Advertising Myths

The Strange Half-Lives of Images and Commodities

Anne Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135141493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Advertising is often portrayed negatively, as corrupting a mythically pure relationship between people and things. In Advertising Myths Anne Cronin argues that it is better understood as a 'matrix of transformation' that performs divisions in the social order and arranges classificatory regimes. Focusing on consumption controversies, Cronin contends that advertising is constituted of 'circuits of belief' that flow between practitioners, clients, regulators, consumers and academics. Controversies such as those over tobacco and alcohol advertising, she argues, distil these beliefs and articulate with programmes of social engineering aimed at altering consumption patterns. This book will be essential reading for students and academics of advertising and consumption.

1 Images, commodities and compulsions

Consumption controversies of the nineteenth century

This chapter explores Euro-American nineteenth-century controversies centred on consumption, examines advertising’s limited role in such controversies, and casts into relief contemporary concerns about consumption and advertising. By focusing on the discursive constitution of deviant or pathological forms of consumption such as kleptomania or oniomania (what we would now understand as compulsive shopping), I examine how new norms of consumption emerged in societies fascinated by things. This chapter does not represent a history of advertising or consumer culture; neither is it an aetiology of consumption understood as social pathogen – in some nineteenth-century accounts, consumption was certainly framed as pathological in its perceived threat to the social order and in its potential effects of social degeneration and moral decay. I am not aiming to reproduce those nineteenth-century understandings: this chapter does not suggest that consuming practices or advertisements engendered social decay or that the new culture of consumption should be understood as pathological. Rather, my aim is to produce a new synthesis of accounts of nineteenth-century consuming discourses that examines the apparently troubling and unstable relations between persons and commodities. The understanding that conceptual distinctions between persons and things are blurred has a long pedigree (see Kopytoff 1986), but it is in the nineteenth century that this porosity of boundaries comes to be seen as particularly problematic, taking its most potent form in controversies about commodities. Drawing on historians’ accounts of such controversies, I offer a speculative account that explores the nineteenth century’s rehearsal of the perceived relations between things, persons and images through emergent discourses of consuming compulsions. In this analytic synthesis, I displace nineteenth-century advertising from its conventionally-imagined status as key site of controversy and prime mediator of consumption acts by arguing that advertising was not at that time posited as a powerfully manipulative force. To explore the dynamics of those consuming controversies, I broaden my analysis to include an examination of the visual aspect and material form of the commodity. I conclude by arguing that whilst advertising and controversies about consumption were not held to have an intimate connection, they did share a common characteristic: both advertising and consuming controversies articulated nineteenth-century debates about type and classification, and focused powerful concerns about the erosion or displacement of established taxonomic hierarchies.

Walter Benjamin’s (1973) characterization of the nineteenth-century flâneur condenses many of the themes that this chapter explores. For Benjamin, the figure of the flâneur encapsulated the shifting characteristics of urban life and the burgeoning of new sites of consumption; as he strolled through the crowded streets, the flâneur epitomized new sensory paradigms and etched out a new spatiality of the city.¹ In discussing Charles Baudelaire’s poetry of nineteenth-century Parisian life, Benjamin wrote of the opiate-like effects of being part of a crowd – the experience of massed humanity numbed the pain and feelings of estrangement of those forced to live in the capital:

The crowd is not only the newest asylum of outlaws; it is also the latest narcotic for those abandoned. The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity. He is not aware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effects on him and it permeates him blissfully like a narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations. The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers.

(Benjamin 1973: 55)

The force of Benjamin’s account does not simply derive from the joint role played by drugs and commodities in engendering Baudelaire’s (1961) famous artificial paradises of intoxication and pleasure. Benjamin marshals the themes of the masses, intoxicating substances, the lure of the commodity and the ambiguous and disturbing relation between persons and things. These tropes were not merely coincident in the contemporary cultural landscape; they were cultural correlates that acquired a particular currency in late nineteenth-century Europe. Operating as social coefficients, they both drew together and amplified some of the major concerns of the period: the role intoxicating substances were thought to play in social degeneration; the effects of city life on the individual; the burgeoning culture of commodities; and massed groups of people which were increasingly framed as populations.

