I want to say how and why this book was written: to give it a context. The introductory section to follow gives a basic outline of its content, and explains its structure and subtitle.
I first submitted this as a project for a course in popular culture at the University of California, Berkeley. It consisted simply of advertisements and a formal analysis of each one. But in the course of my analysis conclusions emerged which formed the basis of the theory which I present here. The book in its present form has been entirely rewritten and re-structured in terms of that theory.
But the reasons for its being written at all go much further back. I arrived in Berkeley with a bulging file of advertisements collected over many years. I had been tearing them out of magazines, and keeping them with a vague hope of coming to terms with their effect on me. As a teenager, reading both Karl Marx and ‘Honey’ magazine, I couldn’t reconcile what I knew with what I felt. This is the root of ideology, I believe. I knew I was being ‘exploited’, but it was a fact that I was attracted. Feelings (ideology), lag behind knowledge (science). We can learn from their clash. We move forward as the revolutionary becomes the obvious.
This process can be reversed, however. When I looked at advertisements and wrote my Berkeley project, my conclusions seemed obvious and clear to me; they explained, although they did not explain away, my reactions to advertisements. But when I read structuralist thinkers, indeed, some modern Marxist thinkers, I found my project placed in quite a new context. It seemed as if people were getting excited about, and taking as unusual, certain aspects of structure and relationships. These are essential, but they are not new. Of course relations between things are important: of course systems are important.
Thus it seems that recently, the very obvious (for example, structure) has become ‘revolutionary’. This is in fact retrograde. We should be trying to see new things both in society and in ourselves, our own feelings and reactions. I could not have written this, theoretical though it has turned out in its final version, without that battle throughout my teenage years, and still now, between the desire for magazine glamour and the knowledge that I will never achieve it, that it is a myth. So what made me want it? A real need—but falsely fulfilled: in fact, sustained by its perpetual unfulfilment.
This is personal, because much of my book is impersonal. I value a theory and formal structure of approach precisely because it can be shared. Yet it should also be material and practical. I like to think of the title of this book as suggesting ‘dismantling cars’ or something—a sort of handbook. I am impatient with any theory of ideology which is not tied to anything practical, to the material factors which influence our feelings, our lives, our images of ourselves.
The personal context for this book, which I have given here, does not fundamentally differ from the wider reasons I give below for studying advertisements. Politics is the intersection of public and private life. This book deals with a public form, but one which influences us privately: our own private relations to other people and to ourselves. The ideology of interpersonal relations (the supply and demand of love, for example) is the subject for quite another kind of work. But these areas are influenced by advertising, and it is in them that the struggle against false consciousness is at once most bitter, and most concealed. This struggle does not take place in theory, but is every day all around us; however, to form a theory of advertising (one which I have since found ‘works’ for other ideological forms, television, film, etc.), breaks through the isolation of individual struggle. It can help to put personal reaction on a scientific basis, and its very impersonality is what validates the particular.
Because, for this reason, I believe that structural analysis and a clear theory of popular media are crucial to a political understanding of media, I must acknowledge my debt to structuralist thinkers. But I have used other people’s ideas only as tools: I have taken the tools which have been useful in ‘decoding’ advertisements and rejected the others. I believe Marxists cannot afford totally to reject structuralism: as the subtlety of capitalism’s ideological processes increases, so does the need for subtlety in our understanding of them. We cannot afford to let any tool that might be useful slip through our hands. This is not being ‘eclectic’ but being practical.
Having attempted both to locate my own subjectivity in this work and to place it in relation to current intellectual trends, I must point out that in its rudimentary form it is already over a year old, and is in no way a final statement. It is, rather, an attempt to find a shareable method of dealing with the ideology with which we are bombarded.
I would like to thank Katherine Shonfield and Leslie Dick for helping me out with some of the typing: Janet Gray, who typed the whole of the final copy: Gerard Duveen for finding the last two advertisements in the book and sending them to me in America: and Chris Hale, whose arguments kept me mentally alert and whose encouragement gave me moral support throughout the time I was writing this.
Berkeley–Brighton
1976–7