Lecture 8 - Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism

Here are my notes from the eighth lecture Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism on 26/01/2012.

Aim - To examine and contextualise Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality.

Objectives: (1) To foreground Baudrillard's position, by showing how it develops out of a Marxist critique of capitalism; (2) To examine how Baudrillard's analysis of advertising led him to argue that a consumer's engagements with commodities had begun function like a language; (3) To explore how Baudrillard extended this analysis into a fully blown theory of postmodernism.

− I'm giving three lectures as part of the Contextual studies course this term. Our topic today is the Jean Baudrillard's vision of hyper-real postmodern society, and the crisis that he feels the abundance of advertising, retail display, and televisual imagery, has generated in the fabric of social reality.
− This will be followed on the 9th February by a lecture on Gilles Deleuze and Felxi Guattari, who deal with similar issues of reproduction and mediation, but see potential for the creation of new forms of social life within these processes.
− Then, on the 23th February we will draw together these analyses to examine how artists and designers, deal with issues of social change in their work, by focusing on the issue of institutionality.
− Throughout the late 1960s Jean Baudillard examined how the increased productive capacity of western nations in the post war era, and the rise of corresponding industries of marketing and advertising transformed the structure of consumer experience.
− Baudrillard argued in texts such as The System of Objects (1968) that with the rise of consumer society, promotion and advertising began to take on a primary role in determining the commodity's value, and the consumer's disposition towards it.
− In the 1970 and 1980s in texts such as The Mirror of Production (1973), and Simulacra and Simulations (1981) he integrated the rise of the mass media into this analysis, and developed the argument that our engagement with material reality had now been superseded by a system of representations that saturate our perceptions.
− As Harrison and Wood note Baudrillard's “Critique of the political economy of the sign turned into a thesis that reality itself, as something separable from signs of it, had vanished in the information saturated, media dominated world” .
− This was Baudrillard's version of postmodernism; a hyper-real world where what we call reality was in fact grounded in simulacra.
− In Baudrillard's analysis simulacra have no natural link with a pre-existing reality. One can determine if an image is a simulacra, if one cannot identify a pre-existing concrete reality which that image can be understood to copy.
− For Baudrillard simulacra became the dominant form of image production in postmodern society.
− This idea was explored in films such as Bladerunner (1982), and grasped the popular imagination in the 1999 with the film the Matrix. The Matrix is a dystopian story about a young man Neo who starts to question the reality of the world he inhabits, and with the help of a gang of renegades, led by a character called Morphious, he leaves the matrix and fights the machines that created it. In this scene Morphious takes Neo back into the Matrix to explain its history and how it is able to function so effectively.
Play Matrix – “What is real extended clip” “Welcome to the Real
− In the Matrix reality has been reduced to a blank white expanse, which is filled with constructed images. Here we can start to have a sense of what Baudrillard means by simulacra. They are pure constructions and refer to no reality outside of themselves, and on mass serve to corrode any sense of a tangible reality.
− Thus, in Baudrillard's analysis the postmodern consumer's sense of the world around them is generated by the manner in which they are continually bombarded by simulacra.
− Baudrillard's theories can appear outlandish to some, and I want to demonstrate how the conclusions that he drew in the 1980s developed out of a Marxist critique of capitalism and towards a fully fledged postmodern theory.
− Baudrillard's early writings were grounded in Marxism. The dynamic development of our practical involvement with the world forms the basis of Marx's thought, and the investigation of how this involvement developed in the postwar period shaped the focus of Baudrillard's investigations.
Slide One – 18th Century German Harvest
− For Marx our involvement with the world occurs through 'labour', a concept which encompasses both how we shape our environment through our industry, and how our own experiences are rooted within and conditioned by our environment. In Capital Marx defines labour as “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature imposed condition of human experience”.
− Thus within this Marxist framework man's relationship with his environment determines the character of his consciousness.
− For Marx a determining factor in this relation is man's own productive capacity and his relationship with the products of his labour.
− Marx considers that man's industry generates products, “external objects” that are useful, as they “satisfy human needs” . The usefulness of the physical properties of a product makes its use value.
− However, as soon as conditions arise where different products can be exchanged for one another they become commodities.
− Commodities are possessed of an exchange value, a quantitative relation of equivalence that allows one commodity to be exchanged for another.
