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Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

Article  in  Fashion Theory The Journal of Dress Body & Culture · February 2002

DOI: 10.2752/136270402778869118

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83Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

Fashion Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, pp. 83–110 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only. © 2002 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.

Paul Antick

Paul Antick is a photographer and lecturer in Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University, UK.

Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each value is sanctioned . . .

Michel Foucault in Rabinow 1984: 73.

Introduction

While the field of visual culture studies may occasionally consider advert- ising photography a useful historical indicator of a particular culture’s

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“structure of feeling,” (Williams 1965: 64) the position of relative infer- iority it is held to occupy within the field of culture generally tends to preclude its inviting the same methods of critical enquiry that are often afforded to a wide variety of other media cultures. More specifically, in the relatively compact field of photography theory, advertising photo- graphy is generally considered to be beyond the bounds of any form of inquiry that seeks to understand (and produce) the photograph as a complex, multi-faceted and unpredictable object.

In other words, the establishing of advertising’s identity within visual culture studies generally, and photography theory in particular, as the quintessential purveyor of dominant ideology in capitalist culture (part- icularly in relation to constructions of gender); its propensity to structure a “false” set of needs and desires; and its concomitant facilitation of a sense of “misrecognition” on the part of the viewing subject, have, arguably, constituted the theoretical boundaries within which most acad- emic debates about advertising and photography have been allowed to take place.1 In this way it could be argued that, instead of expanding and challenging the ways in which advertising photography is considered, reflected upon and analyzed in contemporary visual culture, photographic theory has actually succeeded in limiting the consideration of forms of encounter between advertising photography, consumers and cultural producers. By privileging one set of ideas about advertising photography above all others, photographic theory may have foreclosed the possibility of considering the ways in which advertisements do not simply establish and reproduce dominant cultural agendas but intersect with a multiplicity of other competing agendas and discourses articulated in, and in relation to, advertising itself.2

In the introduction to a recent collection of essays from the highly influential British photography magazine, Camerawork, Jessica Evans (1997) highlights the “need” for audience-based research in the field, and in so doing identifies one of the ways in which different possibilities for the analysis of photography might be explored within the field.

It is to be hoped that the work developed in media studies by David Morley, Janice Radway and others on the ethnography of audiences, and that of Bourdieu on the habitus of audiences will be taken up in future work on photography, for we urgently need to incorporate a sense of the capacity for human agency into our analyses of photography and its uses (1997: 32).

What I would like to consider here is how this kind of work might happen in relation to that sphere of photographic production which is, arguably, negotiated by more people on a daily basis than any other but, at the same time, most denigrated within the field: advertising photography. The problem of how people make use of, and produce meanings in relation to, advertising photography is one that can be approached in several ways.

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The approach I wish to focus on here, however, involves an examination of the relationship between advertising and its “significant others”— specifically, how making explicit the connections between advertising and its “others” can alert us to the ways in which the denigration of advertising might actually represent one of the ways in which, to para- phrase Stallybrass and White (1986), the high defines the low precisely in order to define itself as high, and, as such, the extent to which certain methodological orthodoxies—far from providing us with a set of impart- ial analytical tools—all too often collude in the reproduction of a set of socially anachronistic cultural taxonomies.

Suffice it to say that the theoretical perspectives alluded to above, indicative of most post-1970s photography theory, have largely emanated from academia. In the broader cultural context, however, there also exist a set of anxieties about advertising: anxieties that specifically informed the Benetton debate. These anxieties appear to be less bound up with the ideological nature of advertising photography, and more concerned with the ways in which certain advertising strategies, Benetton’s in particular, might undermine a set of historically established discursive procedures that define, regulate and differentiate fields of culture—specifically, the ways in which different forms of knowledge are conventionally classified as either authentic or inauthentic; the cultural value ascribed different systems of representation; and the division of ethical labor among various institutions of culture.

In examining these concerns, I want to focus on Benetton’s trans- gressions of certain visual or representational boundaries and consider the extent to which such transgressions may have both signaled and stimulated a profound re-alignment and re-evaluation of the role and status of informational culture (photography) in contemporary capitalist societies. In doing so I shall argue that the nature of the criticisms leveled against Benetton during the 1980s and early 1990s was indicative not only of the kinds of tensions that exist between different cultural instit- utions—advertising and the press, for instance—who suddenly find themselves in competition over the same cultural territory, but also of the tensions and contradictions that exist within specific institutions. Namely, advertising, the press and, to a lesser extent, academia.

In contemporary cultural theory it has become commonplace to suggest that the boundaries between different representational genres and cultural institutions, are becoming increasingly blurred.3 Indeed, one could hold up Benetton’s 1992 Shock of Reality campaign as an excellent example of this.4 What is not conventionally acknowledged, however, is the extent to which the blurring of aesthetic boundaries can destabilize cultural institutions. An example of this is the kind of identity crisis sparked in the British press in relation to the Shock of Reality campaign. One symptom of this crisis might be the repeated implication in the press5 that knowledge—articulated through documentary photography—considered instrumental in one context can be socially useful when deployed in another.

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In order to unravel and evaluate the cultural and discursive implications of the criticisms leveled against Shock of Reality during the early 1990s, I intend to examine the ways in which Benetton’s advertising campaigns, from United Colors of Benetton (1983) to Shock of Reality (1992), were themselves represented in a variety of journalistic and academic contexts. In doing so, I will concentrate on the ways in which certain statements were permitted to be made about Benetton at the expense of certain others; the extent to which these statements articulated a set of anxieties relating to the increasing difficulty that contemporary print media arguably have in reproducing certain key journalistic ideologies; and, finally, the ways in which the establishment of a particular set of “truths” about Benetton tended to preclude any critical consideration of the ways in which Benetton’s adverts might actually have “worked” in specific historical and spatial contexts.

This article is not intended to act as a simplistic defence of advertising or advertising photography as such. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the ways in which the denigration and classification of advertising photography as a fundamentally “inauthentic” type of “speech act” can often serve to obfuscate the particularities of its communicative potential, specifically in relation to the ways in which particular adverts might use photography both to reinforce and subvert dominant ideologies in specific interpretative contexts.

