even better! [Advertisements] take great delight in saluting retrofuturism’s undeniably appealing sense of style’ (see http:// weburbanist.com/2009/03/29/retrofuturistic-ads-selling-a-brighter-tomorrow/).
Reading the words and worlds of culture and advertising: Paulo Freire
A way of life is bigger and richer than the culture/civilisation bifurcation above might suggest. If we consider ‘political’ activism during the last thirty years, then it is clear that much of this has been ‘cultural’ in focus. During 2011, so-called pro-democracy movements across North Africa have drawn attention to culture, and not the economy, in the fi ght against oppressive regimes. Since the 1940s, critics such as Adorno, Leavis, Williams and Freire highlight culture’s pivotal role in eff ecting change; and media technologies of the last ten years have amplifi ed how this change is communicated transculturally (Lewis 2005, 2008). Whilst the economy is central in determining the material conditions in which culture is lived, nonetheless, struggle is oft en waged in the name of cultural identity (ethnicity, gender, religious faith, and national identity). In Freire’s logic, culture’s complexity is actually its very ordinariness; and the ordinary, because obvious, is oft en, as Barthes argues, elided or dismissed. Freire’s demand that approaches to, and forms of, cultural literacy be organised in democratic, collective ways (1972: 135–40), is all the more signifi cant because of his own commitment to pedagogy and his desire to work with others in speaking out against oppression. He underscores a commitment to forms of critical literacy, where education might promote readings of culture which facilitate cultural transformation. In that sense, he shares much in common with Williams and Eagleton as well as elements of Slavoj Žižek’s recent work (2008, 2009, 2011; see also Žižek’s endorsement of critical work by Freire, in McLaren 2000, McLaren et al. 2010).
Freire does not propose a particular theory or vocabulary which can then be applied to texts. His notion of ‘banking’ off ers an alternative route of analysis and considers why education constructs learners who accept rather than challenge subjectivity. Under this system, knowledge, Freire argues, underpins existing inequalities in a culture which is less open to democratic reform. People and institutions entrusted with education deposit information, but this services on-going oppression (learners are constructed around defi ciency) as opposed to critical refl ection. Knowledge, Freire argues, perpetuates structural inequalities and culture remains unchanged. Today’s notion of ‘agency’, ‘audience’ research’, ‘media consumer’ and related keywords in some ‘populist’ cultural studies (McGuigan 2011), similarly replicate the discourse of advertising. Agency is restored once a product is
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purchased. However, such a model similarly replicates the very discourse which legitimises defi ciency. Freire challenges this kind of ‘schooling’ approach, arguing that it ultimately dehumanises educators and educated alike. ‘Th e capacity of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors. … Th e oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profi table situation’ (Freire 1972: 47).
Th e impact of the oppression which Freire describes is more widespread than his own experiences in Brazil. ‘Cultural literacy’ too oft en bolsters a singular narrative whose modes of intelligibility ensure the dominant culture is ‘common’ (as in widespread) but not commonly owned; and consent is achieved via a tactical use of offi cial culture in education. Freire suggests, however, that no one is culturally illiterate or deprived, and nor are citizens dispossessed of a culture. To the extent that literacy and cultural literacy are also concerned with the everyday practice of making sense of social relations, so forms of literacy which remain in the service of ‘powerful groups’ (similar to Žižek’s argument about ‘leadership’ ([2010] 2011)), are always more suited to preserving the basic inequality of capitalism. Asking questions about how media consumers ‘use’ television, or how advertisements are encoded in relation to personal identity, fails to interrogate the legitimacy of the very media form and content being transmitted in the fi rst instance. Th e promise of agency remains deferred and, in the words of McGuigan, ‘cultural analysis remains one-dimensional’ and capitalism remains ‘cool’ (2011: 11). Whilst citizens are taught to read and write, continued subjectivity is guaranteed if access to the sources of power and cultural self-determination remain mysteriously inaccessible. ‘It is impossible to understand literacy … by divorcing the reading of the word from the reading of the world, that is, having the experience of changing the world’ (Freire 1987: 49). Freire’s concept of reading signifi es an approach to culture which does not view citizens as ‘adaptable or manageable beings’ (1972: 47); people are not ‘illiterate’ in the conventional sense, but are discouraged, sometimes prevented, from developing a ‘critical consciousness’ of the culture.