− One commodity has many exchange values, as its ratio of equivalence is realised through its exchange for varying quantities of other commodities. In their equality they are both equitable to a third thing, a universal equivalent, money.
− The exchange relation is expressed through the abstraction of use value. In the exchange relation one use value is only worth as much as another, to which it is deemed to be equivalent.
Slide Two – 19th Century Factory.
− Under capitalism the worker's labour becomes a commodity that he or she must sell in order to live. This separates the worker from the products of his labour and makes them alien to him. Marx notes “The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also that it exists outside of him, independently, alien, an autonomous power, opposed to him.”
− Thus in summary: (1) when people produce goods for the market, the value of those goods is not set by their usefulness, but by their ability to be exchanged for other things; (2) the labour embodied in these goods is valued not for its usefulness, but for its ability to generate exchange; (3) people's labour also becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold for a wage.
− Marx notes that as soon as a simple object, such as a table “becomes a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to start dancing of its own free will”.
− The transformation of production and consumption Baudrillard theorised can be rooted in the rationalisation of capitalist production proposed as early as F. W. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which advocated the breakdown of each labour process into a series of requisite actions, and organising production around work tasks based in time and motion study.
Slide Three - Henry Ford, Assembly Line
− Such an approach informed the development of Henry Ford's automated car assembly line in Michigan in 1913. Ford separated the production process into a series of individual tasks allotted to individual labourers. Each worker fashioned or attached a particular part of the car in a synchronised production process that involved the cooperation of multiple workers, who each contributed to the production of individual cars as they travelled down the production line.
− Ford's five-dollar, eight hour day was only envisaged in part as a way of securing the discipline that working in a highly productive car assembly line required. It was also meant to give workers sufficient income and leisure time to consume the products of mass production.
− Slide Four – Volkswagon factory Wolfsburg
− The form of mass commodity production initiated by Ford was brought into maturity in the advanced capitalist countries in the post war period period, and generated a boom that lasted until the early 1970s.
Slide Five – Billboards in a 1970s American city centre.
− In the post war period this massive expansion in productive capacity needed to be met with a corresponding rise in demand, and as factories continually produced large quantities of the same commodities, this demand needed to be made consistent.
− Thus a corresponding industry developed; publicity and advertising. During this period advertisements became a ubiquitous phenomenon, colonising both urban space, and home life.
− Individual competing adverts would sit alongside one another, or be broadcast in a sequence, yet they acted on the consumer as a system.
− John Berger notes, “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, this car and that car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more”.
− Judith Williamson develops this point considering how advertisements seek to address consumer desires, and aspirations, rather than showing how the products they promote might be useful to us. “Advertisements have to translate statements from the world of things, for example, that a car will do so many miles per gallon, into a form that means something in terms of people. Suppose that the car did a high mpg: this could be translated in terms of thriftiness, the user being a clever saver, in other words being a particular type of person. Or, if the mpg was low, the ad could appeal to the 'above money pettiness', daredevil kind of a person who is too trendy to be economising. Both statements in question could be made on the purely factual level of use value by the simple figures of 50mpg, and 20mpg. The advertisement translates these thing statements to us as human statements; they are given a humanly symbolic exchange value.”
− Thus in Williamson's analysis commodities are made equitable to desires or aspirations, and through our continual immersion within advertising, the language of publicity becomes a way in which we comprehend how we might find fulfilment.
Slide Six – 1957 - Miller High Life advert. “For the taste of your life “go first class” with Miller High Life.
− In his 1968 Essay The System of Objects, Baudrillard examined the ramifications of the rise of marketing outlined by Williamson. Baudrillard's claimed that advertising codes products in a way that determines the consumer's relationship with them.
− Poster notes, “advertising codes products through symbols that differentiate them from other products, thereby fitting the object into a series. The object has its effect when it is consumed by transferring its “meaning” to the individual consumer”.
− Baudrillard draws emphasis to the motivational research of Ernest Dichter, noting how he used focus groups to encourage consumers to divulge their emotional relationships with products, providing advertisers with information that they could then shape their advertising campaigns around.
