I assume that it comes as a surprise to find the Communist Party advertising in this way at all; we associate them with banners saying "Workers of the World Unite," not with lifestyle ads about
filofaxes. The ad appeared in the once excellent and now defunct journal Marxism Today, which was associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain, but which led debates attracting interest from a wide range of readers on the left, not just party members. The point of the ad is to convince the reader that Communist Party members do not fit the stereotype, that joining the party might be just one of a portfolio of political activities. Some of these activities are predictable -- reading the latest leftist theory or visiting a country that was then still communist. Others are not -- the filofax suggests a professional, not a manual worker, and the giving up eggs refers to the salmonella scare current at the time, and thus to a consumerism that was not typical of marxism.
That, at any rate, is my reading. But if we want to know if the list worked, we have to look at the diverse ways readers could interpret these fragments. Some yuppies may have recognised parts of it, but not others ("Post-Fordism? What the hell is that?"). Members of rival socialist parties might have singled out the remark about loud macho newspaper sellers as directed at them, while people unfamiliar with these rivalries may have thought it was some reference to The Sun. Some older Communists might have been disgusted by the approach of the ad, and taken the fact that the Party advertised at all as a sign of its approaching capitulation to the market. Some people might note that feminist issues don't get a look in ("Typical"). Some might just laugh. The dream/nightmare of the Adshel poster, in which we are singled out on the street, has not arrived. Ads position readers, but the position they construct is not the position. They act as occasions for trying out a number of positions. When a poster says "You in the shocking pink shell suit," it does not dress me in a pink shellsuit. Some criticism of ads assumes that I have only two choices, to turn around in response to this form of address or not. But the Adshel poster, like the Communist Party ad, allows for a number of positions. How can they all be there in one text? One mistake made both by some advertisers and by some critics of advertising is to assume that ads work on each person in isolation. This makes positions seem more sharply determined than they are. In fact, people talk about ads with each other, they read ads with other ads and other texts. It is closer to the complexity of this process if we imagine audiences talking back. I will be exploring audiences further in chapter 13.
Further reading on addressing audiences
For a highly influential and much more advanced study of how ads position readers, see chapter 2 of Janet Williamson, Decoding Advertisements. The "Daddy, what did you do in the Great War" ad is analysed in Gillian Dyer, Advertising as Communication. On "she," see Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially, Ch.. 6, "Commodity Feminism". The GLC campaign is
perceptively analysed by Kathy Myers in Understains. My brief mention of postures of men and women is based on Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements. Kathy Winship, Inside Women's
Magazines, has a sophisticated analysis of the way women are addressed.
On the social significance of pronouns, see Peter Muhlhausler and Rom Harré, Pronouns
Chapter 7:
"Bread wi' nowt taken out": Languages and Varieties as Signs
In the broadcast of the 1993 All-Star baseball game, Nike showed a commercial calling the Dominican Republic "La Tierra de Mediocampistas," the "Land of Shortstops." The commercial had a voice-over in Spanish, with English sub-titles. Actually, Campaign tells us, the ad was originally planned to be in English; the idea of Spanish voiceover came later, and they got their location driver to do the talking. The network CBS objected before the ad was run, and did not run it after the first showing. What's the big deal? After all, Spanish-speaking people make up a large part of the US population and the CBS audience, and they by a lot of Nikes. One can get Spanish channels (and ads) in many big cities. But this was different, one of the three main networks. The problem was not that English speakes who didn't know Spanish wouldn't understand; the sub-titles were clear enough. Clearly it was perceived as threatening to switch to the first language of a large minority of the population (and a good number of the All-Stars playing), even for just 60 seconds. Quite apart from what the ad said, the choice of language meant something. That choice is part of what I will be considering in this chapter.
An ad need not go as far as Spanish to mark a switch in language; varieties of English can also come with clusters of associations. So, for instance, Allinson Bread has the slogan
Bread wi' nowt taken out.
This stands out as a switch because it is a written version of a spoken accent; it comes with associations of Yorkshire and the past, like the bewhiskered gentleman on the bread wrapper. Ridley Scott's beautifully nostalgic Yorkshire commercials for Hovis evoked the same sort of associations in amber-tinted visual terms; people still remember them fifteen years after they were shown. Accents (varieties that differ in pronunciation) and dialects (varieties that differ in
grammar and words) can suggest geography, class, or historical period. The choice is not simple; it is not a matter of northern accents for northerners. Accents are part of the meaning, like choosing a Handel oratorio or a brass band or Screaming Jay Hawkins for the soundtrack.
On one level the issues of language varieties and language switching are narrowly linguistic; they have to do with when and how one can switch, and how one describes the result. On another level, they are broad cultural questions, about how we construct difference, how we build up meanings around other nations, regions, and classes. One way of describing these clusters of meanings is suggested by the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes' analysis of myth, in the last and rather difficult essay in his very readable book Mythologies. In that essay, he explains myth as a kind of second order system of signs, drawing on the meanings we get from our interpretations of pictures and words.
