SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

142 I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes
each piece of furniture resemble the signs on the pieces on display in the various
reconstructed buildings except that "do not touch" is replaced by a price tag and
an order number. In Colonial Williamsburg's annual report for 1982, the proud
claim is made that
Colonial Williamsburg has enhanced a wide public awareness of the value of
good design which, in turn, has had a profound effect on the general level of
taste. A distinguished editor of a prestigious house furnishings magazine has
suggested that the Williamsburg Reproduction program has been the greatest
single influence on elevating American taste and teaching appreciation of the
lasting values of fine craftsmanship and design.
The reproduction of distinction is disseminated through the commoditization of
historical reproduction.
Ideological Regimentation in Advertising ^ . 6
Colonial Williamsburg does not put forth a decontextualized ideology about
"history" in general. Its interlocking signs work to structure possible interpretations
of theijteforjdsitors at the site itself; its semiotic regîmêrïfafîon is, in other
words, indayfialfy-anehored. This final section, in contrast, deals with a set of
independent signs (commercial advertisements) that, together^rely on a pervasive
„_\ ideology about communication and referentiality.
It is a^omrnbffp1'äeFför"änalysts of contemporary American culture to point
out the powerful impact of advertising on the development of a "culture of consumption,"
characterized by the shift from production to consumption as the
basis for socially recognized values and as the source of artificial or symbolic
needs unrelated to relatively more objective use-values (Lears 1983; Leiss, Kline,
and Jhally 1990:281-84). What is less clear, however, is precisely how advertising
succeeds in this manipulation of consciousness, that is, how the pragmatic
^rrmctions of advertising as_ a system of communication are achieved. My~~afgumentheré
is that the functional effectiveness of advertisements cannot be understood
apart from its "sjnuotic ideolog^," a term modeled after the notion of
"linguistic ideology" formulated~bVSirverstein (1979), namely, a culturally determined,
historically grounded set of interpretive standards for understanding
^ linguistic and, by extension, visual communication. In other words, messages of
any sort are received in the context of explicit understandings and implicit assumptions
of a general nature about how various communicative signals function.
And these understandings and assumptions are themselves products of social
institutions which, for example, regulate communicative usages, impose
canons of interpretation, and codify the principlesToTcommunicative ideology.
To make an argumentjjaiallel to Silverstein's (1985a) paper on gender categories
and Mertz and Weissbourd's (1985) work on legal ideology, I argue that modern
The Semiotic Regimentation of Social Life I 143
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consumers' understanding of particular ads is significantly skewed by the effects
of a_regimented view of the general nature of commercial speech and, further,
that this official ideology is so far from being an accurate account of the forms
and functions of advertising n^ssages that their manipulative potential derives at^
least in partJjomjaaosumers^enforced misunderstanding^) ^J^ ^(^4«ifW ! - h .-..