The Phenomenology of Advertising
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August 9th, 2024 - CJFP 07
Critical Advertising Theory
They say film directors should do “two for them, one for you.” Well, dear readers, I’ve done six for you. This one is for me.
I suspect this week’s newsletter will enrage both academic philosophers and career ad-men although since neither are this newsletter’s primary audience, I’m fine with it. If you’re not a tenured philosophy professor or didn’t happen to work in advertising when one could still smoke indoors, then this is for you.
Philosophy is a pet hobby of mine and there is something I need to get off my chest.
I want to say right off the bat that every person working in advertising should read Hegel. In truth, it’s my belief that every person on Earth should read Hegel, but let’s start small.
There is a problem in advertising. It is a problem that causes vast amounts of confusion among both ad receivers and ad producers alike. It takes commodities and services as being entirely self-contained. Rigid. Static. Unbending and therefore likely to break (in a metaphysical sense). It is a problem that impedes us from seeing the deep relations between us and the things, services, and ideas that are advertised to us. It is a problem with large implications that go far beyond the advertising realm. It is a problem, funny enough, with a relatively simple solution.
Even a pedestrian understanding of Hegelian philosophy gives one immediate access to a higher level of generalistic knowledge. For those working in creative fields and for those who consume the output of creative fields alike, that is an asset that cannot be overstated.
This may not make sense to you right now if you are not familiar with ancient philosophy, but a belief about life that has haunted the writings of philosophers for thousands of years is the belief that all things exist in a state of flow from one to another as opposed to the common belief that all things are static as they are given. For every Confucious, there is a Laozi. For every Parmenides, there is a Heraclitus. Come back to this paragraph later and I promise you it will make more sense.
Let me tell you about the problem I see on a near-daily basis in media and advertising. A commercial comes on, or a politician gets on TV and declares that something or someone is definitively one thing or another. This strikes you as strange because you’ve always considered that thing or person to be entirely something or someone else. Who is correct? Something couldn’t possibly have two meanings at once, could it? This is the trap of Metaphysical Contradiction. Don’t let your eyes glaze over yet, I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
For example, in advertising beauty products, companies today are especially cautious not to say that you need their product in order to achieve beauty. They advertise their products as if in using them, you “unlock” some hidden, natural part of yourself that was always there but is now more visible thanks to them. To me, that has always sounded like unnatural beauty standards with extra steps. This is the kind of contradiction that permeates nearly all modern cultural artifacts. If you haven’t noticed before, it is only because you have not had a reason to look. When these kinds of contradictions go unexamined, they manifest in strange ways. In the beauty product example, people can spend hundreds of dollars on the latest products in order to “unlock their inherent, natural beauty” and still feel ugly when they look at themselves in the mirror. Because they’ve already bought into the contradictive narrative, they are effectively blind to the answer: The solution to the contradiction is to zoom out and look at the situation as a whole.
Only a more holistic philosophical framework for weighing the deluge of ideology hefted at us every minute of every day can break one from the confines of the common view which sees every thing, idea, and person we encounter as fully formed, static, and rigidly defined as opposed to a momentary and blurry capture of a greater, continuous process.
For those who make a living selling commodities, describing a thing at face value only gives you a small fraction of how the mind perceives that thing.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
Hegel the Mad Man
In 1807, supposedly on the same day that Napoleon ended the Holy Roman Empire, one Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel finished a philosophical project hundreds of years in the making, and one that would go on to confound philosophers for hundreds of years more. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in my opinion, “completed” the project of philosophy, and all philosophy since has been an attempt at coming to terms with this fact.
In brief, the problem he solved goes as follows: Descartes (of “I think, therefore I am” fame) began the era of “modern philosophy” with his skepticism about the limits of our knowledge. This went on to split into the Rationalist and Empiricist camps that said knowledge can only be gained through mental reason or physical observation respectively. These debates carried on for roughly 100 years, going back and forth through argumentation. One side would put forth a compelling proof and that would become dogma until, after a decade or so, the other side would put out an equally compelling proof and popular conception would change. Philosophical investigation went on in this way until a man named Immanuel Kant decided he was sick of the arguing and was going to get to the bottom of things. Rather than simply putting forward arguments for one side or the other, he decided he was going to explore the limits of each to better understand them.
