Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences: Advertising, Consumption, and Violent National Conflict

Paul Frosh

Advertising draws on our dread of being in a world of strangers. Robert David Sack, Place, Modernity, and the Consumers World

Terror of the Split Screen

Several times during the course of the Al-Aqsa intifada, the public regulator of Israels commercially funded broadcasting media the Second Authority for Television and Radio issued withering condemnations of its own network franchise holders. The offense that had raised the Second Authoritys ire was the broadcasting of advertisements during television coverage of suicide bombings. On one occasion in 2002, Telad, then a franchise holder for Israels Channel 2 (the main commercial television channel), split the screen in half in order to broadcast live footage from the scene of a bombing in Jerusalem while at the same time continuing to transmit (without sound) a premier league
This article is based on research supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 956/02). An earlier version was presented at the International Communication Association Conference in 2005.
Public Culture 19:3
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Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press

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soccer match and the advertisements scheduled to be shown during the game.1 Complaints from viewers resulted in the Second Authoritys reiterating a formal ban on advertisements in such circumstances originally issued in 2000 and punishing Telad by temporarily cutting its allocation of prime-time advertising minutes. Telads executive director retorted that the companys decision was guided both by financial considerations and by a sense of national responsibility: that not broadcasting the advertisements was a form of capitulation to terrorists because it allowed them to set the nations political and cultural agenda. A number of significant themes emerge from this controversy. One of these is the normative role of mass media, especially television, during terrorist attacks and other catastrophic events involving sudden loss of life. On these occasions media become noticeably important not only as sources of information but also as chief definers of such events as national catastrophes. National broadcasting institutions express, or construct and enforce, the national mood. They indicate through the demeanor of news anchors; the alternatively mournful, outraged, and anxious tone of reporters and commentators; and even the musical choices of radio disc jockeys (slow, sad Israeli songs rather than the latest U.S. and U.K. chart hits) the kinds of attitudes, behavior, and aesthetic pleasures that are deemed publicly appropriate and permissible (Liebes 1998, Liebes and Kampf 2005, Frosh and Wolfsfeld 2007). Telad was in part sinning against this mood-setting and event-defining role of the media. By splitting the screen and not entirely suspending its regular broadcasting, it threatened to destabilize the primary definition of a suicide bombing as a catastrophic event of national importance, one deserving of every citizens undivided attention. A second, related theme is the nature of the relationship between advertising, as a particular expression of consumer culture, and violent national conflict. The Second Authority perceives advertising and national catastrophes to be antithetical: advertising is frivolous, pleasure seeking, profit oriented, and self-interested and hence fundamentally incompatible with the seriousness of such events and the required civic responses of collective empathy and conspicuous solidarity. It is an interruption and distraction of the lowest and most persistent kind, for while other cultural forms (such as sports broadcasts) may also be out of place, they do not need to be banned. Advertising, in short, appears as the inadmissible and inappropriate other of violent national conflict. Telads response, although ostensibly opposed to the Second Authoritys decision, invokes a similarly stark
1. Telad lost its Channel 2 franchise in 2005 in a competitive tender. The decision had nothing to do with the split screen incident. 462