As Foucault (1990a: 139) has argued, this emphasis on the population was channelled through understandings of ‘the species-body’, that is, a new perception of the masses as a body of people. Such conceptual shifts facilitated a new form of social control or ‘bio-politics of the population’ which dealt with the ‘propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, and with all the conditions that can cause these to vary’ (ibid.). Through recasting the masses as a population, bodies and life itself became sites of social regulation in a new way. In effect, these new perceptual grids linked the body, consumption and population in explicit ways; they focused novel mandates for the control of individual consumption by drawing on new understandings of consumption’s perceived significance at the level of the population, of the nation, of the species-body. But effecting social control through bio-politics was only part of late nineteenth-century regulatory concerns. In the previous quotation, Benjamin appears to suggest that the narcotic effect of the crowd is generated through the physical proximity and conceptual connection between people and substances, consumers and commodities. The individual caught up in the crowd both parallels the state of the commodity – thus creating a troubling consonance between person and thing – and is subject to the intoxicating lure of that commodity. This is indissociably a concern with the embodied experience of being part of an urban crowd – part of a mass focused around new sites of consumption – and the new modes of connection or forms of relationship with the commodity. Seen in this way, it is possible to suggest a nuanced version of Foucault’s bio-politics that includes a politics of things or, more precisely, a politically charged concern with the forms of relationality between persons and things. This nineteenth-century politics of the non-biological, the inanimate, the ‘not-living’, draws its discursive force from the anxieties and fascination about the relation between persons and things; it is a relation which was articulated most forcefully and had most economic and social resonance through commodities and consumption.

Commodities, consuming pathologies and the useless object

Things, and particularly their consumption and display, were central to nineteenth-century culture (Briggs 1988). Museums ordered and displayed objects from around the world, hierarchizing and materializing European nations and their relation to ‘uncivilized’ cultures (Gosden and Knowles 2001; Pearce 1992, 1994, 1995). The medium of exhibition and spectacle grew in significance as a mode of relating to the material world and as a way of organizing the conceptual world (see Richards 1990). Commodities embodied imperial values and served as a currency for disseminating those values and expanding capitalism’s material and ideological grasp (see McClintock 1995). Relationships to things took on intensified forms; the hobby of collecting, for instance, became a nineteenth-century passion and served as a means of ordering and controlling the natural and the social world (see Saisselin 1985; Stewart 1993). Taxidermy gained considerable cultural prominence as stuffed animals became popular commodities and the subject of collections. Elephants’ feet were transformed into furniture, tiger jaws formed frames for clocks, hat stands were made from antlers, tiger and bear claws were fashioned into jewellery (Olalquiaga 1999). This was a fascination with things and, in the instance of animal-commodities, represented a fascination with the once-animate – the nowdead – available to be bought, collected and displayed. In this chapter, I am not attempting to review the considerable literature that explores the material culture of nineteenth-century Euro-America. Instead, I take as my focus nineteenth-century concerns about the relation between persons and things, and more precisely, the articulation of these anxieties in debates about, and regulation of, consuming practices. In parallel, I explore the process by which certain commodities and consuming practices came to be distanced from, and functioned as a contrasting definition for, ‘normal consumption’. In the nineteenth century – the era which witnessed the mass production of commodities and a proliferation of technological inventions – novel goods and technologies were not uniformly greeted with consumers’ delight. For some, ‘the invasion of new things carried with it an element of threat’ (Briggs 1988: 372). This apprehension, I will argue, derives not only from the threat of change or the disruptive influence of innovation, but also from the introduction of troubling alterations in the conceptual relationships between things and persons that these new objects engendered. Mechanical innovations distilled many of these anxieties: the perceived distinctions between the human and non-human were challenged or subjected to a process of erosion as the relays between persons and machines came to be conceived as more insistent – more as a relationship of kin than one of inventor or operator to inorganic mechanism (see O’Connor 2000; Rabinbach 1992; Seltzer 1992). But the issues of consumption and the contested nature of the commodity provided another key nexus of concern about this politically freighted relationship. Individual consumption and its supposed effects on the body was subjected to a bio-politics of control. In parallel, attempts to exert control over the perceived conceptual proximity of the category ‘thing’ to the category ‘person’ were instigated through the generation of taxonomic structures and collections. Nineteenth-century bourgeois culture had a fascination with objects which tended to manifest itself through ‘bric-a-brac, clutter, accumulation’ (Saisselin 1985: 65). Amidst this proliferation of objects, the production of a collection functioned to generate conceptual grids of seriality and classification, the appeal of which resided partly in their promise of affording some control over things (see Stewart 1993). Indeed, collecting was seen by some in the nineteenth century as a pathological form of consumption, symptomatic of modern malaises; in particular, collecting was cast as evidence of the unsettling power of objects over persons. In some accounts, however, collecting was seen less as evidence of objects’ power over the consumer, or their desire to impose order on the masses of things, than as a sign of internal disorders of the individual. Here, Saisselin cites Paul Bourget’s psychological essays of 1888 which defined collecting as,

the refined mania of an unquiet period in which the fatigues of boredom and the diseases of the nervous sensibility led man to invent the factitious passion for collecting because his interior complexities made him incapable of appreciating the grand and simple sanity of things in the world around him.

