advertising – GV Loewen

Coincidence and Signage

Coincidence and Signage (The ‘prose of the world’ revisited)

Wherever I go, I observe signs. Many are simply functional; some explaining traffic flow, keeping everyone safely moving in the appropriate directions. Other like signage would include the shingles of business and government, church and non-profit. These are basic locational signs, some with directions, which are then duplicated at the sites themselves. Without directional signage, daily life would become a hierarchical jumble of conflicting ‘local knowledge’; those having lived in a neighborhood or city having a distinct advantage over newcomers. Even so, such signage is yet handy for the experienced city-dweller, and all the more so, for those who venture forth from urban areas into those rural. Function is seldom turned to form at this level of the sign, and only when the state is anxious to make this or that political declaration, itself a sign of a different dimension, does directional signage become a vehicle for ideology.

The other major type of signage available to us in our contemporary scene is that of marketing. It too is primarily functional, but not entirely. While one could perhaps make a gentle argument that directional and locational signage betrays our penchant for social order in its most general, even vaguest, sense, advertising carries a double intent somewhat more bodily. While first oriented to only selling a product or a service, the presence of advertising is after all also a function of a specific economic sensibility, that of capital, wherein entrepreneurs compete for market and franchise through advertising. Here, the undertone of ideology is slightly more manifest than in mere locational and directional signage, for the very rubric of capital is contained within the ad, whereas all known cultures have some semblance of basic order about them, and one that is generally seen as value neutral. Running a red light might well get the communist killed as effectively as it would the capitalist. This said, advertising is not as neutral, and when I recently saw an ad on a nearby campus exhorting students to join the Marxist society I was bemused by its patent irony. It is clear that if one desires to share anything at all, advertising is the most effective way to do it, lending credence to the everyday sense we have that the ubiquity of sheer shill is nothing more than what can be taken from it at face value.

But the combination of signage and outcome lends to us another level of sensate; we are used to every sign being utterly honest about its information and direction. When our digital maps are slow to update, we can get frustrated, as this or that business or other site has, in the interim, moved or simply vanished. If I am on such and such street then I expect to find this or that address along it. I am aware, of course, that larger-scale businesses and other like concerns have more than one location, and so I must sift accordingly, but this is a very different challenge than not being able to find a site at all. I read a piece of signage, and through my success in following its directions, I transform that signage into a sign; that is, its information imparted becomes a force in my life, and one that has led to success. We are quite used to this tacit process of transformation and think nothing of it in the day-to-day. But its presence in our consciousness has a profound impact on how we understand and give meaning to the world more widely, as well as to the myriad of chance interactions we encounter in our smaller lives. This is so because we have already mastered, within our normative and standard rubric of routine, the ability to read the world as if it were a text.

Foucault, as a prologue to his famed book. The Order of Things, (1966), speaks of the medieval period being dominated by a worldview that based itself upon the ‘prose of the world’. Herein, signs were everywhere, just as is in our time, signage. Signs of what, exactly? Simply put, signs that the world was an autograph creation of God. God’s work spoke for itself, in a further sense, but if one desired to accrue meaningfulness to this odd dynamic of the otherworld and the this-world, one had to learn to ‘read off’ that signature which marked a great variety of phenomena. Our interpretation of the divine hand as quill thus re-marked, more than it did simply remark upon, that same world, creating an exegetically inclined prose. The natural world had become its own scripture. Foucault’s own point is that this worldview was about to give way to the incipient version of our own, wherein sign devolves to mere signage, and the world worlds its own way, apart from either human or divine design. Here, I want to suggest that the presence of the prose of the world has not in fact been utterly overtaken by modernity, but has rather been transmuted into what, even as a baser metal than the ideals of the alchemical mindset, is still functioning as sign and indeed, even signatory.

A modernist glance might note that God too had to advertise His works, and so marketing has in fact a longer history than it might seem, but this would ignore the contrast between a source who very much had the time to wait for His market to show authentic interest in the message being marketed, as well as the theological fact that whether or not one was ‘sold’ by its soteriological suasion, the events of the apocalypse and judgment would occur in any case. This is manifestly not the condition for contemporary marketers, hence their sometimes desperate haste and powerful panache present in their attempts to convince us that their own version of salvation is worth our while, and for that matter, our money. But advertising firms owe the majority of their success not to their inventive signage but rather to the more profound and historical fact that we are used to reading signage as if it were a sign. Advertising would have no power over us without this ability, and this interpretative skill, itself sourced in the primordial need for human beings to make their mortal lives meaningful and thus tolerable in some manner, was brought to its most sophisticated head during the medieval period.

