216 / Themes in Popular Culture
that if techno-myth has been partially revamped and restored, it has also, in broader compass, ceased to be symbolically central or even coherent. Indeed, an alternative hypothesis can be advanced: that car imagery, like other sign-bearing material in the cultural vortex of advanced capitalism, is evolving towards a decorative electicism whose signifying gestures refer us only to the universe of symbols from which they are drawn.
In fact, with the public circulation of signs severed from life by commerce, media, and reactive privatism there are grounds for arguing that it is not our technology but our culture that is imploding, parallel with a further disintegration of society in the old organic sense.24 In its costly, computer-linked, post-modern guise, the contemporary car certainly bears all the marks of such a process. But its witness is blind since, as a promotional construct, its imagery can scarcely acknowledge what has happened, let alone its own — doubly — mystifying role. What the decorative play on the car's functionalized surface ultimately hides, that is, is not just the negativity of the product but the relation between that negativity and the kind of gloss it is given. Simply put: that the car's own disruptive dominance as a transport form is part of the disaffected reality from which our culture, as written into the car's very body, has recoiled.
15.
Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic
Sut Jhally
The Magic of the Marketplace
In contemporary America, we are immersed most of our waking hours in a world and a discourse where all normal physical and social arrangements are held in abeyance.
• from deep in the ocean depths, swimming alongside sleek and dangerous sharks, taking on their shape and form, emerges "a new species" of automobile — a Chevrolet Earetta.
• as a woman passes behind him, a man is overcome with desire and immediately starts to pursue her in a blind passion, pausing only to snatch up some flowers that he presents to her when he catches her. We are told the spell is cast because the woman uses Impulse body spray.
• a young male adolescent stares in horror at his pimpled complexion in a bathroom mirror. As he applies a magical lotion, his pimples immediately disappear, even as we watch.
• a young attractive woman boldly enters a pool room where she announces she has had enough of Mr. Wrong and that it is time for Mr. Right. As she sings this she throws a can of Right Guard antiperspirant to individuals with the faces of grotesque monsters. They are immediately transformed into handsome young men who crowd around the woman.
• a young woman walks by groups of men; a "sea breeze" is unleased by her that envelops the young males.
217
218 / Themes in Popular Culture
In advertising, the commodity world interacts with the human world at the most fundamental of levels: it performs magical feats of transfer- . mation and bewitchment, brings instant happiness and gratification;''' captures the forces of nature, and holds within itself the essence of j important social relationships (in fact, it substitutes for those relations), i
What is noteworthy about such scenes is not that they are concerned with the role of objects in the social lives of people. Such a relationship is one of the defining features of what it means to be human; the relationship between people and things is a universal one. What is noteworthy in the modern period however is the [extenj? to which goods enter into the arrangements of everyday life. Much more so than in previous societies, in the consumer culture it seems that every aspect of life is permeated by the presence of objects. Karl Marx, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century and in the early phases of the development of industrial capitalism, perceptively pointed to what would become the main features of the developing system. In the opening lines of Capital he stated that: "The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an Immense collection of commodities'."1 Unlike all previous modes of production, capitalism discovered the "secret" of material production and proceeded to install it as its central and defining activity. While Marx did not witness the emergence of the institution of national advertising, he was able to penetrate to what would become its essential feature:
It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of rehgion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter v into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of_ commodities with the products of men's hands. I call —■ this mef&tishismi which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from
. the production of commodities . . . the labor of the private individual manifests itself, as an element of the total labor of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the product, and, through their mediations, between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labors appear as
! what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between
i persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons
\ and social relations between things.2
Marx was able to predict the supernatural world that advertising would create, in which relationships between people are mediated through
The Dialectic of Technology and Magic / 219
things and in which things themselves come alive and interact with each other and with human beings. This prediction was based upon h!s~lmderstanding that capitalism as a system of production and consumption entails a very different relationship between people and the world of goods than had existed previously — that the "discourse" about society that takes place through the medium of things has a different content and structure. For him, it came down to the difference " between market and non-market exchange.
