© Roger M Tagg 2012
The line taken in this book revolves around the concept of 'Signs'. I particularly like the table after the highlights showing which 'signs' in an advertisement correspond to what is being advertised.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Preface to the | 6 | According to structuralist-semiotic theories. "Meanings are specific for particular societies, classes, periods of history, not God-given and immutable". ... ""Knowledge is not just 'out there', it is something we produce in our social relations." [RT: and, I think, meanings change very quickly in today's societies.] |
| 4th imp. | "What is so shocking in the academic world is the way theoretical work can be used as a weapon of intimidation - as if understanding theories was an end in itself; and the more difficult this end (is), the more superior (are) those who have reached it." [RT: In Frolio terms, theoretical knowledge has become a 'ramp' or a 'rat race'.] | |
| 7 | The key to much popular culture (JW instances 'punk' as well as ads) is "re-using social meanings" in a sort of 'bricolage' (i.e. patchwork fashion). | |
| The point, JW says, is not to change ads, but to change society. [RT: For all the excellence of this book, I fear that is a vain hope. She might have been thinking of a Marxist revolution, but maybe it's just a matter of getting more people to be more intelligent, reflective and responsible for what happens to them. I don't think it's a matter of more book learning.] | ||
| Original | 9 | JW recalls that her own teenage "desire for magazine glamour" was a myth - "a real need, but falsely fulfilled; in fact, sustained by its perpetual un-fulfillment". |
| fore- word | 10 | JW uses the term 'ideology' frequently throughout the book, but I'm not sure it always means quite the same thing. In this foreword she is restricting herself to the "ideology of personal reaction". |
| She talks about a bitter "struggle against false consciousness", but it's not totally clear what is the criterion for falseness (or truth). | ||
| The book, she says, is "an attempt to find a shareable method of dealing with the ideology with which we are bombarded". [RT: I think that is right on the mark.] | ||
| General | The theme is "Meaning and Ideology". | |
| Intro | 11-12 | Apart from selling things, advertising "has another function" [RT: is it deliberate?] which replaces "that traditionally fulfilled by art or religion. It creates structures of meaning". |
| 12 | JW contrasts practical "use-value" with what I [RT] would call 'motivation-value'. Her example is that for a car, 50 mpg is 'good' if "clever saver" is the ideal; 20 mpg may be good if the ideal is "trendy, above money pettiness". [RT: does that go for SUVs too?] This is a general technique in advertising, i.e. to bind qualities of the product to 'human' concerns, rather than just to its basic specification. | |
| 13 | Ads are "selling us ourselves. And we need those selves ...". This is so that we can differentiate ourselves, to satisfy our "desire to classify, order and understand the world, including one's own identity. | |
| JW claims that "the real distinctions between people are created by their role in the process of production, as workers". [RT: I think that idea faded long ago; it sounds like the world of Dickens, or of Engels' father's factory. And in what sense is the distinction "real"? Maybe we can say that "our role in 'production' is of primary importance from the viewpoint of the economics of a society", but this relegates aspects of society outside the workplace. But she has a point here; we are (nowadays) what we consume, as much (if not more) than what we produce. But even that is not all there is to class - there are distinctions through education, social attitude and many other things. | ||
| JW's 'model' is that non-production-based views of class are an 'overlay' on the classic Marxist distinctions. | ||
| 14 | "One of the peculiar features of advertising is that we are drawn in to fill (deliberately-left) 'gaps' ". | |
| "Advertising works because it feeds off a genuine use-value; besides needing social meaning we obviously do need material goods ... (these) two needs are crossed, and neither is adequately fulfilled. ... The point of exchange between the two is where 'meaning' is created." | ||
| Part I of the book explains the methods and tools of advertising. Part II examines some particular themes in which our commonly-held meanings are 'hijacked' or 'bent' - her word is 'cooked'. Examples are Nature, Science, Sex, Magic and Time. | ||
| Intro to | The theme is "Advertising Work" - by analogy with Freud's "Dream Work". | |
| Part I | 17 | A 'sign' consists of a 'signifier' (the object displayed) and a 'signified' (the meaning). The simple example is road signs. These two aspects are inseparable within a sign. |
| The overt content of an ad may be true or false, good or bad, but that's not the point here; JW is addressing "the content of the form" - but that's confusing, hence she sticks to signifiers and signifieds. [RT: The 'form' here means the structure and mechanism that (hopefully) makes the ad work.] | ||
