Marketing Modernity

Italian Advertising from Fascism to Postmodernity

Adam Arvidsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781138880023
• eBook ISBN: 9781134489893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In Marketing Modernity, Adam Arvidsson traces the development of Italy's postmodern consumer culture from the 1920s to the present day. In so doing, Arvidsson argues that the culture of consumption we see in Italy today has its direct roots in the social vision articulated by the advertising industry in the years following the First World War. He then goes on to discuss how that vision was further elaborated by advertising's interaction with subsequent big discourses in Twentieth Century Italy: fascism, post-war mass political parties and the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on a wide range of primary sources, this fascinating book takes an innovative historical approach to the study of consumption.

Part I

From Fascism to Fordism

1 Introduction

Autumn 2001 at my local Sainsbury’s supermarket had an Italian theme. According to The Observer’s food columnist, Nigel Slater, who wrote the copy for the accompanying campaign brochure, the purpose was to introduce Brits to the rich regional variety of Italian food, beyond the now familiar vocabulary of ‘pizza, pasta, espresso’. Such lesser-known regional dishes are authentic, we were assured, but ‘none of this means that Italian food is stuck in a time-warp’, Nigel Slater admitted, showing his awareness of the ‘floating’ or ‘contested’ status of culture and identity. ‘It is simply that they [Italians] have a respect for their traditions that other countries may have lost’. Soon, Slater hoped, this ‘love of good food will be as much ours as theirs’.¹

It is not just that Italian food tastes good. As stressed throughout Sainsbury’s publicity drive, it stands for something that Brits, or at least Brits of the middle class, Observer, Sainsbury’s, New Labour kind, appreciate: authenticity, tradition, a sense of quality and, of course, individual creativity. (Sainsbury’s was eager to point this out: to cook an authentic Italian pasta meal it is not enough to mix the ready-made pasta with the ready-made sauce. One must also ‘get creative, raid the fridge’, add something of one’s own.) Italy is not just another more or less exotic ‘Other’ to consume, as in the case of Sainsbury’s range of Thai, Japanese or African food; it is an ideal to imitate. Indeed, at the ‘Italian’ bar, Café Nero, that has opened in the market square a couple of hundred yards from my local Sainsbury’s branch, the main selling pitch is the make-believe Italian environment. Employers are even instructed in how to ‘behave Italian’ behind the counter and there is a tendency to hire only dark-haired staff. To those of us who remember Nino Manfredi’s immigrant worker in the 1973 film Pane e cioccolata, trying desperately to colour his hair blond, such inverted cultural hierarchies are definitely quaint. As late as the mid-1980s Italian friends would routinely suffer racist slurs and sometimes violence when inter-railing to London. Today their attackers are probably at home cooking up a Stracotto al Chianti.

The international image of Italy has definitely changed since the 1980s. This is not only because the country has progressed from relative poverty to relative prosperity, demonstrated in 1988, when the Italian economy overtook the British in GNP per capita. And it is not only because the country has become a destination for migration rather than a point of departure. (Both of these statements are true with some modifications: northern Italy has ‘always’ been relatively prosperous, or at least since the late 1950’s ‘economic miracle’. Parts of southern Italy are still poor. A lot of Italians still migrate, particularly from the south.) And it is not only because Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party have shown that in Italy, like in the rest of the West, advertising, spin and careful marketing carry more political weight than old-fashioned ideologies. There is also something else. The international image of Italy, an Italian fashion scholar writes, is no longer a matter of ‘madolines, pasta and straw-clad wine flasks (fiaschi)’, but of high-quality stylish labels, like ‘Ferrari, Armani and San Pellegrino table water’.² (Incidentally, the mandolines, pasta and fiaschi are the same objects that Mussolini used to invoke in describing the dreaded Italietta of the preceding liberal years, stuck in underdevelopment and provincialism.) Italy has become a locus for the style-conscious postmodern consumer culture that we all belong to. (And this signifying relation has a global validity. In the posh four-star Bangkok hotel that my airline supplied me with, there was of course an Italian restaurant, and a Prada store in the nearby mall.)

