Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

AN INTRODUCTION
etymology of the word ‘advertising’, charting its development from the
original and supposedly innocent sense of ‘informing’ up to the more
suspicious and potentially reprehensible sense that it has acquired through
modernity of ‘persuading’ and ‘influencing’. Barnard’s analysis constitutes
a deconstruction of this development and the conceptual gap that it has
enabled. He argues that the supposedly innocent sense has never and can
never have existed apart from the sense of influencing. Such reasoning has
a significant impact on the ideas contained within certain canonical texts on
advertising, such as those of Raymond Williams and Judith Williamson,
which still appear to imply that a more innocent form of advertising is both
desirable and possible. Barnard draws out the implications of this debate for
advertising in general, but most particularly for cigarette advertising where
the issues of innocence and persuasion are most sharply and poignantly felt,
interwoven with issues of morality, health and ecology, and political
economy.
Foucault informed us that the origins of modern sociology are not to be
found in the works of Comte or Montesquieu but rather in the mundane
practices of doctors. Early nineteenth-century doctors were ‘specialists in
space’. They practised in the enclosed spaces of hospitals, medical schools
and operating theatres but also in the open spaces of cities and towns. And
they raised questions not just about the health and pathology of the
individual body, but about the environment of the collective body; the
quality of hygiene and climate, the density of habitation and the rate of
migration of peoples and diseases—in short, the social context. From this
inspiration Andrew Barry sets out on an analysis of the practices of
visualising and reporting.
Barry suggests in his chapter that the translation of the doctor’s expertise
from the hospital and the bedside to the city is, perhaps, one symptom of
a more general historical phenomenon. As a number of writers have noted
the nineteenth century saw a vast increase in efforts to observe and document
the wider social and natural environment, whether on the part of government
inspectors, statisticians, political economists, sociologists, botanists,
geologists or hygenists. While the technical and social apparatus of
experimental science developed rapidly in the nineteenth century, so also did
a range of disciplines concerned with the observation of social, biological
and physical phenomena as they ‘naturally’ occurred. The typical scientific
observer of the nineteenth century was to be found, then, as much outside
as inside the artificial space of the laboratory.
In discussing the development and consequences of ways of knowing
distant events many contemporary writers, such as Jay and Giddens, have
drawn upon Foucault and in particular his ideas on surveillance. Thus the
extended territory of the nation or the empire is conceived of as
‘panoptical-instrumental space’ ruled through techniques of surveillance.
In this chapter Barry questions whether modern techniques for
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