| 19 | A signifier object will have some meaning to us from some other (i.e. not directly related to the product), pre-existing area of our knowledge. This other area JW refers to as the "referent" system. We (targets of the advert) are encouraged to transfer, on our own initiative, meaning from the referent system to the product. The referent system might cover folk wisdom, desires and dreams, prejudices, current affairs etc - even other ads. She instances a Goodyear tyre advert of a car stopping confidently on a jetty. jetties are strong [RT:mostly!] and so, so are the tyres. Thus a "less obvious" meaning is created. | |
| 1 - | "A currency of signs" | |
| 20 | The referent may be in the real world (Saussure used the example of a horse; a picture is the sign, the referent is 'what kicks you'), or in some mythological world. [RT: like what happens after a Badedas bath?] | |
| 21 | The transfer of meaning from the referent to the product being advertised is often not explicit; we as the targets are encouraged to make the transfer for ourselves. One technique is to use corresponding colours to help target subjects make the intended transfer of meaning. | |
| 24-28 | Many products, despite different brands, are just almost identical commodities. So the goal has to be differentiation. JW's example is of Catherine Deneuve representing Chanel No 5 and Margaux Hemingway representing 'Babe'. Naming the brands also helps. | |
| 29 | The 'referent-signifier 'connections', like Catherine Deneuve and Chanel [RT: or anyone who is 'the face of XXX'] get implanted in people's minds. Quoting TS Eliot, JW calls such an established referent an "objective correlative". | |
| 30 | "It is now the function of the media to provide us with apparently 'objective' correlatives and 'meanings' (since art has become increasingly preoccupied with its inability to mean." | |
| 31 | "The technique of advertising is to correlate feelings, moods or attributes to tangible objects ... emotion is promised when you buy the product." TS Eliot says it's similar with poetry, "where correlatives are sufficient". | |
| 38 | The meaning in an ad may be an "intermediate currency" between real money and emotion, the motivation being what getting the product can lead on to, e.g. increased status, or attracting the opposite sex. | |
| 2 - | "Signs address somebody" | |
| 40 | "Appellation is simply the 'Hey, you!' process of ideological apparatuses calling individuals 'subjects'." | |
| 41 | "Semiology and Psychology ... are inextricably connected. And it is ideology which ... provides the invisible cloak in which their intermeshing is rendered transparent." | |
| It (ideology) is invisible because "we are active in it, that we do not receive it from above ... we constantly re-create it". [RT: this reminds me of the Goldwater advert: "In your heart, you know he's right". In recent Australian politics, Cory Bernardi's supporters said that, in our hearts, we all agree with him (that if we let in same sex marriages, the next thing will be marriages to animals, i.e. bestiality). | ||
| Ideology "is based on false assumptions". "In ideology, assumptions are made about us which we do not question." [RT: is this the same 'ideology' as earlier in the book?] | ||
| 42 | "Ads create an 'alreadyness' of 'facts' about ourselves as individuals ... that we are consumers, that we have certain values, that we will freely buy things, consume on the basis of these values, and so on. We are trapped in an illusion of choice." | |
| "... the fundamental argument used to justify advertising, that it is part of the freedom of manufacturers to compete, and part of our freedom to choose between the products of that competition. The idea of freedom is essential to the maintenance of ideology." [RT: again, maybe slightly different ideology again - this one sounds like 'the mythology of the evil empire'.] | ||
| "Advertisements work by a process in which we are completely enmeshed, and how they invite us 'freely' to create ourselves in accordance with the way in which they have already created us." | ||
| 43 | "Values exist not in things, but in their transference (i.e., what they can be exchanged for). | |
| "Any system of values constitutes an ideology." [RT: Is this the definition we should use throughout?] | ||
| "The actual point of transference is itself devoid of 'content'; a relationship (one of difference or contrast) is translated, but not an inherent 'quality' ". | ||
| 44 | "The relationship between 'ideology' and 'subject' is one of simultaneous interdependence." [RT: I'd say it's more than that.] | |
| 45-49 | [RT: I think JW's line on 'Totemism' here is messy. Suggesting that we are 're-classed' by which brand we buy is countered by the many different 'product types', so that we would exist simultaneously in many overlapping dimensions, as she admits on p48. I think she is just lamenting that re-classification 'by what we buy' is an undesirable veneer on classification 'by what we produce', 'by what we earn' and 'by whom we work for'.] | |
| 54 | "Appellation, then, gives us imaginary blinkers, in preventing us from looking sideways and recognizing other people (who are) contiguous; it only allows us to see forwards, into the ad." | |