(cited in Saisselin 1985: 69)

In this account, the simple sanity of the natural order of things is disrupted by manias of taxonomy and the possession of objects. The interiority of the self is conceived in contradistinction to an exterior order of things: nervous disorders of the self exert their unruly influence and produce impulses to compromise the natural ordering of things in making a collection, that is, in producing new specifications of type and genre. Such anxieties about interior states were commonly expressed in the nineteenth century alongside ‘a widespread fear that the energy of the mind and body was dissipating under the strain of modernity; that the will, the imagination, and especially the health of the nation was being squandered in wanton disregard of the body’s physiological laws’ (Rabinbach 1992: 6). Thus in nineteenth-century accounts, the imagined causes or locations of malady or social degeneration were multiple and often shifted uneasily within any one account. The causative emphasis was unevenly distributed between the social environment – such as crowded city life or the material effects of commodities – and the disturbed interior states or nervous disorders of the individual. In the following section, I explore in more depth one element of this nineteenth-century concern by focusing on the framing and acting out of the relations between persons and commodities in sites such as department stores, and in practices such as shopping, its illegal counterpart of shoplifting, and its pathologized form, kleptomania.

Nineteenth-century debates about commodities and consumption often took as their focus the department store. This is not to say that department stores dominated the retail environment: there were increasing numbers of ‘multiples’, analogous to contemporary chain stores, such as the London and Newcastle Tea Company which had between ten and twenty branches (Fraser 1981). These were stores of the mass market which stocked relatively cheap ranges of imported goods geared towards mass sale. In addition, co-operative societies played a significant role selling food and provisions in their stores (ibid.). But it was the department store that dominated the nineteenth-century imagination, inspiring writers such as Dreiser and Zola who located dramas of modernity, desire and pleasure in their extravagant interiors (Bowlby 1985). In practical terms, the department stores introduced new modes of retail, producing cheap versions of goods for the masses (Saisselin 1985). Goods were marked with a fixed price and customers were encouraged to browse through the stores and enjoy the carefully managed spectacle (Williams 1982). Indeed, historians suggest that what distinguished department stores from shops was primarily their ‘invitation to desire’ (Saisselin 1985: 33). The stores were designed to entertain and to encourage browsing and indeed came to be seen as almost magical spaces of the imagination ‘where selling is mingled with amusement, where arousal of free-floating desire is as important as immediate purchase of particular items’ (Williams 1982: 67).

Whilst department stores combined selling with entertainment in a novel, potent form, they also offered a new site in which different social groups could interact; the stores afforded a quasi-respectable public space in which women and men, as well as different social classes, could mingle. This cultural shift elicited a range of criticisms from nineteenth-century commentators who articulated concerns about threats to class and gender boundaries (Tiersten 2001). This new social space was a worrisome development for some, representing an erosion of the social order, potentially endangering the morals of ladies, and creating the possibility of shifts in class position. For example, the shopgirl in the department store represented ‘the hope of social mobility for the daughters of the lower middle classes on the one hand, and the moral depravity of these frenetic and seductive workplaces for reformers on the other’ (Crossick and Jaumain 1999: 31). For ladies, the possibilities of shopping in these new urban spaces offered the erotic frisson of newly authorized public encounters with men as well as the intensified pleasures of luxury and possession (Tiersten 1999). One threat of consumer culture was thus the way in which it appeared to offer women forms of independence that undermined their traditional roles within the family (Tiersten 2001). However, the developing consumer culture of the nineteenth century and the advent of the department store in Euro-American societies did not represent entirely new connections between women, shopping and ideas of luxurious consumption. These links can be traced back at least to the early eighteenth century when women were seen as the driving forces in the demand for luxury and expense and were censured for indulging in impulsive spending (Crossick and Jaumain 1999). But the department store of the nineteenth century provided a new context for these associations, creating a densely charged environment of commodified display that engendered ‘popular and accessible models of sexual identity and conduct [and] reformulated and gave specific meanings … to definitions of manhood and womanhood, and to models of heterosocial and heterosexual interaction’ (Reekie 1993: xix).

