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</head><body><hr>Linda M. Scott (1992), "PLAYING WITH PICTURES:
POSTMODERNISM, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, AND ADVERTISING VISUALS", in Advances
in Consumer Research Volume 19, eds. John F. Sherry, Jr. and Brian
Sternthal, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages:
596-612.<hr><acrtext>        <p align="center"><acrvolume>Advances in Consumer Research Volume 19</acrvolume>, <acryear>1992</acryear> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  Pages 596-612</p>    <p align="center"><acrtitle>PLAYING WITH PICTURES: POSTMODERNISM, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, AND ADVERTISING  VISUALS</acrtitle></p>    <p align="center"><acrauthor>Linda M. Scott</acrauthor>, University of Colorado, Boulder</p>    <p align="center"><acrabstract>ABSTRACT - </acrabstract></p>    <p align="left">The
postmodern environment in consumer research has led to a diversity of
approaches to consumer culture. As is typical of many postmodern
enterprises, the new ethic of research has often resulted in recasting
consumption and its culture as "texts" to be read and interpreted.
Within this framework, several interpretive essays on commercial art
have appeared, but all have used structuralist/ semiotic theory. This
essay explores the advertising visual as a postmodern text, proposing
that poststructuralist theory offers particular promise as an
appropriate strategy for interpreting graphic signification in consumer
culture.</p>    <p align="left">"Our advertising is fed by
postmodernism in all the arts and inconceivable without it," writes
Fredric Jameson in his landmark essay, "Postmodernism and Consumer
Society"(1983, p. 124). The postmodern critique has reached a momentous
level among cultural theorists (compare Gitlin 1989; Hassan 1980;
Hebdige 1989; Jameson 1983, 1984; Kellner on Baudrillard 1989; Lyotard
1984; McRobbie 1986; Morris 1989). Although there is disagreement about
postmodernism's meaning, political orientation, and artistic effects,
there is a consensus that the postmodern aesthetic comes from the
marketplace. Postmodernism, it is argued, is the artform of the
consumer society, an outgrowth of mass production, mass media, and mass
marketing (Hebdige 1989; Jameson 1984; Gitlin 1989). Critics assert
that postmodernism represents the rise of the visual at the expense of
the verbal, and the archetypal example is often the advertisement
(McRobbie 1986, p. 54-56). Yet the textual, technological, and
historical developments in commercial art that point to the postmodern
aesthetic have not been traced. </p>    <p align="left">As this
academic kettle was brewing in the humanities, a paradigm shift
occurred in consumer behavior that brought us into a "postmodern"
period (Lutz 1989, Sherry 1991). This new ethic of research welcomes
multiple voices and pluralistic methods for their diversity, richness,
and new insights--and mirrors similar moves toward intellectual
pluralism in fields like literary criticism and anthropology. As is
typical of postmodern enterprises, initial efforts have often recast
consumer culture, indeed the act of consumption itself, as a form of
text (Stern 1989 is just one example). The study of advertising texts
has drawn specific interest, including several essays on advertising
visuals (Durand 1987, McQuarrie 1989, Mick and Politi 1989). So far,
however, all the new work on commercial art in our own discipline has
adopted the mantle of semiotics/structuralism as its theory. My purpose
in this essay is to introduce poststructuralist thought as a new
framework for studying advertising visuals, particularly within the
context of the postmodern aesthetic. This is an exploratory piece,
presenting concepts along with historical illustrations as a way of
suggesting the potential and parameters for a different way of thinking
about advertising images. I am motivated to do this by the uncanny
confluences among certain poststructuralist concepts, the formal and
historical characteristics of advertising texts, and the marks that are
generally agreed to typify postmodern style in graphics.</p>    <p align="center">POSTMODERNISM: A SHOPPER'S GUIDE</p>    <p align="left">"The
entire elusive phenomenon that has been characterized as postmodernism
is best understood not just as a style but as a general orientation, as
a way of apprehending and experiencing the world and our place, or
placelessness, in it" (Gitlin 1989, p. 101). Postmodernism has been
notoriously hard to define. Part of this difficulty is traceable to one
of its most characteristic traits, a tendency to embrace diversity. As
in our own field, postmodernism in art, literature, and everyday life
is often seen as a fundamental multiplicity of viewpoints. To some,
this is a democratic characteristic; to others, this multiplicity is
seen as a cynical inability to commit, a jaded lapse of conscience, a
vision that is hopelessly "fragmented," or simply the absence of
viewpoint caused by the tolerance of many views (Donoghue 1986, Gitlin
1989, Jameson 1984, Lyotard 1984). Postmodernism in intellectual
discourse is often also relativistic and historicist, distrustful of
transcendent principles or underlying structure (see, for example,
Anderson 1986). Thus, for those who prefer hierarchical orders,
traditional art, and absolute truths, postmodernism can be quite
threatening.</p>    <p align="left">"Postmodern" and "postmodernism"
are terms that are used to describe a philosophy, an aesthetic, and the
conditions of living in a certain period of history, much as the terms
"Renaissance" or "classical" are used for the same purposes. This
overlap in terminology is not peculiar to the discourse on
postmodernism. However, our awareness of the overlap of these forces in
social experience is a rather salient feature in postmodern thinking.
