When we talk about the representations of the Other in American advertising, to whom or to what are we really referring? Apart from a discussion of Hegel and Lacan and their theories of Self and Other, how is Otherness presented in advertising? Is it as people, places or things? Or is it a conglomerate of images that deviate from, step outside of, the boundaries and definitions of Self?
We have tended to focus on the Other as a person -- that is to say, we have primarily looked at advertisements that make use of black models as signifiers of difference. We have concluded that these models are either exoticized or whitewashed/normalized. However, while this is a primary representation of Otherness in advertising,we believe there are also many other aspects left to be discussed. "Ways of seeing," to borrow a term from Berger, limit us in more ways than we can acknowledge. When we only look at Otherness that belongs to subcultures of a dominant (white) culture, then we bypass a larger discussion. What about Otherness that is represented in terms of space and time -- i.e. the nostalgic past or better future? What about landscapes that signify the Other -- another, better, purer, somehow more real place? Maybe this goes hand in hand with representations of the Other race/ethnicity/culture. It seems to me, as Olalquiaga says, that everything -- entire cultures and ethnicities -- are susceptible to homogenization, appropriation, commodification. Social constructs like race become free floating signifiers -- and put into an equivalence value with other abstracted signifiers.
Bob Goldman writes, "The simulacrum of the Other/the Exotic exists out of space and time --- even though it claims to represent these. In this kind of world, wearing a sign of the Other/Nature/ethnicity becomes a way in which we both situate ourselves in the currency of sign value, as well as a way in which we might try to address some of the absences (holes/gaps) formed in a world where the Other is marginalized spatially, and in a Self where the Other tends to be repressed socially." Is the Other/exotic as represented in advertising always a simulacrum? The Other is consistently located and positioned in another time and space that is simultaneously negated because it is so often fabricated and falsified. Time and Space, like Otherness, become hyperreal and overcoded. We are constantly locating the authentic (which goes hand in hand with Otherness) in a certain time and space -- we cannot get away from this linearity. We are creating the Other and the authentic in our minds and imaginations, in hopes of discovering our Selves. It is not that postmodernism respects the past; in fact, the past is being robbed and scavenged for cultural moments that can be recontextualized in the eternal now. However, it seems that in our search for the authentic, the past (and future) come to signify a purity and connectedness that has "melted into air."
The Other is consistently being fashioned out of our own discomfort and dis-ease with our Selves. Whether this be represented as another person (i.e. a black model), another time (i.e. the perfect past) or another place (i.e. the peaceful, traditional, unspoiled island), we cannot ignore the point that things only come to mean in relation to what they are not. The Other is enchanting, compelling and different because it is not the Self. Postmodern theorists argue that in today's world, nothing is "real" anymore -- that what we have is a pastiche of recycled ideas and products that are inherently fake. This disenchantment with a fabricated world leads to a fabricated Other that signifies merely difference from the status quo. What follows are a series of images that show the various ways in which the Other is conceptualized in American advertising. Whether these ads are effective or truthful is somewhat beside the point; the dominant images of Otherness speak to a larger picture of American society and culture. They speak to the placement of Self in a world comprised of image and commodity relations . . .