A similarly transformed self-image has been common to Italian observers as well, at least since the mid-1980s. ‘In the last couple of years’, influential semiologist Alberto Abruzzese wrote in 1988, advertising and consumer culture has made ‘the aesthetic dimension of human existence’ more important than before. This has led to a new general awareness and appreciation of personal appearance and of ‘the look’.³ In an essay with the telling title ‘From Ideologies to Gregarious Individualism’, prominent sociologist Franco Ferrarotti did not hesitate to describe the Italy of the late 1980s as a fully-fledged consumer society, where consumption, as many Anglo-Saxon writers on the postmodern have kept stressing, had become the central social institution, comparable to the factory in Gramsci’s classic account of an emerging ‘Fordist’ late capitalism.⁴ Consumerism, Ferrarotti argued, had now fully taken up its function as a ‘surrogate for social integration’. This had led to a ‘fragmentation of formal ideological schemes, both to the right and to the left’; to the ‘rise of short-term needs connected to the interests, but also the diversified tastes of differentiated social groups’; this occurred ‘independently or beyond what is commonly called public interest’. To Ferrarotti, the ‘gregarious individualism’ that followed meant the end of the political as the central locus for the formation of personal and social identity.⁵ (In Italy this latter role of the political has been particularly powerful, at least if we believe Almond and Verba’s study from the late 1950s. Italians, they argued, ‘regard their party not as an electoral contestant but as a church or a way of life’.)⁶

Similarly, in 1995 Giuseppe DeRita, head of the influential polling company Censis, described the trends unearthed by the previous 20 years of polling as a development from a society marked by a fairly simple structure of aspirations and interests to a general state of differentiation and ‘politeism’. This, he argued, was driven by the progressive affirmation of mass consumption.⁷ This narrative is common enough to readers of contemporary social theory. Before, we lived in a class society where each cleavage generated its own values that would eventually find a political expression and that would, in turn, articulate a collective identity. Today we live in a consumer society and politics is if not irrelevant, then a fluid space of unstable social formations that come and go.⁸ Usually, this progression is from a politically centred ‘modern’ society to a commercially decentred ‘postmodern’ society, and consequently from structure and production to culture and consumption, as the most important field of sociological analysis is simply taken for granted. It has become something of a Grand Narrative of contemporary social theory, and is often invoked as an explanatory factor in itself.⁹ This narrative also contains a theory of subjectivity.¹⁰ In modern society we were determined by our position in a well-defined social structure, where identities are more or less given. In postmodern society we are ‘set free’ from social structure and condemned to reflexively construct our own identities through, predominately, consumer choices. We have, as Anthony Giddens has put it, ‘no choice but to choose’.¹¹ Precisely because of the common-sense status of this narrative it is very rare to see attempts at a more detailed explanation of how this transition has come about. Clearly, if we go back half a century, consumer goods were generally not regarded as conducive to a reflexive process of identity construction. Instead, social theory regarded mass consumption as a source of conformity, ‘one-dimensionality’, standardization and the end of individuality in general.¹² How, then, did consumer goods become a medium for the reflexive construction of identity? How did consumer culture go from denying our ability to choose to compelling us constantly to make lifestyle choices? The chapters that follow will address that question. They will look at arguably the most important actor in the formation of consumer culture, of a system of meanings that make goods conducive to one form of subjectivity or another: the advertising industry. I will argue that this conception of goods as tools for the reflexive construction of subjectivity has resulted from the ways the advertising industry has responded to the challenges presented by the modernization process.

The main proclaimed purpose of advertising is to sell goods (perhaps the real, unofficial purpose is rather to sell advertising). In order to do so, goods have somehow to be inserted into the social life of potential consumers: a legitimate space has to be created for them. (At least if we take a Weberian view of the social actor as someone who has more or less meaningful and coherent motives for what he or she does. A behaviourist could of course argue differently.) In its attempts at doing this, advertising thus comes to engage more or less directly with the social. It becomes a kind of sociological, or socio-technical practice. In Italy the development of advertising and a modern consumer culture has coincided with an extremely rapid development from a predominantly agrarian to a ‘post-industrial’ society. This means that advertising has had to engage with and mediate a whole series of kinks and contradictions resulting from this turbulent modernization process. My argument is that the form of subjectivity that contemporary consumer culture carries has come out of these efforts at mediation.

Consumer Culture

Advertising ministers the spiritual side of trade. It is a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the highest responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is part of the greater work of regeneration and redemption of mankind.¹³