In the current practice of cultural criticism--influenced as it is by
neomarxism and the cross-fertilization between anthropology, "high
theory," and the arts--it has become a truism that philosophy and
aesthetics are produced by the conditions of living and, in turn,
affect the conditions of living via their influence upon values,
beliefs, and perceptions. So, although we are primarily concerned in
this paper with a visual style and aesthetic, both the conditions of
living and the philosophical orientations of the twentieth century will
be constant subtexts. </p>    <p align="left">In cultural works, a
certain constellation of styles and tones are generally thought to
characterize postmodernism: pleasure in the play of surfaces; allusion;
mimicry; irony and parody; formal self-consciousness; fragmentation;
repetition; mixtures of forms, periods, and styles (Gitlin 1989, Hassan
1980, Jameson 1983). Although postmodernism occurs in music and
literature, it is frequently characterized as profoundly visual, and
thus a death threat to the culture of the word (Donoghue 1986, Hassan
1980, McRobbie 1986). Since postmodern artifacts frequently allude to
other artifacts in a visual way, postmodernism has been called
(pejoratively) an art that quotes "images already man-made" (Donoghue
1986, p. 36; see also Benjamin 1968). These allusory exchanges are
often between mass media texts--the print ad that "quotes" a TV sitcom,
for example, as in Figure 1. </p>    <p align="left">Postmodernism is
bashed by both political extremes. The New Left reviles postmodernism
as the culture of "Thatcherism"; high art traditionalists bemoan it as
the degenerate voice of popular culture (Hebdige 1989). Nevertheless,
if one observes postmodernism as it exists in everyday life--those
things in ads, album covers, table settings, magazine layouts, and
music videos that are "pointed to" as being postmodern--a number of
other social aspects become clear. One is that the postmodern is a
popular style in both senses of the word: it is a mass form and it is
well-liked by many people (Gitlin 1989; Lyotard 1984, p. 76). Indeed,
the positive reception given postmodern culture appears to be one of
its greatest sins in the minds of intellectuals (Jameson, p. 124;
Lytoard 1984, p. 76). In the forms it takes and the allusions it makes,
postmodernism is an art of the every day; for example, its text and
context is often television ("that mongoloid medium," Hassan, p. 124).
Postmodernism is often identified, explicitly or implicitly, as a
peculiarly American phenomenon; descriptions often focus on sites of
mass consumption, like shopping malls and fast food restaurants (see
Gitlin 1989). Postmodernism shows a penchant for the retro and the
tacky, as well as a preference for the imaginative recombination of
everyday forms over the exaltation of the rare, privileged, or
expensive. Thus, postmodernism is an aesthetic that is accessible to
the many and not just the few. Further, the ability to broadly
communicate is a mark of postmodern cultural artifacts that
distinguishes them from modernist works--and raises the ire of the
critics (Lyotard 1984, p. 76; Merquior 1986, p. 17). Taking advantage
of the shared discourses of television, radio, films, and mass
magazines, the postmodern style can tap into a world of artifice and
allusion that is easily as sophisticated as the world of gentlemen
literary critics--but with a much wider audience. The knowing audience
implied by postmodernism challenges both the elitist assumptions and
anti-empirical methods of the culture of modernist criticism (McRobbie
1986, p. 55-56). Thus, in many ways, the thrust of postmodernism works
against "modernism's relentless hostility to mass culture" (Huyssen,
qtd. in McRobbie).</p>    <p align="center">POSTSTRUCTURALISM: THE TRIAL-SIZED VERSION</p>    <p align="left">As
both a philosophy and a theory of language, poststructuralism exists in
opposition to structuralism and its contemporary manifestation,
semiotics (Davis and Schliefer 1989, pp. 147-148, pp. 205-213; Eagleton
1983, pp. 127-150; Newton 1988, pp. 147-148). Poststructuralism was
introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1966, and gained
rapid acceptance, notably among famous structuralists like Roland
Barthes and Jonathan Culler (Davis and Schliefer 1989, pp. 205-213;
Eagleton 1983, pp. 135-145; Lentricchia, pp. 157-210; Newton 1988, p.
