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Advertising Fictions

This is Actually More About Her Essay, “Coterie Consumption” on Bloomsbury, Keynes, and Woolf

Mark’s Review in Modernism/Modernity

• “What are we to make of strange moments like these in the history of modernism, when modernists’ public anti-mass-market rhetoric seemed to be undercut by flirtations with consumer culture?”
• 1996-7: years when modernism and marketing was hot topic to write about
• Huyssen’s “much-cited” role as forerunner of, inspiration for works about advertising and modernism
  • “Huyssen complicated the Adorno/Horkheimer vision of this split, not only to suggest the necessary relationship between ‘High Modernism’ and mass culture, but also to demarcate a corner of modernism that had a positive relationship to mass culture—what he calls avant-gardism.”
• Interesting notes: in Dettmar and Watt’s collected essays, Marketing Modernism, with essays about Pound, Woolf, Eliot, Stein, etc, but also Harlem Renaissance and suffragettes and how it happens in the classroom now
  • has essay by Timothy Materer “Make it Sell!” about Ezra Pound
    • “Materer argues that the same emphasis upon the direct treatment of the “thing” appeared in both elite literary culture and in popular consumer-culture images. ”
    • Michael Murphy’s “One Hundred Per Cent Bohemianism:” “Murphy notes a 1919 subscription ad that announced Vanity Fair’s purpose as keeping “the Tired Business Man in touch with the newest and liveliest influences of modern life” (63), and suggests that Crowninshield’s mission of bringing modernism to the upper-middle-class influenced even the ads published in the magazine, which appropriated the look of the modern art reproduced there. Murphy explores the packaging of ‘bohemianism’” as “commodity voyeurism”
    • Jennifer Wicke’s “Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, and Modernism as Marketing.”
      • “modernism contributed profoundly to a sea change in market consciousness…modernism (writ large) is neither separate from market consciousness, nor just a Johnny-come-lately in putting to use market procedures to advance aesthetic goals. The connection is much more intense, more salient, more peculiar . . . [because] aspects of modernist practice made possible the transformations in the understanding of that secret sharer, ‘the market,’ and as a result changed the nature of modern markets for once and all”
      • How? Bloomsbury: “site of production and consumption, . . . an invented community, in intention almost a utopia of and for consumption”
      • ”’the market’ is at least as much an aesthetic phenomenon as it is anything else, and that neither art nor economics can be separated out of it or given an artificial primacy as instigator or reflector” (me: this is a claim that needs to be proven by explaining the HISTORICAL MOVEMENT of capital…maybe I could argue that the ‘myths’ that modernism uses are ones that not coincidentally come from historical periods that mirror our stage in the movement of capital and that’s why we go to them to understand the too-large capitalism)
      • Keynes and Woolf don’t influence each other, but rather, both are “giving representation to the everyday of the market in the genres and institutional formats appropriate to their quite different formations as literary writer and theoretical economist”
      • Keynes: in Mark’s words, “the market in Keynes’s work is of a market that defies description, and is essentially chaotic, dispersed, displaced, and only ordered provisionally by the economist.”
      • Woolf: here’s the core of Wicke’s argument, for me (these are Mark’s words): “Wicke explicates Mrs. Dalloway to illustrate that Woolf—coming out of a Bloomsbury that was itself a ‘blooming buzzing confusion of consumption and production,’ ‘a market in miniature,’ as she puts it—while seeming to stand against the forces of market capitalism, instead ‘offers marketing as modernism, the market as susceptible only to the invisible hand of art or creation to ‘order’ it. No longer could positivist reason or rationalist quantification hold sway in conceiving the market or depicting its ‘laws’: the liquidity and lambency Woolf gives to her narrative skein is the nature of the modern market, too’”
      • Mark’s problem with it: is this really the modernist view of the market (has she convinced you that it is)? why should we abandon the psychological understanding of the market that the rest of criticism has used? why can’t (modern) science also have ways of describing this chaotic structure?

Topics

• Dickens, James, Joyce
  • James: his heroines are given the high-gloss glamour of Golden Age Hollywood: “hyper-charged advertising glamour”
  • Joyce: recognizes ad copy as a way to reenergize literary prose
    • Bloom takes enjoyment and pleasure from his interaction in the circulation of commodities and finds it an imaginative boost: takes sensuous tactile pleasure from transactions as well as intellectual ones in thinking about strategies of advertisement
• She looks at the ad men in literature
• “Advertisements are cultural messages in a bottle.” “a new and crucial literature” (on same level in Bloom’s mind with songs, newspapers…as he needs ad copy to keep his monologue going)
  • the ad language is used as an open, dynamic language to add to his own prolixity; and it shows that stream of consciousness, with the ad copy that inserts itself in it, demonstrates quite the opposite of human autonomy and self-determination, but rather shows how language does construct us (see Joan Gibbons Art and Advertising 15)
• Ads and literature part of “one vast textual system”
• Bloom “Bloom receives the signals that the culture is sending out, and he makes his own mix of them”
• P T Barnum using advertisements in NYC….

Other Works

• said in relation to essay on Molly Bloom: “Consumption is imbricated in every transaction, even, or especially, in the production of meaning which is language.�
• Work of consumption
  • �The choice of the word �work,� instead of its synonym, �labor,� is important because the latter fits too neatly into the preexisting compartments of the labor theory of value, for instance, while �work� has a more sinuous semantic life-�offering a word for labor, but more generally what Marx himself called the work of making the (individual�s) world-his homo faber�definition-�and just as insistently labeling a discrete piece of work, usually a work of art or creative labor�
  • it is simultaneously within capitalism and a critique of it
• Her forthcoming book Born to Shop on the “Work of consumption” should be interesting. whenever I can get to it.

Random

• Marx commodity fetish: you think the commodity will obey your needs