Disenchantment and Mass Advertising
I’m grateful to Jonathan Heaps, whose review of Reitter and Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis here in Genealogies of Modernity allows me to launch into this present review of Anat Rosenberg’s The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity with a little more momentum:
Reitter and Wellmon do us the favor of spelling out explicitly how [Max] Weber conceived of “disenchantment.” Certainly, it involves displacing the central role played by the “supernatural”... in modern society’s sense of how the world is ordered. But… what moves in to take its place [is] a belief in the rational agency of fellow human beings to order the world. I may not know how the streetcar or my smartphone or (more troublingly) the global economy works, but surely someone does.
Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” is central to Rosenberg’s massive new study, and she adds to it an important wrinkle. Disenchantment is not merely the displacement of the supernatural by the rational agency of human beings, but “the displacement of the sacral and supernatural into the rational, technical, and capitalistic” (emphasis mine).
If, as Heaps says, “surely someone knows” how the global economy works even if I don’t, then Rosenberg is interested in how that gap in understanding creates opportunities for enchantment to reassert itself. If I am mystified by the workings of global capitalism, my fascination isn’t so much bound up in the economic warp and weft per se but in those who claim to understand it; I am enchanted, in other words, by expertise.
The contests of expertise lie at the heart of Rosenberg’s cultural legal history of early mass advertising, tracing its legal shaping between 1840 and 1914. Rosenberg chooses advertising as her focal point because the legal arguments around its development index the cultural changes happening as industrial Britain renegotiated its relationship to labor. The very idea of “legal expertise” emerged concurrently with efforts to defend journalistic, artistic, and scientific expertise against the perceived excesses of marketing and ad copy.
This legal history also gives us another angle for assessing the disenchantment narrative. “Advertising was criticized for its rationalist shortfalls,” Rosenberg writes, “as it did not live up to the highest ideals of aesthetic appreciation, objective knowledge, and impartial information.” And yet these very standards, the argument continues, did not align with the already-held values of a disenchanted culture; rather, they performed the cultural project of disenchantment in an effort to normalize it: “Languages of rationalism and its failures disavowed the significance of enchantment by advertising, and so affirmed modernity-as-disenchantment… Placing legal powers, forms, and logics behind disenchantment turned a wavering ideology into a form of normative enterprise.”
This gesture, Rosenberg shows, would come with a price. For, while legal scholars disenchanted the world by helping form new ideas of expertise, certain domains got left on the table. Who, for instance, possessed “expertise” over matters of emotion and desire? Clearly, many legal decisions assumed human affect would get subsumed into the thoroughly rational domains of the emerging British culture.
But this was not, in fact, what happened. Then as now, Rosenberg says, narratives of disenchantment often fail to reckon with the persistence of enchantment in and through modernity, what she calls a “will to enchantment” that became its own realm of expertise, presided over by the “magicians, rites, and formulae” of the advertising industry. Debates about advertising’s legal status became, paradoxically, good marketing for marketers, and allowed many forms of enchantment to endure at the turn of the century.
Thus, mass advertising appears to buck traditional narratives of disenchantment. Indeed, the “will to enchantment” emerges not despite, but rather because of the efforts made to define and denigrate advertising alongside other forms of speech. Across these legal cases, disenchanted modernity reveals itself less as a fitting description of the time, and more as a deliberate social project. When advertising threatened that project through mystification and affect, the law stepped in to regulate. It succeeded, but at the cost of producing an enchanted niche where advertisers could operate as “experts,” not of medicine, science, or even art, but as “rational tamers” who “design[ed] and control[led] the non-rational mind.” In this domain, promises of magic and miracle floated free of the rationalist inhibitions that governed other forms of information at the time.
Chapter to chapter, Rosenberg offers a reception history of mass advertising and its enchanting powers through the legal language and debates redefining British social life across the latter half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, for example, details the ways news printers availed themselves of legal options to distinguish the business of “information” from advertisements and enshrine their products as superior. Scapegoating advertising in this way vouchsafed journalism as a “rational” enterprise, free of profit motives, but it also reinforced the “mystical” quality of advertisements-as-information, and the role of advertising “enchanters” in the “creation of desire.”
Advertisers also ran into the need to justify themselves for the aesthetic effects they had on the environments they contested alongside other visual media (Chapter 3). As private, civil, and day-to-day law flexed its various muscles over questions of art, it “entrenched a previously unstable conceptual opposition between commerce and beauty.” Again, despite these debates around aesthetics, the so-called non-rational (re: enchanted) aspects of visual experience were not considered in these arguments and so tacitly ceded to the expertise of advertisers.