Žižek’s ([2010] 2011) very recent analysis of capitalism, including advertising, as well as the spaces of capitalism which provide pleasure (he appropriates Jacques Lacan’s notions of the symptom and jouissance), makes comparable observations to those of Freire. Žižek suggests that there are no inherent problems or pleasures with culture and that, in fact, the problems are ones which require a reading of oppression through an analysis of capitalism’s leadership. Recasting the words of Saint Paul, Žižek states that cultural struggle ‘is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystifi cation which sustains it’ (2011: xv). Th e ideological mystifi cation to which Žižek refers is compounded by media and advertising under capitalism, and he provides a close analysis of China’s economy. Such mystifi cation is referred to as advertising’s magic by Williams, and his observations over the later sections of ‘Advertising: Th e Magic System’ ([1961] 1980) are prescient. It is not advertising’s potential for vulgarity or indecency which bothers Williams or Žižek; and both caution against criticism based on aesthetics and decoding of signs. Williams in particular underlines his concerns
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about forms of criticism which stress consumption and consumer identity. Emphasis on the latter is ultimately an endorsement of the culture of the market as opposed to a critique of a system whose logic insists on ‘consumers’, an identity solely constructed for the purposes of the market and not the culture. Rather (and the parallels with Freire and Žižek are to be underlined), it is advertising’s cultural power over the manipulation and distribution of goods and services which needs to be addressed. ‘An out-dated and ineffi cient kind of information about goods and services has been surpassed by the competitive needs of the corporations, and these increasingly demand not a sector, but a world’ (1980: 195).
Th e problems Williams imagines in his essay uncannily resemble today’s global capitalism. Globalisation, and particularly global media and advertising, what Taylor and Harris call the mediascape (2008), mean that engagements with, and interventions in contemporary culture occur in relation to mass-media technologies and representations (Taylor 2010: 91–119). Although access to technologies remains unequal, most people do not live outside of the global culture which advertising and PR companies display in advertisements. It is to be recalled that Barthes’s analysis of mystifi cation is by way of a critical engagement with the obvious. Th e mystifi cation to which Žižek alludes is one which is also packaged in the very obvious ‘face-to-face’ formats of new-digital media and popular culture ([2010] 2011: 342–352). For instance, the media’s uncovering of a scandal, as Žižek emphasises, does not bring to an end the ‘upbeat message’ ([2010] 2011: 408). He shows how advertising’s cheerful constructions of the world blur the actual facts so that fi ction can easily displace the truth. As a consequence, appraisal of the truth of the facts becomes diffi cult.
Culture, happiness and personal dignity
Th e preceding arguments become all the more important if, in reading culture and advertising, oppression can be challenged. Th e power of media and advertising is not to be underestimated. Merton, foreshadowing more recent criticism, captures something of the infl uence media images and advertising exercise over thinking and behaviour.
We need to recover the belief that it is worthwhile and possible to break through the state of massive inertia and delusion created by the repetition of statements and slogans without meaning … Th e arbitrary, fi ctitious and absurd mentality – refl ected in its advertising and entertainment particularly – must be recognized as an aff ront to man’s personal dignity.
(Merton, op. cit.: 257)
Merton’s bringing together of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘advertising’ in a discussion about human dignity, also invites a consideration of a more problematic equation: advertising is culture to the extent that advertisements refl ect a way of life; yet culture is itself a form of advertising, promoted and represented in the form of identities, language communities, physical spaces, and textual arrangements. Culture does not require advertising or
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advertisements. Nonetheless, all social relations are shaped in cultures marked prominently, if not inescapably, by advertisements, something explored satirically and sensitively in AMC’s Mad Men. In the series, Sterling Cooper is driven by practice (how to do good ads), and theory (how to do better ads). Th e theory and the practice combine in the production of the advertisement itself. Th e drama shows how companies involved in PR, advertising and allied industries are peopled by workers whose lives are shaped around the very fi ctions produced in the advertising industry where people earn a living. Outside of the offi ce, characters re-emerge as the very consumers who live with the myth of agency they helped to construct in the fi rm’s division of labour. In the workplace, the division of labour and people in the production line means some workers have greater agency than others; and in the division of consumption, income diff erentials mean that some workers have far less agency than others. Advertising, however, is ever-present, and its symbolic dimensions are rarely questioned unless the market fails.