With this project, Kant created the movement which is commonly referred to as German Idealism. In Kant’s conclusion, both Rationalism (that true knowledge is gained through reason) and Empiricism (that true knowledge is gained through sense experience) failed to adequately explain where knowledge came from because both had elements of truth. This, though, is in itself a contradiction, isn’t it? How can diametrically opposed and totalizing ideologies each contain elements of truth? For example, using traditional logic, Kant was able to “prove” statements like “The Universe is Finite” and “The Universe is Infinite.” Two statements that cannot both be true at once, but can both be proven true on paper. Kant called these phenomena “Antinomies.” Kant used these antinomies as a basis to build up knowable things into 4 categories, each with their own strict limits, and through this, he put strict limits on what humans are able to say for certain.
From Kant, and without getting too much into the weeds, we get a system called Transcendental Idealism which posits that our experience of reality is shaped by the mind's inherent structures, meaning that we can never know things as they are in themselves, only as they appear to us through the lens of our perception and cognition.
This is where many modern philosophers — or sophists posing as philosophers — stop in their philosophical education (save for the unhealthy obsession with Nietzsche that plagues all philosophy students at some point in their lives). The generation of philosophers that followed Kant devoted their lives to working out the implications of his system and painting a brighter picture of the metaphysical space in which humans find themselves.
Hegel, as a member of the post-Kantian generation, went back to the roots of philosophy, before even the writings of Plato and Aristotle, to find where certain assumptions may have led the entire endeavor astray for thousands of years.
In his exploration of pre-Socratic thought, Hegel found valuable insights into the philosophies of Heraclitus and Parmenides, who lived around 535–450 BCE. Heraclitus emphasized the doctrine of flux, asserting that everything is in constant change and that opposites are interconnected. His famous saying is that one can never “Step into the same river twice.” Parmenides argued that reality is a single, unchanging Being, dismissing change as an illusion. Hegel drew from both perspectives, adopting Heraclitus's ideas of change and contradiction as key elements of his dialectical process and integrating Parmenides's focus on unity and Being. By reconciling these opposing views, Hegel developed a system where reality is both unified and evolving.
In Plato, Hegel saw the idea of two separate worlds: the flawed, perceptible world we experience and the realm of perfect forms or ideas that exist in the mind. He critiqued this dualism, arguing that it created a divide between thought and reality that needed to be overcome. Hegel sought to demonstrate that ideas and reality are inherently linked, with concepts developing and actualizing within the world rather than existing apart from it. In Aristotle, Hegel observed the application of formal logic, which emphasized fixed categories and clear distinctions between concepts. He found that such rigidity failed to capture the fluid and dynamic nature of reality, where contradictions are not mere errors but vital elements of development. By acknowledging the limitations of both Platonic idealism and Aristotelian logic, Hegel's method arises as a more comprehensive framework, a greater system that arises from their ashes. This is Hegel’s Dialectic; I believe it is the key to truly understanding anything.
The term “Dialectic” comes from Plato's writings and the Socratic method. If you’ve ever read Plato’s stories about Socrates, they describe him basically accosting people in the street, interrogating them on the definitions of concepts that at first seem very clear. He will take a concept like “virtue” and continually ask what “virtuousness” entails until it is determined that the current definition fails. Then Socrates will posit something. Then his interlocutor will posit something else. Eventually, by the end of the dialogue, a much stronger definition has been found for virtue. Through conversation and dialogue, multiple parties have gone back and forth, finding the flaws in each other’s arguments, until a deeper level of truth is found. This is the Platonic Dialectic.
The Hegelian Dialectic is often bastardized in the phrase “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” as in: Two things come into contact, coming together and creating the new. This is not quite correct though. In the Hegelian Dialectic, the name of the game is Negation. A concept is taken up for investigation. Through its internal contradictions, that concept is shown to be insufficient and it is “Negated” by a counterposed concept which makes up for what the original lacks. However, over time, this concept is also shown to be insufficient and the negation is negated, leaving the most truthful, rational kernels from both the original position and its negation. This is how knowledge evolves, the negation of the negation, continuously being replaced by that which is more rational according to Hegel. This is Hegel’s Dialectic.
