Advertising & the production of commodity signs

A political economy of sign value emerges when commodities are joined to signs, when commodities become produced as signs and signs become produced as commodities. "In order to ground the 'rational' circulation of values and their play of exchange in the regulated equivalence of values," corporate capital reorganizes consumption practices to convert economic exchange value into sign value and vice-versa (Baudrillard 1981, p.147).

Because the logic of the commodity and of political economy is at the very heart of the sign, in the abstract equation of signifier and signified, in the differential combinatory of signs, signs can function as exchange value (the discourse of communication) and as use value (rational decoding and distinctive social use) (Baudrillard 1981, p.146).

Advertising constitutes an apparatus for reframing meanings to add value to commodities. Ads arrange, organize and steer meanings into signs that can be inscribed on products - always geared to transferring the value of one meaning system to another. In this sense, advertising comprises a system of commodity sign production designed to heighten the exchange value of commodities, by differentiating the meanings associated with each brandname commodity. A commodity-sign denotes the differentiated image attached to a product - e.g., images of affluent status (Rolex) or stylistic trendsetter (Swatch) supplement the functional utility of a watch. From this theoretical perspective advertisements constitute sites where an exchange of meanings can take place. The purpose of this exchange is to generate currency - the social form of value - for a commodity. Advertisers try to encode a sign by prompting an exchange of meanings. But, it is on the decoding side of this 'forced' exchange that a sign is either valorized or not. It is important to note that the advertisement is not the only "imaging site" where commodity signs are constituted and displayed. The commodity-sign industry consists no less of the processes of design, packaging, marketing and the staging of media events (Wernick 1991, pp.15-16).

Advertisements commodify semiotics for the purpose of reproducing a currency of sign values. As an institutionally rationalized process of fitting meanings to commodities, advertising breaks meanings down into their fundamental constituent units - signifiers and signifieds - to create differentiated commodity signs. Born in the 1920s, sculpted and streamlined between 1950-1985, a dominant advertising form has become the standard vehicle for producing sign currency. Under this merger of capital and semiotics, the internal structure of the sign has been remade to operate as a political economy in which the process of joining signifiers to signifieds is driven by the logic of the commodity form and the goal of profit. The semiotic reductionism necessary for producing a currency of commodity signs involves concentrating complex meaningful relations into visual signifiers. It turns the relationship between signifier and signified into one governed by the logic of general equivalence, so that a visual signifier can be substituted for a signified of the product and vice-versa. Like monetary value, sign values "only exist in exchanges, or replacements" (Williamson 1978, p.42; see also Goux 1990). This dominant advertising form is predicated on a sequence of interpretive maneuvers that recapitulate the internal logic of commodity fetishism. The advertising form, daily encountered in the U.S., ideologically reproduces the commodity form - or, more specifically, its constituent moments of abstraction, equivalence and reification as a continuous circuit of semiotic interpretation (see Goldman & Wilson 1983). The signifier/signified relationship has become essential to reproducing the commodity form; and in the process the internal relationship of the sign even becomes isomorphic to the internal relationship of the commodity form: the signifier is to exchange value as the signified is to use value. Just as commodity fetishism privileges exchange value over use value, so too a system of commodity signs privileges the signifier as sign value over the signified as a moment of symbolic exchange (see Baudrillard 1981).

Advertisers compete to have the hottest sign, the sign that commands the greatest market advantage. However, this system of constructing signs to maximize market value exacts a social and cultural cost when meaning systems are systematically abstracted and plundered as a resource for producing commodity signs. Analogous to Marx's observations of an earlier stage of capitalist development, the continuous recirculation of commodity signs must endlessly draw 'new continents' of meaning into the "metabolism of circulation" (Marx 1973, pp.224-5). Advertising has become a form of internal cultural colonialism that mercilessly hunts out and appropriates those meaningful elements of our cultural lives that have value. This process of borrowing on our cultural identities as the price for keeping the engines of the commodity form running saps the vitality of our cultural imaginations. Guy Debord (1977) dubbed the advanced stage of a political economy of commodity signs the "society of the spectacle" because the principles of photographic and commodity abstraction have been carried to such extremes that cultural meanings become more and more thoroughly disjointed and separated from our activities in the lifeworld, but float before our eyes in the service of commodities.

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