The Thicket of Unreality

Abstract

Concern about the potency of images as against the reality they were thought to pervert or obscure, rather than accurately to map, became acute during the 1950s and 1960s in the West, particularly in the United States. Some years before the term ‘postmodern’ gained any wide currency the growth of media such as television and advertising seemed to some commentators to result in the swamping of a real that became lost beneath a wave of image, fantasy and illusion. In describing this process writers such as Daniel Boorstin and Vance Packard adopted a tone at times close to moral outrage. If the line between the image and reality or that between reality and representation was being blurred, it was, wherever possible, to be restored and those responsible were to be castigated. For Packard it was the cynical ‘hidden persuaders’, the advertising men and women of Madison Avenue and their allies in the social sciences, who were to be admonished for their devious manipulations. From Boorstin came criticism of the purveyors of ‘pseudo events’ masquerading as news, of vacuous celebrity, and, everywhere, those who were submerging any authentic reality beneath a gloss of ersatz imagery. Where later observers like Baudrillard are happy to accept the merging together of image and reality these writers seek to guard the sanctity of a distinction between the two.

[…] we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality that stands between us and the facts of life.

Daniel Boorstin¹

The most serious crisis in the history of mankind […] turned on a question of appearances. The world came close to total destruction over a matter of prestige.

Stephen Ambrose²