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III: Advertising, by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Verso, New York, NY, 1996). pp 164-196. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents] |
Discourse on Objects and Discourse-As-Object
Any analysis of the system of objects must ultimately imply an analysis of discourse
about objects -- that is to say, an analysis of promotional `messages' (comprising
image and discourse). For advertising is not simply an adjunct to the system of
objects; it cannot be detached therefrom, nor can it be restricted to its `proper'
function (there is no such thing as advertising strictly confined to the supplying
of information). Indeed, advertising is now an irremovable aspect of the system
of objects precisely by virtue of its disproportionateness. This lack of proportion is
the `functional' apotheosis of the system. Advertising in its entirety constitutes a
useless and unnecessary universe. It is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to
production or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral
part in the system of objects, not merely because it relates to consumption but also
because it itself becomes an object to be consumed. A clear distinction must be
drawn in connection with advertising's dual status as a discourse on the object and
as an object in its own right. It is as a useless, unnecessary discourse that it comes
to be consumable as a cultural object. What achieves autonomy and fulfilment
Advertising in the Indicative and in the Imperative
Advertising sets itself the task of supplying information about particular products
and promoting their sale. In principle this `objective' function is still its fundamental
purpose.
[141]
The supplying of information has nevertheless given way to persuasion
-- even to what Vance Packard calls `hidden persuasion', the aim of which is a
completely managed consumption. The supposed threat this poses of a totalitarian
conditioning of man and his needs has provoked great alarm. Studies have shown,
however, that advertising's pervasive power is not as great as had been supposed.
A saturation point is in fact soon reached: competing messages tend to cancel each
other out, and many claims fail to convince on account of their sheer excessiveness.
Moreover, injunctions and exhortations give rise to all kinds of counter-motivations
and resistances, whether rational or irrational, among them the refusal of passivity,
the desire not to be `taken over', negative reactions to hyperbole, to repetition, and
so on. In short, the discourse of advertising is just as likely to dissuade as to
persuade, and consumers, though not entirely immune, appear to exercise a good
deal of discretion when it comes to the advertising message.
Having said this, let us not be misled by the avowed aim of that message;
while advertising may well fail to sell the consumer on a particular brand -- Omo,
Just as the object's function may ultimately amount merely to the provision
of a justification for the latent meanings that the object imposes, so in advertising
(and all the more so inasmuch as it is the more purely connotative system) the
product designated -- that is, its denotation or description -- tends to be merely an
effective mask concealing a confused process of integration.
So even though we may be getting better and better at resisting advertising
in the imperative, we are at the same time becoming ever more susceptible to advertising
in the indicative -- that is, to its actual existence as a product to be consumed at
a secondary level, and as the clear expression of a culture. It is in this sense that we
do indeed `believe' in advertising: what we consume in this way is the luxury of a
society that projects itself as an agency for dispensing goods and `transcends itself
in a culture. We are thus taken over at one and the same time by an established
agency and by that agency's self-image.
The Logic of Father Christmas
Those who pooh-pooh the ability of advertising and of the mass media in general
to condition people have failed to grasp the peculiar logic upon which the media's
efficacy reposes. For this is not a logic of propositions and proofs, but a logic of
fables and of the willingness to go along with them. We do not believe in such
fables, but we cleave to them nevertheless. Basically, the `demonstration' of a
product convinces no one, but it does serve to rationalize its purchase, which in any
case either precedes or overwhelms all rational motives. Without `believing' in the
product, therefore, we believe in the advertising that tries to get us to believe in it. We are
for all the world like children in their attitude towards Father Christmas. Children
hardly ever wonder whether Father Christmas exists or not, and they certainly
never look upon getting presents as an effect of which that existence is the cause:
rather, their belief in Father Christmas is a rationalizing confabulation designed to
extend earliest infancy's miraculously gratifying relationship with the parents
Advertising functions in much the same way. Neither its rhetoric nor even the
informational aspect of its discourse has a decisive effect on the buyer. What the
individual does respond to, on the other hand, is advertising's underlying leitmotiv
of protection and gratification, the intimation that its solicitations and attempts to
persuade are the sign, indecipherable at the conscious level, that somewhere there
is an agency (a social agency in the event, but one that refers directly to the image of
the mother) which has taken it upon itself to inform him of his own desires, and to
foresee and rationalize these desires to his own satisfaction. He thus no more
`believes' in advertising than the child believes in Father Christmas, but this in no
way impedes his capacity to embrace an internalized infantile situation, and to act
accordingly. Herein lies the very real effectiveness of advertising, founded on its
obedience to a logic which, though not that of the conditioned reflex, is nonetheless
very rigorous: a logic of belief and regression.
[143]
Society as Maternal Agency: Airborne's Armchair
Sometimes this mythology is quite explicit in the discourse of advertising.
[144]
Consider a flyer put out by Airborne, specialists in armchairs, sofas and seating in
general. `True Comfort Cannot Be Improvised', runs the title. We are being warned
here against the easy solution: comfort is not passivity but has to be actively
`created' if passivity is to become possible. The text which follows immediately
stresses Airborne's modern and scientific virtues:
A good seat is a combination of four different factors: aesthetics, comfort,
sturdiness and finish.... The creation of a masterpiece of this kind calls for
something beyond the skills of the traditional craftsman. Not that those skills
are now dispensable; on the contrary, they still lie at the very heart of the
furniture maker's trade....
The past is thus the guarantee of a kind of moral security: tradition is at once
preserved and surpassed by the industrial revolution. But `in this day and age a
good seat has to be manufactured according to the means and methods decreed by
the economics of the modern world'. In other words, this armchair cannot be just
an armchair. Its purchaser must feel himself at one with a technological society
(a society, of course, whose norms are nevertheless kept secret from him). The
armchair makes him into a citizen of industrial society.
This company, now meeting the comfort needs of thousands of French households,
has become an entire industry in its own right, complete with its
own research departments, engineers and creative artists, not to mention its
machines, its stocks of raw materials, its after-sales service agencies, its sales
network, etc.
The consumer needs to be fully aware that the industrial revolution took place
for his benefit, that today all the structures of society are embodied in the qualities
of this armchair, qualities which themselves come together in his own individual
personality. In this way a whole universe is constituted which from his point
This ideological discourse extends even to consideration of materials and
forms. Airborne's advertising evokes `new materials which effectively embody the
style of today'. `After the Stone Age and the Age of Wood, we are now living, as
far as furnishing is concerned, in the Steel Age.' `Steel provides the structure.' And
so on. But though steel may be exciting, it is also a rather hard substance, rather
too closely associated with effort, with the necessity for the individual to adapt. So,
sure enough, it has to be hastily transfigured, rendered pliant -- the `structure' has
to be humanized:
Though solid and unyielding, steel is suppleness itself when it is transformed
into a set of springs. Once overlaid with genuine latex foam, it is soft and
comfortable. And aesthetic too -- because it may be wedded perfectly [again!]
with the warmth of today's fabrics.
