Decoding Advertisements

178 Pages·1983·7.75 MB·English

by  Judith Williamson

IDEAS IN PROGRESS
Judith Williamson
DECODING
ADVERTISEMENTS
Ideology and Meaning
in Advertising
LONDON
Marion Boyars
NEW YORK
When I’m drivin’ in my car
And that man comes on the radio
And he's telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can’t get no
Satisfaction
When I’m watchin’ my TV
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
Well he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me
I can't get no
Satisfaction
I can’t get me no
Satisfaction__
Mick Jagger and Keith Richard
from ‘/ can't get no Satisfaction'
‘The reader who wishes to follow me
at all must resolve to climb from
the particular up to the general.’
Karl Marx
Critique of Political Economy
First published in Great Britain in 1978
by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
18 Brewer Street, London W1R 4AS
First published in the United States in 1979
by Marion Boyars Publishers Inc
457 Broome Street, New York 10013
Distributed in the USA by the Scribner Book Companies Inc
Canadian distribution by John Wiley and Sons Canada Ltd
Australian distribution by Thomas C. Lothian Pty Ltd.,
4-12 Tattersalls Lane, Melbourne, Victoria 3000
©Judith Williamson 1978
Reprinted 1978,1981,1983
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ISBN 0 7145 2614 2 Cased edition
ISBN 0 7145 2615 0 Paperback edition
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Williamson, Judith
Decoding advertisements. - (Ideas in progress)
1. Advertising
I. Title II. Series
659.1 HF5821
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number
79-307415
Printed and bound in Great Britain at
The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton
CONTENTS Preface to the Fourth Impression 6
Foreword 9
Introduction: ‘Meaning and Ideology’ 11
PART ONE ‘Advertising-Work’ 15
Chapter One A Currency of Signs 20
a. Differentiation 24
b. The Finished Connection: An ‘Objective Correlative’ 29
c. Product as Signified 31
d. Product as Signifier 35
e. Product as Generator 36
f. Product as Currency 38
Chapter Two Signs Address Somebody 40
a. Currency Requires a Subject to Make an Exchange 42
b.‘Totemism’: Subject as Signified 45
c. Appellation and Individualism: Individuals Constituted as
Subjects 50
d. Divisions 55
e. Advertising and the ‘Mirror-Phase’ 60
f. The Created Self 67
Chapter Three Signs for Deciphering: Hermeneutics 71
a. Absence 77
b. Language 84
c. Calligraphy 91
PART TWO ‘Ideological Castles’: Referent Systems 97
Chapter Four ‘Cooking Nature 103
a. ‘The Raw and the Cooked’: Representations of
Transformation 103
b. Science 110
c. ‘Cooked’ Sex: ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents' 120
Chapter Five Back to Nature 122
a. The Natural’ 123
b. Surrealism 131
c. The Ideology of the Natural 134
Chapter Six Magic 138
a. Alchemy 145
b. Spells 147
c. The Genie in the Lamp and the World in the Bottle 149
d.The Crystal Ball/Magic Circle. 151
Chapter Seven Time: Narrative and History 152
a. Time Past: Memory 157
b.Titne Future: Desire 161
c. History 164
Chapter Eight Conclusions 167
Select Bibliography 180
PREFACE TO THE In the six years since I wrote Decoding Advertisements there
FOURTH IMPRESSION have been developments both in advertising, and in the
critical context for work like this, which I feel warrant some
comment. I have no urge to up-date the book itself: that would
be seeing it as a permanent expression of ‘my’ ideas, exactly
the kind of notion this preface is intended fo dispel. Any book
is the product of certain things coming together at a certain
time. For me, these were my background of left-wing activism
and a delight in ‘popular’ media, meeting the work of Barthes
and others in my student days - a meeting described in the
original .foreword. But I now want to say more about the
theoretical context which, at that time, simply meant lots of
reading outside my academic syllabus, but within which I
found my own work firmly placed as soon as this book was
published.
