Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials

摘要

"And then…" Marilyn Monroe hawked a red car, while a cranky sarariman debated Bill Clinton, to the tune of "All You Need is Love": Introduction What do Marilyn Monroe, Buster Keaton, Salvador Dali, Bill Clinton and The Beatles have in common? That's simple… the same thing as Mikael Gorbachev, Sadaharu Oh, Charlie Chaplin, the Mona Lisa and Peter Rabbit. Confused? Well, then it probably won't help to learn that Lady Di, Elvis Presley, the Berlin Wall, Natsume Soseki and The Addams Family are all in the mix, as well. Still stumped? Don't forget Ernest Hemingway and Scottie Pippin. Brain frappéd? Albert Einstein. Bewitched— …Uh, that's a 1970s American sitcom not your present state of mind. All sharing time with mermaids, cowboys, Clark Kent, Batman and those mythical river imps called "kappa". The list is virtually endless. But the answer to the riddle is quite simple: they all made appearances in Japanese television commercials in 1999. 1 Of course, these actors, actresses, writers, politicians, athletes, television and cartoon characters, paintings, and world events, weren't all conjured to stand by themselves. Most often they were juxtaposed with Japanese actors, inserted into Japanese settings, or brought into contact with products for sale. In a large number of cases they were not only intermingled, but mutated. Most importantly, though, the appropriation, alteration and blending generally had less to do with commercial than cultural communication. For, in Japan, where advertising as a genre is increasingly characterized by diminishing attention to product,2 ads now tend to adopt the role of cultural historian as much as that of commodity hawker; they more frequently now serve as social commentator rather than simply popular entertainer. And the insertion of such exo-cultural elements into ad text assists the performance of these new-age functions. Indeed, the endless stream of Greek myths, Hollywood movies, historical events, popular songs, scientists, athletes and novelists now embedded in audio-visual space constitutes a phenomenon. Such content is part and parcel of an on-going process of cultural enfolding in which elements from beyond the spatial, temporal and/or ideational bounds of contemporary Japan are loaded into 15 second commercial communication for immediate, local consumption. It is my contention that this mode of discourse amounts to a strategy for interpreting contemporary experience. Importantly, it is neither a passive nor benign form. As this paper seeks to show, such cultural enfolding has important consequences and far-reaching implications for Japanese society. The intentional intermingling of previously unrelated symbolic content from alien spatio-temporal contexts is a communication act I call "resignification". Resignification Explained As its name implies, resignification is a semiotic process—meaning that it involves the creation of meaning from signs. However, resignification is a particular kind of semiosis: one where new sign elements (signifiers, signifieds, signs, significations) are lifted from their original contexts and inserted into other semiotic sequences, though not always (indeed seldom) in the position they occupied in their prior incarnation. Two aspects are most salient about resignification: first, strung together in unrelenting sequence, such recycling amounts to a phenomenon of sociological import. Most especially, because, procedurally, resignification both reflects and assists cultural mutation. Restated, the repeated insertion into ad text of exo-spatial, exo-temporal cultural images and ideas is so pervasive in Japan today that it must qualify as a major mode of communication—a way in which one of the major institutions in contemporary Japanese society (advertising) chooses to interpret and process human experience. Further, because two kinds of cases can be found—those in which resignification seeks to reflect prevailing social reality, and those in which it appears to red