What is promotional culture?
The term was introduced by Andrew Wernick in the early 1990s to describe the emergence of advertising in 1960s and 1970s North America as a ‘rhetorical form diffused throughout our culture’.
In the preface to Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (1991), Wernick claims he set out initially to examine the semiotic colonisation of that culture by commercial advertising, with the particular aim of exploring the ways in which its texts registered, in symbolic form, the ideological upheavals of the era.
In the chapters that follow he identifies a number of examples where such tensions and conflicts are symbolically ‘resolved’ in the content of advertisements, most notably his discussion of feminism and Eve’s cigarettes. But in the course of this research he also identified another, seemingly more significant trend: what he saw as the inescapably recursive function of promotion itself across all aspects of mediated culture.
The advertising Wernick analysed didn’t merely convey information or persuade in the traditional manner: carefully assembled copy and imagery, placed in a specific medium to convey a precise and persuasive message about a specific product, company or service, with the aim of achieving a very specific effect.
These adverts entered a culture already replete with promotional messages, distributed in print but also now electronically across national broadcast media - and they couldn’t but recognise this in the intertextual content of their own messages.
Advertising had become acutely self-conscious and thoroughly embedded in the everyday world of its audiences, stimulating consumer demand for mass produced commodities (and more importantly still, their image) on the one hand whilst simultaneously drawing from (being supplied by) the popular culture that these made possible on the other.
Through reflexive, knowing references to this culture, adverts had ceased to operate merely as persuasive messages or even as cultural texts in this (supposedly) democratic cultural arena. Instead they functioned as promotional intertexts.
‘It is as if we are in a hall of mirrors’, Wernick argued. ‘Each promotional message refers us to a commodity which is itself the site of another promotion. And so on, in an endless dance whose only point is to circulate the circulation of something else.’(1991, 121)
Wernick’s ‘promotional intertext’ extends the scope and nature of the advertising message, encompassing everything from traditional ‘above-the-line’ advertising through reflexive product design practices to newspaper publicity, celebrity stardom and broadcast television programming strategies.
Contrary to his initial thesis, Wernick found that promotional intertexts didn’t merely reflect the culture in which they had been produced. They had instead become the dominant form of symbolic expression - the very fabric of a promotional culture.
Over thirty years on this analysis still resonates. The phenomenon Wernick approached primarily in objective terms - that is, the postmodernist mis-en-abyme of the commodity-sign, encapsulated in the rampant intertextualism of advertising and the ‘vortex of publicity’ across print and broadcast media - now permeates almost every aspect of subjective experience: from the seemingly unstoppable branding of ‘lifestyle’ (what used to be known as hobbies or pastimes) to the near impossibility of presenting one’s self online without recourse to the promotional functions of social networks.
How has this happened?
The international turn towards neoliberalism in political-economic thinking and policy since the early 1980s has seen the extension of the evaluative logic of the market - and so to the attendant imperatives for incessant differentiation, promotion and competition - into aspects of our private lives that would have been unthinkable even as recently as the era Wernick focuses on.
In the broader context of the organisation of the media and communication industries, the neoliberal turn has led to deregulation and privatization, internationalization and conglomeration. The combined effect of these factors has been to create fertile ground for the commercial exploitation of technological developments that have amplified and in some cases altered quite drastically the ways we communicate and think of ourselves - as members of communities and of society but now, increasingly, as individuals.
The further extension of digitally networked and mobile communications into our daily lives toward the end of the twentieth-century has been facilitated by well documented patterns of convergence: among media and markets on the one hand, and practices of production and consumption on the other.
Arguably the most significant consequence of these particular changes is that the rhetorical work of promotion is no longer solely performed at the level of advertising’s symbolic content. Instead, what might be described - drawing from Ian Bogost's work on 'persuasive games' - as the procedural rhetoric of digital media technologies has become intrinsic to contemporary forms of self-presentation and sociability, of labour and affect.
Bogost contends that videogames are not merely an interactive media form, they are expressive: their rule-based processes enable gamers to act out - to represent through the gameplay - whatever social, cultural or political scenario the game takes as its subject.
The procedural rhetoric that is intrinsic to 'persuasive games' makes for a powerful medium of symbolic expression, but one that remains relatively untapped by advertisers and politicians, as well as - and much closer to Bogost's heart it seems - journalists and educators.
Bogost does not extend his argument to other interactive digital forms, but what he argues about the procedural rhetoric of videogames surely applies just as readily, perhaps even more convincingly, to those websites whose business it is to facilitate 'social networking' in its various guises (this being their scenario, or the particular game they enable us to play).
As Aeron Davis notes in his discussion of 'living in promotional times': 'To raise one’s online profile one has to conform to the operational parameters of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Youtube'. By this he means that, as users of the 'free' services these businesses provide, we tacity agree to them trading on our digital identities for meta-promotional purposes.
But conforming to the 'operational parameters' of these social networking businesses also requires that we develop a tacit knowledge of their operational procedures. The savour faire one develops through using 'social' functions - commenting, liking, retweeting, repinning, hashtagging etc - amounts to a kind of cyber-discipline. It is not so much the economic or even the ostensibly 'social' imperative for self-promotion that is internalised through the routine use of these functions - it is the procedure for doing so.
Internalising the logic of promotion in such a way, so Davis argues, has far reaching effects. 'Thus, slowly,
and often imperceptibly, promotion has seeped into all areas of society, at the
organisational, social and individual levels. Organisations, and those who work for them, have internalised and come
to reproduce, often unconsciously, a series of promotional responses and
routines ... Ideas, norms and values have altered, influencing elite
and wider public understanding and decision-making. Mainstream public media and
popular culture have been reshaped. Consumption itself has changed leaving
consumers feeling less in control.'
The promotional culture this gives rise to is therefore both the harbinger and the haven of neoliberal subjectivity.
Harbinger, in that as Wernick argues, promotion became the dominant 'rhetorical mode' in America at a time and in a manner that paved the way for what became known as postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism - for which the correlating political-economic doctrine we now term neoliberalism.
And haven, for as Davis's rather totalising vision of 'promotional times' nonetheless illustrates very clearly, in spite of the systemic crisis that many on the Left argue neoliberalism is currently undergoing, promotion - as the cultural logic of late capitalism - continues to diffuse throughout our society. Increasingly but by no means exclusively, this can be traced to the techniques of the self that are enabled through the procedural rhetorics of 'social networks' and related digital media forms.
But just as it remains extremely difficult if not impossible to isolate or determine the particular effects of the kinds of advertising Wernick was interested in, much the same is true of the promotional procedures, techniques and intertexts of our current era.
*****
The aim of this blog is to provide a platform for members of the media department at Middlesex University to publicise and disseminate research that addresses the many pressing questions that stem from the rise, impact and influence of promotion on everyday life under neoliberalism.
