Arthur Asa Berger Writing Myself into Existence1

Advertising or: the Agent inthe Agency

I had an excellent Catholiceducation in high school, which isremarkable since I attended a publicschool and I’m Jewish When I was inhigh school, at Roxbury Memorial HighSchool for Boys (in Boston), I didn’thave the slightest idea about what Iwanted to do with myself. I knewthat I liked to write and I liked todraw. What to do? I took manydifferent tests—one of which wascalled the Kuder Preference Test, ifI remember correctly—and they allcame out with the same answer: gointo advertising. One of the personswho gave me the test was NormanGreen, who directed an adult summercamp for the YMCA named “SandyIsland.”. He hired me to work thereone summer. The secretary was atall, skinny fellow who aspired to bea writer. His name was John Updike.He did a wonderful caricature of me.

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Maybe it was because the testsrecognized the creative aspects of mypersonality and thought thatchanneling this creativity intoadvertising made more sense than,say, becoming an accountant. Ormaybe they discerned that I had a lotof potential as a flimflam artist?

I’ve always had negativefeelings about advertising. I admirethe creativity of many of the peoplein the business, but I am very uneasy(to put it mildly) about the poweradvertising has to shape individualbehavior and the way it has created aconsumer culture in which, as thesaying goes, “in life, its the boyswith the most toys who win.” In one

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of my books, Pop Culture, I wrote aboutwhat I called “The Affordinary Man”(and Woman), who measure life interms of the goodies they can affordand measure other people the sameway. For this so-called“Affordinary Man” (and Woman) thenumbers on the stock market pages areof all-consuming interest (meantliterally and figuratively) anddetermine how he feels about himselfand his place in the universe.

And it is advertising, ofcourse, that helps shape theconsciousness of these“Affordinaries,” as marketers wouldput it. Marketers in the UnitedStates are always dividing theAmerican public into differentgroups, based on things like age,sex, race, religion, zip code, socio-economic status, and consumptionpatterns. These groupings aresupposed to help advertising agencieslearn how to design their ads andcommercials to appeal to specificgroups that a company is targeting.We are constantly told that we areimportant as individuals (“We do itall for you”) but for companies,what’s most important is whetherwe’re 18-45 years old and have acertain amount of discretionaryincome to spend—or that we’re willingto borrow money to buy things weoften don’t need. And the

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advertising agencies are the ones whocreate the print ads and radio andtelevision commercials that move somany of us in such profound ways.

Some television commercials are

absolutely brilliant works of art, orof persuasive art, to be moreprecise. The question one mustalways ask about advertising iswhether it is ethical to manipulatepeople, to get them to do certainthings that you want them to do.Advertisers argue, of course, thatthey are relatively powerless andthat what they do is provideinformation that people can evaluateand then make up their own minds.It’s an interesting exercise to turnoff the sound and examine the imagesin a commercial—you’ll see incredibleuse of body language, of facialexpressions, of everything the actorsand actresses can do to generate anemotional response in those who viewthese works. Advertising is not, forthe most part, information; it is

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emotion! Consider the advertisementbelow—part of a controversialcampaign with brilliant andsexploitative photographs.

In 1998 I was fortunate enoughto win an award by the AdvertisingEducation Foundation and spent threeweeks at Goldberg Moser O’Neill, alarge advertising agency in SanFrancisco, as “visiting professor.”Everyone was very nice to me and Ilearned a lot, wandering around,chatting with various people. Theywere, as a rule, very bright andhard working, and kind to give me somuch of their time.. There was, Icould see, a mountain of labor behindevery print ad or commercial.

One day I was chatting withFred Goldberg, the number one honchoof the agency (now retired). We weretalking about an ad and he waslooking at in a newspaper. “It’s alousy ad,” Fred said, “But theamazing thing is that even lousy adswork!” If even the lousy ads work,what hope do most people have in of

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not being affected by them,especially since we are exposed to somany print ads and radio commercialsand television commercials in thecourse of a given day. “It’s a 260billion dollar a year business,” hesaid, “and most of the companies keepadvertising because they hope thatone day, somehow, they will get anagency to create a blockbuster ad forthem that will turn everyone on.It’s like playing the lottery. Onecompany gave me hell about the amountof money we were spending on cornedbeef sandwiches on the shoot for acommercial we were making for them,but didn’t think twice about signingthe media bill for almost ten milliondollars worth of air time.”

Some teenagers were asked by aresearcher whether they were affectedby advertising. “No,” most of themsaid. They said, “We’re aware ofadvertising but we’re not affected byit.” Being deluded about one’sbehavior is not unique to teenagers,but the idea that teenagers aren’taffected by advertising is similar,as far as truth values are concerned,to saying the earth is flat!Teenagers have hundred of billions ofdollars of discretionary income, andthe advertising agencies make sure,as best they can, that teenagers andtheir money are soon parted.

