In the face of

Does the highlighted "in the face of" mean "in contrast with" or "within"?

Context:

For Steinbach, it is not so much the object itself that is the problem but our relation to it. In substituting mass-produced objects for art objects, Steinbach and Koons call attention to the artwork as commodity, suggesting that the relationship that people have with consumer products is analogous to their relationship with art. Here, we are not so far away from the thoughts of British cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who saw advertising as a magic system which had developed in the face of‘a cultural pattern in which objects are not enough but must be validated, if only in fantasy, by association with social and personal meanings which in a different cultural pattern might be more directly available’.
These arguments concerning the magic of objects and the magical status of advertising suggest that the commodity art of the 1980s and 1990s plays a similar role to that of the avant-garde advertising discussed above.