Sign And Power—A Study On Baudrillard’s Advertisement Theory

Fetishism is one of the important contents of Marxism, there are three types of fetishisms in the history of capitalism——commodity fetishism, currency fetishism and capital fetishism. Compared with them, the fetishism of sign is the form which is more hidden and stronger to control people in capitalist society. The signifying of object and lost of subject are not only the cause of the fetishism of sign, but also its main features. Ads occupy the daily life as the most powerful sign system in modern cultural space. The sign of advertisement can be divided into two systems——image and voice. Image system can be divided into angles, subtitles, color etc. Voice system is make up of voiceover, characters’language, music and sound. The violence of sign of ads work in a gentle way, they divide commodities through difference and grade. Ads try to persuade consumers to buy products by economic, cultural and symbolic capital. Ads make people feel like consuming so that they can protect the interests and ideology of the producers. Ads can hardly provide people with meaningful explanation. The unified standard of production undermines the diversity of sign. The monopoly of sign makes text available for reading becomes less. Ads also contain the ideology of revolting against the interests of bourgeoisie. The public create their popular culture by silence, changing their signs, guerrilla, blitzkrieg. Therefore, it opened the gap of mainstream and weakened the ruling class.