I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so- called oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier is giving the French
salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness);
finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier. (p. 116)
So in this example, we have one level of signs on which we figure out that this is a picture of a young man saluting a flag. That in itself is not a trivial matter of processing: how do we know he is saluting and not just shading his eyes? But then that whole "picture of a young man saluting" functions to evoke a more deeply buried concept having to do with French imperialism. The complex terminology is useful because it reminds us that the picture is not, itself, imperialism. It is dangerous to think that these associations are simple, or that they are just there.
In the same way, the examples I will analyse are first of all written words, voices, and pictures, signifiers to which we attach a signified. The Allinson slogan tells us that the bread has had nothing removed, and that it is said by a Yorkshireman. But then we treat that signified as itself a sign in another system, telling us about the nation or group that uses those words. The Yorkshireman comes to stand for an older, simpler life, resistance to modernity, and therefore healthy, unprocessed food. (The same associations can work for beer, and beer ads also have lots of exaggerated Yorkshire accents). That cluster of meanings, a second level of interpretation, is what Barthes calls "myth." National stereotypes -- the Italians, the Swiss, the Chinese, and of course the French -- provide some of his favourite examples. After looking at some of the evocations of national stereotypes by switches in language, we can understand better some of the switches between varieties within English and the associations on which they might play.
English / Anglaise / Engels
The first thing we notice about the use of other languages in English ads is that they are generally restricted to a few products, a few effects, and a very few languages. They use the minimum possible switch to call up the desired stereotypes. Here's a typical instance:
Say magnifique
[then a picture of a rocky cove] Say superbe
[then a picture of two men in chef's toques behind a lavish spread of food] C'est Jersey
Here the product is vacation travel, and the reader is encouraged to think of Jersey as being like France. The intended effect is suggested by the lower picture; chefs are stereotypically French in the British (and French) imagination. The non-English spellings work because the advertiser can assume that the British (or at least those they wish to attract to Jersey) know a little French. But even if they don't, the words are cognates, that is, they are very similar in French and English. So the only bit of knowledge required is the pronunciation of c'est, and you don't need A level French for that. In fact, it works better if your French accent (like mine) isn't very good, so that say and
c'est sound exactly the same. That keeps the code-switching as a reference to Frenchness
(Gallicité? ), not really as a message in French.
French is the most accessible of foreign languages to British readers, as Spanish is to most Americans. And the language here is just part of the effect, like the golden photos in the print ads for wine, or the accordion music in broadcast ads for cross-channel tours. It is the France of berets, bicycles, striped shirts, moustaches, baguettes, the Eiffel Tower, a glass of wine, an auberge. It is not the France of, say, the nuclear power industry, motor ways, chemical production, depressed industrial cities, the TGV, hypermarkets, the grandes écoles, the National Front, Libération.
The best-known use of German in an ad is Audi's Vorschprung Durch Technik.
This is not a phrase familiar to beginners, though it has an apparent cognate (technik/technique). And German is not much known in Britain, even by those who might admire German cars. The strangeness is part of the effect. I am told that the full effect comes when this German slogan is pronounced with an atrociously English accent.
In ads for imported beers and other luxury items, foreignness can suggest exclusivity. A bizarre evocation of foreignness occurs in the bus poster campaign for Oranjeboom, a beer from the Netherlands, which uses a string of Dutch words which, if spoken aloud, will sound like an English sentence:
De woord onder bus es Oranjeboom. The last line of all the ads is
Not everyone will get it.
So the puzzle-like difficulty of the ad and its foreignness are supposed to suggest the exclusivity of the drink. But those people in London who do speak Dutch must have been especially puzzled, because for them the words strung together like this were meaningless.
For languages that use different writing systems, only a few characters are needed to evoke a whole myth, and these characters need not be used correctly. A Toyota ad, headed in English, "Eight journalists were completely carried away," has in its lower left hand corner a calligram, and the translation,
Inner peace requires inner space.
For nearly all British readers, this is just an attractive decoration. I've had to check with some of the Japanese students to see that the character had some relation to the English underneath (they said it could indeed be translated as something like "peace"). They could surely get away with putting Japanese characters1 for RUST or BREAKDOWN and not many British readers would be the wiser. (The same is not true in reverse; the Japanese equivalent of Cosmopolitan has lots of English in the ads for fashion and cosmetics). Again, the point is that Japanese characters suggest Japaneseness, an abstract concept, here associated with classical serenity, not that they actually introduce the culture of Japan.
A similar point could be made of Cyrillic characters in ads suggesting Russian. The Russian of ads just requires reversing the R s and N s, to make it look strange. But those letters do not in fact go with R and N sounds in Russian. A current ad for Peugeot has the headline
ALMOST ANYONE CAN ACHIEVE POWER,