The Image (28 page)

The passivity of conformity is the passivity of fitting into images. The prevalence of images makes possible the prevalence of conformity. Before the age of images, it was commoner to think of a conventional person as one who strove for an ideal of decency or respectability, or who simply wished to avoid being conspicuous. Since the Graphic Revolution we think of him as a “conformist”—one who tries to fit into the images found vividly all around him. In our world of pseudo-events, synthesized images take the place of external standards.

We have become thoroughly accustomed to the use of images as invitations to behavior. There was a time when if you wanted a lady to buy a hat you would ask her to do so, or if you wanted a man to buy cognac you would describe the virtues of your cognac. Now the persuasion is more indirect. The widely observed decline of salesmanship may be explained in part by the ways in which the Graphic Revolution has made the hypnotic appeal of the image take the place of the persuasive appeal of argument. Why be a salesman when a well-presented product is one which itself draws the consumer into the picture? Products have become props for
images into which the seller confidently assumes we will try to fit ourselves.

(4)
An image is vivid and concrete
. It often serves its purpose best by appealing to the senses. “The Skin You Love to Touch.” The Old Dutch Cleanser girl with upraised stick (“Chases Dirt”). The bearded cough-drop Smith Brothers. The Arrow Collar Man. “Man of Distinction.” The image is limited. It must be more graspable than any specific list of objectives. It is not enough if the product, the man, or the institution has many good qualities appropriate to it. One or a few must be selected for vivid portrayal.

(5)
An image is simplified
. In order to exclude undesired and undesirable aspects, an image must be simpler than the object it represents. “This strong, vigorous symbol, with its four sections bordering a square center,” The Chase Manhattan Bank explains, “is indicative of our Bank’s character and diversity.” “When people just see those initials, IBM, the mechanism is triggered. In a flash the entire corporate image is etched on the mind.” An effective image has the capacity to become hackneyed. Yet it loses its imagic power as soon as it passes into the language. Then it has become a word in place of a pseudo-event. We have then forgotten that it was contrived on purpose by certain people for specific ends. The maker of an image wishes to hear it on every tongue. Yet when everybody uses it for his own purposes, it loses its pseudo-eventful quality and ceases to serve its original purpose. This happened to “aspirin,” “mimeograph,” “cellophane,” and “linoleum,” and has almost happened to Kodak, Technicolor, Band-aid, and Kleenex. The most effective image is one simple and distinctive enough to be remembered, yet not so handy as to seem the natural symbol for the whole class of objects it describes.

(6)
An image is ambiguous
. It floats somewhere between the imagination and the senses, between expectation and reality. In another way, too, it is ambiguous, for it must not offend. It must suit unpredictable future purposes, and unpredicted changes in taste. Many such changes may have
taken place before the image can be remade to contain them. It must be a receptacle for the wishes of different people. Seldom is this so plainly acknowledged as in the recent program by Pincus Brothers Maxwell, clothing manufacturers of Philadelphia. They advertise their new brand of men’s suits, not by a sharply focused photograph, but by a blur standing on the street. “The agency, Zlowe Co., New York,”
Printers’ Ink
explained (January 20, 1961), “came up with a campaign that discards the fashion plate for personal image. Based on deliberately blurred reflection photography, the illustration is supposed to sell the man through a vague but attractive image he has of himself.” Early in 1961 Volkswagen ran a series of advertisements entitled “The experimental X-93 Volkswagen” below a blurry full-page photograph of an automobile. The fuzzy outlines were designed to make it easier for the viewer to see whatever he wished to see. In advertising, as in painting, the non-representational technique is apt to become more popular, to give the viewer ample scope for his unpredictable but always exaggerating expectations.

*   *   *   *   *

Strictly speaking, there is no way to unmask an image. An image, like any other pseudo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it. For this reason, some of the most effective advertising nowadays consists of circumstantial descriptions of how the advertising images were contrived: how tests were devised, how trademarks were designed, and how the corporate cosmetics were applied. The stage machinery, the processes of fabricating and projecting the image, fascinate us. We are all interested in watching a skillful feat of magic; we are still more interested in looking behind the scenes and seeing precisely how it was made to seem that the lady was sawed in half. The everyday images which flood our experience have this advantage over the tricks of magic: even after we have been taken behind the scenes, we can still enjoy the pleasures of deception.
Paradoxically, too, the more we know about the tricks of image building, about the calculation, ingenuity, and effort that have gone into a particular image, the more satisfaction we have from the image itself. The elaborate contrivance proves to us that we are really justified (and not stupid either) in being taken in.

On a trip to Washington, I found in the usual travel kit at my airplane seat a copy of
Voyager: Capital’s Magazine for Air Travelers
(May–June, 1960). A leading article, “Memory Triggers,” recounted the effort that Capital Airlines (which issues the magazine) had spent in devising a new corporate image. “The planning for Capital’s new corporate image began almost two years ago,” an Editor’s Note explained, “when the company undertook a thorough evaluation of its public identity.” Numerous firms were considered for the project, and finally, in July, 1959, Lippincott and Margulies, Inc., was assigned the task. I was taken behind the scenes. I was expected to think well of Capital Airlines, not only because the service was good, but equally because so much effort had gone into making an image skillfully designed to impress me favorably:

By being told how the corporation has worked to entice him scientifically, the consumer is reassured that the corporation is really up to date. It cares enough for him to improve its means for attracting him. Thus, in some sense or other, he is not really being deceived at all. This is the first great seduction in history where the seducer’s appeal is increased by disclosing his arts.

