Multiplication of forms and improvements of technology inevitably make all experience a commodity. When the entertainment comes packaged in film, the movie-house owner need not know anything about drama. All he needs to know is what will sell. The rise of the paperback has made it unnecessary for the retailer to know about books. Most are marketed with newspapers, magazines, hair tonic, and canned foods. Advances in the merchandising of records now make it impossible for the customer to try before he buys. He had better buy a best seller or a nationally advertised brand. Yet the marketer of recorded music himself usually knows very little about music. Like the tour agent, who seldom knows where he is sending you (and need not know, when he can sell you a tour package), the record merchant need not know his music. To stay in business he need know only which music packages sell. All he sees is the package. The record package becomes more like that of the paperback, with lurid, full-color photographs on coated paper.
When the same theme can be put in so many different ways, and each way is a path to millions of viewers or readers or hearers, the pressures to repeat what has already proved successful become almost overwhelming. Much of modern publishing—whether of books, movies, television shows, or music—can be described as a reviewer once characterized the pat formula used by a successful imitator of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels were for a while outselling those of Scott himself. “For the last ten years, he has been repeating his own repetitions, and echoing his own echoes. His first novel was a shot that went through the target, and he has ever since been assiduously firing through the hole.” The successful dealer in literary, dramatic, and musical commodities is one who discovers a formula for the public wants, and then varies the formula just enough to sell each new product but not enough to risk loss of the market. The artistic standards of the new multiform world of pseudo-events are best summarized, “A best seller is a best seller is a best seller.” And which of us does not want to write (or at least to read) a best seller?
Wherever we turn we see the mirror, and in it (though we like to pretend we are seeing somebody else) we see ourselves. The most successful magazine is the digest which gives us not what is really in the other magazines, but what we already see (or think we see, or would like to think we see). The sure-fire successful movie or book—Ben Hur, Spartacus, a novel by Frank Yerby, Thomas B. Costain, Mary Roberts Rinehart or Micky Spillane—is apt to be the best mixture to the proved formula, a formula we have made for ourselves. Movies and books mirror each other. Both give us the fantastic, unreal image that we wish to believe of ourselves. Music becomes a mirror of moods. Experience becomes little more than interior decoration.
5
From Ideal to Image:
The Search for Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
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TEMPTED, like no generation before us, to believe we can fabricate our experience—our news, our celebrities, our adventures, and our art forms—we finally believe we can make the very yardstick by which all these are to be measured. That we can make our very ideals. This is the climax of our extravagant expectations. It is expressed in a universal shift in our American way of speaking: from talk about “ideals” to talk about “images.”
The Bible tells us that “God created man in his own image.” Until recently skeptics titillated us by reversing the metaphor. “If God made us in his own image,” observed Voltaire, “we have certainly returned the compliment.” Dostoyevsky said, more profoundly, that it was the devil that man had created in his own likeness. But the God of the American Founding Fathers, whatever other qualities he might have had, was a constitutional monarch. He ruled by laws which he was not free to change at his whim. He had not yet become a chairman of the board, ruling under a policy-directive approved by and in the interest of the citizen-stockholders.
“The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” governed an orderly universe. For neither God nor man was the world wholly plastic. But more recently, just as “adventure” has become a name for the unexpectedness we plan for ourselves (or pay others to plan for us), so we have emptied the word “value.” We have moved away from a traditional meaning, found in older dictionaries: “Value.… Ethics. That which is worthy of esteem for its own sake; that which has intrinsic worth.” Toward a newer and modern American meaning: “Value.… pl. in sociology, acts, customs, institutions, etc. regarded in a particular, especially favorable, way by a people, ethnic group, etc.” Our new social scientists speak of “values” all the time. By it they mean the peculiar standards which a society has made for itself. By it they reassure us that we need not worry over the dissolution of ideals, since all ideals are obsolete. The most “civilized” peoples, in fact, are those who know they are guided by values of their own making.
Yet for most of our history we have believed ourselves a nation guided by ideals. Ideals given us by tradition, by reason, or by God. “Ideals are like stars,” observed Carl Schurz on April 18, 1859, the anniversary eve of Lexington and Concord; “you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them will reach your destiny.”
In nineteenth-century America the most extreme modernism held that man was made by his environment. In twentieth-century America, without abandoning belief that we are made by our environment, we also believe our environment can be made almost wholly by us. This is the appealing contradiction at the heart of our passion for pseudo-events: for made news, synthetic heroes, prefabricated tourist attractions, homogenized interchangeable forms of art and literature (where there are no “originals,” but only the shadows we make of other shadows). We believe we can fill our experience with new-fangled content. Almost everything we see and hear and do persuades us that this power is ours. The life in America which I have described is a spectator sport in which we ourselves make the props and are the sole performers.