dichotomy: advertising is the other of catastrophic nationalist violence in that it represents the normalcy of everyday life (as purportedly manifested in everyday broadcasting schedules and policies): that is precisely why the continued transmission of advertisements in the face of terrorist attacks is treated as a veritable act of defiance. This apparent antithesis between advertising and consumerism on the one hand and terrorism and violent national conflict on the other is an unarticulated background assumption of much research. With few exceptions (for instance, Jackall and Hirota 2000, Cohen 2003, Young 2005) recent theorists and analysts of consumerism have tended to assume that consumer societies are societies at peace and that advertising in particular is averse to conditions of violent conflict. After all, the world advertising conjures is largely one of prosperity, pleasure, and secure aspirations. It promises the good life through consumption. While pleasure can certainly be aroused through the imaginative representation of excitement and even of physical endangerment (Campbell 1987), as a whole advertising is supposed to be socially and personally reassuring: it specializes in the selling of well-being and happiness through the selling of goods (Leiss, Kline, and Jhally 1997: 24). Linked to the purported benefits of trade and the marketplace, its fundamental prerequisite would appear to be a society at ease with its place in a world of nations and at peace with itself and with its immediate neighbors. War may encourage certain kinds of accelerated production and technical innovation, but the presence of violence on the streets rarely engenders the sense of security and comfort let alone the intensity of spending and variety of goods that is assumed to characterize contemporary consumer societies. The Israeli social theorist Natan Sznaider provides an ambitious theoretical and historical elaboration of this putative incommensurability. Sznaider (2000) claims that consumerism is crucial to the distinctiveness of modern cosmopolitan societies in contrast to warrior societies. In warrior societies social space is riven by a divide between the in-group, characterized by strong social bonds and obligations between individuals, and those outside it. Peoples first reaction in warrior society is to identify a newcomer as friend or enemy and either way, the bonds of the in-group are strengthened (2000: 303). In contrast, in modern cosmopolitan societies peoples first reaction to newcomers is to ignore them. These societies are based not on a small number of strong social bonds between individuals but rather on a multiplication of weak social ties in which strangerhood, indifference, and civil inattention are crucial to the expansion of moral sympathy beyond the circle of the in-group. This multiple sociality places the individual at the center of a plethora of overlapping weaker ties with a large number of others.
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Consumption and consumerism are central to this framework of individuated affiliation because they provide the means for creating weak social ties with others through the mixing and matching of social identities, including ethnic and national identities, something that is achieved by the commodification of cultural traditions. The complaint that such identities are not authentic is spot-on: that is their achievement. As opposed to the binarism of authentic identities (you either are or are not committed to a particular identity), they are multiple, experimental, and interpenetrative and allow group identities to interlace and coexist within the same social space. Consumerism, then, is a key factor in the emergence and maintenance of cosmopolitan modern societies and a historical antidote to ethnic nationalism and its ultimate expression, violent conflict. Such a theory clearly articulates and endorses the claim that consumer culture and violently aggressive nationalism are mutually incompatible and, if found to be copresent, would at most create a psychotic society, one split between warrior and cosmopolitan dynamics. Sznaiders view invites a devastatingly obvious contemporary challenge: that the United States, the paradigmatic consumer society of our era, is also very visibly a country at war; moreover, it is a country that has been at war somewhere on the planet for much of the past sixty years. Yet to all intents and purposes the everyday lifeworlds of the vast majority of its population from the stability and sturdiness of their physical environment to the expected longevity of their social relationships inhabit a space of peace: that is, their lives and immediate surroundings are unlikely to be seriously affected by the violence attendant upon armed conflict between nation-states or organized national political groups. The encounter with consumer plenty in the United States and other liberal democracies takes place against this sharp distinction between the distant front and the taken-for-granted security of the nations home territory, a security only very recently and dramatically challenged, though not put into permanent crisis on an everyday experiential level, by the attacks of September 11, 2001. It is, of course, precisely the point of critical thought to probe the ways in which this space of peaceful material abundance at home may be purchased through military aggression and violence abroad, in somebody elses lifeworld. So a key riposte to Sznaider concerns the physical and experiential distance between a societys soft interior civic spaces and its hard exterior of military outposts and engagements, a distance that allows the distinction between a cosmopolitanizing consumerism and a militarized, militant nationalism to appear to him as a historically necessary modernizing process. Yet Sznaiders main case study for the claims he advances is not the relatively
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secure consumer environment of the United States or Western Europe, but a society where no such distance between consumerism and aggressive nationalism can be taken for granted: Israel. Accepting that Israel is still seriously mired within ethnic nationalist conceptions of warrior society, which were crucial to the phase of nation building, Sznaider also cites the speedy development of a sophisticated consumer infrastructure in the 1990s, especially in the wake of the Oslo peace accords, as evidence of a significant cosmopolitanizing dynamic. It is in these circumstances, he argues, where modern consumerism and aggressive nationalism contend at close quarters, that the stakes of their historical antagonism are revealed. In what follows I engage in greater detail with the Israeli experience in order to show that even here the social trajectories of consumerism are not opposed to those of ethnic violence or violent national conflict, especially those associated with terrorism and counterterrorism. Israel is a test case not for the antagonism between consumerism and nationalism but for their mutual interpenetration, and as such it can shed light on the strategies for differentiating between these two spheres that are at work elsewhere. Focusing on Israeli consumer culture and the discourse of Israeli advertising professionals during the worst of the suicide bombings in 2002 3, I suggest that consumerism and militarized nationalism exist in parallel and are even at times mutually reinforcing, because they share, in institutionalized practices, similar approaches to social space a space interpreted through the physical duality of penetration and fortification and, in the conception of advertising professionals, the psychic duality of receptivity and defense. By taking the view from countries such as Israel, where everyday civic experience is continually punctuated by and adapted to the violence resulting from national conflict and where aggressive nationalism and consumption interweave as ways of orientating individuals within the social whole, one can disclose the fissures and interconnections that underpin social life in apparently more secure countries.
Advertising and Nationalism

Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences

Among the most visible features of contemporary consumer cultures, advertising has long shown itself capable of adapting to war with relative ease, even benefiting from new kinds of status, connections, and expertise. This is particularly true of U.S. advertising in the twentieth century. Robert Jackall and Janice Hirota go so far as to argue that the rationalization of advertising and public relations in the twentieth century was largely a product of war. The exigencies of the two world wars and the long-term ideological struggle known as the cold war brought
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members of both occupations into periods of sustained cooperation with officials from various governmental bureaucracies (2000: 12). This ongoing, mutually advantageous intersection between state propaganda experts and advertising professionals produced what Jackall and Hirota describe as a generalized apparatus of advocacy that permeates every institutional sector of American society to this day. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young (2005) has similarly claimed that U.S. advertisers during World War II simultaneously employed rhetorics of American consumption and of American sacrifice, contributing toward a dual identity: individuals were addressed as citizen consumers, who were asked to make daily sacrifices (through limited forms of rationing and self-restraint), and at the same time as purchaser consumers (Cohen 2003), whose actual or planned purchases would contribute to the war effort, to the free-market system for which Americans were said (in advertisements and newspapers) to be fighting, and to the payoff of a booming postwar economy. Advertising showed a deft ability to adopt, adapt, and promote new regimes of consumption management that were explicitly tied to national mobilization in wartime. It bears repeating therefore that the discourse of pleasure and well-being is only one of several dynamics at work in advertising and consumer culture. Unsurprisingly, nationalism is another and it intersects with these other forces in complicated and unpredictable ways. Advertising is replete with national themes and influences: not only do advertisements frequently promulgate the national character of particular brands (the Irishness of Guinness, the Americanness of Levis, the Swedishness of Ikea), but advertising abounds with references to mythopoetic national symbols and stereotypes of other nationalities (OBarr 1994), while national conceptions of self and other continue to shape the production of advertising strategies and campaigns (Moeran 2003).2 Nationalism provides one of the principal discursive and organizational frameworks within which contemporary consumerism operates, reinforced through a paradoxical relationship of dependency and profitability with seemingly contrary trends toward regionalism and globalization in marketing operations, advertising campaigns, and advertising agencies (Miller 1997). A concomitant of the influence of nationalism on advertising is the fact that
2. National character is not just associated with particular brands. The advertising industries and total output of different countries can be taken to possess stereotypical national characteristics, such as the eccentric humor and subtle sarcasm sometimes thought to typify British advertisements, the provocative eroticism (or pornographic sexism) of French advertisements, and the alternating slushy sentimentality and hard-selling obviousness of U.S. advertising. I have heard all of these characterizations from advertising professionals in Israel. 466