Anything could be a sign. What today we mainly put down to chance, happenstance, and more strongly, coincidence or yet the déja vu of the psychologists, was for our ancestors something to be noted. Like the Logos itself, not all of which could be directly understood by humanity, the prose of the world was both present and complete. Our human faculties, on the one hand, could access some of its truths, but our human failings, on the other, prohibited an holistic comprehension of the mind of God. Indeed, we only see the charlatan in the place of the mystagogue in today’s world, wherein those who claim to know the mind of God and thus its divine will as well, are generally seen for what they are. We have no record of such figures existing in previous eras, and this makes sense insofar as they had the open book of God’s creation and will before them, and all had the same access thereto. It was the lot of the gnostic to at first make a claim about knowing the truth of things in essence and thenceforth attempt to vouchsafe such a venture through the interpretation of the world as a complement to scripture. There was certainly seen to be a symbiosis between the two, but the addition of the world as a source of God’s truth and will greatly amplified the presence of a form of cultural literacy during the related historical periods, dominated as they were by the second wave of agrarianism, that of the feudal order in the West.

It is this very literacy that advertising now uses, rather unbeknownst to itself. Mammon has perhaps replaced Yahweh, especially amongst the latter’s original acolytes, we might gently suggest, but Yahweh seldom advertised in any indirect way. No, He made demands, followed or not, but one’s that all could understand if not exactly relate to. The world cast as a prose document has its source in the God who didn’t beat around the burning bush, so to speak. Yahweh’s competitors were often obfuscatory; meaning was obscure and thus meaningfulness a chore. It is this simplicity of demand that modern marketers borrow from the Judaic dynamic, as well as the sense that they would become as Yahweh was; a mascot for a better life.

For advertising in capital ultimately sells us its own form of earthly salvation. ‘Better living’ is its mantra, status only its mantle. What we demand from our own mode of production is worldly success, just as did the Calvinists who, not at all by coincidence, imagined that such itself would be none other than a sign of the divine salvation to come. They were to be saved, just as were the chosen people before them. It is confusing at the level of symbolics, to say the least, that the very people who so disdained the Jews sought to so emulate their situation. No doubt the worldly competition within the mercantile affairs of incipient capital was projected upon the deeper canvas of a competition for a reserved place in paradise. It was no more ludicrous for the originally marginal community of sectarians to claim that worldly wealth was a sign of God’s favor and grace than it was for a marginal ethnicity to claim for itself salvation by equally earthly kinship. But all such claims must be taken in the context of both the anxiousness that accompanies our daily rounds and the existential anxiety that is the hallmark of the human condition more generally. If such rationalizations appear as nonsensical today, it is due to our own displacing of such an anxiety into our demand for a better life in the here and now.

Does then advertising have the grace to make that desire into reality? Perhaps not by itself, but what it does do is reduce the level of happenstance in our mundane lives so that we might be able to more appreciate the possible irruptive presence of authentic signs into that same life. Coincidence is, at base, constructed from the sameness that marks mundanity just as did God’s autograph mark the medieval world. Reason in that latter and now mostly absent world was of a superior form of consciousness, but today it comes across as the mere rationalization of an inferior form. With abundant irony, it is marketing which today mimics the call to conscience which once animated an entire culture’s aspirations. Can we then use this seemingly omnipotent source of signage in capital to both engender a better material condition for all, but as well, and more deeply, engage in a latter-day eschatological ecumenism, one in which there is represenced the sense that each of us, as a human being, are subject to the same ultimate forces and are the object of the same essential conditions?

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Not So Sweet Buy and Buy

The Not So Sweet Buy and Buy (can a consumer culture consume a culture?)