In older non-market societies there was a much more direct connection between people and the goods that they used in everyday life. Most of the goods they consumed were produced by themselves or were produced by persons and processes whom they knew, so people had a great deal of information about the world of goods. The social relations of production were visible to all and, furthermore, they were in a sense "embedded" in goods as part of their meaning. Indeed in many traditional societies, the exchange of goods was literally an exchange oi people, in that people had embedded something of themselves in the goods they produced. In giving a good that you produced you were giving a part of yourself. Inherently, goods are communicators of social relations.
Marx recognized this fundamental feature of goods and installed it as part of his methodological framework for the analysis of capitalism. He starts Capital by saying that his investigation will begin with the analysis
of the commodity, because he thought that if one could understand,.....
how the commodity was produced, exchanged, and consumed, then one would have the basis of an understanding of the entire system of capitalist relations — like goods in any social system, contained within them are the social relations of their production. However in capitalism, and unlike previous societies, there is a problem in terms of trying to "read" goods for the social information they contain. Their origins are hi'dcter^ from us. There are two dimensions to this.
• First,; in the world of production the work process is increasingly subdivided- and specialized so that workers only work on part of a pro"auctT In adBitionrfnere is a separation between the planning process for the production of goods and the actual process of production itself — a split between mental and manual labor such that those people who actually physically produce the product (wage-laborers) have no overall sense of the production process or its relationship to other aspects of social life. (Of course, increasingly smaller numbers^ of people are actually involved in industrial production itself, )^econdy most of us use goods that come to us through the marketplace. As such we have little information about them beyond whafmalmfactulir choose to tell us through media advertising or packaging. The social
j
220 / Themes in Popular Culture
The Dialectic or Technology and Magic / 221
relations of production embedded in goods are .systernatically hidden from our eyes. The real meaning of goods in fact is emptied out of them in capitalist production and consumption. Marx labeled this the f'fetishisrri^f^ojnmoditiesT^ disguise whereby the appearance of things in the marketplace masks the story of who fashioned them, and under what conditions.
The Development of the Consumer Society
Of course, the implementation of capitalist production methods meant more than merely a new way to produce goods — it entailed a revolution in the cultural arrangements of traditional society. Traditional pre-industrial society was based around agriculture and there was little separation between work and leisure. The extended family and religion were hugely important influences on the conduct of everyday life. The meaning of goods in such a context was intimately tied up with local production and integrated within the structure of ethnic cultural forms. Ethnicity, family, religion, and community structured the discourse surrounding goods.
The coming of capitalist industrial society shattered these bonds. City living, factory labor, and the separation between work and leisure destroyed the vitality of the older traditions that could not be sustained : within the new urban context. T. Jackson Lears argues that in the early j years of the twentieth century, American society was going through ja major crisis of meaning in which an older culture of puritanism, iself-denial, and work was dissolving under the strains brought on by imodernism. Feelings of unreality, depression, and loss accompanied the experience of anonymity associated with urbanization. Religious beliefs waned in strength as traditional Protestant theology underwent a process of secularization. The feelings of "unreality" that arose in this period could not be dealt with by the traditional institutions that had fulfilled this role previously. Indeed, it was the loosening of their influence that led to the feelings of unreality. These feelings were reflected in a concern for physical and emotional health. Whereas before, the quest for health had been part of a larger communal, ethical and religious framework, by the twentieth century this had become almost entirely a secular process. Lears argues that advertisers picked up on these movements and began to exploit the emotional needs of advertisers.
A dialectic developed between America's new emotional needs and advertiser's strategies; each continually reshaped and intensified the
other ... By the 1920's the symbolic universe of national advertising markedly resembled the therapeutic world described by Philip Rieff — a world in which all overarching structures of meaning had collapsed . . . It jisjirnportant to underscore the role of advertising in accelerating this collapse of meaning.3"^*'
Industrial society is a transitional society which can neither draw on the past nor construct its own structures of meaning. It is a cultural void in which -old .and-new ways of living collide.
