DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-097

Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano, Italy

giacomo.festi@gmail.com)

Abstract

The history of the ways in which food has been valorized finds in the quality one of the most common forms of promotional meaning in modern times (for instance, see Stanzani 2005). If semiotics is interested in exploring questions about food quality, often reduced to a generic synonym of value, it should point out the semantic elasticity of the term. On one side, the quality signified the alliance with the techno-science and its networks of measure (cfr. Callon, Méadel e Rabeharisoa 2000), becoming connected with quantity or performance (consti­tuting an essential pivot in the identity differentiation of food products), on the other side it was always close with the elective values of excellence and absolute singularity, turn away even from the possibility of compari­son (cfr. Teil 2004). The quality in the food processing, in an analogous way, oscillate between the qualitative standards (think about the different ISO) and the singularity of certain productions, given by the sum of hetero­geneous components (the climate, the local history, the treatments, etc.), as in the case of Slow Food presidia.

In our communication, beyond the mapping of different discursive dynamics of quality, which are rhetorical and then socio-cultural (for a first enquiry, see Festi 2013), we will try to show the way quality has been treated by marketing and promotional communication: the strong asymmetry in the competence between producers and consumers, finds in the quality a particularly relevant evidence, asking for further doses of education of the con­sumer in order to make more recognizable the different qualities, appreciated and fully valorized, finally reduc­ing the constitutive distance between the world of production and the world of consumption.

1. Approaching quality from a semiotic point of view

In order to introduce a semiotic perspective about quality, it is emblematic to start looking at the following old print advertisement proposed by Coca Cola in the late 40s (1947). The value “quality” is explicit here and appears along with a representation of the factory and of the assembly line that metaphorically connects the space of production with the external space where the viewer/consumer is supposed to be.

Fig. 1: Cola Cola advertisement (1947).

The industry is the source of quality, and the continuity justifying the quality is the ongoing movement of the assembly line, i.e. the serial production that becomes here a continuous space connecting the two poles of the communication. This print ad is interesting since it displays a specific semantic of quality that dramatically changed over the years. Today quality as a value is still at the center of our world of promotion inside the food domain, but the industry is what need to be hidden, becoming a kind of representational taboo. Nowadays, the same brand Coca Cola is creating a fictive imagery of the factory as a magic place, where each bottle is unique and the result of an adventure full of indetermination which is the very contrary of the serial production. Each conclusion of the process, in an international and popular commercial of 2006 (significantly called the “happiness factory”), recreate an autographic version of the bottle and is celebrated by a parade, charging with exceptionality what can be a daily consumption. The term itself, quality, hardly appears, eventually in the packaging, but transformed in one of the many facets of quality, for instance the information about the quantity of sugar or calories. The quality does not depend explicitly from the serial production, but is more and more immanent to the product itself. Finally, we would like to take seriously our old print advertisement, as a suggestion to reconnect quality to industry, to retrace the threads of a chain of production that is also a chain of meaning production.

This research on quality is part of a wider survey touching the macro-values of food inside communication practices. Along with taste and sustainability, quality is a lasting value inside the food domain and our general and driving questions are: why quality can be interesting for semiotics and for semiotics of food especially? Which theoretical aspects can be touched when we consider this very general form of valorization?

Quality displays an intrinsic semiotic dimension since is always mediated: we could even say that it perfectly exemplifies the idea of an intangible meaning being elsewhere. Sometimes this invisibility depends on an existential requirement (“something is present inside the product”) that exactly problematizes the conversion into an actual experience: i.e. how to recognize and eventually appreciate that quality? Not surprisingly, quality is often inaccessible to the direct perception of the consumer (like in the case of the chemical qualities of a product). The signs of quality used inside communication point then to other spaces and other social domains[1].

Quality is also part of a general landscape of multiple food values, a range of possibilities that are semiotically linked to different general scenarios of implementation of those values: while taste is stressing the actual perception, an embodied relationship between the object and the subject, sustainability is connecting the subject/object relationship to the destiny of the environment and also of human groups, assuming the ethical aim at its core. Quality, on the contrary, seems to isolate or separate the object from the subject in order to introduce a cognitive dimension of knowledge about the identity of the object. We could have hence the confrontation between an esthesic value, the taste, with an ethic value, sustainability, to end with a critical value, the quality[2]. Nevertheless, things are more complex, as we will try to demonstrate.

