REPRESENTATIONS OF WORK IN TV ADS

The Erasure of Production

Susan Willis has observed a relationship between the display of work in upscale grocery stores and the work done in theme parks. "Where the supermarket most closely replicates the historical theme park is in its presentation of labor. The current practice in many supermarkets is to put a theatrical form of production on display, while the real work that goes into maintaining the store is either hidden or made to seem [facile] because of deskilling." (Willis, 1991, 17). Harry Braverman's Labor & Monopoly Capital argued that historically the deskilling of labor and the displacement of labor have been an inexorable consequence of capitalist driven technological innovations. The imagistic display of labor conceals the abstracted character of wage labor along with the deskilling process reinforced by the forces of technology. "As if to compensate for the marginalization and in some cases the erasure, of productive labor, the supermarket offers an array of theatrical labors, whose importance has more to do with the spectacle they create than the actual services they render." (Willis, 1991, 17). The same can be said for advertising's treatment of labor. For example, an oft-repeated Thriftway commercial abstracts the function of labor to brightly-costumed and broadly-smiling display work.

The vast majority of ads leave invisible the acts of labor that make the products being sold. Products are presented on display as if there was no production process. Most commodities apparently materialize magically; they have no past, only their present, and the future they promise. Commodity fetishism erases production. Commodity fetishism in TV commercials presents the commodity's point of origin as the advertisement itself. (Willis, 1991, 24).

Nike offers a lucid example of how a product gets to us minus the history of its production process -- the people and technology of the production process. The Nike

SWOOSH is the primary thing that we buy, and it is what we trade on in our own personal microworlds of identity construction. The Swoosh symbol has often eclipsed the objects that it covers, as well as the commodity chains that bring them to our doorsteps. In fact, by the early 1990s the Swoosh had even replaced the word Nike in ads, on billboards, on hats, at Nike World. To bring back the relations of production buried in this sign takes considerable effort. See Emily C. on the transnational commodity chain of athletic shoes.

Stereotypical images used to indicate a commodity's producer may actually accomplish the erasure process just as effectively as leaving the production process absent. Take the image of Juan Valdez, the long-standing symbol of Colombian coffee. Juan Valdez constructs a romantic, but falsified production process. Instead of representing a peasantry transformed into a rural coffee-bean picking proletariat, Juan is usually so fully decontextualized from any actual conditions of production that he literally materializes into scenes from the everyday life world of consumers.

The image of the peasant laborer and his beast of burden have long since been hollowed out of the actual relationships between landlord and peasant to serve as a logo that stands for quality coffee.

One version of this campaign is an ad where Juan Valdez appears (in the same sense that the Virgin Mary is sometimes said to appear) in the corner of the upscale Starbucks-type coffee shop. While two pretentious young coffee gourmands are overheard ordering the hippest coffee concoction imaginable, a third young woman looks over see to Juan Valdez, sitting in the far corner of the room sipping coffee, and she says, "I'll have what he is having." Her two companions cannot see the the apparition and seem confused. In this way, the ad positions Juan Valdez in semiotic opposition to the pretentiousness of yuppies. His image reaffirms the superiority of the simple, and the high quality, coffee bean. His peasant garb now translates into good taste. His position as producer has been transformed from that of exploited peasant to that of down-to-earth gourmet guide.

In a similar vein, a Contadina ad for ready-made Italian foods frames a moment of sturdy hands engaged in rolling out the pasta dough. The advertiser then superimposes and fades this image of a traditional laboring activity beneath the overlay image of the Contadina label picturing the brand as rustic Italianicity. Notice how the ghostly image of making dough remains faintly visible across the surface of the label. The imagery of production is introduced to convey a sense of the authenticity of the ethnic food product -- if we were gullible or just feeling needy for organic social life, we might easily believe that caring human hands produce these foods, rather than the heavily technologized procedures and machinery of a food processing plant.