In addition to this crisis of meaning, industrial capitalism also faced the potential problem of a severe and debilitating economic crisis. The "immense ^eoflecSion _ of commodities-' that capitalism produces also have to be^soW. Without the consumption of these commodities, capitalism wouId~be in a state of permanent depression and would quickly die. This crisis was especially acute in the early years of this century. Stuart Ewen refers to this complex of relations as the "social .crisis of industrialization" and argues that the developing institutions of the consumer society (such as advertising) offered to solye both problems simultaneously. The consumer society resolves the tensions and contradictions of industrial society as the marketplace and consumption take over the functions of traditional culture. Into the void left by the transition from traditional to industrial society comes advertising, the most prominent aspect of the "discourse through and about objects," and the reconstitution of the population not into social classes as the primary mode of identification but into consumption classes.4
Advertising: The Theft and ReappropriaKon of Meaning
How precisely does advertising fit into this scenario? I argued earlier that in non-market societies there is a unity between people and goods, but that in capitalism there is a separation between object and producer. The world of goods in industrial society offers no meaning, its meaning having been "emptied" out of them. The functionjaf advertising..is to JSfiy_thjtJ?im?ti^ Indeed the meaning of
advertising would make no sense if objects already had an established meaning. The power of advertising depends upon the initial emptying out. Only then can adVerirsinglref^ this void with its own meaning. Its "power comes from the fact that it works its magic on a blank slate. The fetishism of commodities consists in the first place of emptying them of meaning, of hiding the real social relations objectified in them through human labor, to make it possible for the imaginary/symbolic
222 / Themes in Popular Culture v
social relations to be injected into the construction of meaning at a secondary level. "fW(K[^^""einpti€sr^^vertising fiflsTjThe real is hidden by the imaginary. The~social"significance of the marketplace is only possible after the social significance of production disappears beneath the structure of capitalist property relations. The hollow husk of the commodity-form needs to be filled by some kind of meaning, however superficial. This is why advertising is so powerful. People need meaning for the world of goods. The traditional institutions that provided this have been weakened. Thus, advertising derives its power from providing meaning that is not available elsewhere.
If what I have just described is the broad social role that advertising plays, what specific strategie^does it use to accomplish this. Looked at histo^eal^.^fir£=^=ne=ahgle set of strategies that advertising utilizes. Instead we can identify a number of different strategies that are developed through the course of the twentieth century in response to changing market .and social conditions.5
In the'\ initial stage of the development of national advertising the consumer society responds to the appearance of the "immense collection of commodities" in a celebratory mode. What is celebrated is the great productive capacities of industrial society as reflected in products. Advertising has a strong theme of y^HS^PiLPi-E^-^P^'-almost worshipping the fruits of industrial technology. Commodities are idols in early advertising. "Huge refrigerators towered above tiny towns of consumers; silhouetted against the starry sky, they stood guard over communities like giant sentinels. Immense cars straddled the rivers and towns of miniaturized countrysides below, symbolizing the command over the landscape obtainable through the automobile." Such images "conveyed impressions of theproduct as dorninant or transcendent, if 3P^a\Kesome."6 TheJru^TdeveloplrTeht of national advertising can then be labeled as the stage otUohtry, j
Such a developmenfis" rfOt-^an accident or a clever creation by the advertising industry alone. Advertisers sought to mediate between the needs of manufacturers to sell products and the changing context of meaning for consumers. Advertising had to reflect some real needs in the consuming public. What advertisers recognized was the nostalgia for the world that was passing, for a stable world of religious, family, and community life. The early stages of national advertising are characterized both by a veneration for the "immense collection of commodities" and a linking back to traditional themes. The transcendental religious realm provided a rich, deep resource from which to draw although its influence was weakening throughout the society. Advertisers recognized that the public yearned to experience moments of enhancement, awe, and rapture.
