Reading Ads Socially

Robert Goldman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415053990
• eBook ISBN: 9781134938384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This systematic and authoritative book provides an unrivalled guide to understanding ad culture. It shows how the logic of commodities permeates the ways we think about ourselves, our relationships and our desires. Richly illustrated and written with great clarity, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in ad culture.

1

SUBJECTIVITY IN A BOTTLE

Commodity form and advertising form

Marx organized his analysis of capitalism on the basis of a strict hierarchy of conditions of possibility, the most fundamental of which was the commodity form. The commodity form, rather than the abstract categories of orthodox economics, was to be the starting point of historical materialism. In the use value and exchange value of the commodity Marx saw ‘the real relation’ underlying the phenomenal forms of capitalism such as wages and prices. He anticipated that as the capitalist model of production matured the commodity form would permeate all reaches of society.

THE COMMODITY FORM

What is the commodity form? How does it function as ‘the model for all objective forms in bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them’ (Lukács, 1971: 83)? There is no shortage of commentary on ‘the consumer culture’ in contemporary social life, or on the escalating alienation that accompanies it. Criticism often refers to ‘the fetishism of commodities’ to convey a loss of freedom by human beings as they become more and more the slaves to possessions, no longer the willing agents of their own destinies. However, the precise meaning of the concept ‘commodity’ is rarely clear or consistent. Even less attention is devoted to elucidating the logic of the commodity form. In what sense can commodities be said to possess a logic?

This chapter maps three moments, or clusters of meaning, that comprise the commodity form. We examine the potential impact of the commodity form on consciousness by looking at advertising, a primary channel through which the commodity form is extended and reproduced. Advertising amplifies and reinforces the exchange value of existing goods and transforms into commodities those goods and services not considered commodities before. The advertising industry is located at the frontier of expanding the commodity form and thus provides a locus in which its transforming power can be readily observed. In advertisements, we can see images of commodified social relations, a popular consciousness of social relations structured by the commodity form.

THE EXTENSION OF THE COMMODITY FORM

Marx was not the first to be concerned that the advent of capitalism fundamentally altered the nature of work and social relationships. Many before him expressed apprehension about the ‘cash nexus.’ However, for Marx, locating the problem of capitalism in the cash nexus concealed its real foundation in the commodification of labor power. It was this, rather than the use of money or the exchange of goods, that Marx designated as the essential precondition for capitalism.

With the capitalist’s expropriation of the means of production and the separation of workers from ownership or control over capital, there emerged a labor market in which ‘free’ labor could meet with owners of capital. Forcibly removed from the land, people were compelled to sell their labor power in order to survive. Concomitantly, a self-regulating market for consumption goods emerged, transforming what had once been collective and asymmetrical exchange into ‘a series of discrete dual exchanges of equivalents’ as individual laborers converted their wages into food, clothing, shelter and other subsistence needs (Brenkman, 1979: 99). Capitalist development did not immediately absorb the population into fully commodified relations. The stage characterized by absolute surplus extraction demanded long hours of work and little pay; thrift and abstemiousness were enjoined on all workers in the interests of savings and investment. Consequently, levels of consumption adequate to permit subsistence could not be achieved through the marketplace and non-commodity relations survived (Davis, 1978: 264). Many reproductive activities (e.g., food preparation) and consumption activities (e.g., leisure pursuits) remained outside the cash nexus. The transition to monopoly capitalism around 1900 saw a shift of emphasis from absolute to surplus value extraction; from a strategy of prolonging the working day to a strategy of increasing the productivity of labor through mechanization and rationalization of the labor process. Higher productivity, higher pay and increased leisure time accelerated the extension of the commodity form. More and more social relations were transformed as first goods production and then services were rendered amenable to commodification. The sequel was the invention of new goods and new services by means of mass advertising. In this sales effort, corporations reorganized themselves to become marketing as well as producing units, allocating greater amounts of money to advertising, product differentiation, market research, packaging and credit schemes (Braverman, 1974).

Activities involving relations among members of households and neighborhoods were replaced by activities mediated by individuated buying and selling. Thus, activities like bread baking or music making, depending on skills and routines learned and performed in the context of family members and neighbors, were replaced by activities characterized by separation and serialization, the bread purchased in an anonymous supermarket, the music purchased from packaged personalities. Commercial markets also expropriated and displaced the collective, community recreations of traditional culture (Goldman and Wilson, 1977).