Benetton, 1983–1991

According to Oliviero Toscani, Benetton’s art director, photographer and, according to one Arena journalist, all-round “creative genius”:6 “Until 1983 . . . the nature of Benetton’s advertising was clearly product oriented, showing the product and nothing else.”7 Toscani went on to suggest that Benetton’s post-1983 campaigns represented a shift away from the “superficial” and “stupid” preoccupations of conventional advertising to what he called “issues of global concern.”8

Toscani’s reinvention of Benetton through these campaigns was signifi- cant for two reasons. First, in terms of the changes to the actual content of Benetton’s adverts, and, secondly, because in being seen to refer to “social issues,” Toscani—knowingly or not—was bidding to incorporate a set of values or knowledges, commonly associated with other more “legitimate” cultural institutions, into the lexicon of advertising. It could be said that the primary reason for this was to enhance Benetton’s own cultural status in relation to, for example, the institutions of art and journalism.9

Thus, Toscani’s first campaign, All the Colors of The World,10 was intended to provide people with “food for thought with its images of happy . . . racially different children all laughing and smiling together” (Benetton Group 1993: 9). His subsequent campaign, United World of

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Benetton (“a call for peace in the world” (Benetton Group 1993: 9) was followed by United Colors of Benetton, where, according to Toscani, “. . . [in] choosing models with accentuated ethnic features and names written in their own languages, the campaign strives for and achieves an image which is even more multi-racial and international” (1993: 9; Figure 1). This theme, in which racial, ethnic and cultural distinctions are both blurred by and redefined by Benetton—representing what Les Back and Vibeke Quaade, writing in Third Text, refer to as a “fantasy of multi-racial and inter-communal harmony” (1993: 65)—continued in the two subsequent campaigns: United Fashions of Benetton (1987) and United Superstars (1988).

However, although the thematic encoding of United Colors may have signaled a break with mass advertising’s conventional thematic preoccup- ations, on a formal level United Colors still retained certain key generic features that not only enabled it to be firmly situated within the advertising genre—something facilitated by its use of young, conventionally good- looking models; high key lighting codes; the ubiquitous white studio backdrop; large-format camera technologies; and fine-grain film stock— but also prevented its being confused with representational forms char- acteristic of other, more legitimate, cultural institutions—journalism, for example—thus limiting the extent to which their epistemological and cultural legitimacy would have been threatened by the, admittedly limited, extent of Benetton’s thematic transgressions during the 1980s.

However, despite the fact that between 1989 and 1991 Benetton’s advertisements continued to “explore the subject of equality between blacks and whites” (Back and Quaade 1993: 11)—their rhetorical potency generated by what Back and Quaade refer to as “the stark presentation of racial oppositions” (1993: 68)—they also represented a far more radical

Figure 1 United Colors of Benetton. © Oliviero Toscani

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disruption of conventional advertising codes and techniques than had been achieved during the mid-1980s, something that was compounded by the absence of any iconographical reference to Benetton’s “actual product.”

In Manacles and Fetters (Figure 2),11 for example, the conventionally “good-looking” models of previous campaigns have been replaced by a pair of anonymous lower torsos (one black, one white), clad in regulation- issue blue American prison uniforms, and joined together at the wrists by a pair of handcuffs. Arguably, it is the absence of certain key generic indicators—the fabulous face and body of the stereotypical fashion model—in this advertising image, as well as the way in which the photo- graph formally articulates concerns more often associated with “socially concerned” forms of photography (documentary, for example), that marked a defining moment in Benetton’s gradual symbolic shift from advertiser to “social commentator”—a shift that was rendered conven- iently confusing by their use of signifiers redolent of more “staged” (which is to say, “inauthentic”) forms of photography, as well as a mode of repres- entation that explicitly referred to certain postmodernist sub-genres of art photography. Perhaps the most obvious references to postmodernist art photography are to Andreas Serrano’s stylized studio shots of “down and outs,”12 which implicitly reference the documentary genre, but, in doing so, redefine, expand and apparently deconstruct it through an intertextually oblique selection and combination of generically disparate signifiers. Specifically, the viewer is potentially disarmed by Serrano’s conflation of two mutually exclusive systems of representation, where dissolute figures from the American “underclass” are “lovingly” photo- graphed against a plush, but muted, gray studio backdrop.

Figure 2 Manacles and Fetters. © Oliviero Toscani

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In the light of these formal and thematic shifts it was (perhaps pre- dictably) significant that Benetton’s tactics failed to present much of a threat to the ideological legitimacy of the art world, perhaps because Benetton’s use of irony—commercially “interested” knitwear company playfully masquerading as socially concerned commentator—was some- thing that could only ever enhance its position in relation to, and eventually even in, the postmodern art market—something that perhaps accounted for the success of Benetton’s Genitalia at the 1993 Venice Biennale.13

However, despite the postmodern art world’s unabashed enthusiasm for Benetton’s advertising techniques, David A. Bailey (1989: 68) argued that “Benetton’s campaign strateg[ies] foster the process . . . of ‘object- ification,’ in which cultural difference is commodified.” For Bailey Benetton’s postmodern playfulness, its transgression of representational boundaries, was reprehensible because, as Bailey remarked, “Benetton has commodified cultural difference as a marketing ploy.” In other words “. . . the exploitation of particular stereotypical images of nations around the world serves the interest of Benetton as a seductive marketing device to sell and distribute their clothes worldwide” (1989: 64–5). Admittedly, it would be difficult to disagree with the oxymoronic point that Benetton’s advertising strategies remained inextricably linked to a set of explicitly commercial business interests. But the idea that this in itself might be enough to invalidate, or worse, render unmentionable, those messages encoded in Benetton’s advertisements is one that is worth taking up.

Bailey’s suggestion that the reproduction of knowledge in a commercial context necessarily renders such knowledge “inauthentic” implicitly draws on the idea that there exist areas, or institutions, of knowledge that are “untainted” by the pollution of commerce. While I am not suggesting that knowledge is always a commodity, it is perhaps worth wondering why Bailey isolates the Benetton images for censure while failing to level the same criticism at the art world,14 the print media or academia.

When, for instance, an “eye-catching” photograph of the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers appears on the front page of The Guardian,15 one might argue that, as much as this image is part of a carefully orchestrated “consciousness-raising” strategy on the part of The Guardian, it is also involved in the everyday business of selling newspapers and, more to the point, satisfying the demands of those who choose to advertise on its pages. As Donna Schwartz points out (Brennen and Hardt 1999: 171), a newspaper’s front page “can be conceived as an advertisement that sells the advertising inside the newspaper,” and one of the ways in which this is achieved is precisely through the visual “pull” exerted by the drama played out in the documentary photograph.