The Dialectic of Technology and Magic / 223
Advertisers, though^ could not be^too explicit with this for fear of negative public reaction. Richard Marchand points out that instead they used visual cliches ""that employed vague forms of sacred symbolism rather than specific religious figures . . . Such visual strategies sought to transform the product . . . into a 'surrogate trigger' for producing those life-enhancing feelings that consumers avidly pursued. As an ad in Printers' Ink Monthly offhandedly noted in 1926, advertisements were 'beginning to occupy the place in inspiration that religion did several hundred years ago' "7 Consumers were shown entranced before the power of the object. Refrigerator ads featured women who looked as though they had glimpsed through the open door "a secular revelation as speUbinding as any religious vision." The visual cliche of "radiant beams'Vt'hat came from outside the picture and highlighted^the-prodticf'was another often used strategy suggesting some divine intervention in the world of commodities. In other versions the beams radiated from the product itself suggesting a kind of "halo" effect round the product. Marchand argues that through such strategies, advertisers were secularizing images without losing their original spiritual overtones. SucrTimagery "represented a final step in the successful, though largely unconscious adaptation of religious imagery to the advertising tableaux, the modern icons of a faith in mass consumption."8
The idolatrous stage of advertising predominates from the 1890s and into the 1920s. The ^second .stage of religiojusladaptatton starts
) in the 1920s and can be labeled the stage of] Iconology.\|cons......are
f symbols; they mean something. Advertising in thTiTsT;age~inoves from the worship of commodities to their meaning within a social context. As the traditional customs and behavioral codes became unglued in the cultural void of industrial society, marketplace communication stepped in to provide consumers with the needed advice. Goods became powerful not only through what they could do but through what they could mean. Consumption here becomes explicitly a social activity, and goods are intimately connected with social relations. There is a shift awayTrorn"the product.alone,and towards the consumer,J?ut "the movement stops halfway. In the stage of iconology both products and personsjr^,.ernbpdjm£nts social values and the_world
~ ol advertising is neither wholly thing-based or person-based^— instead L-it is meaning-based. Commodities are the icons of the marketplace. From the 1940s into the 1960s advertising completes the shifttpwards the consumer. The product is seen as powerful but now its power is put at the disposal of individuals. Further, these individuals are presented in "real" terms rafeerTrnarTlh^abstract depictions of the second stage. This is the stage (of Narcissism where the product reflects the desires of
224 / Themes in Popular Culture
^_the individual. Advertisements show the fantasized completion of the self, ofhow the produc^can ttansJormJndiyiduaT existence* The power of the^r5ducTcarTbe"manifested in many ways, but predominantly it is through the strategy of "black magic," where p^rsor^undergo_sudd^n_, physical transformations or where the corrimodity^-'can-be~-i^d^fo-.„ entrance "and enrapture other people. The world of objects here enters the everyday world of people and performs in magical ways. /From tRe"l$60s to the present the focus shifts yet again into the stage of jfotemism. Tojfemism in older societies refers to the correlation between the natural-world and the social world where natural differences stand for social differences. In modern advertising, goods take the place of natural species. In this last phase the predominant themes of
. the previous stages are drawn together and remixed into a unique form: commodities are freed from being merely utilitarian things (idolatry), or abstract representations of social values (iconology), or intimately connected with the world of personal and interpersonal relations (narcissism). In the totemic stage, utility, symbolization, and^ personalization are mixed and remixed under the sign of the 'groupJ In lifestyle advertising, products are_ badges of "^oujgZSiemEer^^^^. Through consumption one'^'aT^ocessTo and parKdpafes- in~Wvery specific consumption community which is defined through that very consumption activity. Products give magical access to a previously closed world of group activities.
Although these stages have been presented as an historical progression, they should not be thought of as being exclusive of each other: rather, they should be viewed as cumulative. JThe labels apply to the dominant tendency within any period. The particular forms that arise in different periods do not disappear, but rather are segregated as a mode of representation for particular products and audiences. In the contemporary marketplace, the person-object relation is articulated psychologically, physically, and socially. Some goods seem to serve primarily for display and social judgment, some for personal enhancement, some for locating us within the nexus of group relations, and some just for simple utility in everyday life.
Further, commodities appear as miraculous products of an invisible process of production. In the marketplace they enter into unique and changing relations with each other, jostling for position to satisfy the needs of the consumer. In some instances, products explicitly take on animate^features and come alive. Advertising truly reflects the world that Marx described as 15emg "characteristic of capitalism — an enchanted kingdom of magic and fetishism where goods are autonomous, where they enter into relations with each other and where they appear in "fantastic forms" in their relations with humans.
