Marketing meaninglessness: critical anthropology of transnational advertising agencies

Advertising plays a paradoxical role in contemporary capitalism - it's a central site of production of meanings and value under contemporary capitalism and at the same time a place where meaninglessness is often manifested - by our critical commonsense (we all imagine advertising to be manipulative and play on 'false needs') and by continuous reports of advertisers themselves (Graeber 2018). In my project I intend to study how the absence of meaning is manifested in contemporary advertising and whether meaninglessness could be observed and studied through anthropological means. For this, I suggest an ethnographic study of transnational advertising agency with fieldsites in two regional offices - main office in London, and a regional branch in Moscow. Participant observation across two fieldsites will help me immerse myself in the everyday routine at each site in order to understand how the specific work/communication practices contribute to the perception of absence/presence of meaning. The work across the two offices will allow me to understand how specific regimes of perceptions can be globally sustained within dominating form of contemporary advertising - transnational advertising agencies.
Anthropology is well known for its effective critique of the essentializing ideologies underlying issues of sexism, racism, and colonialism. However, the discipline encounters a certain difficulty when attempting a critique of the political economy. While most anthropologists focus on meanings and how meanings are locally produced and transmitted, the absence and/or superficial nature of meaning is often highlighted as central to the capitalist mode of production and specifically capitalist culture in Marxist theories - for example, in Lukacs's (1972) notion of 'reification', Debord's (1970) 'society of the spectacle', and Baudrillard's (1983) idea of 'simulacra'. Such a critical conceptualization of capitalism is, in turn, often criticized by anthropologists for being essentialist (e.g. Ferguson 1990). But what if we see meaninglessness ubiquitous under contemporary capitalism not as an absence or a defect of culture but as something that is culturally produced and can be empirically and ethnographically observed? Could it promise a possibility of a more substantial critical anthropology of capitalism?
Some anthropologists attempted to tackle this controversy (Graeber 2015, 2018; Frederiksen 2018). But their work has been criticized for failing to provide means for observation and description of meaninglessness or valueless-ness. I suggest, however, that we can approach meaninglessness ethnographically rigorously and empirically by seeing it through a Peircean notion of qualia that has been used to study how people assign value to certain perceived qualities and how certain things come to stand for the qualities they represent (Munn 1986, Chu 2010, Gal 2013, Harkness 2013, Shankar 2015). Following this body of work, my project asks not why certain phenomena are essentially meaningless under contemporary capitalism, but how the quale of meaninglessness is regimented and culturally produced.
For such an anthropological study of meaninglessness the transnational advertising agency is an ideal site. On the one hand, advertising is a central site of the production of meaning and value in contemporary societies: advertising companies shape how consumers imagine themselves, the 'normal' lifestyle, and production and consumption under capitalism in general (Davila 2001, Mazzarella 2003, Shankar 2015). On the other hand, the advertising industry is also marked by a persistent production of meaninglessness that is manifested both in a critical commonsense (we all imagine advertising to be manipulative, play on 'false needs', etc.) and in the personal experiences of their jobs reported by the advertisers and marketers themselves (Graeber 2018).