Hey, don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think about Sut Jhally.
Sounds like you had a really bad personal experience. Well, I’ll answer based on his work that I know about, anyway. Taking the epithets in turn:
Anti-porn prude? Well, his best-known video is probably “Dreamworlds,” of which I have seen only excerpts. Is that what you’re referring to? It focuses not on back-of-the-video-store porn but on mass consumerist objectification of women, notably on MTV, to sell product. BTW, the “to sell product” is the key part of his critique, here and everywhere, and mine, too. I don’t see much evidence that Jhally is some kind of crusading prude in the first place (unless one argues that all criticisms of violent and objectifying images of women are out of bounds--which may be your point?).
>From my end, I don’t understand these arguments about how poor porn
merchants are on the run because of the leftist Puritans, anyway. It just
doesn’t correspond to reality. The damn industry undergirds the consumer
financial base of the Internet, for chrissakes (business press hype to the
contrary), just as it at one time provided the financial base for the home
video industry. I mean, everyone who uses the net knows you’re not going to
find out anything about, say, the legal status of women in Asia by running a
search on “legal asian women.” Why is this particular typically
exploitation-based capitalist enterprise supposed to be off limits to left
criticism? And since when is a society-wide sex-simulation-market some
yardstick of human freedom? My favorite anecdote about the introduction of
market-sex-as-freedom: Ca. 1995, some miners in Siberia weren’t paid wages,
and instead were paid out of a local overstock of—sex toys. Go ahead, tell
me how liberated they should feel.
Pedantic? Well, he’s in academia. (To the academics on the list: Pedantic? Not you, of course. Other academics.) Jhally’s videos can have a tone of lecturing to undergraduates, but then again that’s one of the purposes of the project. I personally think he does a great job of drawing one into considering arguments—and evidence—for a radical and disturbing thesis. “Advertising …” is not a book, and a book allows for greater complexity. It’s an example of the “enhanced-lecture” genre, sure, but a good one. Give the guy some credit for working in what is in essence the enemy’s medium. Maybe even some of your honest ad pros would admit that, given Jhally’s probable budget/production resources, it’s pretty effective.
Humorless? Well, he really does believe that consumerist propaganda can paralyze social action and actually create a world where people are, in a non-trivial way, divorced from reality. Too bad he doesn’t pull more chuckles from it, huh? I have to admit I have trouble with “humorless” as a criticism, since it’s the number two putdown (after “political correctness”) thrown at leftists, those party poopers always unable to find the lighter side of oppression and injustice.
<< Hardly the final (or first) word on the ad culture. >>
Except he really doesn’t care about ad culture. He cares about culture, human society, that sort of thing. He uses the results of what the ad guys come up with, and its effects. He doesn’t seem to really care about *how* they’re made, or what the ad guys “really” think about when they make them. I have no problem with that.
<< I prefer Tom Frank's "The Conquest of Cool" and the work of Howard Gossage >>
I don’t know Gossage’s work. I like Frank and the people around The Baffler, too, but I don’t see him as someone on the other end of some spectrum from Jhally. Frank is also the Bafflerite who is most likely to throw out a “humorless” Big Idea piece about how ad culture degrades society at large, and is a threat to freedom itself. See, e.g., the essay “The Culturetrust Generation,” included in the Baffler anthology “Commodify Your Dissent,” especially the last few pages. (I could probably pull something from “The Conquest of Cool,” but I don’t have it at hand.) Basically, Frank hates those ad corps fuckers, too, and considers them a blight on human existence. And good for him. If you want to give the “contest” to Frank on style points, fine. But Frank falls back on the existential hero of the 21st century, the (unspecified, unknown) Someone who is (somewhere) going to bring the whole thing down by just saying “No” (somehow) to the big-money liars. (See the last pages of “The Culturetrust Generation.”) Well, isn’t it pretty to think so.