This is a different question than ‘can a consumer culture consume itself’? We have seen quite evidently, especially in popular media, that this is in fact not merely an outcome thereof but a way of maintaining its dominance upon consumption in general. One views a situation comedy, especially an animated one, and if one has not viewed many years of similar programming as well as following the popular culture news, one is immediately lost. Such media constitute one long in-joke, and their satire is disingenuous at best, since it serves also as an ongoing advertisement for everyone else in the same game. Humor is itself tied to the consumption of a specific kind of media, and this also has the convenience of saving the hack writer’s time imagining innovative scripts and characters. Similarly, retreads of film and television, upshifts to streaming etc. from video games and comic books, exhibit the same symptomatology, and one might even wish to cast the older but continuing sourcing from the novel as the beginning of this self-absorbed and auto-absorbing manner of production.

But for all this, has our contemporary consumer industry been able to reach its wider goal; that of the consumption of the entirety of the culture in which it is ensconced? This is a more difficult query and the response appears at once more nuanced. In order to take it up, we must begin with the most perceptive analyses of consumption, those of Marx and Durkheim. For the former, the well-known understanding of commodity as fetish may serve, for a moment, as a starting point. We have seen elsewhere how the religious overtones of the original fetish item, a vehicle for, and representation of, Mana, which is otherwise quite an abstract power, turns what is mere force into a usable forcefulness. It is a more focused legerdemain that can also be associated with the difference between magic and sorcery. In the most value-neutral sense, sorcery is simply magic in use. The fetish quality of a commodity turns it from a mere use object into a representation of power redefined by capital, but the much older aura of status retains its hold over the consumer, even if the source of such status has shifted from heaven to earth, as it were. Marx’s own example is pedestrian, likely purposely; a table. Unlike Heidegger, who later uses the same item to illustrate the phenomenological intimacy of dialogue amongst other such aspects of ‘closeness’ and ‘alongsideness’, Marx offers us not a whiff of old-world paternalism. Instead, he is didactic in the extreme. And a piece of furniture is not a terrible example given that such a genre of commodity had been coopted by industrial production in a manner that accosted the senses used to cottage-style craftsmanship. Furniture could well have been called ‘fine’ or even ‘beautiful’, and we pay a homage both archival and ironically fetishistic, genuflecting perhaps somewhat ludicrously, to handcrafted antique furniture in art galleries and museums. I have seen such objects placed adjacent to paintings and sculptures, as if we were to place ourselves, in our mind’s eye at least, in some Mannerist domestic scene, replete with paternalism aplenty and this time with no Heideggerean insight in sight.

So for Marx, the table was a good mark. Now mass-produced, what could the buyer expect regarding possession and status, which prior to industry could be borrowed from the artisan, just as one would borrow status from having a Gainsborough paint one’s wife’s portrait: ‘Hmm, she’s hotter than ever I thought. Now that’s artistic genius!’ For more plebeian items, Marx desired to show that the same fetishistic display of status markers remained available. In our age, however, it was not to be associated with the ability to command ethereal forces, but rather quite material ones, and those through wealth. In pre-modern modes of production, from horticulture through the late-stages of agrarian organizations, one’s own status was linked to the procurement of status items or services. For capital, the accumulation of wealth shifted from an ‘in-itself’, or a ‘for its own sake’, as if it were either a kind of aesthetic endeavor, or indeed an esthetic one, associated with some lineage hagiography. From this the Protestants developed the idea of assignation through worldly success; wealth was a sign of soteriological favor. Especially well-evidenced in the Netherlands, this idea spread forth through Puritanist longings and Anabaptist communitarianism. A Spartan lifestyle belied a very productive lifeway, and it was not long in generational span before considerable accumulations of wealth were built up. To this day, such ethnic enclaves that remain, including those Mennonite and Hutterian, display such in-typical advantages.

But all of this has been analyzed in detail by Weber, who is our usual third wheel in thinking aloud about modernity and capital. For Marx, wealth was to be displayed by and through the purchase of commodities, which for him, meant any object that could contain a value surplus to its own autochthonous use-value. This constitutes an extension of ipssissimosity, and such a sleight of hand can only be maintained, he felt, through consumption itself. In this, Marx’s sense of things proved incomplete, for we now understand modern advertising to be the chief vehicle of the production, not of the object or commodity, but rather of the fetish surrounding it. Its advent in 1925, the year of John Watson’s Theory of Modern Advertising, occurred almost simultaneously with the first overproduction, wherein the means of production outstripped the actual material needs of consumers. For almost a century then have we lived in this odd situation; we make more than we use, so we must make mere needs into desires. This, in a word, is the meaning of marketing.