Structure is always violent, and distressingly so. Even at the level of the object it
threatens to compromise the individual's relationship to society. To pacify reality,
an appearance of peacefulness must be preserved. In order to please you, the
Airborne armchair is thus transmuted by a seemingly natural process from steel to
fabric, becoming a mirror of strength and tranquillity. And of course, to complete
the picture, `aesthetics' envelops `structure', and celebrates the definitive wedding
of the object to your `personality'. Here again a rhetoric of substances is the vehicle
of social conditioning. In this structure become form, in this quieted tenacity, in this
ubìquitous `nuptial' synthesis with its interplay between contentment and the
memory of a will, in this phallic phantasy of violence (steel) which is, as it were,
calmed and lulled by its own image -- surely it is impossible not to discern, in all
these, a pattern of global collusion with the world, implying a complete resolution
of all tensions in a maternal and harmonious society.
It is not, therefore, that advertising `alienates' or `mystifies' us with its claims,
words or images; rather, we are swayed by the fact that `they' are sufficiently concerned
to want to address us, to show us things, to take an interest in us. Riesman
[145]
and other critical theorists of American society have clearly shown how products
are increasingly judged not by their intrinsic value but instead by the concern for
one's existence that they imply on the part of the manufacturer, by the solicitude
the advertiser demonstrates for the public.
[146]
Individuals are gradually conditioned
by their ceaseless consumption -- at once gratifying and frustrating, glorious and
guilt-inducing -- of the social body in its totality.
What advertising bestows upon objects, the quality without which `they
We should remember, too, that in a society where everything is strictly subject
to the laws of selling and profit, advertising is the most democratic of products, the
only one that is `free' -- and `free' to all. Objects are always sold; only advertising
The Festival of Buying Power
This gratificatory, infantilizing function of advertising, which is the basis of our
belief in it and hence of our collusion with the social entity, is equally well
illustrated by its playful aspect. We are certainly susceptible to the reassurance
advertising offers by supplying an image that is never negative, but we are equally
affected by advertising as a fantastic manifestation of a society capable of swamping
the mere necessity of products in superfluous images: advertising as a show
(again, the most democratic of all), a game, a mise en scène. Advertising serves as
a permanent display of the buying power, be it real or virtual, of society overall.
Whether we partake of it personally or not, we all live and breathe this buying
power. By virtue of advertising, too, the product exposes itself to our view and
invites us to handle it; it is, in fact, eroticized -- not just because of the explicitly
sexual themes evoked
[151]
but also because the purchase itself, simple appropriation,
is transformed into a manoeuvre, a scenario, a complicated dance which endows
a purely practical transaction with all the traits of amorous dalliance: advances,
rivalry, obscenity, flirtation, prostitution -- even irony. The mechanics of buying
(which is already libidinally charged) gives way to a complete eroticization of
An essential regulatory function is evident here. Like the dream, advertising
defines and redirects an imaginary potentiality. Like the dream's, its practical
character is strictly subjective and individual.
[153]
And, like the dream, advertising is
devoid of all negativity and relativity: with never a sign too many nor a sign too
few, it is essentially superlative and totally immanent in nature.
[154]
Our night-time
dreams are uncaptioned, whereas the one that we live in our waking hours via the
city's hoardings, in our newspapers and on our screens, is covered with captions,
with multiple subtitling. Both, however, weave the most colourful of narratives
from the most impoverished of raw materials, and just as the function of nocturnal
dreams is to protect sleep, so likewise the prestige of advertising and consumption
serves to ensure the spontaneous absorption of ambient social values and the
regression of the individual into social consensus.
Festival, immanence, positivity -- to use such terms amounts to saying that
in the first instance advertising is itself less a determinant of consumption than an object
of consumption. What would an object be today if it were not put on offer both in the
mode of discourse and image (advertising) and in the mode of a range of models
(choice)? It would be psychologically nonexistent. And what would modern citizens
be if objects and products were not proposed to them in the twin dimensions
Gratification/Repression: A Two-Sided Agency
We need to discern the true imperative of advertising behind the gentle litany
of the object: `Look how the whole of society simply adapts itself to you and your
desires. It is therefore only reasonable that you should become integrated into
that society.' Persuasion is hidden, as Vance Packard says, but its aim is less the
`compulsion' to buy, or conditioning by means of objects, than the subscription
In reality advertising's careful omission of objective processes and the social
history of objects is simply a way of making it easier, by means of the imagination
as a social agency, to impose the real order of production and exploitation. This
is where, behind the psychogogy of advertising, it behoves us to recognize the
demagogy of a political discourse whose own tactics are founded on a splitting into
two -- on the splitting of social reality into a real agency and an image, with the
first disappearing behind the second, becoming indecipherable and giving way
to nothing more than a pattern of absorption into a maternal world. When advertising
tells you, in effect, that `society adapts itself totally to you, so integrate
yourself totally into society', the reciprocity thus invoked is obviously fake: what
adapts to you is an imaginary agency, whereas you are asked in exchange to adapt
to an agency that is distinctly real. Via the armchair that `weds the shape of your
body', it is the entire technical and political order of society that weds you and
takes you in hand. Society assumes a maternal role the better to preserve the rule
This effectiveness is reinforced by the status accorded the signs advertising
manipulates and the process whereby these are `read'.
Signs in advertising speak to us of objects, but they never (or scarcely ever)
explain those objects from the standpoint of a praxis: they refer to objects as to a
world that is absent. These signs are literally no more than a `legend': they are there
primarily for the purpose of being read. But while they do not refer to the real
world, neither do they exactly replace that world: their function is to impose a
specific activity, a specific kind of reading. If they did carry information, then a
full reading, and a transition to the practical realm, would occur. But their role is a
different one: to draw attention to the absence of what they designate. To this
extent the reading of such signs is intransitive -- organized in terms of a specific
system of satisfaction which is, however, perpetually determined by the absence of
reality, that is to say, by frustration.
The image creates a void, indicates an absence, and it is in this respect that
it is `evocative'. It is deceptive, however. It provokes a cathexis which it then
immediately short-circuits at the level of reading. It focuses free-floating wishes
upon an object which it masks as much as reveals. The image disappoints: its
function is at once to display and simultaneously to disabuse. Looking is based on a
presumption of contact; the image and its reading are based on a presumption
of possession. Thus advertising offers neither a hallucinated satisfaction nor a
practical mediation with the world. Rather, what it produces is dashed hopes:
We must not forget that the image serves in this way to avoid reality and
create frustration, for only thus can we grasp how it is that the reality principle
omitted from the image nevertheless effectively re-emerges therein as the continual repression
of desire (as the spectacularization, blocking and dashing of that desire and,
ultimately, its regressive and visible transference onto an object). This is where the
profound collusion between the advertising sign and the overall order of society
becomes most evident: it is not in any mechanical sense that advertising conveys
the values of society; rather, more subtly, it is in its ambiguous presumptive function
-- somewhere between possession and dispossession, at once a designation and
an indication of absence -- that the advertising sign `inserts' the social order into
its system of simultaneous determination by gratification on the one hand and
repression on the other.
[157]
Gratification, frustration -- two indivisible aspects of social integration. Every
advertising image is a key, a legend, and as such reduces the anxiety-provoking
polysemy of the world. But in the name of intelligibility the image becomes impoverished,
cursory; inasmuch as it is still susceptible of too many interpretations,
its meaning is further narrowed by the addition of discourse -- of a subtitle, as it
The Presumption of Collectivity
Pax Washing Powder
It is not only the objective processes of production and of the market that are passed
over in silence by advertising, but also real society and its contradictions.
