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Something more anthropological though. You mentioned the way sailors live in a gray, florescent lit world. I imagine that would be more true on a carrier, than a small boy with only a couple of decks below the waterline, but it’s still mostly true. In design anth. there’s the notion of giving objects like computers, copy machines, phone, etc… their own kind of agency. We interact with them, and in a way they interact with us, each of us coming to the situation with a set of preset functions and limiting biases and abilities. I found that a lot of people have trouble with this kind of abstraction, but I think it comes naturally to many sailors. In the navy the machine is primary, and the human component is merely an organic cog in the machine. Sailors work in unison to serve the function of the machine (ship). The machine isn’t designed to work around people, the people are trained to work within the machine. Its a very real kind of cybernetic meshing that hasn’t been explored in any detail. This is why I think the navy has a unique culture in the military branches; a couple of thousand years of culture adapted to serving objects over other people.

I remember during our training cycles, they would have marines play an enemy force that would attack our ship in port, and we would have to defend it and get it underway. A lot of sailors were always killed, but as long as there was at least 30% of the crew, or so, left to get the ship to sea, then we were considered successful and would pass. The people were secondary to the mission and the mission was the ship.

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Mainly, however, I had a chance to wander around the ship and get to hear my daughter, who was then her helicopter squadron’s PR officer, explain the squadron’s mission (primarily antisubmarine warfare) and the care and firing of Hellfire missiles. There were similar presentations available in every section of the ship, so there was plenty to see and do. The second day out, an air show was put on that made me realize how much news cameras obsessed with jet fighters taking off or landing miss of what goes on. First off are the helicopters, which stand by in case one of the other aircraft goes in the drink. Then come the AWACS (long-range radar surveillance) and midair refueling tankers. Only when all these are up do they finally launch the fighters. When the aircraft land, it is in the reverse order, fighters, then tankers and AWACS and, when everyone else is safe on board, the helicopters.

You are right, though, that a tour on a carrier is no picnic. The notion that being in the Navy means a lot of healthy outdoor activity is, at least in the case of carriers, an illusion. Most of the five thousand crew on board spend the deployment in grey metal corridors with florescent lighting. Since the smallest bit of debrie can destroy a jet engine, access to the flight deck is strictly forbidden to anyone without a mission there. The most frequent chance to get outdoors is joining the several hundred who line up and comb the flight deck every morning to make sure that it is immaculate before the aircraft start their engines.

It’s a strange world with lots to learn about, anthropologically speaking very interesting, indeed.

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It is, you know, good anthropological practice to spend some time getting to know the people you write about before writing sweeping generalizations that may, as in your case, turn out to be both misinformed and highly offensive as well.

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I have the same arguments with defenders of late Picasso. Describing in their own words how good the work is they describe nothing more than their own tastes. I respond by describing it in the context of the culture of 1955-72 with all else that happened and reply that late Picasso seems unimportant. Doing the same for the work of 1904-1920 the result is different. We’ll see how it plays out.

You would call all this unsupported assertion. By comparison your only substantive assertion is that people you know care about their work, and the “form” of their work. I accept that. But still that says no more than that some people care about the form of late Picasso. And nothing is learned about the work your friends enjoy, or late Picasso.

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We communicate in form, in media. Content does not transfer. You may imagine that human communication consists of things like me telling you “one plus one equals two” but it doesn’t. Outside very limited areas it consists of things like someone saying “Trust me.” What’s communicated in that? Trust? No. Trustworthyness? No. And on and on. McCracken is Dr. Immanuel Rath as techno futurist. The 20th century saw enough of those criminal buffoons. I called him a Stalinist for a reason. The illustration of ideas does not communicate those ideas to anyone who does not share them.

We communicate in art, in all the rhetoric we use above and around the words we use when we say: “Trust me.” Use your “labeled nodes and network analyses” but you’re the one who’s ignoring structure not me. You and Dr. Alex Rosenberg, and Dr. McCracken and Dr. Rath. The last of them at least realized his mistake. But you can ignore him if you want. After all, he’s only a fictional character in the movies.