In the very popular square of the values of consumption proposed by Floch (1990, ch. 6), the quality, always connected to price and not really having a proper autonomy, is located among the critical values, as negation of utopian or existential values, since the cognitive aspect of comparison is dominant. It is true that the semantics of quality demonstrates first of all the quest for explicit parameters in order to evaluate the quality itself: the critical knowledge involves the possibility to compare different productions, at least inside the same category. Quality, this is the first feature we would like to point out, signals the alliance between industry and hard science. In this sense, it has always been coupled with quantity. The quality becomes a value if it can be measured in order to assess the performance of a product or of a production. The value quality involves always a form of delegated sanction that objectifies the product passing through the mediation of a third, whether it be another authoritative subject or the knowledge itself, what supports the rhetoric of the trust of the final consumer.

On the other side, quality witnesses immediately the projection of a system of values, anaxiology, introducing the opposition between high quality and low quality, or between presence or absence of quality[3]. Affirming the quality of something means sometimes, immediately, underlying the high quality.

Each specific quality evoked inside a promotional discourse activates a referential dimension, following the analysis of the scientific writing made by Greimas (1983). The quality pretends to be “quality of something”, under a certain relevance, but this cross-reference is not only pointing to other discourses but also to an universe of practices and relationships among different social domains. Industrial food quality, we could say, is such if it could overcome the proofs of science, medicine and law, before arriving inside communication and marketing. The quality is what passes through domains, is the residual that survived to the multiplicity of interests and heterogeneous perspectives. Quality is a kind of compromise that virtually contains struggles, tensions, challenges. The text of Alessandro Stanziani (2005) about the history of quality in France widely demonstrates this stratification of aspects. All the rhetoric of the quality of wine, for instance, arose in the second part of the XIX Century, following a period of crisis in the market with the massive introduction of chemistry inside the production and the new possibilities of falsification of the product itself. A strong questioning about the identity of wine required the different actors involved in the chain of production to establish more rules. The law of 1905 closed a long period of debate and conflicts about wine definition. We could say that a veridictive question arose, establishing what was a genuine or a fake wine, and the term quality, at the end, covered all the negotiations about the re-determination of the identity of the product. As a consequence of this way to consider quality, we could potentially determine different networks of quality, with different rhetorical strength, at least if we were sociologist of science practices.

Not surprisingly, it is quite evident the gap existing between the studies in the sociology of the markets and their interest about quality issues[4], and the relative absence of semiotic reflection about this topic. From one side, a debate around the definition of quality is widely present inside sociology, with a proposed theoretical solution that can be semiotically appreciated, the idea of studying the processes of qualification of products[5]. Quality, then, is the big engine of differentiation in modern markets, but it can work only if the industry creates the alliance with the socio-technical networks responsible of assessing, evaluating and measure the pretended quality. From the other side, the semiotic one, we clearly miss structured works, using specific corpora in order to explore this topic more in depth.

2. Four discursive regimes for quality

This is not the place to open a general semantic discussion about the canonical economic definitions of quality that could be find in any marketing manual: in their diversity, one common element is the matching always stable between the needs of the consumer and the characteristics of the product. This perfect coupling is, on the contrary, an open semiotic issue, since a meaning elaboration is always supposed as a relevant mediation in the subject/object relationship. We could on the contrary switch to the observation on how quality is treated inside different discourses and practices that deal with food. From a discursive perspective, quality appears at least under four different regimes of meanings, which we will try to characterize as follow:

i) Quality seems first of all connected to the respect of certain rules of production which are forms granting a general identity of the output of the process. In continuity with the institutional and law domain, the food supply need some qualitative standards, especially in the perspective of food safety. Quality as standard thematizes the adherence to a system of constrictions, often highly procedural, as in the case of the different formal systems of quality (see the ISO). The syntax of the process is what matters, the shape of the process being more relevant than the contents that are treated. The value, then, switches to the identity of the operations and, extensively, on the subject/ producer that is responsible for that. The process as such is already a form of abstraction: the input and the output count less than the operations. From another point of view, what prevails is an algorithmic logic, where the production is the manifestation of a type, an ideal form. We can call this first case of figure, the normative or grammaticalized quality.