Advertising plays on the presence/absence of an overall social body -- on a
presumption of collectivity. The collective realm is imaginary in advertising, but its
virtual consumption suffices to ensure serial conditioning. Take, for instance, a
poster for Pax Washing Powder. We are shown an immense faceless crowd waving
immaculate white flags (Pax whiteness) and gazing towards an idol in their midst
consisting of a gigantic carton of Pax, reproduced with photographic accuracy,
whose size relative to the crowd is approximately that of the United Nations
building in New York. Of course a whole ideology of honesty and peace underpins
Promotional Contests
Every year certain newspapers feature long-running competitions that conclude
with the following decisive question: `How many correct solutions will we receive
in this contest?' The function of this simple question is to reintroduce pure chance,
to whose elimination the contestants have by now been applying their minds for
several weeks. Any real competition is thus immediately reduced to the kind of
magical choosing that characterizes lotteries. What is interesting, however, is that
the chance involved here is of no ordinary kind. It is neither the God nor the fate
of earlier times, but a nonce-collectivity, a contingent and arbitrary group (the
sum total of people liable to enter or win the contest) which becomes the agency
GARAP
We consume the product through the product itself, but we consume its meaning
through advertising. Picture for a moment our modern cities stripped of all signs,
their walls blank as an empty consciousness. And imagine that all of a sudden the
single word GARAP appears everywhere, written on every wall. A pure signifier,
having no referent, signifying only itself, it is read, discussed, interpreted in a
vacuum, signified despite itself -- in short, consumed qua sign. What indeed can it
signify except for the society itself that is capable of generating such a sign? By
virtue of its very lack of signification it mobilizes an entire imaginary collectivity.
It comes to stand for a whole society. In a way people end up `believing' in GARAP.
They consider it the mark of advertising's omnipotence, and judge that if only
GARAP would assume the specificity of a product, then that product would meet
with an immediate and sweeping success. Nothing, however, could be less certain,
and the cunning of the advertisers lies precisely in the fact that they never reveal
this. Were a specific referent to be made explicit, individual resistance would
certainly come back into play. But consent (even ironic consent) thus founded on
faith in a pure sign is self-creating. Advertising's true referent is here apparent in
its purest form: like GARAP, advertising is mass society itself, using systematic,
Advertising is a plebiscite whereby mass consumer society wages a perpetual
campaign of self-endorsement.
[159]
A New Humanism?
Serial Conditioning
It should now be easier to grasp the nature of the system of conditioning that is at
work behind the themes of competition and `personalization'. That same ideology
of competition which formerly, under the banner of `freedom', constituted the
golden rule of production has now been transposed without restrictions into
the realm of consumption. Thanks to thousands of marginal distinctions and the
often purely formal diffraction of a single product by means of conditioning,
competition has become more aggravated on every plane, opening up the immense
range of possibilities of a precarious freedom -- indeed, of the ultimate freedom,
namely the freedom to choose the objects which will distinguish one from other
people.
[160]
In fact the ideology of competition is arguably bound to fall here into the
toils of the same process, and hence to meet the same fate, as it did in the realm
of production: although consumption may still take itself for a sort of liberal
progression in which personal expression has a part to play, whereas production is
We in Europe still want what others do not have: in the West, at any rate (the
question having been deferred in the Eastern bloc), we are still at the competitive,
the heroic stage in the choice and use of objects. The regular replacement and cyclical
synchronization of models have not yet established themselves here as they have in
the United States.
[161]
Should we attribute this to psychological resistance, or perhaps
to the strength of tradition? Probably the cause is a simpler one: the majority of
Western Europe's population is still a long way from achieving the sort of economic
status that makes it fundamentally possible, with all objects of consumption aligned
on the same maximal standard, for a single repertoire of models to hold sway, for
diversity to become in effect less important than owning the `latest' model, which is
the essential stamp of social worth. In the United States 90 per cent of the population
aspire solely to the possession of what others possess, and from one year to the
next they massively choose the latest model, which is in every single respect the best.
A solid class of `normal' consumers has thus been constituted which, for all practical
purposes, coincides with the entire population. Although we have not yet reached
that stage in Europe, we are already very well able, on account of the irreversible
pressure exerted by the American model, to perceive the ambiguity of advertising:
it provokes us into competing, but at the same time the imaginary competition thus set
in motion already bespeaks a profound monotony, a demand for uniformity, the sinking
of the consuming masses into a regressive contentment. It tells us to `Buy this,
because it is like nothing else' (`the meat of the elite', `the cigarette of the happy few',
etc.) -- but it also tells us to `Buy this because everyone else uses it!'
[162]
Nor is there any
real contradiction here. It is quite possible for each person to feel unique even though
We may well conclude that the destiny of consumer society (thanks not to
Machiavellian technocrats but, rather, to the simple structural play of competition)
is the functionalization of the consumer himself, the psychological monopolization
of all needs -- a unanimity in consumption which will at last harmonize with the
concentration and unbridled interventionism that govern production.
Freedom by Default
Moreover, the ideology of competition is now giving way everywhere to a
`philosophy' of personal accomplishment. Society is better integrated, so instead
of vying for possession of things, individuals seek self-fulfilment, independently
of one another, through what they consume. The leitmotiv of discriminative
competition has been replaced by that of personalization for all. Meanwhile,
advertising has transformed itself from a commercial practice into a theory of the
praxis of consumption, a theory which now crowns the whole social edifice.
Expositions of this theory are to be found in the works of American advertising
men (Ernest Dichter, Pierre Martineau, et alii). The thesis is simple: (1) the consumer
society (objects, products, advertising) offers the individual the possibility,
for the first time in history, of total liberation and self-realization; (2) transcending
consumption pure and simple in the direction of individual and collective self-expression,
the system of consumption constitutes a true language, a new culture.
The `nihilism' of consumption is thus effectively countered by a `new humanism'
of consumption.
As to the first point the question of personal fulfilment, Ernest Dichter,
director of the Institute for Motivational Research, does not hesitate to define the
problematics of the `new man' as follows:
The problem confronting us now is how to allow the average American to feel
moral even when he is flirting, even when he is spending money, even when
he is buying a second or third car. One of the most difficult tasks created by
our current affluence is sanctioning and justifying people's enjoyment of it,
convincing them that to take pleasure in their lives is moral and not immoral.
Permission given the consumer freely to enjoy life, and proof that he has the
right to surround himself with products that enrich his existence and give him
pleasure -- these should be the cardinal themes of all advertising and of all
attempts to promote sales.
[164]
... whenever a person in one socioeconomic category aspires to a different
category, a `tension differential' is developed within him and this leads to
frustration and action. Where a product promises to help a group overcome
this tension, achieve its level of aspiration in whatever area it may fall, that
product has a chance of success.
[166]
A New Language?
Let us now consider the second claim mentioned above: does the system of objects-cum-advertising
really constitute a language? The whole philosophy of idealized
consumption is based on the replacement of live, conflictual human relationships
by a `personalized' relationship to objects. `Any buying process', Pierre Martineau
tells us, `is an interaction between the personality of the individual and the so-called
"personality" of the product itself.'
[167]
The pretence is that products are now so
differentiated and so numerous that they have been transformed into complex
beings, and that consequently the relationship involved in buying and consuming
is equivalent to any human relationship.
[168]
But this is the whole point: is there a living
syntax here? Do objects inform needs and structure them in a new way? And,
reciprocally, do needs inform new social structures through the mediation of objects
and their production? If so, then we may speak of language in this connection; if
not, then all this is nothing but the self-serving idealizations of managers.
