Read This and Fall in Love

"And when a word comes to us in its individual character, and starts in us the individual responses, it is great pleasure to us. The American Advertisers have discovered this and some of the cunningest American literature is to be found in advertisements for soap suds for example.

These advertisements are almost prose poems. They give the word soap suds a bubbly shiny individual meaning which is very skillfully poetic, would perhaps be quite poetic to the mind, which could forget that the poetry was bait on a hook." --D.H. Lawrence, "Pornography and Obscenity"

You're looking through one of those new shiny magazines and suddenly your gaze rests on yet another Calvin Klein ad, but this time it's for women's underwear, a fact which is nevertheless not immediately apparent since the woman in the photograph bears little clear resemblance to a woman. She is shaped like a woman from the waist up, but apparently has a male crouch. Look all the way through that magazine, however, and you won't find an ad for the name product made by Jockey, called "Jockeys for her." Jockey's ad, which was very quickly discontinued, showed fully dressed women and bore the slogan "look who's wearing Jockeys now!" While at the bottom of the ad the company stressed the value of 100% cotton.

Jockey's ad catered to a taste that seems to have gone out with "Secret" deodorant, a sequestering of women towards products designed specifically for allegedly female tastes. Klein, on the other hand, tailored his ad to sell underwear to both women and men, capitalizing on a new desire among women to appear androgynous. You look a bit farther and you see the old and familiar Merit ad, and you wonder why there's a Captain of unclear military affiliation always in the inset. What's Merit's plan? Tapping into new respect for the military.

Klein's ad is an example, a new group off, analysts say, of semiotics, the use of symbols in an ad to plug into systems of desire and expectations that have no real connection to the product being sold. Semiotics is different from subliminal advertising, the better known, gimmick-oriented use of quickly flashed words and hidden pictures, because it associates products with hopes one already has. And this new, burgeoning field is pulling far away from older kinds of ad techniques, because it is relevant to more than just the circumstances of advertising. Indeed, because it is a system that pervades most of modern culture.

Wlad Godvich, a professor of semiotics at the University of Minnesota tells of another kind of sell that seems even more interesting. During the most intense flareups in Poland between the government and Solidarity in the late 1970s the trade union hired semioticians to help them plan their appearance. At the advice of the experts, all of the union's language was directly taken from the Polish Constitution, and the Communist Manifesto. They were also instructed to dress in suits and white shirts with no ties, so that the government, by use of its symbols, and by use of party propaganda, could not attempt to alter Solidarity's message of being a legitimate trade union representing worker's interests.

Semiotics had a different influence here than that of straight public relations because it captured the language of the people itself instead of preventing the government from portraying Solidarity as an illegitimate organization. But the danger in employing semioticians was that they wanted to take the process of breaking apart language to reveal symbolic postures too far and attempted to take on the government directly. Solidarity felt this tendency towards "deconstruction" would lead to a revolution, which they wanted to avoid. Therefore, the union leaders had to fire the semioticians.

"Semiotics," says the famous professor of the subject Umberto Eco at the University of Bologna in Italy, "is the study of anything that can be used to lie." And indeed, its origin, according to both academics like Eco, and Harvard specialist Alice Jardine, as well as applicators such as Marshall Blonsky, head of the consulting firm Applied Semiotics, lies in the deconstructionist origins and plans made by the famous author of the book, Mythologies, Roland Barthes. In the mid-fifties, notes Jardine, Barthes put together trends that had begun in European thought as far back as the Stoics, but had been first formalized by the Swede, Saussure, at the turn of the 20th century. Usually thought of as a literary study confined to language, Barthes reapplied the technique to the world of everyday things, trying to find meaning in the immediate world, for which there was nothing immedeidately visible. Barthes' approach, notes Jardine, and that of his disciples, was always used as a way of deconstructing the symbols of a dominant group. This "contestatory" approach was first applied to the world of American goods and products as a way of avoiding a European point of view, American cultural domination.

Edmund Des Noes, vice president of Blonsky's company, reports having worked as part of an advertising and propoganda arm of Castro's Cuba, during the revolution. There, his job was to associate notions of hard work with the government while his medium was usually posters. He later made a movie that recorded his experience and won a New York Times award.

Blonsky is now editing a book containing articles on the subject from several different sources, including Des Noes and Godvich, called Semiotics....

In a funny sequence from a short article entitled "Depth Advertised," from his book. The Eiffel Tower, Barthes summarizes what American Advertisers have made of the sale of detergent:

...the real drama of all this little psychoanalysis of puffery is the conflict of two warring substances which subtly oppose the advance of the 'essences' and the 'principles' towards the field of depth. These two substances are water and grease...every campaign of beauty products therefore prepares a miraculous conjunction of these enemy liquids...decay is expelled...France is having a great yen for cleanliness...

Although this study made it across the ocean, it was not until recently that colleges began to adopt if formally as a discipline. Now, at both Brown and the University of Indiana, there are full departments in the subject while at the University of Minnesota, the New School in New York and at Harvard, courses in the subject are just beginning to be taught. Students of semiotics study everything from literary theory to anthropology. To cultural criticism, and their discipline, like economics, seems to result in a kind of psycho-social understanding of the social conscious.

But as the media takes a firmer hold over people's lives, and the idea of mind control is particularly in vogue, the world of semiotics is changing. There is a split both within the academics and those, like Blonsky, that have gone out into the marketplace. "Things are mutating and changing and growing," says Jardine, adding that the Europeans have begun to abandon the subject as it continues to grow here. Yet, Blonsky decides the world of academic for not giving up its "vow if non-intervention," and getting involved in the real world. Blonsky reportedly makes thousands of dollars consulting for companies.

