Living within a certain context, it is difficult for people to view it in its totality, and thus they tend to isolate various aspects of it, to which they assign blame for their dissatisfactions, or credit for their contentment. Advertising's portrayal of only one aspect of many contemporary issues aids in maintaining this immersion of minds within the dominant view. Those who move partially outside of the paradigm tend to begin questioning one or another aspect of the modern condition, rather than the condition as a whole. Particularly in its incessantly positive portrayal of technological intensification, advertising assists in the subversion of critical questions through its promotion of compliance [Mander 1978].
In The Resurgence of the Real, Charlene Spretnak writes that “cracks and crevices in the modern world view are widening...people tend to cite [the cause as] corporate capitalism or resurgent communism, profit-driven technology or industrialism, materialism or consumerism, or the lack of respect for spiritual concerns. All of these are indeed worrisome realities of our time, but they are all aspects of an encompassing phenomenon called 'modernity' [Spretnak 1997].”
Obscuring the Past
"The familiar assumption that everything before industrialism was pain, poverty, slavery, and victimization by nature is the assumption that works best for the technological-capitalist agenda [Mander 1991]." This assumption is also one of those that currently dominates the public discourse, holding us within the confines of modernity for fear of the alternative. We convince ourselves that modernity is 'the best' (or, for anti-modernists, 'the worst'), although none of us have any experience of another way of living. The fact that "we are modern because we can no longer quite remember what this machine was built to do” [McKay 1992] apparently does little to dampen public enthusiasm for it.
In his book Tourism and Modernity, Ning Wang alludes to the following concepts as central to a definition of modernity: capitalism, industrialism, de-enchantment, globalization, science, technology, accelerating tempo, urbanization, and abstraction of space.All of these characteristics, particularly the last three, are applicable to the reality of automobiles, and to the imagery of automotive advertising. Cars are an expression of modernity, and modernity is a condition of the dominance of cars.
Logos and Eros Modernity
Wang goes on to define two types of Modernity, Logos and Eros. Put simply, Logos can be defined as the dominance of reason and Eros as the drive for pleasure. Green advertising seeks to identify car use with Eros in the public mind: advertisements align cars with pleasure, personal fulfillment, sensuality, power, and wild nature. "In the symbolic environment, the car is a mystical status marker attached to identity, earthly pleasures, and domination." Cars are portrayed as care-free, powerful, and dominant over, but not damaging to, their surroundings. The lack of visible drivers is intended to make viewers identify themselves as the drivers, communing with nature, free from care.
Beneath the surface, however, the manufacture of cars, as well as the philosophy behind them, is very much a product of Logos Modernity. In Wang's words, "Characterized by the 'primacy of instrumental reason', Logos-modernity pursues a given end by the most efficient means available, regardless of more all-encompassing, substantial, and comprehensive goals. Thus, rationality of the part often ends up as irrationality of the whole."
Put into automotive terms, this means that getting into your car to go to work in the morning makes perfect sense. However, the context within which this is done, a world being dominated by more than 400 million cars, in which people live ever greater distances from where they work, shop, and socialize, makes no sense at all.
Ian McKay writes that "to be modern is...to sense 'a basic uncertainty about what is basic, what is valuable, even what is real'..." This rootless and uncertain character of modern life makes it easier for advertisers to obscure a living being's drive to preserve a healthy and sustainable environment in which to live, and to replace this drive with a drive for increased consumption, leading to increased profit.
Read more articles on automotive advertising:
- The Displacement of Nature
- Short Term Thinking and Nature as Optional
- Cars, Ads, and Individualism
- Making Friends With Nature
- A Narrowing of Options
- Dominating Nature
Sources
- Hope, Diane S. “Environment as Consumer Icon in Advertising Fantasy,” Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
- Mander, Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Quill, 1978.
- Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1991.
- McKay, Ian. The Challenge of Modernity. Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1992.
- Spretnak, Charlene. The Resurgence of the Real. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997.
- Wang, Ning. Tourism and Modernity: A Sociological Analysis. Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd., 2000.
