Objectives:
- Introduce tools: Polemic, counter-argument, cultural analysis, visual rhetoric, troping old materials/concepts
- Review readings with reference to student responses
- Overview changes in consumerism and post-fordist production
- Introduce ProjectOne
Lost in the Supermarket
...whenever pictures perfectly create a single figure and form from many colors and figures, they delight the sight, while the creation of statues and the production of works of art furnish a pleasant sight to the eyes. Thus it is natural for the sight to grieve for some things and to long for others, and much love and desire for many objects and figures is engraved in many men
-Gorgias, Encomium to Helen
I'm all tuned in, I see all the programmes
I save coupons from packets of tea
I've got my giant hit discoteque album
I empty a bottle and I feel a bit free
-The Clash, "Lost in the Supermarket"
I
- Refutation, counter-argument, ethos, cause/consequence, pathos: George W. Bush is often regarded as an ignorant or stupid man. If he is so stupid, how did he get into Yale, one of the most prestigious universities in the country? Bush has been called a coward but he was in the Texas National Guard. How can a dumb and cowardly man become president? He did not elect himself, but was elected by the people of this fine country who must have seen something admirable in him. The war in Iraq was originally set to disarm weapons of mass destruction, get rid of Saddam Hussein to make a dent in terrorism and to free the people of Iraq. There were no weapons found so that mission ceased and Hussein was recently hung. As a result, people see no more reason for the soldiers of America to be there anymore and people are antsy to get their loved ones home. However peace has not been achieved yet and Bush needs more men in Iraq to help aid in the peace spreading to make this final mission complete. - UnionJill
II
- Ethos, Pathos: President Bush has created a society and built a future of security, prosperity, and opportunity for all Americans. Since September 11th 2001, he has taken many steps to protect our homeland and create a world free of terror. Many citizens were crushed by this and tried to grieve for their friends and family and thought invading Iraq was the next best thing. President Bush has his own ideas and plans for the war, but he is also very grateful for the service and sacrifice that our soldiers and families have been through. The President is confident that by helping build a free and secure society that it will help us succeed and make the world a better place to live. He is committed to making sure that we are the best prepared, best educated, and skilled in our workforce through respect and support. He was re-elected for a second term and ensures us that the next generation will be able to look forward to even better days ahead and that our nation will heal after the war. His goal is to promote reliable, affordable, and conservative ways for this place to grow while helping other countries. He truly has a vision for America since his beginning and we, the citizens, should follow his lead. - PomPon
III
- Ethos, Accusation, Either/Or: President Bush's decision to send over 20,000 troops acroos seas into the Middle East has really caused a great deal of controversy throughout the U.S. The aspect of this that really scratches my head is how our country totally and always forgets about the past. It happens with present day voting turnouts. There have been thousands and thousands of men who have died in our past history to protect our freedoms and rights and one of our riches heritages and roots is our right to vote. The fact that people don't even care or turnout to vote for anything at all is a joke to me. The same thing has kind of happened in the War on Terror. Six years ago terrorists shocked the world and gave the U.S. a huge setback and made us face a lot of adversity. We were very vulnerable at that time and upset. Everyone in this country wanted to go to war and stop this terrorism for good so it never happens again. Even though things are still murky in the Middle East we have made a lot of progress. We just ridiculed the French for being cowards and then we come right back at our government and gripe about how we need to bring our troops back. But I believe President Bush sees through the murkiness. He knows that we are potentially very close to stopping terror and can make the world a much safer place with the newly stable governed Iraq that were trying to accomplish. People criticize President Bush all the time but you have to admit he has a lot of courgage and a little pioneer character to him. He has kept to his plan and showed great leadership and confidence to lead this country. I believe he is trying to finish what he started and not get caught off guard. He's doing a great job of staying the course and I respect that. - Zack9
IV
- Ethos: One thing you must respect about Bush is his determination: he does not crumble and conform to the pressures of the public. The public’s disproval of Bush generally stems from the war on Iraq, which in my opinion was necessary to the Iraqi people. Everyone knows that Hussein was an evil dictator and for the United States to place the control of an entire country into his hands was unreasonable; War was necessary to abdicate such a man and it proved effective as shortly after his capture, Hussein was tried and executed. My real issue here is that when people talk of Bush, the war in Iraq is always mentioned but is that all there is to talk about? - SolAce
V
- Ethos, the Framers' card: I also agree with Zack when he says America is easy to forget their heritage, and most of all their history. It may be unpopular, his decision to send more troops, but there are many presidents in the past that have gone against the wishes of the public and that decision ended up being the best for the country. We have put faces of such presdients on a mountain, the same ones who have lead the nation in places that it didn't want to go at the time. I'm not saying for sure that he is doing the right thing but I do know that the public is three things fickle, near-sighted, and critical. So let's not be too quick to judge his decisions because he didn't become president by being a blundering fool but we voted him in for being the best man to lead the nation, even when the nation isn't behind him. - Jim
Return of the Hidden Persuaders
Troping: Vance Packard
Shifts in Marketing Technique: Far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho-persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions.