advertising and other promotional techniques can be counted among those shapers of everyday national sentiment and routine national assumptions that Michael Billig describes as banal nationalism (1995). Billig uses this term to refer to the fact that in the established nations, there is a continual flagging, or reminding, of nationhood (1995: 8). The chief paradox of such flagging is that it is routine and unnoticed, ensuring that the citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in a world of nations. However, this reminding is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding (8). Banal nationalism is central to the reproduction of nationhood in the established countries of the West, which aside from times of crisis (such as terrorist attacks and wars) depend less on the hot flag-waving, consciously mobilizing forms of nationalism and fervent patriotism to which Billig contrasts it. It is a temperate, though not necessarily benign, mode of identification. It is about being reminded, but also reassured, of ones national place in a world of nations. It does not threaten social equanimity, but rather seems to be partially constitutive of it and hence amenable to the sense of well-being and secure self-experimentation associated with consumer society and advertising. Yet while advertising may be implicated in the maintenance of this temperate banal nationalism, nationalism usually achieves its exemplary condition of clarity and self-definition, a self-regenerating mythological telos, in moments of violent conflict and sacrifice (Marvin and Ingle 1999). What happens, then, when advertising and violent nationalism collide, as they did on Israeli television between 2000 and 2005? What happens, more particularly, when this collision occurs in a broader context that since the mid-1990s has put spaces of everyday consumption and leisure on the front line, where suicide bombings are increasingly targeted not at the institutions and symbols of the state and the political system but at supermarkets, malls, street markets, cafs, restaurants, pool halls, banqueting halls, discos, bars, and nightclubs? How can advertising professionals continue to do what they do when shopping itself becomes an act of existential madness? And what might be learned about the dynamics of modern societies more generally from such an extreme instance of the intersection between consumer culture and national conflict?
Bombs and Barriers

Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences

A few pieces of data, one anecdotal, the rest from the Israeli advertising industry, help to carry forward this brief exploration. The first concerns risk and consumption in a war-torn country. An Israeli acquaintance reported a telling case
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of cross-cultural confusion. Entering a department store on a trip to London she passed by a uniformed guard and promptly opened her bag to show him its contents. The guard was flabbergasted by this behavior and quickly assured her that he was certain she had not taken anything from the store without paying for it. Then it dawned on her: this was not Israel. The guards remit was to deter or prevent shoplifting, not suicide bombers. He certainly did not need to inspect her bag on the way in to the store. Whatever ones political views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is important to understand the ways in which suicide bombings have affected the fabric of everyday life in Israels main cities and in the national consciousness. Suicide bombings are based on the notion of metonymic embodiment. All Israelis as individuals irrespective of their political opinions or their ethnic origins can be substituted for the (national) whole of which they are a part: that is the rationale behind their being targeted. Hence, for Israelis, the conflict with the Palestinians seems to place both collective and individual survival at risk simultaneously, since the bodies of individuals stand in for the collective existence of the nation. In Israel the security check has emerged as a key ritual for resolving and policing the potentially deadly intertwining of national conflict and everyday life, collective crisis and individual risk. A measure of its success, for Jewish Israelis, is that the figure of the security guard has quickly become taken for granted and altogether unremarkable, while the process of being checked itself has achieved the status of sheer habit and mere routine. It seems entirely normal and ordinary unstoryable in Paddy Scannells (1996) sense, not worth thinking or telling anyone about to have ones bag opened and inspected and ones body scanned for weapons and explosives when going to the supermarket. Breezing past security guards and checks with ease, and even with a degree of nonchalance or aplomb, has become a popular competency, a form of everyday practical knowledge which enables people to accomplish mundane tasks (Edensor 2002: 92) and which serves, among other things, to consolidate ones sense of Israeliness. Such Israeliness carries, of course, a heavy ethnic (Jewish) inflection. It is a mark of those perceived not to be fully Israeli (such as Israels Palestinian citizens, not to mention Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza) and hence not to be fully trustworthy that they are stopped at security checks: they do not know how to negotiate them simply and successfully. Israelis who for reason of appearance or behavior are mistaken for Palestinians and stopped by security guards often experience this as an affront to their sense of national belonging. The ritual of the security check possesses a compelling spatial dimension. It
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always marks a secure inside from a more threatening outside. It constitutes the frontier of safety, delimiting physically policeable zones of normalcy: the kindergarten, the school, the university, the office block, the supermarket, the restaurant, the cinema, the shopping mall. Places of work, education, entertainment, and consumption what can be called civic enclosures can be sealed off from the uncertainty and potential carnage of other, more porous public spaces: the market square, the city street. The appearance of policed civic enclosures, and the security checks at their boundaries, represents an internal performance, in everyday civilian life, of the border anxiety that afflicts Israel as a geopolitical entity (and, one could add, the Jewish people as an ethnic-religious one), an anxiety that probably finds its ultimate expression in the wall that is still being built to fence out Palestinians. In the ritual of the security check, Israelis routinely perform and allay in microcosm the fear of the outside that afflicts the social totality. That fear has come to be increasingly associated with consumption. As Yoram Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum explain: The 1996 bombing of the Dizengoff Center mall in Tel-Aviv signaled the start of a new era in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the symbolism of consumption as normalcy was raised to the fore. . . . Shopping centers, discos and cafs are targets for terrorism not only because they contain high concentrations of civilians, but also because they characteristically represent profligacy and material privilege. The epitomized expression of normalcy, consumption in Israel is in practice a most fragile zone; a sphere where normalcy is disclosed in its impossibility. (2004: 13) The security check is a kind of filter or transitional space between two worlds and two modes of social experience. Israel is a society at war whose citizens are necessarily by virtue of compulsory military conscription if not through suicide bombing also warriors. Israel is equally a society of consumers whose citizens daily encounter the expectations and promises typical of contemporary Western consumer societies: individual well-being, normalcy, prosperity, longevity. The security check is an institutional and performative switching point between these two modes with respect to the traffic in physical bodies, one that seemingly makes visible the permanent vulnerability of a consumer culture operating in the shadow of the direst existential threats. There is a pseudo-liminal quality to the security check as a switching point: participants are spatially separated, if only by the body of the guard, from their prior social settings and judged to be in transit to a new status of approved civic and national trustworthiness. While they remain in transit their visible differ469

