Marketing meaninglessness: critical anthropology of transnational advertising agencies

广告在当代资本主义中扮演着一个自相矛盾的角色-它是当代资本主义下生产意义和价值的中心场所，同时也是一个经常表现出无意义的地方-通过我们的批判性常识（我们都认为广告是操纵性的，并利用“虚假需求”）和广告商本身的持续报道（Graeber 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，以及是否可以通过人类学的手段来观察和研究无意义。为此，我建议对跨国广告公司进行民族志研究，该公司在两个区域办事处设有实地考察点--总部设在伦敦，区域分支设在莫斯科。参与者在两个现场的观察将帮助我沉浸在每个现场的日常工作中，以了解具体的工作/沟通实践如何有助于感知意义的缺失/存在。这两个办公室的工作将使我了解特定的认知机制如何在当代广告的主导形式-跨国广告公司-中得到全球性的维持。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，这门学科在试图批判政治经济学时遇到了一定的困难。虽然大多数人类学家关注意义以及意义是如何在当地产生和传播的，但意义的缺失和/或肤浅本质往往被强调为马克思主义理论中资本主义生产方式的核心，特别是资本主义文化-例如，在卢卡奇（1972）的“物化”概念中，Debord（1970）的“斗争社会”，和鲍德里亚（1983）的“拟像”概念。这种对资本主义的批判性概念化反过来又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，可以通过经验和民族志观察到的东西呢？它能保证一个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）。但他们的工作被批评未能提供观察和描述无意义或无价值的手段。我建议，然而，我们可以通过皮尔士的感受质概念来严格地和经验地看待无意义的民族志，该概念被用来研究人们如何为某些感知的品质赋予价值，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，而是问无意义的质量是如何被控制和文化生产的。对于这样一个无意义的人类学研究，跨国广告公司是一个理想的网站。一方面，广告是当代社会意义和价值生产的中心场所：广告公司塑造消费者如何想象自己，“正常”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，广告业也以持续生产无意义的产品为标志，这表现在批判性的常识（我们都认为广告是操纵性的，利用“虚假需求”等）。以及广告商和营销人员自己报告的个人工作经历（Graeber 2018）。

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).