The Dialectic of Technology and Magic / 225
The Fetishism of Commodities
The economic and business literature on advertising is dominated by the concept of "information" — advertising is supposed to provide consumers with marketplace information about goods so that there is some rational basis for choice. Unless one has a very broad definition of what constitutes information this is clearly not a very fruitful way to understand this institution. (The installation of the concept of "information" is, of course, an ideological strategy to deflect debate away from the really important features of advertising.) The real function of [ advertising is not to give people information but to mak§^erji_feeL_ !jgpj3fL-Ad maker Tony Schwartz explicitly articulates this when he 'Telíš"advertisers not to make claims that could be proven false but to concentrate instead on creating pleasurable experiences.9 T. Jackson Lears points out that "feeling" replaced information very early on in the development of advertising. In the most sophisticated version of this "feeling good" theory, Staffan Linder claims that it is unreasonable to expect consumers to gather full information to inform their purchasing decisions — there simply is not enough time to collect all the information that would be needed to make truly rational purchasing decisions. In such a context what consumers require is to have some justification for their purchasing, decisions, however irrational. Advertising provides this and makes consumers feel that they have made decisions at least on some basis rather than on some totally arbitrary criteria.10 I argued before that one of the most important functions that advertising performs is to provide meaning for the world of goods in a context where true.meaning has been stolen. It helps us to understand the world and our place in it, and it accomplishes this through integrating people and things within a magical and supernatural sphere.
If this function were attributed to an institution in non-capitalist society, we would have no trouble seeing it for what is was — religion. Indeed, if the basis of advertising is to make us feel good and it has surrendered any objective basis for this feeling, in what way is it different from religion? Why not also tea leaves, ouija boards, black cats, dice, sounds that go bump in the night? Why not God? All these too can "satisfy" us, can "justify" our choices! Advertising here becomes a secular version of God! When couched infthe context oi~reii]jj^fífíBff four-stage developmental model of advertising history takes on new meaning. For instance, is it an accident that advertising messages have-^ moved from focusing on physical functions, to focusing onjdesiresv' personal and small-group lifestyles, and the form of being-in-the-world of a whole social formation? Is it an accident that the messages have moved from the verbal to the visual?11
226 / Themes in Popular Culture
Indeed, representatives of established religious faiths have recognized with alarm the manner in which this new ''religion" threatens their own existence. Believing that a "gospel is a book of revelation, an ultimate source of reference wherein we find ourselves revealed . . . a response to questions of who we are, what we may hope for, how we may aspire to act, what endures, what is important, what is of true value/' the Jesuit scholar John Kavanaugh argues that advertising is part of a gospel based upon the Commodity form — a world where people are identified through the things they consume as well as being dominated by them. Kavanaugh compares this to a life based on more human values, such as justice and spirituality — a gospel based upon the Personal Form. These two kinds of gospels "serve as ultimate and competing 'forms' of perception, through which we filter our experience. Each form, moreover, provides a controlling image for our consciousness in apprehending our selves and our world . . . Each has its own 'church', you might say, its own cults and liturgical rites, its own special language, and its own concept of the heretical."12
We should hesitate accepting the notion of "advertising as religion,'\ however, until we have asked one additional question. W|\at kind op1 religion is it? Is it the same as Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, etc.? If it is different, how is it different? Clearly, it is different from the established religions in that there is^nc-jnorai corj5j*tJis,xentex.jthat is articulated in a ritualized form. We may be able to read the entire seFof advertisements for this moral order but that is not the same as having an articulated moral code already existing. In established religions, the icons that are used reflect a central system of beliefs — they are ritualized expressions of it. In advertising the icons of the marketplace themselves" are this religion. I will come back to this point below. ^ The levels at which the different religions operate are also important. Advertising operates not at a spiritual level but at a mundane everyday level. In this it resembles systems of belief that have existed in other societies. Early anthropological accounts of nineteenth-century West Africa tribes describe practices whereby objects were believed to be possessed by some kind of supernatural spirit, which if worshipped and appeased could have a beneficial influence on .the, wordly existence of the owner. The control of the power of the fetish was associated with black magic and was used for personal ends. It could guard against sickness, bring rain, catch fish, make the owner brave, bring the owners good fortune, protect against other evil spirits, cure the ill, sexually attract persons, capture the power of some aspect of the animal kingdom, etc. This system of belief was labeled by anthropologists as j "fetishism." Like the world of advertising, fetishism_ operated at the ' level of everyday activity; its effects were short-term and immediate
The Dialectic of Technology and Magic / 227
and concerned the practical welfare of its possessor. It was not, in and of itself, a total spiritual belief system but rather a fart_ of a much larger one.13