Thus, given that even the most apparently disinterested forms of know- ledge—“quality” photojournalism, for example—are arguably always caught up with—and to some extent defined by—the vicissitudes of what Andrew Wernick calls “promotional culture,”16 Bailey’s objection to the

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objectification and commodification of race in Benetton’s advertising campaigns begins to look problematic.

The Shock of Reality, 1992

It was as if the reality of suffering only had dignity and moral value in the editorial section of a newspaper and lost all its ability to denounce, and sensitise people when in contagious contact with advertising.

(Benetton Group 1993: 25).

In Shock of Reality, arguably Benetton’s most contentious campaign to date, Benetton appropriated a variety of documentary photographs: Family in Ohio, Boat People, Car Bomb, Flood, Murder, Refugees and Soldier (Figures 3–6). These images were, according to Toscani, chosen because they apparently “express powerful human themes of global concern” (Benetton Group 1993: 12); the most notorious of which was Family in Ohio, an image that apparently depicted a man actually dying of Aids. Complaints about Family in Ohio (an image that only ever appeared in The Face (Jan. 1992)—that is, in the way it was originally intended to appear) were subsequently upheld by the British Advertising Standards Authority, who “deplored the advertiser’s apparent willingness to provoke distress with their advertising approach” (The Sunday Times 26.1.1992). The “Aids ad” was subsequently condemned by adver- tising authorities in Italy, Holland, Spain, France and Belgium, as were four other images from the campaign.17 “Nothing,” Benetton modestly

Figure 3 Family in Ohio. © Oliviero Toscani

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Figure 4 Refugees. © Oliviero Toscani

Figure 5 Boat People. © Oliviero Toscani

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Figure 6 Soldier. © Oliviero Toscani

suggested, “. . . has shaken world opinion in relation to advertising as much as this campaign” (1993: 22).

Putting the issue of “world opinion” to one side, it is worth noting that, as well as generating sustained press hostility, Shock of Reality marked the wholesale appropriation by an advertiser of a completely “other” language (documentary photography) as well as the absolute dissolution of conventional advertising codes (apart from the ubiquitous brand logo).18 Thus, Shock of Reality arguably represented a crucial symbolic break with the so-called “lies” and “superficiality” of advertising (something Benetton had never quite managed in its previous campaigns), as well as marking a kind of aesthetic and intertextual watershed for the advertising industry in general. A crucial symbolic threshold appeared to have been crossed with this campaign: the divide that separated “authentic” and “inauthentic” photographic aesthetics; and, arguably, it was precisely this that made Shock of Reality so intolerable for so many.

Commenting on Family in Ohio, The Times quotes a “spokesman” from the Advertising Standards Authority, “. . . we urge publishers to exercise their discretion so they do not carry an advert that would offend people . . . If this advert appears it is likely to be a depiction we would expect to get complaints about” (24.1.1992). Furthermore, according to Maggie Alderson, editor of Elle, “The advertising space for Family in Ohio was booked by Benetton well in advance for our next issue, but the copy arrived very late, and when we saw it we simply said: ‘No way.’” (24.1.1992). Significantly, Alderson went on to say: “I remember seeing the photograph when it was in Life and thinking it was superb as a piece of photojournalism. But it has nothing to do with fashion and it has no place in a fashion magazine” (Daily Mirror 24.1.1992).

93Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

But what exactly was it that the Advertising Standards Authority, The Times and Elle found so objectionable about Family in Ohio? To answer this question—that is, in a way that goes beyond the “only doing it to sell jumpers” argument—we need to interrogate not just the form or content of the advertising image itself, but the discursive value that such images (and the institutions they “belong” to) are conventionally afforded in contemporary culture. Thus, if we acknowledge that Benetton’s manu- facturing of a novel kind of commodity aesthetic in Shock of Reality provided the press with an initial point of entry into the debate about the meaning of Shock of Reality, then perhaps it is worth going on to consider the extent to which press debate was, in part, sustained by a largely unconscious objection to the transgressive fusion of fashion and “hard news”: a fusion that was made more difficult by the pollution of the masculine logic of documentary photojournalism with the “feminized” “pseudo-logic” of advertising, fashion advertising in particular. In other words, it was not only the alliance forged between documentary photo- graphy and the commodity form per se that stimulated negative press reactions, but the nature of the particular type of commodity with which the documentary photograph was associated.19

Just as the institution of fashion is bound up with notions of the ephemeral, fashion’s identity—as well as its construction of identity— has conventionally been denigrated as “transient,” “superficial” and “depthless”; values that not only characterize the subject of fashion and the institution of fashion as a whole, but that also stand in opposition to those pan-historical and transcendent values and qualities conventionally associated not only with “serious” journalism but also with the High Modernist art object as it is represented in traditional art histories and criticism.20

On the one hand, then, it was the drawing together of two symbolically disparate sign systems in Family in Ohio that was held to be so offensive: the conflation of the “real” world of documentary photography and the “superficial” world of middlebrow fashion advertising. On the other hand, however, it is also worth noting that what was considered equally reprehensible about this campaign was the juxtaposition of fashion—with its connotations of “brand newness”—with “death” and “degeneration”, ideas conventionally associated with HIV/Aids.21

Thus, although Benetton’s previous campaigns (from 1984 onwards) had attracted criticism, it had tended to concentrate on, for example, their multi-racial content and its mobilization for explicitly commercial purposes rather than the form that the advertising campaigns assumed. The press debate surrounding Shock of Reality, however, was largely fueled by an unconscious objection to Benetton’s transgression and blurring of the symbolic and discursive boundaries that conventionally differentiate “hard news” from advertising generally, and to Benetton’s “dumbing down” of the documentary photograph in particular.

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Documentary Photography, Ideology and The Press

What is it then about documentary photography—and the type of knowledge it represents—that remains so precious that any perceived disturbance of its aesthetic and contextual integrity can provoke such emotive displays of collective hostility?

According to Howard Chapnick, former President of the Black Star Photo Agency, the “essence” of the photojournalistic image can be conceived of in terms of its depiction of a series of “implausible” and “inconceivable” events.22 In other words, its particularity and specificity partly result from the distance it establishes between itself and the multi- tude of other photographic images that, arguably, represent what they themselves constitute: that is, the banality of the image world in everyday life. The advertising image would represent perhaps—from a photo- journalistic point of view—a prime example of this.

