ayce Packard, the heroine of William Gibson's recent novel, "Pattern Recognition" (Putnam), has a serious problem. Corporate symbols and logos make her ill. A glimpse of the bulbous Michelin Man is traumatic; even trademarks on the buttons of her Levis have to be sanded off.
But her hypersensitivity to commercial insignias also makes her eminently qualified to be a "cool-hunter." She is hired by businesses to assess their logos and anticipate trends before they congeal into fads. She thus combines the cultural antennae of an advertising copywriter with the allergies of a Marxist: she helps create the very products that most disgust her.
Mr. Gibson, of course, is himself one of the prime cool-hunters of the age, a science-fiction writer so astute he coined the term cyberspace and envisioned virtual reality before its time. His current hunt also resonates: our world, like Cayce's, is saturated with logos and commercial images. Polo players on horseback, giant swishes and geometric medallions are elements in a cultural shorthand: invoked in novels, placed in movies, inscribed on clothing. The contemporary citizen is also a cool-hunter, literate in the symbols and allusions of advertising.
At the same time, these images inspire reactions at least as traumatic as Cayce's. Riots at anti-globalization demonstrations are often directed specifically at trademarked signs and brand-name businesses. A more high-brow antipathy is widespread in the academy where global capitalism and advertising are often treated as instruments of power and manipulation, imposing desires on a citizenry presumably unable to think clearly whenever it hears the words "ring around the collar."
But even that hostility can be put in perspective now that the entire scope of the world of advertising — its fascinations, failures, controversies and triumphs — is being surveyed in a three-volume, $385, 1,873 page work: the Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising (Fitzroy Dearborn), edited by John McDonough and the Museum of Broadcast Communications and Karen Egolf, of Advertising Age. It offers a history of advertising that takes its flaws, deceits and ideologies into account but also provides some insight into the institutions, agencies and corporations that have given it shape. Mr. McDonough argues in his introduction that within the last 150 years, for the first time in human history, it became widely possible to produce more than was demanded and to offer more than was needed. Advertising was a response to surplus.
The articles by an international cast of journalists, academics and advertising professionals give an unusual perspective on that surplus and its effects: one arising from the trade itself.
This makes it quite different from many books that come out of the academy that display, even in subtle ways, Cayce's allergies. In the recent book, "A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America" (Alfred A. Knopf), for example, Lizabeth Cohen, a professor of American Studies at Harvard University, carefully traces the boom in prosperity and consumerism that characterized the United States after the Second World War. Mass consumption, she argues, inspired "more social egalitarianism, more democratic participation and more political freedom." But there were still rampant social inequalities, and in Ms. Cohen's view, the increasing interest in selling products to "segmented" markets — markets divided by age, income, race and interest — eventually led to a segmented citizenry. We live in the fractured and privatized society that was a result.
A generalized hostility toward advertising and commercial culture is here diffused into an objection to particular social effects. But Ms. Cohen's argument still presents marketing as a form of ideological manipulation that can disrupt the social order. In fact, her view of marketing is not that different from the classic Marxist portrait of a retrograde political opiate: it encourages passivity over action and privileges the private over the public.
