‘For while there is clearly a mask, there is nothing behind it; it is a surface which conceals nothing but itself, and yet in so far as it suggests there is something behind it, prevents us from considering it as a surface’.
J. L. Baudry1
Hermeneutics
By this I simply mean interpreting, but interpreting in the sense of deciphering a code, or translating from one language to another: it is an interpretation along given channels, which lead away from the interpreted object, to a ‘meaning’ behind or beyond it—or even ‘inside’ it. (In a way, Platonism and Empiricism are closely linked opposites: they find a ‘truth’ beyond and in objects, respectively.)
Advertisements enclose us more and more in a world that has to be interpreted: a world of significance. The very look of our urban surroundings takes on a symbolic form: objects supplanted from their usual places in our physical lives, from their material context, take on new symbolic meanings on the hoardings and posters where they are no longer things but signs. It is part of the ‘Imaginary’ function of ads to attempt to merge the two, so that these signs become things (cf. the Calligraphy section p. 91). In coding the material world around us in this way, ads produce a universe of puzzles—one that we cannot move in without ‘deciphering’, one that requires us to stop and work out a ‘solution’; one where we must ‘get’ the latest Guinness joke or pun. As Lévi-Strauss describes, the natural world for the tribal mind is bristling with signs to be deciphered. This semantic universe provided by nature is now supplanted by a symbolic system: one that is invested with the status ‘Natural’. I have already shown how ideology represents the subject (it forms and locates him) in a situation of freedom—one of the corner-stones of Liberal Democracy. It will become clear that in advertising the exclusion of products, people or language, as opposed to their customary plenitude, works to give the subject the impression that he is ‘free’ to produce a meaning for himself. The reasons why this ‘production’ is actually consumption, have already been implicated—freedom remains a position given you by the advertisement.
For, although absence in ads requires us to fill something in, and jokes or puzzles require us to ‘decipher’ and ‘think’, these hermeneutic processes are clearly not free but restricted to the carefully defined channels provided by the ad for its own decipherment. A puzzle has only one solution. A missing piece in a jig-saw has only one shape; defined by its contingent pieces. Since the introduction of certain advertising restrictions, Mackeson have been obliged to give up the claim that their beer ‘does you good’. So now they show part of their old slogan: ‘Looks good, tastes good, and by Golly….’ Now, we must fill in this space for ourselves. We are drawn in, openly, as participants in the meaning. But there is only one correct ‘solution’ to this: i.e. ‘it does you good’. We are referred back to the ad itself (see Chapter 8), to its previous form, and it is from this that we derive our knowledge of what to put in the gap. This is simply an example to illustrate how the ad prepares us and guides us to participate ‘freely’ in its meaning, whether by filling absences, or by ‘getting’ jokes.
Absences and jokes are not fundamentally different features of advertising. Freud quotes Theodor Lipps on jokes: ‘A joke says what it has to say, not always in few words, but in too few words—that is, in words that are insufficient by strict logic or by common modes of thought and speech. It may even actually say what it has to say by not saying it.’1 Thus jokes involve an absence; what is absent is meaning. We must break through to it; a joke appears absurd until we have penetrated to its ‘point’, to what is behind its condensed and flawed surface. Indeed, condensation, one of the essential features of a joke, inevitably involves absence, that of the ‘full’ meaning, the things condensed. And an actual absence in an ad, as in a verbal puzzle (like crossword clues) always implies that something should be there, in other words that something is meant.
Therefore jokes and puzzles, humour and understatement in ads, are cases of advertising where certain gaps, and oblique references to what is missing, put us in a position of access to an absent meaning that may be reached through the ad. As I have said, all ads are signs; but this particular kind of ad gives us the impression that we can actually grasp the referent through the ad itself. By being such obvious signs, where we have to ‘work out’ the meaning (as in the Double Diamond series—see below), ads of this sort seem less like signs, in that they hold out their meaning as accessible, they are themselves a physical pathway to the referent—or seem to be—and this prevents us from assessing the real relationship between sign and referent, finding out ads’ real process of signification. The notion of the mask in the quotation above illustrates perfectly the overlooking of the materiality of the signifier in the hermeneutic pursuit of the signified, the apex ‘behind’ it. We have seen how many complex psychic processes are involved in the work of the ad, and the significance of absences and puzzles in ads is that they give us the opportunity for a ‘conscious’ activity that masks these unconscious processes. They present their ‘manifest’ meaning to us as latent, thereby concealing the real ‘latent’ meaning. In Chapters 1 and 2, I have concentrated on examining the ways in which advertising, as an ideological system, has appropriated systems of signification and psychic processes (which is why both semiology and psychology are valuable in the work of ‘decoding’ ads): these two areas merge where we ourselves become signs, part of an exchange system. But it is important that we appear, not part of a system, relegated to the status of things, but separate, ‘free’, and in control of such systems. In the process of deciphering signs, we are constituted as the discoverers of meaning, and are involved in a ‘conscious’ activity which keeps us looking through a certain opacity in the signifying process, to a message beyond; thus although involved in a hermeneutic and limited ‘deciphering’, we overlook the signifying process itself. Our ‘active’ involvement precludes an awareness of our more complex, unchosen involvement. I have been concerned with the way in which the formal structure of ads, their material surface, functions ideologically in ‘signifying’ the Subject. A crucial part of this is the ad’s built-in concealment of it, by referring to a ‘reality’ or ‘meaning’ behind its surface: the mask ‘conceals nothing but itself’.
In pointing to something concealed, or leaving absences in which this something may be revealed, ads of this sort, although sometimes appearing ‘opaque’ (needing to be deciphered) are aiming at total transparency: they are pretending to have a 1:1 relationship with their ‘meaning’, i.e. between signifier and signified. This denies all the complex workings of the signifier so far investigated: because if the signifier leads directly to the signified it becomes nothing but a window, a self-effacing route to the signified. The idea of ‘meaning’ as behind symbols and forms, directly represented by them, was rejected at the very beginning of Part One. But all the types of ad in this chapter re-introduce this idea. Although ads involving absence, puns, and calligraphy may seem very different, it is important to see the connection in their shared, underlying assumption that the ad’s sign system leads directly to a meaningful reality. It simply represents what is ‘already’ there. This denies that the ad creates anything, or works on you, or diverts meanings—all of which we have already seen ads do. But the idea of signs as representational, of meanings as pre-existing and accessible to us, is essential to the ideology in which we seem to be free agents, able to understand a world which has order and meaning: which in turn obscures the fact that this ‘order’ and ‘meaning’ are, of course, determined by ideology, and are not ‘actually’ and ‘already’ in the world. But when a sign points beyond itself, it claims merely to reproduce a system of things as they are; it appears to have an external authority for its form. All the ads in this chapter lead us to feel we are interpreting reality, that the ad really does refer to reality in a direct and not a distorted relationship. The catch is that signs in ads do, of course, refer to a reality—real things are represented; lifted from the materiality of our lives. But these are set up as a symbolic system which does not represent the real place of these things in our lives: they are re-placed, given a new position ideologically, made to ‘mean’ something new. As I have said before, products are made, as well as consumed, but this is concealed. Ideology is the representation of imaginary relationships between real things: and in these ‘hermeneutic’ ads we discover meanings which, because they involve real things, seem to be real meanings. This is why ideology is so hard to pin down or unravel: because it constantly re-interprets while only claiming to re-present reality. And in the sign’s setting itself up as a simple representation of ‘reality’, it contributes to ideology’s claim to ‘transparency’ and ‘obviousness’.
