LEVELS OF CONTEXT

Hitherto I have considered the components ‘message’, ‘code’, and ‘channel’

from Figure 4.1. While the ‘channel’ can be objectively assessed, the components ‘message’ and ‘code’—the levels that have traditionally received most attention in semiotic approaches—pose considerably more difficulties, as we saw. In Jakobson’s original formulation ‘message’ equals ‘verbal message’, but the dual-media nature of the advertisements considered here necessitated a subdivision into verbal and pictorial elements and, accompanying that, the postulation of a linguistic and a (rudimentary) pictorial

‘code’. Both the varying relations between these two codes and their unequal degree of precision already suggests that interpreting ads is by no means a simple application of ‘codes’. Even the role of the linguistic code— that most refined of human codes—should not be overrated, specifically in advertising. Although a code is indispensable for the interpretation of most acts of communication, it is rarely sufficient. Many aspects of interpreting ads typically arise ad hoc and are therefore by definition not amenable to a code. It is in this spirit that Pateman, in a discussion of Barthes’ Panzani analysis, criticizes the latter’s denotation/connotation distinction, arguing that Barthes, ‘fixing an image in a gaze, loses sight of the utterance in action’

(1980:235). Similarly, Cook points out:

A weakness of the semiotic approach is its exclusive devotion to similarities, and then an air of finality once these similarities are observed, which blinds it to what is unique. Although it undoubtedly contributes to the analysis of an ad to see what it has in common with the myths of earlier cultures, or with other discourse types of its own period and place, or with other ads, there are also important elements which are unique in advertising, or in a given ad, as there are in any discourse type or instance of it. Under the influence of semiotics, academic thought has devoted its attention to those features of a phenomenon which allow one instance to be seen as equivalent to another;

and in its analyses it has concentrated on those features to the detriment of others.

(Cook 1992:70) These remarks can be read as a plea to pay more attention to the pragmatics of advertising. In terms of Figure 4.1, this entails a focus on the elements ‘context’,

‘communicator’, and ‘addressee’. Leaving an extensive analysis of the communicator and the addressee in the discourse of advertising until Chapter 5, we are left with the factor ‘context’. In practice, this category is supposed to cover anything of importance that is not captured by the other categories. As a matter of fact, that is a good deal. To complicate matters, I have already used the word ‘context’ to talk about word and image relations within the text. The problem is that the concept of context operates beyond the text as well; it simply depends on the focus of attention what is to be considered context. That means

that context is by no means a stable factor. Indeed, it is also possible to subsume for instance ‘channel’, ‘communicator’, and ‘addressee’ under the label

‘context’. This is what Cook does in his The Discourse of Advertising, although he uses different labels. In his model, ‘discourse’ is subdivided into ‘text’ and

‘context’. Since ‘text’ is with due caution defined as ‘linguistic forms, temporarily and artificially separated from context for the purposes of analysis’,

‘context’ comprises the rest, including the pictures which in my account belong to the ‘message’ (Cook 1992:1–2). All this need not unduly worry us. Different purposes inevitably entail different subdivisions in contextual levels. Ang’s remarks on TV audiences’ viewing behaviour are equally pertinent to the realm of advertising:

‘Watching television’ is always behaviour-in-context, a generic term for heterogeneous kinds of activities whose multifarious and shifting meanings can only be understood in conjunction with their contexts. Of course,

‘context’ itself cannot be reduced to a fixed number of ‘background’

variables, because contexts are indefinite, and indefinitely extending in time and space.

(Ang 1991:161) The bottom line is simply that what is subsumed under the labels ‘text’ and ‘context’

respectively, and what contextual levels are to be distinguished, is bound to vary with the purposes of analysis.

For my own purposes it is useful to distinguish—indeed artificially—

between contextual levels within the text (as I have done in the preceding sections) and those outside the text. A first level of context beyond the text that it makes sense to demarcate is the immediate, physical surroundings of the advertisement. In the case of printed ads these physical surroundings consist of newspaper or magazine articles and sometimes other ads; in the case of billboards, these surroundings can be manifold: a bus shelter, a railway station, a park, a blind wall… It will be obvious that the interaction between printed ads and surrounding texts is potentially bigger than that between billboards and physical surroundings. Printed ads, after all, have been deliberately placed in carefully selected papers or magazines, and one is, for instance, more likely to come across an ad for motorbikes in a periodical devoted to motorbikes than in a women’s magazine. Since bus shelters, railway stations and parks are less subject to changes, active interaction between ad and physical surrounding is far more limited. Nonetheless, in principle physical context can influence the interpretation of the ad. A good example of this last type is the advertisement for the ‘Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam’ that, since the early nineties, has appeared on tram 5, since line 5 actually has a stop in front of the main building of the Vrije Universiteit.

More important, however, are levels of context of a less physical nature.

