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

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  While the word “prestige” is, of course, common enough in our talk about people and things here at home, its significance for all our thought is clearest when we look abroad. There the indirectness of our thinking becomes most obvious. When we talk of prestige abroad we are talking not of ourselves, but of the shadows of ourselves which we can somehow project. To compare prestige, then, is to compare the appeal of images. To insist on our prestige is to insist on the appeal of our image.

  In addressing the Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 26, 1960, President Eisenhower remarked:

  The Soviet dictator has said that he has, in his recent journeys and speeches, succeeded in damaging the prestige of America.…

  Concerning this matter of comparative national prestige, I challenge him to this test: Will he agree to the holding of free elections under the sponsorship of the United Nations to permit people everywhere in every nation and on every continent, to vote on one single, simple issue?

  That issue is: Do you want to live under a Communist regime or under a free system such as found in the United States?…

  Are the Soviets willing to measure their world prestige by the results of such elections?

  But the United States would gladly do so.

  This proposal called for a world-wide market research project by the United Nations to see whether the United States or the Soviet Union offered the world a more attractive package. One did not need to be oversubtle to suspect that the proposal itself was meant to be a piece of skillful packaging. A “bold proposal” like this (of course there was not the slightest chance it would be adopted) would supposedly improve the image of America abroad. In our world of pseudo-events the dramatic gesture of American openness and honesty was as contrived, as devious, and as disingenuous as could be imagined.

  The very notion of “high” or “low” prestige, of people “accepting” or “rejecting” the “Russian Way” or the “American Way,” itself betrays unconcern for the complex, inwardly conflicting reactions of real people to other real people. It reveals a naive take-it-or-leave-it mentality that is at one with the oversubtlety and indirectness of all our thinking about our relations to other peoples. In our popularity game we ask the world not, “Do you like me?” but, “Do you like my shadow?”

  During the Presidential campaign of 1960 there was much discussion over whether the Eisenhower Administration would or should publish the results of a “prestige” poll conducted by the United States Information Agency under the auspices of the Department of State. Candidate Kennedy bitterly attacked the Administration for failing to publish the figures (the data, it was assumed, must have been simple and statistical, with an obvious, damaging moral). Supposedly in the national interest, the figures were not revealed. If people did not like our image, it was not good public relations to announce it, or to reveal why. Better deftly repair the image for better results.

  Our thinking has become so blurred, we have so mixed our image and our reality, that we assume our place in the world is determined by our prestige—that is, by others’ respect for our image. “Not least of all,” Walter Lippmann warned in December, 1960, “our prestige in the world has diminished. We have ceased to look like a vigorous and confident nation.”

  In competition for prestige it seems only sensible to try to perfect our image rather than ourselves. That seems the most economical, direct way to produce the desired result. Accustomed to live in a world of pseudo-events, celebrities, dissolving forms, and shadowy but overshadowing images, we mistake our shadows for ourselves. To us they seem more real than the reality. Why should they not seem so to others? Our technique seems direct only because in our own daily lives the pseudo-event seems always destined to dominate the natural facts. We no longer even recognize that our technique is indirect, that we have committed ourselves to managing shadows. We can live in our world of illusions. Although we find it hard to imagine, other peoples still live in the world of dreams. We live in a world of our making. Can we conjure others to live there too? We love the image, and believe it. But will they?

  III

  ABROAD the making of credible images seems a problem. It is hard to persuade others to fit themselves into our molds, to be at home among our illusions, and to mistake these for their own reality. At home our problem is the opposite. What to do when everybody accepts the images, when these images have pushed reality out of sight?

  Here, in the United States, the making of images is everyday business. The image has reached out from commerce to the worlds of education and politics, and into every corner of our daily lives. Our churches, our charities, our schools, our universities, all now seek favorable images. Their way of saying they want people to think well of them is to say they want people to have favorable images of them. Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals. The domination of campaigning by television simply dramatizes this fact. An effective President must be every year more concerned with projecting images of himself. We suffer more every day from the blurriness and the rigidity of our image-thinking.

  Examples are everywhere. Life becomes more and more illusory. We have become so accustomed to our illusions, they have become so routine, that they seem no longer produced by any special magic. The forces I have described in this book converge on our everyday experience. They are revealed in almost everything we do, in almost everything we see, in the very words we use.

  One example is especially significant to me. I came upon it casually, but it focuses many of the problems I have discussed in this book.

  Early in the fall of 1960, I received an elaborate color brochure advertising the Chevrolet for 1961. Inside, the only full-page illustration is a brilliant portrait of a man in the front seat of a de luxe new model. His hard-top convertible (advertised for its unobstructed view) is parked near the edge of what seems to be the Grand Canyon, a background of indescribable natural beauty. The man is not, however, peering out of the car window at the scenery. Instead he is preoccupied with a contraption in his hand; he is preparing to look into his “Viewmaster,” a portable slide viewer using cardboard disks holding tiny color transparencies of scenic beauty. On the seat beside him are several extra disks. Standing outside the car are his wife and three small children. The eldest of them, a little girl about ten years old, at whom his wife is looking, is herself preoccupied with a small box camera with which she is preparing to take a picture of her father seated in the car.

