"And when a word comes to us in its individual character, and starts in us the individual responses, it is great pleasure to us. The American Advertisers have discovered this and some of the cunningest American literature is to be found in advertisements for soap suds for example.

These advertisements are almost prose poems. They give the word soap suds a bubbly shiny individual meaning which is very skillfully poetic, would perhaps be quite poetic to the mind, which could forget that the poetry was bait on a hook." --D.H. Lawrence, "Pornography and Obscenity"

You're looking through one of those new shiny magazines and suddenly your gaze rests on yet another Calvin Klein ad, but this time it's for women's underwear, a fact which is nevertheless not immediately apparent since the woman in the photograph bears little clear resemblance to a woman. She is shaped like a woman from the waist up, but apparently has a male crouch. Look all the way through that magazine, however, and you won't find an ad for the name product made by Jockey, called "Jockeys for her." Jockey's ad, which was very quickly discontinued, showed fully dressed women and bore the slogan "look who's wearing Jockeys now!" While at the bottom of the ad the company stressed the value of 100% cotton.

Jockey's ad catered to a taste that seems to have gone out with "Secret" deodorant, a sequestering of women towards products designed specifically for allegedly female tastes. Klein, on the other hand, tailored his ad to sell underwear to both women and men, capitalizing on a new desire among women to appear androgynous. You look a bit farther and you see the old and familiar Merit ad, and you wonder why there's a Captain of unclear military affiliation always in the inset. What's Merit's plan? Tapping into new respect for the military.

Klein's ad is an example, a new group off, analysts say, of semiotics, the use of symbols in an ad to plug into systems of desire and expectations that have no real connection to the product being sold. Semiotics is different from subliminal advertising, the better known, gimmick-oriented use of quickly flashed words and hidden pictures, because it associates products with hopes one already has. And this new, burgeoning field is pulling far away from older kinds of ad techniques, because it is relevant to more than just the circumstances of advertising. Indeed, because it is a system that pervades most of modern culture.

Wlad Godvich, a professor of semiotics at the University of Minnesota tells of another kind of sell that seems even more interesting. During the most intense flareups in Poland between the government and Solidarity in the late 1970s the trade union hired semioticians to help them plan their appearance. At the advice of the experts, all of the union's language was directly taken from the Polish Constitution, and the Communist Manifesto. They were also instructed to dress in suits and white shirts with no ties, so that the government, by use of its symbols, and by use of party propaganda, could not attempt to alter Solidarity's message of being a legitimate trade union representing worker's interests.

Semiotics had a different influence here than that of straight public relations because it captured the language of the people itself instead of preventing the government from portraying Solidarity as an illegitimate organization. But the danger in employing semioticians was that they wanted to take the process of breaking apart language to reveal symbolic postures too far and attempted to take on the government directly. Solidarity felt this tendency towards "deconstruction" would lead to a revolution, which they wanted to avoid. Therefore, the union leaders had to fire the semioticians.

"Semiotics," says the famous professor of the subject Umberto Eco at the University of Bologna in Italy, "is the study of anything that can be used to lie." And indeed, its origin, according to both academics like Eco, and Harvard specialist Alice Jardine, as well as applicators such as Marshall Blonsky, head of the consulting firm Applied Semiotics, lies in the deconstructionist origins and plans made by the famous author of the book, Mythologies, Roland Barthes. In the mid-fifties, notes Jardine, Barthes put together trends that had begun in European thought as far back as the Stoics, but had been first formalized by the Swede, Saussure, at the turn of the 20th century. Usually thought of as a literary study confined to language, Barthes reapplied the technique to the world of everyday things, trying to find meaning in the immediate world, for which there was nothing immedeidately visible. Barthes' approach, notes Jardine, and that of his disciples, was always used as a way of deconstructing the symbols of a dominant group. This "contestatory" approach was first applied to the world of American goods and products as a way of avoiding a European point of view, American cultural domination.

Edmund Des Noes, vice president of Blonsky's company, reports having worked as part of an advertising and propoganda arm of Castro's Cuba, during the revolution. There, his job was to associate notions of hard work with the government while his medium was usually posters. He later made a movie that recorded his experience and won a New York Times award.

Blonsky is now editing a book containing articles on the subject from several different sources, including Des Noes and Godvich, called Semiotics....

In a funny sequence from a short article entitled "Depth Advertised," from his book. The Eiffel Tower, Barthes summarizes what American Advertisers have made of the sale of detergent:

...the real drama of all this little psychoanalysis of puffery is the conflict of two warring substances which subtly oppose the advance of the 'essences' and the 'principles' towards the field of depth. These two substances are water and grease...every campaign of beauty products therefore prepares a miraculous conjunction of these enemy liquids...decay is expelled...France is having a great yen for cleanliness...

Although this study made it across the ocean, it was not until recently that colleges began to adopt if formally as a discipline. Now, at both Brown and the University of Indiana, there are full departments in the subject while at the University of Minnesota, the New School in New York and at Harvard, courses in the subject are just beginning to be taught. Students of semiotics study everything from literary theory to anthropology. To cultural criticism, and their discipline, like economics, seems to result in a kind of psycho-social understanding of the social conscious.

But as the media takes a firmer hold over people's lives, and the idea of mind control is particularly in vogue, the world of semiotics is changing. There is a split both within the academics and those, like Blonsky, that have gone out into the marketplace. "Things are mutating and changing and growing," says Jardine, adding that the Europeans have begun to abandon the subject as it continues to grow here. Yet, Blonsky decides the world of academic for not giving up its "vow if non-intervention," and getting involved in the real world. Blonsky reportedly makes thousands of dollars consulting for companies.

Real world applications of semiotics have tended to remain on the "contestatory" aide of things, "deconstructing," mass media ads in a process much like that of trying to figure out how many human figures are in the Camel on the cigarette box. But for Blonsky, this kind of selling is mere gimmicky compared to what can be done with semiotics, and what is now being done with semiotic insights. Blonsky notes that the most recent, novel use of the point of view, though it is as yet perhaps unconscious, is to sell products for which there is initially no real need, by tapping other systems of needs that are culturally already incorporated into society. Blonsky cites the examples of the magazine Cosmopolitan, and ads for liquor and cigarettes, which attach themselves to sexual needs and expectations which have nothing to do with the product itself. For Blonsky, Cosmopolitan's sell is a "Machiavellian" kind of manoeuvre, promising not pleasure but reward for reading the magazine; "read Cosmopolitan forego pleasure and get a man." Similarly, cigarettes and liquor are sold by reference to sexual encounters, in which they have no initial relevance.