I still believe what I said in that foreword, that Marxists -
and anyone who wants radically to change our world - cannot
afford to reject some of the basic structuralist-semiotic
theories. In emphasising how meaning is produced these
theories move away from the old idealism of essential
meanings, of fixed values taken for granted, of social phe­
nomena seen (conveniently) in isolation, not as part of social
systems. They stress that meanings are specific for particular
societies, classes, periods of history: not God-given and
immutable. This has challenged the whole academic tradition
of a knowledge that is out there to be discovered, like Mount
Everest - with the majority of people stuck floundering
around on the lower slopes. Knowledge is not just ‘out there’,
it is something we produce in our social relations (so runs the
theory).
It might seem unnecessary to spell this out, but 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,
the more superior those who claim to have reached it. And the
more people grasp one theory, the more urgent it becomes to
manufacture a different model, fast, so that you are still ahead
in the great race to be ahead - which so uncannily resembles
competitive capitalism. For these ins and outs of theoretical
fashion are not arbitrary, but are linked to wider changes.
New approaches of any lasting significance always, even­
tually, slip out of the academic net and into the world where
meanings are produced, not analysed. And semiotics, for
example, appeared, metamorphosed, on the streets of 1977
(the year after I wrote this book) in the self-conscious
structuring of ‘stolen’ and inverted symbols which was Punk.
‘Bricolage’ - originally a term used by L6vi-Strauss (see p.
101) - was employed in Punk dress, music and performance
with a deliberation which, if not the direct result of semiotk
studies, certainly marked a parallel consciousness of, and skill
in, ‘decoding’ and re-using social meanings.
And advertising also began to show far more skilful,
self-conscious use of ‘semiotics’ (whether under that name is
irrelevant), so that many of the formal practices of advertising
which in this book I felt I was teasing out as implicit in the ads,
are now explicit. When I talked of ads ‘hollowing out’ a social
space and inserting the product in it, I had no idea that Benson
and Hedges would soon be using a cigarette packet as a
Pyramid or an electric plug - or on a larger scale, that we
would see Central Park replaced by a Winston packet: both
literal manifestations of what I had seen as merely a formal
theory. Form is becoming far more important in the overt
‘content’ or meaning of ads: on p. 221 show the connection of
creamy coffee with a ‘mild’ cigarette, effected by picturing the
two together. Today, Silk Cut can make a similar reference by
using the colour and typography of a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk ad
(purple swirls) thereby evoking, through form alone, the
famous ‘glass and a half of full-cream dairy milk’ which,
another ad has told us, go into Cadbury’s chocolate. All this is
the semiotician’s dream - and also her or his nightmare. For
where do you go next, when the notions that some of us
struggled over years ago in Saussure and Barthes now seem to
be part of public imagery and a source of increasing refine­
ment in, not just academia, but the media?
The answer, some think, is onward and upward, always one
step ahead of the object of study, always with something more
difficult up one’s sleeve. But the increasing bulk of stuff that
gets written in academic journals and so on means that the
distance is ever widening between those whose careers depend
on honing down theories finer and finer, and those ‘non-
specialists’ who come across, and need, the structural-semi-
otic approach as part of a way of seeing society in general. It
would be more radical at present to try to close that gap, not
widen it.
For although advertisements have indeed changed over the
last decade, their increasing semiotic refinement has not made
the least difference to their basic function. At the end of this
book I said that the point is not to change ads, but to change
society. I would now add, neither is the point to improve
theory as if the world depended on it: it is more important to
change the relations in which theoretical work exists.
Most of the correspondence I have received year after year
appeals to me as an ‘expert’ on ‘advertising’. It is a measure of
how little self-confidence the education system allows people,
that they cannot believe they are perfectly capable of drawing
valid conclusions about anything. The books I read before
writing this book are in the extremely short bibliography on
p. 180: they are not all easy to read but anyone who struggles
through them can work out what I did. My interest has never
been so much in adverts, as in what they show about our
society and ways of seeing ourselves. Advertisements intend
to make us feel we are lacking; it would be terrrible if
‘theoretical’ books about advertisements had the same effect.
December 1982
FOREWORD I want to say how and why this book was written: to give it a
context. The introductory section to follow gives a basic outline
of its content, and explains its structure and subtitle.