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American Studies

In 1960 I went off to theUniversity of Minnesota to pursue adoctorate in American Studies. For awhile it seemed that American Studieswas the most exciting new developmentin universities—an interdisciplinary(or is it multi-disciplinary or pan-disciplinary?) program that enabledstudents to build a coherent courseof study. In theory, one couldinvestigate some topic of interest interms of its social, psychological,political, literary (and otheraspects).

I had really a wonderful timeat the University of Minnesota.Unlike many of my colleagues, whohoped to teach literature, I was moreinterested in the social sciences andso I spent most of my time takingcourses in American intellectualhistory, political theory, and thehumanities than I did in literature.I took many of my courses with DavidNoble, an intellectual historian,Mulford Sibley, a political theorist,and Ralph Ross, who taught in thehumanities department. I also tookcourses in American music, inAmerican literature, and so on.These courses turned out to be very

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useful to me when I wrote mydissertation, under Mulford Sibley’sdirection—on the comic strip Li’l Abner.I always went for the best professorand didn’t care too much about whathe or she was teaching.

When I told my brother Jason,an artist, that I was going off tothe University of Minnesota to studyAmerican Studies, he said it would bebetter to study one subject in depth.“You must profound yourself in adiscipline,” he said. That argument,I must say, has been made by manyacademics, who think that people whostudy American Studies emerge asdilettantes, which a smattering ofknowledge in this and in that. Butthere is nothing to say that a personcan’t design a program of coursesthat holds together and provides abetter perspective on things thanstudents who are in one discipline.Doesn’t it make sense for someone whoteaches American literature to havestudied American political thought,

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history, and other courses thatprovide a sense of context? AtMinnesota there were some professorswho formed the core of the program,but students could take courses fromwhomever they wanted—as long as theiradvisor thought their program ofcourses made sense.

I found American Studies to myliking. I was intellectually curiousand learned a great deal. I alsomade use of my ability to draw anddid a number of illustrations for thestudent American Studies association,with which I was deeply involved. Imight have run it for a few years. Ideveloped a motto for ourassociation:

“Two Years Before the Masters Degree, a Decade Before the Ph.D.”

I had smooth sailing through mywritten exams, but when I took myorals I ran into trouble—with aprofessor who didn’t agree with someof my ideas. A compromise wasreached—I would write a few papers onRousseau and some works of Americanliterature and that would take careof the matter. I was heading off fora Fulbright in Italy and thecommittee gave me the benefit of thedoubt about my performance in theorals. I was lucky, in a sense—inthat the professors let me write the

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papers. But I was unlucky because ifa different professor had been on myorals committee, I probably wouldn’thave had any trouble at all.

I went off to Milan for a year,where I met Umberto Eco and spentsome time with him and his friends.We were both interested in comics andpopular culture. Then I came backand wrote my dissertation and got ajob at San Francisco StateUniversity. I had three offers: oneat the University of SouthernFlorida, in humanities; one atSouthern Illinois, in literature; andone at San Francisco State College(now University), in a small socialscience department. I chose SanFrancisco, for obvious reasons. Itwas the lesser of the institutions,but it was the one with the bestlocation.

American Studies scholars,until recently, made up for theirfeelings of inadequacy and not beingin a traditional discipline, likeliterature or sociology, by writingexcruciatingly boring papers on dull

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and uninteresting subjects. Now thatcultural studies has liberatedscholars in the social sciences andhumanities, I would hope the papersin the American Studies journalswon’t be so nauseatingly vapid.

Assassin of Academics

I am, I must confess, anassassin of academics. I’ve writtena number of dark comic academicmysteries in which I’ve managed tokill, using various means—knives,poison, guns, poison arrows, bombs--adozen or so professors and anoccasional dean and collegepresident. It is very therapeutickilling off professors and othersinvolved in academia. In my mysterynovels I also express a certain kindof ambivalence (or is it sadness oranger) I feel about what is happeningin universities nowadays as theybecome more and more corporatized.

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Thus, in my comic mystery DieLaughing, I have my narrator, AgostinoGlioma, a berserk professor from theUniversity of California at Berkeley,speculate about academic life. Hehad murdered six professors in aprevious book, The Hamlet Case, and hasjust been released from San QuentinPrison after doing his time.

In universities, one gets ahead byprojecting an attitude of high seriousness and givingpeople the impression--often false, of course--that oneis working on important matters. You have todevelop a certain look--the look of a strategic thinkerwho is scanning the distant horizon for the newestideas. You of course are thinking about screwing abeautiful co-ed in the fourth row of one of yourclasses but you seem to be struggling with enormousthoughts and weighty problems.

It helps if you can write in an unintelligiblemanner; the French are masters of this. I don't thinkanyone really understands what Baudrillard orDerrida or Foucault or DeLeuze writes. The moreopaque and elliptical the better, and the morenonsense you write--with a sense of assurance andconfidence to carry it all off--the higher yourreputation will be. That is because academics, all ofwhom think they are brilliant and remarkable, willassume that since they can't figure out what you aretalking about, you must be even more brilliant thanthey are. I always advise young faculty members toread the French philosophers and culture critics andimitate them stylistically.

