Truly dishonest: and Joe Six-Pack knows it - advertising

Commonweal, Jan 29, 1993 by Frank McConnell

Every spring, the nation's big advertising firms get together and have a ceremony where they hand out awards for the best radio and television commercials for that year: they're called the "Clio" awards. Clio is the classical muse of history, or, more properly, of historiography.

Say what? Advertising, at least since the Industrial Revolution, has been generally regarded as one of the more venal, ephemeral, and sleazebag professions. We've got myths like "Perry Mason" for lawyers and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for pols; but has anybody ever told a story about a (giggle and snort) noble adman? Shouldn't the goddess contact, say MacKenzie & Brackman, and sue for damages?

Well, maybe not. George Orwell observed that all art is propaganda, though all propaganda is not necessarily art. And the evidence is strong that writing itself developed as the most rudimentary sort of advertising. When the Sumerians and their Mesopotamian pals began to depend on big intercity trade - that is, when they became recognizably like us - they took to shipping their goods in large clay caskets. Now the problem is that once you seal a lot of clay caskets, you're apt to forget what's in any given one (ever put an important letter where you were sure it wouldn't get lost?). So what the priests - who were also quartermasters - did was devise some simple, universally-agreed-upon signs they could punch into the top of a casket before the clay hardened: Wheat," "Grapes," "Ox-Jerky," and like that. Bingo! Exosomatic Memory! Writing. History Begins at Sumer, Samuel Noah Kramer's great 1956 book, declares. Actually, Clio is born as a label.

So, just for the hell of it, let's forget for the nonce all the two-bit moralism sociologists and other popular culture-slumming academics who like to natter about the "hidden persuaders" and "subliminal enticement" in ads. The assumption behind most of this stuff, after all, is that the vast majority of the nonacademic public doesn't know it's getting its chain pulled: that Joe Six-pack and his wife Marge are too benighted to get it that Lexus and Coca-cola and Adidas are all creating metaphors that identify the consumption of their product with sex, power, and joy, metaphors that translate elemental human needs into artificially targeted wants. That may have been true once; but not, I think, in the memory of any living soul. Things are more complicated: P.T. Barnum is long to his final rest.

Let's assume that Clio - history - is the muse of advertising, or maybe even the divine daughter ("In the beginning was the label?"), and that a given culture's advertising is in fact its larval poetry, the clearest indication of the way it manipulates its symbols to articulate its sense of life. (Not for nothing did Joyce make Leopold Bloom in Ulysses an advertising canvasser, and aha - there's your story of a noble adman.) Then what do our ads, our labels, have to tell us about the particular forest of symbols we inhabit?

Jean Baudrillard is a French post-Marxist deconstructionist cultural critic, and moonily admired in American graduate schools. Heroically overcoming all that, however, he is a very smart guy. And one of Brother Baudrillard's brilliant observations about postindustrial capitalism read: us) is that it is above all the culture of the "simulacrum": the simulacrum being an infinitely replicable object, for which there is no original. It's the kind of conceptual leap that makes everything fall into place.

As in: of the very hippest kind of baggy shirt and baggy shorts a kid can wear on the West Coast is from a company called "Big Dogs," and how you can tell the kid is hip is that every otherwise indistinguishable shirt from Big Dog says "Big Dogs" on the front and also has a picture of a - well, hell, of a Big Dog. As in: the TV ads for the Infiniti car (and why does misspelling a word make it more glamerus?) tend to feature a lot of shots of waves on the beach or trees in the wind and a pseudo-zen voiceover, but not many shots of the damn car. As in: Madonna, who I think is some kind of genius but who, let's face it, is as close to being Marilyn Monroe as I am to being Raymond Chandler, becomes our regnant sex goddess by blatantly impersonasting the cliche, and letting us know all along it is a cliche. Each case is, in Baudrillard's word, a simulacrum: the cuneiform on the clay casket comes to supplant whatever is "really" inside. In the arts, it's exactly what critics mean by "postmodernism": the free play of language or structure in the void of its "meaningfulness."

Here's a poem, in its entirety, by the greatly gifted John Ashbery:

"THE CATHEDRAL IS

Slated for demolition."

It's far from silly. The energy of the poem isjust in the irony sparking between the grandiose, capitalized title (with the heavyweight word, CATHEDRAL) and the bathos of the rest of the sentence, which also happens to be the whole poem. But is that a poem? Couldn't anybody do that? The answer - and, again, the point - is Yes. This is the reverse of surrealism, because it says that language, by itself, is such an intricate, delightful system that it can't help but produce such elegantly self-reflecting in-jokes. Writing isn'tjust exosomatic memory anymore: it's almost exosomatic consciousness.