Real world applications of semiotics have tended to remain on the "contestatory" aide of things, "deconstructing," mass media ads in a process much like that of trying to figure out how many human figures are in the Camel on the cigarette box. But for Blonsky, this kind of selling is mere gimmicky compared to what can be done with semiotics, and what is now being done with semiotic insights. Blonsky notes that the most recent, novel use of the point of view, though it is as yet perhaps unconscious, is to sell products for which there is initially no real need, by tapping other systems of needs that are culturally already incorporated into society. Blonsky cites the examples of the magazine Cosmopolitan, and ads for liquor and cigarettes, which attach themselves to sexual needs and expectations which have nothing to do with the product itself. For Blonsky, Cosmopolitan's sell is a "Machiavellian" kind of manoeuvre, promising not pleasure but reward for reading the magazine; "read Cosmopolitan forego pleasure and get a man." Similarly, cigarettes and liquor are sold by reference to sexual encounters, in which they have no initial relevance.

Traditionally, says Blonsky, semiotics has done little about such reverses of its theory, tending to try only to "deconstruct" each ads to show why they are attractive. Books like Gadvich's Gender Advertising have picked apart such ads to show what kinds of needs the ads are addressing. For example, ads in which women are playfully sprayed at with hoses, or hit with pillows, have, according to Godvich, emphasized a cultural tendency to want to see women babied. However, new kinds of advertisements have shifted away from cultural tendencies like these to take on newer, more diverse ones.

For example, Godvich notes, MTV, among the largest and most well-known fads in America today, uses completely contradiction methods of association. Songs The Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney's recent hit Say Say Say" are coupled with imaginative relevant narrative that in turn gives a structure to the song that was not there before. Another example that Blonsky cites is that of the old "Grape Nuts" television ad which associated with the idea of the cereal, the study of an old man and his grandson walking through the woods, the old man teaching the child to avoid bears with a grape nut clenched firmly in his hand. According to Blonsky, the otherwise irrelevant ideas of the hand of God, generational change and adventure are associated with generation. The ability to make such a link, asserts Blonsky, means a new kind of applicability of semiotics, from the point of view not of the contestor, but of the contestee.

But critics of the semiotic field say that nothing the semioticians are doing is actually very new. Jane Fitzgibbon, a researcher at the advertising first of Young and Rubicam says she "was not convinced that [the discipline] was more than a formalization of knowledge [her firm] already [uses]." Her sense of the subject, even after taking Blonsky's course, was that it not only seemed a sure formalization, but it also was always caucused in the term of a mysterious" conspiracy," as if there was someone using the plan against the public. Her firm, she says, merely caters to the "certain things that all human beings associated," and she gives the example of baked goods as always tapping into one's traditional vision of childhood, adding that, as awful as some symbols are, the red cross is always a hopeful symbol that can mean good things to people. Others, however, like Director of Production Sam Shahib of Calvin Klein, are openly critical. "It was just a great visual," he says, of the controversial ad. No way.

But despite Shahib, Fitzgibbon and others, Godvich, Blonsky and Jardine all agree that change is imminent in the semiotic field. Yet while Jardine sees that change as purely academic, Blonsky, Godvich and the Brown are noting with increasing interest what new organizations are taking an interest in the field.

Michael Silverman, director of the semiotics department at Brown notes that this year he received several calls from English ad agencies looking to interview graduates in the next few years. Godvich also cites interest on behalf of the CIA, as well as other government agencies. And Blonsky in particular, from the standpoint of running one of the few companies in the country actively researching on a semiotic basis. Says not only has there been an increase of interest in companies, but also among of the government and the military.

A recent Blonsky study looked into the RCA videodisc. The videodisc is a product that actively involves the viewer in choosing among 54 places in a program to start, but the video disc falied because it involved the viewer too much in a product that he or she had become to used to using as a drug. Blonsky and his colleague Edmundo Des Noes studied the product and made an offer to the ocmpany of a video program that would use the ability of the machine to involve the viewer to actively engage their semiotic interest. They wrote up a script which included several different symbolic choices as part of what was essentially a video game except that the viewer would make choices between turning down a street to follow a flying dollar bill or stopping into an exciting-looking disco where love seems to await.

RCA was not interested in the product and declined says Blonsky for much the same reasons that the America public decline to pick up on video discs, but Blonsky and Des Noes continued their study and concluded ironically that their product would be of greater interest to organizations like the military, which uses machines to train recruits to make the right kinds of choice. A product like the RCA modification could be used in helping to construct reactions.

But what about mind control How likely is that semiotics could be turned around on the members of the culture that invented at Despite studies of places like Castro's Cuba there researchers seem fairly certain that the possible ends of the project are not nefarious. Blonsky and Des Noes contend that there are mostly hopeful possibilities for the ideas in semiotics helpful ideas for ways in which businesses can encourage new and important already accepted social trends. Since all of the analysts agree that the systems which semiotic advertising tap into have to exist-before the tapping can go on, they feel that semiotics is most likely only a positive study. And although Jardine notes that she can see a "grey area" where the discipline might be turned towards mind control, she concludes the person would have to be really twisted to do it.

If by chance you have read this far in the article looking for how to fall in love you have just seen how a semiotic effect works.