Against Thrift by James Livingston

Author:James Livingston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

SELLING WITH SEX: THE CASE FOR ADVERTISING

It’s a pretty convincing complaint. But of course there’s another way to tell this story. So let me respond, almost in order, and then see where we stand. I’m not reporting so that you can decide. When I’m done, I want you on my side, but that’s where the conclusions are mostly questions.

Advertising did adjourn the modern scientific opposition between appearance and reality, surface and depth, variety and utility, chance and law. In doing so, however, it was either slightly ahead or just abreast of intellectual and artistic innovation in the twentieth century. It’s preposterous, I know, to characterize such innovation in a single phrase, or even in an entire monograph, but for my purposes here’s what the significant intellectuals and artists of the last century agreed on: these dualisms, these oppositions, and the Newtonian physical science that underwrote them, are contestable truths, on trial like every other received tradition.

Nothing was immune from this innovative contagion, not the fixed relation between time and space (Einstein, Picasso), not the permanent mind-body problem (Freud, Bergson, James), not even the irrevocable differences between males and females (Gilman, Key, Mill). The discussion of these distinctions had long been animated by both an ancient metaphysical and a modern scientific notion, which held that a natural, enduring reality existed apart from its representation—its appearance in words or images—and that the purpose of representation, whether in words or images, was to achieve a closer approximation of this natural, enduring reality. But now, as early as 1905, these distinctions were in question, and would remain so into our own time. Advertising was always in the interrogative camp, along with the artists and intellectuals who tried to get beyond the received tradition. Yes, it was often the calculating stepson along for the ride, hoping, like Robert Downey Jr., to score off the idiot excesses of his parents, but sometimes it reached innovative conclusions on its own—particularly in the 1960s, as Thomas Frank argued in a brilliant book on the subject, The Conquest of Cool, and as the cable TV series Mad Men demonstrates more poignantly.

In adjourning the opposition between appearance and reality, surface and depth, variety and utility, chance and law, advertising stakes an anti-metaphysical claim along with the twentieth-century philosophers we value most—William James, John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger (did I just say Heidegger?)—and validates the claim by voting for the importance of all things irrational. Freud taught us that reasonable decisions have unreasonable origins; advertising is the practical, consistent embodiment of this fundamental psychoanalytical insight. Put it another way. Like James, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, Freud taught us that desire and reason aren’t mutually exclusive ways of knowing, not any more than values and facts are antithetical; they’re inseparable. Evolutionary psychology has recently proven the point by showing that the cognitive capacities of the human brain have developed as adaptive responses to social and sexual possibilities. In this sense, when advertising appeals to the irrational, it’s just acting on what we already know about how cognition works.

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