Since this chapter ends the first half of the book, I intend to reiterate some of the ways in which it follows on from the ideas of the previous chapters, and to show how these apply to the three sections of this one; absence, language, calligraphy. Chapters 1 and 2 give an indication of what is concealed in ads: this chapter is an examination of how it is concealed.
The use of absence and the idea of ‘interpretation’ in ads has been shown to have an ideological function, in that ideology consists of the creation of concrete ‘subjects’ acting ‘freely’. In Chapter 2 we saw how our involvement in ads both constitutes us as subjects, and involves us, as ‘free’ subjects, in the perpetual reproduction of the ideology which ‘appellated’ us as subjects in the first place. Our brief exploration of the field of psychoanalysis showed how the process of becoming a subject coincides with the entry into the world of language, to the Symbolic: since becoming a subject entails a differentiation between the self and others, and this differentiation is also what makes signification possible (see Chapter 1). Language is always a system of differences. So is social identity. Lacan’s work has shown how the subject is formed rather than pre-existent: he/she enters the social sphere and language at the same time, since both these are located in the differentiating area of the Symbolic. The subject is ‘cut out’ from the world in recognition of difference, of Otherness, of what he is not.
This description of how a subject is created is clearly very pertinent to the idea of filling an absence in ads since an absence is also defined by what it is not, by the contingency of objects around it (see A39 and also ads below such as A87). We are invited to insert ourselves into this ‘cut-out’ space; and thus re-enact our entry into the Symbolic. The things in the ad signify us, the absent; they refer to what is not there, the spectator. This is a classical form of representation: a sign is something present replacing what is absent. In ads the play of absence/presence produces a symbolic world where what is replaced by the spectator is formed in relation to what is present—his place is indicated by the things in the ad. Ideology is a concrete system of representations that position the subject: this position may be one of ‘freedom’. And position always depends on contingency. We mean in terms of a set of relations, of differentiation: just as words mean in a sentence. We are positioned both in the ad, by filling an absence, and in relation to the ad, by deciphering it. The ideological illusion of freedom is seen in advertisements’ holding out the possibility of being interpreted: we can ‘consciously’ work in ‘producing’ a meaning. But this is finally the same process as with Catherine Deneuve and Chanel: we make an exchange between what is present and what is absent, between signifier and signified. This ‘interpretation’ is consumed rather than produced—we do not produce a genuine ‘meaning’ but consume a predetermined ‘solution’; since, as already shown, the process is bounded by the ad itself.
But the ‘Symbolic’, the difference that makes signification possible, is always disguised in ads by imaginary samenesses. In an exchange of present for absent, of sign for meaning, ads presuppose an identity of the two—that they are the same. In all the following ads, the relationship between what is absent and what is present is articulated in terms of symmetry: the signifier is a symmetrical reproduction of the signified. This symmetry can mean that the signifiers may totally ‘stand for’ the signified—which is absent but perfectly indicated by what is present: as with the ads in the first section below. This absence, which implies an insertion of the signified, is only an inverted form of the second kind of ad shown, where the signifier is so transparent as to be obliterated by the signified, which we get through to directly. In other words, where signifier and signified occupy a 1:1 relationship of replacement, either one may be absent, adequately represented by the other. These alternatives characterise sections one and two of this chapter. But the third aspect of this 1:1 relationship is that the signifier and signified may be merged in an attempt to collapse the sign with the referent itself: this is seen in calligraphy, making signs and things the same. It is only an extreme example, however, of the tendency in ads to make signs ‘do for’ the things they replace—investing their significance with a reality that supplants our own reality, from which these ‘things’ are stolen and made into alien symbols.
A38 is an excellent example of all that has been said in this introduction. By making ads as sign systems seem to refer to reality, they appear ‘transparent’ and ‘natural’ (see Chapters 4 and 5): we are led through them to the Real World:
A38
A38: This ad invites our participation—we have to do something, to become involved; it is like a children’s game or puzzle. The ad is relying on our conscious action in its meaning. Thus it illustrates the point that we are constituted as free and active: we do not have to cut out the screen; if we do participate, we choose to do so. Furthermore, we will then see for ourselves how the product works.
What we are invited to do, is to fill an absence: we are to provide a content ‘behind’ the empty screen. This content is the real world. It seems to have an existence of its own. Yet it is bounded by the frame of the TV: its significance is predetermined by the ad, it becomes limited to the ad’s terms. So the world ‘behind’ the picture, with which we are invited to fill the screen, becomes in fact only a symbol, used to signify the product, to represent Sony’s TV picture. Yet it also implies that the ad is representing a reality.
This ad makes ‘filling an absence’ into a game: it thus links the ideas of the first and second sections to follow. The absence seems to be filled at random, by our choice, yet is in fact limited by the presence of the TV around it; it is always the presence which provides the significance of the absence. This ad also illustrates the attempt to break through or bypass the signifier and see straight to the signified, behind it: or rather, it mistakes the signified for the referent, since what it signifies is a kind of TV picture, but the gap for the ‘referent’ of the picture, the reality represented on TV, diverts our attention from the signified to the referent and thus gives the ad a transparent status—it denies that it is a sign at all. This is relevant to the idea of calligraphy (where language becomes a sign) discussed in section three; since instead of describing a TV with an excellent picture, in language, the ad attempts to show it, to bring the referent onto the page, and thus collapse the whole signifying process to the level of an ‘obviousness’.
(a) Absence
The whole of the previous chapter was an examination of the way advertisements enter the space of the receiver: how their meaning process requires, and depends upon, their slipping into you. The work of the signifier, as endowed with ‘latent’ meaning, has been shown as very much bound up with the ‘unconscious’ areas of our understanding. But we usually focus on the ‘message’ conveyed by the ad—a message which we feel we receive over a distance—and are unaware of the process whereby the formal surface of the ad, the actual arrangement of things which carries the ‘message’, generates a meaning in a circuit through our own minds. The importance of this is that the ad actually enters us to mean, it appropriates the process of ‘making sense’ in us.