At a meeting of the American Statistical Association in Chicago on March 15, 1961, Mr. David Karr, President of Fairbanks Whitney Corporation, speaking on “A Case Study in Planning a Corporate Image,” described with pride how in 1958 Fairbanks Whitney had taken over the Perm-Texas Corporation, which was then heavily in debt and had a low reputation. The subsidiary corporation was quickly put on a strong financial basis. Then, Mr. Karr explained, “the company’s image building program moved forward rapidly.” The company’s name was changed, and an expensive newspaper advertising campaign was launched. The new company’s establishment of a desalting plant at Elath, Israel, was a climax of these efforts, “typical of the importance played by research and development activities in establishing a proper corporate image.… Israel, with its injunction to ‘make the deserts bloom’ dating from biblical times, and Fairbanks Morse, with roots reaching back more than 100
years in the production of pumps and other water handling equipment, were natural partners in the desalting venture.” “American industry,” Mr. Karr concluded, “is increasingly recognizing the corporate image as a management responsibility equal in importance to finance, operations, and engineering.” But, he warned, “an image program must be built on fact, not fantasy, if it is to gain public acceptance.”

Fact or fantasy, the image becomes the thing. Its very purpose is to overshadow reality. American life becomes a showcase for images. For frozen pseudo-events.

T
HE PECULIARITIES
of the modern image and the consequences of image-thinking appear even clearer by contrast to what has been displaced: thinking in ideals. The English word “image,” which comes from the Latin
imago
, is related to the Latin word
imitari
, which means “to imitate.” According to common American dictionary definitions, an image is an artificial imitation or representation of the external form of any object, especially of a person.

Images now displace ideals. But an ideal is much more difficult to define. It is, I suppose we would say now, an old-fashioned word and an old-fashioned notion. “Ideal” is related somehow to “idea.” Our dictionaries define it as a conception of something in its most excellent or perfect form—something that exists only in the mind.

Differences between “ideal-thinking” and “image-thinking” are the differences between our thinking before and after the Graphic Revolution. An ideal, contrasted to an image, is not synthetic. When we think of an ideal we think of something already there. It was created by tradition, by history, or by God. It is perfect, but it is not simplified. It is not ambiguous (or ambiguous only in a very different sense). Its implications are not passive. An ideal is what we actively strive toward, not what we fit into. Credibility is irrelevant.
Charity, justice, equality, mercy, are no less ideals because no man or society ever lived up to them. Ideals are needed
because
in their perfect form they are somehow hard to believe.

An image is something
we
have a claim on. It must serve our purposes. Images are means. If a corporation’s image of itself or a man’s image of himself is not useful, it is discarded. Another may fit better. The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the other hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us; we serve it. If we have trouble striving toward it, we assume the matter is with us, and not with the ideal.

During the last century great historical forces have promoted both the rise of images and the decline of ideals. The Graphic Revolution has multiplied and vivified images. By new machines to make accurate, attractive replicas of face, figure, and voice, of landscape and events, and by new machines to disseminate these images. By newspapers, magazines, cheap books, telephone, telegraph, phonograph, movies, radio, television. The American system of manufacturing, mass production, which originated about a century and a half ago, was based on the revolutionary idea of interchangeable parts. For the first time, every musket or clock or lock would be an image of every other of the same design. Dies and jigs, calipers and machine tools, and thousands of refinements made each item indistinguishable from others of its kind. All this was supported and stimulated by the growth of advertising, by enlarging markets, by competition for markets—in a society where unprecedented numbers could afford to buy.

Advertising flourished, then, from the effort to produce
apparent
distinctions. Competing products were now more precisely similar and more unnoticeably different. This was one explanation of why modern advertising first flowered in the marketing of beers, soaps, and cigarettes. Different brands of these commodities could not readily be distinguished from one another by actual shape or function. Each
had to be distinguished, therefore, by being attached to, or rather, “fitted into,” a distinctive image. The masters of advertising, men like Albert Lasker, were adept at this. At the same time came the build-up of brand names. The Brand Names Foundation (established in 1943), by 1959 had almost a thousand members—firms manufacturing or promoting nationally advertised products. The Foundation conducted “educational programs” on the benefits and services of brand names and brand advertising. Brand names became household words. They were monuments to American wealth, American democracy, and technological progress in the Age of the Graphic Revolution.

The obvious next step, so recent it has only begun to enter our dictionaries, was from the “Brand Name” to the “Name Brand.” The use of “brand” as a synonym for trademark had entered the English language as early as 1827. In American usage the expression “brand name” called attention to the private ownership of a certain trademark, to the fact that one firm alone was authorized so to designate its product. But the much newer expression “name brand” makes the name and not the product the center of attention. This is quite a natural way to distinguish commodities in the age of the celebrity and the best seller.

The fast pace of life and the increasing speed of movement across vast American spaces, well before the beginning of the twentieth century, had begun to put a premium on quickly impressive, attractive images. They were creating a new Iconography of Speed. Competition for attention put a premium on attention-getting. The word “billboard,” which was invented in America, had first come in use about 1851, in the early days of the Graphic Revolution. The rise of the automobile, the improvement of highways in the 1920’s and ’30’s, and the consequent vast spread of billboards were new incentives to produce images that could catch the eye in a flash and remain indelibly imprinted on the memory. The very multiplication and the increasing size of newspapers and magazines were incentives. How to produce images that
could not be forgotten even if seen only fleetingly as one leafed the pages? Everything pointed to the invention and perfection of inescapable, unforgettable images, drawing the viewer willy-nilly to a salable product.