Thus, Barthes fleetingly refers to anthropological knowledge and, at length, to cultural knowledge. It is worthwhile to have a brief look at Barthes’ mention of

‘anthropological knowledge’, which occurs in his analysis of the Panzani advertisement. In order to interpret the pictorial elements of this ad for a pasta sauce, we must know ‘what a tomato, a string bag, and a package of pasta are:

however, this is virtually anthropological knowledge’ (1986/1964:25). This, surely, is a slip of the pen, for it seems likely that the proverbial pygmy, unfamiliar with Western civilization and, possibly, even with tomatoes, would be completely baffled by the picture. Thus, the knowledge required to interpret the pictorial element in the advertisement is cultural rather than anthropological. It is useful to distinguish between them. Inasmuch as all human beings need food and drink to exist; are in the habit of sleeping part of their lives; normally possess a head, two arms, two legs; and, when healthy, are capable of performing certain motor skills, etc., all explicit and implicit references to background knowledge pertaining to these facts invoke contextual knowledge of an anthropological kind.⁴ Many other kinds of ‘facts’ are not human universals, but restricted to specific cultures or subcultures. For example, under what circumstances—if any—kissing and shaking hands, burping, whipping a criminal, etc. constitute acceptable or desirable behaviour is culturally determined, and reference to information of this kind therefore draws on knowledge of a cultural context. In analysing advertisements, cultural context is obviously of greater interest and relevance than anthropological context. While we cannot contrast human responses to animal ones since animals do not, as far as we know, respond to advertisements, it is possible to contrast advertisements from one culture to those of another. On the one hand we simply must consider to what extent many advertisements are embedded in a cultural context on penalty of not being able to interpret them; conversely, an analysis of the knowledge necessary to interpret a certain ad—as indeed of any act of communication—can reveal much about the (sub)culture in which it is embedded. This latter, of course, can be highlighted by misunderstandings that arise in cross-cultural transmissions of such discourses.⁵

One substantial sub-part of the cultural context, then, is an awareness of what Barthes called the ‘code of connotation’. In his famous essay ‘The photographic message’ he explains,

The code of connotation [is] apparently neither ‘natural’ nor ‘artificial’ but historical, or perhaps one should say ‘cultural’; its signs are gestures, attitudes, expressions, colors, or effects endowed with certain meanings by virtue of the practices of a certain society…. Hence we cannot say that modern man projects into his reading of the photograph certain characterial or ‘eternal’

feelings and values, i.e., infra- or trans-historical feelings and values, unless we make it clear that signification is always elaborated by a specific history and society…. Thanks to its code of connotation, the reading of the photograph is therefore always historical; it depends on the reader’s

‘knowledge’, just as if this were a matter of a real language, intelligible only if one has learned its signs.

(Barthes 1986/1961:16–17)

Another, no less important, aspect of the cultural code can be captured by what Abelson baptized ‘scripts’. A script is defined as a ‘coherent sequence of events expected by the individual, involving him either as a participant or as an observer’

(1976:33). Examples of scripts are: going to a restaurant; marrying; transgressing and ensuing (or non-ensuing) punish-ment; shopping; chatting up a girl/boy;

negotiating a deal; decision-making … All these actions are characterized by a number of events (Abelson calls them ‘vignettes’, ibid.: 34) occurring in a more or less fixed order. Not all of the events necessarily occur; sometimes events change order; and in most scripts there are, at certain stages, certain alternatives available; nonetheless, in a given society, the variations a script tolerates are limited. Scripts, then, are a kind of blueprints that help people, often subconsciously, to decide how certain events are likely to unfold, and to evaluate events. It will be clear that the interpretation of texts, which after all usually describe events, requires the invocation of scripts. Apart from this general truth, the concept of scripts is of particular relevance for advertising texts. Abelson emphatically claims that ‘attitude toward an object consists in the ensemble of scripts concerning that object’ (ibid.: 41). We only need to substitute ‘product’

for ‘object’ and we have yet another view of what advertising attempts to do to a prospective client, namely, manipulate the scripts he or she brings toward the product.

SUMMARY

In this chapter I have elaborated on the two reasons why advertisements in general, and printed advertisements and billboards in particular provide ideal material for an analysis of pictorial metaphors. Moreover, I have adapted the Jakobsonian model of the communication situation with its six components—message, channel, code, context, communicator and addressee —and examined how four of these different

‘slots’ are filled in an advertising situation. An important difference from the conventional model is that the ‘message’ is not of a purely verbal nature, but constitutes a word and image text. The relation between these two media has been explored in terms of the Barthesian concepts of ‘relaying’ and ‘anchoring’. The component ‘context’ has also been elaborated. It was argued that this category can be infinitely extended or subdivided according to the needs of the analyst and the text under scrutiny. For present purposes a subdivision has been made between verbal and pictorial context levels within the text, and physical, cultural, and anthropological knowledge levels outside the text.

Two components of the communication situation have not been discussed:

communicator and addressee. In a sense they are the most important components since all the other components only matter in the light of the fact that in a communicative situation one more or less specified agent wishes to convey something to another more or less specified agent. Without a communicator and an addressee there is no communication in the first place;

and all the other components are interesting only thanks to their existence. In

particular, this has consequences for the role of context as sketched in this chapter. While code, channel and message are relatively stable factors in the communication situation, context is, as we have seen, a rather elusive one. The reason for this is that the factor context is more deeply affected than the other factors by who is the communicator and who is the addressee in a communication situation. This was very well understood by Sperber and Wilson (1986), whose account of the relation between communicator and addressee in a communication situation, and the consequences for the role of context, will be the subject of the next chapter.