Structure and Demarcation: Brands
Buying today bears no resemblance to a free or living form of exchange. It is a
predetermined operation in which two strictly incompatible systems confront one
another, one being the mobile, inconsistent individual, with his needs, his conflicts
and his negativity; the other being the codified, classified, discontinuous and
Let me try to explain in more detail. At the stage of craft production, objects
reflected the contingency, the uniqueness, of needs. The two systems were adapted
to one another, yet their combination lacked coherence -- indeed, the only coherence
was the relative one of needs, which were mobile and contingent: objective technological
progress did not exist. With the advent of the industrial era, manufactured
products acquired a new coherence, one bestowed on them by the organization
of technology and economic structures, while the system of needs now became less
consistent than the system of objects. The latter, by imposing this new coherence,
was able to mould a civilization.
[169]
At the same time, as Lewis Mumford notes,
`the machine has replaced an unlimited series of variables' -- i. e. objects `made to
measure', adapted to specific needs -- `with a limited number of constraints'.
[170]
This
development does undoubtedly lay the foundations for a new language: internal
structuring, simplification, transitions to the bounded and the discontinuous, the
constitution of technemes and their growing convergence. And if craft objects may
be said to be on a par with words or speech [parole], it must be acknowledged that
industrial technology institutes a linguistic system [langue]. But a linguistic system
is not language in the full sense [langage]:
[171]
it is not the material structure of the
motorcar that gives that car its voice, but the form, colour, contours, accessories or
`social standing' of the car as an object. And what we have here is a Tower of Babel,
for each speaks in its own idiom. Even so, serial production contrives, by means
If the industrial organization of technology acquires the power to mould
our civilization, it does so, then, in a dual and contradictory way: by virtue of its
coherence but also by virtue of its incoherence. By virtue, at a `high level', of its structural
(technological) coherence, but also, `at the base', by virtue of the astructural
(but controlled) incoherence of the mechanics of the commercialization of products
and the satisfaction of needs. It is clear, therefore, that whereas language, because it
is neither consumed nor owned in any true sense by those who speak it, always
retains the possibility of access to the `essential', to a syntax of exchange (structured
communication), the system of objects-cum-advertising, for its part, overwhelmed
by the inessential, by a destructured universe of needs, can satisfy such needs only
in piecemeal fashion and can never found new structures of social exchange.
Here, once again, is Pierre Martineau:
There is no simple relationship between kinds of buyers and kinds of cars, however.
Any human is a complex of many motives... [whose] meanings may vary
in countless combinations. Nevertheless the different makes and models are
seen as helping people give expression to their own personality dimensions.
The conservative in car choice and behavior wishes to convey such ideas
as dignity, reserve, maturity, seriousness.... Another definite series of car
personalities is selected by the people wanting to make known their middle-of-the-road
moderation, their being fashionable.... Further along the range
of personalities are the innovators and ultramoderns....
[172]
Both the aforementioned functions entail the solicitation, impressment and
classification of the personal and social world -- a compulsion, exerted through
objects, towards integration into a hierarchical repertoire with no syntax, that is to
say, into a system of categories that is distinctly not a language. It is as though there
were, not a social dialectic, but a social process of demarcation by whose means
an order is imposed, an order which in turn dictates a sort of objective fate
(materialized in objects) for each subgroup: in short, a set of pigeonholes within
which relationships can only become more impoverished. Our enthusiastic and
devious philosophers of `motivation' would love to convince themselves, as well
as everyone else, that the reign of objects is still the shortest road to freedom. As
evidence of this they need this spectacular muddle of needs and satisfactions, this
profusion of choices -- this whole carnival of supply and demand -- whose sheer
The concept of `brand', which is advertising's prime concept, sums up the
prospects for a `language' of consumption rather well. All products (with the exception
of perishable foodstuffs) are now offered under brand names. Every product
`worthy of the name' has a brand which may sometimes even become a generic
term (e. g. `frigidaire'). The brand's primary function is to designate a product; its
secondary function is to mobilize emotional connotations:
Actually, in our highly competitive system, few products are able to maintain
any technical superiority for long. They must be invested with overtones to
individualize them; they must be endowed with richness of associations and
imagery; they must have many levels of meaning, if we expect them to be top
sellers, if we hope that they will achieve the emotional attachment which
shows up as brand loyalty.
[173]
The philosophers of advertising will doubtless object that the satisfaction of
`deep motives' can only be a good thing (even if these motives are then integrated
into an impoverished system of labels). `Free yourselves from your inner censor!',
they are liable to cry. `Outsmart your superego!' `Have the courage of your desires!'
But the question is: are these deep motives really being called up so that they may
be articulated as a language? Can a system of reference such as this really invest
hitherto hidden areas of the personality with meaning -- and, if so, with what
meaning? To quote Martineau one last time:
Naturally it is better to use acceptable, stereotyped terms.... This is the very
essence of metaphor.... If I ask for a `mild' cigarette or a `beautiful' car, while
I can't define these attributes literally, I still know that they indicate something
desirable.... The average motorist isn't sure at all what `octane' in
gasoline actually is.... But he does know vaguely that it is something good.
So he orders `high-octane' gasoline, because he desires this essence quality
behind the meaningless surface jargon.
[174]
In actuality, this stereotyped calling-forth of deep motives is nothing but a
form of censorship. The ideology of personal fulfilment and the triumphant
illogicality of drives supposedly freed from guilt are in fact merely a tremendous
effort to materialize the superego. What is `personalized' in the object is primarily
censorship. No matter how much the philosophers of consumption may revel in the
notion of deep motives as potentials for immediate happiness which have merely
to be freed, the fact remains that the unconscious is conflicted, and inasmuch
as advertising mobilizes it, it mobilizes it as conflict. Advertising does not liberate
drives; first and foremost it liberates phantasies that serve to inhibit those drives.
Hence the ambiguity of the object, in which the individual finds no route to self-transcendence,
but merely an ambiguous retreat simultaneously to his desires
and to the forces that censor those desires. We thus once more encounter the overall
pattern of gratification/frustration described above: with its purely formal
reduction of tensions and its ever-vain regressions, what the object invariably
ensures is a perpetual renewal of conflicts. Here, perhaps, is a definition of the
form of alienation particular to our time: our internal conflicts or `deep tendencies'
are mobilized and alienated in the process of consumption, in exactly the same way
as labour-power is alienated in the process of production.
Nothing has really changed -- it is just that strictures on self-fulfilment are here
no longer imposed by means of oppressive laws or norms of obedience; repression
is ensured instead through `free' actions (buying, choosing, consuming), through
spontaneous cathexes, through a sort of internalization operating within gratification
itself.
A Universal Code: Status
The objects-cum-advertising system therefore constitutes less a language, whose
living syntax it lacks, than a set of significations. Impoverished yet efficient, it is
basically a code. It does not structure the personality, but designates and classifies
it. It does not structure social relationships, but breaks them down into a hierarchical
repertoire. In its formal expression it constitutes a universal system for the
identification of social rank: the code of `status'.