Furthermore, according to Michael Griffen, the legitimacy of the photo- journalistic image is ultimately realized through its production of affect. In other words, as a result of the photographer’s production of “high drama and emotional pull”—the conventional aesthetic criteria by which most successful documentary photographs are judged—it is held that an effective documentary photograph will be capable of transforming the mood of the viewer—which is to say that he or she will be “moved” by it.23

One might argue, however, that the realization of affect relies as much on the relationship between the documentary photograph and the “ideology of realism”24—which frames the discursive conditions of its production and consumption—as it does on anything in the image itself. Consequently, the production of affect, rather than being contingent on the form that any one image assumes, is actually an effect of the viewer’s belief in the veracity of the documentary image (something that is certainly encouraged but not wholly determined by its form); and it is this that enables one to be “moved” by it in a way one would not necessarily be moved by an advertising image, however “moving” its content might appear to be.

It is worth noting that although documentary photography has been subject to the deconstructive ire of photography theory since the mid- 1970s, as well as a variety of aesthetic changes since its inception as a mass media form,25 its basic ideological function (its facility to render the world “as it is”; to provide an “eyewitness” account of what Roland Barthes refers to as “that [which]—has—been” (Barthes 1982: 82)—a function that exists in contradistinction to the function of the “artificial” world of fashion photography), has remained intact. In other words, the documentary photograph has continued to maintain its ideological grip on the social imaginary, in spite of the academic broadsides leveled against it and the various ways in which the form of the documentary photograph has evolved historically.26 So, while various technical and

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critical interventions may have modified the actual form of the docu- mentary photograph, as well as its reception in certain restricted contexts, they have not impacted on its popular epistemological status.

How then, in this context, has the commodity aspect of documentary photography been disavowed in such a way as to secure its position as a privileged form of objective knowledge? To what ends is the myth of documentary photography’s disinterestedness sustained by those instit- utions for which it performs such a vital role?27 In a journalistic context the photograph’s promotional role is repressed by a set of historically established discursive procedures,28 which constrain the ways in which the documentary photograph is received by its audience.29 In relation to Shock of Reality, the invalidation of advertising, coupled with a reiteration of the “integrity” of the documentary project, as it exists within a journal- istic context, clearly provided the discursive framework through which most press criticism was refracted.

Arguably, however, the press’s attack on Benetton, and its parallel defence of documentary photography, betrayed another set of concerns, arguably linked to the fragility of the press’s self-image. In other words, the press’s assault on Benetton might not only represent a specific crisis of institutional identity, primarily made manifest through Benetton’s use and abuse of an assortment of documentary photographs, but a reaction that may be seen as nothing less than a symptom of a more deep-seated malaise. In other words, what was ultimately significant was not just Benetton’s instrumental use of documentary photography, but also the way in which Benetton effectively obliged the press to unconsciously re- evaluate its own status as a commercially disinterested institution.

The Press’s Repressed

The business of journalism seems to be impinging on the basic functions of journalism in a way that is ultimately dangerous to journalism and perilous to the public interest. Across a broad spectrum of news organ- izations, the balance between the bottom line and professional news judgements, between journalism’s private and public functions, has been tilting toward the forces of the market place and maximum return and away from the newsrooms—and the public interest.

Former Washington Post correspondent Dan Oberdorfer, quoted in Sparrow (1999: 3)

Like the documentary photograph, the press is conventionally held to be a privileged eyewitness to world events. Moreover, its primary role in “civilized” liberal society is, again like the documentary photograph, to relay such events to the general public in a reasonable and disinterested fashion (see Schwartz in Brennen and Hardt 1999). In being seen (or at

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least imagined) to be doing this, the press has come to represent what Thomas Carlyle described as a “Fourth Estate” (Powe 1991: 261)—in other words, “a political institution able to act independently . . . and, therefore one capable of safeguarding democracy” (Sparrow 1999: 3). Given its position of privilege in relation to other institutions of culture (a privilege secured in the US, where the press—unlike any other American industry—is protected under the American constitution’s “right to free speech”) it is not difficult to understand why the bringing into question of press impartiality should elicit such a defensive response from the industry.

Jacques Lacan’s remarks about the formation and comprehension of identity may be useful here.30 Although Lacan is referring to the ways in which individual subjectivities are constituted, it is possible to understand his argument in relation to the ways in which an institution might potentially misrecognize itself. Indeed, it appears to be precisely the way in which the “I” of the press misrecognizes itself31 in the mirror of journalistic ideology, effectively repressing the material conditions that constitute its identity, that serves to perpetuate the “un-real” image the press continues to have of itself.

That the psychic history of the press can be characterized by the fraught relationship that exists between its commercial aspect on the one hand and, on the other, its status as disseminator par excellence of value- free knowledge means that, given the immiscible relationship that exists between these two aspects of the press, it is hardly surprising that for its “disinterested” side to maintain a position of ideological pre-eminence in relation to its “other,” its “other” must be evacuated in order to avoid any unnecessary epistemological and discursive complications.

Thus it is precisely that sense of incoherence and fragmentation—the coexistence of contradictory properties in the same body—that, for Lacan, is fundamentally constitutive of identity that is not only refused by the press (for good ideological reasons, perhaps) but that is “returned” to it in the cracked mirror of Shock of Reality—as a result, that is, of Benetton’s redeploying the documentary photograph in an unambiguously com- mercial context. Indeed, it was precisely the conflation of the worlds of documentary photojournalism and business commerce in Shock of Reality that served to draw attention to the contradictions that remain largely unacknowledged in the press itself—that perhaps rendered Shock of Reality so uncannily disarming.

Moreover, one might argue that the more press organizations become indistinguishable from the variety of other related business concerns with which they are increasingly being linked, the greater the likelihood that the integrity of the press will be even more difficult to maintain. Consequently, the return of the press’s repressed, as it has been returned in an age of global mass media monopolization involving the integration of the entertainment and information industries, for example, represents perhaps a partial—and heavily disguised—acknowledgment on the part

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of the press itself that it is actually not so very far removed from the thing it strives to define itself against.32

Indeed, in the light of this one could just as easily ask the question: precisely how ethical is it for the press to use Aids to sell newspapers ? It would, I think, be ridiculous to suggest that, because the press is as subject to the diktats and whims of the market-place as a fashion company is, anything one might find in the press is necessarily rendered invalid. By the same token, however, I would argue that this is also potentially true of fashion photography and advertising.