The extension of the commodity form was not only the structural accompaniment of mass production technologies and mass consumer habits, but also an important legitimating mechanism of capitalist relations. Its extension must be recognized as part of Capital’s struggle to reproduce its hegemony over Labor. The commodity form redefines social relations as transactions, severs personal contacts from their social context and offers back to workers, in the form of the consumption of images, what has been denied them in the wage contract, namely status, individuality, freedom and sensuality. Under mass consumerism, achievements are interpreted according to the personal allocation of money and leisure time, ‘achievements which may not, in principle, be interpreted politically’ (Habermas, 1970: 112). The rise of mass consumerism reproduces wage labor relations at the level of consumption, and it legitimates the bourgeois public sphere by impeding the development of a proletarian public sphere (Brenkman, 1979; Hohendahl, 1979). It does not deny the worker a public status but redefines that status in terms of consumption criteria. Individuality is now derived from the goods people consume and how they appear. Mass-produced objects that give off appearances are touted, ironically, as having been made ‘especially for you’ (Marcuse, 1964: 92). Individuality is expressed in the unique package of satisfied wants each person has accumulated (Lefebvre, 1971: 107).

Modern advertising emerged at roughly the same time as a series of crisis tendencies were pressing a transition from competitive to corporate capitalism. Capitalist development had encountered diminishing rates of profit, declining opportunities for capital investment in the sphere of goods production and skewed capacities for ‘overproduction’ and ‘under-consumption’ that forced significant institutional and ideological changes. Modern advertising was one response to a crisis in the reproduction of exchange value. American corporate advertising constituted an attempt to penetrate and open up the sphere of Culture (as a reservoir of personal meaning) as a new territory for producing exchange value. To fortify the commodity form, a new layer of value production – the commodity-sign – was made to ride piggyback on the commodity form. Roughly seventy-five years later, we have inherited the cultural contradictions set in motion by the institutionalized competition to transform the sphere of culture and desire into a sphere of the capitalist economy.

Early advertising concentrated principally on the use value of products. As selling techniques became more sophisticated, and as the need for new markets became more pressing, advertisements began to stress the ‘psychological utility’ of their products. Commodities began to ‘appear as personified expressions of human characteristics and relationships’ (Kline and Leiss, 1978: 17). Today, very little space in national brand packaged-goods advertising is devoted to giving information on the use value of products. Even when factual information is given it tends to be interpreted in terms of exchange value. Thus an energy-efficient appliance is touted as appealing to the thrifty, budget-conscious consumer. One acquires not only the practical use of the good but its symbolic properties as well. Advertisers then move beyond trying to persuade you that by buying the appliance you become budget-conscious, to the position where they try to persuade you that because you already belong to the category of budget-conscious people you will ‘naturally’ want to buy the appliance (Williamson, 1978: 47).

Escalating emphasis on the symbolic properties or psychological utility of goods represents a qualitative change in the commodity form. No longer need commodities have fixed meanings determined largely by their use value. Nor need commodities simply be defined by that for which they can be exchanged on the market. A new layer of meaning emerges, called the commodity-sign. The commodity-sign is a composite of a signifying unit and signified meaning. The signifying unit or signifier could be a word, a picture, a sound or an object. The signified is a meaning (a mental image, concept of impression) suggested by a signifier. The precise relation between signifier and signified is not fixed but emerges out of social practice.

The commodity-as-sign operates when images are allied to particular products and the product images are then deployed as signifiers of particular relations or experiences. Suppose we begin with an image of ‘successful mothering.’ A particular mental image of being a successful mother is detached from the total context of being a mother and attached to a particular product so that the image appears realizable through the purchase and consumption of the good: it might be attached to toothpaste, mouthwash, detergent or frozen food. The signified, being a good mother, has been separated from the totality of relations within which its real accomplishment must take place and been transformed into a discrete image. This image is then arbitrarily attached to a product which has itself been detached from the customary relations of usage formerly associated with it. In the process, the product becomes equivalent to the discrete image (e.g., toothpaste = successful mothering) and begins to function as a sign of that image, so that when we think of the product we think of the image and when we think of the image we think of the product. The original totality of the signified slips from view. The immanent relationship between act and context is ‘bracketed’ (it cannot be abolished) and replaced with the appearance of immanence between product and image: the product gives rise to the image. The true nature of the product is also obscured. It is disengaged from its context, stripped of its content, divorced from the labor process employed in its production and arbitrarily associated with the image.

