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For Adam
SALMAN RUSHDIE, THE SATANIC VERSES
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Take the example, if you will, of Femfresh ‘natural balance’ feminine wipes. I was always told that the problem with feminine hygiene products is that they wreak havoc with one’s natural balance. They kill off the benign bacteria that maintain a healthy ecosystem. That would mean that the name of the product is the name of the thing the product destroys. This is not about simple deception: I’m sure Femfresh products have been properly tested. There’s something more subtle and profound going on. The idea of good bacteria is already counterintuitive. And the marketing of Femfresh taps right into our psychology through its play on the close association between solution and problem. Sigmund Freud wrote that the human subject, the ego, is acted on by the superego and the id. When we enter civilisation and become a member of society, we repress our id, our desires. Through that act of repression, those desires are sublimated into the superego: the internalised demands of the outside world that make us conform to social expectations. We tend to think that our desires and our self-control are diametrically opposed; but they’re not. The superego and the id are intimately connected. That’s why when you’re on a diet all you can think about is cake, why strippergrams often dress up in police uniform, and why pious tabloids are so obsessed with scandal. The problem, the desire, is bound up with the solution, the repression.
The kind of ideological culture we’ve developed today is all about authenticity, transparency and participation. As the writer and cultural commentator Thomas Frank describes in The Conquest of Cool, advertising has adapted to anti-corporate critique by incorporating the symbols of that critique into its own lexicon. Problem and solution have become inextricably entwined. Just as mass-market consumerism co-opts countercultural individuality, advertising has become anti-advertising. This helps to explain why we now live in a world that seems on the one hand to be full of lightning innovation and the latest underground trends, but on the other to be curiously static and paralysed: any potential challenge is seamlessly absorbed. You can see this kind of thing in action in Saatchi & Saatchi’s ‘viral’ advertising campaign for T-Mobile, featuring an apparently spontaneous ‘flashmob’ dance-a-thon in Liverpool Street Station and a public ‘singalong’ in Trafalgar Square. Crowds of ecstatic participants film the spectacle on their mobile phones, either unaware of or unbothered by the fact that the event is being orchestrated by a company. The ads are truly an image for our times: a corporate simulacrum of ‘alternative’ festival fun. And a million suckers (me included, but for research purposes, obviously) have watched them on YouTube, happy to collude in the creation of a mass internet sensation.
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