Swift Viewing

By CHARLES R. ACLAND

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4924-2

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………xiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………xiiiPROLOGUE Black Magic on Mars…………………………………………..1ONE Subliminal Communication as Vernacular Media Critique…………………13TWO Mind, Media, and Remote Control…………………………………….43THREE The Swift View………………………………………………….65FOUR Mind-Probing Admen……………………………………………….91FIVE Crossing the Popular Threshold…………………………………….111SIX The Hidden and the Overload………………………………………..133SEVEN From Mass Brainwashing to Rapid Mass Learning………………………165EIGHT Textual Strategies for Media Saturation……………………………193NINE Critical Reasoning in a Cluttered Age………………………………227Notes……………………………………………………………….239Bibliography…………………………………………………………267Index……………………………………………………………….291

Chapter One

Subliminal Communication as Vernacular media Critique

As news events, presidential elections in the United States are unusual creatures. Resources and funds flood the proceedings over a lengthy period, shaping coverage of the extensive primary process and the presidential race proper. Control of the presentation of the candidate and party underlies every decision. The orchestration of image and platform enlists experts in population profiling, spin doctoring, speechwriting, event planning, media consulting, and commercial producing. Managing the release of information to the media, the actions and appearances of the candidate, and the impressions made upon those most likely to cast a vote are tasks confronting any election team.

Nothing ever goes exactly as planned. Campaigns seek to capture media and public attention, and doing so results in high visibility for the statements made and the responses given by candidates and their representatives. Consequently, even the smallest verbal slip, inexpertly located phrase, or unthinking gesture can produce headlines and talk- show topics. Just as presidential election campaigns strive toward careful coordination, the attention they receive from the numerous print, broadcast, and Internet news agencies makes unpredictable developments ever more likely.

The election of 2000 made a generous deposit in the bank of unforeseen complications and challenges. The razor-close tallies in Florida, the subsequent recounts and stories of tampering, and the interventions of the Supreme Court were the culmination of months of news oddities. The CBs news anchor Dan Rather rambled all through election night, treating the audience to bewildering aphorisms like “If a frog had side pockets, he’d carry a handgun” and “This race is tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home.” Media outlets jumped to call races that later required embarrassing retractions, prompting Rather to blurt out, “We’ve lived by the crystal ball, we’re eating so much broken glass.” Not letting a tragic plane crash hamper his campaign, the deceased Democratic candidate Mel Carnahan remained on the ballot in Missouri and won, beating the incumbent John Ashcroft for a Senate seat. Ralph Nader’s presence on the presidential ballot assured that at least some media attention turned his way, if only to try to discredit his run by portraying him as an idealistic buffoon. George W. Bush’s malapropisms became legendary. While deepening a popular mistrust of the democratic process, the elections left behind new phrases that are now stuck in the popular lexicon, “fuzzy math” and “hanging chads” among them. And one of the strangest twists was Al Gore’s accusation that the Republican Party was using subliminal suggestion in its advertisements.

In a slick television spot on Bush’s plan for affordable prescription medicine, we see the candidate meeting with, speaking to, and shaking hands with senior citizens. The music hits a dramatic “duh-dum” punctuation as the commercial introduces Al Gore’s competing “big government plan.” Gore is not shown in contact with people but as a distant talking head on a television monitor, thus reiterating visually a theme running through the campaign—that Gore lacked warmth. Where the words “affordable Rx plan” and “the Bush plan” appear steady and clear as they accompany images of Bush, the flashing and unsteady phrases “interfere with doctors” and “bureaucrats decide,” against a black background, graphically represent Gore’s proposals. Momentarily, only parts of these words are visible, so that for a fraction of a second one reads only individual letters rather than whole words, including, most notoriously, the letters “rats” before the word “bureaucrats” appears.

Democrats challenged the Republican ad, declaring that imperceptible, embedded messages were sneaky and unfair. With them Bush’s campaign was attempting to manipulate voters without their awareness, so the claim went, and some members of Gore’s campaign distributed information on subliminal communication to support their accusation. A minor flurry of media reports followed over the next few days, offering denials from Bush, no comment from Gore, assessments of media experts, and historical backdrop to the concerns about subliminal messages. The ad’s producer, Alex Castellanos, maintained that the appearance of “rats” for 1/30 of a second was purely accidental, though he admitted that once it was brought to his attention he did not pull the spot. Many found his claim of ignorance implausible. Castellanos had previously been the target of comparable accusations. An ad that he prepared for Senator Jesse Helms in 1990 presented a white job applicant being informed that although he had superior qualifications for a job for which he had applied, he had lost out to a minority candidate because of a “racial quota.” Augmenting the race baiting, a strange blemish appears on the letter read by the frustrated job seeker, a marking that resembles a black hand. Kathleen Hall Jamieson described this visual tactic as a form of negative campaigning intended to elicit a visceral response.

