presence, even—or especially—when, as in feature films, there are no commercial interruptions.
The centrality of commercial advertisements to the mass cultural genre system does not mean, then, that the form of the commercial imposes itself on other mass cultural products directly, but rather that the market pressures and commercial goals that shape the commercial from the inside impose themselves upon other mass cultural products from the outside. One result is a generalized instrumentalization of the aesthetic. Consciously manipulating beauty’s power to command attention in order to promote economic or political interests was hardly a new practice at the end of the nineteenth century, but the very urgency of proclamations of art for art’s sake and of the disinterestedness of fine art at that time points toward an intensification of the manipulative powers of image and eloquence that finds its most deliberate, scientific expression in the emergent advertising industry. Ohmann argues that the work of the ad agencies, a new form of business enterprise that came into existence in the 1890s, was “to alter consciousness and deliver customers” in pursuit of “interests [that] were structurally very close to those of still more powerful businesses, and not very close to those of other citizens” (100). It is a short step from professionalized market research and the construction of advertising campaigns to the techniques of political propaganda. As Raymond Williams observed in a 1960 essay arguing that advertising had become “the official art of modern capitalist society,” “The need to control nominally free men, like the need to control nominally free customers, lay very deep in the new kind of society” (Problems, 184, 180).6
The citizens of the mass cultural nation—and so the audiences of mass cultural genres—are first and foremost consumers, then, and the ideological force borne by the act of consumption is evident in the utopian aura it acquires. The world projected by advertising takes on a magical quality, as a 1909 New York Evening Post editorial wryly observes:
What a reconstructed world of heart’s desire begins with the first-page advertisement. Here no breakfast food fails to build up a man’s brain and muscle. No phono record fails to amuse. No roof pane cracks under cold or melts under the sun. No razor cuts the face or leaves it sore. Illness and death are banished by patent medicines and hygienic shoes. Worry flies before the model fountain pen. Employers shower wealth upon efficient employees. Insurance companies pay what they promise. Trains always get to Chicago on time. Babies never cry; whether it’s soap or cereal, or camera or talcum, babies always laugh in the advertising supplement. A happy world indeed, my masters! (quoted in Ohmann 210)
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