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ences in status, class, religiosity, or even ethnicity can be held in suspension by the concentrated suspicion of the guard: this is a paradoxical achievement of the tactics of suicide bombers who have tried to downplay any distinctive signs of Palestinianness and have even disguised themselves as Jewish Israelis of various types (for instance, Ultra-Orthodox Jews) and of the fact that categories of persons previously considered safe, such as women and older children, are no longer above suspicion. Virtually every person identifiable dignitaries, politicians, and celebrities aside is therefore a juridical equal before the suspicious gaze of the guard and potentially united with everyone else in perhaps the purest form of communitas, one based on the personal assumption of immanent, and imminent, existential risk. The security check is not, however, blessed with the openness and indeterminacy often associated with liminal or liminoid experiences. Although experientially condensed for most of its participants, it has a distinctly purgatorial logic (and of course the Catholic conception of purgatory is a prime example of a liminal realm). It is a domain of judgment in the starkest terms, allowing only an affirmative or negative decision: either one passes through or one does not. Moreover, for those who are stopped, this purgatorial realm becomes spatially and temporally elastic one is detained in the penal sense: not only delayed but made subject to interrogatory measures and liable to be physically removed to another location, where the purgatorial realm becomes one not only of judgment but also of potential intercession by the appeals of others for the process of transit to be resumed. Finally, the transit itself involves a process of collective and individual purgation and purification: social space is collectively purged of all those who are judged to threaten its integrity and security, while individuals who pass across are simultaneously purged of their dubiousness, of their capacity to arouse suspicion (they achieve a temporary state of approval), and of their fear of the strangers around them (who they know have been similarly approved). The security checks purgatorial logic gives it an overtly instrumental disposition at odds with the playful aimlessness often assumed to characterize spaces of consumption and especially the experience of simply wandering down city streets past shops and other leisure spaces. Passing through the security check into a shopping mall or supermarket signifies and imparts a highly concentrated intentionality: one enters in order to consume. Or rather, the very act of passing through the security check makes one into a consumer; one is interpolated, in a very Althusserian sense, as a subject occupying a position or pursuing a purpose relevant to the space whose perimeter the security check delimits. Why else would one go through with it?
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This is in fact the double bind of the security check as a switching point between modes of social experience. One is interpreted as passing through the security check in order to fulfill a particular intention, as a voluntary act of will (I want to see a movie, I want to shop in the supermarket). However, the security check is also inescapable and has to be negotiated for almost all public activities, whether one has a particular intention or not. The security check is spatially and temporally ubiquitous: not only do guards in Israel check entry into virtually every public building, with increasing emphasis on spaces of consumption, but it is a ritual that has to be constantly repeated: one never gets a season ticket or personal pass that can attest to ones civic trustworthiness across every public frontier. This combination of voluntary intention, spatial inescapability, and enforced repetition closely resembles the contours of contemporary consumption, where it is simultaneously the aggregated outcomes of deliberate individual actions (consumer behavior) and the form of social existence through which almost all interpersonal transactions have increasingly to be conducted, time after time.
Territorializing Consumption

Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences

The idea of the security check as a switching point does not necessarily undermine Sznaiders claims about the opposition between warrior society and consumer society. Would a country in transition between the two not need mechanisms for switching between them? However, additional problems with this view begin to emerge if one probes further into the normalized status of the security check as a switching of modes between the risks of aggressive ethnic nationalism and the well-being of consumerism. For were consumerism and violent national conflict so antithetical, one would assume, or at least hope for, a modicum of felt incompatibility or intolerability regarding the need for this kind of transition between them. One would expect people to never quite get used to being checked for explosives on their way into shops or cafs, or even actively to resent it. But as I have said, the security check and the security guard have become routine, unstoryable components of everyday life. More telling still, there is no evidence of great discomfort and opposition to them. Extra security charges are frequently added to restaurant and caf bills to cover the wages of guards, and these rarely meet opposition from customers. Security checks and guards appear to be perceived by consumers and advertised by cafs and restaurants as necessary and welcome features of the landscape of consumption. Given the ethnic inflections of these security provisions, their normalization and routinization show how consumption, rather than multiply bonds between
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diverse social groups and identities, can happily coexist and exploit the boundary building and territorialization so integral to the phobias and philias of ethnic nationhood. Consumerism in such circumstances is spatially defined within a military schema of physical penetrability and defensive fortification. It even, one could argue, thrives within this environment, since the geographical and architectural logics of malls and out-of-town shopping areas already promote similar schemas of spatial sequestration and surveillance and utilize physical enclosures to promote modes of corporeal and psychic switching to heightened states of consumption including the characteristics of an interpolated consumer intentionality described earlier (simply by entering one has both signaled and performed ones intentional transformation into a consumer). While George Ritzer (1999) has dubbed such enclosures cathedrals of consumption, it is less frequently noted that they are also, when necessary, fortresses of consumption. They deny entry to the noise of the outside, certainly; but they also shut out its terrors. The success of this fit between ethnic-national territorialization and the sequestration of consumption depends crucially on the ability to cast the subject of consumption the individual consumer fully within its terms. For, as far as the individual is concerned, the switching of modes between warrior society and consumer society is never wholly successful. One is never securely inside the safe zone of soft pleasures and multiple identities: the protective envelope of policed space is constantly shrinking. In fact, its spatial logic produces an abysmal process of withdrawal to a whole series of insides, nesting, Russian dolllike, within a progressively more threatening series of enveloping outsides. Ultimately even domestic space is not safe enough: new homes in Israel are legally required to be built with an extra strong and potentially airtight secure room to which everyone withdraws in the event of chemical attack. Within this room each person dons his or her own protective mask and clothing in anticipation of such an attack (a much-rehearsed procedure during the first Gulf War). This is the ultimate withdrawal to an insecure inside beyond which no further retreat is possible. In these circumstances, how can the subject be made safe for consumption?
Cocooning and Escape

The problem has not entirely escaped those working within the Israeli advertising industry. In Israel as elsewhere, advertising professionals often act as folk ethnographers (Malefyt and Moeran 2003), self-reflexively observing the cultural environment in search of developments that can lead to timely interventions and strategic gains for clients, for themselves as corporate agents competing against
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other advertising agencies, and for themselves as individuals eager to demonstrate their own expertise and importance within the agency in an extremely fluid and mobile sector. As a result they often ask the same kinds of questions about consumption, consumers, culture, and media as sociologists and anthropologists do, albeit with much greater instrumental and commercial urgency.3 These questions include, in the case of Israel, the problematic impact of suicide bombings on consumer culture. Observation and questioning need not lead to intervention, of course. One response of Israeli advertising professionals is articulated up by the vice president for research and strategy at Yehoshua TBWA:4 At a certain moment the public by itself understood that it too would have to live with the situation for a long time, and it alone constructed its own defense mechanisms; it normalized its own life. I didnt have to deal with it; I carried on as normal (Moyal 2005). This statement is revealing in several respects. Its use of the term defense mechanisms makes salient the metaphorical roots of this psychological commonplace in military discourse, a mingling of semantic domains that acquires an extra layer of urgency in Israel. It also signals the expansion of the danger zone from bodily location to the space of the consumers psyche: consumerism requires not just the physical policing and fortification of domains of consumption against the threat of violence but the erection of psychic barriers against the threat of trauma. And this professionals confidence in a public capacity for self-protection that is adequate to the needs of advertising suggests a principle of coordination or parallelism between the dynamics of consumer culture and modes of response to violent national conflict. Consumption, it seems, can flourish not as an antidote to this violence but by deploying the same kinds of defensive psychic mechanisms to which violence gives rise. Not all advertisers are so certain, however, that they themselves do not need
3. The descriptions of advertising professionals are of course by no means perfectly accurate assessments of actually existing consumer cultures, especially given the doubtful accuracy of much advertising research, the unproven effectiveness of many advertising campaigns, the importance of self-promotion in the demonstration of advertising expertise, and the interminable uncertainty of advertising knowledge about consumers generally (see Cronin 2004, Lury and Warde 1997, Nava 1997, Schudson 1984). They are nevertheless useful guides to the ways in which advertising practitioners understand the overall terrain of consumer culture and how they hope or intend to shape it. 4. Unless otherwise stated all quotations of advertising professionals are taken from interviews carried out with the author between 2002 and 2005 and have been translated by the author from the original Hebrew. The names of the advertising agencies have not been changed: they usually consist of the local agency name (in this case Yehoshua) and the global agency with which it is affiliated (TBWA). 473

