[...]le body
male body
sex in advertising
racial marked body
(boring questions:)
•whether advertising reflects the world or shape it
•how signs reproduce, create, normalize or subvert the often unequal power structures that exist between male and female bodies
--> **despite potential ambiguity in images we as visual consumers are always presented with a “preferred reading”** @Pierre, Goda --> “image is controlled by discursive limits” (--Sina--> fable of ‘subtlest ideological weapon of advertising’) --Campbell--> paradox of identity construction: the consuming subject chooses among a limited repertoire of “iterated” or preexisting identities provided by marketing and adertising, steering viewers in preferred directions [<-- a fable]
[*]coopt: advertising pretends to acknowledge a competing discourse or ideology, but only pays lip service to it, ignoring its real radical challenge

the idea of advertising: a system that instils (القا، کم کم تزریق کردن) products and services with cultural and social values that are not intrinsic to them [~ magic]
--> highly visible display of ruling-class interests
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetics*
advertising: the pre-eminent way in which the interest of the powerful minority maintain the docility, alienation, or servitude of the majority (--> Goda's understanding of pop culture)

[*]magic: conjure an object from its immediate material rootedness and animate it with a much more potent energy ==> erase human experience of the monotony of consumption with its transient satisfactions and reinvigorate it anew with fresh promise-claims
for example advertisement for mobile phone = *suggestion* (about a certain design aesthetic + a certain tole in professional life + a certain sexual appeal + a certain social network) =/= *announcement* (about a technical device)
(announcement =/= suggestion: the act of advertising)

}--1--> the idea that advertising's signs = carefully constructed highly selective and distortive ways of seeing [=/= simple reflections of the state of the world] ==(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Klein, Curtis, Jhally, @apass, Pierre)==>
•false consciousness
•commodity fetishism
•docility
•passivity
•manipulation of unconscious desire
•environmental degradation

}--2--> the idea that signs actually achieve their aims (through mortise and framing work, cropping, reification, interpellation, cooption, the gaze, face-ism, individuation) --> [Althusser's] interpellation: process by which we are called or hailed into subjecthood through practices imposed onto us from outside interests, subjects are created through material practices (going to church and kneeling down to pray precedes my subjecthood as a spiritual person)
•recruitment advertisement: interpellative genre par excellence ~ through the practice of response we enter into the predefined parameters of relation with the organization {Microsoft's “we want you!” --> 1: act of defining the subject: one who is special, unique, an individual among the masses. 2: collective pronoun: “we” serves to close the subject and the organization within a circuit of common purpose. 3: what is missing: a concrete visualization of working life in the organization, an absence which allows the reader to project his/her own fantasy onto space : ‘infantilize the organization ==> empower the subject’ --represent--> an imaginary relationship =/= real conditions of our existence}

}--✕--> (Campbell) ****images are ontologically cryptic**** : we conceive images to be both agentic & passive, residing in and affecting many spheres simultaneously
•image: visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, figurality, exist within a distinctive socio-legal environment --> **multiple ontologies [Ihde's multistable] move images beyond simple categories of analysis (<-- that is why i am still a visual artist, @Pierre)
***images are extra-organizational entities*** (they are designed by organization but become) *quixotic* and *uncontrollable*
*fable of complex: there is something about the image that is beyond analytic investigation (--Mitchell--> every image theorist seems to find some residue (surplus value) that goes beyond communication, signification, persuassion (there is an extra in images) --> images are complex {
1. they are constantly mutating in meaning and significance
2. they cross aesthetic borders and are not confinable to a particular domain (image = aesthetic + political + social)
3. they act on all domains recursively --impossible--> how the aesthetic life of images affects the political life of images }--Mitchell--> *image as species* (co-evolutionary entities, quasi life-form depend on a host organism) ==>
◦something not fully under human control
◦spread through the host organicism
◦some die some become pandemic


aesthetic --affect--> politic --affect--> aesthetic --affect--> politic


#workshop make an ad for apass


advertising trend
1. information: (from) traditional forms of print & television --to--> intensification and hybridization in oblique ways + through new media (adver-gaming, twitter-piccing, virtual-worlding, Corridor Crew's product placement)
2. persuasion: [as a rhetorical force] (from) information-heavy selling --to--> dramatic persuasion
3. entertainment: communication through entertainment =/= information, persuasion
•(from) staging products in films --to--> embedding of brands so deeply into the fabric of the film's narrative as object-actors that propel the plot
(Corridor Crew's unobtrusive embedding of branded goods and services in storytelling, hybrid both staging and embedding)

brand --> creativity of consumers to create artistic output in the form of art (Star Wars world, Marina Abramovic) --advertising--> rhetorical purpose: *entertain* =/= inform (announcement), persuade, *warn*[old original function of advertising]

*to warn = to inform* [<-- 15th century advertising ==> journalism]


ever growing impetus of advertising to reproduce itself in new forms ==> different account of the evolution of new media : advertising creates new media to propagate itself (*two globally pervasive and path-changing forms of media that would not exist without advertising revenue:)
•search engine
•social networking site

(McLuhan's “medium = message” --> that we should look at the structural nature of media rather than what it contains =/=) *message = medium* (in 20th century)--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and put in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]


[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]

(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)

amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•


[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)

...................................

***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***

marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture

postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> cons[...]