The in depth analysis of Ruth Shalit's part one, Return of the Hidden Persuaders, I would have to disagree with his theory of relating enjoyable childhood experiences to the favoring of certain gas stations. In this case, it only relates to pathos, but doesn't touch bases with ethos and logos. There isn't logic to come into a gas station where someone had a great experience in, especially in childhood days. In all realness, no one would faithfully go to a certain gas station if it were 8 cents higher, or 5, 4, 3 (at least I wouldn't try to) cents higher as opposed to another gas station across the street that was cheaper.
I found it very interesting that alot of ads now a days mention incentives like free food or 'half-off'. I feel that memories of younger years and expiriences do not affect the influence of the same person years down the road. For example, my mom uses colgate toothpaste and always has since I was little. I personally have never liked colgate, nore use it, and plan to never purchase any in the future. I feel that Shalit's point was not well justified and can only be really proven in the most extreme cases only.
As a psychology major, I couldn’t help but shake my head in disgust after reading the two articles by Ruth Shalt. Being an advocate of Jung, and a being a semi-advocate of Freud’s dream theories (most of his theories are garbage since, as Jung himself said, “Freud considers the brain an extension of the genitals!”) I can’t help but feel dirty over the fact that they’re being used by big business. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of these practices being put into use, though I have imagined it to be the case many times, so I’m a bit torn on the subject. While it’s obvious the benefits of the archetype research, the idea that they’re probing people’s subconscious for a quick buck bothers the hell out of me. The main two problems that are bothering me with this is: why should they be using the data gained from the unconscious for advertising a product regardless of how the product is? And, is their idea that it’s like therapy actually… work like therapy?
Products based on conquering marketshare through understanding mindshare: Rapaille's greatest triumph came last February, when the consultant was asked to preside over the design of the PT Cruiser -- a Mad Max-type vehicle described by the Wall Street Journal as "part 1920s gangster car, part 1950s hot rod, and part London taxicab." The vehicle, which hits dealerships in January 2000, is a focus group on wheels -- an actual, chrome-and-sheet-metal incarnation of the popular will. "We didn't set out to create a market," Bostwick says earnestly. "We just tapped into what people had in their heads in the first place."
After reading “The Return of the Hidden Persuaders” by Ruth Shalit, I find myself disgusted. I am disgusted by the fact that corporations are trying to mess with people’s subconscious’s so they can sell more products. How long will it be until our dreams become commercials? While trying to find what people would like in the depths of their minds and making an object fit those specifications isn’t too bad, the whole molding the mind to want to purchase Shell gasoline is more than a little sick. I also think it’s funny that the companies who put so much effort into psychoanalysis are paranoid that they won’t be able to sell anything without some sort of mental influence (to or from the brain, it doesn’t seem to matter). It’s more than a little disturbing that these companies don’t seem to care about what happens to these people or any sort of damage their studies might do (conditioning children for example). And the PT Cruiser? That’s one hella ugly car.
Conformity, orginality, and rhetoric: The turn probably began back in the '50s, when the admen realized, much to their chagrin, that advances in technology and the growing standardization of ingredients were resulting in brands that were technically identical. The old approach -- reciting product benefits, hammering home a "unique selling proposition" -- didn't work anymore. And so, as the marketers wrung their hands, wondering how to cope with this newfound problem of "rapidly diminishing product differences," the ad agencies groped for new and deeper persuasion techniques, sexier approaches, sharper hooks.
Looking at the readings I realize what my view of commercial advertisement was in the past. Dead wrong. I used to think the usual- they just want your money, they don’t care about the individual, etc. This kind of thinking was merely an imposition of the thinking of others and I find now that although I held this view that wasn’t mine, i put it out of my mind and regardlessly played the role of consumer and was attracted by their ploys. What I have gleaned from these articles is that it doesn’t really matter either way. Advertising tries to entice you into buying the product, whether it be toilet paper or a movie, but I see that without this race to entice me, I would miss out on many amazing experiences. Today’s corporations have changed or are changing their ways to accomodate you, the consumer. What I don’t get is why people still see this as mere mind control when it obviously isn’t. YOU are in control of your brain and YOU are in charge of buying what YOU want and need, not because a company is telling you to do so.