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to actively intervene, at least by taking special precautions. One of the principal ways in which the subject can be made safe for consumption is by seeing to it that advertising is made safe for the subject. This is not an easy task, according to the creative director of Gitam BBDO, one of Israels largest agencies: Of course there are a lot of sensitivities arising from the security situation if you only think about them. If you come now to advertise Apropos [a restaurant chain and scene of a recent suicide bombing] then Ive got a problem. . . . And almost every place in Israel reminds us of a terrorist attack, although we dont want to rank them. . . . It can be religion, or bereavement, or the wars of Israel, or the Shoah, but to make creative [advertising] in Israel is a minefield . . . you are very, very careful. (Shamir 2003) The symbolic topography of potentially traumatic associations (not just terrorism but war and the Holocaust) is mapped onto the countrys scarred physical landscape (almost every place in Israel reminds us . . .).5 Making advertising safe, insulating the world of pleasure and well-being from the scene of horror and trauma, is itself like a military operation undertaken in treacherous terrain. This terrain, however, cannot simply be fenced off through reliance on defense mechanisms. It is coterminous with Israel itself as a historical and geographical entity; it underlays the very ground on which one walks. The metaphor shifts here from spatial sequestration and barrier defense to tactics of caution, stealth, and mobility. Consumer culture is an unmarked path that needs to be cleared through a deadly symbolic environment. Advertising is carried out in a cultural minefield. A radical way of meeting these challenges is to try to make advertising and consumption both the journey and the destination of psycho-cultural security. Discussing the Israeli consumers process of withdrawal to an imperfectly secure inside is an article called To Shut Oneself in at Home or to Escape Outside, which appeared in the Marketing and Advertising page of the Economy section of Haaretz, the daily Israeli broadsheet, on April 9, 2002.6 Quoting from
5. The perhaps surprising inclusion of religion in this list of traumatic associations is revealing of the practical schemas of mainstream (largely secular) Israeli advertising professionals, signaling the implicit conflation of a seemingly disparate range of potentially threatening discursive realms (religious themes and symbols find their way into Israeli advertising largely, but not exclusively, by being assigned to separate campaigns, undertaken by specialist sectoral ad agencies, aimed at the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations). A full analysis of this traumatic association with religion would, therefore, require a separate article in its own right. 6. The translation here is inelegant but important. The Hebrew verb Lehistager is the reflexive form of lisgor, which means to close. Lehistager means more than to stay at home: it is to close 474

David Tamir, chairman of the Israeli affiliate of the ad agency J. Walter Thompson, the article outlines notions of cocooning and escapism as the major ways in which marketing and advertising professionals conceptualize consumer behavior in a time of violent crisis. Interestingly, and important for the claim that warrior and consumer societies easily intertwine, neither of these concepts is a homegrown Israeli invention, and neither of them originates in the context of violent conflict. Escapism has long been connected to both consumer culture and media use more broadly (postulated, for instance, within the Uses and Gratifications theory of communication research as a basic social need that can be gratified by using media [Blumler and Katz 1974]), while cocooning was coined by American marketing trend consultant and self-styled futurist Faith Popcorn in the early 1980s. Here is how the article, quoting Tamir, describes it: Cocooning expresses the consumers need to protect himself from the reality of a threatening and unpredictable external environment, through self-fortification and ingathering in the home . . . the cocooning consumer creates a domestic world separate from that outside, with an emphasis on family leisure. Consumer behavior in this situation is characterized by the purchase of products that promise, on the one hand, protection and on the other self-compensation, especially at home. . . . So, for instance, consumers who usually left home during vacations and found their entertainment outside the home will now avoid doing so, and will purchase more goods that make their stay at home pleasurable: electronic goods related to entertainment, personal pampering, little ornaments for the home, books and videos. (Barabash 2002) Two very brief points need to be made. The first is that the article as a whole, addressed primarily to advertising and marketing professionals, emphasizes the fact that the notion of cocooning is taken from a different context the peacetime consumer culture of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. It even stresses the continuity in this trend in the United States, or its acceleration, immediately after September 11. The only difference indicated is the way in which a trend affecting certain social groups or personality types becomes generalized for a period across the whole of society, but there is no indication that this constitutes a problem for marketing or advertising practitioners.
oneself off, shut oneself in, secure ones own seclusion. It is semantically related to a word widely used by military spokespeople in recent years, seger, which is conventionally translated as closure but more accurately understood as a combination of blockade and curfew. Seger is what the Israeli army does to the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Lehistager the reflexive verb form is what Israelis do to themselves. 475