171). Using Saussure's principle that a sign has distinctive meaning by
virtue of its difference from other signs, Derrida built the
poststructuralist argument that all gestures signify according to their
present place in a web made of the existing universe of signs (Eagleton
1983, pp. 127-134). The locus of meaning, then, is not an immutable,
ideal structure of language that acts as a "center" for
signification--and thus knowledge and life. Instead, meaning inheres in
the surface of an ever-changing web of signs, making all language acts
essentially provisional and allusory. Each signification is seen as
being constructed of fragments of prior significations, being
meaningful by virtue of the traces that each fragment carries of
previous uses (Derrida 1972). These already-used words and images are
then reassembled, in an act and form that Derrida calls bricolage, and
they come to mean in the way that they shimmer against each other and
against their previous context. This "play" among the fragments is what
is known as the freeplay of the signifiers. Since each fragment means
by virtue of association with other fragments, meaning is said to be
always deferred to another chain of signifiers. This constant deferral
of meaning is known, in a play on Saussure, as the diffTrance (Derrida
1972; Eagleton 1983, pp. 127-135).</p>    <p align="left">A primary
interpretive strategy of poststructuralists has been to reveal the
constructed nature of texts by unravelling the associations upon which
they are built, a technique called deconstruction (Abrams 1977, Miller
1976). Indeed, this technique is so famous and controversial that
poststructuralism is often called "deconstruction" or
"deconstructionism." In particular, the deconstructive strategy often
aims to subvert the binary oppositions presumed by structuralists,
showing the text to be undecidable in binary terms, due to the freeplay
of the signfiers (DeMan 1979, Eagleton 1983, pp. 132-134). As the text
is unravelled, poststructuralists assert, one catches a glimpse of the
absence of an immutable structure, or philosophical center, underlying
the utterance. This momentary insight into the chasm underlying
language is known as the mise en abyme (Abrams 1977, p. 560). The work
of the critic toward the moment of the abyss has given
poststructuralism a bleak metaphysical aspect (Abrams 1977; Gitlin
1989, pp. 106-107), and led to a reputation for the theory as,
ironically and at once, both playful and nihilistic (Derrida 1972, pp.
243-246; Lentricchia, pp. 160-163).</p>    <p align="left">For our
purposes here, we must note that poststructuralism also differs from
semiotics in another important way. While structuralism is a
speech-based theory of language, or phonocentric, poststructuralism is
a writing-based theory, or graphocentric. Everything in
poststructuralism is a text, and there is nothing that exists oustide
the text (Derrida 1972, Davis and Schliefer 1989). Among other things,
this difference opens poststructuralism to the differences in how
images, as a form of writing, are portrayed, as opposed to focusing on
or assuming their referentiality, as has been the case with
structuralism (for example, Barthes 1982). The effect of
poststructuralism is specifically to divide the signifier from the
signified, as well as to decenter the privileges of the word over the
image (Eagleton 1983, p. 128; Morris 1989). </p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19598f01.gif">FIGURE 1</a></p><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19598f01.gif">    </a><p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19598f01.gif">ADVERTISING AS POSTMODERN BRICOLAGE</a></p>    <p align="left">Given
its preoccupation with fragments, allusion, playfulness, surfaces, and
the work of bricolage, poststructuralism predictably has become nearly
synonymous with postmodernism in cultural critical discourse (Gitlin
1989; McRobbie 1986; Morris 1989). Poststructuralism, seemingly the
most suitable analytical tool for postmodern artifacts (though by no
means the only tool), has become identified with them, much the same
way New Criticism became identified with Modernist poetry and fiction
(Davis and Schleifer 1989, p. 15). Consequently, it seems likely that
poststructuralism would have much to offer our own scholars in their
desire to analyze that prime mover of postmodernism, advertising. </p>    <p align="left">In
the remainder of this essay, I wish to suggest how advertising came to
exhibit the distinguishing characteristics of postmodern artifacts and
show the suitability of poststructuralist concepts to the explication
of ads-as-text. We will look first at the historical basis and ground
for pictorial allusion in advertisements, thus sketching out the
symbolic web and the trajectories of the diffTrance. Then, practices of
signification typical of advertising, the reuse of images and mimicry
of styles, will be analyzed as overt acts of bricolage. Target
audiences will be discussed as the coin of which one side is
fragmentation and the other, multivocality. The development in
television advertising of story-telling and character description as a
progression of broken images will be examined. Finally, the changing
relationship between image and word will be explored in order that the
question of an emergent pictographic culture may be raised. </p>    <p align="center">THE PICTORIAL WEB</p>    <p align="left">The
history of advertising as a visual discourse, as opposed to its verbal
history, must be traced from retail signboards to the popular printed
poster to the magazine ad (Hornung and Johnson 1976, Presbrey 1929).