Formally, Hegel's system was called “Absolute Idealism” and asserted reality is the manifestation of an all-encompassing, rational process, where the development of ideas (the dialectic) leads to the unfolding of the Absolute, a unity of thought and being. This builds upon Kant by rejecting the notion of an unknowable thing-in-itself, proposing instead that reality and thought are inherently interconnected and that the evolution of human consciousness reflects the gradual realization of this unity. Once one comes to understand the internal and external contradictions of a thing, one gains an understanding of the thing-in-itself. One begins to see all of reality as an interconnectedness of things flowing into and from one another.
This process of acknowledging the flow of all things is best described by Hegel in the following quote from the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit:
“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.”
Throughout The Phenomenology, Hegel references the concept of having “one’s being in another.” Which is to say that self-identity as a being is only available to us relationally. Just as a master cannot recognize themselves as such without a servant, often the identity of a thing is informed more so by what it is notthan what it is.
Take, for example, Aristotle’s formal rules of logic. For the sake of time, we’ll examine only the first, the law of identity or that A = A. On paper, who could possibly argue with this? This is the bedrock on which all syllogistic logic is built. The purpose of logical reasoning is to boil down logical stances to their most basic in order to avoid confusion and then move forward based on reasonable inferences. Thus, A = A, so if B = A, then C = A; things like this. On paper, this cannot be disputed. Often when people argue the finer points of politics and such, this is what they point to. They build up a faultless idea and proceed to argue logical inferences from assumptions.
However, things get more complicated when we apply these hard and fast rules to observed phenomena in reality. Let’s say that instead of just thinking about various ideas on paper, we are comparing rocks. Is it possible for Rock to ever equal Rock the same way A = A on paper? Rocks will differ in weight, mass, chemical makeup, etc., even if they look identical. Furthermore, our definition of what makes up a rock can also be prodded. At what point does a pebble become a rock? At what point does a rock become a stone? Are the microscopic grains that fall from a tumbling rock simply smaller rocks, or are they deserving of a different definition? Are rocks formed from cooling magma the same as rocks formed from compressed sediment? Lastly, and most critically, the rock is made up of many, many things that we would not consider to be rocks. How is this possible? How can many things which are not a singular thing, come together to create something entirely different? At what exact point does a collection of one thing become another? Is this a fact of reality or simply a trick of the eye? These differences all seem arbitrary but become very serious problems when one tries to write down exactly how to define things. This extends beyond rocks, this extends to everything.
The truth lies in understanding that the term “Rock” fails to accurately define what we are trying to describe. A ≠ A in reality because A is a multitude of many things that are not A when examined. In reality, A does not drop to Earth from the heavens fully formed, it builds up over time from disparate elements and then eventually dissolves into disparate parts. “Rock” is just a name we’ve given to a changing phenomenon. Given enough time, even a rock becomes something that is non-rock.
Imagine if, at noon on a bright, summer day, you wrote down “It is daytime” on a piece of paper. You could prove that statement as representing the truth in probably 50 different ways. However, what happens if you wait a few hours? The world changes around that static statement. Eventually, it becomes night time and the statement no longer represents the truth. Just as it would be foolish to assume the previous statement is now eternally incorrect and throw it out, the Hegelian understands that when propositions are shown to be contradictory and false, they often contain kernels of truth that can enlighten us to a deeper understanding of reality lurking underneath. Hegel said of this that the truth loses nothing from being written down, but that it can become stale.
Here is his full quote from section 95 of the Philosophy of Mind:
“Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.”
Many philosophers choose to ignore Hegel because they believe his ideas muddy the intellectual waters, I believe this couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, the waters are already muddied. One needs Hegel in order to acknowledge this fact and then move forward on sound footing. Otherwise, we are stuck pretending the muddy water we’re treading in is perfectly clear.
There is a joke I heard told by the Cultural Theorist Todd McGowan once. It goes like this. A police officer notices a drunk man looking for something under a streetlamp and asks what he’s lost. The man replies that he’s lost his keys, so they both begin searching under the streetlamp together. After a few minutes, the officer asks if he is certain he lost them in this spot, and the man admits he didn’t, saying he actually lost them in the park. The officer then asks why he is looking here, and the drunk replies, “Because this is where the light is!”