In the decades just prior to this seismic shift in the definition of value in capital, it was Durkheim who detailed and augmented Marx’s analytic to include the sensual and sensitive aspects of fetish in general. For Durkheim, the aura of the commodity had less to do with a borrowed status hung up upon material outlay and rather more about the character of awe. Just as the collective conscience could be offended by a perceived injustice, so too could it recognize itself in a culture’s higher self-expressions. Beauty, in this view, still made sense as a representation of its traditional siblings; truth, the good, and the spirit. Marketing would soon learn how to exploit this sensitivity by engineering quite artificial outbursts of the ‘collective effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s phrase. In one of his most famous epigrams, if ‘religion is society worshipping itself’, then one immediately can understand the wider scope of what is at stake in modern mass media. The commodity fetish in our day must transcend the object in order to take into itself the whole of culture.

What then would it mean to worship ourselves in this more material manner? Certainly there are collateral clues – signage, rather than truer signs, perhaps – in the cult of celebrity, the esteem of marque and logo, the esthetic purity of fashion and modeling, or yet the mystique surrounding the founder or CEO of this or that ‘revolutionary’ enterprise. All these and others no doubt foster a sense that not only is our culture a visionary one, holding in its own breast the heated breath of distant stars and with its eyes reflecting their eternal light – all the while whilst bathing in a bathos of self-stultification, mind you – but that it is also of the value that we may indeed sincerely worship it and not feel anything of either the larger narcissism which must be involved, or, more damning, of the anxiety which must drive such collective preening. Here, we must allow Durkheim to take us back to Marx in order to read again, with a fresh set of frames, the critique of capital itself. Now the rhetorical term ‘bathos’ traditionally suggests a lack of intent, and while it may not be central to the goals of advertising and marketing to create this slide from what we take to be the historically sublime to what can be taken as trivial – almost everything within the ambit of popular media is at least this, if not actually ridiculous or yet absurd – in any calculated manner, the mere fact that it has the power to manifest the nothing much as something and even something great suggests to its latter-day sorcerers that magic, at least of a sort, is yet extant in our otherwise disenchanted world.

Yet this cannot be a conclusion, for it begs the implication that our culture is, as a whole, trivial. I would like to think that this is not the case, even if we are often turned in the direction of the valueless by the fetish of status-value and that of the marque. One might go so far, without being overly vain, and suggest that for some of the legendary marques, whose brand-value has distinguished itself consistently over many decades, that the actual quality of the products in question do merit some respect, if perhaps not outright adoration or yet worship. Ferrari, the brand with the most current admiration of this sort, could serve as an example of a product which actually is what it claims to be, at least in its actual use. Whether or not its aura is transcendental is not really at issue; all it needs to do is transcend its general genre of commodity. In this, a keenly-crafted and daringly-designed machine can carry a near-primordial torch; the shaman accomplished his tricks ad hoc. Sorcery, unlike magic, is always directed to some specific purpose.

Yes, but in capital we also have magic itself as a commodity of sorts, for a Ferrari accomplishes its specific engineering purpose in it remaining an automobile, and nothing else. But if it were perceived in capital as only a car it would lose most of its value all along the line. So, marketing has, in addition to point-of-sale, the deeper and more sophisticated task of maintaining aura ‘after-market’, so to speak. The fact that a new auto loses about a quarter of its ticket value when driven off the lot – it is now a ‘used car’ or, in a marketing lingo perishingly close to that Orwellian, ‘pre-owned’ – must not impinge upon its value as a status item, a commodity in the Marxian sense. And indeed, the exotic car’s new owner cares not a jot that they have been stiffed however much cash on the barrel upon getting behind the wheel of such a vehicle. Even my relatively quite staid and stoic Lexus sports sedan was able to overcome any such hint of regret on my part when I purchased it new many years ago. But less mystically, its truer value has manifest itself in the fact that though now 16 years old, it still drives like a new car. Surely such testimonials from the ‘consumer’s themselves’ would be of the greatest value to any marketer. But even here, the suasion of worship is present; a testimonial is suggestive of a testament; but then again we are today not recording the irruptive Mana of a messiah, but rather the manufactured mimesis of the forces of nature and cosmos, ever aloof to the Babel of humanity’s vainer desires.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.