Madmen clip – “Focus Group on madmen” 20 seconds to 3:20 mins (interview room observation room)
− Dichter notes “one of the fundamental tasks of all advertising is to permit the consumer to freely enjoy life, and to confirm his right to surround himself with products that enrich his existence and make him happy”.
− Staging a focus group became a common aspect of planning advertising campaigns in the post-war period. In response to the findings of the focus group adverts were then specifically designed to match products with particular desires or fears.
− As a continual presence throughout urban space and within the home, advertisements served to generate associations between consumer needs and products.
− Thus in this context the point of sale is re-formulated. The consumers sense of the product's usefullness is superseded by a set of codified emotional connections generated by advertising prompts. Baudrillard notes “the act of buying is neither a lived nor a free form of exchange. It is preconditioned activity where two irreducible systems and confront one another […] this is the forced integration of the system of needs with the system of products”. Further to this such a codification of needs is necessary as mass production requires constant demand for consumer goods if it is to be sustained.
Slide Seven – 1970 Dodge Challenger Convertible “Our plum crazy Challenger R/T is no shrinking violet”
− For Baudrillard this array of advertising messages takes on the character of a language. This is made evident with the example of a car, “it is not the concrete structure of the auto mobile engine that is expressed, but rather the, form, colour, shape, the accessories, and the “social standing” of the object”. He goes on, “Needs disappear into products which have a greater degree of coherence. Parcelled out and discontinuous, needs are inserted arbitrarily and with difficulty into the matrix of objects”. This then is the work of advertising, to cohere desires to commodities.
Slide Eight – 1970s Storefront
− In his essay of 1970 Consumer Society Baudrillard relates this earlier analysis to the layout of store-front displays and the interior layout of department stores.
Slide Nine –Meat Counter in a 1960s Woolworth's foodhall
− “Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods and clothing, are like a primary landscape of affluence. […] by purchasing a portion one in effect appropriates the whole crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears, or canned asparagus”.
− The consumer desire for abundance finds representation in the halls of department store, which are are made to signify surplus, affluence and feasting. Products are arranged in stacks, displays or collections that the consumer distinguishes from each other in terms of the needs, desires or fantasies that embody for them.
− For Baudrillard “The display window, the advertisement, the manufacturer, and the brand name here play an essential role in imposing a coherent and collective vision”.
− Baudrillard understands that products arranged such a manner take on a similar character to that of the linguistic sign in the analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Slide Ten – Saussure Diagram
− Saussure examined the status of signs as part of a wider language structure. He considered that linguistic signs were made up of two parts. A sound made by the vocal chords when speaking, or the graphic marks that comprise a word.
− Inseparable from the signifier in any sign and indeed, engendered by it, is what Saussure called the signified.
− This is the mental concept. Saussure considered that the linguistic sign is an arbitrary construct, produced purely through agreement between users of a given language system.
− We can see this by looking at how the same objects are named by different words in different languages.
− For example in France the word for dog is “chien”, and in Germany “hund”. The only reason that the signifier does entail the signified is because there is a conventional relationship at play.
− Saussure considered that a sign signifies by virtue of its difference from other signs. Saussure called this system of differences between signs “langue”, which he differentiated from individual speech acts “parole”.
Slide Eleven – Supergiant Supermarket 1960s.
− Similarly, Baudrillard argues that one cannot comprehend the nature of the consumer's psychological attachments with the commodity if it is considered directly. Rather, one must consider how these attachments converge as a system of signs, which like Saussure's notion of collective signification “langue” are structured by relations of difference. One can see this process in a commercial break on television where adverts converge arbitrarily, and in the distribution of different adverts on billboards throughout the city.
− In Baudrillard's argument continual consumer exposure to these campaigns and the presentation of commodities within retail environments themselves, constitutes a system of signification that constructs consumer desire.
− The Mirror of Production (1973) marks Baudrillard's break with Marxism. He argues throughout that core Marxist notions such as labour and use value are in fact mirror images of capitalism that are only comprehensible in relation to it.