The development of the department store channelled a range of criticisms that were paralleled in concerns about new pathologies associated with the use of certain substances. Running alongside more established conceptual paradigms such as diseases of the will or nerve-power, the new concept of addiction was beginning to frame certain understandings of the consumption of alcohol and drugs such as morphine (see Valverde 1998). In parallel, the opulence and sensuousness of the displays in department stores was thought to overwhelm weak-willed persons (Miller 1981). In 1904, Theodore Dreiser wrote of New York’s store windows: ‘what a stinging, quivering zest they display … stirring up in onlookers the desire to secure but a minor part of what they see, the taste of a vibrating presence, and the picture that it makes’ (cited in Leach 1989: 99). Indeed, the stores used display to create ‘a visual vocabulary of desire’ (Leach 1989: 103), and it was women and the lower orders who were thought to be particularly susceptible to their allure (Miller 1981). Writing in 1882, one critic described the department store as a mass of ‘intoxicating displays, the shimmer of fabrics, dazzling mirages, irresistible seductions … which bedazzle women’ (cited in Tiersten 1999: 122). This heady mixture led the department store to be seen as ‘a crucible of new urban pathologies’ focusing a range of social concerns (Tiersten 1999: 120). In this new context, women who purchased goods and, as we shall see, women who stole merchandise, were responding to ‘the calculated arousal of desire in an environment dedicated to sensory stimulation and unfettered abundance’ (Abelson 1989: 11). The new culture of consuming – epitomized by the department store and the consumption of alcohol and drugs – was thought to introduce retrograde social shifts and precipitate the degeneration of self and social structure. Both articulated anxieties about the disintegration of class structure and blurring of gender roles. For instance, the regulation of substances was a consequence ‘not of their pharmacology, but of their association with social groups that were perceived as potentially dangerous’ (Kohn 1992: 2). In nineteenth-century Britain, conceptions of particular substances were closely tied to the perceived status and social role of women, the working classes, and to issues of race and empire. Hence, driven by the ideal of mental hygiene, public health measures focused on the problematic use of alcohol, an issue which was also discussed in synonymous terms with concerns about racial dilution and pathology and national decline (McDonald 1994). In these debates about the effects of alcohol, ‘women became the focal point for many of the proposed measures to counteract the increasing “degeneracy of the race”’ (Thom 1994: 34–5).

In this way, classifications of race, gender, class and nationality functioned as primary points of articulation for nineteenth-century perceptions of ‘dangerous consumption’. In effect, the more that the working classes, black people, Catholics and Irish immigrants were perceived to be heavy drinkers, the more drinking was perceived to be a problem (McDonald 1994). In this controversy, compromised will or nerve-power, or unbalanced ratios of will to desire, were considered to contribute to problematic consumption of substances (Valverde 1998). This is was what Valverde (1998: 67) calls ‘the social stratification of the free will’, that is, a classifying structure which posits women and lower class groups as inherently lacking will. In this context, it is clear that the laws and regulations governing ‘dangerous substances’ were primarily concerned with governing the realm of freedom (ibid.). These forms of social control, I suggest, do not concern themselves solely with the ingestion of dangerous substances and the morally and socially atrophying effects thought to result from this; they also attempted to govern the more general realm of consumption, delimiting it as an important nexus of individual action, social stratification and cultural taxonomy.

I am not suggesting that we should collapse nineteenth-century concerns with commodities and shopping with concerns about alcohol and drugs (see Cronin 2002a). Instead, I wish to explore how the contours of those discourses – the consumption of commodities and the ingestion drugs and alcohol – formed a consonance with one another, each drawing on the other’s conceptual frameworks to cohere into powerful discursive forms that took a firm hold of the nineteenth-century imagination. In the regulatory project around drugs and alcohol, ‘moral and political perceptions of danger allowed and encouraged the establishment of a pharmacology of harm’ (McDonald 1994: 4). Nineteenth-century commentators deployed these tropes of intoxication and unhealthy connection to substances to describe the forms of sensory stimulation engendered by the department store and the lure of the commodity. One journalist of the time wrote that shoppers emerging from department stores appeared to ‘wear a bizarre expression. Their pupils were extraordinarily dilated … and they have dark shadows beneath their eyes’ (cited in Tiersten 1999: 121). The same journalist argued that ‘bourgeois ...