In the context of `consumer society', the notion of rank as a yardstick of
social being tends to assume the simplified form of `status'. Status in this sense is
still measured in terms of power, authority and responsibility, yet fundamentally
the message now is `There is no responsibility without a Lip watch!' Advertising
always refers explicitly to the object as to the essential criterion: `You will be
judged by such and such', `The elegant woman is recognizable by such and such',
and so on. No doubt objects have always played an identifying role of this kind,
but formerly they did so in parallel -- and this often in a purely auxiliary
way -- with other systems: gestural, ritual or ceremonial systems, language, rank
at birth, codes of moral values, etc. The peculiarity of our own society is that all
such other means of gauging rank are gradually giving way to the code of
`status'. Naturally this code applies in varying degrees according to socioeconomic
level, but the social function of advertising is to bring everyone under
its sway. It is a moral code, for it is sanctioned by the group, and any infraction
of it entails the apportionment of some measure of guilt. It is a totalitarian
code, for no one escapes it; escaping it in a private sense cannot prevent us from
participating every day in its collective development. Not believing in it still
means believing sufficiently in other people's belief in it to adopt a sceptical
stance. Even actions intended as resistance to it must be defined in terms of a
society that conforms to it.
Nor is this code without its positive aspects. In the first place, it is no more
arbitrary than any other code. After all, even in our own eyes, value resides in the
car that we change every year, in the part of town where we live, and in the
multitude of objects with which we surround ourselves and which distinguish us
from other people. True, that is not the whole story, but have not codes of value
always been partial and arbitrary (and moral codes more than any)?
Secondly, the code of `status' does constitute a socialization, and a total
secularization, of distinguishing signs, and consequently contributes to the emancipation
-- at least in the formal sense -- of social relations. Not only do objects make
material life more tolerable by proliferating as commodities, they likewise make
the relative standing of people more tolerable by gaining general acceptance as
identifying signs. One thing may be said in favour of the `status' system: it has the
Thirdly, this code offers a universal system of decipherable signs for the
first time in history. Perhaps it is to be regretted that it is usurping the place of all
other codes, but it is arguable, conversely, that the gradual exhaustion of other
systems (birth, class, function), the widening of competition, a greater social
mobility, the accelerating fissiparity of social groups and the growing instability
and proliferation of languages all created the necessity for a code which, by
virtue of its straightforward universality, could guarantee clear and unencumbered
communication. In a world where millions of men and women pass one another
every day without being acquainted, the code of `status' fulfils an essential social
function by addressing people's vital need for knowledge of others. The fact is,
however, that this universalization and this effectiveness are achieved only at
the cost of a radical simplification, an impoverishment and a well-nigh definitive
regression of the `language' of value: `Individuals define themselves through
their objects.' Coherence is achieved through the institution of a combinatorial
system or repertoire -- a language that is functional, certainly, but symbolically and
structurally immiserated.
What is more, the fact that a system of identification is now in place which is
clearly legible to all, that the signs of value are entirely socialized and objectivized,
by no means implies any true `democratization'. On the contrary, it would appear
that the insistence on univocal reference merely exacerbates the desire to discriminate:
within the very framework of this homogeneous system, a perpetually renewed
obsession with hierarchies and distinctions is to be observed. Even though barriers
of morality, social convention and language have been overturned, new barriers
and exclusions have arisen in the realm of objects: a new class or caste morality is
thus enabled to colonize the most material and hitherto unchallengeable of
spheres.
So, while the code of `status' is at present coming to constitute a universal
apparatus of signification that is immediately readable, facilitating the free flow
of social representations from one end of society to the other, this does not
mean that society is becoming more transparent. The code produces an illusion of
Note from page 165: 19. See Roland Barthes's account of the system of fashion: Système de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967).
Note from page 165: 20. We should not forget, however, that the earliest advertisements were for miracle cures, home remedies,
and the like; they supplied information, therefore, but information only of the most tendentious kind.
Note from page 167: 21. One is reminded of the neutral substances or placebos that doctors sometimes prescribe for psychosomatic
patients. Quite often these patients make just as good a recovery after the administration of such inactive
elements as they do after taking real medicine. What is it that such patients derive or assimilate from the
placebo? The answer is the Idea of medicine plus the presence of the physician: the mother and the father
simultaneously. Here too, then, belief facilitates the retrieval of an infantile situation, the result being the
regressive resolution of a psychosomatic conflict.
Note from page 167: 22. Such an approach might well be extended to mass communications in general, though this is not the place
to attempt it.
Note from page 168: 23. This is by no means necessary, however -- the advertising image alone can easily convey it.
Note from page 170: 24. The Lonely Crowd (see above, p. 152, note 17), pp. 210 ff.
Note from page 170: 25. In the case of radio programmes sponsored by a particular product, for example, the advertising injunction
itself may be quite minimal as compared with the emotional collusion involved; indeed, it may amount
to no more than a statement of the type `This programme comes to you courtesy of Brand X'.
Note from page 171: 26. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, p. 167.
Note from page 171: 27. Thus Riesman tells us of a Chicago suburb whose residents protest, not against any objective shortcomings
of the municipal services, but rather against the deficiencies of the psychological support offered,
complaining that they have been `so manipulated as to make them "not like it"' (ibid., p. 213).
Note from page 172: 28. The same goes for choice (see `Models and Series' above): the object per se is sold to us, but the `range' of
objects on offer is `free'.
Note from page 172: 29. That choice and advertising should be offered to us `free' in this way results from a greater expenditure
on the `personalization' of models and on the dissemination of advertising than on basic technical research.
What is given to us `free' at the psychological level takes away from the technical qualities of what is being
sold to us. The significance of this tendency can hardly be understated, and in `developed' societies it has
assumed truly vast proportions. At the same time, who is to say whether advertising, by relieving insecurity
and satisfying the imagination, does not fulfil an objective function every bit as fundamental as a technical
progress responding to material needs?
Note from page 172: 30. Some common leitmotivs (breasts, lips) should perhaps be deemed less erotic than `nurturing' in character.
Note from page 173: 31. The literal meaning of the German word for advertising, `die Werbung', is erotic exploration. `Der umworbene
Mensch', the person won over by advertising, can also mean a person who is sexually solicited.
Note from page 173: 32. Advertising campaigns designed to alter group behaviour or modify social structures (for example, those
against alcohol abuse, dangerous driving, etc.) are notoriously ineffective. Advertising resists the (collective)
reality principle. The only imperative that may be effective in this context is `Give!' -- for it is part of the
reversible system of gratification.
Note from page 173: 33. Negative or ironic advertisements are mere antiphrasis -- a well-known device, too, of the dream.
Note from page 174: 34. Naturally the existing political situation of the two Germanies must be taken into account, but there can
be little doubt that the absence of advertising in the Western sense is a real contributing factor to West German
prejudice against the East.
Note from page 176: 35. What is more, behind this system of gratification we may discern the reinforcement of all the structures of
authority (planning, centralization, bureaucracy). Parties, States, power structures -- all are able to strengthen
their hegemony under cover of this immense mother-image which renders any real challenge to them less and
less possible.
Note from page 177: 36. This account may also be applied to the system of objects. Because the object too is ambiguous, because it
is never merely an object but always at the same time an indication of the absence of a human relationship (just as
the sign in advertising is an indication of the absence of a real object) -- for these reasons, the object may likewise
play a powerful integrative role. It is true, however, that the object's practical specificity means that the
indication of the absence of the real is less marked in the case of the object than in that of the advertising sign.
Note from page 182: 37. Every single advertising sign bears independent witness to this tautological system of recognition,
because all such signs, whatever they signify, also refer to themselves as advertising.