^T^alT societies where the term "fetishism" has been applied, there are different levels of spiritual belief: acceptance of the powers of the fetish should not blind us to the possibility that its user may also have belief in a higher spiritual power, such as a supreme being. There is no / denial of God but merely an indifference to "Him" as regards the conduct of everyday life. The fetish does not operate at a higher spiritualistic ^, or vague futuristic level, for which other spheres of religion are more / appropriate. In fetishism it is to the vast number of spirits in the air /' that affect physical, social, and psychological human conduct that j attention is directed. Advertising, then, can more closely be compared ' \ ■■■■■■  to this fet-ishistic religion. ,---_
v......................-.....■ r \
The moral universe ... is essentially that of a poJytheisticj;eligion. It is a world dominated by a sheer num^rlexs.-pantrte^ which literally reside in every article of use or consumption, in every institution of daily life. If the winds and waters, the trees and -brooks of ancient Greece were inhabited by a vast host of nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and other local and specific deities, so is the universe of the TV commercial. The polytheism that confronts us here is thus a fairly primitive one, closely akin to animistic and fetishistic beliefs.14 y/
Technology and Magic
Raymond Williams notes that advertising is "a highly organized and h    professional system of magical inducements and satisfacfens,_funcr.v \ tionally very similar to magical systems in simpler societies, but rather / strangely coexistent with a highly developed scientific technology/'15 . If, functionally speaking, the "broad purpose of a religion is to provide a confused population with answers to the problems of existence, why does advertising focus so much attention on the use of magic rather than on some other, more spiritual system of beliefs? To answer this question we need to recontextualize advertising within the broader parameters of seeing it as an institution of a developing capitalist society. Judith Williamson defines magic as/'the production of results disproportionate to the effort put in (a transformation of power — or of impollmceTwr^p^wer)/'16" How does this fit into the cultural framework of advanced capitalist society?
For Raymond Williams the fundamental choice that emerges in a modern industrial society is between seeing people as producers or as consumers. A society that encourages a view of people as producers
228 / Themes in Popular Culture
The Dialectic of Technology and Magic / 229
highlights the political dimensions of industrial activity and recognizes : that different ways of organizing material production entails debates about the distribution of .power, andwho benefits within any social system. Such a society recognizes that the important decisions made about the structure of society are made in the realm of production — for it is the economic sphere that structures the distribution of valuable and scarce social resources. To the extent that a society wants democratic discussion about the proper uses of social resources, a view of people as producers is absolutely vital.
On the other hand, to the extent that a society wants to divert attention away from the political consequences of economic structures it encourages people to regard themselves as consumers of industrial products rather than as their producers. Democratic activity in this perspective is equated with the different options that the marketplace is able to offer. Consumption is democracy, in as much as people have "choices" about the products they can buy, but not the productive arrangements under which they live. To the extent that a society is successful in this type of definition of people, we have a deflection of consciousness away from the real areas of social life (production) and | towards those that are secondary (consumption). As Raymond Williams I writes: "The fundamental choice that emerges, in the problems set to us by modern industrial production, is between man as consumer and man as user. The system of organized magic which is modern advertising is primarily important as a functional obscuring of this ..choice."17 It obscures this choice because it both recognizes our reality and then offers a false interpretation of it. It recognizes the reality that modern forms of capitalist production strip away from us any notion of control of our productive activity. At work we are not in control. It gives a false interpretation of this in that it naturalizes the loss of control and instead offers us control in another realm — consumption. Judith Williamson writes:
In advertising, it is essential to compensate for the inactivity forced on us; hence advertising's Romanticism and its emphasis on adventure and excitement. But the only thing we can do in fact is to buy the product, or incant its name — this is all the action possible as our part of the excitement offered. Such minimal action inevitably creates a "magical spell" element: from a little action we get "great" results (or are promised them) . . . Magic allows us to feel that we may not be producers of meaning but of material effects . . . This creates a never ending exchange between passivity and action, a translation between technological action and magical action with our own inactivity as the turning point. Technology deprives us of a control which we are given back in the surrogate form of spells and promises.18
In modern industrial society the link with nature has been shattered: nature is viewed only as a resourcelhat is there for human consumption. Our defining relationship is with technology. Rather than the ^  spirits of nature invading the body of objects (as in older fetishistic / belief systems), in the mythical universe of advertising it is the spirits of S  technology that invade the body of the commodity and supply the basis /  for a belief in its power. The "technologicaliix" "is, in modern capitalist society, a deep-rooted way of approaching (and obscuring) social problems andit would not surprise us to see this pattern everywhere we look, from SDI to car commercials, cloaked in magical and supernatural modes of representation.
