Levi's "Wildman" (1987) introduced the hypersignifying eye.

By 1993, Levi's routinely, though self-reflexively, decentered models on the screen.

Advertisers in the 1980s adopted two fundamental changes in the way they framed and presented photographic images. First, advertisers now commonly included shots that we call denotative danglers -- close-up shots of signifiers that emphasize the detailed contours of material objects and human gestures in "the world of directly-experienced social reality" (see Schutz, 1967). The second change incorporates violations of photographic conventions about centering images. In the new realism (e.g., AT&T; Levi's; Michelob; Clearasil) faces and objects were dispersed asymmetrically along the edges of the screen, or sometimes the primary signifier on screen consists of an oversized and offcenter eye or cheekbone or shoulder. The new 'realism' materially de-centers human subjects within the frame of the screen. These two advertising practices have gone hand in hand. Joined to the practice of photographically decentering people are extremely tight close-ups of their body parts -- an eye here, a hand there, a foot, a partial face. Levi's 1987 'Wildman' ad featured 22 shots of hands and 26 shots of eyes and/or facial expressions. Hypersignification and photographic decentering depend on an extreme abstraction of body parts from the human subject. In so doing, interpretation is steered not just towards the inflated significance of the objectified body part, but even more so to the metacommunicative technique that frames the objects as hypersignifiers.

The use of hypersignified eyes has evolved over the years in advertising to connote human subjectivity but also as a dataport (see our page on "Eyes').

The shift to hypersignifiers has been motivated by the need to stand out and break through advertising clutter. For example, when Johnson & Johnson wanted a campaign that would break rules for baby advertising, their advertising agency, Lintas, tried using photographic blowups of babies' body parts. To be "impactful" they concentrated on close-ups of parts and then created contrast between visuals and the copy by doubling the meanings (Seeman, 1988: 28). Pepsi pioneered the use of hypersignifiers with a campaign featuring vignettes of interaction focused exclusively on close-up shots of hands and feet. But these were slowly paced narratives. Over the years, the pace has quickened and the abstracted signifiers are frequently thrown together in ways which might appear to the novice viewer as non-narrative. Accustomed as viewers are to recognizing media codes and to seeking out and identifying stories (seeking closure), commercials such as those for Levi's and Michelob represent startlingly opaque texts.

In the 1970s, advertisers perfected the art of depicting the self in terms of its constituent body parts, fetishizing each body part so it corresponded to appropriate commodities. Typically, ads articulate a fetishism defined by linear editing practices that set up assumptions of causal relations between properly commodified body parts and desirable social outcomes (see Goldman, 1987). By contrast, 1980s campaigns such as those by Pepsi or Johnson & Johnson focused on the body part by dwelling on the surface texture of a hand or a foot in relation to a trace of a surrounding material reality. In these ad campaigns, the part becomes read as an indicator of a person's subjectivity - the personality seems to express itself via the body part. The cuts and the relational editing do not establish a necessary relation of causality. Again, as opposed to ads which abstract a perfect hand and represent it as the idealized and perfect hand, ad campaigns which rely on the 'realism' of hypersignifiers seek to convey an existential quality by emphasizing the hand's gestural significance rather than its form. Whereas, the conventional ad as commodity-mirror asks that we collapse our ego ideal with commodity abstraction, campaigns that rely on apparently non-mediated hypersignifiers 'claim' to leave your existence intact but 'merely suggest' that you can integrate the commodity sign into your own authenticity in ways you deem fit. As an alternative to ads which steal yourself and offer it back in new improved forms, hypersignifier-based ads offer instead to give you back a sign of yourself as you are.

And yet, the very form of advertisements subverts this kind of humanist, existential claim since every ad demands that we interpretively abstract and universalize the object, sign or gesture as corresponding to what we might potentially have if we used the commodity in question. Hypersignifiers may be organized to deny the fiction of reproducibility, but they generally reproduce that condition.