A Gaze Through the Mirror: Advertising and History
Milan Ristovic
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Abstract
Historians constantly struggle with the difficulties of decoding the signs of the times according to which certain segments of history are recognised, become specific and distinct from others. Driven by the desire to quench their intellectual curiosity and the need to find out the truth, they are forced to add, select, group, reject and doubt documents and facts, searching for fragments from which they will attempt to piece together the picture of a past time. This picture is always a more or less pale copy of the "original"-of a past reality, once consisting of an uncountable multitude of threads which linked the moments of each individual life, of a network which it is impossible to connect again in the same shape due to its unique complexity. The obsessive devotion to studying political, military or diplomatic history and the pyrotechnic effects which have always accompanied wrangles over land, power and riches still cause a sort of "night blindness" in members of the sect of worshippers of the muse Clio, preventing them from seeing all those "ordinary", transient phenomena which much less noticeably, but still persistently and strongly influence the forming of everyday human existence. The despised (past) "quotidian life" is much harder for the historian to get to, also because it appears in countless hard-to-grasp forms; to study it, a new heuristics, a new methodology and different thinking about the past are needed in order to "resuscitate" some slice of the erased quotidian life. Sources for this reconstruction and analysis cannot always be subjected to criticism in the way that the strict old rules made for reading and understanding classical sources demand. They are also more numerous and varied, they require adaptability in the researcher and count on the awakening of his inventiveness and imagination. Also, most "testimony" about past quotidian life is very flimsy: the nature of their function was not to last long and testify. Their short-lived utility, like some self-destructing "genetic code", determined in advance the fate of these sources chosen at the historian's will. All this certainly applies to advertising (of goods and services), too, as it can be seen as an interesting additional historical source for studying economic and social history. What made this "Champollionic" problem into the nightmare of researchers of the modern era is the selection and reading of these "codes" from the enormous quantity of new textual and visual material which multiplied daily at increasing speed. The explosion of media in this short century (whose fuse was carelessly lit by Guttenberg) brought down the dams which had held the flow of information at a perceptually more bearable level. Conversion of most of the world into consumers of goods and information was supported in an organised fashion since the beginning of the 19th century by the introduction of a discipline which would with its special language, iconography and rules of application influence the creation of a "sign system" according to which periods would be recognised. Advertising and advertisements would become a special kind of communication typical to modern societies. This universality and readability-put in the service of selling goods and ideas-influenced the shaping of quotidian life, but also the creation of a Utopian image, in our country, too, of the "wide world" from which all wonders come. Here, too, the establishing of advertising was connected to the creation of the modern bourgeoise as a sepsocial stratum capable of accepting (wether selectively or unselectively ia
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