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  • Introduction:Ethics of Seeing: Consuming Environments
  • Christine Harold (bio)

At least since the 1920s, when Ford-style assembly line manufacturing made it possible to mass produce consumer goods, armies of advertisers have been producing something almost more important than commodities, consumers. Consumers aren't born; they are made. And American culture is the Mercedes Benz of consumer-makers. As Ralph Nader has said, we are a people for whom "shop 'til you drop' is the eleventh commandment." Those in industrialized societies are exposed to over 3,000 commercial messages per day through our televisions, radios, computers, freeways, and sidewalks. Arguably, the language and imagery of advertising is as much a part of our environment as air and water.

Even our political leaders speak the language with growing finesse. In the wake of 9/11, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appointed a new head of Public Diplomacy to revamp the United States's image abroad. Powell's choice, Charolette Beers, had no experience in diplomacy or international politics. Rather, the so-called "Queen of Madison Avenue" is a marketing executive who has helmed three of the country's top ad agencies. When asked about his choice, Powell responded, "We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand [End Page 1] diplomacy." In 2002, when reporters asked White House Chief of Staff Andy Card about a possible attack on Iraq, he responded, like any good adman would, saying: "from an advertising point of view, you don't launch a new product line until after Labor Day." For better or worse, those of us interested in the effects and possibilities of today's ethical ecology must learn to interrogate the logics and aesthetics of commerce that pervade every aspect of social life. Advertising, branding, public relations—important environmental conditions of consumer culture—profoundly influence how we envision our communities, our families, our jobs, and ourselves. We perform our role as citizens infrequently and in very specific contexts. We perform our role as consumers each and every day.

The title of this special issue was carefully chosen. As the following essays illustrate, "consuming environments" can be taken at least two, often overlapping, ways. First, it addresses a tendency for those of us living in industrialized cultures to visually and materially consume the natural world. That is, "nature" often serves the dual roles of providing the raw materials of industry as well as providing the beautiful scenery in which laborers (as consumers) spend their leisure time. Further, "the environment" is a favorite visual trope of advertising industries. Increasingly, in the commercial imagination, the world "out there" is sold as either a dangerous dystopia from which to escape (say, in our SUVs) or as a rarified utopia available only through the purchase of the latest "pure," "simple," or "green" product. Second, the phrase "consuming environments" simultaneously addresses the ways in which our cultural environments (largely visual in character) promote and intensify our roles as consumers. These cultural environments can include commercial media ecologies (e.g., television, Internet) as well as physical public landscapes that are increasingly saturated by commercial messages and imagery.

"Ethics of seeing" was carefully chosen as well. As many contemporary thinkers have asserted, unlike "morals" which describes an a priori commitment to a somewhat static set of principles, "ethics" must necessarily emerge out of specific situations. With this in mind, we encouraged papers that resist the urge to condemn this or that environment or practice as "right" or "wrong" and instead explore the different constraints, effects, affects, and provocations they produce. "Seeing" can be taken both as an inquiry into theoretical questions of ethics (taking seriously the classical sense of "theory" as a way of seeing) and as the cultural and material process of "taking in" an object in a particular way. The essays that follow [End Page 2] offer a diverse set of explorations into the ethics of seeing in today's commercialized environment. In their own ways, each asks: Given the increasingly intensified role of the visual in contemporary life, what are the ethical implications and obligations of the ways we are conditioned to see?

Christine Harold

Christine Harold is Assistant...

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