REPRESENTATIONS OF WORK IN TV ADS

Craft Production and Deskilling

Craft production has been so far displaced from everyday consciousness that it rarely appears even as a trace except as a testimonial to the elite status of consumption objects destined for upscale consumers. When it does appear, craftsmanship appears in trace form as the signature on an aestheticized piece of Steubing glass. Sightings of craftwork on television are few, limited mostly to endorsements of fine furniture or expensive cars. For example, an ad for Buick Reatta shows it being "signed by the craftsmen who work on it." Their signature attests to their pride of work on an object that presumably has had their personal focus, rather than merely another mass produced object pumped off an assembly line. Craftsmanship has value as the semiotic opposite of mass production. On the other hand, in the context of consumption oriented toward the middle and the working classes, the name "craftsman" has been appropriated and made to name a line of products -- e.g., the Craftsman line of tools from Sears. The legacy of craftsmanship lives on in name only in a world where craft after craft has been either deskilled or eliminated by new technologies. Craftworkers have been displaced in one field of work after another by automated tooling, but the tools they once used are now named for them, such that the qualities of craftsmen are now available via the consumption of the commodity and its sign. It is interesting that these advertising evocations of the concept of "craftsmanship" focus on the meaning of the object produced rather than the act of producing. But, as C. Wright Mills wrote in his essay on "Work," the traditional "ideal of craftsmanship" refers to a model of work gratification in which

"the worker is free to control his own working action...[T]here is no split of work and play, or work and culture. The craftsman's way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living." (p.222)

Yet another mid 1990s' Saturn ad addressed the question of craftsmanship in conjunction with the premise of a non-alienated workplace. The premise once again is that non-alienated relationships can be seen (register) in the quality of the product. However, this ad situates the issue in the language of "ownership" rather than craft. The few fleeting images of production that do appear are heavily abstracted from the actual relationships of production for the sole purpose of signifying production activity. These images are not unlike the image of a high-tech medical equipment tool that I have intentionally abstracted (even more so than it was in the ad from which it was taken) so far from its actual production site as possible in order to stress that craft has been divorced from human acts of production. The Saturn ad is narrated by a man we presume to be a line worker because of the way he is positioned visually in the text.

"We were called an experiment. But what someone figured out is that there is something more important than machines if you want to make a good car. It's about people and giving them ownership of the product they're building. And if you have 8000 people making the right decisions individually, with the company and the car in mind, then you have 8000 people that own that car and every car that goes out. That's the way I feel."

The entire ad is shot in grainy color video with the color drained out to give a sense of a slightly blued production space. To emphasize production there are scenes of Saturn machinery and equipment -- sparks flashing -- in operation. But to stress that Saturn refuses to allow its machinery to eclipse the role of labor, the remainder of the ad is devoted to scenes of workers signing a placard that reads the 1,000,000th Saturn."