ii) A second meaning of quality is exemplified by the technical policies of production (disciplinari in Italian), for instance in the case of the Slow Food presidia. In that case, the difference with the standard procedures is the fact that the quality depends on a praxis settled over time, which is of course codified, but where the codification keeps memory of all the heterogeneity of the traditional aspects of the production process. It is about a testimonial quality, connecting an identity to a specific past, historically hence culturally determined. The kind of knowledge introducing norms pretends to mirror historically attested praxis more than imposing new forms of process depending on a certified knowledge. We can call this second figure, praxeological ortypified quality.

iii) A third case of figure depends on the refusal of already existing norms, introducing new evaluative parameters. The quality in this case becomes part of a process of innovation or of redetermination of the identities of products, first of all from a cognitive point of view. It's about the re-opening of a dispute about the identities, amplifying the expressive possibilities on the basis of new knowledge or on the inedited projection of knowledge created in a field, into another one. An example of this kind of new quality is the extension of the wine system of cru into another field of production, like honey, which was done by Mieli Thun in Italy, a clear attempt to redefine and refine the complexity of a tasting object like honey.

Of course, the search of a new quality faces the problem of re-qualifying the consumer. This kind of quality, which constitute a movement forward, that anticipates the contact with the consumer, can be called “designed”, or redesigned, in order to emphasize the attempt to reconfigure inter-identity relationships. Indeed, the project of enhancing a quality requires formative or educational strategies for the consumer. If the producer is not considering this necessary moment, foreshadowing possible couplings, the operation risks to remain under-perceived.

iv) In the last case of figure, quality is played as singularity, as a sum of specificities. The quality as exceptionality of something is the very contrary of grammar. It can be a local product, specific, layered, that reinvents nature-culture relationships in its own. As a contrary of grammar, here the concept of text as singularity is what counts, following also the idea of autography proposed by Goodman (1968). This quality, as singular, is textualized[6]. Products and production practices that are part of this niche, individuate a ground of possibilities, that not necessarily is inside a circuit of rationalization of practices or ingredients that constitute its specificity. The case of the terroir in the field of wine can be taken as an example. Each terroir is singular and the reflexive movement of explanation of its constituent is never ending[7].

We could resume these four meanings in a square of oppositions, articulating in this way the different interpretations of quality.

Moreover, we could move toward a tensive representation of these positions, slightly different, but probably more interesting, since we can realize a topological representation, a mapping, that starts from continuous valences. The problem, in that case, is the interpretation of the two axes of control. From one side we should have the degree of heterogeneity in the relations involved along the process of determination of the value (the opposition being between /restricted/vs. /extended/ or /uniqueness/ vs. /multiplicity/). The extension is hence concerning the comparison as a form of rationalization. From the other side, on the contrary, we find the intensity of differentiation, more or less tonic. The oscillation between the quality as conformity and the quality as specification, already present in literature, is better represented in this second semantic representation.

The contrast between the two main meanings of quality finds here a form of translation and reinterpretation: excellence is a model that insist on singularity whose limit is the subtraction of the object from the comparability itself (like in the models of valorization of the luxury products[8]), while the conformity ends to be indifferent to the product in favor of the process, which can be participated by other producers.

3. Quality inside advertisement

If the general model of quality informed the world of production, the internal logic of organization of industries and factories and the quest for innovation and differentiation, the arrival of quality inside the domain of the communication seems to be a kind of derivation. This is probably one of the reasons why quality has not been really considered an interesting field of analysis, as a pale reflection of what happened elsewhere. Nevertheless, we can observe the different forms of translation of quality inside promotional communication.

Sketching a typology of the different strategies of communication, we start with the most adopted solution, the certification, that exactly imagines the object as the result of a performance of production, already sanctioned by a third social actor and then trustful. The presence of a label on the packaging is typically the textual element that point to and assure the quality claim of the product.

The focus on the sanction can change in what we can call the descriptive model, where the reasons of quality are argued, as an attempt to work on the competence of the consumer. But sometimes, in this process of derivation, quality becomes a kind of empty rhetorical device used only to point out a difference, hence a value, without any further explanation, without any specific label. This is a sort of dead-point, the degradation of the quality model inside communication.

On the other side, considering the requalification of the same value, quality can become an attractor around which imagining a whole form of life, what represents an effective promotion of the value. We had occasion to work on a corpus of print advertisements of Eataly, the Italian store of high quality food products, where quality is the absolute protagonist also in communication, with a lot of facets. In the following couple of print advertisements, the movement toward a form of life seems to us more evident.