A key tenet of sociological thought, from the classics and on, is the double nature of modernity. On the one hand, the modernization process destroys old meaning systems. Capitalism reduces it all to the cold and neutral reality of the commodity form. The spread of instrumental rationality disenchants the world. The individual is left to face the reality of life without the veil of myth or tradition: Marx and Engels put this well in the Communist Manifesto.¹⁴ On the other hand, modern society depends on its ability to recreate a meaningful sense of community. Durkheim understood this well. Life without any kind of myth is not worth living, and an entirely meaningless society will eventually collapse under its own anomic tendencies. (Which was precisely what Durkheim feared would happen.) Consequently, the modernization process gives rise to a series of institutions in which the naked reality of a disenchanted life is re-presented as a coherent, ordered and meaningful totality, and where the amorality of brute facts is given a renewed ethical dimension. The disenchantment of modernization is accompanied by its re-enchantment.¹⁵ The institutions that engage in this ‘self-representation of society’ (to use Niklas Luhmann’s term) construct a model of the social.¹⁶ They present it as a place were a certain moral, ontological and epistemological order prevails, and where the individual has a particular place. Many different instruments are employed in constructing such a model of the social. Social theory is one important tool, but so are statistics, moral philosophy, psychology, medicine and theology (religion also is not declining in modern society, but rather on the rise). Usually some mix of these different tools is employed. Many actors are involved in this self-representation of society. An obvious candidate is the state (or its ‘ideological apparatus’); others are churches or sects, the media, political parties and movements and, yes, the advertising industry. That the state has been a central actor in the self-representation of modern society; and that it has employed a whole variety of techniques to that purpose, both ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, is hardly a disputed issue. But what about advertising?

In Marx’s rendering the commodity form is empty. What is meaningful from the point of view of the individual, use-value, is meaningless from the point of view of commodity exchange. Commodification turns quality into quantity. Of course, this is not an empirical description of how consumer capitalism works. Since capitalism began to take the consumer side of the equation seriously, somewhere in the nineteenth century, it has been crucial to give meaning to commodities, to generate a consumer culture. Take the case of the US, not the earliest, but the best-studied example in this respect. There the emergence of new mass distribution systems that followed the economic transformations in the wake of the Civil War made it increasingly important to give potentially anonymous commodities a meaningful place. When the local grocer was no longer there to create trust and give the commodity a place in human society, the commodity had come to carry such meanings by itself. As has been more recently argued, it was this need to create meaning in the face of potentially anonymous forms of distribution, rather than the need to sell off forcefully a surplus accumulated through new mass production systems, that provided the main opening for American advertising.¹⁷ At first, advertising would make use of the shared symbolic resources (or the ‘commercial vernacular’ to use Lears’s term) of popular culture. Products would be linked to images of royalty, to colonialist images of Africans or Native Americans, to famous buildings or to the often invented personal identity of the manufacturer.¹⁸ Soon, however, commodities would begin to embody meanings that referred back to a particular consumer culture, reproduced and elaborated in advertising-financed media like weekly magazines, radio and cinema, and populated by people, or better, ‘forms of personhood’ that were first and foremost defined as consumers.¹⁹ During the twentieth century this consumer culture has grown to become one of the most important forms for the self-representation of society.²⁰ Advertising is ‘capitalist realism’, as Michael Schudson claims. It is there that the idealized mythology of life in capitalist society is mainly articulated.²¹ (We are all familiar with this: in advertising, breakfast cereals taste great, family dinners are actually fun, parents and children interact, etc.) By presenting objects as part of this realist mythology advertising connects them to a model of life that is already presented as desirable by its very presence in the discourse.²² This link to a desirable ideal thus justifies the presence of goods; it provides a legitimate reason why anyone would ever desire, crave or need a particular object. Advertising thus supplies us with a set of arguments and guidelines, or, more abstractly, values, which can be invoked to justify our behaviour as consumers. It gives us what we can call a ‘consumer ethic’.²³ Now this consumer ethic need not necessarily have a great influence on actual purchases and uses of goods. A large body of research – market research as well as more recent sociological research – has shown that people are not passive recipients of advertising and, as the advertising profession has known for a long time, a wide range of other factors influence actual purchasing decisions. (Hence a wide range of other subtle and not-so-subtle methods are employed to influence consumers, like sophisticated shelving systems in supermarkets.)²⁴

What people do as consumers, however, tends to diverge quite widely from what they say they do. As Daniel Miller has shown, shopping activity and the models used to make sense of or legitimize that activity are two quite different things: along with shopping there is a ‘discourse on shopping’ that ‘generalizes the normative statements that are made about shopping in the abstract’.²⁵ My suggestion is that in modern society consumer culture may be an important reference for such a normative discourse on consumption. The consumer ethic that prevails there thus has a greater impact on thinking than on doing. It can influence how people conceptualize their subjectivity as consumers, or as members of society in general before it impacts directly on their everyday practice. Consumers, and in some cases people in general, can mobilize the ethical models of consumer culture to justify their own practices. In advertising, a particular consumer subjecti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• II From Fascism to Fordism
• II The Roots of Postmodernity
• Index