Thesis On History #8: Intellectual Self-Defense

One Adversary: Advertising. Immerse yourself in reading history to combat?

One of my mythological assumptions is not unique and is derived from - as I currently understand it - the Judaic idea that we all have an infinity within, and while we’re biologically more similar to each other at the larger scales of comparison, we are all inexorably different at the smallest levels, such as personal memory, imagination, and the effects of prior experience and learning.

While I am not Jewish and have never joined any church or even subscribed to any mainstream religion, ever, I have seen glimpses of this idea I ascribe to Judaism in many of the other world religions and philosophies I have studied. I simply tend to see this “infinity within” as a Jewish idea, but it’s the idea that’s important to me, not so much where it came from. I also tend to link this notion to my variant of universal humanism, and I see our species as beings in which the planetary environment and culture flows through us, and while I think individualism is a good and important idea, I think my local group, the Americans, have overdone individualism, and it’s brought us to the brink. So this is no small thing.

I got a lot of these ideas from reading histories.

Immersion in history - anything meaningful to you - allows for a quality of subjective depth and perspective about human nature, motives, and games that seems to provide a measure of prophylaxis against hype, bullshit, advertising. And I think there’s something counterintuitive about this: advertising theory says we’re all suckers for a Good Story. And History that we enjoy reading is a good story. But we have a distance from historical events, and therefore, perspective. At least ideally. With ads, they’re here and now, as we know too well.¹

The aforementioned cultural flow has become more like a firehose in the electronic era. We’ve always needed to arm ourselves for intellectual self-defense, but the electronically-mediated world has made this an urgent thing. How often do we forget? I think we’ve by and large fallen down, probably because of the acceleration of culture with electricity. We are still the same biological hominids who wandered in packs through tundra, jungle, desert, and plains, and most of us were caught off guard being born in these recent 160 or so years. It’s like I just threw the I Ching: no blame.

We can name the onslaughts against our private interiorities, but for now I’m going to riff on Advertising, which deserves its mighty due in capitalization, for it has proven powerful and lo, is a Force. And of course we use intellectual self-defense. I copped that phrase, I think, from Chomsky, but I don’t know or remember if he said who he got it from.

There seems to be a huge thorny question around this private interiority of “self” and our desires, wants, little stuff like that: how much has advertising influenced our, for lack of a better term, personalities? Clearly it has had some level of influence on us as consumers in a hypercapitalized society. But how much?

They are clueless idiots who have fallen for some consumer scheme; you are pretty smart but seem oddly oblivious about displaying your at-times bad taste, while I? Well, I practice “intellectual self-defense” and don’t fall for ANY bullshit. Yea.

Yeah right. But in my own defense I must say when I look back at some of my more egregious errors in consumer-judgement, I must say I’ve gotten really good at lying to myself about motive. So there.

It’s clear that even if we’re a Toynbee or Braudel or some savant along that level, none of us can read and incorporate all of history in our private understandings and depthless, unfathomable interiorities (there must be time for bio-survival needs, masturbation, contemplation, doing the dishes, “being social,” and worrying about foggy, amorphous things), so let us choose the histories we find most interesting, and let them furnish part of that vast space within us. Let’s face it: there’s a lot of good history books we still have yet to get to. These pieces of furniture will serve to attenuate - or so I aver - the possible ravishing effects of capital and its advertising people. I look at a 25 year old white male driving a pickup truck with cartoonishly ginormous wheels and a Trump sticker on the bumper and think: not a lot of furniture in there. Maybe that’s just me. Let’s hope he can replace that tattered beanbag reeking of cat-piss with a decent chair at some point. I, for one, have stopped holding my breath.

So: I don’t really want you to read the same books as I do, but if we do happen to read something in common: cool. We can talk about it. But I really do want you to listen to that wise voice inside you that says, ya know, you really want and need to understand Ancient China. Or the Hanseatic League. Or the evolution of private life. Or how fossil fuels were discovered and mined and used and the upsides and downsides of all that. O! So many ways we can go to here!

But I wanted to say a few things about Advertising.

