JODTER WILLEM UN & book Decoding Advertisements, is the first full-length accoont of advertising from a Marxist point of view, writes Chris Hale.
Advertising intervenes in the circulation of commodities one of its effects is that people bay more goods and As well as this, advertisements are themselves enough to say this, because advertising also produces ideological value. With television speaking almost continually in the home during our leisure time, our experience of advertising is constant in everyduy life.
And this massive and powerful onslaught not only creates needs that the manufacturers of commodities can THIS advert for a Triamph car shows DELINESS CPUSY COC Was In which commodities are attributed with value in all advertisements.
In the big plotograph, the car is initinly set up as something desirable but out of reach. The angle and caposton Teintorce le Coolion "It looks like you can't afford it'because so much of the car is glossily visible, and because the effect of the rocky, yet unrealistic terrain in which car placed the foreshortened horizon) is to remove the car from a real viewpoint, The caption Is ex sanded on - it "looks" and feels" like a E10,000 car relations between things cach of them for Socialist Challenge.
capitalist society advertising" obscuring them.
understand how they work, it looks like you can't afford it.
but the punchline (where reverse bur 'view" of the car in both *It costs 13.146'. In the photograph. we are both looking down ou the car and up at the horizon. This is sitilar to a Peugoe advertisement where the caption is: "Way up in style, way down in costs'.
In other words, the car somebow has a value which Is DelineE 105 158 value nor is price: between this 13.146 price and its £10,000 "feel" and "look it has miraculously gained with a social currency which is still SECULI and exchangeability. exploit and profit from — it reinforces the ideological cement of a society where social relations appear as JUDITH WILLIAMSON has selected the thre examples on this page, and written a brief analysis o - there can he no such thing as 'socialis - reinforcing class relations precisely b For this reason, it is central to a political practice to This Image is buyahle along with the car and clearly doesn't exist on a economic value: but what it can do is indiants coonomic position. The effect in this case is actually to reinforce the image of wealth while cutting costs.
I can do tas because dexone the real price having been revealed the image still has a primacy over the written part of the ad, making the "looked-up-to" £10,000 image seer matural: we can see how it looks, It is because the produce secols to contain the quality of not being affordable that you can 'buy the unbuyable" exchange.
A struchute bE resi events is referred to. starting with 'Tacts' broduct can be inserted higory of the South, black oppression, and black music material content in theratos lenied, co conta' history, with its image of "the South' Britain's finvarise crumne de cuentlo 'worth a mint', the certainty thai she must he worth a mist (a drink).
you can't.
MISE YUBE DUE CRYONE Progress" at £7.95 hardback and 13.95 paperbuck. THE SOUTHERN COMFORT series, which is discussed at greater length in Decoding Advertisements, shows how a product can appear to occupy a false place in history. just as the car took on a false place in ters ol economic In both cases the produce appropriates meaning from something real (coonomic/historical) in a way which functions to misrepresent that reality.
*When prohibition hit Southern Comfort, New Orleans discovered the Blues - In 1920 the US Government..." elc. But these simply form ashell of authenticity into which the While we are not seriously supposed to believe that the Blues originated from a lack of Southern Comfort, for the ad to work even as a joke history must b reduced to an aura of 'History', an Image that has nothing to do with the rea The product apparently becomes the content of a system whose actual and at the same time the product appears IN THIS FREEZOMINT advert, with the pun "She must be worth a mint', the explicit. Apparently it is the product that shows what the woman is worth. What gives value to the product, bowever, is the joke" side of the caption If she is worth a mint (of money) she is also worth a mint (Freezomint): this creutes a circuit where a monetary exchange value is given to the women who then pusses it to the prodact. The mint of moncy" meaning is made secure by So the pun, appurently shout the womas, works back to the product which must then be 'worth a mint" although its own availubility is what caares she is worth a mint, and so on. This is similar to the car you can afford that looks like What is ditferent here is that a woman's image is used, purely as un intermediate carrier of value. As history and class are denied reality when they are used as images, so this perpetmates the idea of women as merely symbols of Decoding Advertisements is published in the Calder and Boyurs series * Ideas in SOCIALIST CHALLENGE 8 June 1978 pa
illustration FM SURE I'm nol alone in finding the ilustration on the leafler for the published in Socialist Challenge (18 May), extremely unsatisfactory Under the slogans "Every child a wanied Child Every mother willing mother", it portrays an "idyllie' scene: children playing happlly in a park, while two adults — both attractive young women → sit conTentedly on a bench, one holding a smiling infant, the other pregnanti occupied with her knitting. Ever the sun has a smiling face, "A motter's right to choose": so no lems or tears. The result is an image a long wav removed from realty, and one which manages to reinforce a Mary Whitchouse view of mother bood and childcare.