Relocating “Family in Ohio”

Having outlined the ways in which a set of discursive procedures—largely organized around issues of commodification, gender, race, photography and advertising—were deployed in relation to Benetton’s advertising campaigns during the 1980s and early 1990s effectively to prohibit consideration of their impact on the social imaginary, I now want to imagine what might have been. In other words, I want to offer some informed speculations regarding the ways in which Family in Ohio not only intersected with a variety of other Aids-related “utterances” in Britain, but positively contributed, in a moderately subversive fashion, to oppositional Aids-related discourses elsewhere.

As I have implied, issues of context and interpretation in relation to Shock of Reality are conveniently elided by Bailey et al. by virtue of the ways in which they fetishize the sphere of production, to the extent that any consideration of the ways in which the discursive environments within which Shock of Reality was actually situated may have shaped the variety of ways in which it was consumed becomes pointless.

Having said that, even where meaning is considered as something other than a straightforward effect of the image’s commodity status, this is generally done in such a way as to prevent any critical evaluation of the relationships between a particular advertising photograph, its exhibition in a specific cultural context and, finally, its reception. Arguably, this mode of analysis does the important ideological work of naturalizing or rendering commonsensical the relationship between a “tainted” sphere of image production (mass advertising) and the inevitability of its “react- ionary” messages; an outcome of what White, writing in The Sunday Times (1992), refers to as the unacceptable “imbroglio of sweaters and morals.”33

This isn’t to say that the content of Shock of Reality may not amount to the reproduction and dissemination of a series of “reactionary” messages in relation to HIV/Aids. However, in order to assess this, it is worth considering the ways in which specific advertising images have been deployed in a variety of historically specific and discursively uneven contexts. As one such example, I want to consider the ways in

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which Benetton’s most notorious Shock of Reality ad intersected with a variety of Aids-related utterances in Britain and Italy. In doing this I want to consider how those utterances could be understood as having inflected Family in Ohio with strikingly different sets of meanings and significances.

To begin with, it is worth noting that Family in Ohio evokes an atmosphere of religiosity. This is suggested by the depiction of a bed- ridden Christ-like figure; a painting directly above his head featuring the image of a man with outstretched arms, dressed in Christ-like robes; and a black-clad arm (suggestive of a priest) entering the image from left of frame, uncannily echoing the outstretched arms featured in the painting. Furthermore, although Family in Ohio certainly appears to make explicit reference to documentary photography (a reference reinforced by the swathes of comment surrounding it) it also refers to a variety of other sign systems. Indeed, Oliviero Toscani refers to this image as a “modern- day pieta” (1993: 36); that is, “a representation of the dead Christ . . . in which the sufferings of Christ are exaggerated and distorted” (Murray 1978: 345).

On one level then, the kinds of religious connotations identified above might constitute a “positive” message about HIV and Aids—one that, in Britain, may be understood as a reaction against the type of “negative” Aids imagery that came to characterize dominant media representations of the illness, particularly during the 1980s and early 1990s.34 Thus, in contrast with those representations of Aids that suggest, as Simon Watney (1987) implies, that people with Aids have “brought it on themselves and, therefore, deserve everything they get,” what we, arguably, have in Family in Ohio is an image that re-articulates Aids as a curiously privileged condition: synonymous with spiritual transcendence, resurrection and an intimacy with God.

Having suggested one of the ways in which Family in Ohio may be understood as a “positive” reaction to the kinds of negative Aids imagery Simon Watney refers to in Ten 8, we might, on the other hand, argue that, in fact, Family in Ohio actually represents an equally polarized point of view where individuals suffering with Aids are crassly figured as quasi- religious figures whose physical martyrdom through Aids ludicrously signifies a first, feeble step on the rocky road to spiritual redemption. As Roger Clarke, writing in The Guardian about popular, liberal represent- ations of Aids, remarks, “We make a saint of Derek Jarman, a fallen angel of Bruce Chatwin and a Madonna of the Princess of Wales” (1.12.1994). Thus, inasmuch as the physical suffering of Aids becomes synonymous with “spiritual health” (ibid.) Family in Ohio may arguably be seen to contain another “negative” message, inasmuch as Aids here is hysterically romanticized by Benetton—to such an extent that the actual ways in which most ordinary mortals experience dying from an Aids-related illness—(a frightening “shitty” thing where “nothing is resolved”)— remain unspoken. It is perhaps an example of cruel irony that Benetton

99Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

chose to describe this image as showing us the “reality of suffering” (Benetton Group 1993: 25, my italics).

However, even if the kind of “alternative Aids myth” I have provis- ionally identified in Benetton’s Family in Ohio actually operates to foment further the climate of cultural negativity that arguably exists in relation to Aids, any serious evaluation of the extent to which Family in Ohio represents a fundamentally reactionary mythologization of Aids must surely be measured against its relationship with all those other images of Aids in circulation in Britain at the time and immediately prior to it. In other words, it may be the case that, in an ideal world, the reactionary nature of Family in Ohio would go without saying; but in a world where messages or sign values are constantly in competition for positions of hegemonic pre-eminence one could argue that, however ideologically imperfect Family in Ohio might be, it does, at the very least, represent a flawed attempt to subvert and displace those images constitutive of an especially virulent type of Aids-related discourse—images largely situated in the field of popular journalism. Which is to say that Family in Ohio’s ideological or discursive significance is as much a consequence of the specificity of its relationship with a host of other images as it is an effect of its semiotic singularity.

However, in suggesting some of the potentially contradictory ways in which Family in Ohio may have operated in one particular social context, it is worth pointing out that this is not a guarantee that Family in Ohio would have performed a similar task elsewhere. Which is to say that, even if its apparently implicit idealization of Aids continued to inform its reception outside Britain, the cultural and political value afforded to such an idealization may have varied dramatically from context to context.

Bearing this in mind, I want to consider the social, ideological and political climate pertaining to Aids-related issues in Italy in 1992 and the cultural value that Family in Ohio was afforded in this particular context.

On 10 November 1992 The Guardian reported that “. . . a young middle-class Roman (A.G.) wrote at length about his solitude, his shame and his thoughts of suicide . . . to the editor of La Stampa, the Italian newspaper. La Stampa published his appeal in full on the front page and triggered a nationwide debate about AIDS, which has never been confronted head on in a country where unspoken but strict religious and social codes mean such issues are taboo.” Following its appearance in La Stampa, The Guardian went on to report that the story of “A.G.” “. . . was leading the national television news and becoming a topic in bars” (ibid.) Furthermore, The Guardian stated that “The controversy over an advertisement by clothing manufacturer Benetton featuring an AIDS death-bed . . . [had] kept the issue in the news” (ibid.).

