The origins of advertising discourse: Locke, landscape, and America

Ethics, Place and Environment

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 101-124

  Coleman, Frank M ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

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EID: 33645287332     PISSN: 1366879X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13668790600574406     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. References are to John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited and with an intro. by C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing, 1980), hereafter cited as 2T followed by section number and to John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vols I and II, collated and annotated by Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York, Dover Publications, 1959), hereafter cited as ECHU followed by book, chapter, and section.
2. See particularly Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1986)
3. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1955)
4. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (New York, Harper and Row, 1986)
5. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr, America's Constitutional Soul (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
6. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London, Marion Boyars, 1986), pp. 17, 40-44, 50.
7. Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion (New York, Basic Books, 1986), p. 211.
8. Locke compares 'vacant' America to the 'first peopling of the world by the children of Adam or Noah' in the passage cited.
9. On the impact of the enclosure movement on subsistence agriculture see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (New York, Oxford University Press, 1962)
10. Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1984)
11. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1944)
12. Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992).
13. By Locke's 'American landscape' I mean a culturally inscribed landscape but whose inscription is then erased by virtue of its representation as consubstantial with nature itself. See W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1994)
14. and Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1986).
15. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. by Ruth Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing, 1996), pp. 171-172.
16. See Denis Cosgrove's analysis of America as a community organized on the basis of fee simple ownership. Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) ch. 6.
17. An estimate of the Amerindian population of America at this time is given by Peter Coates, Nature (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1998), p. 94.
18. Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, chs 1-2. More precisely Locke's 'America' is a reference system employing synecdoche. America is a part signifying universal nature, or the whole of nature, or the 'state of nature'. Compare the Marlboro commercials where the part - panoramic, western landscape - signifies the whole, the American national community. Locke and the Leo Burnett ad agency are linked by the use of synecdoche and photo representation to dramatize and reify a landscape throwing into relief the prerogatives of an imperial self seeking self-extension through commodities.
19. In affirming that Locke is the original 'author' of the discourse on commodification discussed here I do not wish to affirm that he claimed this role for himself; nor do I wish to deny his association with other, more lofty, discourses (anti-monarchical, limited government, religious toleration); nor do I maintain that he intended the discourse on commodification to be his most important legacy. 'Authorship' is retroactively conferred, Foucault justly argues, because, commonly, it exposes the person so designated to danger and is rarely acknowledged as such within the lifetime of its progenitor. Additionally, the discursive community which an author seeks to bring about is prospective. All of these caveats apply to Locke. He withheld information on authorship of his most famous work, Second Treatise of Government, until long after the date of its completion because it harbored dangerous views. See Michel Foucault, 'What is an author?' in Daniel Preziosi (ed.), The Art of Art History (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 299-314
20. and Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's 'Two Treatises of Government, (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1986). Nevertheless, I do claim that Locke's references to vacant America in the context of the 17th century dispute over enclosure of the public lands is the occasion for the invention of a discourse on commodification which has clear relevance for the interpretation of the modes of address and the medium of contemporary advertising.
21. See the accounts of Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1958)
22. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York, Oxford University Press, 1986)
23. and Gordon D. Kaufman, 'A problem for theology: The concept of nature', Harvard Theological Review, 65 (1972), pp. 337-366.
24. Consider the assumptions underlying the passage: 'Thus the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, the ore I have digged... become my property' (2T. 28) and see the discussion by Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, pp. 203-222.
25. Also note John Locke, 'The fundamental constitutions of Carolina', in David Wootton (ed.), Political Writings of John Locke (New York, Mentor, 1993), pp. 210-232.
26. The well known work of R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, Mentor, 1954)
27. and Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, Scribner's, 1958) amply confirms this judgment. Also see the discussion below on the contribution of the Hebraic Bible to the materialist foundations of Locke's metaphysical and social thought.
28. Put differently, Locke's picture theory of mind enables him to escape the charge that he is inscribing reality as opposed to representing it. A critique of Locke's picture theory of mind is supplied by Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1979)
29. and Norman Malcom, Problems of Mind (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1971).
30. The dependence of Locke's picture theory of mind on photographic representation is emphasized by W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 121-128, 168-186.
31. See also Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 26-71 who notes the connection between picture theory and the camera obscura. Contrast J. L. Mackie who writes that Locke meant that images in the mind are caused by external reality not that they accurately represent it.
32. See J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (New York, Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 37-55.
33. On the merits of denaturalizing a 'nature' that has always, already, been constructed see Steven Vogel, 'Environmental philosophy after the end of nature', Environmental Ethics, 24 (Spring, 2002), pp. 23-39. A'critical realist' position replies that while nature may be a cultural construction it is not solely a construction.
34. See David W. Kidner, 'Fabricating nature: A critique of the social construction of nature', Environmental Ethics, 22 (Winter, 2000), pp. 339-357
35. and Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1995), pp. 7-11, 132-137, 155-160.
