Critical Analysis

Some consistency of factory representation occurs in corporate automaker ads of the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century where nearly identical scenes of capital-intensive production facilities appear in ads for GM, Saturn, Ford, Mercedes, Acura, Honda, Hyundai and Toyota. In these ads, automated computer systems control precision technologies that regulate the production process, while autoworkers are given cameo appearances as skilled craftworkers or even as artists. Spotless factories gleam and shine like the cars they produce, the site for a graceful ballet of meticulously choreographed movements. Production, and not simply consumer appreciation, is turned into an aesthetic -- a fireworks display of sparks explicitly proclaimed as art and tended by occasional workers who display the exactitude of technicians or the sensitivity of artists. As might be predicted, these ads are more about the manufacture of desire than the manufacture of industrial goods.

As with the vast majority of commodity advertising the site of material production is largely absent. Production is not really locatable in geographical space, nor for that matter in time. This may be why we can be momentarily persuaded to accept the the premise about craftsmanship as a possibility amidst a production system that has been driven for the past four decades by the goals of eliminating the costs of skilled labor. When signifiers of production do appear, they take the form of high-speed automated robotics. When workers are present, they most likely gaze at control panels and other simulations of the act of production. If we see either factories or workshops, workers have been turned back into adjuncts to computer controlled tools - this is not the first time in the history of industrialization that workers have been depicted as machine tenders, but this time the role is glamourized by the presence of glinting, streamlined high tech tools, tools that once again permit human beings to use their hands. Though the work shown is probably still tediously repetitive manual labor, the references are so brief and the setting so glamourized, that the possibility of alienated activity seems remote.

The Acura ad seems to address the possibility of an unalienated linkage between consumption and production. There is a strangely (and ironically) Marxian tone to this ad as it restores our species capacity - our collective capacity for expressing “body and soul” - in the unalienated production practices that can produce objects that are almost as if ‘pure of heart.’ Here the ad must falsify and deny its most basic function - to reproduce the exchange value of the branded vehicle. The ad refuses to admit that the fundamental motive driving the design, production, distribution and exchange of the vehicles is the drive to produce exchange values - the drive to realize currency. Indeed, the final scene of the ad - like almost all ads - seeks to attach the value of the meaning systems constituted in the ad to the value of brand icon.