I am not suggesting that Family in Ohio was single-handedly res- ponsible for a sudden turnaround in dominant attitudes towards Aids in Italy at this time. But, clearly, investing “Aids sufferers” with Christ-like

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connotations in a country where the Catholic Church arguably represents the key player in terms of the definition and reproduction of the dominant moral and ethical codes, was a strategy that afforded Family in Ohio the kind of incendiary ideological status it could never have acquired in Britain. The fact that the Church in Italy had largely defined Aids using, to paraphrase Back and Quaade (1993), “the grammar of religion” (Aids being conventionally figured as a kind of “divine retribution” visited on various amoral types, i.e. homosexual “perverts” and drug addicts) meant that Family in Ohio’s evocation of a type of alternative, and fund- amentally redemptive, Aids myth, relying upon and ultimately subverting the “grammar of religion,” would have afforded it considerable cultural weight. Moreover, given that Aids is generally represented in terms of its being a “gay disease,” the conflation of Christ with the idea of a gay man would have had added significance.

The Guardian reports A.G. as saying, “. . . because of my homo- sexuality I have been close to suicide many times, but a sense of the power of life and Christ himself stopped me” (10.11.1992). Thus it is possible to understand Family in Ohio, as it existed in an Italian context, not as simply alerting the world to a set of “issues of global concern,” as Toscani would have us believe, but as intersecting with a constellation of inter- woven discourses where it was not just the meaning of Aids that was at stake, but the meaning of Christ and, by implication, the veracity of dominant forms of Christianity—in other words, the authority and legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church itself.

Conclusion

Clearly, taking into account the social, political and discursive climates within which advertisements such as Benetton’s inevitably find themselves situated brings into question the usefulness of methodologies that dwell exclusively on the commercially driven nature of the advertising industry. In many ways, however, it would be counter-productive to argue that because advertising photography may operate in ways that cannot simply be reduced to “the reproduction of dominant ideologies” or “the mis- recognition of the self” it is, therefore, not ideological at all. The point is, perhaps, to acknowledge that while advertisements can sometimes perform several different, often contradictory, tasks at the same time, it is worth paying close attention not only to the specificities of any given advertising campaign but also the precise nature of those evaluative techniques or tools one brings to bear upon them. In doing so one should ideally become sensitive to the ways in which such tools can work to conceal as much as they reveal. Thus, as Victor Burgin saliently points out, “The question is not ‘Is this tool better than that tool?’ The question is rather ‘What tool is best suited for this particular job?’” (Evans 1997: 75).

101Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Benetton for allowing me to reproduce their advertising images.

Notes

1. See Victor Burgin’s “Looking at Photographs” and “Photography, Phantasy, Function” in Burgin (1982). Here Burgin echoes the theo- retical sentiments expressed in “Screen Theory” when he states that “Photography is one signifying system among others in society which produces the ideological subject in the same movement in which they ‘communicate’ their ostensible ‘contents’” (1982: 153). It is worth noting that Burgin’s emphasis on the seemingly effortless production of the subject of ideology in photography is one that still characterizes much contemporary photography theory. For a more recent example of this approach see Hirsch (1997). The essay that, perhaps, best characterizes the theoretical position assumed by Screen—which, broadly speaking represented an amalgam of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian Marxism; what Mulvey refers to as “political psycho- analysis” (1975: 6)—is Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Screen 16(3), Autumn 1975, p. 6. Here Mulvey evaluates the ways in which the visual conventions of popular cinema structure and prescribe the female subjects’ identification with an alienated, and alienating, representation of femininity that is always, according to Mulvey, “. . . displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men,” whom she describes as the “the active controllers of the look . . .” (1975: 13). As Marianne Hirsch points out, “Mulvey is writing about the film camera and not about still images but . . . in its reception, her argument has been and can be extended to the camera gaze more generally” (1997). For an incisive critique of “Screen Theory” see Paul Willemen’s “Notes on Subjectivity” in Screen 19(1) and Morley (1992: 59–71). Willemen (1978) suggests, in relation to “Screen Theory,” that “There remains an unbridgeable gap between ‘real’ readers/authors and ‘inscribed’ ones. Constructed and marked in and by the text, real readers are subjects in history, living in social formations, rather than mere subjects of a single text. The two types of subject are not commensurate. But for the purposes of formalism, real readers are supposed to coincide with the constructed readers.” Similarly, Morley suggests that “. . . psychoanalytically based work has ultimately mobilized what can be seen as another version of the hypodermic theory of effects (see Adorno and Horkheimer 1972)—in so far as it is, at least in its initial and fundamental formulations, a universalist theory which attempts to account for the way in which the subject is necessarily positioned by the text” (1992: 59). He goes on to state that: “The text . . . may offer the subject specific positions of intelli- gibility, it may operate to prefer certain readings above others; what

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it cannot do is to guarantee them – that must always be an empirical question” (1992: 71).

2. See, for example, Berger 1972 (especially Ch. 7, which represents a condensed version of some of the arguments presented in Debord 1967); see also Williamson (1982); Victor Burgin’s “Art, Common Sense and Photography” in Evans (1997) (and its theoretical precursor, Roland Barthes “The Rhetoric of the Image” in Barthes 1977); and Myers 1986.

3. Indicative, perhaps, of the extent to which such a cultural “common sense” now routinely informs debates in popular culture is the appear- ance in Dazed and Confused of Rachel Ames’s “Austrian Label, Wendy & Jim Blurring The Boundaries Between Fashion and Art” (Ames 2001). For an example of the ways in which academic debate is begin- ning to question some of the epistemological and conceptual difficulties attendant on “the blurring of boundaries” see Coles and Defert (2000).

4. The advertising campaign The Shock of Reality of spring 1992 marked a new step in Benetton’s campaign strategies: the seven images presented were not traditionally commissioned fashion images, but actual docu- mentary photographs taken by photo journalists and already published in newspapers and magazines. The subjects, in accordance with the “corporate philosophy of information and concern” (http://www. benetton.com/wws/aboutyou/ucdo/reality/file1848.html), included: an obscure and insidious illness; violence and intimidation; forced emigration; natural catastrophes.

