THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ADVERTISING - A GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY IN EUROPE

Advertising dominates the cultural field in the West and the aesthetic universe of our time. But, contrary to the mainstream manipulation thesis, what characterises the dynamic of advertising activity is essentially the recognition of advertisements as cultural goods and the development of the advertising industry as a specific function in the system of cultural industries. Thus, an analysis of the modern advertising field should be drawn from a genuine sociology of differentiation processes and cultural classification. The main hypothesis, borrowed from Luhmann's theory of self-referential differentiation is one of an internal disjunction within the cultural system, the latter being taken as the environment of advertising activity. Three levels of analysis for a European comparative study are proposed: the organisational level (what is functionally linked to cultural industries in the mode of production of advertisements), the textual level (what is culturally significant in the place advertising discourse occupies in the public space) and the level of the principles of cultural classification (what kind of cultural logic is involved in the construction of advertising as a genre).