The “rats” spot ran 4,400 times over two weeks in sixteen states, and the Republican campaign spent approximately $2.6 million on it. When asked about the accusations on a tarmac in Florida, Bush replied, “Conspiracy theories abound in American politics. I don’t think we need to be subliminable [sic] about the differences between our views on prescription drugs.” Bush feigned naivety, saying that he did not know what subliminal suggestion was, let alone know how to use it for campaign purposes. As if to emphasize the point, Bush mispronounced the word “subliminal” repeatedly. Whether deliberate or not, his verbal blunder was met with wide ridicule. How could he not know what the term is or even how to pronounce it? Was he as intellectually underdeveloped as had been suspected, or was he insincere in his protestations? The talk-show host David Letterman ridiculed Bush, saying that the mispronunciation made him wonder, “Gosh, do you think this guy is ‘electimable’?” For a short time Bush’s “subliminable” was homologous to Dan Quayle’s “potatoe.”

The Republicans pulled the ad, insisting that they had always planned to do so and that the controversy played no part in their decision. Bush and his representatives dismissed the affair as a ridiculous effort to distract from the real issues. The Federal Communications Commission (fCC) took the ad seriously, and investigated 217 stations that had aired it to decide whether they had willfully participated in deceptive broadcasting. Several months later the FCC concluded that no penalties were in order. Playful responses followed as well. To an admiring Letterman, his guest Geena Davis, a Democrat, bawdily described her sheer dress as a subliminal ad for Bush.

Whether an accident or an effort to deceive, this incident is not unique. There were similar charges by Andrés Manuel López Obrador against the right- wing candidate Felipe Calderón in the Mexican presidential elections of 2006, in which the color scheme for a popular soft drink and its publicity mirrored those of Calderón’s party. Opponents saw the similarity as a sneaky way to circumvent campaign spending limits by a corporate supporter of Calderón. Similar suspicions in 2008 that John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s campaigns had planted hidden messages in their spots were rampant on the Internet, with occasional, temporary appearance in the mainstream press. Both MSNBC and ABC reported on McCain’s “subliminal” attempts to link Obama with terrorism, Islam, and hypersexuality. Here the accusations referred to design choices rather than fleeting images: the messages were entirely visible, but their use was seen as unethical because they appeared as innuendo. The concern was not just the unfair ideas, but some sense that the subtlety of their appearance had an unrecognized effect upon the viewing audience, and ultimately upon voters.

The public understanding of the “subliminal” may range from the exact to the fictional, but it is undoubtedly part of popular language. Survey research published in 1983 found that 81 percent of respondents claimed to have some knowledge of subliminal advertising, of whom 81 percent believed that subliminal suggestion was being used by advertisers and 44 percent believed that it had some effect on buying behavior. Surveys in 1994 demonstrated that approximately 75 percent of the population in the United States believed that advertising companies used subliminal advertising, that they did so to influence consumer behavior, and that the technique worked. The gap between the questionable scientific validity of subliminal influence and the popular response to it is often captured in psychology textbooks. For example, one definition of subliminal advertising notes that it “has been received with much excitement but as yet little empirical support.”

Subliminal suggestion has a particularly strong association with sexuality. In his history of sex in advertising, Tom Reichert writes, “When I mention my research, many people I speak with say, ‘Oh, yeah. You’re researching naked people in ice cubes.'” For their part, advertisers have long complained about the tenaciousness of the concept because it gives a tainted impression of their business. In light of the debate that swirled around the initial revelation of their existence—to be discussed at length in coming chapters—subliminal techniques deserve a place in the history of advertising, and the last thirty years of advertising scholarship have obliged. Stuart Ewen devoted a page and a half to a specific illustration of subliminal advertising in All Consuming Images. Bryon Reeves and Clifford Nass included a short chapter on the topic in The Media Equation. James Twitchell offered a mocking take on subliminal advertising, though he nonetheless concluded that “the real work of advertising is subliminal. But not in the sense of messages slid below the surface, but subliminal in the sense that we aren’t aware of what commercial speech is saying.” In a book on composition, iconicity, and the indexicality of magazine advertising, Paul Messaris included a dozen pages on the debate and research on the persuasiveness of subliminal elements, taking a relatively neutral position on the issue. His section on subliminal advertising continued with a discussion of the connotations of gender, social status, and youthfulness. Max Sutherland’s mainstay text on the relationship between the unconscious and advertising presented itself as a practical and reasonable exploration of the topic, unlike other works that see advertisers as possessing “witch-doctor-like powers.” Sutherland represented many frustrated advertisers and advertising researchers when he wrote, “I hate the term ‘subliminal.’ There has been so much nonsense talked about so- called ‘subliminal advertising’ that there is always the risk that when I talk about it, I will fuel the uninformed hype.” He explained that a better term for the phenomenon was “shallow mental processing,” implying that the audience was barely attentive to stimuli and that the advertising was therefore very ineffective. An editorial in the Journal of Advertising Research complained of the persistent allegations: they were a problem not because “they make advertising into more than it is, though they do, but because they make ad recipients less than they really are. It is as great a sin for a critic of advertising to depict the consumer as an unthinking pawn as it is for a creative to treat his or her audience condescendingly.” The author called upon critics and advertisers alike to “melt the ice cubes of doubt and suspicion” on the topic.