374 / Notes to Chapter 14
Notes to Chapter 16 / 375
8. This sense of the car has perhaps never been more passionately expressed than in Marinetti's 1905 encomium (also called "To Pegasus") "To the Automobile":
I finally unleash your metallic bridle . . . You launch yourself,/intoxicaiingIy into the liberating Infinite! . . . Hurrah! No longer contact with the impure earths . . ./Finally , I am unleashed and I supplely fly/on the intoxicating plenitude/of the streaming stars in the great bed of the sky!
Cited in Silk et al, Automobile and Culture, p. 67.
9. Q. v. John Heskett, Industriai Design (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 72-74.
10. The streairdining idea, replete with futurist enthusiasm, was popularized by the publication of Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons in 1932.
11. A wonderful extension of such imagery is to be seen in the classic Australian underground film. The Cars That Ate Paris.
12. The poem begins
she being Brand
-new; and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her and (having
thoroughly oiled the universal
joint tested my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.
K. . ,
13. Q.v. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet, 1963).
14. And also architects, of whom the most influential in this regard was Le Corbusier, both through his actual buildings and through his own manifesto, Vers Une Architecture.
15. It was no accident that several of Chuck Berry's rock and roil songs were about or set in cars, and that Jack Kerouac's beat classic was called On the Road.
16. This did not pass critical commentators by, and there were masterful dissections of the car's stylistic embodiment of the technology complex on both sides of the Atlantic. See, for example, Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon, 1951), pp. 82-84; and Roland Barthes's essay in Mythologies on the 1955 Citroen DS.
17. A good account of this is provided in Theodor Rosak's The Making of a Counter-culture (Garden City, NY: Doubieday, 1969).
18. For the relation between expressway construction and the modernity crisis see Marshall Berman's account of Robert Moses and the South Bronx expressway in All that is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 290-312.
19. See Bayley, Sex, Drink and Fast Cars, pp. 63-67, 101-110.
20. I have explored this point with respect to the overall development of recent advertising in "From voyeur to narcissist: the changing imagery of men, 1950-80," in Michael Kaufmann, ed., Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure and Power (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987).
21. On another level, Toyota's reference to Flashdance was a tactic for Americanizing its product in the face of protectionist (and, to a degree, xenophobic) resistance to
"foreign competition." In the present phase of its assimilationist campaign Toyota has reached back to Gershwin: "Who could ask for anything more?"
22. See McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 346-369.
23. See Fredric Jameson's essay "Post-modernism: the Cultural Logic of Capitalism," New Left Review, No. 146 (July-August 1984).
24. For this now familiar neo-Marxist inversion of McLuhan see Jean Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majority (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
15. Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic
1. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 125.
2. Marx, Capital, pp. 125-126.
3. T, Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of Consumer Culture," in T. Jackson Lears and R. Fox, The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 4,21.
4. See William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising (Toronto: Methuen, 1986); and Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), for further discussion of these issues.
5. See Leiss et al, Social Communication, for the development of the four Stages of advertising and culture frames for goods.
6. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 264, 267.
7. Marchand, Advertising, p. 265.
8. Marchand, Advertising, p. 282.
9. Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (New York: Anchor, 1974).
10. Staf fan Linder, The Harried leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
11. This paragraph is based upon Bill Livant "On the Religion of Use-Value/' Unpublished paper, University of Regina, 1983.
12. John Kavanaugh, Following Christ in a Consumer Society (New York: Orbis, 1981), p. 15-16.
13. See Jhally, Codes of Advertising, p. 53-58.
14. Martin Esslin, "Aristotle and the Advertisers: The Television Commercial Considered as a Form of Drama," in H. Newcombe, ed., Television: The Critical View (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 271.
15. Raymond Williams, "Advertising: The Magic System" in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: New Left Books, 1980), p. 185.
16. Judith Williamson Decoding Advertisements (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), p. 141.
17. Williams, "Advertising: Magic," p. 186.
18. Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, pp. 140, 142.
16. The Importance of Shredding in Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture
and Terrorism
1. Taking the Stand: The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North (New York: Pocket Books, 1987), pp. 26-27.