The Image (26 page)

T
HE
G
RAPHIC
R
EVOLUTION
has produced a new fluidity in all experience. We are not quite clear where the air conditioning ends and where the Muzak begins. They flow into each other. The forms of books and magazines and dramatic offerings merge. “Through the pages of
McCall’s
,” reads a full-page advertisement in
The New York Times
(August 18, 1960), “pass the most exciting books of our time.” “Read any good books lately?” it asks. And answers by naming twenty-one books that had gone from pre-publication in
McCall’s
to best-sellerdom. Three quarters of these were the ghostwritten lives of celebrities—what should more accurately have been called “non-books.”

The more different forms it becomes possible to cast any work into, the more vague and wraithlike become all the forms. Is a hardcover book simply an unhatched paperback? Or rather is a paperback a hardcover book that has not yet grown a shell? “Do you know
War and Peace
?” “Yes.” “Did you like it?” “Yes, pretty much.” “Which, the movie or the
book?” Was it the unabridged original (the negative is significant)?—or the “definitive modern abridgment”? Nobody is quite clear. Was it the 1931 or the 1961 version of
Cimmaron
? The “original” may mean the motion picture, the novel, the comic book (
Prince Valiant
and many other movies have derived from comics), the magazine article, the musical score, the phonograph record, the radio program, or the television show.

Not long ago I approached one of the best publishers in the country with a proposal for a book. The book I outlined, it seemed to me, was much needed. The climax of the publisher’s consideration of my proposal was a conference in the firm’s board room with several vice presidents and the heads of numerous departments. As we went around the table, the chiefs of different divisions debated whether the book could be taken apart and marketed in different pieces. Could it be made into an “Executive Gift”? Could it be made into pamphlets and sold separately, chapter by chapter? Could it be printed piecemeal on the back of maps? Could it be marketed as a premium for a mail order house? No one asked whether it could be shredded into a marketable breakfast food. We hardly discussed the need for the book itself, and that came to seem beside the point.

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.

T
EMPTED
, 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.

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.