Advertising

A Cultural Economy

Liz McFall

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761942559, 9780761942542
• eBook ISBN: 9781446232484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Advertising is often used to illustrate popular and academic debates about cultural and economic life. This book reviews cultural and sociological approaches to advertising and, using historical evidence, demonstrates that a rethink of the analysis of advertising is long overdue.

Liz McFall surveys dominant and problematic tendencies within the current discourse. This book offers a thorough review of the literature and also introduces fresh empirical evidence.

Advertising: A Cultural Economy uses a historical study of advertising to regain a sense of how it has been patterned, not by the `epoch?, but by the interaction of institutional, organisational and technological forces.

colonising of the real

1

Advertisements do not simply manipulate us, inoculate us or reduce us to the status of objects; they create structures of meaning which sell commodities not for themselves as useful objects but in terms of ourselves as social beings in our different social relationships. Products are given ‘exchange-value’: ads translate statements about objects into statements about types of consumer and human relationships. (Dyer, 1982: 116)

introduction

Semiotic theory and method have been of defining importance to the development of academic approaches to advertising.¹ Pure applications of semiotic method may be rarer now than in the past, but concepts, ideas and methods deriving from the tradition continually resurface in theoretical work, and even inform commercial practice.² For this reason the aim of this chapter is to look closely at how advertising has been theorised within the semiotic tradition, in order to establish some of the insights, and some of the pitfalls, of the approach.

At the centre of the semiotic account of advertising is the relation between meaning and reality. Semiotics offers both an explanation of the relationship between meaning and reality and a method of getting at the meanings of texts. Its success in both these respects is radically dependent on how categories like meaning and the real are conceptualised. If the semiotic definition of these categories is accepted, its account of what and how texts mean is very convincing. Yet semiotics offers only one of a number of epistemological stances on meaning, not all of which are at all compatible with the semiotic account. One of the main aims of this chapter is to review some of these different stances, not in order to arrive at the best way of thinking about meaning, but rather to make the case for an approach to the study of advertising less centred upon the problematic of meaning. The simple reason for this is that while debates about the nature of meaning provide a fertile and fascinating philosophical challenge, in the end they reveal little about advertising. This relates to the overall argument of the book that critical debates about advertising are hampered by their focus on the meaning of texts and products, at the expense of the practices of the industry.

This chapter begins with a detailed review of semiotic theory and method. A variety of theorists have contributed to the development of the structuralist semiotic project originally envisaged by Saussure (1960); but insofar as the approach has been applied to the study of advertising, Barthes’s expositions (1973, 1977) are the most interesting and influential. Accordingly, close attention is paid to how Barthes defined the semiotic project and the relationship between meaning, reality and society in Myth Today. For Barthes, semiotics is a science devoted to the problem of meaning, which, in combination with other sciences, provides a totalist explanation of how social systems function and are reproduced. This overview of semiotics as theory is followed by a discussion of semiotics as method, in a review of its application to the study of advertising by Barthes and by critical theorists like Williamson (1978), Dyer (1982) and Goldman (1992), among others. These semiotic analyses of advertising texts share a preoccupation with the way in which advertising dissolves, captures, abducts, colonises or otherwise corrupts ‘authentic’ meanings, so that ‘reality’ increasingly disappears from view.

The validity of semiotic method as a basis for such large, ‘totalist’ claims is considered in a section airing some of the criticisms which have been levelled at semiotics as a way of getting at meaning. These criticisms derive, in the first instance, from concerns about the objectivity of semiotics as an interpretive method, but also from the status of texts as discrete and competent sources of meaning. Theorists, particularly those working within or influenced by a loosely defined ‘post-structuralist’ tradition, have argued that meaning is ‘intertextually’ negotiated across a range of sites, not inherent within texts. These criticisms highlight some of the problems with textual analysis as a way of getting at meaning, but they also begin to suggest a deeper problem raised by the pursuit of meaning.

This arises because of the status of meaning as a contested category. Alternative conceptualisations of meaning uncover both the dependence of the semiotic account on what can be described as a materialist conception of meaning, and the availability of alternative approaches to the definition of meaning. The main goal here is not to ‘re-re-conceptualise’ meaning, but to describe some of the pitfalls of placing meaning at the centre of critical accounts of advertising. The pursuit of meaning in literature critical of advertising is a potentially limitless task which, whatever it may yield in philosophical terms, explains very little about the commercial practice of advertising.

the semiotic project

Semiotics as science This section sets out the main characteristics of the semiotic explanation. Semiotics offers not only a method but a comprehensive social critique – what Barthes, with Marx in his sights, calls a totalist explanation of social life. Barthes’s vision of semiotics is quite in keeping with Marx’s ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’, which accounts for any phenomena in terms of the determinative action of the mode of production (Marx, 1844: 12). The goal is to outline the ways in which Barthes understood the links between semiotics as a formal method and the overall operation and reproduction of the social system. The key to this is in the status of semiotics as a ‘vast science of signs’ applied to ‘the problem of meaning’ (Barthes, 1973: 119). The operation of meaning is of concern to Barthes because it is intrinsic to the functioning of all aspects of social life. At the most fundamental level Barthes’s method of exploring meaning depends upon an acceptance of semiotics as a formal science. What this means is that forms should be studied apart from their content. The study of forms may be an abstraction, but if so it is justified as a necessary aspect of scientific technique, and because it can provide the best insight into social life.