Key to the momentum is the ability of printing technology to reproduce
visual forms in an increasingly accurate and full-bodied way--with
line, color, half-tones, and so on. Both the reproduction of pictures
and the growing vocabulary of typefaces have been of central interest
to advertisers throughout graphics history (Hornung and Johnson 1976).
Advertisers, however, were precluded from running elaborate pictures in
newspapers and, later, in magazines, for decades after pictures were
routinely included in editorial (Hornung and Johnson 1976, Presbrey
1929). Once allowed to use fully the pictorial capability of a medium,
advertisers frequently appropriated the styles of the contextual
vehicle. For example, the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, the most
popular early-century magazine and the most aggressive in soliciting
advertising, was mimicked in advertising layouts as early as 1905
("Pro-phy-lact-ic Tootpaste" ad 1905) and continues today ("Durolast"
ad 1989). As the "Golden Age of Illustration" progressed, more
illustrative styles and layouts were both known and mimicked, not only
in advertising but in other cultural forms as well. Furthermore, once
the technology was sophisticated enough to reproduce high art forms in
quantity, the practice of visually alluding to famous paintings and
sculptures became common. Typical of this genre is the current ad for
Minolta (Figure 2), which alludes to the works of Rene Magritte. The
sense of this ad, like others of its type, is based on a sufficient
reproduction of the original, graphically altered for the purposes of
rhetoric. Thus, it signifies through partial allusions, recombined in
fragments, that "shimmer" against each other in a new message. Such ads
often result in a visual parody of high art, like the 1970 Levi's ad
that simply showed Michelangelo's David dressed in a pair of "cut-offs"
(Goodrum and Dalrymple 1990, p. 170).</p>    <p align="left">In the
1930s, growth in two other cultural forms, comic strips and radio, is
mirrored in advertising pictures. Throughout the magazines of the
thirties are examples of comic characters or strip styles being adapted
for commercial use. Advertisers, apparently trying to effect synergy
between the new medium of radio and the more mainstream medium of
popular print, also tended to announce their sponsored radio offerings
in the corners of print ads, often signalled by an appropriate picture,
like a drawing of an orchestra conductor ("Coca-Cola" ad 1936). In the
1936 ad for Campbell's Tomato Juice reproduced in Figure 3, we see a
full-blown example of this kind of intertextual allusion: the visual
convention of the comic strip is used to evoke the sponsored radio show
by making a box-and-balloon recreation of the comic antics of Burns and
Allen. Eventually, similar practices would be used to announce
sponsored television shows, as well. The main visual in Campbell's Soup
advertising of the 1950s is usually a photograph of Timmy and Lassie or
Donna Reed's TV family, since both Lassie and The Donna Reed Show were
sponsored by the soup-maker ("Campbell's Soup Print" 1900-1985).</p>    <p align="left">Given
this pictorial past, then, it is perhaps easier to see how the TV
allusion in Figure 1 came to be. The headline does not refer
exclusively to I Love Lucy, nor to the characters of Fred and Ethel
Mertz, nor to Vivian Vance and William Frawley, though certainly the
advertiser is banking on the viewer making those connections. The
headline's allusion, however, is more general than that. It gestures
toward all the domestic squabbles that typify the genre of television
situation comedy. The headline is aided by a graphic screen over the
photograph, a convention that we know signifies "television." Thus,
both the textual referent and the manner of "writing" are important to
the allusion. The graphic style is not empty mimicry, as is often
claimed by critics of postmodernism, but a purposive, meaningful
