Toward this end, moreover, contemporary branding practices require much more than just ads. Just as the use of stars in ads proves especially helpful, because ads can thereby attach their product’s brand identity to an already established unit of meaning, so too have advertisers long since realized the utility of attaching their brand identity to other established texts, whether individuals, events, or shows. Hence, for instance, for many years, du Maurier cigarettes sponsored the annual Montreal Jazz Festival in an attempt to “borrow” the festival’s meanings. Sears prominently sponsors the “miracle work” of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (2004–), in an attempt to become synonymous with good deeds, family values, great and selfless service, and a strong presence in local communities. Or, as Victoria Johnson notes of Dodge’s longtime sponsorship of The Lawrence Welk Show (1955–71), the goal was to associate the automaker with “simple,” “Heartland” values of family, community, and conservatism; as Johnson playfully notes:
Welk’s “citizen” stature as a man of tradition, community, and character was essentially defined by his denial of conspicuous personal gain in favor of a rigorous code of moral and behavioral standards. If Welk refused to play Las Vegas because it might offend some of his staunchly religious fans, must it not be the moral thing to do to drive a Dodge?10
In each case, the advertiser attempts to create meaning for a product or brand not at the site of the product or brand itself (i.e., not by simply making a funky cigarette, or a moral store or car, whatever they might look like), but at the site of the ad or promotional venue.
Much of the world of media hype and synergy is pure advertising and branding: posters on subways and at bus-stops and construction sites; roadside billboards; ads in newspapers or magazines; usually one ad spot out of every television commercial break; trailers and previews; “next week on . . .” snippets following television shows; appearances by stars on talk shows or entertainment news programs; interviews in industry or fan magazines; a toy promotion at a fast food chain; a new ride at an amusement park. Even revenue-generating synergy, such as a toy or clothing line, a CD or DVD, or a videogame, act as advertisements in their own right. The product in question, though, is a show, and hence a text, with or without the ad/synergy/hype. This allows advertisers to draw more deeply from the show when constructing an image of that text, as with trailers that lace together multiple scenes from a film or program, or interviews that draw on a star’s already well-manicured public image. Film and television shows therefore often weigh down their paratexts more heavily than in the tabula rasa world of product advertising (where Hummer ads insist that the car is at one with the natural environment that we all know it’s killing). Nevertheless, the advertiser is still faced with the same fundamental need to create a desire, hope, and expectation for the show that will convince a consumer to “purchase”/watch it. As such, hype, synergy, and promos are just as much about creating textuality, and about promising value-added as are ads for Nike or snack foods. As with other ads, too, they create this meaning away from the “product”/show itself. And just as the images and qualities attached to the “text” of Nike shoes by the company’s ads often remain attached, so too then do the images and qualities assigned and attached to shows by their paratexts stick to them, becoming an inseparable part of “the text itself.” In this way, paratexts help to make texts.
What Is a Text?
If paratexts fashion and/or act as “airlocks” to texts, what does the text itself look like? The strange merging of synergistic text with “actual” text and the resulting confusion in vocabulary of textuality demand a reappraisal of what a text is and how it works. Roland Barthes famously insisted that the text is always on the move and hence impossible to grasp or to study as a set object. Barthes drew a distinction in this respect between the text and the work. The work, he explains, “can be held in the hand,” whereas “the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse,” and is “experienced only in an activity of production.”11 One can hold a roll of film or a tape of a television program, but that is the work alone—the text is only experienced in the act of consumption. However, Barthes defines this act of consumption as one of production because no text can be experienced free of the individual reader. In effect, all of us bring to bear an entire reading and life history to any act of textual consumption, so that each one of us will find different resonances in the same text. To offer an exaggerated example, when watching a war film, a person with a family member at war will likely experience a different text than will a second viewer in the middle of a fraternity’s action film marathon. Thus, while the work consists of letters on a page or images on a screen, the text comes alive in the interaction between these letters or images and the reader. The text, as Barthes notes, “decants” the work and “gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice,” thereby asking of its reader “a practical collaboration.”12 The magic and majesty of art rely upon the individual spark that occurs between work and reader as the reader participates in the birth of the text.
Texts make sense because of our past textual experiences, literacy, and knowledge. At a basic level, for instance, if we are new to a language, we can only decode small parts of anything that we read or hear. But fluency extends beyond mere vocabulary and grammar, to visual, imagistic, and artistic literacy and experience. As such, intertextuality—the inescapable links between texts—creates added meaning. Stories that begin with “Once Upon a Time” immediately signal their fairytale roots for those of us who have heard such stories before. Should we hear a character in a television show demand “a room of my own,” if we have read Virginia Woolf’s famous feminist treatise “A Room of Her Own,” the demand may have added resonance. Or, should we be watching a film in which a hand-held camera is following a character by peering through foliage, a history of watching horror films will likely suggest that the character is being stalked, and that the camera’s “eyes” are those of the predator. Language, images, and texts never come to us in a vacuum; instead, as Valentin Volosinov notes, “The utterance is a social phenomenon,” for each shard of textuality or meaning comes to us in a given context. “Any utterance—the finished, written utterance not excepted—makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances. Each monument carries on the work of its predecessors, polemicizing with them, expecting active, responsive understanding, and anticipating such understanding in return.”13 This means not only that texts talk back to and revise other texts, either implicitly or explicitly calling for us to connect their meanings to previous texts, but also that we will always make sense of texts partly through the frames offered by other texts.
Much intertextuality is random, entailing links that an artist could never have predicted. Indeed, much communication is chaotic: change channels from a news item about a rise in local crime to a channel that is advertising home security systems, and the former text may handily intensify the effect of the latter. Or turn from the cannibal-serial-killer film Silence of the Lambs (1991) to a hamburger ad and one may be repulsed. But much intertextuality is intentional too. Michael Riffaterre in particular writes of intertextuality as a means by which writers “guarantee” that readers will come to the same meaning. He argues that all texts rely upon other texts for their meaning and value, so that “the most important component of a literary work of art, and indeed the key to the interpretation of its significance, should be found outside that work, beyond its margins, in the intertext,” the recovery of which “is an imperative and inevitable process.”14 Riffaterre’s faith in intertextuality as conditioning and guaranteeing the “proper interpretation”15 is unrealistic, holding out for a world of perfectly informed readers. Similarly, his inability to recognize the disruptive force of invasive or corruptive intertextuality underplays the multiple roles that intertextuality plays in the reading process, as I will discuss shortly. Nevertheless, he