Page 188 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Keeping the Portals Open: Poster vs. Innis 177

In TV ads, where the new mode of signification is most clearly seen, floating
signifiers are attached to commodities. . . . Each TV ad replicates in its structure
the ultimate facility of language: language is remade, new connections are es-
tablished in the TV ad through which new meanings emerge. . . . Floating sig-
nifiers, which have no relation to the product, are set in play; images and words
that convey desirable or undesirable states of being are portrayed in a manner
that optimizes the viewer’s attention without arousing critical awareness. 14
“Floating signifiers” attaching to products corresponds well to what
Lawrence Grossberg referred to as articulation (see chapter 3). Regarding an
ad for floor wax, Poster writes:

The [television] ad takes a signifier, a word that has no traditional relation with
the object being promoted, and attaches it to that object. . . . Johnson’s floor wax
now equals romantic rescue. The commodity has been given a semiotic value
that is distinct from, indeed out of phase with, its use value and its exchange
value. . . . The ad shapes a new language, a new set of meanings (floor wax/
romance) which everyone speaks or better which speaks everyone. Baudrillard
calls the collective language of commodity ads “the code.” . . . The code may be
understood as a language or sign system unique to the mode of information, to
electronically mediated communication systems. 15

We shall return later to Poster’s analysis of the particular floor wax com-
mercial. First, though, consider Poster’s general claim that “representation
comes to grief when words lose their connection with things and come to
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stand in the place of things, in short, when language represents itself.” This
purported loss of referentiality in language is magnified by electronics, Poster
continues, bringing about new patterns of human relations, creating new
processes of establishing self-identities, and altering our very conception of
truth, the authentic, and the real. Let us look more closely at these three pur-
ported consequences of linguistic change resulting from the predominance of
electronic media.
Regarding patterns of human relations, Poster proposes that electronics
change the time and space relations among communicators. He writes: “The
exchange of symbols between human beings is now far less subject to con-
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straints of space and time.” He explains that electronics give rise to “vast,
massive, and profound upheavals” because the social world has “become
constituted in part by . . . a simultaneity of event and record of the event, by
an instantaneity of act and observation, by an immediacy and copresence of
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electronically mediated meanings to a large extent self-referentially.” While
acknowledging that writing and print in previous eras distanced message
senders and receivers, Poster claims that electronics magnifies that effect
to such a degree as to bring about qualitative changes in the nature of human