However, as has just been suggested above, advertisements conceal this aspect of themselves from us, by diverting our attention to the ‘message’; and they are even more diverting if we have to hunt around for it. They function most effectively not by making their meaning immediately apparent, but by holding it up as the result, or prize, of a hermeneutic ‘interpretation’ of the ad. Having deciphered its surface, we then discard this surface as we ‘break through’ to the ‘hidden’ meaning. So this entails a reversal of the ad’s slipping into you: you are invited to slip into it, to enter its space, drawn in to participate in a ‘discovery’ of meaning.
One of the most obvious ways in which you are invited to enter the ad is by filling an absence. Now, in a hermeneutic universe, meaning is always ‘absent’, in that it does not reside in things, but must be interpreted through their (limited) channels: it is found in the imaginary space ‘behind’ them. Therefore ‘meaning’ in the hermeneutic sense is always absent from the object to be deciphered: that is why decipherment is necessary. Of course, the catch is that this meaning, supposedly the ultimate ‘reality’, is in fact of totally imaginary nature; yet it is endowed with an ontological status superior to that of the concrete signifiers which are in fact our only clue to its existence.
So ‘meaning’ is always absent from a system that asks to be deciphered. Therefore absences in the signifying surface take on the nature of ‘windows’ to the meaning; (cf. A38); they must inevitably be the areas where the ‘signified’ reveals itself, though as suggested above, this is actually a masking of the signified by the referent. In the ‘mirror-phase’, for example, the ‘imaged-I’ in the mirror signifies the ‘I’, the person looking in the mirror; but yet he is always absent from the mirror, whose signification is a pointing outwards, away from itself, to the referent. I have shown ads where the imaged-person in the ad referred to you, the person absent from the ad. But as, by keeping us busy deciphering, ads defer us from understanding, so they also deflect the consciousness of this fundamental absence by representing it within the space of the advertisement itself. Ads produce internal absences: hollows that anticipate the receiving subject; gaps whose content has to be interpreted within the parameters set up. It is not as if we were free to read the material: by being given something specific to decipher, our comprehension is channelled in one direction only. Advertisements of the following kind reabsorb the ‘self-creating’ process described at the end of the last chapter—by creating a space for you to do it in. While on one level the advertisement surreptitiously, as it were, enters the subject, on another, the subject is given a space in the ad and thereby constituted as an active participant in deciphering it. It is the overt nature of this that is so deceptive; it conceals the meaning we create, by making us seem to ‘discover’ the meaning ‘already’ there.
The hermeneutic function of absences in advertisements can be demonstrated more clearly by the following examples:
(al) The Absent Person
A39
A39: In this ad there is no person, but we construct a self from the data given (the paper, the cards, the ticket, the hat, the location), the correlatives for a particular character; we ‘read in’ what kind of person has all these objects around him. These ‘clues’ signify a person—but he is absent; and so are we. In this shared absence we can easily merge: we can become the absent traveller. The perspective of the picture places us in a spatial relationship to it that suggests a common spatiality (as in all ‘classical’ art); everything is proportioned to the gaze of the observer—us, the absent person ‘meant’ by the picture. This ‘deciphering’ of the objects in the ad, and the potential coincidence of their ‘absent signified’ with us, the absent looker, draws us into the ad, which presupposes that we were at a distance from it in the first place. Yet, for their very ability to point to their ‘owner’, the objects depend upon us; we unconsciously assume their primary meaning, as signs: e.g. that the ‘Times’ is an upper-class newspaper, that Istanbul is an exotic place to be, that dark glasses are mysterious, and so on. It is these meanings which point, as sign-posts rather than signs, to the person who is conspicuously absent. Our knowledge of sign systems outside the ad is called upon; and we are called into it by them.
A similar phenomenon has already been observed in the A21 where the host of the dinner party was absent, at the point where the perspective of the picture opened into the space of the viewer. These ads are almost an invitation for us to reverse the mirror relationship: for us to enter the mirror and become the figure who, by his absence, is all the more like us. This removal of the imaged-I from the mirror-space of the ad makes obvious, and thus renders transparently innocuous, the invitation for us to enter them held out by all ads. Because the mirror space is empty here, no contradiction is implied in our entering and filling it; we can merge with the Other only because he or she is absent. This conceals the difference between ourselves and the Other; we are no longer enticed to an impossible dissolution into the ‘Ego-Ideal’ because it is absent, already dissolved into us. The imaginary unity remains so very imaginary that its imaginary nature is never noticed. It all becomes like a game—hide and seek the subject.
There are numerous examples of this kind of absence in ads—there is not room here to show a great many of them, almost all of which would precisely duplicate A39 in structure. More of them are, however, to be found in the chapter on Time, Chapter 7. Once you start noticing how frequently a subject is lacking in pictorial ads, the elision between you as absent looker and the absent subject becomes a very obvious and widely noticeable feature of advertising. Here is one other of this type, where the hollow for the missing person is a whole room: which is the product.
A40
A40: Here, the angle of the photograph creates the illusion that you are actually in the room, standing just behind, and to the right of, the surface with the tomatoes. You are the missing person. Again there are clues about this excluded person forming an outline like a shadow: accessories which point to a life-style—the Scott Joplin music, the wine bottles, the old-fashioned syrup tin.
The wine and glasses and the four bowls also suggest a dinner party: there is a story involved here. The narrative proceeds across the perspective of the picture, from foreground to background (see Chapter 7): the tomatoes and onions lying right next to ‘you’, the spectator, will be cut up and cooked, then the wine in the background will be drunk, the record played, etc. There is a merging of spatial and temporal movement as the space of the kitchen is crossed by the suggested narrative in this way; yet there is still an asymmetrical relationship between the duration of looking time and the duration of the implied narrative. We are thus given a position in this empty kitchen, both spatially and temporally: constituted in an absence that defines us by crowds of surrounding signifiers. Here there is a kind of ‘gestalt’ where the sum of the ad’s parts creates a totality—the absent subject.
One other point to be made about these ‘absence’ ads is that they involve a narrative. (Narrative is, of course, all contingency.) In A39, someone is in Istanbul—travelling, card-playing, possibly involved in diplomatic dealings, possibly in something shadier (like his dark glasses). In either case, the scene is set for a story. The same is true with the kitchen, A40. This temporal aspect will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 7. The point in this context is that the leading actor in this narrative is the absent you: you are invited to become locked into a place in a closed narrative which has been hermeneutically revealed, and thus appears open. But it is only open to swallow you up.
