The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  BOOKS BY DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The Creators

  *

  Hidden History

  *

  The Discoverers

  *

  The Americans: The Colonial Experience

  The Americans: The National Experience

  The Americans: The Democratic Experience

  *

  The Mysterious Science of the Law

  The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson

  The Genius of American Politics

  America and the Image of Europe

  The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

  The Decline of Radicalism

  The Sociology of the Absurd

  Democracy and Its Discontents

  The Republic of Technology

  The Exploring Spirit

  *

  For young readers:

  The Landmark History of the American People

  A History of the United States (with Brooks M. Kelley)

  First Vintage Books Edition, September 1992

  Copyright © 1961 by Daniel J. Boorstin

  Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition

  copyright © 1987 by Daniel J. Boorstin

  Afterword copyright © 2012 by Douglas Rushkoff

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published under the title The Image or What Happened to the American Dream. This edition first published by Atheneum, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, in 1987. Reprinted by arrangement with Atheneum Publishers, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company.

  The author thanks the following for permission to use various quotations:

  Michael Flanders and Donald Swann for four lines from “Song of Reproduction”; Grove Press, Inc. for a passage from The Stars, by Edgar Morin, translated by Richard Howard; Harcourt, Brace & World for a quotation from Senator Joe McCarthy, by Richard Rovere; Houghton Mifflin Company for a selection from The Fourth Branch of Government, by Douglass Cater; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for passages from Struggles and Triumphs, by P.T. Barnum, copyright 1927 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Paul S. Nathan for passages from his feature “Rights and Permissions” in Publishers’ Weekly; Saturday Review for quotations from “Why Write It When You Can’t Sell It to the Pictures,” by Budd Schulberg, and “Music to Hear, but Not to Listen To,” by Stanley Green.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Boorstin, Daniel J. (Daniel Joseph).

  The image: a guide to pseudo-events in America/Daniel J.

  Boorstin.—1st Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: 25th anniversary ed. New York: Atheneum, 1987.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81916-1

  1. National characteristics, American. 2. United States—

  Civilization—1945– 3. United States—Popular Culture—

  History—20th century. I. Title.

  E169.12.B66 1992

  973.9—dc2092-50080

  v3.1

  TO

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

  “a place of light, of liberty, and of learning”

  “My money affairs are in a bad way. You remember before the wedding, Anisim brought me some new rubles and half rubles? I hid one packet, the rest I mixed with my own.… But now I can’t make out which is real money and which is counterfeit, it seems to me they are all false coins.… When I take a ticket at the station, I hand three rubles, then I think to myself: Are they false? And I’m frightened. I can’t be well.”

  ANTON CHEKHOV, The Hollow

  Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition

  WHEN THIS BOOK first appeared a quarter-century ago, television still had the charm of novelty and public relations was only in process of becoming one of the most powerful forces in American life. “The Image” was not yet a cliché. This book was my own exploration of the momentous changes in the American view of reality. For the present edition I have left in the examples I used then, so that the reader, in sharing my own sense of discovery at that time, may also sense that present fashions have their roots in history. The reader can have the added pleasure of finding new examples every day.

  This book has had a surprising vogue. It was not a best seller when it appeared, but it continues to live, to be quoted and to be assigned in colleges. It has been translated into the principal Western European languages and is in its thirtieth printing in Japanese.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that it has had an even wider and more enthusiastic audience outside the United States than here at home. For we Americans are sensitive to any suggestion that progress may have its price. When the book appeared in 1962, I happened to be out of the country on a lecture engagement. Time, in reviewing The Image, said it was no wonder that the author left the country just before his slander on the United States was published.

  Others have not been so hypersensitive about the facts of our life. Many have welcomed the vocabulary offered in this book for the new rhetoric of democracy. “Pseudo-event,” the expression I introduced here, has entered our dictionaries (and the Oxford English Dictionary), along with “well-knownness,” and these have entered the Western European vernacular. The definition of a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness” has almost become a familiar quotation.

  Meanwhile our technology has reinforced the tendencies described in this book. Is there any advance—from VHS and Cable TV to their unimaginable successors—that has not multiplied and vivified pseudo-events? Is there any advance in transportation—from the Walkman and the cellular telephone to supersonic planes and their successors—that has not erased the differences between transportation and communication? Every day seeing there and hearing there takes the place of being there.

  Still, the author never really knows what his book means. Especially today the author’s view of what he has done, like everybody else’s, is clouded by the blurring together of images and realities, the disorder that eyedoctors call diplopia. It is a fair testimony to this book that it has continued to puzzle, pique, and amuse quite a few. But my Foreword to this 25th anniversary edition, insisting on the book’s well-knownness, is only another evidence of how hard it is for any of us to escape the passion for pseudo-events that has accelerated, and still accelerates into the foreseeable future.

  DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  June, 1987

  Foreword to the First Edition

  THIS IS a “how-not-to-do-it” book. It is about our arts of self-deception, how we hide reality from ourselves. One need not be a doctor to know he is sick, nor a shoemaker to feel the shoe pinch. I do not know what “reality” really is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one.

  This is a large subject for a small book. Yet it is too large for a big book. If I pretended in this volume to survey or comprehend all the bewitching unrealities of American life in the twentieth century, I would misrepresent the vastness of the subject. The task of disenchantment is finally not the writer’s but the reader’s. The complete survey must be made intimately by each American and for himself.