5. See also G. Adair, “In the name of God, go stick it up your jumpers” in The Guardian 13.2.1992; Anon, “Benetton profits from con- troversy” in The Times 28.3.1992; P. Corrias, “Beneath Jumpers” in The Guardian 8.6.1993; J. Erlichman, “Benetton defends shock tactics as art” in The Guardian 20.2.1992; A. Fresco, “Benetton uses Aids victim in advert” in The Guardian 24.1.1992; S. Moore, “Graphic Violence” in The Guardian 2.10.1993; J. Moir, “Ad Nauseum” in The Guardian 11.2.1995; J. Mullin, “Benetton plays new card in rolling back the frontiers of shock” in The Guardian 24.1.1992; N. North, “Sick! Benetton Use Dying Aids Man” in The Daily Mirror 25.1.1992; I. Webb, “One jumper ahead of the pack” in The Times 15.1.1994; C. White, “Blood, sweaters and designer tears” in The Sunday Times 16.2.1992.

6. Russell 1993: 25. 7. Benetton Group 1993: 9. 8. According to the writers of the official Benetton Web Site (http://

www.benetton.com/wws/aboutyou/ucdo/race/file1847.html) Benetton started its “Campaigns for Racial Equality” when Oliviero Toscani’s first photographs, in which different races are seen living in harmony, were used in the advertising campaigns of 1984. Benetton’s new communication strategy began this campaign entitled “All the Colors of the World,” which included “ads which spotlight groups of young

103Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

people of different races and colors as they play and laugh together. This campaign appeared in 14 countries and sparked off yet another racial polemic in South Africa: the photos featuring white and black youths together published in magazines targeted at the black popul- ation were refused by publications reserved for whites.”

9. There are three ways in which this strategy was, and continues to be, realized. First, through Benetton’s gradual, and discontinuous, appropriation of signs conventionally held to belong to a set of discursively opposing institutions—a strategy complemented by the dissolution of sign structures that constitute the visual and linguistic rhetoric of conventional advertising images generally, prior, that is, to the early-mid-1980s. Secondly, through a sustained mythologiz- ation of the “visionary idiosyncrasies” of Oliviero Toscani himself, Benetton’s former “artist in residence”; and thirdly, through the investment in Benetton of “oppositional” values, something which is largely realized through the circulation of Benetton’s own secondary promotional materials (Colors magazine, press releases, catalogs etc.) as well as the various ways in which Benetton’s campaign style was (and is) represented in both the press and academe—this article being yet another example. For an example of recent press coverage see Clark (2000).

10. http://www.benetton.com/wws/aboutyou/ucdo/race/file1847.html. 11. Toscani Manacles and Fetters (also known as “handcuffs”), Benetton

Advertising campaign, 1989, see http://www.benetton.com/wws/ aboutyou/ucdo/race/file1846.html

12. See “Nomads” in Andreas Serrano, Body and Soul, Takarajima Books, 1995.

13. A selection of Benetton’s advertising images were also featured in shows at the Musée D’Art Contemporain, Lausanne, Switzerland, Benetton par Toscani (1995); and the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico, Toscani Al Muro: 10 anos de imagenes para United Colors of Benetton (Mantle 1999: 314).

14. See the section on dealerships in Nairne (1987). 15. Spencer Platt, The Guardian, 12 September 2001. 16. According to Wernick, “. . . with the development of the market,

promotion is a condition which has increasingly befallen discourses of all kinds; and the more it has done so, the more its modalities and relations have come to shape the formation of culture as a whole,” quoted in Lee 2000: 305.

17. Of the seven images produced for display on billboards and mag- azines in Europe, five were either subject to court injunctions or voluntary bans: Soldier, France; Family in Ohio, Britain and Spain; Soldier, Britain; Car, Ireland (Benetton Group 1993: 173).

18. In the light of this, it is interesting how many students in my own department at Middlesex University have remarked, when confronted with an especially powerful documentary image, that, although they

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can’t be exactly sure where it comes from, it is, in their opinion, just as likely to be a Benetton advert as anything else. Arguably then, branding a product with an immediately identifiable and distinctive set of visual signs—the color-saturated documentary photograph, for example—could easily obviate the need to reference the brand logo altogether. Thus, as much as Benetton’s appropriation of docu- mentary photography might have effected a re-branding of Benetton, it also potentially represented, for many people, the re-branding of documentary photography itself.

19. According to Stuart Ewen, during the early years of what Michell Aglietta refers to as the Fordist “regime of accumulation,” “the primary function of advertising was the creation and stimulation of new consumer needs as well as to sell the system of mass consumption itself” (1976: 90). Thus, where “commodity consumption became the natural means to need satisfaction” advertising was the “critical intermediary agency bridging the industrial process and everyday life” (Ewen 1976: 93). Furthermore, in the visual rhetoric of advertising photography, men were largely featured as the producers of goods and women as the producers of domestic lifestyles, which were always—according to the logic of advertising discourse—contingent on the goods being made available to them by the men who labored away on the proverbial Fordist production line. The development of advertising, and advertising photography, then, became not only the “means by which women could be educated into the correct modes of consumption” (Ewen 1976: 95) but also the way in which women’s sense of their own social identity came to be constituted in relation to the “soft,” “cosmetic,” “fantasy-oriented” world of advertising itself. Furthermore, in the same way that these values coalesced around the sign “woman,” so the idea of the “feminine” arguably came to define the cultural and discursive value of advert- ising knowledge itself. Thus, not only did the process of consumption become feminized, but the institution of advertising and—by implic- ation—the knowledge it furnished the world with acquired a “soft” or feminine gloss. In addition, I would suggest that fashion discourse, as it is articulated through fashion photography in advertising, constitutes the very apotheosis of “soft knowledge” in contemporary capitalist culture. First, because fashion—unlike “hard” news— is generally considered to be solely preoccupied with the body in particular and the commodity form in general, something that has historically facilitated its classification as “superficial” or, worse still, “trivial.” So, where “serious” journalism does the work of fostering the reproduction of universal values (conventionally synthesizing a particular news event through a set of blanket, humanistic principles and beliefs intended to “unite the populace” (Schwartz in Brenen and Hardt 1999: 162)), fashion is held to cast its “unethical” and immaterial eye upon a collection of disparate bodily forms whose

105Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

social identities are constituted through a set of transient, and, there- fore, culturally insignificant, desires and passions.

20. Particularly where the value of the art object—be it “modern” or “postmodern”—is constructed according to a set of evaluative tech- niques and procedures characteristic of High Modernist criticism, i.e. where the measure of a “good” piece of art is determined by the extent to which it is perceived to satisfy a set of criteria—organized around notions of authorial intent, aesthetic integrity etc.—that pre- exist the object itself.

