Page 221 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

17
Sexuality for sale*

Janice Winship

Despite its glorifying display of commodities, advertising represents a moment of
suspension in their production and circulation: production—the sweat and
exploitation of work—is over and hidden in its verbal and visual persuasion: the
consumption of someone else’s (or your own) objectified labour, to which you,
the as-yet-passive spectator, are invited, has not begun. Yet in monopoly
capitalism advertising has become integral to these circuits of production and
circulation: it sustains the movement of commodities, from their social
production to their individual but socially repeated consumption, which
eventually ensures the reproduction not only of the individual but of capital too.

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself,
but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual. Consumption
thus appears as a moment of production. 1

By concealing the production process, advertising similarly covers up class
distinctions between people, through a form of fetishism: ‘the definite social
relation between men…assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation
2
between things’. It replaces them with the distinctions achieved through the
consumption of particular goods. As Judith Williamson points out: † ‘Instead of
being identified by what they produce, people are made to identify themselves
3
with what they consume’. However, in order to cement identification with
consumption, ads move away from capital’s terrain proper; we individually
consume outside the production process:
in consumption, the product steps outside this social movement [of
production and distribution] and becomes a direct object and servant of
individual need, and satisfies it in being consumed. 4

In confirmation of consumption outside economics, ads rarely exhort us to buy
the commodities, but merely to use them, hence glossing over the capitalist
moment of exchange—the purchase with money. Further, they never simply sell
5
us the use values of commodities; they sell them as ‘exchange values’ for
qualities in our private relationships with people that are unattainable through the