I first submitted this as a project for a course in popular
culture at the University of California, Berkeley. It consisted
simply of advertisements and a formal analysis of each one. But
in the course of my analysis conclusions emerged which formed
the basis of the theory which I present here. The book in its
present form has been entirely rewritten and re-structured in
terms of that theory.
But the reasons for its being written at all go much further
back. I arrived in Berkeley with a bulging file of advertisements
collected over many years. I had been tearing them out of
magazines, and keeping them with a vague hope of coming to
terms with their effect on me. As a teenager, reading both Karl
Marx and ‘Honey’ magazine, I couldn’t reconcile what I knew
with what I felt. This is the root of ideology, I believe. I knew I
was being ‘exploited’, but it was a fact that I was attracted.
Feelings (ideology), lag behind knowledge (science). We can
learn from their clash. We move forward as the revolutionary
becomes the obvious.
This process can be reversed, however. When I looked at
advertisements and wrote my Berkeley project, my conclusions
seemed obvious and clear to me; they explained, although they
did not explain away, my reactions to advertisements. But when
I read structuralist thinkers, indeed, some modern Marxist
thinkers, I found my project placed in quite a new context. It
seemed as if people were getting excited about, and taking as
unusual, certain aspects of structure and relationships. These
are essential, but they are not new. Of course relations between
things are important: of course systems are important.
Thus it seems that recently, the very obvious (for example,
structure) has become ‘revolutionary’. This is in fact retrograde.
We should be trying to see new things both in society and in
ourselves, our own feelings and reactions. I could not have
written this, theoretical though it has turned out in its final
version, without that battle throughout my teenage years, and
still now, between the desire for magazine glamour and the
knowledge that I will never achieve it, that it is a myth. So what
made me want it? A real need—but falsely fulfilled: in fact,
sustained by its perpetual unfulfilment.
This is personal, because much of my book is impersonal. I
value a theory and formal structure of approach precisely
because it can be shared. Yet it should also be material and
practical. I like to think of the title of this book as suggesting
‘dismantling cars’ or something—a sort of handbook. I am
9
impatient with any theory of ideology which is not tied to
anything practical, to the material factors which influence our
feelings, our lives, our images of ourselves.
The personal context for this book, which I have given here,
does not fundamentally differ from the wider reasons I give
below for studying advertisements. Politics is the intersection of
public and private life. This book deals with a public form, but
one which influences us privately: our own private relations to
other people and to ourselves. The ideology of interpersonal
relations (the supply and demand of love, for example) is the
subject for quite another kind of work. But these areas are
influenced by advertising, and it is in them that the struggle
against false consciousness is at once most bitter, and most
concealed. This struggle does not take place in theory, but is
every day all around us; however, to form a theory of advertising
(one which I have since found ‘works’ for other ideological
forms, television, film, etc.), breaks through the isolation of
individual struggle. It can help to put personal reaction on a
scientific basis, and its very impersonality is what validates the
particular.
Because, for this reason, 1 believe that structural analysis and
a clear theory of popular media are crucial to a political
understanding of media, I must acknowledge my debt to
structuralist thinkers. But I have used other people’s ideas only
as tools: I have taken the tools which have been useful in
‘decoding’ advertisements and rejected the others. I believe
Marxists cannot afford totally to reject structuralism: as the
subtlety of capitalism’s ideological processes increases, so does
the need for subtlety in our understanding of them. We cannot
afford to let any tool that might be useful slip through our
hands. This is not being ‘eclectic’ but being practical.
Having attempted both to locate my own subjectivity in this
work and to place it in relation to current intellectual trends, I
must point out that in its rudimentary form it is already over a
year old, and is in no way a final statement. It is, rather, an
attempt to find a shareable method of dealing with the ideology
with which we are bombarded.
I would like to thank Katherine Shonfield and Leslie Dick for
helping me out with some of the typing: Janet Gray, who typed
the whole of the final copy: Gerard Duveen for finding the last
two advertisements in the book and sending them to me in
America: and Chris Hale, whose arguments kept me mentally
alert and whose encouragement gave me moral support
throughout the time I was writing this.
Berkeley-Brighton
1976-7