Note from page 182: 38. Is this not somewhat reminiscent of Claude Lévi-Strauss's account of the totemic system, according to
which arbitrary totemic signs are the conduit by whose means a social order makes itself apparent in its
durable immanence? Viewed in this light, advertising would appear to be the end-product of a cultural system
which has reverted (with its repertoire of `brands') to the poverty of the sign codes of archaic systems.
Note from page 182: 39. The French word `concurrence' [here rendered as `competition' -- Trans.) is ambiguous in that it means both
rivalry and convergence. It is true that furious competition is a sure way to produce convergence at a single
point. There is a threshold of technical progress (reached notably in the United States) beyond which all
objects of a given type become interchangeable, and the differentiation requirement can then be fulfilled only
to the extent that all are modified in unison, say once a year, and this in accordance with the same criteria. The
extreme form of free choice similarly subjects everyone to the ritual obligation to possess the same things.
Note from page 183: 40. In the United States, essential objects such as cars and refrigerators tend to have a predictable and obligatory
life-span of one year (three years in the case of television sets, somewhat longer for a flat). Norms of social
status end up imposing a kind of metabolism of the object, an ever-accelerating cycle. Very far removed from
the cycles of nature, yet often oddly congruent with the old round of the seasons, this new kind of cycle and
the necessity of complying with it are now the true basis of the American citizen's ethos.
Note from page 183: 41. This ambiguity is perfectly epitomized by advertising's use of `you' -- as in `Guinness is Good for You'. Is
this a polite (and hence personalizing) way of addressing the individual, or is the message directed at the
social group as a whole? Is this `you' (or the French vous in similar contexts) singular or plural? The answer is
both: the pronoun addresses each individual inasmuch as he resembles all others. Fundamentally this is the
impersonal or gnomic `you' (cf. Leo Spitzer in Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, December 1964,p.961).
Note from page 184: 42. When Brigitte Bardot hairdos were all the rage, every girl who followed the fashion remained unique in
her own eyes, because her point of reference was never the thousands of others who looked exactly like her
but, rather, Bardot herself, sublime archetype and fountainhead of uniqueness. Among the mad -- to carry this
logic to its extreme -- there is nothing especially bothersome about being one of four or five people in the
asylum all of whom take themselves for Napoleon. Consciousness here is shaped not by a real relationship but
by an imaginary one.
Note from page 185: 43. [Translator's note: The author gives The Strategy of Desire as the source of this passage, but I have been
unable to trace it in the original edition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), so I have retranslated from the
French. But see the identical arguments set forth in Dichter's book, pp. 253 ff.]
Note from page 186: 44. Adapting a Marxian formulation from `On the Jewish Question', we might say that the individual in
consumer society is free as a consumer, but only as a consumer. The emancipation involved is a purely formal
one.
Note from page 186: 45. The Strategy of Desire, p.84.
Note from page 187: 46. Motivation in Advertising: Motives That Make People Buy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), p. 73.
Note from page 187: 47. There are other, archaic, ways of personalizing buying: barter, the second-hand trade (which involves
chance), shopping expeditions (which involve patience and an element of play), and so on. The reason I call
these forms archaic is that they all assume a passive product and an active buyer. Today all the responsibility
for personalization has devolved onto advertising.
Note from page 188: 48. See Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958), p. 24.
Note from page 188: 49. Technics and Civilization (see above, p. 57, note 37), pp. 277-8.
Note from page 188: 50. [Translator's note: No convention having been established on the English rendering of the terms parole,
langue and langage, they are given here in square brackets in the hope that this may assist readers
interested in the way the author uses these notoriously slippery Saussurean concepts. See also above, p. 11,
note 7.]
Note from page 190: 51. Motivation in Advertising, p. 75.
Note from page 191: 52. Ibid. p. 50.
Note from page 192: 53. Ibid., p. 100.
Note from page 192: 54. Comparing advertising to a kind of magic is really giving it too much credit, however. The nominalist
lexicon of the alchemists has something of a genuine language about it, structured as it is by a praxis of research
and interpretation. By contrast, the nominalism of `brands' is strictly immanent -- and congealed by economic
imperatives.
III Advertising
[p. 165]
through advertising is thus the whole system that I have been describing at the level
of objects: the entire apparatus of personalization and imposed differentiation; of
proliferation of the inessential and subordination of technical requirements to the
requirements of production and consumption; of dysfunctionality and secondary
functionality. Since its function is almost entirely secondary, and since both image
and discourse play largely allegorical roles in it, advertising supplies us with the
ideal object and casts a particularly revealing light upon the system of objects. And
since, like all heavily connoted systems, it is self-referential,
[140]
we may safely rely on
advertising to tell us what it is that we consume through objects.
[p. 166]
Simca or Frigidaire -- it does sell him on something else, something much more
fundamental to the global social order than Omo or Frigidaire -- something, indeed,
for which such brand names are merely a cover.
[p. 167]
(and particularly with the mother) into a later stage of childhood. That miraculous
relationship, though now in actuality past, is internalized in the form of a belief
which is in effect an ideal extension of it. There is nothing artificial about the
romance of Father Christmas, however, for it is based upon the shared interest that
the two parties involved have in its preservation. Father Christmas himself is un-important
here, and the child only believes in him precisely because of that basic
lack of significance. What children are actually consuming through this figure,
fiction or cover story (which in a sense they continue to believe in even after they
have ceased to do so) is the action of a magical parental solicitude and the care taken
by the parents to continue colluding with their children's embrace of the fable.
Christmas presents themselves serve merely to underwrite this compromise.
[142]
[p. 168]
[p. 169]
of view is governed by the sole sublime aim of ensuring his satisfaction. This
perspective is confirmed as Airborne's advertising copy continues: `A good armchair
is a seat in which every family member feels at ease. There is no need to adjust
it to your weight or height, for it is designed to wed the shape of your body.'
There is no need to change anything in society or in yourself, because the industrial
revolution has occurred, and technological society in its entirety adapts itself to you
via this armchair so perfectly matched to your body's contours. There was a time
when moral norms demanded that the individual adapt to society at large, but from
the standpoint of an age of consumption -- or a would-be age of consumption -- such
requirements belong to the outmoded ideology of the age of production; nowadays
it is society as a whole which must adapt to the individual. What is more, society
does not merely estimate the individual's needs and adapt to this or that particular
need; rather, it is at pains to adapt to the individual himself, personally: `You can
always tell an Airborne seat from the fact that, when you sit in it, it is always your
armchair, your chair or your sofa, and you always get that comfortable feeling of
being in a seat made exactly to measure for you alone.' To put all this metasociology
of compliance in a nutshell: by virtue of this armchair's devotion, submissiveness
and secret affinities with you personally, you will come to believe also in the
devotion of Airborne's owner, his technical services, and so on and so forth. In this
armchair, which is frankly quite pleasant to sit in (it is truly very functional), you are
thus expected to apprehend the essence of a society that is definitively civilized, a
society irreversibly committed to the idea of happiness -- to your happiness -- and a
society that spontaneously supplies each of its members with the wherewithal to
achieve their own self-realization.