gesture.</p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19601f02.gif">FIGURE 2</a></p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19602f03.gif">FIGURE 3</a></p>    <p align="left">Looking
at the "flip side," if you will, we also find allusions to and parodies
of advertising in other media forms. Saturday Night Live is but one in
a long history of late-night TV shows that have used advertising parody
as a staple comic gimmick. But new forms such as Nick at Nite, which
reruns old TV shows but parodies them in the promos, have made such
allusions even more complex. In Figure 4, Nick at Nite pretends to
offer a ceramic sculpture of the graphic sign of a classic sitcom, My
Three Sons. In so doing, it parodies "mail-away" ads like those of the
Franklin Mint, ending with the send-up, "Not available anywhere, even
from us." This ad's picture must be understood, therefore, as both the
intertextual referent and its parody. We can see, then, the web of
signs being altered by this use, refabricated in the current play of
signification. Our sketch of the pictorial web is now more or less
complete: we have seen the interaction of the advertising visual with
popular magazines, high art, radio, comic strips, television, and,
ultimately, with itself. This formal consciousness of self is, in many
opinions, the essence of postmodernism. </p>    <p align="center">REUSING IMAGES AND MIMICKING VISUAL STYLES</p>    <p align="left">The
ability to accurately reproduce and mimic other images also led quickly
to the reuse and repetition of the advertiser's own signs. For example,
in 1897, Colgate paid Maxfield Parrish twenty-five dollars for the
painting of a Dutch boy for the purposes of advertising Cashmere
Bouquet. Once in possession of the painting, Colgate had other artists
copy it, adapt it, and reconfigure it in various forms, large and
small, in line art and halftones, as a female and a male, in multiple
repetitions and for many other products. Consequently, it became one of
the best known advertising signs of the turn of the century, constantly
reappearing in new incarnations (Ludwig 1975, pp. 105-106). The Dutch
boy image itself--like thousands of others that would follow--became
meaningful specifically through the mechanism of graphic reconstitution
and repetition and referring always to its string of previous
appearances. </p>    <p align="left">Using unknown artists to mimic
the visual styles of well-known popular illustrators in the production
of new images became a common strategy among advertisers. By borrowing
certain visual styles, the advertiser alluded to the associations that
the known artist had come to have (Scott 1991). Thus, the style of
rendering itself came to signify. Beginning in the late 1920s,
advertising art directors also appropriated the styles of high art, as
they were articulated both pictorially and typographically, often to
lend an air of authority or prestige to their campaigns (Marchand 1985,
pp. 140-148). This taught the conventions of Cubism, Vorticism,
Impressionism, Bauhaus, and other styles to an audience that might
never have otherwise been exposed to them (Marchand 1985). Over time,
the social and historical associations of these styles could be invoked
through their reproduction to create an ethos or a sense of period.
Ultimately, the profusion of popular and high styles that could appear
and be meaningful within the context of a single magazine issue comes
to constitute a kind of visual heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981); that is,
cultural multivocality stated in visual terms.</p>    <p align="left">As
it appears in a magazine, the Jello Jigglers ad in Figure 5 has a
noticeable all-over yellow cast, similar to that caused by the color
print-production technologies of the 1950s. The headline is set in a
typeface popular in the 1950s and the graphic recipe cut-out is much
more typical of that decade than the present one. The consumption
texts, both the little boy's pajamas and the recipe itself, are also
evocative of the baby boom years. For all appearances, this is an ad
from the 1950s; however, it actually ran for the first time in 1989.