The Absent Man
Another type of absence is that of a spectator, and this is usually connected with sex. Here, it is important not to confuse the entry into the ad as spectator, with entry by identifying with the person shown, which was the mirror-relationship. In the following example it might seem that there is not an absence, since there is a person in the room; but someone is conspicuous by his absence, and this is The Man. The ‘clues’ in the room signify him; and the woman is simply another one of these clues. In this case, the hollow in the ad is a sexed one.
A41
A41 The Invisible Man: This woman is looking at a man (who may coincide with the reader: he is drawn in): her words are in reply to his ‘what will you drink?’ Her dress is unbuttoned provocatively, indicating beyond doubt that the invisible character is male; the final factor is the chess set visible behind her, implying a second person, an intimacy, yet defining her intellectual quality in relation to the man, as does her decided preference for a certain drink. The message is that she is at home in a man’s world, yet is sexy; and not in a passive way, as is shown by her unbuttoning of her dress. Women (in media) are ‘entirely constituted by the gaze of man’. This woman is alone, is decisive and intellectual: ‘Femininity is pure, free, powerful; but man is everywhere around, he presses on all sides, he makes everything exist; he is in all eternity the creative absence….’1 The man in this picture is nowhere and everywhere, a pervasive presence defining and determining everything, and in whose terms the woman must define herself. She is doomed to see herself through his eyes, describe herself in his language.
This happens literally in an American ad for a shampoo called ‘Gee, your hair smells terrific’. The very product is named in a man’s words. He creates the woman, even her shampoo is a means of seeing (or smelling) her via his perceptions. And in the ad for the shampoo the caption is ‘Gee, you’d look terrific in Hollywood’: the invisible man is heard, not seen.
Occasionally the situation is sexually reversed, but this is rare, and the tone is different.
A42
A42: Here, a woman seems to be necessary to appreciate the man’s luxury and independence. He has ‘got away from it all’ with a drink and a cigar; his isolation, his independence, his masculinity are bound up in this. He, unlike all woman models, does not look at an ‘audience’: he doesn’t need to, the audience looks at him. He is not looking out of the ad. He does not have to seek out, to please; he will fasten his gaze on whatever interests him and at the moment it is his beer. We are sold the product by looking with him, not at him (as with women). The provocative positions of the women in the ads discussed are exaggerated to break through precisely this situation; to attract the free and choosy male.
Thus ads invite you to constitute yourself in coincidence with an absent person, and in relation to certain given objects—one of which may be a member of the opposite sex.
(a2) The Absent Product
We have so far discussed the ‘absent person’ in ads. But since this person is always signified by objects (and above all, the product) in the ad, interchangeable with them in that they represent his absence with their presence, it follows that the other side of the exchange, the product, may likewise be absent from the ad, and signified by the people in it. There is a series of lager ads on TV where the lager itself is never there. In one of these ads, two workers in a factory pick up two empty glasses from the conveyor belt and start ‘drinking’ lager from them. The foreman comes up behind them and tells them to ‘drink up’ because it’s nearly ‘closing time’. In another ad the two men come into a pub which turns out not to have this particular brand of lager when they order it. So they take two empty mugs and again ‘drink’ the invisible lager. Although the product is actually absent in these cases, it is sufficiently signified in the ad—by the two men—by their attitude towards it, by their taste, and so on. There is also a definite space for it to fill: the surrounding presence of the mugs makes the actual presence of the lager redundant. Thus with absence in an ad, the thing meant to fill the gap is always defined, not by a simple replacement but by what is contingent: it is what surrounds the gap that determines its shape. It is the contingency of the replacing object/person that makes these ads differ from others. As already suggested, all ads involve a replacement, they all exchange something present for something absent; what makes the ads in this section special is that they represent the absence in the picture—making it part of a chain of contingencies. It is next to what replaces it.
The idea of contingency necessarily leads to narrative. In ads where people were absent we saw a narrative structure: e.g. the ‘story’ of the traveller in Istanbul, the ‘story’ of the dinner party. Giving the product a place in a narrative always involves this sort of definition by contingency: when it is seen as humorous however, it is because the ‘gap’ in the narrative does not completely fit the product. In the Benson and Hedges cinema ads, for example (where Spike Milligan and others are doing a gold robbery and put a packet of Benson and Hedges cigarettes in the alarm bell to jam it, but then one of them cannot resist pulling it out so the alarm rings and they rush off only to sink in their boat because the gold is so heavy)—in these ads the product is made to fill a place in the story that it does not adequately fill in reality—it is defined as valuable by the story around it and the things (gold, money) shown as exchangeable with it in the story. The joke is the inadequacy of the given cause, in explaining the effect: a discrepancy between the product and its place in the narrative (who would ‘really’ risk being caught robbing a bank just for a few cigarettes?). We can return to Freud’s discussion of jokes as based on ‘insufficient’ words or logic. It is the fact that a Benson and Hedges packet of cigarettes is not adequate compensation for setting off a burglar alarm and getting caught thieving, which makes the ad funny (and indicates an exchangeability of Gold with Benson and Hedges, which is the main point—a sort of pun). And where ‘treasure’ is represented by packs of Benson and Hedges in a chest, the joke is again the fact that the cigarettes are not treasure. The joke involves an absence—the absence of real treasure—an absence that still exists precisely because Benson and Hedges does not adequately stand for treasure and fill that gap in the signification. There is a further dimension to the joke because it is based on the idea of Benson and Hedges being ‘Gold’: this is a joke on the level of the Symbolic, as the gold packet stands for gold; but the identity of packet and real gold is purely imaginary. Where the contradiction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic is made overt, there is always a release of humour, since it means that a sign is made to function on the level of the impossible. Further, there is an element of ‘calligraphy’ here in that the slogan ‘Pure Gold’ is not written on the cigarette pack but shown, by its being pure gold (the colour, not the substance).
These Benson and Hedges ads—which, because of their complexity and subtlety will crop up time and again in this book—unite many aspects of humour and hermeneutics in ads—but centred still on absences, gaps (including those formed by a misfitting). The following, A43, indicates a product by its absence: it is even Lacanian in that the TV has become the ‘lost object’.