Less terrorised by the spectre of ‘formalism’, historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principle of totality and History. On the contrary: the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. (Barthes 1973: 120)

The sort of formal, historical criticism that Barthes has in mind is based on the combination of semiology with other sciences. This is to be achieved through mythology, which deploys semiology, the formal science, in ‘dialectical coordination’ with ideology as ‘historical science’, to yield a totalist explanation of social life and its structures of order and reproduction (Barthes, 1973: 121). Barthes’s definition does not stretch beyond describing ideology as an historical science, but his use is consistent with the Marxist conception of a tool elaborating the base/superstructure model, whereby the ‘mode of production of material life conditions the general character of social, political and intellectual processes of life’ (Marx, 1859: 67). Material production is caught up here in some form or pattern of determination with the superstructural forms of ideology and culture. At the risk of doing a disservice to the various Gramscian, Althusserian and post-Althusserian reformulations of the nature and relative degree of ideological autonomy, this is broadly what Barthes has in mind when he describes ideology as an historical science. Mythology is therefore rooted in two distinct but coordinated approaches: the specific historical science of ideology, and the formal science of semiology. An understanding of what this means in practice requires some detailed unpacking of the methodology of this formal science.

Semiotics, fundamentally, concerns the study of formal relations between different elements that are understood to produce meaning. The most basic element is the sign, which is the ‘associative total’ of two further elements: the signifier, or material object and the signified, its meaning. In practice a sign is always object plus meaning, as the separation of signifier and signified is purely an analytical device. Meaning in signs works at two levels in the first instance; the first level is denotative, the second, connotative. Denotation refers to literal, ‘objective’ meaning: a rose is a type of flower. Connotation goes beyond literal meaning and draws upon cultural codes, while still depending on the denotation: a rose is a flower that signifies love. In this system denotation is the site at which connotations can be expressed, such that ‘the first system (denotation) becomes the plane of expression or signifier of the second system (connotation) … the signifiers of connotation are made up of signs (signifiers and signifieds united) of the denoted system’ (Barthes, 1967: 91).

A further relation studied in semiotics is that between signs. Saussure (1960) originally proposed the distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. Syntagmatic relations refer to the possible ways in which signs can be combined together in a chain. In verbal language this is governed by grammatical syntax rules, but other types of language or code also employ syntagmatic or combinatory rules. Paradigmatic relations, on the other hand, refers to the association between different signs that share a function, such that they can appear in the same context but not at the same time. Barthes’s famous example of these relations used the fashion code to clarify how syntagmatic relations were those between different elements of dress which could be worn together – for example, jeans–shirt–jacket – whilst paradigmatic relations existed between those elements which could not – for example, hat–veil–hood (Barthes, 1982: 211).

Mythology involves the study of how these relations operate at a more general, ‘macro’ level. For Barthes, myth is a kind of second-order system, ‘staggered’ in relation to language, the first system. Signs that function as total units of meaning at the first level are thus reduced to mere signifiers at the second. Meaning in myth comes from combinations of signs that collectively express broader, cultural ideas.

We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a mere signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth.… Whether it deals with alphabetical or pictorial writing, myth wants to see in them only a sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain. (Barthes, 1973: 123)

To clarify this point Barthes uses the example of a Paris-Match cover depicting a black soldier in French uniform saluting the French flag. Here, meaning is communicated not through the individual signs in the image but through the transformation of these individual signs into a single signifier of French imperiality. The signifier here then is ‘a black soldier is giving the French salute’ and the signified is ‘a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness’ (1973: 125). It is at this level that ideology is in operation, transmitting specific, semiologically structured historical ideas about the nature of French society. Mythology thus concerns the distribution of specific ideologies through the dialectical coordination of historical and formal sciences. This dual nature underlies Barthes’s account of the relationship between myth and meaning.

