THE INAUTHENTICITY OF PEANUT BUTTER, Part 2

Gary Groth also writes in the aforementioned excerpt:

"Superman... is the perfect American commodity, representing nothing so much as the 20th century triumph of market engineering, of image over substance, of visceral perception over the concrete understanding of coherent values."

Groth does not use the word "inauthentic" in his essay, but I choose to use it (again, colloquially rather than as a specialized term) as a convenient shorthand for all of the faults that Groth imputes to the character.

In the previous essay I've shown that the only distinction Groth gives us for finding Superman to be the "ultimate icon" of American marketing was that of the sheer preponderance to which a secondary icon like Superman could lend itself to marketing many different commodities. However, Groth does not supply any particular reason as to why SUPERMAN is a more fundamental icon of marketing than any other seconary icon, such as Schulz' PEANUTS. In similar fashion the above quote never pins down just what it is about Superman in particular that makes him "the perfect American commodity," as opposed to any number of any franchises one might nominate for that honor. The closest Groth comes to narrowing down some quality of Superman in particular in the essay is to characterize the franchise in terms of "visceral perception."

By this one assumes that Groth means that the character appeals to those pleasures associated with "good old American junk," pleasures which many critics besides Groth call "visceral" in the same careless way Groth does. "Visceral perception," however, is a surprisingly inelegant phrase even for Groth, potentially leading one to picture something very like a stomach peeking out of one's torso with little eye-tendrils, in search of superheroic stories to digest.

I wonder that if one could actually prove which modern icon actually has sold the most unrelated items-- and if that icon was actually PEANUTS rather than SUPERMAN-- would Groth find PEANUTS also characterized by "visceral perception?"

Be that as it may, Groth seems to find something particularly horrible about the act of using an image to market an item. This probably stems in part from the tendency of Frankfurt-School intellectuals to view everything related to the "culture industry" as inauthentic in contrast to "authentic" art which has, one assumes, "coherent values." Yet if Superman is both "ultimate" and "perfect," then it must be more objectionable to use a derived, secondary image rather than one that is original to the thing being marketed.

Here's where peanut butter comes in at last.

On one hand, there's the now-defunct label of SUPERMAN peanut butter.

On the other, there's the still extant JIF peanut butter.

Now, if either one simply had a purely denotative name, like "Ben and Jerry's Peanut Butter," then there would, one assumes, be no reason to speak of "visceral perception." But both brands of peanut butter chose to sport a name with associations that might evoke the "visceral"-- or more probably, Joyce's "kinetic"-- than a simple denotation of who made the stuff.

In neither case does it seem that the image or action conjured forth by the brand-name has any actual relation to the thing so labeled.

SUPERMAN peanut butter, as with most secondary usages of iconicity, has no real associations with Superman: it is not made by "him" or by any of the people responsible for Superman's adventures. It will not give anyone powers like Superman, and though I've seen testimonials to how good the actual peanut butter was, I'm going to surmise that it probably never made anyone literally feel any more "super" than any other good-quality peanut butter.

The name JIF, so far as I can tell, was, like McDonalds' Golden Arches, a primary marketing label. Reputedly the name "JIF" was chosen because it was short and easy to remember. It may be that the person who decided to use that name was thinking of the only English word that approximates the brand-name-- "jiffy," for which "jif" is a shortened form-- but there's no way to know this. However, the word can have a favorable connotation insofar as one getting things done "in a jiffy." This favorable connotation may have subliminally appealed to mothers anxious to get peanut-butter sandwiches made quickly, as in the marketing tagline, "Choosy mothers choose JIF." But if so this too is a false association: there's nothing about anyone's peanut butter that has any aspect of swiftness.

Now, I've specified in the previous essay that a secondary icon can have wider applicability than a primary one. But is a secondary one any more "perfect" in its inauthenticity than a primary one? The above would suggest that this is not the case. Both brands of peanut butter use names with vaguely favorable connotations that have nothing to do with the product as such, and so are about equally "inauthentic" by standard Frankfurt-School estimations.

But-- is hype "inauthentic" if everyone in the society to which the hype is directed already expects it to be nothing more than an insubstantial come-on? This is the question Groth does not raise because he's invested in his "image over substance" rhetoric, which would only mean something if he had supplied a form of advertising that was in his opinion based in substance rather than image.

Unfortunately for him, there is no such form. All advertising, even for "substantial" works like LOVE AND ROCKETS, is hype which emphasizes the good and elides any possibility of badness. Long before there was industrialized civilization or a bourgeoise class, the ancient Romans warned, "Caveat emptor." This was not the nature of any modern "marketing engineering," but a symptom of the nature of any kind of merchandising activity, even down to the merchant selling his wares in the local market.

I therefore conclude that the supposed "perfection" of the Superman character as a marketing tool is a delusion of Gary Groth's slanted rhetoric.

This is all she wrote for the "inauthenticity" essays but I'm not finished with Groth's SUPERMAN tirade quite yet...