A43
A43: Here, the product’s contingency in the narrative is used to signify its quality: ‘The first time….’ Although the TV is absent it is defined by the other objects in the room—the lush plants, the numerous small sockets (they must have lots of electrical appliances), the TV stand. Its absent place is also invested with a sort of glow, an aura that places the lost object in the realm of desire. If the ‘I’ of the slogan (‘I lost a clear sharp picture …’) regrets the loss of the TV (‘pity’), we, at least, have found it—in the inset ‘mini’ ad or alternative ad, at the bottom of the page. (In as much as we identify with the ‘I’ in the ad, we can recapture what is gone, imaginarily). Thus we are given access to presence and absence simultaneously; the absent thing of the picture is defined by the narrative so clearly (and sharply?) that it virtually becomes present, and this is realised at the end of the ‘story’. The only regret we are allowed to experience is that we do not yet possess this TV: so in a sense we are implicated in the narrative in that our future purchase becomes contingent to it, giving the story of absence a full and happy ending.
Since the absence of products and the absence of people are interchangeable with their presence, which we ‘read in’, ads can clearly double the process, in making the presence of one side of the equation contingent on the absence of the other, within the same advertisement.
A44
A44: In previous examples I showed how the ad produces an exchange between people and products. This example shows a much more sophisticated method of doing this—precisely by denying the connection in one way and yet relying on it in another. In A44 the absence of people and products is possible in the same picture: we have a choice of either ‘removing’ the TV and keeping the people, with the world they belong to and signify, or, ‘removing’ the people, keeping the TV and producing an ‘outline’, as it were, demarcated by smart people (who cannot be watching the TV and therefore are a potential absence) in which we may place ourselves. It is quite clear that something in the picture does not fit, it is illogical, and this provides a sort of negative potential where we may insert ourselves.
It is important that the couples watching the TV in the picture (or rather ‘not watching’ it) are somewhat removed from the other party-goers who are standing on a level above them. This is crucial because in ‘removing’ the couple, who by definition cannot be watching TV, we do not affect the place of another sign for wealth and chic, the ‘smart people’ generally. The relation between the two groups of people (one watching themselves, the other watching TV) is once again a narrative one—the couple got bored and have gone off to do something else. The function of this narrative separation is to allow us to place ourselves within the ad, without changing its social terrain. Our place is defined in the play between the absence and presence of the exchange formed by a contradiction achieved through language, between the representative couple and the TV. If they can be smart and still watch TV, so can we: if they are ‘not watching if’, neither are we. The importance of the two groups is that we see ‘smart people’ both watching and not watching. This is very much having your cake and eating it. The central point, however, is that it is enough for signs to be in relation, even negatively, for them to be meaningfully coexistent and exchange values (i.e. since they are smart people ‘not watching’ the TV, the unwatched TV is smart, too). It is this co-signification that is exploited here: a system of interchangeable invisibility is produced. Since smart people don’t watch TV, either they cannot be there watching it, or it can’t be there to be watched. But this exchange, even of absence for absence is still one of value for value. And this implied exclusion of either the people or the product, is produced by the negative relation of the language to the picture.
(b) Language
In A44 it was the language that gave opacity to the ad, as it did not make sense in connection with the picture: smart people who don’t watch TV were shown watching it. Thus it was language that cracked open the absence in this case: it created a gap of negativity in the fact that what was described was pictured in reverse. It was only the language that made a difficulty, an absurdity that we had to interpret; the same phenomenon is seen in A45:
A45
A45: The caption in this ad is ‘She’s miserable’. Here again, the words and picture catch our attention by their incongruity: we are drawn in, by attempting to understand the ‘contradiction’. It is resolved through our ‘deciphering’: we learn how to assimilate the two elements by reading the small print, where the mystery (she looks happy/she is unhappy) is solved.
Thus language is the basic element in creating a ‘hermeneutic’ of the ad: the two preceding examples show how we need to ‘interpret’ its ‘misrelation’ to a picture—drawn in by an absence of logic between the two (which is the definition of a joke). Language is the primary Referent System (cf. Part Two) used in ads, in that we bring our understanding of it to the ad, it is a system of meaning whose frame the ad can use, but does not generate. Our knowledge of it can be manipulated—as in A44 and A45, where our very ability to understand the ‘logic’ of words created the tensions within the ads. So our ability to decipher one system—language—creates the difficulty and opacity which in turn lead us to feel we must decipher a second system, the advertisement. But once deciphered, the language, instead of being a system of signs, has become a sign complete in itself, which can then be exchanged with different forms of signs, i.e. pictorial ones: which is what happens in A44 and 45. We can see language used as a pivotal sign in A46:
A46
A46: Here, the slogan ‘sex has never been a problem for us’ can be read either up or down in the page. Because it is inside the pictorial part of the ad, it functions like a caption for the picture: here, it implies that the couple have no problem with their sex life. But these words, simply because they are words, are linked to the block of language beneath them; and read downwards, the phrase has a quite different meaning: that ‘Minis’ are made for both the sexes. This gives the picture and the block of words the status of signs, because they replace each other—they are exchangeable around the central axis of the slogan. Thus the verbal section of the ad is, in itself, a sign.
Having established that language can function as a sign, not only as a group of signs, it can be shown that ads may use language in exactly the same way as pictorial signs: it can be present, to be deciphered, or absent, to be filled in.
(b1) Words: Deciphering Language, Puns and Puzzles
Language can make very precise references, which we decipher as part of the ‘real world’, since it is the most accessible to us of all the forms used in ads, and we use it ourselves—it almost becomes our speech. Ads can use language closer to or further from our own, to produce different effects—we decipher a certain meaning from the style of the language used, the way in which it is written.
A47
A47: Here, very colloquial language is used, so the product is linked to everyday life, valued in a child’s terms—‘I’ll swop my prize marble for a finger’. The writing itself joins in this significance, as it is a child’s writing. There is also a sort of narrative implied: a playground ‘deal’ between two children. All this is signified purely by the language in itself (= connoted: see Part II).
A48
A48: Here, on the other hand, we see an ad which uses the reverse technique: unfamiliar language intended to convey ‘class’‚ something special; we are told, through the language, that this is something just a little bit different.
But not too different. The ad has made use of a well known proverb, ‘smile and the world smiles with you’. Using a colloquial phrase, as the structure of the ad, keeps the foreign word within a familiar framework, and this prevents it from alienating us. Using an English proverb and a French word conveys the precise meaning desired; that this rather groovy French product will be very much at home in the English context. The balance between novelty and familiarity which is an integral part of the message, is actually contained in the language used.
Thus we see the use of language as a conveyor of decipherable meaning, not in its spoken ‘message’ but in the very style, even written (calligraphic) style (with the Kit-Kat ad)—in other words, it functions as a sign in itself, signifying childishness, or Frenchness, in the above two examples.