But to what end? How surprising if men who make their environment and fill experience with whatever they please could not also make their God! God himself becomes a pseudo-event with all the familiar characteristics. He is not spontaneous or self-created. He has been planned or planted—primarily for the desirable effects of having him reported and believed in. He is to be viewed like a television show only at our convenience. His power can be measured by how widely he is reported, how often he is spoken about. His relation to underlying reality is ambiguous. As with other pseudo-events, about God, too, the most interesting question for us is not what he does but whether he exists. We worry over his prestige. By creating him we intend him to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. He is the Celebrity-Author of the World’s Best Seller. We have made God into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness. He is The Greatest of “the greatest.” What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.
I
Now the language of images is everywhere. Everywhere it has displaced the language of ideals. If the right “image” will elect a President or sell an automobile, a religion, a cigarette, or a suit of clothes, why can it not make America herself—or the American Way of Life—a salable commodity all over the earth? In discussing ourselves, our communities, our corporations, our nation, our leaders, ourselves, we talk the language of images. In the minister’s study and the professor’s seminar room as well as in advertising offices and on street corners.
When the distinguished scientists and educators on the Science Advisory Committee reported to President Eisenhower on November 19, 1960, they criticized universities for making an artificial division between research and teaching. What was essential, they urged, was “that the environment as a whole should be an environment of learning, investigation, and teaching—all together. Only too often the universities fail to understand and support this image of their nature.”
This devious, circumlocutory way of talking has become common. We do not even notice it. In an earlier age critics would have objected simply that universities failed to pursue this ideal or that ideal. But today universities, like other institutions—in fact like everybody—are judged by whether they fit into a well-tailored “image” of themselves.
Some characteristics of the image can be suggested by our use of the “corporate image.” This is, of course, the most elaborately and expensively contrived of the images of our age. In a series of lectures on effective advertising at a recent meeting of the American Management Association (New York City, October 27, 1960), Mr. Mack Hanan, managing partner in Hanan & Son, discussed the problem of building a corporate image. He warned of the dangers of building a “positive corporate image.” This might do a firm more harm than good. By its very nature, he explained, no positive image can be all things to all of a corporation’s publics. The sharper and more precise the image, the more likely it will accommodate only certain subsections of the corporate publics while isolating others. He mentioned a corporation that had the image of being totally efficient but completely dehumanized. “A dehumanized image discourages present employees, warns off prospective employees and executive recruiters and may even dissuade certain discerning groups of investors.” He then offered an escape from these “perils of positivism.” What he urged was a “neutral corporate image.” This, he said, was not to be equated with a wishy-washy, vague, or unplanned image. “It is, instead, open-ended. It allows the various corporate publics to be drawn into the corporate picture.… A neutral corporate image is an invitation to management’s public for a suspension of their critical judgment. Middle-of-the-road as it is, the neutral image attracts all but the marginal fringe groups at either attitudinal extreme. But because it is impartial, it repels none.”
This interesting advice presupposes certain familiar characteristics in a corporate image. They are clues to all the image-thinking of our time. What the pseudo-event is in the world of fact, the image is in the world of value. The image is a pseudo-ideal. As we shall see, it is synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, simplified, and ambiguous.
(1) An image is synthetic. It is planned: created especially to serve a purpose, to make a certain kind of impression.
Older and more obvious illustrations are the trademark and the brand name, both of which have become increasingly important in this century. A trademark (intended to become a standard for judging all products of a certain kind) is a legally protected set of letters, a picture, or a design, identifying a particular product. Because trademarks and many of the other images flooding our experiences are, like most other pseudo-events, expensive to produce, someone always has an interest in disseminating, re-enforcing, and exploiting them. Unlike other standards, they can be owned. To keep them legally valid as trademarks, the owner must constantly reassert his ownership.
It was by elaborate design that the cumbersome name “International Business Machines Corporation” was made in the public mind into “IBM.” This is probably the most expensive and most valuable abbreviation in history. Under the creative direction of Eliot Noyes and a design group consisting of Paul Rand, Charles Eames, and George Nelson, the firm developed its streamlined trademark, to project a “clean, impressive” image. Nowadays a trademark is seldom a simple by-product of other activities. It is not merely the name, initials, or signature of the maker or owner, or a hallmark assigned by a guild. Usually it is produced by specialists.