Advertising’s own textual arrangements, alongside its methods, grammar, and eff ects continue to be scrutinised in media and cultural studies. However, advertising and PR companies have themselves benefi tted from media theory’s own engagement with audience research and textual analysis. In the gathering of data, PR fi rms ensure that the illusion of agency is foregrounded in all campaigns (Gordon 2011: 132–155). Indeed, PR and advertising fi rms encourage more critical applications of media theory than many media studies courses, showing how the frameworks which have provided media studies with a disciplinary, academic identity can be re-deployed in order to keep the advertising and PR industry ahead of the critical fi eld and also very profi table (Gordon 2011: 27–97). Despite the contribution of media theory to the analysis of culture, advertisements and brands are aff ected by the interventions of media theory only when the theory can make the brand sell with greater ease. If this were not the case, advertising and advertisements would cease to persuade in the way they do today. Arguably, what is referred to as ‘audience studies’ helps advertising to operate even more successfully in that it provides the very critique upon which PR fi rms rely in the construction of the market.
Th e language and eff ects of advertisements, whilst they might seem intimate, addressed to a ‘you’ and a ‘me’ via the discourses of representation, consumption and identity (du Gay et al. 1996; Mackay 1997), are ultimately impersonal and inhuman to the extent that advertising industries care little about personal eff ects (or aff ects) so long as products achieve sales. Whilst advertisements provide the illusion of agency, the illusion is eff ective precisely because the impersonal, commanding power of the economy has been provisionally displaced in order that the ‘person’ might seem more important than the mass-produced images in which s/he is interpellated. Th e brand, constructed as the object which will bridge the gap between the subject who lacks and the new way of life promised in the advertisement, will ensure the subject’s life will be sans manqué. Mad Men shows that whichever way audiences fi nally decode or re-encode the message, in the sphere of the market, meaning is paramount only if sales fail. Advertising tells us that we lack objects/brands which can make us and the culture ‘whole’. Desire is satisfi ed on the basis of a belief that the purchase of an object (which we lack)
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will make us complete. Advertisements, for example, promoting cars, holidays, cosmetic surgery, or a second home, aim to sell products to subjects who are encouraged to believe that, with the product, life will never be the same.
Th e myths and promises of advertising, the selling of identities, and the construction of corporate, alternative or indeed resistant subcultures through advertising, make sense inside the capitalist economy and which advertising promotes. Th ere is no inside/outside culture in capitalism, as Mad Men clearly exposes, and arguments about agency and autonomy make sense inside capitalism itself. To examine advertising is to examine culture. However, it is to examine a way of life from the perspective of the images and texts of a system which, whilst it remains fundamentally economic in its determination, is nonetheless imagined in the domains of identity and way of life.
Mad men, mad world?
Th ese two spheres, of identity and way of life, are central to Mad Men’s narrative.
Vinyl upholstery and mirrored walls, but brand new. It’s aft er work, but the women have their hair done and each man’s tie is pushed to the top of his collar. Highballs and martinis clink under quiet music and everywhere are the sights and sounds of smoking.
(Source: Set directions: Mad Men, Series One: Episode 1)
In the series, Sterling Cooper’s campaigns and advertisements are built around a cultural imaginary external to the offi ce where the ‘martinis clink’ and where it all seems ‘brand new’. Th is space is conceived as universal (everyone shares the culture), and as goal-driven (people get on with each in the cause of the ‘American Dream’). Th e narrative is textured by the myth of a unifying national history where people are brought together around common cultural values. Th ese American values, however, are subsequently passed off as universal. Th e set directions from Series One, Episode 1, construct this world with such obviousness that in the watching of the drama, the obvious – precisely that which is most ideological – is easily bypassed. Again, the set directions arrange this world with some clarity.
Images and sounds from late 1950’s and early 60’s advertising: Doctors selling cigarettes. Athletes selling liquor. Bathing suit models with vacuum cleaners. And most importantly, proud Dads with their perfect wives and children driving their cars to some green suburban utopia. We get a sense of the time and its ideals.
