ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the agents work to look instead of their role as part of the elaborate machinery that permitted the sellers and buyers of doorstep finance. Benjamin probably estimated the power of advertising rather than many companies did, but he was on to something in identifying the reflection, repetition, variation and reiteration of the idea. Gabriel Tarde knew when the doorstep finance industry was still in its infancy; market attachment is never achieved without sentimental relations, without extending lines of relationships. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Stewart Ewen, Wolfgang Haug and a long line of others, elaborated Benjamin's impressionistic insights into comprehensive accounts of how advertising offered, not subversion, but structural support for the commodity form. Stefan Schwarzkopf describes the way nineteenth and twentieth-century advertising concepts passed in and out of circulation, noting how practitioners in the interwar period, whether advocating techniques like repetition, behavioural branding or propaganda, saw advertising largely in the same terms that excited dystopian critics.
