H-Business/H-Net, February 1998
In
1968, Petrocelli sport coats adopted the advertising slogan "Tune
in. Turn on. Step out." This gloss on one of the most famous
slogans of the counterculture—Timothy Leary’s "Tune in. Turn
on. Drop out."—symbolizes the paradoxical relationship between
American consumer capitalism and the counterculture of the sixties.
As Thomas Frank argues in this fine book, American business underwent
its own cultural revolution in the sixties, a process that
paralleled, and in many ways even anticipated, the broader cultural
upheavals of the decade. Focusing on developments in advertising and
men’s fashion, Frank complicates standard notions of hippie
innocence and corporate venality to offer a complex and compelling
study of the dynamic nature of capitalism and the ways it foresees,
deflects, eviscerates and absorbs alternative value systems.
The
sixties, of course, is still very much a contested decade in the
national memory. For conservatives, like Robert Bork and Newt
Gingrich, it symbolizes a period in which traditional standards of
decency were overwhelmed by an ethic of hedonism. For those more
sympathetic to the political and cultural changes of the period, the
sixties witnessed a welcome challenge to the rigidity and repression
of the gray-flannel fifties. But as Frank indicates, out of these
diametrically opposite readings emerges a consensus that business
represents order, stability and tradition while the counterculture
represents freedom, anarchy and liberation. Thus is posited a
simplistic vision of capitalism as a static entity. In fact, though,
capitalism is extremely dynamic and consumer capitalism in particular
demands not repression, but self fulfillment and immediate
gratification.
Many
histories of the sixties describe the relationship between business
and the counterculture as a process of gradual co-optation as
capitalism cynically created an ersatz version of the authentically
rebellious youth movement. Abe Peck, for instance, has defined the
era as "from counterculture to over-the-counter culture,"
citing Columbia Records' infamous advertising campaign, "But the
Man can’t bust our music."1
As Frank shows, though, the story is not so one-directional. Instead,
key elements within American business, notably advertising, had begun
formulating their own critique of the staid post-World War II
business culture several years before the development of the
counterculture. In significant ways this emergent business culture
articulated the same anxieties that would motivate the
counterculture: fear of conformity and alienation and, ironically,
revulsion at the manipulation of consumerism.
Advertising
in the fifties emphasized images of conformity and complacency. As
articulated by such influential figures as David Ogilvy and Rosser
Reeves, the philosophy of advertising aimed at a mass audience which
was to be reached through constant repetition of a single, simple
message. Images focused on happy families living in suburban bliss.
Underlying this attitude was a fundamental lack of respect for the
intelligence of the consumer. As Frank says of the fifties, "Never
has advertising been so unwilling to acknowledge the myriad petty
frustrations, the anger, the fear that make up so much of daily
existence, consuming and otherwise. Never has it insisted so
dogmatically on such an abstractly glowing vision of American life.
And never has it been so vulnerable to mockery.”
The
mass society of the fifties, of which advertising was only one
example, did not go unchallenged. A number of critics, such as David
Riesman, William Whyte, John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard,
expressed dissatisfaction with the sterility of American culture and
the manipulative nature of consumerism. And, as Frank argues, these
criticisms found sympathizers within the advertising industry itself,
where some were chafing at the restrictions of the dominant
Ogilvy-Reeves philosophy. Fueled by people like Bill Bernbach, Howard
Gossage, Jerry Della Femina and George Lois, a creative rebellion in
advertising developed in the early sixties challenging the vision
proferred by advertisers in the previous decade. "But the ads of
the creative revolution not only differed from those of the gray
flannel past," Frank argues, "they were openly at war with
their predecessors. What distinguished the advertising of the 1960s
was its acknowledgment of and even sympathy with the mass society
critique.... It deftly punctured advertising’s too-rosy picture of
American life and openly admitted that consuming was not the
wonder-world it was cracked up to be.... [I]n the sixties,
advertising actively compared a new, hip consumerism to an older
capitalist ideology and left the latter permanently discredited.”