(Source: Set directions: Mad Men, Series One: Episode 1; opening set)
Th is period, described as one most typifying the ‘culture of consumption’ (see Fox and Lears 1983), is also one marked by civil rights, anti-war demonstrations, feminism, class politics in the form of trade unionism, and countercultures. Whilst the drama might appear to
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consign the ‘reality’ of these historical-political spheres to Mad Men’s extra-textual margins, they are never absent and serve always to highlight the individualism which capitalism’s advertising industry helps create and exploit during the 1960s. Th e dyadic focus of the series is fi rstly on advertising as an industry and the concomitant generation of ‘belief in the business’ in order to survive; and secondly on the advertisements themselves, whose fi ctions of happiness require another set of beliefs. Th e latter beliefs become acts of faith, and are converted into sales returns once consumers buy the product, promoted as the object of desire in the advertisement. At the same time, increased sales make sure Sterling Cooper’s profi tability and viability are maintained. Th e advertisements and images make sense in a culture where the mediascape is built on advertising fl ow. All advertisements attempt to promote sales on the basis of representations (Gordon 2011: 24–27) or ‘image speak’ (Schutzman 1999: 12). Such images re-confi gure the culture in the shape of the object of desire (an imaginary future is a one in which the product is owned), simultaneously promising contentment in the present (Bennett 2005a, 2005b). Th e advertisement is a text of culture yet it is one which promotes the sale of a product and a particular way of life.
Th e promotion of a way of life and a brand is something which companies today have exploited in the name of (so-called) green- and eco-cultures, the Innocent drinks company being a recent example of such ethical narratives (Simmons 2008: 11–29). Žižek, citing a full-page Starbucks advertisement from USA Today (4 May 2009, p. A9) argues that the ‘buying into a coff ee ethic’ is an ‘exemplary case of “cultural capitalism”’ (2009: 53). Within that ‘cultural’ logic, the metaphor ‘adverting is culture’ would appear to make complete sense. However, advertising seeks additionally to legitimise both the act of purchase and the object. As a consequence, the consumption of the text and the product appear necessary and thus ‘natural’. In Mad Men, to use the earlier argument of Barthes’s, ‘newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history’ (op cit: 11). Th e more successful the representation, the more the object, and the activities surrounding its ownership (browsing, shopping, purchasing and self-identifying), are accorded the status of nature as opposed to history. On the basis of a purchase, consumers (who are also workers in the division of labour) return their income to the cycle of production, buying back a part of the culture from the wages which were earned in the making of the product. Th e exchange of money, however, operates according to an allied logic, so that ‘identity shopping’ is bound up with shopping for the object itself, where language and identity are all-important. Th e soft drinks company Innocent ‘has found more and more ways to communicate essentially the same message. It has been able to do this by creating a tone of voice so engaging that you will want to read on’ (Simmons: 71; emphasis added).
Mad Men exposes how, supposedly happier with our lives once we purchase a car or buy the latest fragrance, we nonetheless go shopping for more and more objects, and always on the basis of advertising’s promises. Th e production and consumption of consumer objects, tied as it is to advertising, simultaneously sustains the advertising industry itself and so the incessant fl ow of images and meanings is maintained. Desire becomes confl ated with need
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and demand via evermore intense, innovative advertising campaigns. In the case of some soft drinks, it is precisely desire and not the drink (or need) which is being purchased. Žižek explains how Coca-Cola is ‘the direct embodiment of … the pure surplus of enjoyment over standard satisfactions, of the mysterious and elusive X we are all aft er in our compulsive consumption of merchandise’ (2001a: 22). Th is does not mean contemporary consumers are more compulsive or consumerist, more duped or less ethical than the past. Sterling Cooper, not unlike PR companies today, does not ask consumers to evaluate the ethics or aesthetics of the advertisements which the industry spawns. Companies then and now are largely impervious to the results of textual evaluations of advertisements undertaken on degree programmes, unless this is in order to identify a potentially larger market share (Gordon: 37–66). Since the 1960s, semiotics, feminist theory, and audience ethnographies have served as critical tools in the decoding of visual-textual representations and deployed in collections by Mackay (1997), and Hermes (2005). However, the discipline cultural studies, some have argued, has had little impact on the subjection and manipulation of consumers under capitalism (Hennessy 2000; McGuigan 2011; Žižek 2001b), and particularly PR regimes (Dinan and Miller 2008).