  Here, if ever, is a parable of twentieth-century America. All the ingenuity of General Motors, Eastman Kodak, generations of Fords, Firestones, and Edisons, the accumulated skills of fifty years of automotive engineering, of production know-how and industrial design, all the imagination and techniques of full-color printing, of junior and senior executives, and the whole gargantuan paraphernalia of the American economy have brought us to this. An opportunity for me to be impressed by the image of a man (with the Grand Canyon at his elbow) looking at an image, and being photographed as he does it!

  While this example is beautifully symbolic, others are all around us. Almost any evening on television I can watch in my own home a celebrity performing in a skit which is the television version of a movie (made from a novel), to the accompaniment of dubbed-in laughter and applause—the whole performance sponsored by a steel manufacturer or an oil company, by a manufacturer of cosmetics to cure imaginary ailments, or by a brewer or cigarette manufacturer of products indistinguishable from those of his competitor—all put on in order to create a more favorable corporate image.

  I well remember my disappointment when the Democratic National Convention was being held in Chicago in the summer of 1956 and I finally secured some tickets to the visitors’ galleries at the International Livestock Amphitheatre. It was the first time I had ever attended a National Party Convention, and I took my young sons along. Finally admitted to our seats, we found ourselves confused by the floor events. Along with the other “actual spectators,�
� we spent our time watching the television screens which the arrangements committee had considerately placed there. These sets showed us precisely the same programs we would have seen from our living room. The unlucky delegates on the floor below (those were the days before portable television) without the aid of a television screen must have been more confused than we were about what was going on.

  Not long ago I met a public relations counsel who held a responsible position in a large and influential firm. His specialty was writing—speeches, articles, letters—for public figures. I asked him how much he consulted with his clients. He explained that of course he had to meet and know the men for whom he wrote in order to be able to write like them. But, he said, a difficulty in working for the same clients over an extended period was that, if you were successful in writing for them, it became harder and harder to know what they were really like. His clients, he said, had an incurable tendency to forget that they had not written their own speeches. When he asked them in briefing sessions what they thought of this or that, they were increasingly inclined to quote to the public relations counsel the very speech which the counsel had supplied them a few weeks before. It was disturbing, he said, to hear yourself quoted to yourself by somebody else who thought it was himself speaking: you began to wonder whether it was your language after all.

  This suggested to my public relations counsel friend another example of the same problem. A client had decided to move his plant away, and therefore to change his public relations counsel to a firm in the city where his new plant would be located. This client telephoned my friend, explained the situation, and asked that he ghostwrite a letter to be sent to the head of the public relations firm, explaining the situation, enumerating his regrets, and generally keeping up the image which the firm had helped him build up over the years. My friend wrote the letter. A few days later the head of the public relations firm called in my ghostwriting friend, told him he had a piece of bad news, namely, that Mr. X was moving his firm away and would have to drop their services. But, the boss said, there were only the warmest feelings (as he had just learned from the letter he had received); now he wanted my friend to draft a nice letter which he as head of the firm could send, explaining his regrets that the business connection was being terminated. My friend remarked that he was probably the highest-paid man ever employed to write letters to himself.

  We have heard ours called an age without direction—a “directionless” age. It would be better to call us the age of indirection. Everything I have described helps us produce secondhandness. We make, we seek, and finally we enjoy, the contrivance of all experience. We fill our lives not with experience, but with the images of experience. The most popular—most “functional”—styles of modern architecture are not necessarily those most comfortable to live in, but always those which photograph well. “Money,” we are told on the radio by a “friendly” personal loan company promising to give us cash without security so we can rid ourselves of worrisome debts—“Money is the magic ingredient that gives you financial status.”

  The awkward monstrosities of our everyday speech betray the secondhandness of our way of looking at everything. We no longer talk about something; we talk “in terms of” it. In an organization a man is no longer important; he is “at the policy level.” What we seek, we are told, is no longer wealth or glory or happiness, but a sociological concoction called “status.” We do not simply “believe”; instead we talk of “the values we hold.” We cannot do something in our spare time, we must cultivate it as a “hobby.” We do not study music or art or literature; we study the “appreciation” of music or art or literature. We do not rest; we “seek relaxation.” We are not asked to go see our Ford Dealer, but rather to “visit our local dealership.” We no longer do a job; we play a role. We do not learn parental virtues; instead we are prompted on how to “play the role of” parents. We less often say we like a man or find him sympathetic; instead we prefer to observe that he has “made a good impression on us.” We do not simply plan to meet again; we must arrange to “set up” another meeting. We do not find a person; we “contact” him. We do not discuss a problem; we look at it “policy-wise.”

