Abstract
Advertising and the other arts of mass publicity are often compared to magic. The comparison is generally offered as an ironic simile. But what if one were to propose, in all seriousness, that mass publicity is not like magic but rather that it is magic? This chapter revisits Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance in order to develop some hints that he left regarding the esoteric affinities between magic and the work of advertising, and asks questions like: what makes one thing or person resonate with another? How can these resonances be manipulated or harnessed?
Some of the material in this chapter is adapted from Mazzarella 2017.
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Notes
- 1.
McCreery 1995 first brought the reference to my attention.
- 2.
Had Couliano known of Malinowski’s intervention, he might have been at once pleased and disappointed: “How are these things looked upon from the point of view of anthropology, which is not directly called upon to give its verdict on the mental health of its subjects?” (Couliano op cit: 124).
- 3.
Thus runs Malinowski’s speculative linguistic history: “having started using language in a manner which is both magical and pragmatic, and passed gradually through stages in which the magical and pragmatic aspects intermingle and oscillate, the individual will find within his culture certain crystallized, traditionally standardized types of speech, with the language of technology and science at one end, and the language of sacrament, prayer, magical formula , advertisement , and political oratory at the other” (Malinowski 1935: 236).
- 4.
It was in fact Sloterdijk’s Bubbles that first led me to Couliano’s work—despite my having worked, by that time, on the campus where Couliano was murdered for 14 years.
- 5.
See Mazzarella 2013: 209–218 for one version of such an argument, which theorizes the obscene as public punctum.
- 6.
For a bracing discussion of such appropriations in the domain of marketable ethnic identification, see Comaroff and Comaroff 2009.
- 7.
Again, Marshall Sahlins has, more eloquently than most, repeatedly deconstructed homo economicus by showing its socio-historical determinants. See, especially, Sahlins 1996.
- 8.
See Taussig 1999 on the auratic powers of defacement and Simmel 1971 [1904] on the dialectics of fashion.
- 9.
Jean Pouillon: “it is the unbeliever who believes that the believer believes” (1982 [1979]: 4).
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Mazzarella, W. (2018). The Magic of Mass Publicity: Reading Ioan Couliano. In: Moeran, B., de Waal Malefyt, T. (eds) Magical Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74397-4_11
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