“ Advertising culture and the making of the modern consumer ”

My paper aims to historicize our understanding of the consumer, a being who nowadays quite often seems to be treated as a quasi-natural entity not only in some sciences, but also in politics, economics and in the media (and all that not only in the West). Specifically, I would like to show how at the beginning of the 20 century advertising deployed various means to bring forth a specific consuming subject and configure its emotional conduct. With a perspective informed by science and technology studies, I will argue that theoretical knowledge adopted by the advertising culture played a crucial performative role in these processes of subject formation. The analysis focuses on various developments in German-speaking countries from the 1890s up through the 1920s. At the center of this analysis stands the transformation of the thrifty housewife into a consumer with needs. Finally, I will touch upon several shifts that took place with the introduction of psychology in advertising during the 1920s.