− He argues first that the very idea of use value is produced through relations of exchange. “The presupposition of use value – the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct utility for a subject – is only the effect of the system of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it”. Thus Marx's notions of use value and unalienated labour, are re-conceived here as mere fantasies constructed from within our experiences of wage labour and commodity production.
− “The use value of labour power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in three orders of production, consumption and signification”.
Slide Twelve – Time Square in the 1980s
− From here Baudrillard then developed a fully blown theory of postmodernism. These later writings examine the relationship between images and reality, and consider relevance of the concept of the simulacrum to discussions of contemporary life.
− These later texts place emphasis upon the way in which experience has become saturated by media imagery. Within these circumstances representation, which we traditionally think of as following reality, as an image of it, in fact begins to shape the way in which we interpret reality itself.
− Baudrillard argues that such simulacra, do not have any referent or ground in reality, and that our cultural condition becomes one of “hyperreality”. In hyperreality images of take on lives of their own and become templates for new realities.
− Simulacra colonise reality overtaking it, and shaping the manner in which we interpret and respond to our environment. Baudrillard considers that these simulacra form into a code that extracts meanings from concrete social relations, and redeploys them within the media.
− In his essay Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Baudrillard cites the example of Borges's story of an empire whose cartographers create a map which exactly replicates and covers the whole territory. Once the empire falls into decline the map becomes ruined, leaving shreds and tatters distributed throughout a desert. Baudrillard considers this to be a “fine allegory of simulation”.
− Slide Thirteen – Frontierland at Disneyland, 1955
− He also considers Disneyland to be a prime example of such a hyper-real landscape. “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of the simulation. […] It is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world etc. He argues that the overtly fantastical environment within the park serves to distract attention from the equally vacuous reality outside it, first encountered in the solitude of the massive car parks that surround the theme park.
Slide Fourteen – The Twin Towers
− Baudrillard also considered that the Twin Towers stood as an architectural sign of how a concrete social life was being superseded by a code that was free of reference to any reality outside itself. The two towers, whose mute structures replicated one another, ignored the architectural bustle an competition that surrounded them. They existed as one for the other, immune to their surroundings, as a closed series of two.
Slide Fifteen - 9/11 2001
− Indeed, the terrorist attack that finally destroyed these Towers can be seen as an example of how the media representations can shape concrete social events. Weren't the spectacular explosions of 9/11, strangely reminiscent of the explosive finales of many Hollywood action films.
− Baudrillard considers that examples such as these are indications of how social events themselves are now shaped through the influence of simulacra generated by media culture. Baudrillard notes “all hold ups, all hijacks and the like are as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media”.
Slide Sixteen – Blair Election 1997
− In Baudrillard's analysis simulacra also invade political policy. Wants, desires, and beliefs forged by the propaganda and advertising, are recorded in opinion polls, which are closely monitored by politicians, and inform the policy decisions.
− This vision of hyper-real society formulates Baudrillard's sense of postmodernism, which for him is an era in which progress has come to a standstill. Bertans notes “Baudrillard's relentless dystopic vision of late modernity, as he saw it in the seventies, or postmodernity as he has come to see it, leaves no exits”
− Baudrillard himself states “postmodernity […] is a game with the vestiges of what has been destroyed. This is why we are “post” - history has stopped, one is in a kind of post history, which is without any meaning”.
American Psycho clip - Intro to Patrick Bateman
− We might consider Patrick Bateman, the main character in Bret Eastan Ellis's American Psycho as an example of the kind of personality that hyperreal society might create. His values are almost entirely constructed through marketing, and he exists in a world of fantasies where his desire to be the envy of others turns into murderous rage.
− In summary, Jean Baudrillard's theory of postmodernism developed out of a Marxist critique of capitalist production, focused upon how, in the postwar period, the rise of the advertising industry served to shape and regulate consumer demand, in ways that could meet the increased productive capacity created by the rationalisation of industrial production.
− He extended this analysis by focusing on how advertisements, and retail environments formed into a language, which continually re-iterated the same prospect of happiness and fulfilment through consumption.
− Then, in the 1980s his focus shifted onto how the proposals made by advertisements and the growing media culture influenced decision making, the construction of social space, and even political policy, ultimately arguing that this replication of social reality brought history to a standstill.