This ability of language to refer to particular worlds, to invoke certain areas of ‘reality’ besides carrying a direct message, clearly gives it the capacity for uniting several meanings in one. It is capable of ‘double meanings’ precisely because it does refer to and represent things, areas of life, social circles, at the same time as ‘telling’ something directly. The way you speak ‘says’ a great deal about you. Thus language is not ‘transparent’. The Kit-Kat ad did not merely convey the desire to swop a marble for a finger of Kit-Kat: this ‘signified’ is also a ‘signifier’. The language here described the kind of person speaking, the situation it was spoken in, a world to which it belonged. So like all signs, language refers back to the wider system in which it has meaning—not as a sign system transmitting meaning (i.e. sentences which make sense, etc.) but as an opaque thing which has a social setting and social meaning, like everything else. It is in this sense that the two preceding ads had to be deciphered: the language as a sign-object referred to two worlds. (That of the playground, and that of French chic.)
So the ‘transparent’ meaning, i.e. the meaning carried by the words, and the ‘hermeneutic’ meaning, the meaning implied by them, can be used to create an elision of two things in the words, which refer outwards to these two different meanings: one, the direct ‘message’, the other, the ‘referent system’ or referred-to world. Puns provide a short cut between a product and a referent system—we do not have to ‘get through’ the product to the reality it connotes, because the elision in language of the product and world brings them into a frame of reference simultaneously. This is a further example of the assumption of a 1:1 relationship between signifieds and signifiers, product and words: puns actually condense two meanings to fit together perfectly, in the same space—so they must be symmetrical (it appears). The symmetry is rendered ‘obvious’: it is disguised by the condensation which creates an ‘Imaginary’ unity of two meanings into one symbol.
The fact that puns are an instant connection between product and world ‘meant’ by it (thus giving the product an inevitable ‘meaning’, produced automatically) is shown in A49.
A49
A49: The caption refers on one level to the product—the drink. But in all this series, the people (usually decapitated) are shown wearing shorts; the words also refer to these shorts and the meaning on this level is not so much a direct ‘message’ as a reference to a whole world, where one wears shorts because it is so hot and luxurious. The people in these ads are always nearly naked and have sun-drenched bodies, usually dressed very provocatively. There is an aura of luxury and richness. All this is the world around the product, which the product is meant to signify: by referring to this style of life, as well as to the drink, the pun facilitates this meaning process (which is the basic process of all ads, cf Chapter 1), making it something to be deciphered, to be ‘got’ as one gets a joke.
The writing is, in fact, as a concrete object, ‘getting into’ her, very nearly into her shorts; since it intrudes across her body in precisely the place where her shirt is pushed up—the fullstop of the sentence coincides with her navel. So the writing, as a thing, has a definitely sexual connotation here—which backs up the whole idea of ‘getting into shorts’, and the ‘image’ of the drink.
Thus puns perform the correlating function seen in all ads, but in a way that begs to be deciphered. Condensation is the central feature in all the following examples; and condensation draws together both the denoted and connoted meanings of the ad, therefore making a deterministic connection between them, so that this deciphering involves, not finding a meaning, but finding the (hidden but inevitable) link between two meanings.
A50
A50: This pun unites, verbally, both a physical and an emotional meaning. ‘Do you dare let him touch you?’, the meaning of the sentence taken colloquially, intensifies the physical point made by the other meaning, of whether your skin, your face, is good enough to let him touch it. The two meanings combine to create the idea that if your skin isn’t all right, it would take a lot of nerve to let him touch it. This fear is condensed into a short question because of the pun, and the product becomes connected with the fear, brought in as a solution to it.
A51
A51: This pun relies on the difference between ‘entertaining’ as transitive and intransitive. Is she entertaining because of her sparkling character (which is suppressed when she has to get a meal without the Hostess trolley) or, is she entertaining them, her guests, by providing a meal (on the Hostess trolley)? The slight verbal twist here manages to emphasise, besides the practical side, the woman and her qualities, thus adding weight to the point that she should be able to participate in the dinner party talk rather than be stuck in the kitchen. The practical and the social argument for the trolley are united in the pun.
A52
A52: The ‘More’ advertisement is a good example of using condensation to perform the basic advertising function of linking the product and a quality or idea. ‘More’ cigarette, the product, becomes synonymous with MORE the measure of quantity. On one level, that of our own language, it is obvious that ‘If you aren’t getting more you’re getting less’. By the naming of the product this truism seems equally obvious as regards the More cigarette. Of course More is the opposite of less; and the ambiguity in the words does not allow you to separate the product from the ‘fact’. ‘More’ is made into an absolute, despite its (linguistically) relative quality: you can only have More, or less; there cannot be more than More.
Condensation is a way of translating between absent meanings (the ‘full’ meanings) as I have said above. Thus all the preceding examples, varied though they were, still involved our finding a ‘meaning’, getting through the condensation to its signified ideas.
In the case of the ‘Double Diamond’ puzzle ads, the condensation is not merely that of ideas into words, but of words into letters, so that the deciphering process functions to reproduce the words absent from the ad.
Y Y U R
Y Y U B
I C U Q
4 A D D
The letters are lifted from their alphabetical place, to the status of words in a sentence.
In some cases the pun can work to lift words from their contingency in a sentence and place them as things in reference to a picture. There is an advertisement for a man’s suit with the caption ‘Oriented to embrace both style and elegance’, which shows an oriental-looking woman with her arms around a man. The caption is split, so that ‘both style and elegance’ is on a separate line. Now, the words ‘Oriented’ and ‘embrace’, although they have a perfectly logical function in the sentence about Dormeuil suits, also refer to the woman—they read, ‘embrace an Oriental’, as a sort of caption. She is clearly Oriental and is embracing the man in the suit. Thus two ‘key’ words have resonance quite outside their place in the structure of the sentence. They have become signs on their own, as is shown by the fact that they may be exchanged with the picture. Thus it is ultimately the picture, the woman, that is referred to by the words, though obliquely: it provides the ‘grammar’ that is the structure for their underlying meaning.
Since we do have to ‘get through’ the condensed or dense language, to an ‘idea’ or to a picture, language might be seen as a barrier, an opaque obstacle brought in to exercise our hermeneutic skills; if we end up getting through to the picture it might seem simpler to have only the picture. We can see how the hermeneutic process of language is undone and finally discarded, in the next section; yet the ads in it still presuppose a direct link between the ad and its meaning. Thus the ads in this section have, in their use of language as dense, disguised the actual redundancy of language in their process (since as we have seen, an ad makes correlations anyway, through its visual structure). Hermeneutic interpretations may be made difficult or easy; but their fundamental nature is the same.
