I recently strolled into a hip little pizza place — “Slice” — in New Orleans. It’s a pleasant joint, but, like most restaurants bearing monosyllabic titles (“Spoon,” “Sprig,” “Salt,” etc.), it’s the kind of place where the walls are a patchwork of exposed brick and unfinished wood and everything comes with goat cheese. When I arrived at “Slice,” eagerly awaiting a pie that would surely come with caramelized onions or some other artfully burnt legume, the server asked if I would like a drink. “Yes, I would,” I replied, and promptly ordered a Coke.
I never drink Coke. Before this moment, I hadn’t willfully consumed a (non-beer) carbonated beverage in years, but there I was, slurping down a liquid the color and toxicity of the nearby Mississippi River. As I quaffed the syrupy fluid and munched on my artisan pizza (there were indeed caramelized onions), I wracked my brain, trying to figure out what could have forced the word “Coke” out of my mouth. After several bites and many sips, I remembered, somewhat horrified, that I had seen an advertisement for Coke earlier that day, as I had driven along Interstate 10 through downtown New Orleans. I don’t remember what the ad said; I only remember being hot, thirsty, and almost cruelly tantalized by the droplets of condensation running down a 15-foot tall glass bottle of Coca-Cola.
Coke ad (photo credit: ianturton)
We encounter advertising daily, and, compared to the scarily sophisticated targeted marketing tactics deployed by facebook and other major corporations, the ad that duped me was extremely primitive. It worked nonetheless, reminding me that, although we often imagine ourselves free to choose certain goods and services over others, the choices we make — not only about what and how we consume, but also about how we live our lives — are severely constrained by innumerable, interpenetrating, and compounding factors, most of which reside firmly outside of our control. Although we may always already be without genuine agency, targeted manipulation tactics like those employed by advertisements conspire to strip from us any scraps of free will we may have salvaged from the junkyard of determinism.
Scholars have filled volumes with the case against free will. But, because this is a blog and pith is paramount, I will limit myself to a short discussion of Raymond Williams’s theory of advertising and attempt to illustrate how marketing erodes our, perhaps illusory, freedom.
I will note that, while I am certainly concerned with free will as a philosophical problem, I am more interested here in determining how, in any given situation, advertising limits our ability to evaluate a specific set of options with reference to certain criteria. I am presupposing that agency is not absolute, but instead exists on a continuum — that we can have more or less of it depending on the type and force of the constraints on our will. Let’s suppose I am someone who values my health. (Bracket, for now, all of the genetic and environmental factors that have made me a health-conscious person.) I will, as a healthy person, evaluate my beverage choices with reference to their healthiness and select the beverage that best satisfies that criterion. Certain constraints can limit my ability to make that evaluation. It is with these constrains that I take issue.
Suggesting that agency is not an absolute is a tendentious claim, but it is (a) one maintained, both directly and indirectly, by a sizeable clutch of thinkers, including Raymond Williams and (b) a claim we in fact must make if we hope to make normative pronouncements. After all, if we aren’t free, why waste our time thinking about how we ought to behave?
Raymond Williams (photo credit: Wikipedia)
Raymond Williams, in his brilliant and accessible essay “Advertising: the Magic System,” traces the history of modern advertising from the huckstery of 17th century England all the way to the highly refined marketing techniques of the modern era. For Williams, advertising as we know it emerged in the decades before and during the First World War, when it abandoned more or less straightforward inducements to buy — emphasizing a product’s positive qualities and drawing relatively simple associations between a commodity and desirable emotions or states of mind — and embraced an increasingly sophisticated understanding of human psychology and social relationships to apply more precise pressure on shoppers as they browsed newspapers and storefronts. This new form of advertising, aimed not at convincing but at subtly coercing, made a qualitative leap from encouragement to manipulation, and Williams contends that advertising, armed with new, potent, and dangerously effective marketing tactics, evolved, at that moment, into a tool for social organization.
“The need to control nominally free men, like the need to control nominally free customers,” Williams observes, “lay very deep in the new kind of society.”[1]
The “new kind of society” to which Williams refers is that brand of bourgeois social organization exemplified by the United States and Western Europe: a liberal (ostensibly democratic) society governed systems of exchange for which “the maintenance of the economic system becomes the main factual purpose of all social activity.” For these societies, in which citizens are “nominally free” and yet must be constantly cornered and cowed, prodded and hoodwinked into reproducing the dominant system of exchange and production, advertising represents a nearly ideal form of social control. Advertisements present the illusion of choice — producers do not, after all, “force” individuals to buy the goods they peddle — while numbing our faculties of reason and limiting our already severely constrained ability to choose one thing over another.
According to Williams, advertising coaxes us into purchasing certain products by convincing us that a certain product — let’s say Coke — will increase our “utility” (to use the painfully vague term employed by economists). However, it does so not through good-faith persuasion (the possibility of which is itself dubious), but by drawing an illusory causal relationship between Coke and some kind of higher-order good (for Coke, usually, “enjoyment”). These higher order goods generally fall into the categories of pleasure, personality, and power, such that advertising associates products with a positive emotion or state of mind — coke/enjoyment; an identity that a consumer desires or imagines she already has — hemp shirts/environmentally conscious; or status and influence — rolex/wealth.
