‘Mythical thought builds structured sets by means of a structured set, namely, language. But it is not at the structural level that it makes use of it: it builds ideological castles out of the debris of what was once a social discourse.’
Lévi-Strauss1
‘… the peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality in the sense in which that structure and functioning are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we call history, in the sense in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggles, i.e. the history of class societies.’
Althusser, Ideology and The State2
Denotation, Connotation
Denotation is the work of signification performed ‘within’ a sign (q.v.) as it were: it is the process whereby a signifier ‘means’—denotes—a specific signified (q.v.).
When I discuss connotation I am concerned with a similar process but one where the signifier is itself the denoting sign: the sign in its totality points to something else. That something else I term a Referent System. See the discussion of ‘staggered systems’ below.
What has been said in the previous chapter indicates that the subject drawn into the work of advertising is one who knows. To fill in gaps we must know what to fill in, to decipher and solve problems we must know the rules of the game. Advertisements clearly produce knowledge—otherwise the Chanel bottle in A55 could not stand in such a blank space—but this knowledge is always produced from something already known, that acts as a guarantee, in its anteriority, for the ‘truth’ in the ad itself. This has already been shown to be a central part of ideology: the constant re-production of ideas which are denied a historical beginning or end, which are used or referred to ‘because’ they ‘already’ exist in society, and continue to exist in society ‘because’ they are used and referred to; and which therefore take on the nature of a timeless, synchronic structure, ‘out of’ history’, although this structure as a whole clearly does exist in history. It only seems ‘timeless’ from the inside: obviously, an ideology can never admit that it ‘began’ because this would be to remove its inevitability. Thus although systems of knowledge do have a beginning and ending and a place in historical developments, their internal workings must be purely structural, and self-perpetuating not from any movement onwards, but from a process of translation and retranslation between systems, vertical rather than horizontal momentum; so that as with a chemical ‘dynamic equilibrium’, the movement is internal and imperceptible and never constitutes a disturbance. I emphasise this at the outset because my concern in this half of the book is with precisely such systems, those referred to and drawn into the work of the ad, and although I will be looking at these systems as systems, rather than tracing their historical development, I want to make it quite clear that I am not denying this historical development, and investing them with the very ‘inevitability’ that I seek to expose. Synchronic structural analysis is very valuable in areas of ideology, precisely because these areas set themselves up, and function internally, as synchronic structures: but in examining them it is important not to forget that they are ideologies and this necessarily implicates the very tools that fit so well the job of describing and deconstructing them.
Thus when I speak of our ‘anterior’ knowledge that is brought to the advertisement, I have no intention of endowing this knowledge with a ‘true’ status. I am simply pointing out that it endows the ad with such a status. With ‘objective correlatives’ we saw how an object with a known quality was used as a way of transferring this quality. To make the exchange between Catherine Deneuve and Chanel in relation to one between Margaux Hemingway and Babe, requires us to be already in a position of knowing. There is a cognitive outline in which the product is inserted: we exchange because we know.
The assumption of pre-existing bodies of knowledge allows reference to take the place of description, connotation of denotation, in ads: this reference must inevitably take place on the formal level, by pointing at another structure, since the ‘content’ or substance of the reference is the product itself. So the ‘referent system’ is always a connotation because what is denoted is the product. However, there is a circular process involved because having introduced the referent system by means of connotation, it is then made to denote the product—‘place’ it in a system of meaning. This denotation is basically the process described in Chapter One. In this section, we are concerned with connotation. In his discussion of ‘staggered systems’ Barthes says that he is dealing with ‘two systems of significations which are imbricated but are out of joint with each other’.1 Catherine Deneuve is signified by a photograph, but ‘she’ in turn becomes a signifier: for wealthy—chic-Frenchness. The ‘out-of-jointness’ of these two systems is compensated by the spectator’s knowledge, without which connotation is not possible.
A ‘connoted system’ is one ‘whose plane of expression is itself constituted by a signifying system.’