Professor Carlin has noted that there seem to be too many people active in their own degradation, who willingly buy clothing that has advertising on it, which they then wear as unpaid billboards:

I’m tired of being unable to buy clothing that doesn’t have writing and printing all over it. Insipid sayings, pseudo-wisdom, cute slogans, team logos, designer names, brand trademarks, small-business ego trips; the marketing pigs and advertising swine have turned us all into walking billboards. You see some asshole walkin’ by, and he’s got on a fruity Dodger hat and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. Of course you can’t see the shirt if he’s wearing his hot-shit Chicago Bulls jacket. The one that only 50 million other jock-sniffers own. And since this cretinous sports fan/consumer zombie is completely for sale to anyone, he rounds out his ensemble with FedEx sneakers, ValuJet socks, Wall Street Journal sweatpants, a Starbucks jock strap, and a Microsoft condom with Bill Gates’s head on the end of it. No one in this country owns his personal appearance anymore. America has become a nation of obedient consumers, actively participating in their own degradation.²

Comment: yea, but how are others gonna know what you consume? For verily, We consume, therefore we are…in this Neoliberal dispensation, anyway. Thus: yet another reason for public nudity, as if we needed more arguments.

-Nice to meet ya. Who are ya? I mean: what do you do?

-I support the Giants, Facebook, I mean Zuckerberg, I mean Meta, and the Democratic Party.

(Yikes)

Not long ago I was yakking it out with someone about ceremonial magick, and I could see I was in the interlocutionary space of someone who was talking about something they knew nothing about. I tried to explain it was all DIY brain-change stuff, ways to alter your consciousness so you can break out of fixed patterns, etc. They “knew” it was all “black magic” and therefore: bad people doin’ bad things. This was going nowhere and we needed to change the subject, pronto, but not until I said “You wanna know what black magic really is? Look at advertising.” There was no response, only a puzzled “you puttin’ me on?” stare. We did move on.

I have a book on my shelf titled Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth. I will take it off the shelf, open randomly and read for a few minutes. It’s interesting and yet, as you can see: it hasn’t worked for me. (Yet?) Forsyth noted how brazen admen have been with pleonasms, that element of rhetoric or faulty logic that might be illustrated by “wet water.” Admen know pleonasms are fucking stupid, yet they use ‘em anyway, ‘cuz they done work real good: the moolah flows. Hence, “free gift” “added bonus” “general public” and “progress forward.” I add this - a free gift, just for you! - as an incitement to get yer dukes up and use intellectual self-defense.³

One of the best little passages against the “Captains of Consciousness” view of the use of Psychology by advertisers - endemic in the literature and of surpassing interest - that I’ve seen was Thaddeus Russell’s argument for “consumer demand from below” to muddle this one-way-ishness of advertising. Nothing is that simple. A choice bit from Russell:

No less an authority than Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, spoke to the inability of Hollywood to control its audience. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1916 on the moral content of his films, Laemmle reported that he had sent a survey to twenty-two thousand theater owners titled, “What Do You Want?” The studio chief said that he expected 95 percent of the respondents to ask for clean and wholesome films, but “instead of finding 95 percent favoring clean pictures, I discovered that at least one-half, or possibly 60 percent, want pictures to be risqué, the French for smutty. . . They found their patrons were more willing to pay money to see an off-color than a decent one.” Because “one after another [theater owner] said that it would be wise to listen to the public demand for vampire pictures.” Laemmle argued that film producers could not be the “guardian of public morals.”⁴

It’s now trite in my circles to note the linkage between Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, and William S. Burroughs and his uncle, Ivy Lee: was an actual thing. Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays were among the first great purveyors of International Black Magick, or, as it’s politely termed, Public Relations.⁵

Regarding Burroughs: he has a bit analogizing advertising to the Mayan priests’ secret calendar⁶; he also related a brief job in commerce, in which employer-employee relations were strained from the get-go, as Burroughs openly laughed at the company’s market slogans that they didn’t consider funny at all. EX: they marketed a high colonic enema they called The Cascade. Burroughs added the tag line: “Well done! Thou true and faithful servant!” This was right after he failed an interview with the OSS.

In order to render his modern day Odysseus - an ad canvaser in Dublin in 1904 - as accurately as possible, James Joyce annotated a copy of Howard Bridgewater’s 1910 book, Advertising; Or the Art of Making Known: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Advertising. NB Bridgewater repeats “advertising” twice in his the title, a simple principle of both advertising and magick: invoke often. Joyce was interested in how advertising went from simple arresting of attention to appealing to that which is beneath consciousness. Subsequently, systematic social science and psychology went “big” after the War To End All Wars (sic) and, then Goebbels learned everything he knew from the Americans, etc.⁷

David Foster Wallace noted in an interview that there seemed to be a disconnect between his generation and his professors’. He thought it weird that he grew up in a generation that was so totally immersed in selling and ads that they don’t often realize there’s humans behind it all; it’s as if all of it comes from some sort of Platonic Realm. A recurring trope in the collection of interviews with DFW⁸ is that the “reality” his professors lived in was “natural”, not man-made, and this was a main reason they rejected celebrity names or brand-names in fiction, but his use of pop-culture references reflected the reality of those born in the 1960s.

