Advertising doubles language into a mockery that linguistics cannot analyze
Evidence
That is why, now, it is useless to analyze advertising as language, because something else is happening there: a doubling of language (and also of images), to which neither linguistics nor semiology correspond, because they function on the veritable operation of meaning, without the slightest suspicion of this caricatural exorbitance of all the functions of language, this opening onto an immense field of the mockery of signs, “consumed” as one says in their mockery, for their mockery and the collective spectacle of their game without stakes - just as porno is a hypertrophied fiction of sex consumed in its mockery, for its mockery, a collective spectacle of the inanity of sex in its baroque assumption (it was the baroque that invented this triumphal mockery of stucco, fixing the disappearance of the religious in the orgasm of statues). — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 310
Categorization
- DEFINE: Distinguishes the self-referential mockery of signs in advertising from meaning-making semiology - a key step against standard semiotic analysis.
- XREF: This rejection of linguistics/semiology for the doubling of signs is where Baudrillard splits from Barthesian semiology and anticipates Jameson’s postmodern pastiche. — connects to: Culture that is fully commodified becomes unusable and merges with advertising — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120; Repeated slogans sever language from lived experience, linking advertising with totalitarian control. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121; Propaganda reduces both language and its audience to instrumental tools — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 261 (+1 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The collapse of language into a self-consuming spectacle of signs, staged like pornography without faith, is a dense pivot connecting Baudrillard’s theory of simulation to his theory of the gaze.