| 60 | "A sign is defined [RT: again?] by what it is not." It's the same with a subject of appellation, it depends on our recognition of being oneself, different from others. | |
| 61-3 | This leads on into her discussion of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. This says that we acquire self-consciousness when we first see ourselves in a mirror [RT: or photo]. JW takes on "Lacan's terms 'imaginary' (general mass consciousness pre-mirror) and 'symbolic (differentiated). Lacan's 'ego-ideal' is "desire for one's (imaginary) 'real' self". | |
| 64 | "Advertisements alienate our identity in constituting us as one of the objects in an exchange that we ourselves make, thereby appropriating from us an image which gives back our own value." | |
| 65 | "Desire ... blandly strives after the unattainable, constantly replenished but never fulfilled." | |
| 70 | "Since parts of you have been claimed as separate objects by advertisements, in order to get back these 'lost objects' you must buy them and re-create yourself out of your own spare parts." | |
| 3 - | "Signs for deciphering: Hermeneutics" | |
| 72 | In ads, deciphering processes "are clearly not free, but restricted to carefully defined channels provided by the ad for its own decipherment". | |
| 73 | "Our 'active' involvement precludes an awareness of our more complex unseen involvement." | |
| 78-84 | Absence (e.g. of a person, often a male - or sometimes even of a product) is a riddle which we are invited to resolve. | |
| 84-90 | Language, in the forms of puns and puzzles, or even absence of words, is a technique. | |
| 91-96 | Calligraphy (which here seems to mean substituting icons for alphabetic characters) is another technique. | |
| Part 2 | "Ideological 'castles' in referent systems" | |
| 100 | This intro contains a contrasting of 'denotation' and 'connotation'. For example, a photo of Catherine Deneuve 'denotes' Catherine Deneuve, but 'connotes' French 'chic'. | |
| 101 | Designing an ad is a form of 'bricolage', i.e. assembling "odds and ends from ideological thought that already exists". | |
| 4 - | " 'Cooking' nature" | |
| 103-5 | 'Cooking' here means using some transformation between the raw and a processed product. An example is McCain's ad showing chips emerging from potato skins; another is a picture of a Chivers marmalade jar with the lid replaced by a slice of orange. | |
| 112-5 | A form of cooking is the use of Science as a way of "(re-)ordering nature". | |
| 116-9 | A common ad technique is impressing the target person by showing the science - but, she says, "everything is revealed, and nothing explained", i.e. why all that science makes the product any better. | |
| 120-1 | A technique she includes here is "unleashing our 'natural' sexual desires" - but within the bounds of cultural acceptability. [RT: very variable between countries and cultures.] | |
| 5 - | "Back to nature" | |
| 103-5 | This is about exploiting people's desire to be nearer 'nature' - the "romance of the natural". | |
| 125 | "Romanticism involves the concept of (a sort of Platonic) perfectability." | |
| 131-4 | Surrealism is sometimes used - plonking products in unlikely natural surroundings, e.g. bottles on grass, packets in fields, soaps in piles of herbs. | |
| 6 - | "Magic" | |
| 140 | "Magic is therefore a kind of pivot around which misrepresentations may be produced." | |
| 141 | Some adverts "appeal specifically to our sense of magic ... where ... disprportionate results appear". [RT: because we want to believe in miracles, or that prayers are deterministically answered.] | |
| 143 | Midland Bank claimed they had "a simpler way to tackle complex problems" - which rather implies magic. | |
| 145 | Alchemy is sometimes implied, e.g. Wondermash producing some magic transformation. | |
| 148 | 'Spells' are sometimes implied - just saying the right words will do the trick. | |
| 149 | Some sort of 'Genie' is sometimes invoked. | |
| 151 | Some adverts use a crystal ball as a referent - implying paranormal forecasting ability. | |
| 7 - | "Time: narrative and history" | |
| 155 | "In ads there is an illusory perfect balance between the time of desire and the time of consumption." | |
| 157 | Use of nostalgia in ads is quite common. | |
| 161 | "All the enjoyment we can really have from ads is the anticipation of consumption. ... In ads, the products are always unconsumed, waiting." | |
| 162 | Many ads contain a suggestion of something about to happen | |
| 163 | (The future consumption) "is the central point of the myth, the story of the future that we supply". | |
| 164 | Historical narratives are sometimes used, often inaccurately. Hopefully though, the "style and aura" will rub off onto the product with our help. | |
| 166 | 'Then and now' contrasts are another time-based technique. | |
| 8 - | Conclusions | |
| 170 | "Advertising may appropriate not only ideas of time and space, and give them a false content; but real needs and desires in people, which are given a false fulfillment. We need a way of looking at ourselves, which ads give us falsely; we need to make sense of the world, which ads also make us feel we are doing in making sense of them." | |