This ad is thus a particularly good example of the postmodern genre of
pastiche. The pastiche is a form of historical parody that Jameson
criticizes as one text aping another without the humor or affection
characteristic of "real" parody (Jameson 1983). Yet if we think of all
the signs here as fragments coming together to signify through their
associations with prior symbolic gestures, as well as their
appropriateness for the task at hand, then this pastiche is merely
using visual forms to communicate in much the same way words do under
the poststructuralist model. Notice also that the graphical manner of
signifying in this ad is as important as what objects are
pictured--perhaps more so. Thus, the structuralist principle and
practice of brushing aside the surface manifestations of pictures in
search of the underlying structures or the apparent referents would
obscure much of what is being said here (see Leymore 1987, Barthes
1982). And, surely, though the literary critics may not view these
pajamas as an affectionate allusion, most of the rest of us would.
Using these affectionate allusions, the Jigglers ad visually evokes a
fondly-remembered historical period as a means of building the ground
for mutual confidence that is necessary to persuasion.</p>    <p align="center">FRAGMENTATION, MULTIVOCALITY, AND PRACTICAL UNITIES</p>    <p align="left">In
ways similar to the work of the Jello ad, various visual strategies may
be used to appeal to and create alliances with certain groups of
readers, or target audiences. Targeting audiences obviously is further
achievable through the channels and vehicles of media. For example, in
the current Toyota ads, different pictures rendered in the same style
target the typical readers of various magazines: a youthful, male
sportscar driver for Rolling Stone; a young woman for Mademoiselle; a
family around the fireplace for Metropolitan Home. The pictures and the
placements carve out various audiences, while the consistent visual
style creates formal campaign unity. </p>    <p align="left">As a
consequence of this use of pictures and styles to carve out smaller
groups from the larger society, however, consumer texts are often
charged with "fragmenting" culture (Gitlin 1989). This is a specious
argument, in my mind, which is best refuted by considering the textual
alternative. Opposing this kind of fragmentation in the media can only
be done by homogenizing both the approaches to society and the channels
for reaching it, as well as the depictions of its members, thus denying
its diversity and multivocality on all levels. Recently, Dick Hebdige,
has argued in support of the multivocality--and implicit democratic
impulse--behind such postmodern developments, and, taking his cue from
Raymond Williams, suggests the worthiness of "demassifying the masses,"
even unto the point of forging alliances between Marxism and market
research (1989, especially p. 52-53). </p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19604f04.gif">FIGURE 4</a></p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19605f05.gif">FIGURE 5</a></p>    <p align="left">A
further source of criticism falling under the general heading of
"fragmentation," is the convention of visual collage or montage,
particularly in television. This convention was begun by advertisers in
the early 1960s as a means of telling stories and evoking characters in
the short time frame allowed for television commercials (Haber 1989,
Levine 1984). Since there wasn't time in a TV spot for the careful
plotting and revelation of character allowed by traditional dramatic
forms, advertising producers experimented with stringing together
multiple visual moments--an action, a facial expression--that would,
together, constitute a narrative, describe a character, or evoke a
mood. Television programming itself has generally continued to use a
much more traditional form of dramatic exposition--essentially the
"naturalistic theater" form of storytelling--while the commercials have
become increasingly composed of vignettes and montages, especially as
lengths shortened. Even so, such "fragmentation" is constrained by the
achieved unity of story or character comprehension, as intended by the
advertising author (Haber 1989, Levine 1984). In other words, the
composition of the fragments is not open-ended, but constrained by
normative strategies of seeing, story-telling, and inference. It is
often aruged, on the other hand, that the poststructuralist model
avoids the issue of interpretive norms that circumscribe the play of
associations and therefore make communication possible (Abrams 1977). </p>    <p align="center">THE IMAGE AND THE WORD</p>    <p align="left">The
community of criticism, being heavily invested in the culture of the
word, has traditionally viewed pictures as atavistic icons, powerful
implements that bypass our rational faculties to drag us back to more
primitive times, while the word is the very heartbeat of civilization
(Mitchell 1986, p. 3 and 7-46). There is thus a thoroughgoing
antivisual bias in cultural criticism that nearly always lies just
beneath the discourse on popular culture. The tendency toward verbal
imperialism in structuralist theory plays well to this disposition; the
impetus of poststructuralism is directly against it (Saussure 1959, p.
16; Mitchell 1986, pp. 53-74; Morris 1989). Further, the gestures of
postmodernism, particularly in advertising, have tended to change and
subvert assumptions about the relationship between word and image.</p>    <p align="left">In
Western culture, verbal literacy has long been equated with power.
