i$4 I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes The Semiotic Regimentation of Social Life I IJJ regulatory activity as protecting consumers from false or deceptive advertisements, thereby increasing confidence in the informational side of commercial speech, they would surely reject my claim here that the regulative environment works to disarm consumers through a false\semiotic ideojpgy. In fact, the Commission demonstrated, in a 1978 ruling, a real concern that "the viewer's critical faculties of classification and differentiation are drowned in patterns of imagery and symbols" (cited in Richards and Zakia 1981:115; see Zakia 1986). The important point to note is that this concern with "critical faculties" was voiced in the context of potentially deceptive visual representations and not in the context of language-based "informational" messages. But bringing symbolic images under the purview of the FTC is only another way of putting the consumer in a situation of false confidence that, now, even visual symbols are being inspected for accuracy. This, then, would parallel the legal arguments made by corporate interests that even "persuasion" in advertising is indirectly informational, because ads promote entry of superior products into the market, enhance competition by lowering prices, or stimulate product innovation (Fred S. McChesney cited in Lowenstein 1988:123z). Should consumers ever become persuaded that the subtle, symbolic, or connotative meanings of commercials have been approved by regulators, then an additional piece of armor will have disappeared from their already diminished interpretive arsenal. The second recent-xrend-istrrat some advertisers are increasingly rejecting the rhetoric of puffed exaggeration and the image-mongering of symbolic association in favor of ad messages which refer directly and explicitly to advertising as a communicative form and function. The 1990s may well be a new era in the history of the metapragmatics of advertising. If in the first period consumers expected the hard sell of puffery and protected themselves by caveat emptor, and in the second period the assumption of referentiality promoted by governmental institutions disarmed consumers faced with extensive verbal and visual nonreferentiality, the third period can be identified as the age of the "meta-ad,"^that is, ads about advertising. Meta-ads, I suggest, signal a renewed^frofrorrthe part of advertisers to positively recapture their power to institute a generalized semiotic regime for interpreting their ads. 6 Instead of passively assuming thaf consumers are metapragmatically naive, meta-ads build into their overt signals, for example, preference to previous ads for the same product, the behavioral effectivenësTof ads, the truth value (or deception) of ad messages, the formal or poetic features of ads, the act of experiencing ads, the the technical process of broadcasting ads, and the institutional history of advertising as an industry. In an ad for the American Express card, a man taking a shower is robbed while the television in the background shows Karl Maiden warning viewers to carry traveler's checks. In an IBM ad, a portable movie screen shows commercials from the past ten years; a rose is tossed from the image on the screen into the space of the present ad. An ad for the RCA camcorder shows the camcorder making an ad for itself. A woman carefully reads the label on a bottle of Kraft- Free dressing and fervently affirms its truth value. Joe Isuzu makes repeated ridiculous claims about the price and quality of his cars, intentionally generating an image of the classic huckster whose puffery is never to be believed. (As if in dialogue with this ad, Lee Iacocca warns that "if Chrysler isn't a performance car, then I'm Joe Isuzu.") Bo Jackson, dressed as a singer, walks off the stage claiming "I'm an athlete, not an actor," and then passes through the television screen showing the commercial for Nike shoes. An ad for McDonalds "fast-forwards" itself to "get to the good part." John Cleese informs the viewer that "those smart people at Magnavox have asked me to tell you about all these highly intelligent [electronics] products in just fifteen seconds." A car phone installed inside the Lexus automobile is set to automatically dial the Lexus sales office, which answers "thank you for calling Lexus." Candace Bergen tells a couple watching her image on their television not to use the mute button of the remote. In what might be the ultimate non-ad, a farmer comes into a salesroom to look at John Deere tractors and leaves without buying a new tractor, though he is wearing a new cap with the company logo. Since meta-ads are all truthfully "about" advertising (in the sense that all metapragmatic utterances are inherently semantic), the viewer is led by this positively supplieilset of interprétants to overlook the persuasive function being accomplished simultaneously. For as Boorstin (1961:213) prophetically wrote over thirty years ago: "Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths."
PART IV Social Theory and Social Action f f