| 171-3 | There's a bit here about using other ads, or even one's own ads, as a referent. | |
| 174 | It may be that, by making jokes about other ads, advertisers are hoping to deflect us from the general view that ads are 'rip-offs', or their "mythic status as a lie". We might think that because the can joke about it, they are by contrast trustworthy. | |
| 176-7 | In Smirnoff ads (the joke 'I was/thought X until I discovered Smirnoff') "the images are the essential signifiers" - we want to be like the person shown. We don't "drink it for what it is" as it says on the ads. | |
| 179 | The people shown in the Sunday Times ads for buying advertisement space are (presented very much as) the sum of their consumer goods. | |
| "We re-create ourselves every day, in accordance with an ideology based on property - where we are defined by our relationship to things, rather than to each other." [RT: I think this is her soundest comment.] | ||
| App 1 - | Some related highlights from JW's next book, "Consuming Passions", same publisher 1986, ISBN 0-7145-2851-X. All the extracts are from the final essay in that book, entitled "The Politics of Consumption", which first appeared in the magazine New Socialist in 1985. Page numbers are as in this later book | |
| 229 | "The original context of any product is that of its production." [RT: I don't agree; surely design, and before that recognizing a need, come before. A product is produced for a reason, whether it's a good or bad one.] | |
| JW complains that in both Richard Hoggart's 'The Uses of Literacy' and in "cultural studies post-punk stylists", "the concern is with the meanings of consumerism alone", without "any sense of a relationship between the spheres of production and consumption". | ||
| She then asks "Because if the product's context is, first of all, its production ...?" [RT: "First of all" might be better taken to mean "most important". But this sounds like a rather dated Marxist view that "it's all about the production". In South Australia, the slogan is "It's all about the footy". Surely 'it's all about' lots of aspects. But JW is right in noting a lack of relationships between consumer and other aspects.] | ||
| 230 | "It is the context of a society in which the majority of people have no control whatsoever over their productive lives ... and no means of public expression ..." [RT: I don't think that describes the society I live in.] | |
| "If you pay for something you tend to feel you control it." | ||
| 231 | "A great many 'ordinary' people do want "a stake in this country" - something which they (like so many NHS patients) were evidently not made to feel they had when it was owned by the state." [RT: In other words, we resent state or government bureaucrats just as much as capitalists.] | |
| JW laments the lack of support for miners (trying to control the future of 'their' product, coal) or print unions (trying the same for 'their' product, newspaper articles). This is a dodgy argument because of her misuse of the word 'their'. Surely, the coal is also 'ours' (we being citizens, people living in the coalfields, users of coal (for whatever purpose), or just people needing heat, light or energy for whatever purpose in whatever form. And what about journalists or newspaper readers? | ||
| People also need to control their environment and communal identity [RT: and don't want bureaucrats or apparatchiks telling them how to do it.] | ||
| JW claims that consumerism captures many popular needs but doesn't fulfill them, and that "a more daring socialism" could do better - but she gives no clues as to how. | ||
| 232 | "It should be possible for public housing to provide these (desired for control) by, for example, building into its principles the notion of control of the individual tenant, and in practice giving council tenants the feeling that their council flat or house is 'their' home." [RT: I'd say that there has been enough time and opportunity for this to be introduced, even if only as a pilot project. But the suspicion is that it isn't possible, and people who buy their house will always feel they have more control.] | |
| JW makes the point that things like the Sony 'Walkman' cut users off from socializing in the street. [RT: It's even worse with iPods and mobile phones.] | ||
| "Economic oppression is a large part of the powerlessness which consumer ideology seeks to overcome." [RT: True, but so too is bueaucratic oppression.] | ||
| 232-3 | "The possession of expensive jogging shoes, videos, home computers and so on does not necessarily mark a level of fulfilment for the supposedly right-wing 'bourgeoisified' working class, but in part at least, a measure of frustration." [RT: This sounds very debatable; and there are other escapes apart from buying things.] | |
