Marketing meaninglessness: critical anthropology of transnational advertising agencies

营销无意义：跨国广告公司的批判人类学

• 批准号: 2724869
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2724869
• 关键词: Marketing; meaninglessness; critical; anthropology; transnational

Advertising plays a paradoxical role in contemporary capitalism - it's a central site of production of meanings and value under contemporary capitalism and at the same time a place where meaninglessness is often manifested - by our critical commonsense (we all imagine advertising to be manipulative and play on 'false needs') and by continuous reports of advertisers themselves (Graeber 2018). In my project I intend to study how the absence of meaning is manifested in contemporary advertising and whether meaninglessness could be observed and studied through anthropological means. For this, I suggest an ethnographic study of transnational advertising agency with fieldsites in two regional offices - main office in London, and a regional branch in Moscow. Participant observation across two fieldsites will help me immerse myself in the everyday routine at each site in order to understand how the specific work/communication practices contribute to the perception of absence/presence of meaning. The work across the two offices will allow me to understand how specific regimes of perceptions can be globally sustained within dominating form of contemporary advertising - transnational advertising agencies.Anthropology is well known for its effective critique of the essentializing ideologies underlying issues of sexism, racism, and colonialism. However, the discipline encounters a certain difficulty when attempting a critique of the political economy. While most anthropologists focus on meanings and how meanings are locally produced and transmitted, the absence and/or superficial nature of meaning is often highlighted as central to the capitalist mode of production and specifically capitalist culture in Marxist theories - for example, in Lukacs's (1972) notion of 'reification', Debord's (1970) 'society of the spectacle', and Baudrillard's (1983) idea of 'simulacra'. Such a critical conceptualization of capitalism is, in turn, often criticized by anthropologists for being essentialist (e.g. Ferguson 1990). But what if we see meaninglessness ubiquitous under contemporary capitalism not as an absence or a defect of culture but as something that is culturally produced and can be empirically and ethnographically observed? Could it promise a possibility of a more substantial critical anthropology of capitalism?Some anthropologists attempted to tackle this controversy (Graeber 2015, 2018; Frederiksen 2018). But their work has been criticized for failing to provide means for observation and description of meaninglessness or valueless-ness. I suggest, however, that we can approach meaninglessness ethnographically rigorously and empirically by seeing it through a Peircean notion of qualia that has been used to study how people assign value to certain perceived qualities and how certain things come to stand for the qualities they represent (Munn 1986, Chu 2010, Gal 2013, Harkness 2013, Shankar 2015). Following this body of work, my project asks not why certain phenomena are essentially meaningless under contemporary capitalism, but how the quale of meaninglessness is regimented and culturally produced.For such an anthropological study of meaninglessness the transnational advertising agency is an ideal site. On the one hand, advertising is a central site of the production of meaning and value in contemporary societies: advertising companies shape how consumers imagine themselves, the 'normal' lifestyle, and production and consumption under capitalism in general (Davila 2001, Mazzarella 2003, Shankar 2015). On the other hand, the advertising industry is also marked by a persistent production of meaninglessness that is manifested both in a critical commonsense (we all imagine advertising to be manipulative, play on 'false needs', etc.) and in the personal experiences of their jobs reported by the advertisers and marketers themselves (Graeber 2018).

广告在当代资本主义中扮演着一个矛盾的角色——它是当代资本主义下意义和价值生产的中心场所，同时也是一个经常表现无意义的地方——通过我们的批判性常识（我们都认为广告是操纵性的，并在“虚假需求”上发挥作用）和广告商自己的持续报道（格雷伯2018）。在我的项目中，我打算研究意义的缺失是如何在当代广告中表现出来的，以及无意义是否可以通过人类学的手段来观察和研究。为此，我建议对跨国广告公司进行人种学研究，并在两个地区办事处进行实地考察——伦敦的主要办事处和莫斯科的地区分公司。通过对两个现场的参与性观察，我可以将自己沉浸在每个现场的日常生活中，从而了解具体的工作/交流实践是如何对意义缺失/存在的感知做出贡献的。这两个办公室的工作将使我能够理解，在当代广告的主导形式——跨国广告公司——中，特定的观念制度是如何在全球范围内持续下去的。人类学以其对性别歧视、种族主义和殖民主义等问题的本质化意识形态的有效批判而闻名。然而，这门学科在试图对政治经济学进行批判时遇到了一定的困难。虽然大多数人类学家关注的是意义以及意义是如何在当地产生和传播的，但在马克思主义理论中，意义的缺失和/或表面性质经常被强调为资本主义生产方式，特别是资本主义文化的核心——例如，卢卡奇（1972）的“物化”概念，德博德（1970）的“景观社会”，以及鲍德里亚（1983）的“拟像”思想。反过来，这种对资本主义的批判性概念化经常被人类学家批评为本质主义（例如Ferguson 1990）。但是，如果我们认为在当代资本主义下无处不在的无意义不是文化的缺失或缺陷，而是文化产生的东西，可以通过经验和民族志观察到，那又会怎样呢？它能提供一种更实质性的资本主义批判人类学的可能性吗？一些人类学家试图解决这一争议（Graeber 2015, 2018; Frederiksen 2018）。但他们的工作因未能提供观察和描述无意义或无价值的方法而受到批评。然而，我建议，我们可以通过Peircean的质性概念，从严格和经验的角度来看待无意义，这一概念已被用于研究人们如何为某些感知品质赋予价值，以及某些事物如何代表它们所代表的品质（Munn 1986, Chu 2010, Gal 2013, Harkness 2013, Shankar 2015）。在这一系列的工作之后，我的项目并不是要问为什么某些现象在当代资本主义下本质上是无意义的，而是要问无意义的等量是如何被规范和文化产生的。对于这种对无意义的人类学研究，跨国广告公司是一个理想的场所。一方面，广告是当代社会意义和价值产生的中心场所：广告公司塑造了消费者如何想象自己、“正常”的生活方式，以及资本主义下的生产和消费（Davila 2001, Mazzarella 2003, Shankar 2015）。另一方面，广告业也以持续产生无意义为特征，这既表现在关键的常识中（我们都认为广告是操纵性的，玩弄“虚假需求”等），也表现在广告商和营销人员自己报告的个人工作经历中（格雷伯2018）。