Lecture 9 - Censorship and 'Truth'

Here are my notes from the ninth lecture Censorship and 'Truth' on 02/02/2012.

Overview

• notions of censorship an truth
• the indexical qualities of photography in rendering truth
• photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth
• censorship in advertising 
• censorship in art and photography

Indexical qualities of photography - captures a scene that is going on. 

Camera never lies - actually it can.

With analogue photography, there are the negatives which are the original. In digital photography is code that sits there and exists - image doesn't actually exist, it's just a code.

More truth in analogue photography than digital.

Manipulation is not true.

'Fove years before coming to power in the 1917 October revolution, the Soviets established the newspaper Pravada...'

What is actually published to us isn't actually the truth. Political agenda is only publishing you to see what they want you to believe is the truth.

The internet masks exposure to the internet in order to expose things that aren't necessarily real to the masses through the internet.

GQ magazine cover

Kate Winslet on cover of GQ magazine, with elongated photoshop - does it really make any difference to us?

Photo journalists 

Is it a real image? Does it really matter if it is?

'At the time (world War II), I fervently believe just about everthing I was exposed to in school and in the media. For example...'

Does a photograph stand up in it's own right?

Persuasion - 'a deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by appeals o reason to freely accept beliefs, attitude...'

'Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation id no longer that of a territory...'

Does colour add more of a sense of real life in photos as opposed to black and white imagery.

Censorship

'Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich and reconstruct the world around him - to introduce...'

To sell you a life that you wish to have.

'Suppose that a picture of a young woman inserting a chocolate bar into her mouth makes one person think of fellatio, but someone else says that this meaning says more about the observer than it does the picture...' 

Where do we stand with it? Is it left to the viewers thought.

Highly sexualised and porogative history of the imagers late 60s - early 80s.

 Cook, G. (1992) The Discourse of Advertising, London...

Amy Adler - The Folly of Defining 'Serious' Art

• professor of law at NY Uni
• 'an irreconcilable conflict between legal riles and artistic practice'

The Miller Test, 1973

Asks 3 quesions

Obscenity Law

' I think that the pictures are incredibly innocent and totally unsexual.  don't crop them, I don't retouch them and the shots are never staged. I might introduce an element like a mask, to a given situation, but I would never insist that the child put it on.'

Final Thought

Just how much shuld we believe the truth represented in the media?

Should we be protected from it?

Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a capitalist consumer society?

Should art sit outside of censorship laws exercised in other disciplines?

Who should be protected, artist, viewer, or subject?

Lecture 7 - Identity

Here are my notes from the seventh lecture Identity on 19/01/2012.

Historical conceptions on Identity
Discourse methodology
Critique contemporary practice within these frameworks
Idea of liquid identity

Theories of Identity
Modernity - industrial revolution
Facial characteristics

Postmodern theorists disagree with it

Phrenology - splits the mind into sections

image of head


Notion that different parts of the brain formulated the person that you are
If one part is large then it will mean another side is lacking

Cesare Lombroso - says that it's genetically inherited - suggests if someone looks a certain way is more likely to commit crime than others

You can study and measure someones facial characteristics to see how intelligent you are.

Blonde haired blue eyed beast

Physiognomy legitimising racism
Harper's Weekly

image of lots of people
Hieronymous Bosch - Christ carrying the Cross

painting of black person
Chris Ofili - Holy Virgin Mary
Part of sensation exhibition in 1997.

Historical hases of Identity
Douglas Kellner - Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern, 1992

Pre modern identity - personal identity is stable - defined by long standing roles
Modern Identity - modern societies begin to offer a wider range of social roles. Possibility to start 'choosing' your identity, rather than simply being born into it. People start to worry about who they are
Post-Modern Identity - accepts a fragmented 'self'.

Pre-Modern Identity
Institutions determined identity - marriage - mans owning of the wife, church, monarchy, government, the state, work

Secure identities
Farm worker - report to rich people
Soldies - reports to the state
Factory worker - related to industrial
Housewife
Gentlemen
Husband-Wife

Modern Identity
Charles Baudelaire - The painter of modern life 1863
Thorstein Veblen - Theory of the leisure class 1899 - theory of the leisure class that doesn't have to go to work. Conspicuous consumption - relates to fashion. If you wear a certain type of dress it shows that you don't have to go to work, shows have money. To see and be seen.
Georg Simmel - The metropolis and mental life 1903 - Establishment of modern city and relates a note of social anxiety, concern of who you are and how you fit into society.