Whilst the critical approaches of media and cultural studies certainly serve an important purpose in foregrounding the reading of culture, the obsession with identity-based criticism has not ultimately undermined the industry’s own obsession with the myriad images deployed in the construction of the brand and the exploitation of identity. Th e contradictory logic of capitalism, which Marxist criticism has long argued, (John Rees 1998; Alex Callinicos 2010) is that it generates its own critique. Th e critical readings of culture by oppressed groups generated a profoundly vocal, politicised critique of the culture during the decade in which Mad Men is set. Th ese readings of culture took place despite the prevailing cultural criticism in the academy, and oft en as a direct challenge to the economy as much as hegemonic cultural representations of identity. Th us, identity-based criticism, whilst it might raise questions about regimes of ‘neoliberal governmentality’, ‘versions of intersectionality’ and ‘underlying essentialisms’ (McRobbie in Gill and Scharff , eds, 2011: xii) does nothing to interrogate the very economic modes which allow such cultural criticism, or indeed identity for that matter, to appear intelligible. Indeed, the contradictory, cultural dissensus refl ected in the many counter-mainstream manifestos of the period in which Mad Men is set, are ones which seek to question fundamentally the economic bases which sanction oppression and which simultaneously foreground and privilege identity.
Re-presenting culture and advertising
Mad Men exposes these massive contradictions in culture. Th is is oft en achieved formally, by means of the drama’s setting, its depiction of social spaces, the use of gesture and stillness, and the silence of the high-rise cityscape. Similar to the personal tragedies of lead characters, whose private grief rarely disrupts the public workplace, so the political mainstream attempted to dismiss the economic and cultural contradictions of the period. Th e double-voiced, dialogic dimensions
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of culture (Holquist 1990), are echoed in the advertising texts themselves. It is not as a result of inherent textual instabilities of advertisements that the culture may be called into question (Taylor and Harris 2008: 1–14). Indeed, the deconstruction of the advertisements comes about not on the basis of an a priori desire to subvert its dominant meaning; such ambivalence is already in the text. Rather, there is instead something more obvious, to recall the arguments of Barthes, Freire and Williams, in the very oppressive culture from which the advertisements emerge. Th e cigarette campaign in Episode One of Mad Men, and the promotion of the ‘toasted seed’ which is transformed into Lucky Strike, hides from view the real cost and waste of cigarette manufacture. It does not follow, however, that those involved in the manufacture of cigarettes were necessarily content workers or believed Mad Men’s narrative about happiness.
Žižek, too, has shown that even so-called ethical consumption (he cites coff ee and water), is never as ethical as the advertising might imply. Cigarette advertisements today are arguably far more ethical than most others in that at least they warn that we will die. Th e belief is that the Th ird World is being assisted under capitalism’s return to an authentic experience associated with the 1960s. Accordingly, ‘the price is higher than elsewhere since what you are really buying is the “coff ee ethic” which includes care for the environment, [and] social responsibility towards the producers’ (Žižek 2009: 54). By purchasing coff ee and making a contribution to the ‘Ethos Water’ programme, consumers are encouraged to believe that ‘we are not merely buying and consuming’ but are ‘simultaneously doing something meaningful, showing our capacity for global awareness’ (54). Moreover, whilst advertisements might appear to depict society’s ethical choices (via the new moral identifi cation with a brand), this is always in order to sell the product as widely as possible. Such attention to cultural and ethical diff erence conceals the fi xed economic sameness which unites people in the division of labour and the mundane routines of daily life. Th ese advertisements, similar to the ones in Mad Men, are spaces upon which some identities are more conspicuously inscribed as diff erent. A fi nal extract from set directions illustrates this point:
[MORNING] From the air, we see an elegant modern glass building. Below, the hats on the tops of men’s heads swarm like ants through revolving doors. [ELEVATOR] A middle-aged black man mans the controls of the crowded elevator. Th ree young execs, KEN, DICK, and HARRY, in apparently identical suits take off their hats and crowd to the back of the elevator.
DICK: ‘Twenty-three.’ HARRY: ‘Oh, but not right away.’ An attractive YOUNG SECRETARY, holding her purse to her chest, steps on the
elevator and turns her back to them. Th e three men look her over and nod to each other approvingly.
(Source: Set directions: Mad Men, Series One: Episode 1)
Whilst racism and misogyny today are materialised in diff erent ways, the set directions for Mad Men show clearly how oppression occurs in spaces as blatant and obvious as the
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elevator, the city’s streets and the wider communities. Yet the diff erence which race and gender appear to make visible in this sequence itself comes about because of the cultural sameness of the wider public space whose homogeneity is metonymically signalled in the three young men who are ‘apparently identical’ (emphasis added).