| 233 | "It is precisely the illusion of autonomy which makes consumerism such an effective diversion from the lack of other kinds of power in people's lives." [RT: I'm not sure we would be wise to worry about lack of power in many of these other aspects. In some areas, we'll probably always be pretty powerless, and always have been. Anarchy doesn't tend to work, so we have to put up with some people having lots more power than we have. But this sort of passivism isn't much use to 'revolutionaries'. | |
| Consumerism is "a much more fun place to be ... than trying to deal with ... the economic realities which are still the major constriction on most people's lives". [RT: True, and anyhow, even if we have a Marxist-type revolution in some countries, we still won't get rid of most such constrictions, especially the world-wide effects such as global limitations that relate to trade, ecology and natural resources. | ||
| App 2 - | I think it makes sense here to make a few comments on a much more recent book that I have read, namely 'Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having, Being' (2010) by Michael R Solomon and others, which is a text book for Marketing students. | |
| This book runs to just over 500 pages, and includes sections on 'Individuals' and Cultures and Sub-cultures. It by no means shirks the issues raised by Judith Williamson, but does so from a less political standpoint. Most of the 15 chapters include sidebars titled 'The Good, the Bad or the Ugly' and 'R U Ethical'. It certainly recognizes the semiotic angle in advertising, though it proposes a 3-way model with 'Object' (the product being marketed), 'Sign' (JW's 'referent'), and 'Interpretant' (the 'meaning' to be carried from the sign to the object). Two examples are given below. | ||
| Example 1: 'Object' is XXXX beer from Castlemaine brewery, Brisbane; 'Sign' is a photo of a Queensland Rugby League 'State of Origin' player; 'Meaning' is to prefer something that's from Queensland. | ||
| Example 2: 'Object' is a McDonalds hamburger; 'Sign' is the clown 'Ronald McDonald'; 'Meaning' is that there's something magical, doable by Ronald, so tastable in the burger. | ||
| The book admits the risk of 'hyper-reality', when the connection becomes too unthinkingly embedded in people's heads. | ||
| At the other end of the scale, there is a high rate of 'forgetting' among us targets, and there is also the phenomenon of 'extinction' - when the ad doesn't mean much any more. | ||
| Models such as Maslow's pyramid, the '3M' model of Mowen, and Rokeach's 'Value Types' are discussed critically. It is noticeable that these don't include much of Judith Williamson's emphasis on our role in 'production'. | ||
| There is a paragraph entitled "Materialism: 'He who dies with the most toys wins' ", and the book admits that "Australians inhabit a highly materialistic society". | ||
| There is a section on "The Dark Side of Consumer Behaviour", which includes 'Anticonsumption' - organized opposition to consumerism. | ||
| App 3 - | A collection of some of the 'Correlatives' shown in examples in JW's original book on Decoding Advertisements (see separate table below). Some of these products are a bit dated, and many are no longer marketed. |
| Referent | Product |
| Cup of coffee with cream | Silk Cut |
| Smart partygoers | Lambert & Butler |
| Golden beach | Revlon sun tan lotion |
| A-list personality | Sanderson wallpaper |
| Classic car | Players JP Kings |
| Salad bowl | Belair (cigs) |
| Wedding promises | Halifax Building Society |
| Roulette at a casino | Players JP Special |
| Portobello market scene | Morris Marina |
| Cheerful girl | Babycham |
| High-kicking lady in New York street | Happiness hair colour |
| Comic strip romance | Glow Girl |
| People like you (trendies) | Players No 6 |
| Not being like sheep | Fiat |
| Handwritten-like italics | Nina Ricci |
| Multiple 'you's | Eugene |
| Multiple 'you's | Stain dynamics |
| Multiple purposes | GM Chevette, Austin Maxi |
| Feeling yourself again | Thomson holidays |
| A younger you | Ulay, Coty |
| Settled M&F partnership | Record club |
| View of Istanbul in window | Benson & Hedges |
| Man lounging at luxury villa | Löwenbräu |
| Escapees from a party | Murphy TV set |
| Stolen TV | Sony |
| Happy girl looking miserable | Psychology Today magazine |
| Girl wearing shorts in water | Bacardi |
| Smoking airline pilot | Rothmans |
| Men in large greenhouse | ICI |
| Clunky techy box | Akai |
| Large mock Tudor house | MG (car) |
| Couple, one fishing, one painting | Sanatogen |
| Butterfly wings | Max Factor |
| Moon on water | Max Factor |
| Trousered lady on scooter | Kool (cigs) |
| Incomplete love letter | Black Magic |
| Molecule model | Midland Bank |
| Jinks in spa bath | Seagrams |
| Wigged 18th century grandee | Martell |
| Crystal ball | Embassy (cigs) |
| Old clock face | Aquasic bath salts |
| Out of focus orchard | Mateus Rosé wine |
| Kids playing in sand dunes | Kodak |
| City gent relaxing after work | Cracker Barrel |
| Rain stopped play at cricket ground | Benson & Hedges |
| Picnic hamper on river wharf | Benson & Hedges |
| Deserted New Orleans bar | Southern Comfort |
| Southern US plantation mansion | Southern Comfort |
| Lady airplane pilot | Virginia Slims |
| Black knight in full armour | Holsten |
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This version updated on 28th September 2012