(b2) No Words
Since language is a sign, it may be replaced by signs. In many of the ads already shown, while the words do say something, they do not directly convey the meaning of the ad. The Benson and Hedges series provides many examples of ads where the significance is all in the picture:
A53
A53: Here the important feature of the picture is the product: displayed almost without words. The joke in the only three words of the ad is. related to the attempt to produce this picture of the product, the crucial image. Also a part of the joke is the attempt to get the words onto the packet—the name, ‘Benson and Hedges’. In a way, this shows the need for some words in the ad; yet also part of the joke is that we know, before it appears (and would know even if it did not appear) the name of the product. Everyone knows it because of the packet, the visual symbol; it is actually the gold box that mutely provides the image of the ad, and the joke is its struggling to produce an unnecessary name for itself. The ad is about the creation of words and yet could not be so confident of its humour if it were not sure that these words are superfluous to the basic image.
In the effort to produce the third packet we are given the illusion of ‘breaking through’ to the meaning, getting to the point of the ad, but actually it was there all along: in the signifies the goldness of the first box, not the words on the last. So we again see that it is the signifier that carries the meaning of the ad, and that our attention is diverted from this in an attempt to create a verbal signified, words carrying an abstract, ideal ‘message’.
Thus the meaning is already in the ad—not absent from it in the realm of the ideal, to be deciphered and reached through words. This point is made conclusively by the following pair of ads:
A54(1)
A54(2)
A54 (1) and (2): These ads have different captions but the meaning, held in the picture rather than the words, is the same. Both pictures convey an image of confidence, authority, masculinity: the words are superfluous. It would be impossible to say that the ads have different meanings. So it seems that the ad generates the illusion of a hermeneutic meaning, while actually the meaning is ‘right there’ in the ad, not separable from it.
A55
A55: The Chanel ad here realises this fact: it does not use other sign systems but the ad is itself a sign. There are no words at all, except the name on the bottle. This is pure advertisement: the very essence of all advertising. The ad just shows us the product visually, and does not need to tell us anything. (The Chanel ad already seen, of Catherine Deneuve for Chanel, is almost equally silent, deriving its success from the tacit assumption that words are unnecessary to sell this product.)
However, this example introduces a confusion that leads to the idea of ‘calligraphy’: it is a sign, but it is trying to present its referent, the Chanel bottle. Obviously the picture can never be more than a sign for what is real. But we have the impression here of ‘breaking through’ the ad, by-passing the more complex hermeneutic process of language, to a hermeneutic that simply involves the replacement of the present sign by the absent referent; so this ‘transparent’ ad is still very much in the hermeneutic genre.
A56
A56: This ad actually makes a joke in drawing attention to the redundancy of words. It shows how all the language of the ad is merely a false screen set up precisely for us to penetrate to the ‘meaning’, the signified, which is, simply, the product—in this case, Jaffa. So, as in A55, we are directly presented with the meaning: ‘Jaffa’. The idea of ‘the Perfect One’ reflects the Platonic nature of the hermeneutic meaning: the referent, grapefruit, is elevated to the level of the ideal—in the senses both of imaginariness and of perfection. This shows how the referent of the sign is made its ‘meaning’ (signified)—and is thus abstract and concrete at the same time, a ‘real thing’, grapefruit, yet an ultimate, perfect ‘meaning’, the apex of the concept grapefruit: in other words, it is a symbol. The meaning of the ad is grapefruit—and meaning is ideal: there is only one ‘meaning’. But the referent of the ad is all (real) grapefruits everywhere: what we see in the shops. In eliding the two the ad makes real grapefruit a symbol, and simultaneously makes the idea of ‘perfect’ grapefruit seem real. This brings us back to the starting point of the whole chapter: the appropriation of reality by advertising, in creating symbols, transparent and opaque, all offering ‘meaning’ behind posters and pages and screens, rather than in material life.
We have seen that language is frequently superfluous in the hermeneutic of ads, since its referent is absent but can be ‘shown’ directly, without words. But a way round the problem of language and the absence of its meaning, is Calligraphy: the only way to make language signify the product directly is by uniting it with the product.
(c) Calligraphy
‘The calligram makes use of this double property of letters to function as linear elements which can be arranged in space and as signs which must be read according to a single chain of phonic substance. As sign, the letter permits us to establish words; as line it permits us to establish letters. Hence the calligram playfully seeks to erase the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilisation: to show and to name; to figure and to speak; to reproduce and articulate; to look and to read. Pursuing twice over the thing of which it speaks, it sets an ideal trap: its double access guarantees a capture of which mere discourse or pure drawing is not capable. It undermines the invicible absence over which words never quite prevail by imposing on them … the visible form of their reference…. The signs summon from elsewhere the very thing of which they speak…. A double trap, an inevitable snare….’1
Calligraphy ties up the two previous sections on absence and language because it is the way in which language deals with absence. In hermeneutic systems, referents are always absent, but the calligram tries to unite referent and sign, again giving the impression of producing ‘transparent’ meaning, as in A55 and 56. The thing, the product, signified by language in the ad, is made to be the language of the ad: in A55 the product spoke mutely, and in A56 it spoke only one word, its name; but the next examples show language as form taken over and ‘filled’ by objects. The signified product is organised in space according to the shape of language. In examples in the ‘language’ section we saw the materiality of words enable them to function as signs: the child’s writing in the Kit-Kat ad, or the physical shape of the caption in the ‘Bacardi Shorts’. But here the words become not only signs but referents. In Calligraphy words cannot be merely signs, either in their signifying function or material appearance; they must appear to incorporate the referent itself. The masking of the absence of the referent in its represented presence is clearly the furthest you can go in a one-to-one relation of the signifier and signified, sign and referent: their conflation must be imaginary and thus a denial of their symbolic function. (See above, p. 62.) In calligraphy, the sign is apparently formed of the objects to which it can really only refer.
A57
A57 and 58: These two ads have been placed together since they use different calligraphic methods based on the same pun: ‘You’ve got all Weekend to make up your mind’. In the light of Chapter Two, the common phrase that is exploited in these ads can no longer retain its familiar innocence. To make up your mind is to be constituted as a subject: here it is possible in choosing between different chocolates.
In A57 the contents of the box, all ‘Weekend’, are arranged according to a form of language. This functions as a sort of demonstration of why you’ve got all weekend to make up your mind, since the chocolates are arranged in the space of the abbreviation SATSUN, which cryptically covers all of a weekend. The ad represents a perfect coincidence between the ‘material’ space of the product and the temporal space that the product is named after. A box of chocolates allows you to make up your mind in time. And it is the function of calligraphy here to make these co-exist.
