Deb Marber recently received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of St Andrews. She works on topics related to belief and imagination, and is a member of the Northern Imagination Forum.
A post by Deb Marber
As the weather warms up and I look at people sunbathing on their front porches, not risking a holiday abroad, I have been reminded of a short book by Pascal Ory: L’invention du bronzage, or The invention of sun-tanning. In it, Ory explores the cultural ‘revolution’ that made sunbathing fashionable in France and other European countries. Despite the apparent triviality of this subject matter, Ory is by all standards a serious academic. In March of this year, he was elected to the Académie Française, arguably the most prestigious academic French institution; and he is an Emeritus Professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris who has spent much of his career writing about Fascism and other non-frivolous matters. Ory’s intellectual progression from dealing with the topic of fascism to that of suntanning might surprise some; but it is less mysterious once both subjects are viewed through the lens of public relations: both involve the engineering of radical shifts in public opinion.
Figure 1: Claude Monet’s Lady with an umbrella turned to the left. (1886)
As Ory highlights, tanned skin was, in the early 1900s, frowned upon in well-to-do circles in European countries such as France, Germany, and England - and this dates back at least to antiquity. The beautiful or ‘fair’ was associated with pale skin, leading women of upper classes to often protect their skin from tanning by wearing long sleeves and carrying umbrellas (the word itself is derived from the Latin ‘umbra’, meaning ‘shade’) or parasols with them on sunny days (see Figure 1). Paleness was also cultivated through the use of makeup. For example, both women and men of the Elizabethan era achieved a lighter look by covering their faces in Venetian ceruse - a mixture of lead and vinegar, which, when used over a long period of time, could cause shriveled skin, lead poisoning, and even death (see Figure 2). Yet, by the mid-1930s, being tanned had become associated with health and leisure, leading instead to the popularity of bronzing powders and tanning creams. (See Figure 3).
Figure 2: Portrait of Elizabeth I, Queen of England.
Radical cultural shifts like this one fascinate me because they seem to provide good case studies of how public opinion can be progressively redirected in ways that are of great social significance. (If you doubt the significance of the suntanning revolution, think for a moment about the role it conceivably played in enabling a broader acceptance of ethnic diversity.) And, they also interest me because they appear to reveal that the public’s imagination can be manipulated in ways that suggest that the distinction between the creative imagination and the recreative imagination is not always clear-cut.
Figure 3: Women applying sun cream at London’s Serpentine Lido, 1937. Credit: Daily Herald Archive/National Science and Media Museum/SSPL
As a reminder for most people reading this blog post, the creative imagination is often distinguished from another kind of imagination, the recreative imagination. The distinction was made popular by Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft in their 2002 book, Recreative Minds. They explain that the creative imagination is exercised when “someone puts together ideas in a way that defies expectation or convention: the kind of imaginative ‘leap’ that leads to the creation of something valuable in art, science, or practical life.” (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, 9). By contrast, they demarcate the recreative imagination as, very roughly, the capacity “enabling us to project ourselves into another situation and to see, or think about, the world from another perspective”; it enables us to “recreate the mental states of others” (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, 2). This recreative kind of imagination often gets described as related to simulation: it enables us to simulate situations and mental states that we may not have encountered before, and can do so with or without recourse to mental imagery.[i]
The distinction between creative and recreative imagination matters, it is often argued, because different kinds of imaginings carry different epistemic properties. Whilst the creative imagination is thought to be both initiated and developed voluntarily, and thus appears unsuited to provide us with knowledge non-accidentally, the recreative imagination is deemed to be developed involuntarily (see, e.g., Williamson 2016, Kind 2016, Balcerak Jackson 2018) in a way that is constrained by prior beliefs and perceptions (at least). Thus, the recreative imagination, even if it can be initiated voluntarily, is thought to be epistemically valuable due to its unfolding being bound by constraints. What exactly these are and how stringent they need to be varies according to different theorists, but very roughly, they are constrained in line with previous experience (although there are well-known debates as to whether the knowledge such imaginings provide is truly additional to the prior beliefs etc from which it derives (see, e.g., Taylor 1981).
Paying close attention to the suntanning revolution (and other such cultural shifts), however, raises questions regarding whether the distinction between creative and recreative imagination is always so clearly warranted, and whether and how both might interact.
Suppose you are part of the French upper class in 1800. You are shown a picture of a tanned woman walking next to a castle and asked to imagine, in a reality-oriented way, what the woman will do next. More likely than not, you will picture the woman as a worker rather than as someone of your own class; you might imagine her as a maid fetching some herbs in the woods, and you might describe her through the word ‘burned’ (a common adjective used instead of ‘tanned’ at that time). Contrast this with another scenario where you are now in 1950, and presented with the same request. You are more likely to imagine, then, that the tanned woman has been on holiday (or at least enjoyed some leisure), and associate her color with a ‘healthy glow’. What you might recreatively imagine in both cases is very different. Yet, in both situations, what initiates your imagining is similar, but for the period. Thus, it seems plausible that, depending on which culture you find yourself being a member of, your recreative imagination will involuntarily develop similar initial scenarios in different ways.
