69249454-chandler-semiotics

ANALYSING STRUCTURES 105
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its association with ‘small-talk’. The traditional gender stereotypes
also led men to favour ‘instrumental’ (and therefore short) calls
rather than ‘expressive’ (and more expensive) uses of the medium –
a state of affairs which was eventually undermined by the mobile
phone’s colonization of the (traditionally masculine) public sphere.
Part of the research involved mapping alignments in this universe of
discourse. The ‘cultural norm’ was a vertical alignment of female,
emotional, trivial, [domestic] small-talk and male, rational, important,
[public] ‘big talk’ (a term so unmarked that a label had to be
invented) (Alexander 1995). Challenging this alignment included
using gruff-voiced, ‘no-nonsense’ actor Bob Hoskins – a ‘man’s man’
– to front the campaign.
More recently, the slogan for a campaign launched in 2005 for
the washing powder ‘Persil’ in the UK was ‘dirt is good’. This
provocative inversion of the Christian folklore that ‘cleanliness is
next to godliness’ can be seen as part of a deliberate strategy of
conceptual realignment which has a distinctly Lévi-Straussean
flavour (see in particular Lévi-Strauss 1968). For many years, the
core concept had been that ‘Persil washes whiter’ (alluded to even
by Barthes 1957, 40–2). Soap powder and detergent advertising
(distinguished by Barthes in their rhetorical appeals) had long
reflected conceptual frameworks in which cleanliness–dirt and godliness–evil
were vertically aligned with science–nature. In other words,
the vertical alignments had been of dirt with evil and with nature.
This went back to the days when the advertising for many domestic
products regularly featured white-coated ‘scientists’ – often in laboratories
– ‘testing’ the product and representing it as a technological
advance. In the new campaign, ‘dirt is good’ was the slogan for print
ads and television commercials in which we were shown people
enjoying themselves outdoors and getting dirty in the process. The
company literature also refers to one of their goals being to do ‘the
least possible harm to the environment’. The new campaign thus
challenged the traditional alignment of cleanliness, godliness and
science. Within this modified mythological framework not only had
dirt become explicitly good (rather than godly) but (inexplicitly)
nature rather than science had become the hero. Viewers might also
infer that ‘dirt is fun’. This implication generates a new pairing –