Little melting has occurred. On an anecdotal and personal level, teachers of media and cultural studies know that the idea of subliminal influences enjoys popularity among students, a popularity that curiously exists side by side with the view that the media have little or no impact upon an individual’s thinking. Teachers regularly confront and attempt to manage the pedagogical frustration associated with these contradictory beliefs. On the very final day of a very bright undergraduate’s education, in the very last class, after years of being introduced to the intricacies of representation and cultural practice, the student might well say, “But of course they use subliminal messages to get us to buy things.” After an obligatory moment of self-loathing—”What have I done wrong?”—I am usually tempted to respond firmly that the student’s assumption is unfounded and that there are more pressing forces for us to consider in the organization of power and culture. Truthfully, this is not a very satisfying response. In the end we still have to confront the appeal and longevity of the concept. For present purposes, the veracity and strength of a “subliminal” effect is a different and, I would venture, secondary concern. The empirical evidence of its reappearance in multiple situations, and its relatively elastic application, suggests that subliminality resonates as a common explanation for certain kinds of quotidian media experiences.

And what is supposed? Well, many things. Literally and traditionally, the term “subliminal” refers to something below (sub) the threshold (limin) of awareness or consciousness. But for many, it does not just describe this realm. Colloquially it implies that something can happen to us without awareness, unconsciously, and thus, as it is popularly used, the word harbors a thesis about effect and causality. For psychology, the subliminal marks a distance between perception and sensation, hypothesizing that some sensations may not be perceived but can nonetheless find their way into our minds. You may not see, feel, hear, smell, or taste something, but that external phenomenon might still register unconsciously and you may be able to respond to it. You may, in essence, discriminate without being aware of what you are discriminating about.

In the nineteenth century comparable theses about the traffic between awareness and unawareness proposed that there is some realm below our waking, conscious state, which for some theorists becomes a self below the self. As will be covered in chapter 2, the term “subliminal” was first used to refer to this newly discovered unconscious. Under certain conditions of hypnosis, itself a new term in the nineteenth century, it was believed that access to this self below the self could be gained. And exploration of this new continent—and the metaphors of colonialism were often astonishingly plain—involved, as with other forms of conquest, not only knowing but exploiting and manipulating. In other words, as we will see, influence and control are embedded in the history of the empirical and theoretical investigations of the limits of sensation and perception. This history subsumes the history of technological apparatuses designed to verify, measure, and ultimately manipulate that zone between sensation and perception, in particular the apparatus known as the tachisto scope, which flashes images and text at extremely high and variable speeds. The history of the tachistoscope is dealt with in chapter 3.

According to the psychological literature, while extremely limited subliminal effects have been shown in laboratory settings, their more general significance continues to be a matter of contest. Certainly evidence of the persuasive power of subliminal stimuli is scant if not nil. Some psychologists claim to have found evidence that subliminal influence is a form of priming, or readying people for behavior and belief, rather than direct influence, while others indicate that the findings in this area are contradictory, unconvincing, or inconclusive. Psychological research has been able to chart the variability of the perceptual threshold, and has on occasion shown slight affective relationships attributed to subliminal stimuli. This effect is only evident when stimuli are close to the sensation threshold, that is, close to a recognized point at which people normally see, hear, or feel. The further from this threshold one goes, the weaker the chances of charting any form of sub-threshold perception, a result which leads some to consider that the supposed effect, when observed, is in fact not subliminal to some particularly fast-sensing subjects. In addition, there has been no consistent demonstration of a causal relationship between stimuli and behavior. In the rare study that has recorded subliminal perception, the research methods have been challenged, or the effect was not reproducible, moving the explanation for whatever effect was shown away from the subliminal command. For example, one of the most frequently cited studies demonstrated a rise in thirst levels among samples subjected to subliminal flashes of “Coke” and “drink Coke.” This finding was drawn into question when a replication of the experiment did not show any such results, leading the authors to conclude that the first experiment had resulted in a type 1 statistical error, or “false positive.”

Even as the first public debates about subliminal communication were taking root in the late 1950s, psychologists and social critics knew that for the most part there was “no subliminal perception mechanism known to science that can effectively coerce human action against the conscious, deliberate will of the people.” One researcher argued in 1960 that measuring subliminal perception varied depending on the recording procedures, from multiple choice to open response, and was led to conclude that evidence of subliminal perception was nothing more than a methodological quirk. Despite this, in a comprehensive review of the psychological experiments in subliminal perception from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, William Bevan remarked upon a shift in focus from efforts to establish its existence, along with perceptual defense mechanisms, toward efforts to measure its effects upon behavior. Others have attempted to provide definitional boundaries, with “subception” meaning automatic, reflex-like discrimination, and “subliminal perception” meaning discrimination without awareness, implying some sort of unconscious assessment. W. J. Rees argued that the phenomenon labeled “subliminal perception” was not perception at all, but an “epiperceptual” event. Norman Dixon drew a distinction between “unconscious perception,” in which one is simply unaware of an existing stimulus—like that dripping faucet that one doesn’t hear after a few minutes—and “subliminal perception,” in which the stimulus is below a threshold of sensation.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Swift Viewingby CHARLES R. ACLAND Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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