[p. 170]
[p. 171]
would not be what they are', is `warmth'. Warmth is a modern property which we
have already identified as the basis of `atmosphere': just as colours are hot or cold
(rather than red or green); just as the `controlling dimension of personality'
[147]
(in an
`other-directed' society) is the `warm-cold axis'; so likewise objects are hot or cold,
that is to say, indifferent and hostile, or spontaneous, sincere and communicative
-- in a word, they are `personalized'. They no longer present themselves as appropriate
to some strictly circumscribed task -- a crude and outdated practice; instead
they submit themselves to us, they seek us out, surround us, and prove their
existence to us by virtue of the profusion of ways in which they appear, by
virtue of their effusiveness. We are taken as the object's aims, and the object loves
us. And because we are loved, we feel that we exist; we are `personalized'. This is
the essential thing -- the actual purchase of the object is secondary. The abundance
of products puts an end to scarcity; the abundance of advertising puts an end to
insecurity. The worst thing possible is to be obliged to invent one's own motives
for acting, for preferring, for buying. The individual in such circumstances is
inevitably brought face to face with his own misapprehensions, his own lack of
existence, his own bad faith and anxiety. Any object which fails to dispel such
guilty feelings -- which fails, as it were, to know what I want, and what I am -- is
liable to be dubbed bad.
[148]
If the object loves me, then shall I be saved. Advertising
(and, more broadly, public relations as a whole) relieves psychological insecurity
by deploying an enormous solicitude, to which we respond by internalizing
the solicitous agency -- namely, that whole immense enterprise, producing not
just goods but also communicational warmth, which global consumer society
actually is.
[p. 172]
is offered gratis.
[149]
The mechanism of advertising thus subtly renews links with
archaic rituals of giving, of offering presents, as well as with the infantile situation
of a passive gratification vouchsafed by the parents. Both choice and advertising
serve to transform a purely commercial relationship into a personal one.
[150]
[p. 173]
choosing and spending.
[152]
Our modern environment assails us relentlessly,
especially in the cities, with its lights and its images, its incessant inducements to
status-consciousness and narcissism, emotional involvement and obligatory relationships.
We live in a cold-blooded carnival atmosphere, a formal yet electrifying
ambience of empty sensual gratification wherein the actual process of buying and
consuming is demonstrated, illuminated, mimicked -- even frustrated -- much as the
sexual act is anticipated by dance. By means of advertising, as once upon a time by
means of feasts, society puts itself on display and consumes its own image.
[p. 174]
of advertising and choice? They would not be free. We can understand the reactions
of the two thousand West Germans polled by the Allenbach Demoscopic Institute:
60 per cent expressed the view that there was too much advertising, yet when
they were asked, `Would you rather have too much advertising (Western style) or
minimal -- and only socially useful -- advertising (as in the East)?', a majority
favoured the first of these options, taking an excess of advertising as indicative
not only of affluence but also of freedom -- and hence of a basic value.
[155]
Such is the
measure of the emotional and ideological collusion that advertising's spectacular
mediation creates between the individual and society (whatever the structures of the
latter may be). If all advertising were abolished, individuals would feel frustrated
by the empty hoardings. Frustrated not merely by the lack of opportunity (even in
an ironic way) for play, for dreaming, but also, more profoundly, by the feeling
that they were no longer somehow `being taken care of'. They would miss an
environment thanks to which, in the absence of active social participation, they can
at least partake of a travesty of the social entity and enjoy a warmer, more maternal
and more vivid atmosphere. One of the first demands of man in his progression
towards well-being is that his desires be attended to, that they be formulated
and expressed in the form of images for his own contemplation (something which
is a problem, or becomes a problem, in socialist countries). Advertising fills this
function, which is futile, regressive and inessential -- yet for that very reason even
more profoundly necessary.
[p. 175]
to social consensus that this discourse urges: the object is a service, a personal
relationship between society and you. Whether advertising is organized around
the image of the mother or around the need to play, it always aims to foster the same
tendency to regress to a point anterior to real social processes, such as work, production,
the market, or value, which might disturb this magical integration: the object
has not been bought by you, you have voiced a desire for it and all the engineers,
technicians, and so on, have worked to gratify your desire. With the advent of
industrial society the division of labour severs labour from its product. Advertising
adds the finishing touch to this development by creating a radical split, at the
moment of purchase, between products and consumer goods; by interpolating a vast
maternal image between labour and the product of labour, it causes that product
no longer to be viewed as such (complete with its history, and so on), but purely
and simply as a good, as an object. And even as it separates the producer and the
consumer within the one individual, thanks to the material abstraction of a highly
differentiated system of objects, advertising strives inversely to re-create the
infantile confusion of the object with the desire for the object, to return the
consumer to the stage at which the infant makes no distinction between its mother
and what its mother gives it.
[p. 176]
of constraint.
[156]
The immense political role played by the diffusion of products and
advertising techniques is here clearly evident: these mechanisms effectively replace
earlier moral or political ideologies. Indeed, they go farther, for moral and political
forms of integration were never unproblematical and always had to be buttressed
by overt repression, whereas the new techniques manage to do without any such
assistance: the consumer internalizes the agency of social control and its norms in
the very process of consuming.
[p. 177]
unfinished actions, continual initiatives followed by continual abandonments
thereof, false dawnings of objects, false dawnings of desires, A whole psychodrama
is quickly enacted when an image is read. In principle, this enables the reader to
assume his passive role and be transformed into a consumer. In actuality, the sheer
profusion of images works at the same time to counter any shift in the direction of
reality subtly to fuel feelings of guilt by means of continual frustration, and to
arrest consciousness at the level of a phantasy of satisfaction. In the end the image
and the reading of the image are by no means the shortest way to the object, merely
the shortest way to another image. The signs of advertising thus follow upon one
another like the transient images of hypnagogic states.
[p. 178]
were, which constitutes a second legend. And, by virtue of the way it is read, the
image always refers only to other images. In the end advertising soothes people's
consciousness by means of a controlled social semantics -- controlled, ultimately, to
the point of focusing on a single referent, namely the whole society itself. Society
thus monopolizes all the roles. It conjures up a host of images whose meanings
it immediately strives to limit. It generates an anxiety that it then seeks to calm. It
fulfils and disappoints, mobilizes and demobilizes. Under the banner of advertising
it institutes the reign of a freedom of desire, but desire is never truly liberated
thereby (which would in fact entail the end of the social order): desire is liberated by
the image only to the point where its emergence triggers the associated reflexes
of anxiety and guilt. Primed by the image only to be defused by it, and made to
feel guilty to boot, the nascent desire is co-opted by the agency of control. There is a
profusion of freedom, but this freedom is imaginary; a continual mental orgy,
but one which is stage-managed, a controlled regression in which all perversity
is resolved in favour of order. If gratification is massive in consumer society, repression
is equally massive -- and both reach us together via the images and discourse of
advertising, which activate the repressive reality principle at the very heart of the
pleasure principle.
