In the production of commodity signs, the origin of surplus value lies in the structure of the communicative exchange set up by ads (Goldman, 1987). Viewers who habitually perform this exchange seldom dwell on its being an unequal exchange. Advertisements typically try to position viewers as potential subjects of the discourse, as well as the executors of the discursive exchange. Williamson (1978) has detailed the mechanics of how ads appellate viewers - hailing viewers and inviting them to step into the mirror of the ad. Viewers who do not participate in this mode of address - who do not step into the appellation box - are less likely execute the interpretive labor necessary to assembling sign values, and hence, the possibility of surplus values diminishes.

Bateson (1972) understood that every communicative exchange consists of both a report and a command. When ads position viewing subjects, a power relation is present. At the same time, an ideology of freedom of choice is embedded in the "very sub-structure" of consumer ads. It is therefore imperative to make the command portion of ad messages appear congruent with the notion of free choice, even though the very act of positioning a viewing subject involves the exercise of power. In years past, ads worked best when they worked as if they were transparent bearers of messages - power relations were invisible. This continuous positioning of viewers has eventually taken its toll, and viewers have grown vexed about being positioned. Mistrustful viewers may contest the efforts to position them vis-à-vis the advertising discourse by adopting cynical stances or even withholding the good faith interpretive labor necessary to give value to signs.

Advertisers have responded to this shift in the winds by resorting to methods of structuring ads that strategically employ what Bateson referred to as "falsified meta-communication." This means that advertisers have adopted a form of address that acknowledges the relationship between advertiser and viewer, but just as important, acknowledges the relationship between the viewer and the code. By taking a self-reflexive stance about the power dimension of positioning, these ads now misdirect viewers to a kinder, gentler, more honest political economy of sign values. Towards this end, some ads now acknowledge the command portion of the ad in order to misdirect viewers about the commodity agenda of the ad. Reflexively positioning the subject is an attempt to borrow legitimacy from the subject's everyday life. Self-reflexive modes of address also admit that ads normally operate on the basis of false assumptions. This allows an advertiser to apparently take the side of the viewer: advertisers thus seek to regain viewers' confidence and interpretive cooperation by exposing the false assumptions of other folks' ads, and claiming that they (as opposed to competitors) do not appellate viewers with distorted communications models. Viewers are thus, ostensibly, armed.

These developments mark a crisis in the system of producing sign value - we witness this when particular ads discredit the ideology of advertising to validate their own particular sign. However, it should be added that advertising contributes to a still deeper crisis of meaning in our society. Collapsing opposing signifiers onto each other disrupts the relationship between the signifier and signified in the sense that it disintegrates the signifier/signified category. Advertising has instrumentally reduced both the signifier and signified to semes: these smallest units of meaning become meaningful only in the sense that they are understood to mean at all. What happens when the signifier and signified become indistinguishable in the whirling vortex of advertising? The integrity of the signifier/signified relationship is defeated when the difference between them is undermined. The contextualizing factors responsible for determining what signifies what and who is signified by what, i.e., the chain of signification as a whole, are cut off. Meaning becomes a floating point, a search for narrative where advertisers confuse the identity of signifier and signified. Uniquely privatized meanings must surely abound under such circumstances.

The repository of relevant cultural meaning necessary to interpret ads is drawn more and more from the world of previous media images. Even this intertextuality is, however, undermined by both the shallow appropriation of stylized surfaces and the constantly shifting change of contexts that places them in opposition to other equally abstract signs. Thus the chain of signification tends inward rather than out. In such contexts, signs are transmuted in their social meanings in the instant they are fused with their opposites. Shaped by the internal structure of the ad, decontextualized signs become the internal world of an almost solipsistic ad space, and whatever meaning they may previously have had is shed like a skin.