‘The signifiers of connotation … are made up of signs (signifiers and signifieds united) of the denoted system…. As for the signified of connotation, its character is at once global and diffuse; it is, if you like, a fragment of ideology…. These signifieds have a very close communication with culture, knowledge, history, and it is through them … that the environmental world invades the system.’1
It is important to recognise that in no sense are we leaving the ‘realm’ of the signifier: a realm I have already suggested is all-embracing (in the ‘invisible’ perpetuation of ideology). In signification, signifieds are continually being formed as signifiers. The signified ‘Margaux Hemingway’ becomes a signifier for ‘aggressive femininity’ on the level of connotation, and so on. What the ad does is to provide a ‘meta-structure’ in which these transformations may take place. It draws together disparate objects which are initially signified by their place in a system of knowledge, but then made to signify, i.e. become signifiers, in terms of that place so that it is their position, rather than themselves as the ‘content’ of that position, that signifies. Indeed, since they have been taken out of their positions, these are necessarily empty, merely forms of knowledge. Referent systems must be referred to as systems, as whole areas for ideas and not single, specific ‘ideas’.
The gathering of objects which are signifieds in ideological systems, making them signifiers of these systems (hence ‘referent systems’) by arranging them in terms of another structure (the ad), is described by Lévi-Strauss as a kind of ‘bricolage’; a word which derives its meaning from the work of the ‘bricoleur’ who does odd jobs making and mending things, not with new materials, but with bits and pieces left over from previous jobs and constructions. This metaphor is clearly very apt for the process I have described as taking place in ads: they can only use odds and ends from ideological thought that already exists. In this sense ads are similar to the rites and myths which, Lévi-Strauss suggests, ‘like “bricolage” … take to pieces and reconstruct sets of events (on a physical, socio-historical or technical plane) and use them as so many indestructible pieces for structural patterns in which they serve alternatively as ends or means.’2 And a crucial feature of these odds and ends of thought used by ads is that they do not exist ‘independently’ but in our thought: it is we, as subjects, who are appealed to as the providers of these elements. Thus, where a purely structural analysis can become too abstract in areas like this, a sound understanding of the role of ‘appellation’ (see above) and the constitution of the subject in creating/perpetuating ideology can bridge the gulf between the ‘system’ of knowledge (which as a system becomes ‘autonomous’) and the actual, historical and social situation in which it functions. For it is individual people, real people, who are the connecting link here: they, we, clearly exist in time and space, in a changing world, but also provide the arena—unconscious—for the ideological structure of ideas. This only exists in so far as it exists inside our heads. It is therefore through us that mythical structures partake of historicity.
It is perhaps helpful in this context to distinguish between the ‘knowledge’, which, as suggested above, we must have as a prerequisite of the ad’s connotation process (a knowledge which must inevitably be specific and historical), and the system of signification of this knowledge, which as a system cannot have a specific ‘existence’ in one place and consists of a series of formal relations. At all levels, denotation and connotation, signification intersects with knowledge—which produces the movement between levels. But in dealing with connotation, as opposed to the work of denotation, we have to look at the ‘forms’ of knowledge that advertisements employ—that they turn into signifiers. If, for example, previous significations (e.g. Romanticism—which is situated historically) have produced the signified ‘NATURE’, this can be ‘emptied’ and used as a signifier in relation to a product. A product is placed within a hollowed-out knowledge, and draws its significance from that.
The chapters in this part of the book do not cover all the referent systems available to advertising. They do, however, seem very central to an examination of ideology since they all involve relations of transformation—we are placed in reconstructed and false relationships to real phenomena. We misrepresent our relation to nature, and we avoid our real situation in time. I have placed ‘magic’ as a topic between these two because in a way it combines the other two fallacies—transforming our temporal relationship with nature. Nature is our fundamental spatial environment, time (obviously enough) our temporal one. Ideology functions to misplace us in each: advertisements refer to this misplacement as to an inevitable and ‘natural’ fact.