36. For a discussion of the contribution of the Bible to the development of 17th century natural (materialist) philosophy and metaphysics including the philosophy of Locke see M. B Foster, 'The Christian doctrine of creation and the rise of modern natural science', Mind, 43 (October, l934), pp. 446-468
37. 'Christian theology and modern science of nature (I)', Mind, 44 (1935), pp. 439-466
38. 'Christian theology and modern science of nature (II)', Mind, 45 (January, 1936), pp. 1-27.
39. Also consider Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York, Doubleday, 1955)
40. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1986)
41. and Frank Coleman, 'Thomas Hobbes and the Hebraic Bible', History of Political Thought, 25 (Winter, 2004), pp. 642-669.
42. Lynn White, Jr, 'The historic roots of our ecologic crisis', Science, 155 (March 10, 1967)
43. Scarry, The Body in Pain
44. Gordon D. Kaufman, 'A problem for theology'.
45. Accordingly to complain that there is no nature unaffected by artifice and thus an end of nature (Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York, Random House, 1989)) is to miss the point, Ideally, if only as a potentiality, there should be no nature unaffected by artifice in the biblical and Lockean perspective. For the world conceived as artifact urges us, homo faber, to a completion of the task undertaken by God, deus faber, in the beginning. Absent transformation into artifact, as Locke says, nature is 'wasted'.
46. Keekok Lee suggests the phrase 'landscape of supersession' to apply to Locke's project of world transformation into artifact. See Keekok Lee, The Natural and the Artefactual (New York, Lexington Books, 1999), pp. 128-129.
47. Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (Philadelphia, PA, Westminster Press, 1961).
48. Ibid., p. 53.
49. Kaufman, 'A problem for theology', p. 349.
50. Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 191-198.
51. Ibid., pp. 198-210.
52. Ibid., pp. 170-171.
53. And see Arendt, The Human Condition
54. Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969)
55. Piers H. G. Stephens, 'Picking at the Locke of economic reductionism', Environmental Futures, ed. by N. B. Fairweather (New York, St Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 7, 10 comments that 'labour [is] an activity which has a spiritual component in the Lockean scheme' with the consequence that 'the motive for appropriation does not merely come from acquisitiveness, but from divine injunction'.
56. Robert Hoffert, 'Scripture and the expression of liberalism', Social Science Journal, 21 (April, 1984), p. 18.
57. See also the interpretations of Locke's teaching by Eldon Eisenach, Two Worlds of Liberalism (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago, 1981), pp. 76-93
58. Joshua Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago, 1993), pp. 73-97
59. and James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993).
60. Locke's instrumentalist conception of mind and enthusiasm for technological advance are treated by Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke's Philosophy, pp. 121-135
61. Also see the important essay by Peter Koslowski, 'Nature and technology in the religions', in Peter Koslowski (ed.), Nature and Technology in the World Religions (Boston, MA, Kluwer, 2001), pp. 1-17.
62. The debt owed by Locke's theory of perception to a mechanical universe, one which privileges mechanical means of imprinting information on the perceptual apparatus (such as the camera obscura), is set forth in the ECHU where Locke compares the mind to a 'dark room' to which pictures from the outside world are admitted. Locke says, 'methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas, of things without: (would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there), and lie so orderly as to be found on occasion' (ECHU II. 11. 17). Elsewhere Locke flatly states 'our ideas are as it were the pictures of things' (ECHU II. 29. 8). The camera obscura (ca.1632) referred to in this passage, ancestor to the camera (1839), resembles it in the respect that it casts a real image of external objects in perspectival relation on a sheet of paper (although it inverts the order of appearance). The painting, View of Delft, by Jan VerMeer (1632-75) dates among its earliest uses in art. Alpers notes the connection between this self-depiction of Locke's epistemology and Kepler's redefinition of the eye as a 'picture making optical instrument'. See Alpers, The Art of Describing, pp. 28-30, 50, 91, 123-124.
63. Locke's English landscape, now redeemed by enclosure, divests the commoners not only of their property and resources, as has been demonstrated elsewhere (Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism; Wood, The Politics of Locke's Philosophy) but also of the images to which the commoners will hold access. This result is achieved by his representation of an American landscape void of feudal hierarchy and the ancient commons. Iconoclasm, Mitchell observes, is the tribute which an image based theory of mind (like Locke's) pays to icon worshippers. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology, pp. 121-125.
64. Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, p. 210 (emphasis added), and see ECHU (III. 10. 34).
65. For a discussion of the linkage between the 'prospect' genre of British landscape and Whig political ideology see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology.
66. See James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 137-176. The depreciation of aboriginal perspective is a persistent strategy in western landscape representation. It appears in Lockean theory, is striking expressed in the literature of the Puritan forefathers, and is a constant motif of the creation of the national parks system.