Access to the skill to read has been the goal of the oppressed, as in
the heroic efforts of the American black community to attain literacy
in the 19th century, as well as the means to keep the oppressed in
their place, as in reading requirements for voting rights. It is
important to understand that the rise of the mass media substantially
changed the role of reading in several ways. First, popular fiction, as
published in mass magazines or cheap books, made reading a pastime of
the masses for the first time (Darnton 1987). Secondly, the growing
hegemony of the visual and aural cultures of television and radio, have
threatened the preeminence of the written word. Finally, the
ever-widening visual vocabulary caused by the practices I have
described here has changed the interaction between pictures and words
in popular texts. Whereas pictures in a written work have traditionally
illustrated or elaborated the text in a subordinated fashion, the
postmodern work is more likely to show a meaningful interaction--a
free-playing--between image and word. And, the use of communicative
styles of typeface, as well as purposive layouts, have come to mediate
the word in a profoundly visual way.</p>    <p align="left">For
example, in Figure 6, the meaning of the ad must be inferred by holding
the picture and the headline in semantic tension. The headline, which
uses a typical diplomatic phrase that normally occurs in situations of
conciliation, "strengthens our ties," is contradicted by the visual, a
caricature of Ayatollah Khomeini dangling Uncle Sam by a string.
Together, they form an ironic trope. Neither picture nor headline alone
can produce the trope, a proposition you can easily test by covering
one while "reading" the other. Both must be present to constitute the
irony. So, the meaning occurs precisely in the space of interaction not
only between two signs, but between two sign systems (see also Foucault
1983). </p>    <p align="left">The inablity of structuralism to
account for meanings that must be inferred in a state of ambiguity has
been one of its weakest points, and a place frequently attacked (Davis
and Schliefer 1989; Eagleton 1983). In poststructuralist theory, this
argument is further articulated in the demonstration of the
undecidability that occurs in a text between binary categories of
structurality (see De Man 1979). For a demonstration of this phenomenon
occuring on both a visual and verbal level, look at the J &amp; B
advertisement in Figure 7. Here we see a messy representation of the
alphabet that looks like it was brushed hastily in black paint. The
letters "B" and "J," however, have been set in a neat, Garamond
typeface, in red. They contrast succinctly, but not overly, with the
surrounding alphabet and they are not in the order of the product's
name. The legend is simply, "J &amp; B neat," simultaneously a play on
"J &amp; B straight up"and on the contiguous representation of the
messy alphabet with the neat letters "B" and "J." The meaning here is
created by both a metaphor (the pun on "straight up") and a metonymy
(the letters)--and is thus undecidable. It is also undecidable whether
the joke inheres in the letters themselves or the visual representation
of the letters. Therefore, neither a paradigmatic (metaphorical,
rhetorical) model nor a syntagmatic (grammatical, metonymic) model is
sufficient by itself to decide the meaning. It is found, instead, in
the shimmering surface between each binary opposition. </p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19607f06.gif">FIGURE 6</a></p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19608f07.gif">FIGURE 7</a></p>    <p align="left">M.
H. Abrams has explicated the Derridean notion of language as a
graphocentric system in which we constitute meaning from black marks
and spaces that have been estranged from our usual prior model of
speech acts. These marks and spaces, however, are signs we have seen
before, not random markings, and as they are reused to make new
meanings, they carry with them the disembodied traces from previous
uses. Thus, any act of interpretation or attempt at definition ties one
to the never-ending, ultimately meaningless chain of deferral. By
breaking down each text into an endless chain of associations,
synonyms, and etymological roots, purposely working across those places
where the possibilites are generally narrowed and guided by norms, the
poststructuralists interpret their texts into oblivion. This action is
intentional; its purpose is to lead to the aforementioned moment of the
abyss. The deconstructionists claim that all linguistic configurations
are ultimately undecidable, or, as Abrams puts it "more bluntly: 'All
reading is misreading'" (1977, p. 560). Thus, though the Derridean
concept of language is grounded in shared knowledge and past experience
as the source (indeed, the only source) of meaning, the
poststructuralist activity of deconstruction finally denies the way
that social experience and norms constrain the limitless possibilities
presented by the text. In this way, the Derridean concept has led to a
model of language that does not communicate. Poststructuralist critics,
by exploding shared practices, knowledge, and historical events,
ultimately reject the possibility for either communication or action in
a way that many feel is cynical (Abrams 1977, Gitlin 1989, Hirsch 1976).</p>    <p align="left">Figure
8 provides a surprising play on this cynical model of language. This is
a recent advertisement for Cointreau that appears only in hip, upscale,
postmodern magazines like Spy, Details, and Vanity Fair. The visual is
a very artificially dressed and made-up woman. Tinted purple, and
superimposed slightly to the left of her image, is the partial face of
a man, who seems to be the speaker. (Perhaps he is the human equivalent
of a "fragment.") The backdrop for the copy block is even marbleized,
like the world of these readers, hopelessly hip. </p>    <p align="left">But
it is the copy that is remarkable in its strangeness. It is an odd
French-based patois, at once Gallic and pidgin. A second headline and
copy block appears at the bottom of the ad, but it is cut off, as if
the run of the press was crooked. (Freeplay in the machine?) It is as
if to indicate that the next signification, the next diffTrance, is
already in the process of being formulated. When we are first
confronted with it, this language has all the strange and threatening
appearance of the innovative text described by Poststructuralist J.