The philosophy of the creative revolution stressed the consumer's
intelligence, the fact that both advertiser and consumer realized the
manipulative and depersonalizing nature of mass society. Thus was
created what Frank labels "hip consumerism." Ads for
Volkswagen, for example, deliberately flaunted its lack of style
change as an attack on the auto industry’s policy of planned
obsolescence.
Beginning
in the early sixties, the creative revolution increasingly identified
itself with youth. As Frank says, this focus only partly derived from
an attempt to capture the youth market. More importantly, he argues,
"youth" symbolized an attitude, a break with the old
patterns of conformity, an emphasis on the new and exciting.
Therefore the image of youth could be applied to a variety of
products not necessarily aimed at young people. Consumers were
invited to join the Pepsi Generation, for instance, if they were
willing to "think young."
Stressing
youth as a form of rebellion against the conservatism of the old
order, advertisers of the creative revolution viewed the
counterculture that began to emerge in the second half of the decade
with sympathy. They adopted many of the trappings of the
counterculture: psychedelic graphics, rock music and hip fashions.
And if this vision of the counterculture remained superficial and
unconvincing to those actually involved in the youth culture (as it
did), that was all right with the advertisers because young people
were not necessarily the primary intended audience. After all, they
did not have to be told to "think young."
A
similar process also occurred in the men’s clothing industry with
the "Peacock Revolution." Men's fashion, which had
remained virtually unchanged for decades, began to change profoundly
in the early sixties. As Frank says, "The garment industry threw
itself headlong into revolution for reasons of its own: the
counterculture merely happened along at precisely the right time with
what the industry believed to be the right attitudes toward clothing
and the right palate of looks.” By 1967, these tendencies had
coalesced into an archetypal character, "The Rebel," whose
sartorial choices symbolized his resistance to conformity. Once
again, images of youth and counterculture were used to target an
audience that was neither youthful nor countercultural.
As
Frank recognizes, in many ways this work is marked by an
old-fashioned sensibility. Recent scholarship has tended to focus
(perhaps too much) on resistance to capitalist culture industries,
showing how people appropriate the messages of these institutions to
serve their individual or group needs. By focusing on culture
producers rather than consumers, Frank not only restores a needed
emphasis on the role of power in cultural discourse, but provides a
fascinating look at "the creators of mass culture, a group as
playful and even as subversive in their own way as the heroic
consumers who are the focus of so much of cultural studies today.”
The
development of hip consumerism, then, is the story of the
adaptability of consumer capitalism. Recognizing the validity of
critiques of fifties’ mass society, representatives of the
advertising and fashion industries sought to speak to those who felt
alienated, who craved authenticity. Industry representatives,
particularly younger people dissatisfied with the bureaucratic and
creative strictures on their work, articulated their own variation on
the frustrations of living in a consumer society. But in this view,
the solution to such problems lay in increased consumption. And, as
Frank argues, in the period since the sixties, hip consumerism has
become the dominant ethos for "transform[ing] alienation and
despair into consent.”
In
Frank’s view, both defenders and detractors of the counterculture
are mistaken in portraying the sixties as a period of "fundamental
cultural confrontation.... [I]nstead...the
counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the
development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful
installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity.”
With its emphasis on self-fulfillment and immediate gratification, on
the new and revolutionary as opposed to the stodgy and conformist,
the counterculture did not need to be co-opted. It was already firmly
within the value system of consumer capitalism. While this argument
is not necessarily new—it
has
been variously made by such critics as Michael Harrington and
Christopher Lasch—it
serves
as a useful corrective to more recent scholarship which has tended to
minimize the role of power in cultural discourse. For one of the most
significant forms of hegemony wielded by the dominant culture is the
power to determine the nature of its own countercultures. As Peter
Fonda said in Easy
Rider,
"We blew it."
1Abe
Peck, Uncovering
the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press,
New York: Pantheon, 1985, pp. 164-165.
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