Modern Identity 19th & 20th Centuries
Baudlelaire - introduces concept of the 'flaneur' (gentleman stroller). People going about their leisure, being out and about and showing they don't need to go to work.
Veblen - conspicuous consumprion

Simmel introduces trickle down theory - upperclass seen wearing newest fashion and gear and then the lower class aspires to be like them and emulate what they are wearing. Upperclass want to distinguish themselves from the lower class, don't want to be linked. Emulaton, distinction, the 'mask' of fashion - people hide behind what they're wearing.

Georg Simmel
quote from slide titled his name


He suggests that with the speed and mutability, individuals start to draw into themselves to find peace. Become less concerned what is going on around them and more of what is going on inside.

Foucault
Identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us.
What is discourse?
quote on this page


Possible discourses
Age, class, gender, etc...

Discourses to be considered
Class, nationality, race/ethnicity/gender and sexuality - 'otherness'

Class
Being with the industrial revolution, people moving to cities and working in factories became the working class. To recognise your own class you must acknowledge other classes.
If you are upperclass you want to maintain this distinction.

Mass observation - observing people, upper class people observing lower classes

bauman quote


Las Vagas
Sums up the fluid identity of the world. Different identities all pushed into one place.

quote about disney world


Sums up the notion of why go anywhere around you.

Race/ethnicity
Chris Ofili
images
No woman no cry - comes from the Bob Marley song - obviously.

Captain Shit - how he believes a black superhero would be perceived by a white audience. Is it a statement he is making on his race and identity with these?

Gender & Sexuality
Masquerade and the mask of the femininity

Postmodern condition
Identoty is constructed through our socialPo experience
Ervin Goffman The Presentation of self in every day life

Zygmunt Bauman
Identity 2004
Liquid Modernity
Liquid Love

quote & image


The Morality of Advertising - Theodore Levitt 1970
quote


Portmodern Identity
I shop therefore I am

Darley (2000), Visual Digital Culture, p.187
quote

Essay

Would advertising strategies work without its reflection to Panopticism's form of discipline?

The strategies of advertising reflect the principles that have emerged from the creation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in the late eighteenth century, enabling ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind’ (Wikipedia, 2011, online), which developed Panopticism – a form of discipline developed by Michel Foucault that introduced a way of control through the mind, rather than resorting to violence.

The role of an advertising team is to project an image that will convince the consumer, both existing and new, that they ‘need’ the product that is being advertised, even if in fact owning it would be unnecessary. In order to produce an effective advertising campaign, they must first get to know their customers and understand their needs.

…”Ordinarily the business man does not realize that he means psychology when he says that he ‘must know his customers’ wants’ – what will catch their attention, what will impress them and lead them to buy, etc”…

This role that is created for the team behind any advertising campaign is similar to the role of the guards within the central tower of the Panopticon, where they observe the consumer just like the guards observe the individuals within the cells - monitoring their every move and generating a general understanding within the way that they think. This then enables them to play on this and manipulate it in order to generate interest towards what is being advertised.

…”Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behaviors; knowledge follow the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised”…

Upon observing the consumers, the advertising team obtains knowledge that they later translate into a unique selling point within an advertising campaign that will prove to be effective. ‘There is no element in an advertisement more important than the appeal – the reason you give the reader for buying’ (Caples, 1997, p73). In order to do this, the team recognizes the general aspects within the consumers’ lives, and project an image of a life that is somewhat superior to theirs which then generates a desire to have this life. This leaves the life they’re already living feeling belittled and not as good as it could be, and suggests that they could in fact vastly improve it by the one small gesture which is being recommended to them – to buy this product.

The consumer reflects the role of the individuals that were kept within the cells of the Panopticon that are monitored. ‘He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication’ (Foucault, 2001, online). Although the lives of the consumers are closely monitored and analyzed in order to appeal to them, the information that is actually discovered is never then used as a unique selling point within an advertisement. This is because what is being projected is a ‘better’ version of the consumers’ life of what it could become once this product is owned – to show them what they could have. In order for the advertisement to be effective, the advertising team must identify where the consumers’ deepest desires lay and then play on this, essentially offering it to them on a plate through the consumption of this product.

