Manufacturing Desire
Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen in their book Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness trace historically the imposition of mass media and images on working class and immigrant populations and audiences and the changes brought about. They discuss the manipulation of desire through imagery and media, (relation between desire and media) to usher in a new way of life for workers/immigrants. This new way of life (consumer/market society) “did not arrive merely as a cold economic structure…its evolution was wrapped in the history of mass imagery and need.” (“Wrapped” as in gift wrapped or wrapped in secrecy.) The Ewens describe and critique the form of psychic and class exploitation that was built into early mass media.
From the mid-1800’s to the 1920’s the Ewen’s argue that the “channels of popular sensibility and desire” were increasingly subjected to and usurped by a growing mass media and mass market. The Ewen’s argue that mass images take on the important social function for industrial capitalism of absorbing and transforming the cultural patterns and sensibilities of workers and immigrants that had been based on long-standing agrarian ways of life. The Ewen”s might be a little too nostalgic over this “customary” way of life as they assume that people had to be strenuously seduced from this way of life. One of the criticisms of this excellent history is that the Ewen’s portray little of the struggle over meaning within these historical periods. Their account of the transformation in everyday life and popular culture is somewhat one-sided, a little too top-down. What pleasure did audiences get from these “channels of desire”? To what extent were workers and immigrants active participants, co-creators in these media and images? Although it can said that these various “channels of desire” such as movies, mail order catalogs, fashion, and department stores were mobilized to transform these traditional cultures and their anti-industrial values into a national, homogenous culture of mass consumption by “reorganizing the structure and meaning of need.”
The Ewens do give us an important testament to folk and working class cultures. One of their main arguments is that home production, traditional and folk cultures were realms outside of the power and influence of industrial and mass culture and resistant to their inherent values. Industrial society had to invade this terrain; the hegemony of industrialism and mass culture had to struggle with these preceding indigenous cultures.
In a similar vein Stuart Ewen in his book All Consuming Images explores how advertising created and organized new spaces. The creation, by industrial capitalism, of not only new spaces but also new surfaces was key in the creation of modern consumer culture. Ewen’s major argument is that currently style does not signify only fashion but extends over more and more of the individual’s everyday life and is a central instrument for the maintenance of power relations. Ewen draws a parallel between industrial engineering and consumer engineering as style takes on a prominent role in the areas of popular culture, business, modernist design and architecture. Designers such as Raymond Loewy created compelling and unified styles for industry and business. These corporate styles were instrumental in consolidating power, not just in the business world, but also in the political and cultural realms as well. Furthermore the democratization of style, through advertising, design, and the hegemony of consumer culture, has been a primary form of social control.
Ewen also argues the formation of identity based on any real political expression and participation in democracy is erased by the individual’s concern and fascination with constructing a personal style and image. There is in the personal construction of a style an authentic quest for wholeness. The role of advertising and the entire style machine is to take this authentic quest for wholeness and exploit it: “Style is a process of creating commodity images for people to emulate and believe in.” For Ewen people are incorporating and dwelling in the “commodity images” being provided for them. The quote goes on:
“Such emulation is not without its costs. As frozen photographs – in fashion or style magazines – become models from which people design their living spaces, or themselves, extreme alienation sets in. One becomes, by definition, increasingly uncomfortable in one’s own skin. The constant availability of alternative styles to ‘adapt to,’ to purchase, thrives on this discomfort. The marketing engines of style depend on anomic subjects seeking to become splendid objects. The extent to which objects seem so promising maybe but an index of the extent to which the human subject is in jeopardy; destined only to defined as a consumer.” Thus there is extreme reification involved in the meaning of objects. is subtle and all-pervasive set of models that seduce and trap people into a social world.”
This material culture must be opposed and overcome but any real political culture is overwhelmed by a media culture full of images designed with subtle and sophisticated strategies of persuasion. If opposition to this regime of style appears, from subcultures, it is ultimately incorporated into the dominant culture and style and ends up being in next years fashion shows.
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