‘The process, then, is simply this: The product becomes a commodity, i.e. a mere moment of exchange. The commodity is transformed into exchange value. In order to equate it with itself as an exchange value, it is exchanged for a symbol which represents it as exchange value as such. As such a symbolized exchange value, it can then in turn be exchanged in definite relations for every other commodity. Because the product becomes a commodity, and the commodity becomes an exchange value, it obtains, at first only in the head, a double existence. This doubling in the idea proceeds (and must proceed) to the point where the commodity appears double in real exchange: as a natural product on one side, as exchange value on the other.’
Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Advertisements are one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life today. They are ubiquitous, an inevitable part of everyone’s lives: even if you do not read a newspaper or watch television, the images posted over our urban surroundings are inescapable. Pervading all the media, but limited to none, advertising forms a vast superstructure with an apparently autonomous existence and an immense influence. It is not my purpose here to measure its influence. To do so would require sociological research and consumer data drawing on a far wider range of material than the advertisements themselves. I am simply analysing what can be seen in advertisements. Their very existence in more than one medium gives them a sort of independent reality that links them to our own lives; since both share a continuity they constitute a world constantly experienced as real. The ad ‘world’ becomes seemingly separate from the material medium—whether screen, page, etc.—which carries it. Analysing ads in their material form helps to avoid endowing them with a false materiality and letting the ‘ad world’ distort the real world around the screen and page.
It is this ubiquitous quality and its tenacity as a recognisable ‘form’ despite the fact that it functions within different technical media and despite different ‘content’ (that is, different messages about different products) that indicates the significance of advertising. Obviously it has a function, which is to sell things to us. But it has another function, which I believe in many ways replaces that traditionally fulfilled by art or religion. It creates structures of meaning.
For even the ‘obvious’ function of advertising—the definition above, ‘to sell things to us’—involves a meaning process. Advertisements must take into account not only the inherent qualities and attributes of the products they are trying to sell, but also the way in which they can make those properties mean something to us.
In other words, advertisements have to translate statements from the world of things, for example, that a car will do so many miles per gallon, into a form that means something in terms of people. Suppose that the car did a high mpg: this could be translated into terms of thriftiness, the user being a ‘clever’ saver, in other words, being a certain kind of person. Or, if the mpg was low, the ad could appeal to the ‘above money pettiness’, daredevil kind of person who is too ‘trendy’ to be economising. Both the statements in question could be made on the purely factual level of a ‘use-value’ by the simple figures of ‘50 mpg’ and ‘20 mpg’. The advertisement translates these ‘thing’ statements to us as human statements; they are given a humanly symbolic ‘exchange-value’.
Thus advertising is not, as might superficially be supposed, a single ‘language’ in the sense that a language has particular, identifiable constituent parts and its words are predetermined. The components of advertisements are variable (as will be seen in Part II) and not necessarily all part of one ‘language’ or social discourse. Advertisements rather provide a structure which is capable of transforming the language of objects to that of people, and vice versa. The first part of this book attempts to analyse the way that structure functions. The second part looks at some of the actual systems and things that it transforms.
But it is too simple to say that advertising reduces people to the status of things, though clearly this is what happens when both are used symbolically. Certainly advertising sets up connections between certain types of consumers and certain products (as in the example above); and having made these links and created symbols of exchange it can use them as ‘given’, and so can we. For example: diamonds may be marketed by likening 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. Thus a diamond comes to ‘mean’ love and endurance for us. Once the connection has been made, we begin to translate the other way and in fact to skip translating altogether: taking the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling.
So in the connection of people and objects, the two do become interchangeable, as can be seen very clearly in ads of two categories. There are those where objects are made to speak—like people: ‘say it with flowers’; ‘a little gold says it all’, etc. Conversely there are the ads where people become identified with objects: ‘the Pepsi People’ and such like. (See below, chapters 1 and 2.) This aspect of advertising’s system of meaning is shown in Mick Jagger’s lines above. The classifications of advertisements rebound like a boomerang, as we receive them and come to use them. When ‘the man’ comes on in one advertisement, the TV watcher (who, it is interesting to note, sees all advertisements as one, or rather, sees their rules as applicable to one another and thus part of an interchangeable system) uses the classificatory speech from another advertisement and directs this speech back at the screen. ‘Well he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke/the same cigarettes as me’. Advertisements are selling us something else besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.
And we need those selves. It is the materiality and historical context of this need which must be given as much attention as that equation of people with things. An attempt to differentiate amongst both people and products is part of the desire to classify, order, and understand the world, including one’s own identity. But in our society, while the real distinctions between people are created by their role in the process of production, as workers, it is the products of their own work that are used, in the false categories invoked by advertising, to obscure the real structure of society by replacing class with the distinctions made by the consumption of particular goods. Thus instead of being identified by what they produce, people are made to identify themselves with what they consume. From this arises the false assumption that workers ‘with two cars and a colour TV’ are not part of the working class. We are made to feel that we can rise or fall in society through what we are able to buy, and this obscures the actual class basis which still underlies social position. The fundamental differences in our society are still class differences, but use of manufactured goods as means of creating classes or groups forms an overlay on them.
This overlay is ideology. Ideology is the meaning made necessary by the conditions of society while helping to perpetuate those conditions. We feel a need to belong, to have a social ‘place’; it can be hard to find. Instead we may be given an imaginary one. All of us have a genuine need for a social being, a common culture. The mass media provide this to some extent and can (potentially) fulfil a positive function in our lives.
But advertising seems to have a life of its own; it exists in and out of other media, and speaks to us in a language we can recognise but a voice we can never identify. This is because advertising has no ‘subject’. Obviously people invent and produce adverts, but apart from the fact that they are unknown and faceless, the ad in any case does not claim to speak from them, it is not their speech. Thus there is a space, a gap left where the speaker should be; and one of the peculiar features of advertising is that we are drawn in to fill that gap, so that we become both listener and speaker, subject and object. This works in practice as an anonymous speech, involving a set of connections and symbols directed at us; then on receiving it, we use this speech, as shown in the ‘diamond’ example, or in the use of ‘a little gold’ to ‘say it air. Ultimately advertising works in a circular movement which once set in motion is self-perpetuating. It ‘works’ because it feeds off a genuine ‘use-value’; besides needing social meaning we obviously do need material goods. Advertising gives those goods a social meaning so that two needs are crossed, and neither is adequately fulfilled. Material things that we need are made to represent other, non-material things we need; the point of exchange between the two is where ‘meaning’ is created.
This outlines and necessarily anticipates ground covered step by step below. By examining the ideological function of advertisements’ way of meaning, Part I, ‘Advertising Work’, seeks to understand the meaning process: this is where structuralism has been influential and helpful. Part II, ‘Ideological Castles’, examines the ideological context in which things and people are re-used in that process to create new symbolic systems. These systems are an ideological bric-à-brac of things, people, and people’s need for things.
The need for relationship and human meaning appropriated by advertising is one that, if only it was not diverted, could radically change the society we live in.