  This book arises out of some very personal convictions. First, an affection for America and an amazement at America: acquired over the half century of my life, increased by periods of living abroad, and deepened by having spent my adult life studying the American past. Having read a good deal about the villains who are said to be responsible for our perplexity—the hidden persuaders, the organization m
en, Madison Avenue, Washington bureaucracy, the eggheads, the anti-intellectuals, the power élite, etc., etc., etc.—I am unimpressed by their villainy. But I remain impressed by the perplexity of life in twentieth-century America. I have long suspected that our problems arise less from our weaknesses than from our strengths. From our literacy and wealth and optimism and progress.

  Yet it is a mistake to believe that a wholesale problem can find a wholesale solution. From the beginning, the great promise of America was to open doors, so that men could try to work out their problems for themselves—not necessarily alone, but in communities of their choosing, and toward often-uncertain ends which appealed to them.

  I am suspicious of all mass medicines for national malaise and national purposelessness. The bigger the committee, the more “representative” its membership, the more collaborative its work, the less the chance that it will do more than ease or disguise our symptoms. The problem of “national purpose” is largely an illusion—although one of the most popular illusions of our time. Our real problem is personal.

  I try in this book to give the reader a representative sample of his illusions. These come out of my own experience, an experience I share with nearly all Americans. I notice here only a few of the many new varieties of unreality which clutter our experience and obscure our vision. Because I cannot describe “reality” I know I risk making myself a sitting duck for my more profound philosopher-colleagues. But I remain confident that what dominates American experience today is not reality. If I can only dispel some of the mists, the reader may then better discover his own real perplexity. He may better see the landscape to find whatever road he chooses.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  FOREWORD TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

  FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

  INTRODUCTION: Extravagant Expectations

  1. From News Gathering to News Making:

  A Flood of Pseudo-Events

  2. From Hero to Celebrity:

  The Human Pseudo-Event

  3. From Traveler to Tourist:

  The Lost Art of Travel

  4. From Shapes to Shadows:

  Dissolving Forms

  5. From Ideal to Image:

  The Search for Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

  6. From the American Dream to American Illusions?

  The Self-Deceiving Magic of Prestige

  AFTERWORD BY DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING (AND WRITING)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Extravagant Expectations

  IN THIS BOOK I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. I recount historical forces which have given us this unprecedented opportunity to deceive ourselves and to befog our experience.

  Of course, America has provided the landscape and has given us the resources and the opportunity for this feat of national self-hypnosis. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience.

  We want and we believe these illusions because we suffer from extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word—“going beyond the limits of reason or moderation.” They are excessive.

  When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect—we even demand—that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.

  We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God.

  Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

  We are ruled by extravagant expectations:

  (1) Of what the world holds. Of how much news there is, how many heroes there are, how often masterpieces are made, how exotic the nearby can be, how familiar the exotic can become. Of the closeness of places and the farness of places.

  (2) Of our power to shape the world. Of our ability to create events when there are none, to make heroes when they don’t exist, to be somewhere else when we haven’t left home. Of our ability to make art forms suit our convenience, to transform a novel into a movie and vice versa, to turn a symphony into mood-conditioning. To fabricate national purposes when we lack them, to pursue these purposes after we have fabricated them. To invent our standards and then to respect them as if they had been revealed or discovered.

  By harboring, nourishing, and ever enlarging our extravagant expectations we create the demand for the illusions with which we deceive ourselves. And which we pay others to make to deceive us.

  The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America, some of its most honest and most necessary and most respectable business. I am thinking not only of advertising and public relations and political rhetoric, but of all the activities which purport to inform and comfort and improve and educate and elevate us: the work of our best journalists, our most enterprising book publishers, our most energetic manufacturers and merchandisers, our most successful entertainers, our best guides to world travel, and our most influential leaders in foreign relations. Our every effort to satisfy our extravagant expectations simply makes them more extravagant and makes our illusions more attractive. The story of the making of our illusions—“the news behind the news”—has become the most appealing news of the world.

  We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give us or than we can make of the world. We demand that everyone who talks to us, or writes for us, or takes pictures for us, or makes merchandise for us, should live in our world of extravagant expectations. We expect this even of the peoples of foreign countries. We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making: the world of the image.

  Nowadays everybody tells us that what we need is more belief, a stronger and deeper and more encompassing faith. A faith in America and in what we are doing. That may be true in the long
run. What we need first and now is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.

  To discover our illusions will not solve the problems of our world. But if we do not discover them, we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. It will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind.

  1

  From News Gathering

  to News Making:

  A Flood of Pseudo-Events

  ADMIRING FRIEND:

  “My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there!”

  MOTHER:

  “Oh, that’s nothing—you should see his photograph!”

  THE SIMPLEST of our extravagant expectations concerns the amount of novelty in the world. There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, “How dull is the world today!” Nowadays he says, “What a dull newspaper!” When the first American newspaper, Benjamin Harris’ Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, appeared in Boston on September 25, 1690, it promised to furnish news regularly once a month. But, the editor explained, it might appear oftener “if any Glut of Occurrences happen.” The responsibility for making news was entirely God’s—or the Devil’s. The newsman’s task was only to give “an Account of such considerable things as have arrived unto our Notice.”

  Although the theology behind this way of looking at events soon dissolved, this view of the news lasted longer. “The skilled and faithful journalist,” James Parton observed in 1866, “recording with exactness and power the thing that has come to pass, is Providence addressing men.” The story is told of a Southern Baptist clergyman before the Civil War who used to say, when a newspaper was brought in the room, “Be kind enough to let me have it a few minutes, till I see how the Supreme Being is governing the world.” Charles A. Dana, one of the great American editors of the nineteenth century, once defended his extensive reporting of crime in the New York Sun by saying, “I have always felt that whatever the Divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report.”