Maybe it is possible to describe the essence of an advert … In so far as it is about using the viewer as imagination’s dupe rather than finding out the imagination from within (so to speak), so that the viewer becomes its instrument. It functions as way of knowing the world, in this sense, since in this form there is nothing mysterious about it. Two distinct components conjoin, make a coming together: actuality + imagination. So it is a kind of tool for anesthetising the mass audience who happens to be sitting in front of it, for purposes of merely occupying their time in a way useful to it – to an advertiser, to an industry – rather than you, so that tv (advertising) creates a kind of divorce from imagination. It presents life as of a moment other than the one that is actually being occupied; just as a person might treat someone purely instrumentally despite their apparent good manners. You are not in their world; or you have ceased to be in their world. There is no actual care. It amounts to the same thing. You are persona non grata; a person not in the world that is; in a place that isn’t because actuality has to be elsewhere … But perhaps that treats advertising too much as a monolith. It isn’t any one particular thing. It can simply be humorous for example. We don’t always have to insert metaphysics … A thing that struck me about The Prisoner when quite by accident I happened on it, when it first came out, was that it incorporated the event of viewing television into its plot, so it became something that asked the question of what it was, and it made viewing a thing in this ‘television’ way a mysterious act. The other resonance was the boundless mockery the series made of the concept of normality. It made the ‘real’ real actually real by showing it to be a kind of manipulative tool for enforcing passivity. As a child I found all this subversively reassuring; in the face of endless adverts and their contextless, storyless ’scenes’ here there was a sense of the mystery of what was happening, a sense of its actuality.
Tags: Advertizing, Imagination, The Prisoner, TV
