Brand Stamped On The Face Of Culture--Advertising, Utopia Or Suffering Of The Human

From the visual field of culture studies, the paper tries to examine advertising with semiotic, linguistics, sociology, aesthetics etc., to find out the characteristic and law of it and to discuss the effect and position of advertising images. One of the presupposition of the paper is that our society has been into the stage of electric culture but not oral culture or printing culture. From the basic point of post-structuralism, Mark Poster thinks that electric culture has been a new language experience in some degree and the new language experience is reconstructing the modern subject. He puts forward the concept of the mode of information, which means the structure of interchange. The mode of interchange hints that history can be divided into different stages by the structure changes of symbolic interchange of face to face by oral media (symbolic correspondences); the second is interchange by writing media (representation of signs); the last is interchange by electric media (informational simulations). One of Mark Poster's important presuppositions is language is not transparent tool of action, the other is that subject is constructed in the actions and structures of interchange. In the stage of electric culture, electrical interchange makes subject changed from a central position of reason/imagination into a decentered and dispersed state.TV advertising is a typical pattern of electrical interchange, the discoursing pattern of which are non-contexts, monologic and self-referential. Non-contexts means that advertising cancels the realitic contexts of conversations but creates some speech situations in the same time. The monologic feature means that advertising is not dialogic. The self-referential feature means that the discourse of advertising has no realitic referential thing butto refer itself. The discoursing pattern of advertising is the internal mechanism of the aestheticism of daily life. The special manner does stem from the discoursing pattern of advertising, which is discussed in the last chapter. The desiring rhetoric of advertising expresses the semiotic mechanism of advertising language. In the language, goods or trade mark occupies a position of a word, and the advertising image is the signified of this word. In the same time, advertising image occupies a position of a signifier, the desire hiding in our unconscious is a signified. On the base, advertising creates a Utopia of images which is a substitution for the secular Utopia in present China. The meaning net of the present people was broken into pieces, which they can endure in no ways.so they indulge in the Utopia of images.Anyhow, advertising provides a futural scene for the society. Unreal as the scene is, maybe we could foresee the tendency of the society's progress through it. If we only evaluate advertising by classic concepts of real or false, do or not we will lose some precious life-force for safe's name?...