Raymond Williams discusses the power of advertising in terms of magic:
If the consumption of individual goods leaves that whole area of human need unsatisfied, the attempt is made, by magic, to associate this consumption with human desires to which it has no real reference. You do not only buy an object: you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, power to control your environment. The magic obscures the real sources of general satisfaction because their discovery would involve radical change in the whole common way of life. [2]
I will note here that a number of Marxist theorists, including radical geographer David Harvey*, contend that advertising is a product of capitalism’s incessant need to expand. According to Harvey, the expansionary tendency of capitalist accumulation creates periodic crises in which rapid growth in production saturates the market, shrinking profits. Harvey suggests that, in addition to expanding geographically, producers can solve the waning demand for existing goods by “creating new social wants needs” [3]. Although neither Williams nor Harvey link capitalism’s need to create new “wants and needs” with advertising’s “magic,” it seems likely to me that advertising aims to sell intangible (and, in some ways, almost essential) goods like identity and “social respect” because there is no limit to the quantity of those goods consumable by any one individual. I can have a sufficient number of shirts to clothe me, but I can never have enough respect or confirmation that I am a hip person. Given the effectively inexhaustible demand for these immaterial goods, advertising’s “magic” offers producers a way to avoid constantly “creating new social wants and needs” by allowing them simply to develop new products that (partially) satisfy the extant and insatiable needs of human beings in a bourgeois society.
What is perhaps most insidious about the “magic” of advertising, however, is that it reinforces an understanding of political agency that equates freedom — in a political sense — with consumer choice. Companies like Whole Foods, for instance, recognize, as Williams does, that their customers do not simply want cereal and milk; they want to feel politically engaged — to end animal cruelty, slow global warming, and ensure liberty and justice for all. To that end, these companies market their products in a way that promises their customers the satisfaction of ethical action with every purchase, reducing, in the process, political and ethical practice to certain patterns of consumption.
Enjoy.
The consequences of this “ethical consumerism” are threefold. First, genuine political agency dips even further below the horizon of the possible. When we imagine political liberty to find its highest expression in the kind of cereal we buy for breakfast, we not only delude ourselves, but we also ratify the dominant mode of production and exchange. Consumer choice is always circumscribed within the strictures of capitalist production, such that, no matter what brand of cereal we choose, our choice necessarily endorses capitalism as a legitimate social and economic arrangement. This is, in my view, the most dangerous consequence of the “nominal freedom” of capitalism.
Moreover, believing that the aggregate of our individual consumption choices can prompt meaningful political change precludes action that might have real political consequences. Not only does ethical consumerism convince us that we’ve somehow done our duty to “do good,” but, because it attempts to promote political change through capitalism, it also suggests that it is not the economic system that is flawed but the way individuals have been interacting with that system. When we promote these patterns of ethical consumption we fail to recognize, however, that, in many cases, it is the logic of capitalist production — the cold cost-benefit calculus that subordinates ethical concerns to the singular goal of maximizing profit — that produces the very problems we think we can solve by buying organic tomatoes.
Ethical consumerism also treats political and ethical action as the exclusive province of the wealthy. If leading an ethical life or advocating for political change requires purchasing organic, sustainable, green, fair-trade, etc. goods (which are almost always more expensive than “unethical” brands), then only those few with the time, knowledge, and purchasing power to seek out and consume those goods can be ethical and politically relevant actors. Those who do not have this privilege — namely, the poor and the uneducated — are, by contrast, unethical and politically powerless. Resembling, in many ways, laws stipulating property ownership as a condition of suffrage, the growing tendency to equate purchasing power with political agency is patently undemocratic.
In effect, ethical consumerism allows us to feel politically engaged, while simply reproducing the status quo. In this way, the advertising that sustains the architecture of ethical consumption behaves as an agent of cultural hegemony. According to Antonio Gramsci, hegemony consists in a process of social domination that operates through a subtle and non-forceful coercion intended to convince the masses that the dominant social arrangement represents the only sensible way to organize society. As Gramsci indicates in the Prison Notebooks,
the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as “domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership” . . . the “normal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterized by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent. [4]
Because advertising functions by eliciting consensual participation in the market economy, it forwards the cultural hegemony of capitalist relations of production.
With the rise of big data and the proliferation of advertisements targeted at specific individuals based on past consumption habits, the hegemonic power of advertising has grown dramatically in the last decade. In my view, this new era of advertising represents not a change in kind but in scale. Advertisers can now use personal information to convince us with a greater degree of success that we ought to buy their product. But the logic remains the same. Advertisers continue to cast a captivating spell, selling us not a product but an identity, purporting to offer us choice while further constricting our freedom.
*Radical geography refers to the study of space and spatial representation as it relates to social and economic organization, patterns of human settlement and movement, and the distribution of power.
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[1]Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” p. 321. PDF
[2] Ibid., p. ??.
[3] David Harvey, The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory, p. 11. PDF
[4] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 215. PDF
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