We need Hegel in order to admit to ourselves that we are looking for meaning in the wrong place and that if we’re really going to get anywhere without understanding, we have to have the courage to walk away from the streetlamp and look for our keys where they’re at, in the darkness.
Hegel’s project is to fight back against the foundationless confidence of what he called “sense-certainty” or the tendency of people to see ideas and objects as having dropped to the Earth from the heavens, fully formed. Hegel’s project seeks to redirect the object of philosophy from the simple love of knowledge to knowledge itself. His Phenomenology of Spirit is a profoundly difficult book because it follows the path that the mind must take to go from sense-certain assumptions to true, lasting knowledge.
Only through Dialectical analysis can one see the limits of a thing through an examination of its internal contradictions. Only through Hegel’s Dialectic can one break through a static, unchanging, Metaphysical view of life which becomes “stale” to arrive at more holistic understandings.
When I say that an understanding of Hegel can help anyone, this is what I mean. Every profession deals with ideas, practices, and assumptions about observations within the world. If you work in Advertising or Marketing, the object or service that you’re trying to describe should not be seen as a wholly complete phenomenon, it should be seen as a flow of its productive processes and its internal contradictions.
It is only when we acknowledge the contradictive dichotomy at the heart of modern beauty advertising, that we truly understand what a beauty product is. That acknowledgment allows us to crucially step outside of the frame of what is being examined. Until we do this, we just endlessly debate contradictions within. We go back and forth as modern philosophers did after Descartes. “You’re beautiful just the way you are… but you should still buy our product because it will help you be more of yourself… even though you don’t have to because you’re already enough… but wouldn’t it be nice to be more than enough…” and so on, ad infinitum. Nothing definitive is ever said and thus fades away with time.
Once we acknowledge that there is a contradiction at the heart of this debate, we can step outside of the frame and see the situation as a whole. Fundamentally, it allows us to acknowledge the falsities in both views. Namely, that whether or not you are perfect is ultimately a decision you have to make, not one that a commercial can tell you. You may very well not be perfect or sufficient in your eyes, but beauty companies have no right to make this decision for you nor do they have anything close to a product that will eliminate this inadequacy you place upon yourself.
This is why I think advertisers and advertisement-watchers alike should be more versed in Hegel. Most advertising tries to sell you a product by convincing you of a problem you didn’t know you had. Once you’re convinced of this problem, you’ll continuously buy their product because ultimately you decide whether you have that problem or not.
Notice how we never would’ve come to this understanding if we had remained within the argumentative sphere of the advertisement itself. We had to look into the internal contradictory elements within and then take them to their logical ends to discover their limits. Once we see their limits, our overall understanding grows because we are able to see the frame as a whole.
For me, this is the skeleton key to Advertising. Take any given product and examine its internal contradictions. Analyze and attempt to define the points at which that product in its development goes from being one thing to being another thing to eventually being itself. At what point in its life cycle does it stop being itself? Why? Examine the story that is traditionally told about what that product is or what it means and try to sus out what proves to be true and what is a convenient story we tell ourselves. Only then will you really be able to describe what that thing is.
Take a car for instance. Many car commercials try to sell you freedom or safety. You should buy this car because it will free you, keep your family safe, or make you sexy. Is any of this really true? The safest, freest thing you could do is move to a place with large investments in public transportation and forego the car entirely. A car doesn’t make you sexy, the false confidence one gets from purchasing an expensive car is what makes one sexy. But a commercial can’t say that, right?
If you Google the “Most effective advertisements of all time,” you may notice a trend among them. They usually reveal something about the product that you tell yourself you already knew, but that you didn’t have the words to describe. The Hegelian Dialectic has been, for me, a shortcut to insights like these. But in order to get to this point, one must be able to see outside the world of “The Market” usually portrayed to us, the world in which new products continuously fall to Earth completely alienated from what came before them, their internal components, and the implications of their existence. And the best thing about basing your analysis on a system as Rational as Hegel’s is that it makes it very difficult to be dishonest. Something sorely lacking in advertising today.
That’s the secret to good advertising. Advertising doesn’t need to lie. People have needs and advertising is a perfectly genuine art form that seeks to inform people about things that can improve their lives. Consider a utopian, future society that does not rely on markets to direct commerce nor has any need for money; the likes of which are portrayed in Star Trek. Even this society would still have a need to inform its populace of new programs or the discoveries and implications of research programs. The public sector still needs to advertise goods and services. In fact, I believe it has a moral imperative to do so. Thus, advertising is not simply a nuisance of modern times, it is a fact of any sufficiently advanced human society.