Fig. 2: Two print advertisements by Eataly.

The first one says: “We are not satisfied. Quality has no limits. We looked after even better food, (etc.)”. Quality is grasped as imperfect from an aspectual point on view (“no limits”), what requires an always activated subject, in search of new qualities, hence a refined modern subject. That driving dimension of quality is shared between the producer, the distributor and the consumer, being a crossing valorization but only in the form of life perspective. The second one is more centered on the consumer: “Dedicated to who prefers what puts inside his body rather than what remains outside”. The search for quality seems immediately to foreshadow an axiology that depends on filtering values (the refinement of the food choice), a pathemic disposition (curiosity and generic passion for food), a rhythm (regular intervals), a modal dimension (combining wanting to with knowing), etc. All the semiotic levels of organization of contents are affected by this “coherent deformation” (Greimas 1993), that defines a form of life.

4. The power of quality

As a consequence of this approach, moving toward a conclusion, we realize that a dialectic between the production of qualities and the communication of them is effective. This inevitable tension permits us to detect four phenomena that we will briefly comment. First of all, inside the quality paradigm of industry, all the strategies of falsification, sophistication or adulteration of quality becomes possible. Since the communicative gap is present, all the uses of signs in order to lay are possible, and the progressive complexification of the controls is paralleled by the inventiveness of the forgers. Secondly, we should reflect about the statute of certain kind of discourses or knowledge involved in a quality assessment, that impact on the strength of certain webs of quality. For instance, the science of nutrition can be highly controversial, following a kind of Latour characterization of scientific practices[9], at least since it structurally depends, more and more, on lifestyles, which are intrinsically introducing a semantic and axiological dimension.

A third observation is that quality in communication can disappear in favor of a constellation of other values which are avatars of the quality model: freshness, genuineness, organoleptic contents, nutritional aspects, nutraceutical components, food safety. Beside these different determinations and denominations, the common aspect is exactly the alliance between socio-technical webs of measurement and the industry. Quality can be indefinitely specified through many descriptors that become values in their own.

As a last point, since quality is mainly about the rational organization of the domain of production, we could say that it tried to cannibalize the two other big forms of valorization of food, taste and sustainability, which seemed both to resist to the quality model for different reasons, creating a growing destabilization for the actors of the food market. Taste involves a phenomenological and hence embodied experience of the product, a strongly qualitative experience. Nevertheless, the development of sensorial analysis created the background for the imitation of a scientific approach, capable of determining or of giving a scientific-like representation of taste[10]. More and more, we see spider schemas or scales of value with specific taste descriptors appearing on the packaging of certain products (coffee and tea are leading examples of this phenomenon). Tasting quality, then, tends to be reconfigured inside the pure quality model, while audiovisual advertisement, on the contrary, faces the problem of using its own language (mainly audiovisual) to translate the invisible tasting experience, in order to promote and enhance it, as a subjective event. On the other side, the quality model is stressed by the value sustainability, which immediately poses the problem of denying the autonomy of the product, putting it in relationship with the environment (also pushing more democratic instances inside the life of the enterprises, for instance giving more weight to the stakeholders). Sustainability pretends to activate a reference to ethics, an ethical system of production that enters in relationship with the future generations, what can hardly be measured as required inside the quality systems. The narrative of the achievement, as a consequence, is substituted by the narrative of the engagement and challenge.

Nevertheless, starting from the early appearance of the discourses about sustainability, the concept of “environmental quality” was developed during the 70s[11], exactly with the intention of mapping all the relationships a product could interweave with the environment. A quality, furthermore, no more immanent to the product, but already relational, like in the case of taste quality. Many indexes of the impact of the product on the environment were then developed, like the life cycle assessment (LCA) and today we count many institutions that try to certify sustainable productions. That said, can we really label ethics? The price to pay to this quality approach toward sustainability is the substantial disappearance of the ethical dimension and the reduction of sustainability only to the environmental aspects, largely avoiding the socio-cultural dimension. The phenomenological tasting body from one side and the holistic perspective on the environmental issues from the other side, which were supposed to erode the historical dominance of the quality model, have to face the adaptive and masking power of this highly semiotic dispositive of communication which is quality.

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