RAYMOND WILLIAMS’S ESSAY
was originally written as a chapter in his 1961 book The Long
Revolution, but was published only later and as an essay. It
belongs to an older form of British-orientated cultural studies
than the other essays collected here, but one that it is important
not to forget. It stands apart in two main ways: first, for
Williams, cultural studies moves unproblematically back into
cultural history. For him, telling the story of advertising’s
development allows one to grasp the forces which condition it now,
and also, thus, to begin to be able to conceive of a different
contemporary function for advertising. Second, Williams writes as
a committed socialist; for him private sector capitalism cannot
fulfill the needs of society as a whole. Today it is, perhaps,
harder to promote state socialism than to insist that cultural
studies requires historical narratives. But it is not as though
these two strands of Williams’s essay are quite separate. For him,
the history of advertising shows a minor mode of communication
becoming a major one – a vital component in the organization and
reproduction of capital. In a metaphor which goes back to Marx’s
belief that capitalism makes commodities fetishes
, for
Williams advertising is magic
because it transforms
commodities into glamorous signifiers (turning a car into a sign
of masculinity, for instance) and these signifiers present an
imaginary, in the sense of unreal, world. Most of all, capitalism
makes us forget how much work and suffering went into the
production of commodities. Williams’s history aims to dis-enchant
capitalism: to show us what it really is. It might be objected, of
course, that advertising’s magic (like many magics) actually
works: that, today, the use-value of many commodities is their
signifying-function. But that objection (and others) which may
occur to readers does not spoil the essay’s power to defamiliarize
the current advertising industry through erudite narrative
history.
“ That excellent and by all Physicians, approved, China drink, called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay alias Tee, is sold at the Sultaness Head Coffee-House, in Sweetings Rents, by the Royal Exchange, London.” “Coffee, chocolate, and a kind of drink called tee, sold in almost every street in 1659. ”
— Thomas Garraway
Mention of the physicians begins that process of extension from the conventional recommendations of books as ‘excellent’ or ‘admirable’ and the conventional branding, packaging and a good ‘selling line’. I remember being told by a man I knew at university (he had previously explained how useful, to his profession as an advertiser, had been his training in the practical criticism of advertisements) that advertisements you booked and paid for were really old stuff; the real thing was what got through as ordinary news. This seems to happen now with goods: ‘product centenaries’, for example. But with persons it is even more extensive. It began in entertainment, particularly with film actors, and it is still in this field that it does most of its work. It is very difficult to pin down, because the borderline between the item or photograph picked up in the ordinary course of journalism and broadcasting, and the similar item or photograph that has been arranged and paid for, either directly or through special hospitality by a publicity agent, is obviously difficult to draw. Enough stories get through, and are even boasted about, to indicate that the paid practice is extensive, though payment, except to the agent, is usually in hospitality (if that word can be used) or in kind. Certainly, readers of newspapers should be aware that the ‘personality’ items, presented as ordinary news stories or gossip, will often have been paid for, in one way or another, in a system that makes straightforward advertising, by comparison, look respectable. Nor is this confined to what is called ‘show business’; it has certainly entered literature, and it has probably entered politics. The extension is natural, in a society where selling, by any effective means, has become a primary ethic. The spectacular growth of advertising, and then its extension to apparently independent reporting, has behind it not a mere pressure group, as in the days of the quacks, but the whole impetus of a society. It can then be agreed that we have come a long way from the papyrus of the runaway slave and the shouts of the town-crier: that what we have to look at is an organized and extending system, at the centre of our national life.