Personalization or the Smallest Marginal Difference.

This chapter focuses on the marginal differences in consumer theory. Advertising as a whole has no meaning. It merely conveys significations. Its significations (and the behaviors they call forth) are never personal: they are all differential; they are all marginal and combinatorial. The real differences which characterized persons made them contradictory beings. Differences of the 'personalizing' type no longer set individuals one against another; these differences are all arrayed hierarchically on an indefinite scale and converge in models, on the basis of which they are subtly produced and reproduced. There is in "personalization" something similar to that "naturalization" effect people constantly meet in the environment, the effect which consists in restoring nature as sign after it has been eliminated in reality. The logic of personalization is the same: it is contemporaneous with naturalization, functionalization, culturalization, etc. It is important to grasp that this personalization, this pursuit of status and social standing, are all based on signs. That is to say, they are based not on objects or goods as such, but on differences.