Advertising

Definition

Advertising, for Baudrillard (The System of Objects, 1968, Part D, ch. III), is neither a mere adjunct to the object-system nor a mechanism of conditioning, but a discourse on objects that is itself an object to be consumed. "Advertising is now an irremovable aspect of the system of objects precisely by virtue of its disproportionateness… Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe. It is pure connotation." Its power is not propositional but fabulous: it works through the logic of Father Christmas ("We do not believe in such fables, but we cleave to them nevertheless"), through a maternal agency that solicits and gratifies, and through a presumption of collectivity that stages an imaginary social body. Its result is the coupling of gratification and repression: "the consumer internalizes the agency of social control and its norms in the very process of consuming." Advertising is the paradigm of the consumption of signs and the engine of the status-code.

Key Claims

Indicative as well as imperative. "Even though we may be getting better and better at resisting advertising in the imperative, we are at the same time becoming ever more susceptible to advertising in the indicative – that is, to its actual existence as a product to be consumed at a secondary level, and as the clear expression of a culture."
The Father Christmas logic. "This is not a logic of propositions and proofs, but a logic of fables and of the willingness to go along with them… We are for all the world like children in their attitude towards Father Christmas." What is consumed through the fable is "the action of a magical parental solicitude."
Society as maternal agency. Reading Airborne's armchair advertisement ("designed to wed the shape of your body"): "There is no need to change anything in society or in yourself, because the industrial revolution has occurred, and technological society in its entirety adapts itself to you via this armchair." "Society assumes a maternal role the better to preserve the rule of constraint."
Advertising re-creates infantile fusion. "Advertising strives… to re-create the infantile confusion of the object with the desire for the object, to return the consumer to the stage at which the infant makes no distinction between its mother and what its mother gives it."
Gratification and repression together. "Gratification, frustration – two indivisible aspects of social integration"; "advertising does not liberate drives; first and foremost it liberates phantasies that serve to inhibit those drives"; "our internal conflicts or 'deep tendencies' are mobilized and alienated in the process of consumption, in exactly the same way as labour-power is alienated in the process of production."
The presumption of collectivity. The Pax Washing Powder crowd and the pure signifier GARAP ("a pure signifier, having no referent, signifying only itself… consumed qua sign") show advertising "playing on the presence/absence of an overall social body." "Advertising is a plebiscite whereby mass consumer society wages a perpetual campaign of self-endorsement."
Advertising is a code, not a language. It "does not structure the personality, but designates and classifies it. It does not structure social relationships, but breaks them down into a hierarchical repertoire" (see status-code).
The advertising sign inserts the social order. "It is not in any mechanical sense that advertising conveys the values of society; rather, more subtly, it is in its ambiguous presumptive function – somewhere between possession and dispossession… that the advertising sign 'inserts' the social order."

Key Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the discourse-as-object; the Father Christmas logic; the maternal agency; gratification/repression.
Vance Packard (not yet paged) — The Hidden Persuaders and "hidden persuasion," the target Baudrillard partly qualifies.
Ernest Dichter (not yet paged) — motivation research and the "strategy of desire" ("free to enjoy life" means "free to be irrational and regressive").
Pierre Martineau (not yet paged) — the "psychological label" and brand as emotional synthesis.
Claude Lévi-Strauss — the totemic analogy Baudrillard invokes: advertising as a sign-code "reverted to the poverty of the sign codes of archaic systems."

Consumerism — the social order advertising serves and stages.
Status Code — advertising as the vector of the universal code of rank.
Sign Value — what advertising sells beyond the product ("we consume its meaning through advertising").
Psychoanalysis — the register of the mother-image, regression, and the superego.
Ideology — advertising as a moral and political discourse in the guise of solicitude.
Consumption — the general definition advertising exemplifies.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Part D, ch. III): discourse-on-object vs. discourse-as-object; indicative/imperative; the Father Christmas logic; Airborne's armchair; Pax and GARAP; gratification/repression; the "new humanism" debate; brand and status.
Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — advertising's terminal phase ("Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising"): "All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form… degree zero of meaning." The form of advertising — "simplified, equivalent, combinable" — now governs the social and the political ("the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized"); advertising is "no longer a means of communication," having "become its own commodity"; and it is already being superseded by "the languages of computer science." The Forum des Halles is "a gigantic advertising unit," "sarcophagus of the commodity." See simulation-hyperreality, implosion-of-meaning, hypercommodity.
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

Baudrillard's "presumption of collectivity" anticipates social media and the algorithmic crowd. Does the Pax poster's imagined collective become the actual, metricized audience of platform advertising — or its inversion?
He insists advertising "does not alienate us with its claims" but through solicitude. How does this differ from Debord's spectacle and from the wiki's semiocapitalism?
"Free to be oneself" as "free to project one's desires onto commodities" — is this the same subject the wiki's consummative-mobilization names (Tang via Lefebvre)?
The maternal-agency thesis is psychoanalytic and unfalsifiable. Does the wiki have evidence for the pleasure/consent side (de Certeau, Madigan & Munro) that complicates it (see consumerism)?