Hillis Miller: "...the terror or dread readers may experience when they
confront a text which seems irreducibly strange, inexplicable, perhaps
even mad" (1989, p. 567). The traces of French and pidgin are even a
bit offensive, implying a cruel, long-ago, but still destructive
colonialism. We may, perhaps, despair of understanding this ad,
considering ourselves not qualified to aspire to the hipness demanded
by postmodern society. Maybe we turn the page.</p>    <p align="left">But
maybe we try reading this out loud. The language, it turns out, is
completely phonetic. A minimal knowledge of French makes the sense of
these lines come rolling out when they are spoken. The primacy of
speech reasserts itself in a wonderful little joke; the closed graphic
presentation is opened by a phonetic key. In a playful gesture between
writing and speech, the word reasserts its communicative power.</p>    <p align="left">Conclusions</p>    <p align="left">I
have tried to draw here the outlines of a visual history in which
images have come to communicate in abstract, allusory, and stylistic
ways that challenge verbal language. We have seen several instances in
which the visual presentation of words impinged heavily on meaning,
conflating the traditional separation between image and text. We, as
collective viewers and readers, have moved and continue to move beyond
a past in which pictures largely confined themselves to referentiality
or ritual, and toward a culture in which pictures demonstrate, exhort,
explain, allude, and, above all, play. What we are making here, it
seems to me, is a full-blown pictography that can both speak to and
represent a wide, diverse audience. Unfortunately, it appears that a
mistrust of consumer society, a vested interest in the culture of the
word, a thinly-veiled contempt for the "masses," and an unwillingness
to support art as communication, have led cultural critics to greet
this development in human ability as the death knell of civilization. </p>    <p align="left">The
role of advertising in this development appears to be direct. Many
developments discussed here grew out of the desire to address people in
an attractive and economical way, taking advantage of technology,
channels of discourse, and cultural history, as opportunities presented
themselves. It seems logical to me that in harnessing pictures to the
service of rhetoric, a subtle and complex language of the visual would
be born.</p>    <p align="left">The appropriateness of
poststructuralism for research on consumer culture lies its awareness
of the dynamic nature of signifiers and their inherent intertextuality.
It also seems possible that poststructuralism offers much in its
ability to deal with pictures and graphics without subordinating them
to referentiality or to the "structure" of another sign system. The
overall concern with the constitutive effect of surfaces is also
peculiarly relevant to advertising. Advertising makes much of its
meaning by borrowing from other texts and altering them on the surface
to make new meaning. Ultimately, </p>    <p align="center"><a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v19/19610f08.gif">FIGURE 8</a></p>    <p align="left">however,
our own disciplinary concerns with communication and persuasion would
find poststructuralism lacking. For concepts of the norms that guide
practice, we would need to return to theories of grammar, such as
structuralism. To evaluate persuasion and social effects, we must
continue to develop the tools of history, ethnography, and rhetoric. In
other words, to truly accommodate the multivocality of consumer
culture, we must be multivocal ourselves, recognizing language theories
and methods as strategic efforts to get at particular kinds of
knowledge, just as in science. The current postmodern climate promises
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322-333.</p>    <p align="center">----------------------------------------</p>  </acrtext></body></html>