It is one thing lo present a graphic representation of what we are against - doctors denying an abortion; the tools of the backstroet abortionists. But where Tameside has gone wrong is to treat abortion as if it were something that can be isolated from all that is involved in a woman's ability tochoose most particularly. childcare.
An illustration of a mother reading a newspaper while the father plays with the child could have a lot of demonstration.
isation. But albough a (who is biological weapons, cuts in alliances.
in Sweden and Switzerland.
Windscale demonstration, WCI.
the while the "peace" organisation, it is not pacilist. It B committed to nocicar disarmamient and the destruction of chemical and arms expenditure, and an end to mallitary CND favours a "positive neutralist" policy based on mass defence as used CND is concerned about the arms trade; it is also opposed to nucicat be a re processing on the grounds that it praduction of bomb-grade muterial. For that reasor CND actively supported the recent I think CND deserves the support of all socialists in political action and COMETISTI information may be obtained from: CND, 29 Great James Street, London STEVEN DAWE (West London)
NOW 1 KNOW) fundamental progressive change. All sorts of curious alliances and tactics have resulted, plus unexpected confrontations with the Take the small fand tabour intensive) Workers naturally enough de bot sec beautiful why the provision of the means for a comfortable life should take up more necessary:
These counterposed positions could jaunching point TOT iluminating discussion between environmentalists and the traditional worker's movenient.
The question la how should decisions abour what is to be made, by what methods and by whom, arrived at?
In a socialist society 1 believe this would he done democratically b discusson and negolation belweer groupings of OTUUULLE consumers (everyone being in ar least one of these categorics).
Of course no such system is possible under the present system because the Landon, or any other ground of racialism, could tell you quite that the latter is the case.
Organisations like the Nationa Front are unfortunately objective than you scem to be theme. them the most important thing is what they da. To be on top, and appear to be able lo control events, is where they sand or fall.
Their ahility to manipulate and falsify the truth in working class an ghetioes in Fast elsewhere, is a springboard for their racialism and ultimately fascist intentions. Ifthey are opposed onthe streets, then evetybody knows; not everyone reads the smail print in the national press.
efforts were made by the Front to have the streets to themselves, certain organisations knew by the Sunday of and the Carnival at least where the Front would end their demostration. саллос belp anti-Fascist struggle is the OLTE To London, and essential, .To would appear that although feeling that the KANT!* hreeding | Incidentally a fall in CP membership 7,000 rwo-and-a-half years).
Ir is one rhing to refleer and report on the everyday sruggles of the working class; quite another to pive a lead in combating the reformist perspectives within which the vast majority of those struggles take place Thus while the CP's recent turo towards the Anti Nazi League s a welcome advance, in which direction docs it wish to point the ANL: towards apposition on the streets to the fascises; or towards the 'peacelul road" of community relations type activities and reliance on the state and ies legal institutions?
pose such questions is not sectarian. What is sectarian is to close all avenues of dehate in advance. to refuse to recognise that it was the demonstrations and activity against the fascista in Ladywood and Lewisham, so stridently denounces by the representatives of tbe CP. which actually laid the basis for an organisation such as the ANL
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She must be worth a mint.