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起着矛盾的作用 - 它是当代资本主义下的意义和价值产生的中心地点，同时我们经常表现出毫无意义的地方 - 通过我们的关键常识（我们所有人都认为广告是操纵性并在“虚假需求”上扮演的“虚假需求”），并通过不断的广告报道（Graeber 2018）。在我的项目中，我打算研究当代广告中没有意义的缺乏以及是否可以通过人类学手段观察和研究无意义。为此，我建议对跨国广告机构进行民族志研究，并在两个地区办事处（伦敦的主办公室和莫斯科的区域分支机构）进行了现场站点。跨两个野地的参与者观察将帮助我沉浸在每个站点的日常工作中，以了解特定的工作/交流实践如何有助于感知缺乏/存在意义。两家办公室的工作将使我能够了解如何在当代广告的主导形式以跨国广告机构的主导形式维持全球的特定看法。人类学以其对性别主义，种族主义和殖民主义的有效批评的有效批评而闻名。但是，在尝试对政治经济学的批评时，该学科遇到了一定的困难。虽然大多数人类学家都专注于含义以及如何在本地生产和传播含义，但意义的缺失和/或表面性质通常被突出显示为资本主义生产方式，以及马克思主义理论中的资本主义文化的核心，例如，在卢卡克斯（1972年）的“ e debord of”（1972）的概念中'Simulacra'。反过来，对资本主义的这种批判性概念化经常被人类学家批评为本质主义者（例如Ferguson 1990）。但是，如果我们认为在当代资本主义下无意义的普遍存在不是存在文化的缺陷，而是文化产生的东西，可以在经验上和民族志上观察到的东西怎么办？它是否可以承诺有可能对资本主义进行更重要的批判性人类学？一些人类学家试图解决这一争议（Graeber 2015，2018; Frederiksen 2018）。但是，他们的工作因未能为观察和描述无意义或毫无价值的方式提供手段而受到批评。但是，我建议我们可以通过质量的质量概念来在严格和经验上以人性化的方式来处理毫无意义的人，这些质量概念被用来研究人们如何为某些感知的品质分配价值，以及某些事物如何代表他们所代表的质量（Chu 1986，Chu 2010，Gal 2013，Harkness 2013，Shankar 2015，Shankar 2015）。在这项工作之后，我的项目不是问为什么在当代资本主义下某些现象本质上是毫无意义的，而是如何将毫无意义的Quale进行条例和文化生产。对于对跨国广告机构无意义的人类学研究，跨国广告机构是一个理想的网站。一方面，广告是当代社会中意义和价值产生的中心地点：广告公司塑造消费者如何想象自己，“正常”的生活方式以及一般资本主义下的生产和消费（Davila 2001，Mazzarella 2003，Shankar 2003，Shankar 2015）。另一方面，广告行业还以持续的无意义产生的形式出现，这两者都在关键的常识中表现出来（我们都认为广告是操纵性的，在“虚假的需求”等方面，以及广告商和营销商本身报告的工作经历（Graeber 2018）。