This essay examines twentieth century US advertising as a key historical intersection between capital and semiotics. At this intersection, the internal relations of the sign have been turned into a political economic site where the process of joining signifiers to signifieds is driven by the logic of the commodity form and the goal of profit. What happens when cultural forms, and even linguistic forms, are made to obey the logic of the commodity form? And what is the relationship between this political economy of 'meaning' and changes in the wider political economy of capitalist relations?¹ The conceptual framework of a political economy of commodity signs has a material and theoretical specificity that is otherwise absent when we speak of images and styles and looks and fashions (the phenomenal substance of a political economy of sign values). Though images and styles often appear free-floating, they are, as commodity signs, industrialized and subject to the forces and contradictions of commodity production, circulation, valorization, 'equivalence' exchange and consumption.

This essay pursues the thesis that when capital annexes culture as a semiotic universe and directs the meanings of images to obey the logic of the commodity form, it also introduces into culture the contradictions of the commodity form. Hence, while the capitalist ideal is to overcome barriers to capital circulation, this has bred a commodity culture driven by an increasingly rapid turnover of signifiers and signifieds. This also institutionalizes a cultural form based on recombinations of signifiers and signifieds (otherwise known as pastiche) and a predictable circuit of valuation and devaluation. Do these processes made necessary by the commodity reproduction of a political economy of sign values build up or break down cultural hegemony? By turning to culture to expand the range of exchange values, capital has exported its crisis tendencies into the cultural sphere. Today, the imperatives of flexible accumulation and reducing turnover time cultivate cultural contradictions that are frequently labeled as 'postmodern.' The incessant demands of commodity differentiation in the context of proliferating brands and product lines have made the rapid turnover of meaning in the form of decontextualized images as crucial as the turnover of material objects.

The competition to possess the preeminent sign value of the moment (whether in commodity markets or political candidate markets) may have cumulating long-term impacts on both political culture and political economy. The sphere of commodity culture is a unity of opposites characterized at the surface level by the continuous composition and decomposition of signifying images. But this surface instability is driven by the underlying structural and ideological hegemony of the commodity form. While commodity pastiche appears hegemonic in the short term by undermining the capacity for coherent public discourses, it may also be antagonistic to bourgeois ideologies. Insofar as it undermines the likelihood for shared discourse anchored in a shared lexicon of concepts, this cultural form may also be a factor in undermining moral traditions and the reproduction of communities as a counterbalance to the dissolving influences of commodification. In contributing to commodity hegemony, advertising has left a trail of discarded ideological systems or rather their skeletal remains after they have been picked clean of signifiers and signifieds. As a cultural form, commodity pastiche may eventually undermine the reproduction of a political economy of sign value because its arbitrariness erodes the motivation to participate in a culture of sign values. And, the sheer frequency of fleeting and disconnected signs viewers generates indifference, resistance and cynicism among viewers. In political culture, this cultivation of skepticism and cynicism undermines the possibilities of democratic public discourses. Its impact on political economy is less clear, as it simultaneously sustains and saps a crisis-ridden capitalist economy.²