67. See Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999)
68. William Cronon (ed.), 'The trouble with wilderness, in Uncommon Ground (New York, W. Norton, 1995), pp. 69-90
69. Chris J. Magoc, Yellowstone: The Creation and Selling of an American Landscape (Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1999)
70. Roderick Neumann, Imposing Wilderness (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1998).
71. On the Puritan forefathers see William Bradford, 'Of Plymouth Plantation', in Perry Miller (ed.), The American Puritans (New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1956), pp. 12, 17.
72. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, pp. 145-155
73. Wood, The Politics of Locke's Philosophy, p. 66.
74. Robert Markley, 'Land enough in the world', South Atlantic Quarterly, 4 (Fall, 1999), p. 829.
75. Compare William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York, Hill and Wang, 1983).
76. And see Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, pp. 203-220.
77. Locke's expansive definition of 'waste' is highlighted in the discussion of Robert Markley, 'Land enough in the world', pp. 817-837
78. Also consider Govert den Hartogh, 'Tully's Locke', Political Theory, 18 (November, 1990), pp. 656-673. In Shrader-Frechette limits on appropriation from the commons are, in part, restored.
79. See 'Locke and limits on land ownership' in L. K. Caldwell and K. Shrader-Frechette (eds.), Policy for Land: Law and Ethics (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).
80. Well known accounts of the 17th century dispute over the commons emphasize conflict between 'middle men' who acquired title to land expropriated from the Church under the Henrician Reformation, and an expropriated class of commoners and small men who, during the period of the civil wars (1642-46), fought on the side of these same middle men (and Parliament). Later this expropriated class is disadvantaged by the very groups taken to be their allies. Framed in these terms the most important result of the protracted conflict over the commons was a change in the distribution of power and in the basis of material wealth. But it is more to the present purpose to point out the respects, drawing from the ECHU, in which it is incomplete. Left out of this account is that the 'quarrelsome and contentious' commoners (2T. 34) are dispossessed of more than their common lands. Locke also subverts the old 'idols' around which coalesced the experience of the commons.
81. A forceful reply to Locke from within conservation biology is made by Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York, Harper and Row, 1983)
82. William Cronon, Changes in the Land
83. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York, Ballantine, 1970)
84. Keekok Lee, The Natural and the Artefactual.
85. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, Vintage Books, 1993).
86. Resource economics following John Stuart Mill provides an implicit rejection of the 'progressive state economy' advanced by Locke. See 'Of the stationary state' in John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York, Pelican Books, 1970), ch. vi
87. Herbert Daly, 'Operationalizing sustainable development by investing in natural capital', in AnnMari Jansson et al., Investing in Natural Capital (Washington, DC, Island Press, 1997)
88. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins et al., Natural Capitalism (Boston, MA, Little, Brown, 1999)
89. Lester R. Brown, Plan B (New York, Norton, 2003).
90. For a critique of alternative theories of advertising see Frank M. Coleman, 'Picking the 'Locke' of 'nature's nation': Nature, national landscape, and the ad industry', Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism, 16 (September, 2005), pp. 75-94. The thrust of this article is that ad space is premised on key ideas encoded in Locke's vision of America - nature as artifact, the imperial self, picture theory, and palimpsest representation. These ideas are transmitted by formative influences upon the cultural reading of landscape in America notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Jackson Turner.
91. Daniels and Cosgrove, The Iconography of Landscape, introduction.
92. Cronon, Changes in the Land, pp. 78-80. Note Bradford's fascination with the 'vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants'.
93. Bradford, 'Of Plymouth Plantation', quoted in Perry Miller (ed.), The American Puritans, p. 12.
94. Cronon, Changes in the Land, pp. 77-80, and see 2T. 26, 28.
95. Ibid., pp. 66-69, 98-100, 139-142, 160-170.
96. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, p. xviii.
97. See also the treatment of agrarian capitalism by Donald Worster, Under Western Skies (New York, Oxford, 1992)
98. and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest (New York, Norton, 1988).
99. Cosgrove and Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape, introduction.
100. See Gregg Easterbrook, 'Axle of evil', New Republic (January 20, 2003), pp. 27-35
101. Elizabeth Kolbert, 'The climate of man', New Yorker (May 9, 2005), pt III, p. 55
102. Amory Lovins, 'More profit with less carbon', Scientific American (September, 2005), p. 78.
103. Advertising Age, 'The advertising century: Special issue' (December, 1999), p. 42.
104. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a landscape which will effect a union between 'the Self of the nation and of nature'. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Essays, with an introduction by Brooks Atkinson (New York, Modern Library, 1950), p. 81. A reply might be made that Locke's 'America' is a literary device in which the image is represented as photo copy. Marlboro Country is photo copy. But see the discussion of the camera obscura as ancestor to the camera above.