An example of a brand that grasps this concept exceptionally well is the men’s deodorant Lynx, with them now being ‘one of the largest consumer-goods companies in the world’ (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online) after being launched in 1983. They are targeted towards boys and young men who are forever becoming more conscious about their ‘sex appeal’ and how they are perceived by the opposite sex.

…”Lynx is Britain’s best selling men’s deodorant. The Lever Fabergé- owned brand targets young men in their late teens and early twenties. A central plank of the brand’s marketing strategy is the annual launch of new variants”…

Before the re-launch of Lynx under a ‘new brand strategy which encapsulated in the endline ‘The Lynx Effect’’, they previously ‘had revolved around the concept of attraction’ (Marketing Communication Plan, 209, online) which had worked well until during the nineties, when the brand began to loose its edge.

…”A new strategy was proposed that refocused its target market and identified a common truth: those young guys are preoccupied with the opposite sex, but often lack the confidence to do anything about it. The new campaign portrayed women finding Lynx users irresistible”…

Lynx understands that ithe importance of carefully planned communication marketing in achieving these ends can not be underestimated’ and their objectives ‘are to create sustainable brand awareness among the existing and potential customers’ (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online). As a result of Lynx’s close monitoring of it’s target market, it has allowed them, as did the Panopticon, to analyze and constantly review the behavior and needs of the subject, and ensure that their desires are being somewhat fulfilled without leaving them completely satisfied, ultimately causing them to want more and know what they will want next. Without this close monitoring and understanding, Lynx may not have fully grasped as well and effectively as they have that;

…”Men are increasingly concerned with their image and the image of their products is equally important…A growing number of men are said to be especially image-conscious and are particularly interested in the approval of their peers. Though deodorants are a staple item, men’s interest in grooming and physical appearance creates opportunities to target them with products that specifically address their issue, whether they are tangible, like alluring fragrances, or more ephemeral, like the projection of image through brand identification”…

An example of this is the ‘Getting Dresses’ Lynx Effect advert, where the opening of it begins with a very good-looking couple laying in bed together, before getting up and putting their clothes on. At first you see them put their underwear on, and then as they are putting other things on such as their trousers and t-shirts, you see them going on a journey which goes from a house, down lots of different busy streets, into a supermarket which then leads to two half filled shopping trolleys facing opposite directions. This promotes the image that just by wearing Lynx, no matter where he is or what he is doing he will be completely irresistible to females and they just wont be able to keep their hands off him.

By the girl in the video being really good looking, maybe even perfect in some men’s eyes thanks to the constant images of women which are presented within the media suggesting that only this type of beauty is what should be admired, suggests that not only will the male become irresistible, but also that he could be picky with which girl he would ‘choose’ to let be all over him and ultimately sleep with him. The male in the advert also represents what is classed ae the ‘perfect’ male, with his chiseled facial features and highly toned body – this suggests that even if in reality you don’t look like this, once the Lynx is applied, you will immediately gain confidence and appear like this in the eyes of any girl you wish to have.

Another good example is the advert for Lynx Twist ‘the fragrance that changes’. Consisting of a different angle to the previous example, this advert focuses in more on the fact that men don’t always know what it is that is going on in a woman’s mind, or what it is she actually wants, and suggests that by wearing this particular type of Lynx, it will do all of the hard work for them and they can just sit back.

The video begins with an average looking male with messy hair and a beard trying to impress a good looking blonde woman, but the expression on her face suggests that she is bored. Then, just as it looks like the male is about to give up, a machine appears which alters his appearance to now suit  the woman’s new mood, giving him a hair cut and a shave – suggesting that this is what the smell of the deodorant will do – make the woman see the male differently to what she has been doing and not just loose interest. This happens again as the couple more on to a different location and the woman is bored once again, changing the males appearance to now suit the new mood of the woman giving him a more stylish haircut and trendy clothes.

What the advert is suggesting to its targeted consumer is that it’s ok for them not to understand what it is a woman is thinking as the changing fragrance of this particular deodorant will be able to alone keep her more than interested, meaning the male can just sit back effortlessly and still have her weak at the knees.

Although both of these Lynx adverts have different agendas, they both still link back to what they have learnt from understanding their target market by ensuring a promise to the male that by wearing this product, he will have no trouble with the opposite sex. It will make them oozing with a confidence that they wouldn’t be able to achieve otherwise, and will make them more appealing without having to do anything about it despite the fact that they are becoming more image-conscious.