If you publish very little, you explain thatyour work is theoretically important and that you arenot a hack, like certain colleagues you could mentionin your university, whose work is everywhere. Youmention the term "public intellectual" with a sneer. Itis quality, not quantity, that counts, you say. Yourwork, you suggest, has taken enormous thought andenergy, and if it is not well received critically, it isbecause you are so far ahead of your time. Attitude is

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all in academia and you must convince those whodole out the money, the deans and the provosts, thatyou are one of their brightest stars.

The ultimate dream of universityadministrators, it seems, is to have a university withonly administrators and students and maybe ahandful of professors, at the most. The only problemis that a virtual professoriat teaching courses on theInternet would lead, ineluctably, to a virtual set ofuniversity administrators. University administratorswant to avoid virtuality at all costs. In recent yearsthey have been multiplying at an enormous rate.Professors, of course, would like to rid universities ofadministrators, who came to administer and takecare of minor bureaucratic functions--parking andthat sort of thing--and stayed to command.

I’ve been in universities formost of my adult life. (I don’t knowwhether I should be pitied or begiven a medal for foolhardy valor.)That is, I’ve been connected, as astudent or a member of the faculty,with one university or another, since1950. I started as a student at theUniversity of Massachusetts inAmherst in 1950, continued on as astudent at the University of Iowa inIowa City, “the Athens of theMidwest,” from 1954 to 1956. Thenthere was an interruption of fouryears. I spent almost two years inthe U.S. Army, and then when I wasreleased, I went to Europe. I livedin Paris for around six months andthen made a “grand tour” of Europe.I returned to the United States in1959 and spent a year in New York

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City, working for a few months for aunion newspaper.

And then I went to theUniversity of Minnesota inMinneapolis, from 1960 to 1965. In1963-1964, I had a Fulbright grantand taught at the University ofMilan. In 1965, I joined the facultyof San Francisco State University andwas there until I retired in 2003,except for a year in 1984 at theUniversity of Southern California inLos Angeles when I taught a course onpopular culture and art at theAnnenberg School for Communication.

In America the term “academic”has rather negative connotations. Wetend to contrast academics with thepeople in the “real” world, withpeople who are practical, with peoplewho can “cope.” Academics aresupposed to be unworldly, all caughtup in their particular interests,which are often esoteric and pettyand seem to have little value orutility. Americans are supposedlyanti-intellectual and scornful ofacademics, but they, for the mostpart, want their children to go tothe best universities and get a goodeducation…if only because it now isnecessary to have a college educationto get a decent job.

The lengths to which someparents, and young people, go to getinto the best universities are now

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quite absurd. Sometimes parentsstart the process of trying to gettheir children into Harvard in thethird grade. One person I know hadhis son study the bassoon, since hefigured that the Harvard symphonyorchestra would need bassoon players.It worked! His son did get intoHarvard and went there. My son did,also. “My Harvard years were,” as heused to put it, “the happiest yearsof my mother’s life.”

Although I’ve spent most of mylife in universities, I’ve neverreally been comfortable in them. Myolder brother Jason, who taughtpainting at various art schools inand around Boston (and for a year inBuffalo), also had trouble withacademic institutions. The Bergerbrothers, on both coasts, never quitefit in with academia.

I now obtain a good deal ofpleasure by writing comic academicmurder mysteries that also generallydeal with some topic, such aspostmodernism or ways of interpretingHamlet or mass communication theory.If you’re going to be a disgruntledprofessor, you should find a way tomake it pay off, I say. For example,I wrote a mystery, Postmortem for aPostmodernist (AltaMira Press), whichexplains different perspectives onpostmodernism. In this mystery, afamous professor from the University

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of California at Berkeley, EttoreGnocchi, is killed four differentways on the first page.

In another one of my mysteries, TheMass Comm Murders: Five Media Theorists SelfDestruct (Rowman & Littlefield) I dealwith mass communication theory. Inthis mystery, five media theoristskill one another off. In my mysteryThe Hamlet Case (Xlibris), I have myhero (or is it villain) AgostinoGlioma kill off six professors, butnot before each of them has offered adifferent interpretation of Hamlet.They were all members of theeditorial board of the journal heedited, Shakespeare Studies, and he wasafraid they were going to replace himas editor. He also plays a part in mymystery Die Laughing, which is aboutdifferent approaches to humor.

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The most important thing aboutmy academic career, as far as I amconcerned, is that it gave me thetime and freedom to pursue myscholarly interests and write mybooks. Many professors mistakenlyargue that, the three best thingsabout academic life are, sad to say—June, July and August! They are, ofcourse, forgetting about the monthbetween semesters!