Media language needs the combination
of more than one discipline for its complete examination and understanding. The
operational function of advertisements triggers common sense knowledge by
accounting on multiple dimensions of discourse such as philosophical,
linguistic, psychological, sociological and anthropological. Knowledge of media
language presupposes the grounding of the former notions into our perceptual
apparatus; knowledge is expressed conveyed, accepted and shared in the
discourse of advertising by further defining its nature as not only social, but
also as cultural and subjective. Advertising is the body of multiple types of
knowledge since its systematic analysis endows with not only the comprehension
of a particular passage, but also with local and global knowledge a particular
object signifies on the grounds of verbal and non-verbal processes of
conceptualization. In other words, advertising entails a double association -in
certain cases even a double dissociation- between meaning-interpretation and meaning-realization.
Interpretability
constraints of media discourse are based on the concept of a multidisciplinary
matrix, which examines language from both an insider’s perspective (the surface
structure of passages) and from an outsider’s perspective (meaningful remarks
derived from visual, aural and auditory modalities. Commercials represent a
synthesis of global behaviors with the individual’s experiences, resulting in
an interactional discourse which further constitutes the reification of the
given product as the image of the market on the one hand and the image a single
consumer expects to obtain on the other. As long as the market remains
relatively stable, fluctuating within predictable advertising techniques, the
individual is disposed to operate according to the established attitudes (buy,
or not a particular product). However, when the market produces such
fluctuations that the individual is not able to locate with a single reading,
old practices of advertising, are replaced by new ones, in our case subliminal
images.
According to Danesi (2002: 179) advertising derives from the Medieval Latin
verb “advertere”, which means to “direct one’s attention to”; it designates any
type of public announcement and representation in order to promote the sale of
specific commodities and services. According to Cook (1992: 3) advertisements
are interactions of multiple elements such as language, paralanguage,
participants, society, situations, pictures, music, other ads and discourses.
The purpose of ads concerns the substances of attention getting, talking microchips,
novel substance and lastly fixing the product more firmly by actively involving
the reader (1999: 25). Lastly, it is should be noted that the difference
between advertising and any other kinds of representations and activities lies
on the fact that it aims at influencing judgments, attitudes and behaviors.
Advertisements need multidimensional readings in order to
perceive their intended messages, if not entirely, at least approximately. The
analysis of the particular genre demands two axes of organization: i) analyzing
by virtue of synthesizing multiple disciplines and ii) embedding and
de-embedding the multiple dimensions in the representational functions of
commercials. The body of commercials entails the perception and the
internalization of a stylistic structure, which functions as a mental path leading
to the semantization and thematization of their persuasive nature. The
structure of commercials is highly descriptive since it simply denotes a
specific quality or quantity of the product, which has to be in proportion with
consumers’ needs and desires. The dependency of advertisements on not only
linguistic dimensions, but also on multiple discourses, leads in their
enrichment and revitalized nature.
In particular, Fairclough
and Wodak (1997: 258) argue for a dialectical relationship between a particular
discursive event and the situations, institutions and social structures that
frame it. They speak of discourse as a form of social practice, which embodies
variables ranging from ideology and power, to hierarchy, gender and sociology. As
for advertising, we could hypothesize that it is in parallel relations with the
social aspects of human behavior so that to embody the linguistic information
in the societal dimension that patterns the habitus.
But what is habitus and
how can we define it in relation to modernity? And if habitus is associated
with modernity, what is its impact on advertisements? Many scholars agree that
the habitus is an aspect of human behavior on the grounds of ideology and
socialization. As the following definitions show, habitus is an innate and
universal aspect of human cognition. In particular, Bateson, Elias and Scollon
claim that:
“The notion of the habit is a major economy of conscious thought” (Bateson [1942] 1972: 141).
“Social and physical habitus are interrelated and social and
physical habitus are transformations of habitus resulted in historical change” (Elias 1939, 1968).
“Habitus is a set of generative dispositions and has its ontogenesis in
the earliest development of social and cognitive life” (Scollon 2003: 176).