The streamlined structure of advertisements has abolished the ability to tell which end is signifier and which end is signified. Ads as a whole, and every sign in them, have become meaningful only in that they mean at all (that they are intended to be interpreted). This is the consequence of structurally reducing any, and every, meaning system to the status of a signifier, forced to serve as a means to the goal of commodity realization. We have argued that the very logic of producing commodity signs demands that all meaning systems be reduced to the status of mere signifier. The velocity of this process increases as the sign-value market matures and it becomes more and more difficult to sustain a differentiated sign-position. There is a constant tendency for the exchange value of a sign to depreciate because of the dialectic of saturation and redifferentiation (see Goldman and Papson, 1992). In its drive to reproduce a system of sign values, advertising has contributed to a corruption of the signifier-signified circuit. Ironically, in this regard, advertising undermines the system of commodity signs in the long run, because it erodes the bread and butter of the commodity-sign business - the desire to pin down and possess the mighty signified. What happens when the signified gets replaced by the mere fact of signification?

Aggravating these mutations of the signifier-signified relationship is the relentless hyperreal encoding prompted by the collapse of sustainable distinctions between the 'real' and the 'simulated' in the world of representations. Baudrillard's notion of the 'hyperreal' points to an everyday life world where technologically mediated simulations of reality have made indistinct what is representation and what is referent. In an image-world dominated by self-referential signs, we must further emphasize 'hyperreal' encoding as a style of representation that acknowledges both the history of media simulation as well as the distinction between a world-out-there versus media representations. This encoding style permits the voice of a brand-name commodity to relegitimate itself as more authentic - i.e., as the new improved version, 'more real than real.' Positioning their ads as realist texts in relation to previous 'unreal' media texts, advertisers ironically displace everyday life as a reference point. The question of 'realness' now lies in the encoding strategies rather than what is being referred to. The media have become unremittingly self-referential.

What then, is the relationship between the crisis of meaning in the ad, and the crisis in the economy of the sign as a whole? The trend toward turning the relationships that make signs meaningful into signs themselves may have something to do with this crisis of meaning. There is a certain paradox to having the structure of meaning as the particular meaning of a sign. When ad campaigns bring the structure of meaning to the surface in order to stylistically differentiate themselves from other ads, this 'structure of meaning' becomes both signifier and signified of the ad. As viewers sift through the debris of signifiers cut off from both their cultural referent systems and the security of narrative structures, the only overarching signified to be found in such ads is calculated 'ambiguity.' With no difference between signifier and signified, differential meaning is forfeited and the sign is reduced to its own instrumentality so that it only means that it means. This seems to be an inclination in postmodernism as a whole too, where the claim to discarding unitary desires and concepts is in fact an attempt to elevate the sign and structure of difference into the grand unified cultural meaning; the transcendental signified becomes nothing more than the fleeting moment of signification. By stressing difference, the postmodern does not insure difference, but moves to abolish it. The sign of difference replaces difference. The fact of 'interpretive freedom' replaces any interpretive community.

Though bringing the structure of meaning to the surface could potentially promote an interpretive community based on reflexivity, the greater probability is a fractured and privatized fascination with the isolated and fleeting moment of signification. When every moment of signification is encapsulated in a sea of roughly equivalent video texts, the substance of any single signified tends to be eclipsed by its temporal video successors - its significance is lost in a stream of video matter. When this is compounded by the heavily privatized social relations of reception, we must wonder what kind of discursive rationality can grow in such a climate?

This essay has examined contemporary advertising by conceptualizing advertising as a political economy of sign value subject to its own self-contradictory tendencies. Still, there remains a difficulty of how we conceptualize the economy of the sign? David Ogilvy's famous commandment about the principle of sign value - that "every advertisement is an investment in the image of the brand" - speaks only to one side of the coin. A sign's exchange value can be diminished in the same ways that any other commodity's value is subject to devaluation. The advertising industry endeavors to transform meaningful images into commodity form, which makes the various signifiers like currency (capital). But the more currency that is imaged to represent the same amount of a commodity (whether it be gold or individuality), the less the currency is worth. But this devaluation of the sign hardly exhausts the crisis of sign value. The crisis of sign value is also a crisis of meaning spurred along by advertisers' constant rearrangement - coupling and uncoupling - of the signifier and the signified. To counter the tendencies toward devaluation and saturation, advertisers increase the temporal velocity at which the process of decomposing and recomposing signifier and signified takes place. We have referred to this as the declining half-life of sign value. This speedup in the circulation of signs and meanings further alienates the viewers whose interpretive labor is necessary to keep the sign circulation process humming along. This is the world of hypersignification where fetishized signs eclipse their commodity referents precisely as they become ever more arbitrary.