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Which brings me to the second point. The article itself, its rhetoric and pedagogical purpose as an example of marketing journalism, contributes to the tracking and shaping of the consumers subjectivity within this fortified domestic space. It does so, ironically, by urging marketers and advertisers to penetrate the defended and protective home with promotional messages and products that contribute to further cocooning. This becomes most obvious when the article quotes with approval the launching of a new product by Popcorn that while developed before September 11, benefited from the situation post September 11: a luxury television armchair for women called the cocoon. There is absolutely no sense of contradiction here between the boundary anxiety and fear of the outside that characterizes warrior society and the aims of consumption: rather there is a sublime compatibility between rhetorics, practices, and spatial logics. Largely thanks to domestic media such as television, radio, and the Internet, advertising and marketing are understood as penetrative means to a fortifying end. And what of escapism? The following is an extended quote from an article in the advertising industrys main trade publication, Otot, also from April 2002. It is written by the then creative director of a small Israeli agency: Not easy, not easy is our path. So, what did you think? Surrounded by a billion Arabs, attacked from morning to night, burnt by a winter sun, crushed by our bank overdrafts. Not that Herzls second option is more optimistic. . . . No, Uganda is also not an alternative. So what is? Escapism. Escapism, Escapism and again Escapism [written in Hebrew letters to sound like the English word], everywhere I turn my head thats all I hear. Simply translated: escape, repression. . . . But where can one escape to? News broadcast follows news broadcast, people get shot in cafs, cinemas are putting up prices, its dangerous to get on planes, and touring here is a relevant option only for those who have served in elite commando units. . . . In short, depression. We want very much to escape, but theres nowhere to go. . . . I want to offer a sane option, half a minute of escape, a moment of brilliance that raises a smile and makes you forget about the [fact that you live in] a pot of boiling blood, fire and pillars of smoke. I am talking about a number of advertisements, brilliant, in my opinion, which prove that there is a double hope: from the viewers perspective to forget for a moment the perpetual sadness and chaos, and from the advertisers point of view to use humor to overcome the threatening routine and thus to promote the brand, to create identity and salience in its positioning with regard to its competitors. (Midan 2002)
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Again, a few brief points are in order. To begin with it is important to note the relationship of escape to Zionism, especially the various alternatives open to the Jewish people in the task of finding a national refuge: if not Palestine, then Uganda (an option suggested by Theodor Herzl and rejected by the seventh Zionist congress in 1905). Advertising is framed within, not against, the narrative of national salvation and the creation of Israel as a space of refuge. Given the contemporary situation, it even offers a better (if momentary) solution to the mess apparently created by Herzlian Zionism. Moreover, for all the urgency and distress concerning violent conflict, something seems weirdly out of proportion here. The writer demonstrates an almost surreal inability to create a sane hierarchy of dangers, instead offering the taxonomic hypersensitivity of a consumer who cocategorizes suicide bombings, the heat of the Israeli climate, and the overdraft at the bank and who cannot distinguish between being shot at in cafs and being overcharged at the cinema. The profusion of seemingly incompatible categorizations is reminiscent of the preface to The Order of Things (1970), where, remarking on the absurd categorizations of a certain Chinese encyclopaedia in a short story by Borges, Michel Foucault introduces the notion of the table the space of operations and tabula of categorizations that underpins our thought. The table underpinning this writers thought permits, for an instant, not the famous surrealist encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine, but the deadly similitude of high prices and high explosives. It also seems to constitute a negative version of Colin Campbells (1987) notion that modern consumption is distinguished by autonomous imaginative hedonism, an insatiable and self-generated need and capacity to derive pleasure from any situation. It is as though modernitys radical expansion of possibilities for pleasurable stimulation and imaginative activity produces its own moment of unease, exacerbated by but not reducible to the effects of suicide bombings, in which all situations also present possibilities for unpleasureable stimulation and imaginings. Hence the author discloses a capacity to derive unpleasure, in apparently equal measure, from the prospects of perspiration and of expiration. Finally, this taxonomic equivalence between such seemingly incommensurate threats is reproduced in the solutions that the author offers: escape for the consumer from the trauma and chaos of what Israelis refer to obliquely as the situation occupies the same level of importance and urgency as the escape offered to the advertiser from threatening routine. The syntactic ambiguity of the latter phrase means that it is not entirely clear whether it refers to the threatening routine of suicide bombings and so forth (and in this period they were an almost daily occurrence) or to routine itself as threatening, primarily to brand recognition in
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a competitive environment. This ambiguity bolsters the amazing parity of a solution (humorous, escapist advertisements) that enables the consumer to forget a traumatic external reality while simultaneously allowing the advertiser to achieve identity and salience for the brand in the consumers consciousness. Escape, then, as the author observes, is not just escape from a threatening outside: it also has to offer a place to go. Escape is not opposed to cocooning. Rather, it proposes a solution to the problems of the ultimate insecurity and permeability of the home by transferring the sphere of operations from physical space into the space of the consumers subjectivity. Paradoxically, it is both penetrating, in the sense that through advertising it permeates the defenses of the home and the psyche, and evasive, turning the mobile imaginings of the consumers consciousness into a source of security. Escape is an example of what Susan Buck-Morss (1992) has described as a technoaesthetics: the sensorium is protected from exposure to a traumatic external environment by flooding it with phantasmagoric stimulation. This is not just escape from, but escapism into, the phantasmagoric enclosure of advertising worlds, into an ideal state (from the advertisers point of view) of subjective receptivity, into the mall of the mind. This escape then produces a further fortification, a type of affective policing of the subjects perception and cognition regarding the brand: it encourages identification with the brand and distinguishes it from its competitors. Somewhat like the security check, the advertisement is a kind of switching point or gatekeeper between states of anxiety and distress and spaces of safe receptivity, psycho-cultural spaces that need to be protected not just from suicide bombers but also from business competitors. In the wake of this description it should come as little surprise that in late 2002 Motorola in Israel launched a new brand of cellular phone services and content aimed at young people. Its name? Escape. Its slogan? As if in answer to this very advertising executives rallying cry: Escape? There is somewhere to go (Escape? Yesh Lean).
Conclusion: Consume or Die

