Abstract
The origin for the arguments in this chapter partly lies in two singular and apparently disconnected encounters that speak for the affective, cognitive and representational power of publicity. The first was with a newspaper cutting I saw lying on the kitchen table at the wake for a friend’s funeral that seemed to speak for a life otherwise unaccounted and un-lived. The second involved Sir Martin Sorrell’s opening speech for ‘Weapons of Mass Communication’, an exhibition of war posters at the Imperial War Museum, London, in November 2007. Without irony or reflection, he placed advertising and publicity in the driving seat at every important moment of the twentieth century.2 For him, it simply was the case that advertising and publicity infect the political processes of democratic governments in positive ways. It was not something he was going to question or challenge.
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Notes
This chapter is a development of ideas set out in J. Aulich and J. Hewitt (2007) Seduction or Instruction. First World War Posters in Britain and Europe (Manchester, New York and Vancouver: Manchester University Press).
See W.J.T. Mitchell (2005) What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
J. Butler (2009) Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso), p. 42.
A pre-eminent practitioner in this regard is Gerald Spenser Pryce. See the Labour Party poster, ‘Forward! The Day is Breaking’ (1910), which depicts an heroic worker leading the huddled masses. Reproduced in B. Margadant (1998) Hoffnung und Widerstand. Das 20. Jahrhundert im Plakat der internationalen Arbeiter — und Friedensbewegung (Zurich: Verlag Hans-Rudolf Lutz und Museum für Gestaltung), fig. 3.
I am taking W.J. T. Mitchell’s definition of the visual in this context as an ‘image-text’, which places the image in a theoretical frame where the reception of the image is variably determined by associated verbal imagery as much as by the cultural, historical and iconographical contexts of the image itself. See W. J. T. Mitchell (1986) Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) and (1994) Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
S. Splichal (2002) ‘The Principle of Publicity, Public Use of Reason and Social Control’, Media, Culture and Society, 24(1), p. 6.
See J. Habermas (1992) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press).
S. Splichal (2000) ‘Publicity, Democracy and Public Opinion’, in S. Splichal (ed.), Public Opinion and Democracy: Vox Populi — Vox Dei? (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press), p. 29.
See C. Otter (2008) The Victorian Eye. A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 50–5.
Ibid., p. 61.
See J. Corner (2007) ‘Mediated Politics, Promotional Culture and the Idea of “Propaganda”’, Media, Culture and Society, 29:4, pp. 660–77.
G. Jowett and V. O’Donnell (1992) Propaganda and Persuasion (Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage), p. 4.
P.M. Taylor (1992) War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press), pp. 12–13.
M. Hilton (2001) ‘Advertising, the Modernist Aesthetic of the Marketplace? The Cultural Relationship Between the Tobacco Manufacturer and the “Mass” of Consumers in Britain, 1870–1940’, in M. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity, Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg), p. 51.
T. Richards (1991) The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso), p. 158.
See W.J. Reader (1988) At Duty’s Call. A Study in Obsolete Patriotism (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
See M. Thompson (2001) ‘Psychology and the “Consciousness of Modernity” in Early-Twentieth Century Britain’, in M. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity, pp. 97–118.
M. Rickards and M. Moody (1975) The First World War. Ephemera, Mementoes, Documents (London: Jupiter Books), fig. 8.
See S.O. Rose (2003) Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 153–7.
C. Baudelaire (1964) ‘On the Essence of Laughter and, in General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts’, in J. Mayne (trans. and ed. 1978) Baudelaire. Art in Paris (London: Phaidon), p. 153.
See N. Hiley (1997) ‘“Kitchener Wants You” and “Daddy What did YOU Do in the Great War?” The Myth of British Recruiting Posters’, Imperial War Museum Review, 11, pp. 40–58.
H.A. Williams (1920) ‘Canada’s Flaming War Posters Stirred Dominion to Action’, The Poster War Souvenir Edition (Chicago: Officers of the Poster Advertising Association), p. 59: ‘Staid old banks and ultra-conservative businesses, that formerly frowned upon all advertising as vulgar, undignified commercialism, waived their prejudices and gladly lent their splendid properties for the display of the posters that were to hasten world order. Poster boards were conspicuous in public and private parks, they flanked the sacred monuments of the Dominion; they were prominent on church properties; in fact, Canada was turned into Posterland.’
R. Ohmann (1996) Selling Culture. Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso), pp. 104–8.
H. F. Le Bas (n.d.) ‘Advertising for an Army’, in Sir H. Le Bas (ed.) The Lord Kitchener Memorial Book (London: Hodder & Stoughton), unpag.
Ovid (1955) Metamorphoses (London: Penguin Books), p. 85
M. Taussig (1993) Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge), p. xiii.
J. Rancière (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum), p. 34.
Ibid., p. 39.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. 3.
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Aulich, J. (2012). Advertising and the Public in Britain during the First World War. In: Welch, D., Fox, J. (eds) Justifying War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230393295_6
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