The calligraphy in A58 is more radical since the chocolate is present while its name is not: the name of the chocolates in question will presumably be given to us when we buy a box of ‘Weekend’. It is important to remember that chocolates contained in named boxes are themselves named: so that in buying one thing by saying ‘Weekend, please’ we are obtaining access to a kind of hidden language which we only discover at the moment of consuming them. The calligraphy in A58 rests on the desire to replace the objects with their names—which we will discover by deciding to eat them. Words, of course, come out while chocolates go in. Words are produced, chocolates consumed. So even on this small scale, consumption replaces production in emphasis. And actual objects are turned into words, appropriated by a language that claims to be ‘reality’ in being ‘made’ of objects.
Time in A58 is the time of speaking. The implication of a nearly infinite choice in a weekend/Weekend in that the sentence is never closed (‘No, I’ll…’) further suggests that if we possess a box of these chocolates then our speech for SATSUN can be produced entirely from the names of these objects. An entire body of language is congealed into the brand names of ‘Weekend’. We buy our language which gives us freedom to choose. ‘Weekend’ becomes a kind of logos: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was Weekend….’ It provides access to all else. Ideologically this serves a double function: it suggests that language is in some sense absent, that objects can signify without being named (i.e. forms and structures are used, those of language, but we are denied knowledge of their content in language), a suggestion allowed calligraphically. At the same time it is indicated that a collection of names may be used as a corpus of language, a system of differences (the chocolates are different from each other as words are) within which we may choose. We can see why Foucault says that calligraphy is a ‘double trap, an inevitable snare’ since we are required to make a choice, that desirable process, between words and objects. Or rather in a false space occupying the no-man’s-land between sign and referent, we are caught endlessly making up our minds.
A58
The third Weekend ad makes the notion of choice completely explicit:
There is one group of examples that should be mentioned in this context: the Brook Street ads on the London underground. In these, either the hands or the feet of two people are shown, with a dialogue printed above, which we assume to be that of the partially seen speakers. These ads approach calligraphy in that the dialogue is printed in alternating colours which are the same colours as the objects that signify the speakers: blue shoes, blue words. Looking at the ad we assume that the person in blue shoes is the one who speaks with blue language. In one case the coloured speech is correlated with drinks held in the hands of the unseen speakers: a green drink and a pink one are held by absent people, whose speech is printed, respectively, in green and pink lettering. This is particularly striking because there is a further, unstated connection being made; the drinks are destined to go in where the language has come out. As suggested in the ‘totemism’ section and in relation to the three ads above, consumption is used again and again to conceal production, with language as much as with material goods. But here, language is a material thing too. In these ads linguistic signs are both given a materiality in their colour, and, following from that, a referent not signified in the words themselves. A coloured block of language refers to coloured objects which are not spoken of in the words of the dialogue. And the objects metonymically signify the source of the speech—it is connected with them, not with the people, thus the objects are seen as producing the speech. Unlike the above calligraphic ads, the referent is not incorporated in the signs; rather, the speaker and spoken are placed within the same material space which is one of colour. What is spoken of is the job that the bureau may obtain for one of the speakers. But labour is misrepresented in terms of consumption since the coloured objects that the coloured words refer to are already possessed. These contradictions indicate the ideological place of the Brook Street Bureau itself in that it sells labour that is then possessed like shoes or consumed like drinks.
A59
A59: In the ‘White Horse’ ads, the sign and referent co-exist in the brand name. It is the language on the bottle, specifying the type of whisky, that becomes calligraphic, in this case outside the writing proper. The function of picturing the horse itself, in this example, is to make more ‘real’ the natural signification that the brand-name gives the whisky. But the system of the ‘White Horse’ ads as a group lies in the slogan: ‘You can take a White Horse anywhere’. On one level, this whisky is universally consumed and is never out of place wherever you are. More importantly, the ads operate an interchangeable incongruity. In the example here the bottle is present in a quasi-realist fashion resting on a rock; but its excessively foregrounded position in fact both compensates for and makes clear the bottle’s out-of-placeness in the Highlands. What allows it to be present is the object status achieved by its name. A white horse should not be out of place on a hillside. It is the whisky’s name that places it here and makes it the receptacle for the significance of the landscape and its horse—that which is the shared property of the bottle and the landscape. Here, the calligraphy allows a separation between the whisky and the world so that we may exchange the two in a way prescribed by the White Horse/white horse equation. In other examples, in this series, the incongruity is reversed: it is not the bottle out of place in a landscape, but the White Horse (a horse) surrealistically present in a drawing-room. Now the whisky can retain the significance of the white horse as a natural object while through the strength of its own cultural status overcome the oddness of the horse in a drawing-room. What calligraphy makes possible in these ads, which function all together as a system, is a doubling of the significance of the product: the bottle can be placed outside in nature, or the horse inside in culture. But ‘Nature’ itself is a sign and hence cultural, as will be seen in the next chapter.
With calligraphy, the advertisement reaches a final point in its imaginary joining of sign and referent. The analyses in this section attempt to show what ideological function this can serve. But there is a further point to be made. The organisation of the material in the ad, the chocolates in the ‘Weekend’ example A57, is according to what can be termed a ‘Referent System’ (to distinguish it from the referent of the sign). The arrangement SATSUN appeals to our pre-existent knowledge of the forms taken by language itself. SATSUN is a simple puzzle whose shape produces its solution: it means the weekend. Part Two looks at the way in which the subject’s knowledge is appropriated by advertisements, in their appeal to major Referent Systems, like nature or time. These are systems of meaning that can be used, referred to by ads, just as language refers to objects which are what it ‘means’ or represents (—and these two different things are confused in ideology, which makes reference do for meaning). Language is the meta-referent system, a structure of denoting signifiers, while other referent systems are structures of connoted meanings. In calligraphy we have seen how language provides a structure for referent systems while these systems themselves provide structures of meaning that flow through the elements from them as structured by the ad. Advertisements structure outside elements, while in calligraphy, language structures elements within it, like sweets. This shows that the meaning is literally in the structure; language provides not a system of inherent meanings but a system of relations that can carry meaning (in the Weekend ads, this is the product). Similarly, advertisements use already existing structures of relations filled with a new meaning—the product. In Calligraphic ads the structure (language) is very clearly refilled by the ad’s own meaning, which is the product, but this is simply an exceptionally clear case of what all ads do. They work an exchange between meaning and system using structures of relations hinted at by elements from them (e.g. Catherine Deneuve suggests the whole system of the world of chic) but once these structures have been evoked they are used purely structurally (to create differences)—and so there is a permanent robbery, of materiality from structures and of structures from their material. Symbolic structures come to replace and confuse our perception of the real structure of society.