  The technology of our daily lives has, of course, prepared us for all this. When we have a letter from a person, it is no longer in his own hand (as it would have been if Franklin or Washington or Jefferson had written us); it is a typewritten, mimeographed, or Thermofaxed image of what he has written. Often it is a transcription not of his writing at all, but of the words he spoke into his dictaphone, copied by a secretary he has not seen. The voice we hear, more and more often, is not in the physical presence of the speaker, but a sound in a telephone receiver, or from a phonograph record, or over radio, or on television.

  This is the age of contrivance. The artificial has become so commonplace that the natural begins to seem contrived. The natural is the “un-” and the “non-.” It is the age of the “unfiltered” cigarette (the filter comes to seem more natural than the tobacco), of the “unabridged” novel (abridgment is the norm), of the “uncut” version of a movie. We begin to look on wood as a “non-synthetic” cellulose. All nature then is the world of the “non-artificial.” Fact itself has become “nonfiction.”

  But people—even twentieth-century Americans—will not so supinely allow themselves to be deprived of the last vestiges of spontaneous reality. By a new residual effect, then, we become doubly interested in any happenings which somehow seem to offer us an oasis of the uncontrived. One example is the American passion for news about crime and sports. This is not simply an effect of the degradation of public tastes to the trivial and the unserious. More significantly, it is one expression of our desperate hunger for the spontaneous, for the non-pseudo-event.

  Of course, many sports events become pseudo-events; and some (professional wrestling, for example) have actually flourished by exploiting their reputation for being synthetic. But there still remain many areas (for example, amateur sports and professional baseball) where we have succeeded to a certain extent in guarding the uncorrupted authenticity of the event. Our outrage when we find that a boxing match was rigged or that an amateur basketball team was bribed comes not merely from our feeling that our morality has been violated. It also expresses our angered frustration at being deprived of one of our few remaining contacts with an uncontrived reality: with people really struggling to win, and not merely to have their victory reported in the papers.

  The world of crime, even more than that of sports, is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted spontaneous event. Of course there are rare exceptions (the planned “violators” of law for political purposes, like the suffragettes, or more recently the Freedom Riders in the South). But, generally speaking, crimes are not pseudo-events, however industriously they may be exploited by the press. Only seldom are they committed for the purpose of being reported. Quite the contrary, a man who commits a murder or a rape, who robs a bank, or embezzles from his employer, hopes to get away with it. Our hunger for crime news and sports news, then, far from showing we have lost our sense of reality, actually suggests that even in a world so flooded by pseudo-events and images of all kinds, we still know (and are intrigued by) a spontaneous event when we see one.

  The same quest for spontaneity helps explain, too, our morbid interest in private lives, in personal gossip, and in the sexual indiscretions of public figures. In a world where the public acts of politicians and celebrities become more and more contrived, we look ever more eagerly for happenings not brought into being especially for our benefit. We search for those areas of life which may have remained immune to the cancer of pseudo-eventfulness.

  IV

  ONE OF the deepest and least remarked features of the Age of Contrivance is what I would call the mirror effect. Nearly everything we do to enlarge our world, to make life more interesting, more varied, more exciting, more vivid, more “fabulous,” more promising, in the long run has an opposite effect. In the extravagance of our expectations a
nd in our ever increasing power, we transform elusive dreams into graspable images within which each of us can fit. By doing so we mark the boundaries of our world with a wall of mirrors. Our strenuous and elaborate efforts to enlarge experience have the unintended result of narrowing it. In frenetic quest for the unexpected, we end by finding only the unexpectedness we have planned for ourselves. We meet ourselves coming back. A Hollywood love triangle, according to Leo Rosten, consists of an actor, his wife, and himself. All of us are now entangled with ourselves. Everywhere we see ourselves in the mirror.

  Some schools of philosophers have long told us that all experience consists only of the images we have in our mind. This has been expressed in various forms of Neoplatonism. In the eighteenth century it was given classic modern expression by George Berkeley (1685–1753). In his New Theory of Vision (1709) he argued that what we see is not simply the imprinting on the mind of the characteristics of external objects, but the mind’s reconstruction of the fragmentary visual signs received, into the images which alone make sense to the mind. He went on to argue that only these mental images were “real”—and anything in the whole world was therefore real only insofar as it was held together in the mental experience of some being. According to him, the all-imaging, all-perceiving being was God. But, though we are not philosophers, we can see a difference between what bothered Berkeley and what bothers us. Even if we agree with Berkeley that all experience everywhere in some special sense consists of nothing but images, there remains a great difference between the older philosopher’s world of omnipresent images and our own. The difference is not that never in the past has it been possible persuasively to describe experience as consisting only of mental images. Rather that such an overwhelming proportion of the images we live among have been contrived by man himself.