But the images which fill our experience are not only the few letters, the simplified picture, or the catchy slogan. They are not merely “IBM,” “USS” staggered in a circle (for United States Steel Corporation), the graceful cursive “Coca-Cola.” They are not merely “His Master’s Voice” (the dog listening quizzically at the horn of a primitive phonograph), “Time to Re-tire,” (a yawning infant wearing Dr. Denton pajamas and holding a candle), “Rock of Gibraltar” (Prudential Insurance Company), a Benjamin Franklin medallion (Saturday Evening Post), a sleek, speeding greyhound (Greyhound Buses). Nor are they merely memorable slogans: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel,” “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous,” “When It Rains It Pours,” “Breakfast of Champions,” “Man of Distinction,” “57 Varieties,” “Milk From Contented Cows,” “Hasn’t Scratched Yet,” “Don’t Write—Telegraph,” “Keep That Schoolgirl Complexion,” “Say It With Flowers,” “Next to Myself I Like B.V.D.’s Best,” “Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should,” etc. etc.
While all these uses of the image have become more important with each decade of the twentieth century, a more abstract kind of image is the peculiar product of our age. Its tyranny is pervasive. An image in this sense is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan, or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product, or service. It is a value-caricature, shaped in three dimensions, of synthetic materials. Such images in ever increasing numbers have been fabricated and re-enforced by the new techniques of the Graphic Revolution.
When we use the word “image” in this new sense, we plainly confess a distinction between what we see and what is really there, and we express our preferred interest in what is to be seen. Thus an image is a visible public “personality” as distinguished from an inward private “character.” “Public” goes with “image” as naturally as with “interest” or “opinion.” The overshadowing image, we readily admit, covers up whatever may really be there. By our very use of the term we imply that something can be done to it: the image can always be more or less successfully synthesized, doctored, repaired, refurbished, and improved, quite apart from (though not entirely independent of) the spontaneous original of which the image is a public portrait.
Examples could be multiplied. Systematically collected, they would be nothing less than an encyclopedia of the most vivid figments among which we live. A few examples will suggest the pervasiveness of image-thinking. Such a headline as “President Striving to Develop Public Image” (Kalamazoo Gazette, February 20, 1961) is common in our daily papers. “Goldwater Attempting to Shape a Popular Conservative Image,” topped a front page story of The New York Times (January 16, 1961) showing a photograph of the Senator. There Senator Goldwater amplified his intention “to make sure the image of conservatism is not an obstructive image.” “Do you read between the lines?” asked an advertisement for the S. D. Warren Paper Company. “Your customers certainly do. When a hi-fi enthusiast studies your catalog, he sees more than just text and pictures. Unconsciously he is reading between the lines for evidence of your company’s character. He looks for the quality image that only a good printer can help you achieve.” The pamphlet Admission to Harvard College (1960), a printed report by a special committee on college admission policy of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, talks the same language. It devotes a special section to the “public image” of Harvard, recommending that Harvard undertake “a careful investigation of its public image or images.” The committee urges “a much more systematic study of the public image question than the time and resources available to this committee would permit. The committee believes that such a study should be launched by the University, with all the thoroughness and sophistication of research technique it obviously deserves.” Everywhere we meet the implication that if an image is damaging or unacceptable, it can and should be repaired.
(2) An image is believable. It serves no purpose if people do not believe it. In their own minds they must make it stand for the institution or the person imaged. Yet if an image is to be vivid and to succeed popularly in overshadowing its original, it must not outrage the ordinary rules of common sense. It would be a mistake, then, for Harvard College to claim that it selected its whole student body without any regard to family antecedents, alumni associations, or financial connections; no one would believe it. The most effective images are usually those which have been especially doctored f
or believability. One of the best paths to believability is understatement. “Ask the man who owns one.” In the words of the great public relations genius of American higher education in this century, The University of Chicago was “not a very good university … simply the best there is.” Ivory Soap is “99.44% pure.” A prudent advertiser or master of public relations takes advantage of the increasingly reckless use of superlatives to make his own hyperbole seem a conservative truth.
(3) An image is passive. Since the image is already supposed to be congruent with reality, the producer of the image (namely, the corporation) is expected to fit into the image—rather than to strive toward it. The consumer of the image (namely, the viewer of the corporate image: a potential client or customer) is also supposed somehow to fit into it. All these relations are essentially passive. The real effort in relation to an image is not by the corporation as a whole, but by the experts and executives who have made the image and who are its chief custodians. The “projection” of an image is itself a way of touting reputed virtues. Both subject and object then will want to fit into the picture. Both will assume that a portrait so persuasive and so popular must be made from life. Once the image is there, it commonly becomes the more important reality, of which the corporation’s conduct seems mere evidence; not vice versa. In the beginning the image is a likeness of the corporation; finally the corporation becomes a likeness of the image. The image (unlike actual conduct) can be perfect. It can be a precise pattern which will satisfy everybody.
When the Container Corporation of America decided (according to one reporter) “to make itself known as a company both tasteful, resourceful, and design-conscious,” this decision might have been made simply enough in the minds and inner councils of its executives. Such an ideal had all along existed and could have been privately pursued. Traditionally, such inward-dwelling convictions were those considered most real and most effective. But now this is not enough.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage) Page 20