DECLINE OF REFERENTIALS
Advertisers have evolved a visual language system based on the principle of isolating and decontextualizing and then recombining images as signifiers and signifieds. This language system is in a continuous state of flux, driven by market interests and calculations.
Professional image-makers borrow from the well of past meanings to make and remake signifying images, producing "semiological chains" in which decontextualized meanings drawn are converted into "second-order signifiers" and so one and so on. The result is a "staggered system of connotation" in which a derived and processed language of images, though at least a step removed from the language of daily life, nonetheless addresses viewers as a language "in which" to speak about daily life (Barthes, 1972:114-5).
As the fundamental unit of this "second-order" language, the photographic image necessarily removes what is depicted from its context. The photograph is a frozen moment that "isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant." The inherent discontinuity of photographs
always produces ambiguity. Yet often this ambiguity is not obvious, for as soon as photographs are used with words, they produce together an effect of certainty...In the relation between a photograph and words, the photograph begs for an interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words. And the words, which by themselves remain at the level of generalization, are given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photograph (Berger and Mohr, 1982:91-2).
The meaning of an image is thus modified according to what meaning system is made contiguous to it. Advertisers have adopted the mortise and frame format to steer this process because using mortise, frames and captions (words) with photographs is an efficient method of motivating interpretation of photographic images. The mortise mediates a relationship of mutual definition between words and photographic images, supplying the possibility of interpretive closure where it might not otherwise exist.
Early in the 20th century, "national advertisements constituted a new and bewildering code, a set of verbal and visual signs for which the referents were unclear" (Lears, 1983:21). As frequency of exposure mushroomed, the underlying advertising codes become familiar, taken-for-granted and unproblematic. Since the 1920s, advertisers have, decade by decade, streamlined their coding practices. Since the bulk of the population soon recognized basic advertising codes and markers, ads became briefer and the codes more abbreviated and contracted. Meanwhile, advertisers' practice of detaching visual and verbal signifiers from lived, organic contexts blurs the relationship between the material referent systems of daily life and this "second order" language constructed through the mass media. Splitting the unity of signifier and signified, advertising has built up a coding system, the form and content of which has grown progressively self-referential. Lefebvre (1971:112) describes this process of substituting a self-referential language of reproduced images for the material referents of daily life as "the decline of referentials."
Advertisements supply a context within which to restore the continuity of an image's meaning. But this restoration of meaning also changes meanings, since the image represents an abstracted moment from history, subculture, biography or nature, has now almost always been placed into a relationship with a world of commodities.