Many will be tempted to explain this difference through differences in prior beliefs and perceptions constraining how the recreative imagination may develop both scenarios - the beliefs of those in the 1800s are indeed different from those of people of the 1950s. Whilst that is admittedly a part of the explanation of how differently one would develop recreative imaginings in dissimilar cultures, it seems, however, that such a straightforward explanation risks oversimplifying by failing to acknowledge the role of public relation experts in guiding the public imagination.
Studying how publicists shaped the suntanning revolution suggests that the public’s recreative imagination regarding bronzed bodies was heavily influenced via exercises of the creative imagination. Indeed, as Ory delineates, the cultural shift leading to sunbathing becoming fashionable required multiple influences, amongst which were several advertising campaigns. Jean Patou’s 1927 advertising campaign for a tanning cream, l’Huile de Chaldée, is highlighted by Ory as a precursor to others like L’Oréal’s Ambre Solaire (see Figure 4). It is significant, Ory notes, because whilst it promotes the sun-filtering properties of the oil, typically advertised of previous sunscreens too, it also markets its skin-darkening benefits, and relates getting browner as a result of the sun as ‘bronzer’ (meaning ‘tanning’ in French) or ‘bronzing’, instead of as ‘burning’ which was more commonly used previously. The use of words like ‘bronzing’, previously typically associated with sculpture and echoing the physical beauty and strength of statues, and how these became adopted in the French language in association with suntanning are remarkable, Ory defends. Also noteworthy are the oil’s bottle and the ad itself, designed in the Art Deco style, symbolic of the chic avant-garde of the times.
Figure 4: The 1927 ad for Huile de Chaldée by Jean Patou.
The Huile de Chaldée advert provides materials helping to understand how the creative imagination may influence the recreative imagination. It seems plausible enough that the ad itself is a product of publicists’ creative imagination. But the more interesting point is that it appears to engage both the viewer’s creative imagination, and their recreative imagination in order to succeed to change what tanning evokes for them. Indeed, the ad conjures modernism, luxury and the beach, whilst alluding to luxury. Simultaneously, the abstract, cartoonish, characteristics of the picture encourage consumers to use their creativity to fill in the details as they please. Consumers are simultaneously encouraged to imagine themselves in the place of the figure whose traits are left to guess, to recreate her state of mind from their own perspective, and to do so in a way that appears realistic even if it relies on creativity. It seems plausible that it is through this dual engagement of the creative and recreative imaginings that successful ads such as this one progressively shape viewers’ future recreative imaginings as they direct them to features which are suggested as essential to any recreation in imagining.[ii]
This is certainly far from offering a complete account explaining how the creative and recreative imaginations might interact. But it does suggest that they might be importantly related in at least some cases, and that it seems worthwhile to explore more precisely how. This leaves us with many questions. For example, if recreative imaginings can be influenced through culture, and via creative imaginings, what epistemic consequences might we expect?
So, next time you expose your skin to the sun, whether you wear sunscreen or not, think twice about what the image of a tanned body leads you to imagine and why.
Notes
[i] The exact relationship between simulation and recreative imagination is controversial; for example, whilst Currie and Ravenscroft distinguish simulation as a narrower type of recreative imagining which is strictly cognitively conservative after the input stage (see (Currie and Ravenscroft, 2002: 95)), others seem to allow for different degrees of conservativeness even if they insist that it involves important constraints (see, e.g., Kind 2016, Balcerak Jackson 2018).
[ii] For more details on how advertisers evoke the imagination, see Petrova and Cialdini 2008).
References
Currie, G.& Ravenscroft, I. (2002.) Recreative minds: Imagination in philosophy and psychology Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Balcerak Jackson, M. (2018). Justification by Imagination. In Fiona Macpherson & Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory. Oxford University Press. pp. 209-226.
Kind, A. (2013). The heterogeneity of the imagination. Erkenntnis, 78(1), 141-159.
—- (2016) “Imagining Under Constraints,” in Amy Kind and Peter Kung, eds., Knowledge Through Imagination, 145-159. Oxford University Press
Ory, P. (2018). L'invention du bronzage. Flammarion.
Petrova, P. K., & Cialdini, R. B. (2018). Evoking the imagination as a strategy of influence. In Handbook of consumer psychology (pp. 510-528). Routledge.
Taylor, P.(1981). Imagination and information. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 42 (December):205-223.
Williamson, T. (2016) "Knowing by Imagining." In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind, and Peter Kung. Oxford: Oxford University Press.