Therefore, habitus could be treated as a kind of
embodied ideology as it constitutes a set of socially learnt
dispositions, the acquisition of which is held through the activities and
experiences of everyday life.
According to Scollon (2003:179) the
modern world has reconstructed national habitus as the image of the society on
the one hand and the image of the individual personality on the other. In other words, habitus could be defined as a mental structure
functioning in the realization of social structure at the level of individual
subjectivity. Social
changes establish transformations by restructuring the habitus as old practices
are replaced by new. As the world we live in constantly changes, the acts that
we perform and our attitude towards them also has to change. On the grounds of
the pattern of social transformations, we could further suppose that
advertisements have to adjust their ideological and attitudinal character in
proportion to the current social settings.
In addition to the
socio-cognitive definition on habitus, Myles (2010: 20) argues for its relation
with mass media by proposing that the linguistic habitus acts as a constraint
in media because the embodied nature of language is not only subject to the
determinations of the market, but also to the type of “orchestrating” located
in the habitus. To me, this assumption could be based on the fact that media
has autonomy vis-à-vis the social field because it shapes or it is shaped from
the transparency and immediacy of human experiences and ideologies. Media discourse
embraces a sociological view of language that subordinates the
non-arbitrariness of linguistic meaning in order to stress the necessity of
persuading and promoting specific values and moralities.
Besides the above, the social dimension of advertising encodes two kinds
of knowledge for discourse processing. Firstly, personal and group knowledge
shapes mental models for the interpretation of the advertised message. After
that, this knowledge becomes socially and culturally shared, if we consider the
multiplicity of the channels of message transmission, like television, radio,
magazines, newspapers, Internet, films etc. According to van Dijk (2003: 106) discourse
processing correlates with social knowledge and demands a systematic analysis
on the basis of four steps: i) comprehension of a passage through a huge amount
of general knowledge, ii) local and global coherence, iii) presupposition of
knowledge and iv) context model knowledge.
Moreover, media language
is established in public space on the basis of generating power and further
linking the concept of power with legitimacy and public discourse (Benhabib
1992: 80-1). Power is a fundamental concept of commercials, it is entrenched in
the way the market presents products; however, power should not be solely
described as a moral value originated by individualistic behaviors. I view that
the concept of power is an abstraction of the processing language of
commercials; power is not restricted to people, it is rather endowed with
entities and objects. Habermasian philosophy explores the notion of public
space in a dual manner: at a primary level the public sphere is approached as
an institutional mechanism for rationalizing political and any other type (in
our case advertising) domination and, at a secondary level the public sphere
illustrates public opinion (Fraser 1992: 112-13).
With regard to
advertising, I would like to stress that the notion of public sphere is
governed by the derivative relationship between a logical object and a passive
subject or, between a passive object and a logical object. According to me, commercials are inclusive devices of an object,
which has to be entrenched in subjects’ choices; the given product stands for
the object, which is either active –when it is represented by agents- or
passive –when it is represented alone (for example, display commercials which
singly illustrate products, without any particular setting). The subject stands
for consumers’ public space; if the product is presented in a communicative
environment surrounded from agents, consumers seem to passively and
effortlessly process its message. However, if the product stands alone (for
example, in certain display advertisements alcohol drinks are illustrated
without any agents), the public sphere -consumers- need to process the intended
message of commercials in a more active manner; they need to seek for the
degree of desirability and necessity in buying the advertised object.
Lastly, Garnham (1992: 365, 367) claims that media communication synthesizes ideologies
based upon face-to-face communication in a single physical space because, what
has become mediated is the content of communication and the subject of debate.
Could we further assume that what is physically shared, is lost? If we suppose
that mass media focus on the necessary material resource base for any public
sphere, we could further assert that markets tend to distribute advertisements on
the basis of what a public sphere seeks to obtain. However, in a pluralistic
perspective markets seek to influence subjects at a public point, which puts
its grounds on individual constraints. As a result, the public space of
advertising is mediated by a general social ideology reflected in an external
reality that has to be subject to personal experiences and behaviors.