I realize that my heuristic - that the acceleration of craziness in modern American life really started to gain steam with the trumped-and ginned-up Spanish-American War - seems to work for me more often than not. 1898: William Randolph Hearst helps to “sell” the war to the public, and the US then becomes a world powerhouse, for which I apologize on behalf of the few sane ones here, to those of you living in Europe and…everywhere else. I really did grow up in an air conditioned nightmare, an armed madhouse, a country in which I grew up absurd.⁹

Sometimes, in my reading, I have to stop in awe at the implications on the page. Recently, in another re-reading of Mike Davis’s City Of Quartz, still the best book on the history of my birthplace, Los Angeles, I noted that in the 1880 census, the city of Los Angeles had a population of just over 11,000. In 1883 and 1886 the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads reached LA. The railroads themselves bought up land and invested in the new “scientific farming” in order to grow citrus, and to market the place back East as a nice place to retire, with its “Mediterranean climate.” Here’s Davis:

To realize this vision, the railroads allied their immigration and advertising departments, their land agents and tourist bureaux, to local promotional forces. As the SP and Santa Fe began a rate-cutting war in 1886, Los Angeles - a mystery place to most Americans - suddenly became the urgent destination of around a hundred thousand land speculators and curious tourists. As the San Jose Times-Mercury complained, “The average Eastern mind [now] conceives of California as a small tract of country situated in and about Los Angeles.”¹⁰

Los Angeles population in 1900: 102,000.

1910: 319,000.

1920: 576,000

1930: 1,238,000

And so it goes. It certainly didn’t go down…

Defend that space between your ears, was all this spew was about. You tell me how you do it. ‘Cuz I will falter at times, don’t mind tellin’ ya.

1. There’s a passage in an early Platonic dialogue where young men are following Socrates through the agora and they get to the marketplace and Socrates says something like, “Oh! How many things there are that I do not want.” I paraphrase from memory and ‘cuz I’m too lazy to hunt the reference down. But it’s the kind of thing that made me love Socrates.

2. Brain Droppings, G. Carlin, pp.6-7. See Richard Powers’s wonderful novel The Gold Bug Variations, in which a minor character, “Keith”, strays from academia into advertising and the “manufacture of needs,” p.58.

3. Elements Of Eloquence, M. Forsyth, p.182. I hasten to add: Korzybski’s General Semantics, once taught in high schools and colleges in the US after World War II, disappeared for complex reasons, but I think one of the reasons was politicians, advertisers, and churches didn’t like what they saw. One sturdy admonition of General Semantics: with any assertion, look for the referent. So often, there ain’t anything there. Like Make America Great Again. And so I urge you to check it out if you haven’t already. On another level, I heard an ad for a musical instrument purveyor, in which they tell us “There’s never been a better time to play music.” Of which: no comment.

4. see A Renegade History of the United States, T. Russell, pp.225-228, for this and other arguments that markets also move from consumer demand “below” in addition to the manufacturing of desires from above. This, with regard to film in the US, didn’t work: though the public wanted risqué, that got shut down by the Hayes Code and other imbecilities that infantilized the public along a cheesy minority’s stick-up-the-ass morality. Here, too is a History worth delving into for some, no?

5. Wikis for Bernays and Ivy Lee. One of the more engrossing books on the history of public relations (I feel kinda icky just using the term) is Stuart Ewen’s PR! A Social History of Spin. I’d say my favorite book to read on advertising is McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride. If anyone reading this also likes it, please chime in in the comments.

6. Mayan priest bit from WSB: see Word Virus, p.318. A bunch of Burroughs scholars contributed to William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up The Century, and anyone who has read Burroughs knew his extreme antipathy for Henry Luce, but I had no idea how extreme it was. WSB making fun of the colonic ad after failing to get in with the OSS: Word Virus, p.10.

7. Now see here, old chap: HERE.

8. Conversations With David Foster Wallace. See especially p.140.

9. Advertising really takes off just before the turn of the century. Have a gander at the “eyeball attention economy” which didn’t begin with Facebook, but in 1895, when Edward Wheeler Scripture of Yale noted that Advertisers were ahead of Psychologists in the understanding of manipulation. HERE. Similarly, see “Is Man A Free Agent?: The Law of Suggestion,” by Santanelli, 1902, HERE.

10. City Of Quartz, Davis, p.111.

(artwerk courtesy: Campbell)