In conclusion, the way in which Panopticism works as a form of discipline is reflected within the process of advertising theories as these use the same sort of principles where it is the way in which someone thinks and what they believe is what is being manipulated in order to make products more appealing to them. Without generating and projecting an idea of a ‘more perfect’ life to the consumer than what they have, and making them believe that this is what they need in order to be happy then advertising wouldn’t work as effectively as it does to generate sales because there wouldn’t be a constant need within each individual to better what we already have.




Bibliography 


2007. Advertising Media Planning and Strategy. [online] Available at <http://www.admedia.org/>


2009. Marketing Communication Plan. [online] Available at: <http://ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2009/12/marketing-communication-plan-lynx-deordrant.html>


Caples, J, 1997. The Advertising Methods Fifth Edition. United States: Prentice Hall.


Farbey, A D, 1998. How to produce successful advertising. London: Kogan Page Limited.


Foucault, M, 2001. Michael Foucault: Panopticism. [online] Available at: <http://www.cartome.org/foucault.html> 


Heller, S, 2000. Sex Appeal. New York: Allworth Press.


Scott, W D, 2009. The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the principles of Psychology. Milton Keynes: Lighting Source UK Ltd.


Thelynxeffect, 2010. Lynx Getting Dressed ad. [video online] Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4aFfW0bl>


Thelynxeffect, 2010. New tv ad for Lynx Twist - the fragrance that changes [video online] Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDISjpOVuaE&feature=relmfu>


Wikipedia, 2011. Panopticism. [online] Available at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism>

Essay - Lynx Adverts

Thelynxeffect,. 2010. New tv ad for Lynx Twist – the fragrance that changes [video online] Availably at < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDISjpOVuaE&feature=relmfu> [Accessed 21st January 2012]

Thelynxeffect, 2010. Lynx Getting Dressed ad. [video online] Available at < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4aFf5W0bI> [Accessed 21st January 2012]

Essay - Foucault Quotes

From the reference - Foucault, M, 2001. Michael Foucault: Panopticism. [online] Available at: < http://www.cartome.org/foucault.htm> [Accessed 15th January 2012].
here are a variety of quotes which I have found to possibly include within my essay.

In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague.

the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning

They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible

Visibility is a trap.

He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.

The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.

one is totally seen, without ever seeing

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection

Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised.

power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible;

The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.

Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives 'power of mind over mind'.

In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact

its aim is to strengthen the social forces

And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network which, according to Le Maire, comprised for Paris the forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the 'observers', who were paid regularly, the 'basses mouches', or secret agents, who were paid by the day, then the informers, paid according to the job done, and finally the prostitutes.

Essay - Advertising Strategies Quotes

How to produce successful advertising
Farbey, A D, 1998. How to produce successful advertising. London: Kogan Page Limited.

• "It does not of itself sell goods (unless the subject area is direct marketing) but it creates the conditions for selling goods." - page 14
• "Advertising aims to meed a need" - page 14

The advertising methods fifth edition

Caples, J, 1997. The Advertising Methods Fifth Edition. United States: Prentice Hall.

• "Early in Han's own advertising career, a supervisor told him that all successful advertising was based on one or more of three appeals: 'sex, greed, or fear'." - page 70
• "An ounce of belief is worth a pound of half-belief" - page 71
• "There is no element in an advertisement more important than the appeal - the reason you give the reader for buying." - page 73

Theory of advertising

Scott, W D, 2009. The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the principles of Psychology. Milton Keynes: Lighting Source UK Ltd.

• "I have attempted to read broadly on the subject of advertising; I have tried to talk with business men - manufacturers, salesmen, publishers, professional advertisers, etc, and in all that I have read, and in all these conversations, I have never seen or heard and reference to anything except psychology which could furnish a stable foundation for a theory of advertising." - page 2
• "Ordinarily the businessman does not realise that he means psychology when he says that he 'must know his customers' wants - what will catch their attention, what will impress them and lead them to buy', etc" - page 2 and 3
• "And this will come through a closer knowledge of the psychological composition of the mind." - page 4