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This is all still contra the MIT model of intellectual economic vanguardism and intellectual “designers” and designed intellectualism.

I understand that you have this particular bee in your bonnet. But, take it from this copywriter, phrases like “intellectual economic vanguardism” don’t communicate anything but self-righteous anger. I gather that you don’t like Grant McCracken or Henry Jenkins, but I don’t understand why, except, perhaps, that you feel indignant that they are traitors to the (in my mind wholly imaginary) purity of art. You sound like a classic snob shocked, yes, I say, shocked! by something you take to be vulgar, failing to communicate in a manner that my steel magnolia southern female relatives would call throwing a tizzie-fit.

It would also involve close reading and connoisseurship rather than labeled nodes and network analyses.

It involves both. In this respect I am a faithful student of Victor Turner, who insisted that cultural analysis (the close reading and connoisseurship, you mention) be grounded in solid understanding of social structure and process (here the nodes and network analysis but also prior understanding of the institutional structure of an industry as well as trends revealed by statistics related to GDP and ad spend, the latter broken down by media and client industries).

Even this is, of course, produces only partial understanding of what is going on. But without the social structure and process stuff the close readers and connoisseurs are like theater-goers who have never been back stage.

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I agreed as much as copywriters are craftsmen. But I don’t pay that much attention to scriptwriters either. Maybe there’s a literary craft in Japanese advertising that functions as the equivalent to the visual and theatrical craft in western advertising. That would be a very interesting topic. It would also involve close reading and connoisseurship rather than labeled nodes and network analyses. I’m curious.

This is all still contra the MIT model of intellectual economic vanguardism and intellectual “designers” and designed intellectualism. You seem pulled in both directions.

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“But I don’t want to leave Maki as nothing more than a labeled node in a network analysis diagram.”

And that’s why you want to celebrate “creatives” because otherwise your life is flat. In an academic culture where subjectivity is seen as secondary, apart and merely personal, what’s left that’s human deserves unconditional love. But subjectivity is constitutive, it’s part and partial of consciousness, and the petty seductions you celebrate as poetry are just your way to rationalize your sense of the true superiority of reason; until Doktor Immanuel Rath gets floored by Lola. Rath is not the poet, his tragedy is the subject of a poem.

The people who shoot ads are in LA, and they laugh at the intellectuals on Madison Ave who come up with the ideas. They’re the stagehands who know what’s going to happen from the moment Rath walks into the theater. They understand how culture works, and what people are. The intellectuals don’t. But I’d like to say that’s because the intellectuals are not what they claim, but only schoolmen, and an intellectual is something more.
An intellectual is someone who understands the distinction between Rath and von Sternberg

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People who create ads care a great deal about form. Many aspire to produce work that is, in formal terms, as good or better than most of what passes as art. Hours are spent in production meetings niggling over details.

Perhaps the most striking evidence against the absurdity of the claim I am rejecting is the amount of effort devoted, over and over again, to reminding advertising creatives that what they are doing is not art, not a form of personal expression that may, at its best, be regarded as art. To succeed as advertising the work must add value to the product or client advertised. Industry folklore is filled with stories of campaigns that won creative awards but were then canceled by the client whose sales were not meeting their targets.

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At some point that became explicitly the goal of what was no longer the art of flattery -for princes and patrons- but an independent art of description, as it had perhaps been earlier or was still elsewhere in pre-commercial economies. But as Panofsky said, if commercial art can end up as a whore, independent “noncommercial” art in a commercial economy can end up an old maid. Which is why all I’m talking about is one form or another of commercial art.

John McCreery, you’re describing examples of advertising, an art of flattery, that has in your opinion has produced an actual art. But it is not so because of its function but on top of it. Read my comments on McCracken. Or begin here. It’s funnier. More vulgar than Maki but not unrelated.
McCrcken sees advertising function as art, and ‘content’ manipulation as art. If official portraits made to glorify kings can be art there’s no reason modern advertising can’t be also, but the intent to glorify, or sell, is not the measure of success.

The paradox of anthropology applies to studying salesmen too. You’ve never understand sales unless you do it for a living. But if you get caught up in it, you won’t either.

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