Myth has a peculiar function in relation to meaning. Analogous to the sign, the signifier of myth has two components: meaning and form. Meaning here is a full and authentic category made up of the history of the object, which is emptied or ‘impoverished’ by the form of myth. Historical meaning, whilst not finally nullified, is kept at a distance, close enough to sustain the form of myth but far enough to tame and reduce historical meaning. In the Paris-Match cover, for example, Barthes explains, ‘one must put the biography of the Negro in parentheses if one wants to free the picture, and prepare it to receive its signified’ (1973: 127). In this way historical meaning is transformed, through the formal action of semiology, to a state which will not threaten existing social and economic interests. Of particular interest for the purposes of this chapter is the status of meaning as a coherent, univocal ‘truth’ impoverished by myth.

If semiology explains the formal relations of meaning, ideology provides the connection between myth and what Barthes terms ‘the interests of a definite society’ (1973: 139). These interests are conceived in Marxist terms as those of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Through suppressing historical meaning, myth acts in the interests of a definite social order, the capitalist system of production, to ‘transform history into nature’.³ Even where the intention of myth is explicit, it is perceived as natural, ‘not read as a motive but as a reason’ (1973: 140). This naturalising of specific historical intentions is how myth operates as bourgeois ideology. For Barthes, as for Marx, the world pre-exists language as a set of dialectical relations between ‘man’ [sic] and nature, but myth acts to transform the historical reality of these relations into a harmonious façade. Concealed beneath this façade is the struggle and contest of man’s ‘real’ relation to nature, where nature is transformed through labour (1973: 155).

In Barthes’s schema myth obscures the dialectical structure of the real and serves the interests of the bourgeoisie by concealing their existence. The bourgeoisie are made invisible because myth acts to transform bourgeois interests into the everyday, the apparently natural order of things, and in this it is distinct from left-wing myth.

Left-wing myth never reaches the immense field of human relationships, the very vast surface of ‘insignificant’ ideology. Everyday life is inaccessible to it: in a bourgeois society, there are no ‘Left-wing’ myths concerning marriage, cooking, the home, the theatre, the law, morality etc. Then it is an incidental myth, its use is not part of a strategy, as is the case with bourgeois myth, but only of a tactic, or, at the worst, of a deviation; if it occurs, it is as a myth suited to a convenience, not to a necessity. (Barthes, 1973:161)

There is then a clear structural separation of function and intent between bourgeois myth and myth on the left. Bourgeois myth has a natural, universal everyday status, a completeness that refers to all aspects of social order, rendering it unavoidable and inescapably deterministic. This is what Barthes is getting at when he labels myth ‘depoliticised speech’: the disappearance of particular political and economic intentions under a natural, quotidian appearance. Despite Barthes’s assertion that every myth has its own history and geography, this account of the progress of myth stresses a linear top-down dissemination from ‘high’ to ‘low’ culture (1973: 163). There are no competing interests here; there are no fundamental differences between bourgeois and petit-bourgeois myth, as they all exist in the same ‘naturalised’ relation to history. While there is myth on the left it is not myth in the proper sense, as it can not disguise specific political intention as everyday knowledge, and is therefore separate in function and intent from myth proper.

Semiotics, at least for Barthes, was conceived as part of a much larger explanation of the operation and reproduction of given societies. As a method, semiotics is designed around the description and analysis of formal relations between elements that contribute to the production of meaning, but instilled within this is the view that the formal operation of meaning is strategically linked to particular historical intentions, in accordance with the interests of ruling groups. In its coordination with ideology, semiotics achieves this by suppressing authentic, historical meanings that derive from the dialectical reality of man’s relation to nature.

Crucially, there are two different sorts of meaning operating in the semiotic account. There is formal meaning, which is communicated through the relational functionality of the sign, and there is historical meaning, which is suppressed through the action of the former. In this sense signification is understood as a sort of artifice on top of the real relations between meaning, history and nature. This is an interesting proposition, but it begs the question of precisely how and when the dialectical structure of reality started to fade from view. The question of periodisation is not one that Barthes really addresses; there is simply an assumed, distant past prior to the ‘order’ of capitalist societies. Barthes’s semiotics thus evoke the enduring myth of a simpler, purer past where reality was less susceptible to signification. This sort of position has had an enormous influence on thinking about the role of advertising in contemporary societies. Advertising more than any other medium is precisely placed to transform ‘real’ meanings, to make what Barthes would call specific historical intention appear natural and inevitable. In the next section attention will shift to exactly how semiotics has been applied to advertising to make precisely this sort of argument.

the rhetoric of the advertising image: how it works

Because in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional; the signifieds of the advertising image are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible. If the image contains signs, we can be sure that in advertising these signs are full, formed with a view to the optimum reading: the advertising image is frank or at least emphatic. (Barthes, 197...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the quaint device of advertising
• 1 Colonising of the real
• 2 The persuasive subject of advertising
• 3 The hybridisation of culture and economy
• 4 The uses of history
• 5 Pervasive institutions and constituent practices
• 6 Persuasive products
• 7 Conclusion: devices and desires
• Bibliography
• Index