21. The Guardian quotes “Aids expert” Nick Partridge, “acting chief executive of Aids charity, The Terrence Higgins Trust” thus: “Using the distressing depiction of any form of serious illness or deathbed scene to sell clothing for commercial profit is offensive. Benetton is trying to cash in on the plight of millions dying from Aids.” Significantly, Partridge is also quoted as saying that “. . . not only is the ad. offensive, but it leaves me wondering what Benetton is trying to communicate to the general public” (24.1.1992).

22. Quoted in Michael Griffen, “The Great War Photographs: Con- structing Myths of History and Photojournalism” in Brennen and Hardt 1999: 128.

23. Michael Griffen in Bremen and Hardt 1999: 129. 24. See Taylor 1998: 52–6. See also Martha Rosler, “In around, and

afterthoughts (on documentary photography)” in Bolton 1992; Pierre Bourdieu The Social Definition of Photography in Evans and Hall (eds), 1999 and Abigail Solomon-Godeau 1991. According to Solomon-Godeau, “the documentary photograph . . . is ‘spoken’ within language and culture; its meanings are both produced and secured within those systems of representation that a priori mark its subject—and our relations to the subject—in preordained ways. The fact that a photograph appears to speak itself, as do realist forms in general, should alert us . . . to the working of ideology which always functions to naturalize the cultural” 1991: 171.

25. See Solomon-Godeau 1991: 171. 26. The historical evolution of the documentary photograph would

include such things as its incorporation of color; its appropriation of surrealist aesthetics (see, for example, Humphrey Jennings’s Mass Observation project and, more recently, the work of Magnum photo- grapher, Martin Parr); and, most significantly perhaps, the ways in which it has embraced a variety of innovative photographic technologies; 35mm film, faster lenses, etc.

27. It is worth noting, in relation to criticisms of Benetton’s use of documentary, that if a documentary photograph can only retain its “authenticity” within a particular institutional context—a point of view that underpins objections voiced in the press and, to a lesser extent, academe—then the idea that there is something inherently truthful about the documentary image itself is obviously brought into

106 Paul Antick

question. It is ironic perhaps that we, as newspaper readers, are as much alerted to the contingent nature of photographic meaning by the ways in which the debate about Benetton was structured in the British press and print media—institutions for which the inherent veracity and truthfulness of the documentary photograph, are argu- ably, inestimable—as we are by anything in the images themselves. See also Donna Schwartz’s remarks on “the establishment of photo- journalism as an objective reportorial strategy” (in Brennen and Hardt 1999).

28. “The advertising is exploitative” wrote Helen Fielding in The Times, “because it is using Aids to sell jumpers” (26.1.1992); the implication being that if a story about Aids was being used to sell newspapers it would somehow be more acceptable. Fielding goes on to ask, “Where is the social commitment? What does the Benetton group sponsor with its wealth? Aids research? Help for the world’s poor? No: Formula 1 racing, a basketball team and one or two small arts projects in Italy” (26.1.1992). Significantly, this is a demand that can only be made of Benetton—and not News International, for example—precisely because the press refused to allow Benetton’s communicative pretensions a legitimate position within its own normalizing discourse—a discourse within which any ideological difficulties consumers might potentially have had, in relation to a particular cultural institution’s moral responsibilities, were resolved through the construction of an arbitrary institutional division of ethical labor. In other words, consumers were invited by the press to identify Benetton as an “inauthentic,” self-interested knitwear company and News International as a purveyor of “authentic,” “objective” and “impartial” knowledge. Hence the inevitability of the numerous calls made in the press urging Benetton to donate money to Aids charities (24.1.1992)—something that, to my know- ledge, no one ever demanded of News International, The Mirror Group or Tony O’Reilly, owner of The Independent.

29. Arguably, a similar set of constraints proscribe the ways in which academic texts are received. Here I would suggest that it is equally problematic to suggest that the production and circulation of “intel- lectual” knowledge remains free from the constraints of the market. The commercial nature of relationships between academic publishing houses and intellectuals; the ways in which prestige and status afforded intellectuals by their publishing successes are often translated into forms of financial remuneration by their employers; the commodified nature of higher education, inasmuch as students, nowadays, are construed as much as “consumers” as they are “scholars”; and the relationship between the research assessment exercise in Britain, departmental funding and the concomitant proliferation of juried academic journals surely renders any claim for the autonomous nature of academic production extremely dubious. See Andrew

107Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion

Wernick (in Lee 2000) for a discussion of the commodified nature of Higher Education and Bourdieu 1988 for a provocative account of the relationship between the production of academic knowledge and the instrumental position it occupies within the Academy.

30. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Lacan 1977.

31. For a concise and extremely clear account of Lacan’s theory of the “Mirror Stage,” where, according to Lacan, the subject is enjoined to identify with “a mirage of himself, outside of himself” 1975: 140) see Bowie 1991: 17–43.

32. One can appreciate the ways in which economic imperatives can explicitly determine news content by considering the extent and consequences of Rupert Murdoch’s News International’s aggressive drive towards vertical integration—that is, the acquisition of comp- anies involved in the production of the same product. For example, as part of News International’s shift from content provider to global distributor, Murdoch “purchased Hong Kong’s Star TV satellite system in July 1993; Star also carried BBC World. However, because the Chinese authorities did not want the BBC’s coverage entering China from Hong Kong, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star” (Sparrow 1999: 100). For a useful account of the political and financial consequences of the interrelatedness of different media organizations owned by the same parent multinational, and their propensity for self-promotion (the Sun providing favorable coverage of BSKyB, for example) see Peter Golding and Graham Murdoch’s discussion of “media synergy,” “Culture, Communications and Political Economy” in Curran and Gurevitch 2000: 70–93.

33. This mode of analysis is exemplified by Back and Quaade, who argue in relation to United Colors that “images of human difference are fixed within Benetton’s discourse” and that “. . . race and ethnicity are presented as essentially unchanging and eternal social categories” (1993: 68).

34. Watney states that “I am not aware of a single photojournalistic Aids narrative published in the United Kingdom which does not collude in every respect with the overall discursive tendency to criminalise and stigmatise its hapless subjects” (1987: 22). Also, for a concise discussion of media representations of Aids in the British press during the 1980s and 1990s, see Eldridge, Kitzinger and Williams 1997: 60– 72.

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