Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences: Advertising, Consumption, and Violent National Conflict
Advertising draws on our dread of being in a world of strangers.
— Robert David Sack, Place, Modernity, and the Consumer’s World
Terror of the Split Screen
Several times during the course of the Al-Aqsa intifada, the public regulator of Israel’s commercially funded broadcasting media — the Second Authority for Television and Radio — issued withering condemnations of its own network franchise holders. The offense that had raised the Second Authority’s ire was the broadcasting of advertisements during television coverage of suicide bombings. On one occasion in 2002, Telad, then a franchise holder for Israel’s Channel 2 (the main commercial television channel), split the screen in half in order to broadcast live footage from the scene of a bombing in Jerusalem while at the same time continuing to transmit (without sound) a premier league soccer match and the advertisements scheduled to be shown during the game.1 Complaints from viewers resulted in the Second Authority’s reiterating a formal ban on advertisements in such circumstances originally issued in 2000 and punishing Telad by temporarily cutting its allocation of prime-time advertising minutes. Telad’s executive director retorted that the company’s decision was guided both by financial considerations and by a sense of national responsibility: that not broadcasting the advertisements was a form of capitulation to terrorists because it allowed them to set the nation’s political and cultural agenda.
A number of significant themes emerge from this controversy. One of these is the normative role of mass media, especially television, during terrorist attacks and other catastrophic events involving sudden loss of life. On these occasions media become noticeably important not only as sources of information but also as chief definers of such events as national catastrophes. National broadcasting institutions express, or construct and enforce, the “national mood.” They indicate — through the demeanor of news anchors; the alternatively mournful, outraged, and anxious tone of reporters and commentators; and even the musical choices of radio disc jockeys (slow, sad Israeli songs rather than the latest U.S. and U.K. chart hits) — the kinds of attitudes, behavior, and aesthetic pleasures that are deemed publicly appropriate and permissible (Liebes 1998, Liebes and Kampf 2005,Frosh and Wolfsfeld 2007). Telad was in part sinning against this mood-setting and event-defining role of the media. By splitting the screen and not entirely suspending its regular broadcasting, it threatened to destabilize the primary definition of a suicide bombing as a catastrophic event of national importance, one deserving of every citizen’s undivided attention.
A second, related theme is the nature of the relationship between advertising, as a particular expression of consumer culture, and violent national conflict. The Second Authority perceives advertising and national catastrophes to be antithetical: advertising is frivolous, pleasure seeking, profit oriented, and self-interested and hence fundamentally incompatible with the seriousness of such events and the required civic responses of collective empathy and conspicuous solidarity. It is an interruption and distraction of the lowest and most persistent kind, for while other cultural forms (such as sports broadcasts) may also be out of place, they do not need to be banned. Advertising, in short, appears as the inadmissible and inappropriate other of violent national conflict. Telad’s response, although ostensibly opposed to the Second Authority’s decision, invokes a similarly stark dichotomy: advertising is the other of catastrophic nationalist violence in that it represents the normalcy of everyday life (as purportedly manifested in everyday broadcasting schedules and policies): that is precisely why the continued transmission of advertisements in the face of terrorist attacks is treated as a veritable act of defiance.
This apparent antithesis between advertising and consumerism on the one hand and terrorism and violent national conflict on the other is an unarticulated background assumption of much research. With few exceptions (for instance, Jackall and Hirota 2000, Cohen 2003,Young 2005) recent theorists and analysts of consumerism have tended to assume that consumer societies are societies at peace and that advertising in particular is averse to conditions of violent conflict. After all, the world advertising conjures is largely one of prosperity, pleasure, and secure aspirations. It promises the good life through consumption. While pleasure can certainly be aroused through the imaginative representation of excitement and even of physical endangerment (Campbell 1987), as a whole advertising is supposed to be socially and personally reassuring: it specializes in the “selling of well-being and happiness through the selling of goods” (Leiss, Kline, and Jhally 1997: 24). Linked to the purported benefits of trade and the marketplace, its fundamental prerequisite would appear to be a society at ease with its place in a world of nations and at peace with itself and with its immediate neighbors. War may encourage certain kinds of accelerated production and technical innovation, but the presence of violence on the streets rarely engenders the sense of security and comfort — let alone the intensity of spending and variety of goods — that is assumed to characterize contemporary consumer societies.
The Israeli social theorist Natan Sznaider provides an ambitious theoretical and historical elaboration of this putative incommensurability. Sznaider (2000) claims that consumerism is crucial to the distinctiveness of modern cosmopolitan societies in contrast to “warrior societies.” In warrior societies social space is riven by a divide between the in-group, characterized by strong social bonds and obligations between individuals, and those outside it. “People’s first reaction in warrior society is to identify a newcomer as friend or enemy — and either way, the bonds of the in-group are strengthened” (2000: 303). In contrast, in modern cosmopolitan societies people’s first reaction to newcomers is to ignore them. These societies are based not on a small number of strong social bonds between individuals but rather on a multiplication of weak social ties in which strangerhood, indifference, and civil inattention are crucial to the expansion of moral sympathy beyond the circle of the in-group. This multiple sociality places the individual at the center of a plethora of overlapping weaker ties with a large number of others.
Consumption and consumerism are central to this framework of individuated affiliation because they provide the means for creating weak social ties with others through the mixing and matching of social identities, including ethnic and national identities, something that is achieved by the commodification of cultural traditions. The complaint that such identities are not authentic is spot-on: that is their achievement. As opposed to the binarism of “authentic” identities (you either are or are not committed to a particular identity), they are multiple, experimental, and interpenetrative and allow group identities to interlace and coexist within the same social space. Consumerism, then, is a key factor in the emergence and maintenance of cosmopolitan modern societies and a historical antidote to ethnic nationalism and its ultimate expression, violent conflict. Such a theory clearly articulates and endorses the claim that consumer culture and violently aggressive nationalism are mutually incompatible and, if found to be copresent, would at most create a psychotic society, one split between warrior and cosmopolitan dynamics.
Sznaider’s view invites a devastatingly obvious contemporary challenge: that the United States, the paradigmatic consumer society of our era, is also very visibly a country at war; moreover, it is a country that has been at war somewhere on the planet for much of the past sixty years. Yet to all intents and purposes the everyday lifeworlds of the vast majority of its population — from the stability and sturdiness of their physical environment to the expected longevity of their social relationships — inhabit a space of peace: that is, their lives and immediate surroundings are unlikely to be seriously affected by the violence attendant upon armed conflict between nation-states or organized national political groups. The encounter with consumer plenty in the United States and other liberal democracies takes place against this sharp distinction between the distant front and the taken-for-granted security of the nation’s home territory, a security only very recently and dramatically challenged, though not put into permanent crisis on an everyday experiential level, by the attacks of September 11, 2001.
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Notes
This article is based on research supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 956/02). An earlier version was presented at the International Communication Association Conference in 2005.
- Telad lost its Channel 2 franchise in 2005 in a competitive tender. The decision had nothing to do with the “split screen” incident.