Culture is ordinary
Western mainstream culture, the series shows, is peopled by groups who live uncannily alongside an excluded and oft en silent other. Despite the agency which consumer capitalism and advertisements promise, this culture operates oppressively. Advertising has to win all consumers and all identities, not simply those made visible in the cultural mainstream, but it cannot do this with parity because of the economic division of labour and the subsequent construction of people, in the words of Freire, as ‘objects’ and not ‘subjects’ in their own aff airs. Th is stress on identity is paralleled in the workplace, in civil rights, and in the advertising industry’s proliferation of identities. Th e products and campaigns advertised in the world of Mad Men require and imply a division of labour which, under capitalism, will always legitimise some ways of life, or certain identities, more than others. Th e series shows a business and PR world whose advertisements and products are available ‘for all’, tied harmoniously and democratically to the American dream. However, Mad Men’s irony goes some way in exposing how these PR campaigns sit jarringly next to cultural oppression and social segregation, and where the same uncanny silences that punctuate the script’s dialogue and set shout loudly of discontent and division in the culture itself. Here, the real object being produced and consumed is human labour.
Th is assignation of subjects to lower positions in the division of labour, something which in the world of Mad Men is also gendered and racialised, is a division which must also compete with capitalism’s contradictory production of subjects as free agents in the imaginary which is cultural consumption. Freire writes that ‘every approach to the oppressed by the elites, as a class, is couched in terms of [a] false generosity’ (1972: 103). However, if gender and ethnic identities are coded in relation to subjection via the division of labour, the consumer is encoded with a sense of power. Work identity is experienced as subjection whereas consumer identity equates sovereignty. Advertisements do not sell to subjects so much as they interpellate consumers as free, willing agents who supposedly act with autonomy. In Mad Men, characters’ positions as consumers are not dissimilar to those today, based around the necessary selling of labour in a market place, where advertisements hide from view the other labourers and promote, instead, an image of consumer autonomy. Freire suggests that the selling as opposed to the owning of one’s labour means that labour itself is depersonalised (1972: 150). However, his argument is one which does not negate consumption. It would be short-sighted to simply or uncritically dismiss consumption as consumerist or hedonistic or oppressive per se (Littler 2008). Similarly, it is diffi cult to argue that agency is a redundant concept if alternative-hedonism and anti-globalisation lobbies
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today, and civil rights and feminist campaigns in the past, have been able to exercise a limited agency in promoting counter-discourses in old and new-media formats.
Perhaps the problem with the agency-focused model of media, as Taylor (2010) lucidly discusses, is that it tends to reify agency so that consumer ‘choice’ is read fi rst of all as agency (freedom to choose as an equal) and that this subsequently valorises the imagined democracy of perfect competition and the market. As Freire has expounded, capitalism and markets do not possess a morality or conscience (1972: 96–108). Th us, the pursuit of profi t still requires a state to maintain certain conditions within which that profi t may be legitimised: education, agency, choice, and morality. Th e state in such circumstances must make itself available to be used by those on the lowest social rungs. Here, advertising works as an appendage of the state, where the ideology of equal cultural citizenship (we can buy this or that object) acts to dampen more critical, dialectical forms of inquiry. In an argument which anticipates shows such as Th e X-Factor (2004–) and American Idol (2002–), Freire writes that ideology is at its most eff ective in the myth ‘that anyone who is industrious can be an entrepreneur [and] worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory’ (109). Despite these conditions, Freire’s optimism, something he shares with Williams, is one which shows how, in the context of oppression, individuals and groups have necessarily toiled collectively in order to question the very causes and conditions of a reality where division is made to seem inevitable.
Mad Men, too, dramatises how culture is founded on mutuality, interrelatedness and cooperation. In the advertising industry, people necessarily work together. Moreover, characters live lives in a culture outside of work and do ordinary things such as taking holidays, socialising, travelling, or simply passing the time. Th ese signifi ers of people’s daily life amplify theoretical accounts of culture which itemise its mundane, ordinary and repetitive schedules. In Williams’ meticulous reading of culture, it is indeed the ordinary where a way of life happens. However, as this chapter has argued, ordinary life chances – what some refer to as ‘agency’ – are not equal. Nonetheless, Freire’s pedagogy is one which believes that people will be ‘truly critical … if their action encompasses a critical refl ection which increasingly organizes their thinking and thus leads them to move from purely naïve knowledge of reality… to one which enables them to perceive the causes of reality’ (101).
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Note
1 See Plate 1: Mad Men – John Slattery (‘Roger Sterling,’ left ), Jon Hamm (‘Don Draper,’ centre) and January Jones (‘Betty Draper,’ right) – courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment’s Mad Men: Season One.
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