The English novelist and journalist Linda Grant, writing reports for the Londonbased broadsheet the Guardian from Tel Aviv during the most violent days of the intifada in 2002 and 2003, acutely noted that Israelis constantly referred to the bubble (buah in Hebrew).7 The bubble refers to the personal space around them, their everyday lives and commitments, their safe enclosures of family, career, lei7. Many of these reports form the basis for the account of Israeli society and the buah given in Grants recent book, The People on the Street: A Writers View of Israel (2006). 478

sure: all that separates them from the violence, conflict, and fear of the war with the Palestinians. Consumer culture in Israel, despite Sznaiders claims, does not seem to disperse this bubble or work to create multiple spaces of interlacing identities and affinities that counteract ethnic nationalism. In particular, as practiced and envisaged by advertising professionals, it seems mainly to guard and enhance these bubbles as ideal physical and psychical spheres of operation, using and invigorating for the ends of consumption the very strong oppositions between inside and outside, us and them, that animate the ethnic nationalism of warrior societies This is not to say that there are no cosmopolitanizing dynamics in Israel, but that consumer culture cannot be treated as unproblematically emblematic of those dynamics, especially if such treatment is the result of conceiving consumption in terms of an inexorable, transnational characteristic of modernity or from a consideration of the figure of the Jew as stranger, merchant, and cosmopolitan in European history (Sznaider 2000). Yet if Sznaider is wrong, or at least wildly optimistic, about the relationship between consumer culture and national conflict, are there alternative frameworks that can account more convincingly for their intersections and analogies, alongside the abiding contrasts and differences, on anything larger than a local scale? Is it possible to make transcultural and epochal claims, as Sznaider does, about such phenomena as consumption and nationalism without instantly reifying and impoverishing them? The specific complexities of Israeli society and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might appear to offer particularly poor ground for generalization in matters such as these. But it may also be the case that the intensity of the conflict and its proximity to practices and discourses of consumption throw into relief latent characteristics of modern social dynamics that are at work elsewhere. By way of speculative conclusion, then, it is perhaps worth thinking slightly differently about the opening example of the split screen and taking seriously the response of Telads executive director to the effect that not broadcasting advertisements was a dereliction of national duty. How can advertising and consumption be theorized as socially and symbolically central to national continuity, to the nations demonstrable existence and vitality in the face of external threats of death? What is it about the commercial normalcy of consumption that is nationally compelling, so much so that its physical fortification is worth guaranteeing behind barriers and metal detectors? So much so, in fact, that security guards have died trying to prevent suicide bombers from entering restaurants and bars? 8
8. When stopped by the security guard the suicide bomber often decides to detonate the explosives there and then: the security guard is almost always among the victims and is sometimes the 479

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Without belittling the obvious financial reasons for continued advertising, for more (fortified) malls, supermarkets, cafs, and cinemas (bills have to be paid, shopping needs to be done), it seems highly probable that consumption plays a central symbolic role in the life of nations, a role worth sacrificing lives to protect. If sacrifice is the most important border ritual of the nation, regeneration is the ritual focus of its fertile center. . . . Here commerce reconstructs and nourishes the community. Without it, the community would die (Marvin and Ingle 1999: 200). National conflict and consumer culture are intertwined through the complementary nation-affirming dynamics of military sacrifice and commercial regeneration. In nonconflict situations, however, these dynamics are sequestered from one another: their connectedness is hidden from view. Few, if any, would consider it appropriate or praiseworthy to risk death for the nations right to consume. Yet in consumer cultures such as Israels, which are both conflict riven and media saturated, the nationally regenerative center of commerce is everywhere, its borders are diffuse and proximate (the thin dividing line on a split television screen, the security barrier outside a caf), and it is harder to defend it against the equally ubiquitous physical and psychic threats of nationalist violence, or to separate it from those once-distant frontier locations where the nation is prepared to sacrifice its own. Just as the civilian rear has become the new military front, the fertile center has merged with the sacrificial border, and advertising takes form as a national art of war. It is in this context that the seemingly absurd table of the hypersensitive consumer begins to make sense: the consumer is equally crushed both by suicide bombings and by the overdraft at the bank. So while one may continue to hope for the cosmopolitanizing impact of consumption in particular societies, there seems little reason to believe that consumption as such, since it occurs within national frameworks, will be exempt from a role in the performance of nationhood. If anything, the reverse may be the case: that it is only the structured protection of consumption within national life, its sequestration away from the nations most dangerous spheres of action, that has made consumption seem indifferent and irrelevant to the nations spatial defense and its temporal reproduction. For societies at peace, or whose wars are carried out at a great distance, this denial of the national significance of consumption can remain the order of the day. The Israeli experience shows, however, that consumponly fatality (apart from the bomber). While there has been much sympathy expressed for security guards, and honor bestowed on them for the risks they are prepared to take, none question the legitimacy of sacrificing some lives so that others may continue to consume. In addition, despite the dangers they face, security guards are surprisingly poorly paid. 480

tion asks and receives as much as the nation is willing to demand for itself: not just the minds and resources of its subjects, but, if necessary, their lives.
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