Even more than art, science was defined by ideals of restraint that typified scientific method, logic, and subjectivity. Meanwhile, their negation—in the form of exaggeration—defined advertising and the consumer market (Chapter 4). As legal debates around “quackery” ensued, medicine’s association with scientific truth became stronger through negative comparisons to market exaggerations, which further downplayed the seriousness of enchanted viewpoints among consumers.
These debates directly led to the doctrine of “puffery,” an unprecedented legal innovation which protected and governed advertising speech precisely by denigrating it and producing a hierarchy within market speech (Chapter 5). The doctrine implied that anyone who bought into such “unenforceable speech” as advertising, was, quite simply, stupid in a technical-legal sense.
Rosenberg notes puffery as a touchstone within the history of disenchantment, because it at once exposes and belies the hope that industrial capitalism would produce a new, rational culture in which reason governed the market. It was, at the time, the most explicit legal denial that enchantment still played any role in society. These expectations would also influence laws against gambling and indecency, which at once created a rational subject and judged them for their (irrational) failings rather than holding advertising language accountable for its effects (Chapter 6).
Again and again, legal decisions in speech-related cases worked to define a perfect, rationalistic citizen who could operate in the new market—with the caveat, of course, that the citizens imagined by this project did not really exist. Taking advantage of holes in these definitions, and of actual rather than ideal human psychology, advertisers emerged as “experts” on non-rationality, partly motivated—even forced—by the many legal strategies used to curb their influence.
There is another leaner, though perhaps more divisive way of saying all this: beginning in the nineteenth century, advertising became a scapegoat against which other spheres of British social life could define themselves as “progressive, knowledgeable, and moral.” On the flip side, mobilizations of the law “disavowed [advertising’s] enchantments to such an extent that enchantment became an attractive field of action for advertisers, free from direct legal attention.” It was precisely in scapegoating advertising’s enchanting powers that British culture invested advertisers with expertise over the enchanting, the magical, the irrational—and yes, even the sacred.
I use the language of scapegoating deliberately here, as I think Rosenberg’s argument shares some interesting valences with Rene Girard’s theories of mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and the sacred. In Girard’s work, the scapegoat is a person, violently expelled in the name of social cohesion. Here, however, it is an idea that serves as an “other” to an imagined cultural ideal. British culture did not need to define its perfect rational citizen when it could, instead, denigrate the perceived irrationality of advertising and, by extension, the sort of person to whom it appealed. Yet in a process much like the deification of the sacrificial victim (Rosenberg likens it to the Freudian “return of the repressed”), advertisers latched onto the margins of this social project and claimed for themselves expertise over all those elements of human psychology that exceeded instrumental rationality.
Closing out his own reflection on disenchantment, Heaps concludes, “this belief [that “surely someone” somewhere understands what’s going on] may turn out to be no less spurious than ancient trust in the haruspex, but its object is radically more immanent.” Rosenberg’s history of the rise of mass advertising showcases a particular form of this spurious trust, and provides a keen insight into dis/enchantment along the way. We are not, it turns out, enchanted by the haruspex, the economy, or the dispositions of a sheep’s liver as such, but rather by what they might mean. And when we cannot discern these meanings for ourselves, we become enchanted by those who can mediate meaning for us. We displace our awe onto experts.
This is perhaps the biggest hole Rosenberg punches into the disenchantment narrative: the very idea of the “expert” in disenchanted modernity seems to rely less on the meritorious work of specialists than on citizens willing to defer to the judgments of other rational human agents. And this is a spurious trust indeed when it rescues the average person from exercising their own capacity for discernment. According to nineteenth-century British legal theory, every gambler is a failed citizen on precisely these grounds, and yet the “ideal citizen” imagined by disenchantment is one who is more than willing to trust that “surely someone, somewhere” knows what’s going on.
Two hundred years later, it appears that the forms of “expertise” grown by advertisers at the margins of the post-industrial West have come to dominate our own culture. Meticulously-branded “experts” proliferate like rabbits on social media, podcast platforms, and bestseller lists. Their sheer quantity contributes to a new form of experience, a simultaneous disenchantment-through-and-of-enchantment. Mass media now overwhelms consumers with variety and spectacle to the point where they have too much data for decision-making and so rely on the most striking pictures or the most heart-rending stories. No less than our predecessors, we possess a “will to enchantment,” but today our affect is provoked and our finitude brought into relief not by wonder at our own understanding, but by shock over the sheer volume of our information. A shock we cope with through an overabundance of tightly tooled experiences that increasingly border on the religious, in which authority and celebrity coincide absolutely.
Rosenberg’s study reminds us that we can't just assume modernity means a sundered sacrality. Rather, our discovery that we can produce the sacred means there is potentially more of it than ever before. It is not our increased understanding of the world that secularizes it, but our increasing refusal to ask questions about what the sacred is. This is, perhaps, the upshot of modernity: that it gets us to ask where the feelings of sacrality and transcendence even come from in the first place.