Jhally’s overall critique is more radical, not to mention more disturbing, than Frank’s. (BTW, is that the problem?) He denies that consumer culture brings real happiness. And he doesn’t do this by engaging in ultimately useless arguments about, “What is real happiness?” or (worse, in my mind) “Positing something called ‘real’ happiness is just elitist nonsense,” but by pointing to consistent poll results that show that, by their own yardstick, Americans are not that happy. And, after some probing of his own, he finds that this lack of real happiness is apparently tied to a belief that other people are experiencing happiness unavailable to them, and this “other” happier world is actually the fake world created in people’s mind by the advertising/consumer culture industry. And the effects of this are alienation, in a most basic sense, from reality itself. And this alienation makes for not only an unhappy but very likely a dangerous society.
Jhally deals with what for some reason is still a radical point, that the billion-dollar industry called the “mass media” really has an effect on how people think. Jhally (with Justin Lewis) during the Gulf War conducted surveys that showed that people who followed the war on TV actually grew *more* ignorant of the facts the more they watched: Those who missed the tube and were forced to fall back on their common sense and had a much firmer grasp of the reality of the war. Propaganda works.
<< You'll see ad pros discussing the reality of their trade, warts and all. Like the business press, the ad press speaks honestly about the strategy and goals of advertising. >>
On the professional tell-it-like-it-is vs. actual soul-killing degradation index, I’d put ad pros kind of in the middle, between US Senators (low honesty/high soul-killing end) and independent call girls (rather favorable, both axes). I wouldn’t include bourgeois economists, since it would distort the scale too much.
So, ad pros are scum, but relatively honest scum when they let their hair down. So what? Fuck ‘em anyway. Wall Street brokers would score pretty well, too, if Henwood’s book is to be believed. Fuck them, too.
And, as with anybody, those hearty honest pros can clam up once they’re outside the group and are called on the actual existing results of their trade. By chance, I was watching a football game at my brother’s with a guy who worked on that ad campaign for the Marines (it usually shows up on sports programs, as it did here), where some computer-generated sword-and-sorcery battlers are transformed by the magic of video production into a dress-blue-sword-fondling gyrene. I fake-naively said something like, “Gosh, won’t some kids think that joining the Marines is like some video game?” and he got all excited: “Yes, exactly! That’s exactly what they think, and that’s exactly what we tried to do!”, etc. (The campaign apparently got boffo results, lots of fresh blood for imperialist adventures.) I tried to play it nice, but something in my expression must have said, “My, you certainly are lower than pond scum,” and the embarrassed silence fell rather quickly, shortly after the angry defensive glare directed at me. We went back to the game.
>From another post, quoting W. Burroughs:
“Thanks for the American Dream - to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through.”
Except I’m not convinced that that the bare lie shines through. That’s the genius of the awful thing, and of those ad pros who produce it.
<< Jhally, "ironically" enough, simply jerks off. >>
Funny how you figuratively use this simple non-corporate-mediated pleasure as an insult. Maybe if you had to pay for it you’d respect it more…
----Original Message Follows---- From: "Nancy Bauer/Dennis Perrin" <bauerperrin at mindspring.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Addiction, Advertising, & Easy Virtue (was Re: How far do we go?) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 09:26:12 -0400
Gregory Geboski wrote:
>I think the ubiquitous role of advertising and consumerist fantasies in
>shaping people's consciousness can't be overemphasized. The best recent
>treatment of this I've seen is a video called "Advertising and the End of
>the World," by Sut Jhally at the Media Education Foundation at the
>University of Massachusetts.
I remember Sut Jhally -- a real anti-porn prude, humorless, pedantic. Hardly the final (or first) word on the ad culture. I prefer Tom Frank's "The Conquest of Cool" and the work of Howard Gossage, who understood the ultimate aim of advertising from the inside out. Also, if you read Communcation Arts, you'll see ad pros discussing the reality of their trade, warts and all. Like the business press, the ad press speaks honestly about the strategy and goals of advertising. Jhally, "ironically" enough, simply jerks off.
DP
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