ABSTRACT

At the conference giving rise to this anthology, one of the papers occupied itself with analysing the promotional materials of a consultancy group called Semiotic Solutions. 1 The group had recently set itself up to facilitate communication between the advertising profession and academic specialists in contemporary cultural studies. The piquancy of the occasion was heightened by the fact that, unknown at first to the paper giver, the key players in SU (an Oxford history graduate and a new university PhD in media studies) were sitting in the audience. As they explained, they were at the conference touting for business. Of course, the application of a critical semiotic to their own advertising abashed them not one wit. It merely underlined — in a kind of impromptu live ad — one of their own promotional points. If there was a niche for their service this was because there was already a lively (if often unacknowledged) trade between structuralist and post-structuralist cultural theorising and the signifying practices of commercial popular culture. In the warm wash of amusing, seductive, persuasive and diverting messages by which we are surrounded, those who try to fashion and pass on conceptual tools for becoming more culturally alert will hardly demur. For we know that dissemination cannot be controlled and that, as witnessed by student career paths (and good luck to them), the protocols of hermeneutics and deconstruction, however nobly, politically or abstractly introduced, can readily be converted into a purely instrumental knowledge.