As I wrap up this week’s newsletter, I want to quickly explore three of what I see as the most powerful ideas in Hegelian philosophy in case you read this and are inspired to start the upward journey towards understanding Hegel yourself. Hopefully, these short explanations will get you on your way a bit faster. I’ve chosen these three concepts as being the ones most readily applicable to professional creative endeavors.
Measure - Everything in life can be divided into two categories of observations: Qualitative and Quantitative. Quantitative observations describe the attributes of a thing that can be counted such as its weight, height, or number. Qualitative observations describe the aspects of a thing that make up its essence and cannot be easily counted such as its color, relation to other things, or even a thing’s given name; these kinds of observations are often harder to define but usually make up more of what we consider to make a thing what it is. Hegel posits that there is a point at which a sufficiently large change in quantity leads to a change in quality. This can be observed in physics where a change in temperature causes matter to change states. It can be observed in biology where sufficient mutations in one organism require us to categorize it as a new kind of organism. The point in a thing at which quantity becomes quality is called the Measure of the thing. Water’s Measure is its boiling and freezing points. An organism’s Measure is often the defining characteristic within its biological genus. It is the point at which a collection of straw becomes a bale of hay. The Measure of a thing is not immediately given, it needs to be investigated to be discovered and defined, but once identified, allows us to more confidently and accurately define a thing. When considering a product or service to sell, consider its qualitative elements and its quantitative elements. At what point do the thing’s quantitative elements create qualitative changes?
Immanent Critique - As discussed earlier, everything contains multitudes. Even you, the reader, are a collection of trillions of cells, each with its own goals and motives, each working in unison, and in their efforts generating the phenomenon that you call “consciousness.” You are both one and many in the same instance. That is a contradiction. All things are like this, many internal and separate parts coming together to become a whole. This creates a challenge when one is trying to define an idea or an object as they all carry with them pieces of the former ideas and objects that had to be negated and destroyed in order to give rise to them. This point of view can be used to better understand a thing for what it is, by meditating on and analyzing the parts of itself which do not belong fully to it. To practice immanent critique, consider an object or idea considered to be fully formed at first glance. Think about its parts and how they came together. Think about what was left behind by these processes and think about which parts continue on. Think about how these existing parts may still be in conflict with one another. Think about how these parts in conflict may come together to destroy the thing or idea before you. Immanent critique places ideas or objects within their Becoming, not within their Being. Which is to say, when you practice Immanent Critique, you can better see a thing for what it is: A momentary capture in a flow from one state of being to another. When considering a product or service to sell, consider its internal contradictions. Consider its path to becoming what it currently is. Imagine where this path might lead.
Retroactivity - Hegel’s Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit is legendary as far as prefaces go. He states explicitly in it that the idea of a preface is in itself contradictory. It is meant to precede a work, however, it can only be written after the book’s completion, otherwise, it would be an introduction. It is only after one finishes reading a book that one can truly appreciate its preface. This is Retroactivity in Hegel: The idea that the present makes the past. The fact that all of our interpretations of reality are retroactive, that we are always reinterpreting the past through fresh eyes every time we consider it and we are technically always considering it. A sentence’s meaning is only fully formed once the sentence ends. For example, I said at the beginning of this newsletter that one would probably have a better appreciation for the first few lines after one finished the whole thing. Scroll back and check, that is Retroactivity at work. When considering a product or service to sell, consider how its meaning may change with time. Consider how its meaning to you now is anchored to your point in history. Consider how it may be reinterpreted in the future.
A Hegelian understanding of the universal application of the field of advertising, I would assert, would involve an examination of “propaganda.” What is the difference between an advertisement and a piece of propaganda? (In Portuguese, all commercials are called propaganda and I love that).
I’ll leave this to you, dear reader. Consider where one concept ends and the other begins, and you will start to realize how advertising can direct people to and inform people of things that make their lives better, as opposed to simply selling them problems they don’t have and things they don’t need.
An Ethical Life, one could say.
Until next time, stay fresh.
Casey