Modern advertising thus teaches us to consume, not the product, but its sign. What the product stands for is more important than what it is. A commodity-sign is complete when we take the sign for what it signifies. For example, ‘diamonds may be marketed by a likening of them to eternal love, creating a symbolism where the mineral means something not in its own terms, as a rock, but in human terms, as a sign’ (Williamson, 1978:12). The diamond is no longer a means of securing eternal love, it has become eternal love. Conversely, eternal love assumes diamond-like qualities. Finally, the act of consumption becomes as important as the thing consumed. We begin to derive pleasure from using up the symbolic properties of goods so that we might be allowed to consume again. We draw pleasure from the image-making process itself, the glorification of the product by associating it with important social qualities becoming our satisfaction too. One index of this is the interest in name brand products (rather than brand name products), the reversal of words showing the reversal of priorities (Boorstin, 1961: 198). Few women’s perfumes were ‘positioned’ by designer name in 1970, but by 1979 14.7 per cent of women’s fragrances were positioned by reference to designer name, and another 5.5 per cent were positioned according to celebrity/authority referent (Lebowitz, 1979: 10). A more general indicator of a heightened emphasis on sign values may be seen in the growing volume of imitations of designer products and the ‘pirating’ and counterfeiting of designer labels.

THE LOGIC OF THE COMMODITY FORM

‘Commodities do not assert themselves qua things but rather qua a kind of logic’ (Lefebvre, 1971: 98). A logic is a framework within which social practices are defined and enacted. The logic designates the cognitive and procedural rules which mediate exchanges between people. These rules are evident in the formally rationalized contractual and juridical codes of capitalist society but, more significantly, they comprise tacit and underlying principles which define what is ‘real’ about individuals and the social relations they form.

In Capital, Marx sought to unravel the form or logic underlying the social categories and social relations necessarily implied in a society based upon the production and exchange of commodities. This was an exercise somewhat akin to decoding a language (Balbus, 1977: 584; Lefebvre, 1971: 204) in which form is given priority over content (Buck-Morss, 1977: 37). The assumption was that disparate practices and institutions of capitalism could be connected and explained by uncovering the underlying form (D’Amico, 1978: 91). Thus, an institution like law could be linked to other social institutions, and its particular phenomenal forms explained by reference to the logic of commodification. Extension of the commodity form into the sphere of law meant a victory for the formal principle of freedom and equality of opportunity. Capitalist development brought about fundamental changes in the law, including

the emergence and consolidation of private property; its universal expansion to every kind of object possible as well as to subjects; the liberation of land and soil from the relations of dominance and subservience; the transformation of all property into moveable property; the development and dominance of relations of liability; and, finally, the precipitation of a political authority as a separate power, functioning alongside the purely economic power of money, and the resulting more or less sharp differentiation between the spheres of public and private relations, public and private law.

(Pashukanis, 1978: 40–1)

Capitalist legal systems do not therefore directly and overtly coerce non-bourgeois classes. The legal system perpetuates the dominance of the bourgeoisie because the logic of legal concepts corresponds to the logic of social relations of commodity exchange. ‘All concrete peculiarities which distinguish one representative of the genus Homo sapiens from another dissolve into the abstraction of man in general, man as a legal subject’ (Pashukanis, 1978: 113). It is in its logic that the force of capitalist law is to be found. Specific laws might run counter to the interests of Capital. Laws controlling the rents charged by landlords run counter to the interests of the landowning class, but the form in which these laws are written and the definition of rights under the law nevertheless reproduce capitalist social relations.

THE ELEMENTS OF THE COMMODITY FORM

Three general consequences result from the commodity form in capitalist societies. The commodity form universalizes social relations. Formalized standards and rules of the market are imposed upon social relations to effect a quantitative, standardized process of exchange. All human qualities are reduced to quantitative measures. The commodity form also atomizes social relations, dissolving traditional forms of social reciprocity. Once labor becomes a commodity, customary bonds of exchange are replaced by ‘the seriality of the exchange of equivalents’ (Brenkman, 1979: 100). The commodification of labor transforms the essentially social activities of producing, exchanging and consuming into a series of discrete dual exchanges of equivalents as each worker uses their wages to meet subsistence needs. Atomization is epitomized in the explosion of the mass media ‘in which the members are connected with one another only in so far as they are isolated from one another’ (Brenkman, 1979: 100). A third consequence of commodification arises from the fact that, when labor becomes a commodity, its value appears to be a property of the commodity itself rather than a relation of which labor now forms a part. A relation between humans appears ‘in the form of a property of a thing’ (Rose, 1978: 47). Social relations, the outcome of human agency, thus take on the appearance of objects. Social relations are reified.

The logic of the commodity form consists of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Subjectivity in a Bottle: Commodity Form and Advertising Form
• 2 Advertising and the Production of Commodity-Signs
• 3 The Mortise and the Frame: Reification and Advertising Form
• 4 Legitimation Ads: The Story of the Family and How it Saved Capitalism From Itself
• 5 Envy, Desire and Power: Gender Relations and the Dialectics of Appearance in Ads
• 6 Commodity Feminism
• 7 This is Not an Ad
• 8 Levi’s 501s and the ‘Knowing Wink’: Commodity Bricolage
• 9 The Postmodernism that Failed
• References
• Name index
• Subject index