Sceptical Sociology (RLE Social Theory) by John Carroll

Author:John Carroll [Carroll, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317651215
Google: aIQ9BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-07T02:43:54+00:00

6

The soap fetish

WE VACUUM your skin to beauty with an ingenious machine designed in Europe for our skin spa treatments. It’s positively uncanny what it sneaks out of your skin. Vacuuming is just the first of 6 unique stages in our hygiene skin renewal clinic. We also oxygenate and polish your skin to shining….

Advertisement, Herald, Melbourne, 18 July 1978

OMOmatic contains ingredients to remove dirt from clothes (anionic and nonionic surfactants); soften water and disperse soils (sodium polyphosphate); break up fatty soil (sodium silicate); remove bleachable stains (stabilized sodium perborate); modify foam (long chain soaps); provide a special brightening effect on cotton (triazolyl stilbene fluorescer) and improve product processing (sodium sulphate); also small quantities of normal fabric brightener, soil suspending agent, colour and perfume.

Statement on a soap packet

You’re very particular about the outside. Choose Harpic for the inside.

Harpic Powder toilet cleaner: It power cleans, kills germs and freshens above the waterline, and through the S-bend where ordinary scourers and brushes cant reach.

Harpic Thick Liquid toilet cleaner: Squirt it on under that hard-to-get-at rim. Thick liquid clings to the bowl, cleaning continuously and killing dangerous germs without the need for hard scrubbing.

Advertisement, Australian Family Circle, 30 June 1978

To know a society means above all to know its irrationality. Sociologists might do well to take as their exemplar the haughty Madame in Louis Malle’s brothel, in his film Murmur of the Heart, who claimed that she could tell a man’s perversion at a thirty-second glance. Presumably she would have read in these men’s so-called normal daily gestures clues to their deepest wishes. And it is true that there are few of even the most humdrum everyday activities in the life of a society that are not deeply veined by the irrational. However, in this particular essay I am not choosing an ordinary gesture as the starting point for the enquiry. In a more cowardly style I shall go in search of a fully-fledged dodo specimen, something so perverse that it defies all reasonable attempts to give it a purpose or a function.

In the quest for his dodo specimen the sociologist in the latter half of the twentieth century cannot do much better than watch television. If there is a leading clue to be found to collective out-landishness in a consumer society then it may well lie in the more extravagant fantasies that advertising agencies can stimulate in their audiences, indicators of the degree to which the average housewife – the target for at least eight advertisements in ten – can be coaxed beyond the perimeters of reasonable need. Moreover, as Vance Packard taught us in 1957, in The Hidden Persuaders, modern advertising agents have developed an acute talent for getting at the unconscious wishes of the potential consumer – the student of the irrational can learn much by simply paying attention to the images they employ. Now if the industrious sociologist were to follow this advice I am sure he would end up at the spot I have reached, admittedly by another path (for who arrives rationally at the scene of their enquiry): that is at the soap fetish.

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