To answer your question more directly. Advertising does not really get going until well into the early half of the 20th century. Hence it just was not a prevalent cultural phenomena or institution. So yes Marx's key concepts (fetishism, alienation, etc.,) would have to be applied to adverstising. A more general angle would be to start from Marx's observations about the relative and cultural historical determination of needs/wants and the role that advertising has come to play in helping to determine the content of working class desires and expectations with respect to their living standards. ____________________________________ Travis W Fast
G'day Joanna,
I think the British Culturalists of the late fifties and sixties would consider the following observations inspired by a Marxist world-view:
There was Richard Hoggart insisted that advertisers should not be used as 'scapegoats for bigger social problems' but argued also that neither should critics 'make easy accommodations' with them. Where literature sought to produce self-understanding via a tweak of the emotions, advertising does not. Anyone who believed that it was better for people to understand themselves and their weaknesses, he argued, 'must regard most modern advertising as, at the best, a waste of good human resources and, at the worst, a misuse of people.
He wrote in 1965 (I think it was in his Uses of Literacy)
"If critics spend a lot of time attacking advertising this is not because advertising is a peculiar kind of vice, but because it is a symptom, because it exhibits more plainly and persistently than anything else the issues raised by mass persuasion. At bottom the case against advertising is the same as that against political propaganda, much religious proselytizing, and any other form of emotional blackmail.
The case is this: that advertising tries to achieve its ends by emotionally abusing its audiences. Recognizing that we all have fears, hopes, anxieties, aspirations, insecurities, advertisers seek not to increase our understanding of these feelings and so perhaps our command of them, but to use their existence to increase the sales of whatever product they happen to have been paid to sell at ant particular time. They exploit human inadequacy."... .(Hoggart, Vol.1, 206)
And then there was Raymond Williams: In the last chapter in the 1976 edition of Communications, Williams reaffirmed his sixteen-year-old conviction that a crisis in communications was afoot:
"This book was conceived in 1960, in what seems, in retrospect, a very different Britain. Yet the first thing that struck me, working through it again, was the essential continuity of the crisis in communications. It is no kind of satisfaction to see that the analysis of the the condition of the press, of tendencies in broadcasting and publishing, and the subordination of a general communications process to an increasingly powerful system of advertising and public relations, has been strikingly confirmed. Since the analysis was first made, seven more national newspapers have closed down, and as I write the future of several others is in serious doubt. Commercial interests, having made their way into television, have gained a foothold ... in sound broadcasting, and are keeping up their pressure to exploit such new developments as cable ... the crisis is not external to the system; it is a part of it ... It is clear, looking back, that the period from the late fifties to the early seventies in Britain was a time of evasion of all the structural problems of the society. But this was not, as it is now ... represented, the result of general inattention. The evasion was systematic, and the communications institutions were one of its central agencies (Williams 1976: 180-81)."
Cheers,
Rob.
My son has put me on high alert that he is showing up on Tuesday night with a paper to write in which he is to do a Marxist critique of an advertisement.....and I am to "help."
Has Marx written about advertisement anywhere specifically -- or does one just use his alienation/commodification stuff to get into it?
Joanna
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