[p. 179]
this image, but for our present purposes the most interesting thing here is the
way it makes use of a hypostasized collectivity. The individual consumer will be
successfully persuaded that he personally desires Pax to the extent that his own
image is reflected back to him in advance as part of a synthesis. The crowd in the
advertisement is him, and his desire is evoked by the image's presumption of a
collective desire. Advertising is very canny here, for every desire, no matter how
intimate, still aspires to universality. Subtending a man's desire for a woman is the
assumption that all men are capable of desiring her. No desire, even a sexual one,
can endure without the mediation of an imagined collective realm. Perhaps, indeed,
no desire can ever take form without this imaginary dimension: is it conceivable
that a man could love a woman if he were certain that no other man in the world
could possibly desire her? Conversely, one can easily love a woman one does not
even know if she is adored by masses of people. This is the ever-present (but for the
most part hidden) underpinning of advertising. It is normal that our desires as we
experience them should embody a reference to the collectivity, but what advertising
strives to do is to make this the inaugural dimension of desire. Far from relying
on the spontaneity of individual needs, advertising prefers to control these needs
by mobilizing the collective reference and having consciousness crystallize entirely
upon the collective idea. There is a kind of totalitarian social dynamics here,
jubilantly celebrating its finest victory -- the successful prosecution of a strategy of
solicitation founded on the presumption of collectivity. This promotion of desire on
the sole basis of the group responds to a fundamental need, that of communication,
but it does so as a way of reinforcing not genuine collectivity but merely a phantom
thereof. The Pax advertisement is perfectly clear: advertising affects to unify
individuals on the basis of a product whose purchase and use actually banish each
individual to his own private sphere. Paradoxically we are induced, in the name
of everyone and out of a reflex of solidarity, to buy an object that we immediately
use to differentiate ourselves from other people. Thus nostalgia for collectivity fuels
competition between individuals. In point of fact this competition is itself illusory, in
that in the end each individual who first reads the poster and then buys the product
is personally buying the same object as everyone else. The upshot of the transaction,
its `benefit' (to the social order), remains a regressive identification with a vague
[p. 180]
collective totality, and hence an internalization of the sanction of the social group.
As always, complicity and guilt are closely associated here: what advertising also
underpins, therefore, is (virtual) guilt towards the group. But it no longer does
so according to the traditional pattern of moral censure, the difference being that
anxiety and guilt are now aroused in advance, ready for use as required; and in fact
they will be used, with the emergence of a controlled desire, to effect submission to
group norms. It may be easy enough to resist the explicit imperative of the Pax
poster -- to declare that it cannot make you buy Pax rather than Omo or Sunil or, for
that matter, any of them; it is much harder to reject the poster's second referent,
namely the vibrant and enthusiastic crowd (buttressed by the ideology of `peace').
And the reason why we have difficulty resisting this pattern of complicity is
that here resistance is not even the issue: it is true that in this particular advertisement
the connotation is still easy to interpret, but group sanction need not be indicated
by a crowd: any representation whatsoever will do. An erotic one, for instance.
True, we do not buy potato crisps just because they are connoted by a woman with
blonde hair and a sexy bottom. What is certain, though, is that the brief moment
when the libido is thus mobilized by an image offers a sufficient opportunity for
society as an agency of control to invade us in its entirety, complete with its
customary armamentarium, namely the mechanisms of repression, sublimation
and transference.
[p. 181]
of adjudication, and it is the divining of this agency, the successful identification of
an individual with this collective chance, that becomes the mark of the winner.
All of which explains why the earlier questions in such competitions are generally
so simple: the greatest possible number of entrants have to participate in the essential
moment, in the magical intuiting of the Great Collectivity (pure chance serves,
in addition, to restore the myth of absolute democracy). In short, the ultimate
referent of these competitions turns out to be a sort of phantom collectivity, purely
conjectural in nature, non-structural, devoid of any image of itself (it is `embodied'
solely in the most abstract way, and simultaneously with its self-dissolution, in
the number of correct entries received), and bound up exclusively with the gratification
of the single person or very few people who have happed upon it in its very
abstractness.
[p. 182]
arbitrary signs to arouse emotions and mobilize consciousness, and reconstituting
its collective nature in this very process.
[158]
[p. 183]
inescapably governed by planning, this is merely because the techniques of psychological
conditioning are far less advanced than those of economic planning.
[p. 184]
everyone is alike: all that is needed is a pattern of collective and mythological
projection -- in other words, a model.
[163]
[p. 185]
[p. 186]
regressive -- and hence adapted to a specific social organization of production.
[165]
The `philosophy' of selling has little use for such paradoxes, and it appeals to
rational goals (enlightening people as to what they want) and to scientific methods
as justifications for its attempt to provoke irrational behaviour (i. e. accepting
the role of being nothing but a bundle of unmediated drives and being satisfied so
long as those drives are satisfied). Even drives can be dangerous, however, and the
neo-sorcerers of consumption are very careful indeed not to liberate anybody with
a rousing call to happiness. Rather, they offer merely to resolve tensions -- that is
to say, they offer a freedom merely by default:
[p. 187]
of a reassuring regression into objects calculated to buttress the images of the Father
and the Mother in every possible way. The increasingly `free' irrationality of drives
in the depths is to be accompanied by an increasingly strict control as they emerge
into the light.
[p. 188]
relatively consistent system of products in all their positivity. There is no interaction
between the two, but there is certainly a forced integration of the system of needs
into the system of products. Of course, the net result does constitute a system that
signifies as well as a system for procuring satisfaction. But for there to be `language'
there has to be syntax, and in the case of objects of mass consumption all we have is
an inventory.
[p. 189]
of its calibrated differences and combinatorial variations, to carve out meanings, to
generate a repertoire or lexicon of forms and colours via which recurrent modalities
of `speech' can be expressed. But does this amount to a language? No, because this
vast paradigm lacks any true syntax. It lacks the rigorous syntax of technology and
it lacks the loose syntax of needs, and it wafts back and forth between the two, a sort
of two-dimensional repertoire which tends to exhaust its possibilities on the day-to-day
level in an immense combinatorial grid of types and models where needs, in
their incoherence, are effectively assigned places, but no reciprocal structuring
occurs as a result; inasmuch as products are better integrated, it is needs that flow
towards them and manage -- by cutting themselves into pieces, by becoming
discontinuous -- to insert themselves, with difficulty and in arbitrary fashion, into
the grid of objects. The fact is that the system of individual needs swamps the world
of objects with its utter contingency, yet this contingency is somehow inventoried,
classified and demarcated by objects: it thus becomes possible to control it -- and this,
from the socio-economic point of view, is the system's real goal.
[p. 190]
And Martineau offers several examples of such `personalization':
[p. 191]
effervescence creates the illusion of a culture. But let there be no mistake: objects
work as categories of objects which, in the most tyrannical fashion, define categories
of people -- they police social meaning, and the significations they engender are
rigidly controlled. In their proliferation, at once arbitrary and coherent, objects
are the best possible vector of a social order that is equally arbitrary and equally
coherent, and, under the banner of affluence, they indeed become a most effective
material expression of that order.
[p. 192]
language than this one, laden with referents yet empty of meaning as it is. It is a
language of mere signals, and `brand loyalty' can never, therefore, be more than a
conditioned reflex of manipulated emotions.
[p. 193]
[p. 194]
[p. 195]
virtue of rendering obsolete all the old rituals of caste or class, along -- in a general
way -- with all preceding (and preclusive) criteria of social discrimination.
[p. 196]
transparency, an illusion of readable social relations, behind which the real
structure of production and real social relationships remain illegible. A society
would be transparent only if knowledge of the apparatus of signification was
simultaneously knowledge of social structures and social realities. This is not so in
the case of the objects-cum-advertising system, which offers nothing but a code
of meaning that is always complicitous and always opaque. What is more, though
it may provide a formal security thanks to its coherence, this code is also the best
means for the global social order to extend its immanent and permanent rule to all
individuals.
III: Advertising
[p. nts]
III: Advertising, by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Verso, New York, NY, 1996). pp 164-196. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents]
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