Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

ADVERTISING: THE RHETORICAL IMPERATIVE
the world of the hearer or viewer, the creation or inflation of desire by
advertising, that the critics noted above are objecting to, that they are calling
reprehensible or destructive. The objection also begs the question, begged by
Hoggart’s ideas concerning ‘good persuasion’ and ‘bad persuasion’, as to
exactly how trivial a case of ‘non-innocence’ or reprehensibility needs to be
in order for it to escape critical attention. 40
Kaldor adopts interesting and opposing positions on this matter. He
refers to the ‘common distinction between “informative” and “persuasive”
advertising’, as though these were two different types of advertising. 41 He
then says ‘we must sharply distinguish…between the purely informative
element in advertising and the persuasive element’, as though there were
one type of advertising in which these elements co-exist. 42 The distinction,
it seems, is ‘one of degree’. ‘All advertising is persuasive in intention and
all is informative in character’; some ads will be more persuasive than
informative and others will be more informative than persuasive, 43 but all
will contain both elements. Kaldor’s account differs from the one presented
in this essay in that it is being argued here that the informative sense
contains or is inhabited by the persuasive sense, not that there is some
sliding scale between one and the other.
However, he also argues that once the information has been received, it
loses its status as information and ‘any further repetition of the message’
serves only to persuade. ‘As soon as the public are first told’ the
information, its information value is ‘exhausted’, it is ‘zero’ and the sole
purpose of the message is persuasion. 44 Whether meaning or information
are helpfully conceived in terms of things that may or may not be
‘exhausted’, the idea that ‘the public’ may be guaranteed to receive an
identical informational message on each ‘repetition’ is not one that would
attract much sympathy.
If indeed it is an objection, it might also be objected that it follows from
this account of informing and information that all communication, and not
just that which occurs in capitalist societies, is reprehensible in that it is
effecting some change in the world or behaviour of the viewer or listener.
While this might be grounds for rethinking the meaning of ‘innocence’ and
‘reprehensibility’, it hardly constitutes an objection in that it makes
possible, if not necessary, the analysis of all types of communication in
terms of the workings of desire and power, something that many students
of communication would say they were doing anyway. A more interesting
objection along these lines might be to suggest that desire not be conceived
as a lack, and as operating on the level of representation or ideology, in
the manner of Williamson and Williams. The idea of desire as productive,
in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari might be more useful in explaining
how people will desire things that are not in fact very good for them. 45 And
it would certainly spare analysts the embarrassment of having to come up
with alternatives to the false categories and fictitious needs found in
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