Why Johnny Can't Dissent
Genre: (Pop)Cultural Criticism
Tone: Polemical
Troping: Why Johnny Can't Read
Capitalism is changing, obviously and drastically. From the moneyed pages of the Wall Street Journal to TV commercials for airlines and photocopiers we hear every day about the new order's globe-spanning, cyber-accumulating ways. But our notion about what's wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven't changed much in thirty years. Call it, for convenience, the "countercultural idea." It holds that the paramount ailment of our society is conformity, a malady that has variously been described as over-organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy, logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian. We all know what it is and what it does. It transforms humanity into "organization man," into "the man in the gray flannel suit." It is "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery," the "incomprehensible prison" that consumes "brains and imagination." It is artifice, starched shirts, tailfins, carefully mowed lawns, and always, always, the consciousness of impending nuclear destruction. It is a stiff, militaristic order that seeks to suppress instinct, to forbid sex and pleasure, to deny basic human impulses and individuality, to enforce through a rigid uniformity a meaningless plastic consumerism.
Structure
- 2-4: The Countercultural Ideal (1950s conformity, the Yippies, The Beats)
- 5-6: (segue) Corporations no Longer Hypostasized on Conformist Ideals
- 7-8: (intensification) Consumerism now itself about "Difference"
Johnny can’t dissent my ass. If Johnny can’t find things to dissent from (you know, like the ever-becoming fascist government, the very power that big business has over our lives, or the corruption in either) he’s an idiot and doesn’t deserve to be part of the counter-culture.
The other article, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent” by Frank discusses how people will naturally stray from normality and eventually become social deviants. I always find it amusing when businesses try to set them apart from other businesses that sell similar products because you can’t really tell which kind of crowd they are trying to appeal to or when the company tries too hard to reach out to the younger generation (just the other day I saw a Pepto Bismol commercial which had a bunch of people just break dancing). Although I can agree that some companies need to be different to succeed, the main thing to look at is how great the product is, and how this will help people.
Consumerism is no longer about "conformity" but about "difference."
Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated individualism.... This imperative of endless difference is today the genius at the heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from "sameness" that satiates our thirst for the New with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-Eleven.
The two come together in perfect synchronization in a figure like Camille , whose ravings are grounded in the absolutely noncontroversial ideas of the golden sixties.... For her, as for most other designated dissidents, there is no contradiction between replaying the standard critique of capitalist conformity and repressiveness and then endorsing its rebel products--for Paglia the car culture and Madonna--as the obvious solution: the Culture Trust offers both Establishment and Resistance in one convenient package. The only question that remains is why Paglia has not yet landed an endorsement contract from a soda pop or automobile manufacturer.
Paglia
- 12-17: New Management Theory (Drucker, Peters, Reich, Handy, Mindell)
- 18: Blurring of Consumerist/Anti-Consumerist Tropes (the anti-office, the dis-organization, "Different is Good")
Our businessmen imagine themselves rebels, and our rebels sound more and
more like ideologists of business. Henry Rollins, for example, the maker of loutish, overbearing music and composer of high-school-grade poetry,
straddles both worlds unproblematically.
What we understand as "dissent" does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the cultural faiths of Western business. What David Rieff wrote of the revolutionary pretensions of multiculturalism is equally true of the countercultural idea: "The more one reads in academic multiculturalist journals and in business publications, and the more one contrasts the speeches of CEOs and the speeches of noted multiculturalist academics, the more one is struck by the similarities in the way they view the world." What's happened is not co-optation or appropriation, but a simple and direct confluence of interest.
(Dissent) is no longer any different from the official culture it's supposed to be subverting.
- 24: Accusation / Specification
The people who staff the Combine aren't like Nurse Ratched. They aren't
Frank Burns, they aren't the Church Lady, they aren't Dean Wormer from
Animal House, they aren't those repressed old folks in the commercials who
want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They're hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is their official ideology, and they're always going to be there at the poetry reading to encourage your "rebellion" with a hearty "right on, man!" before you even know they're in the auditorium. You can't outrun them, or even stay ahead of them for very long: it's their racetrack, and that's them waiting at the finish line to congratulate you on how outrageous your new style is, on how you shocked those stuffy prudes out in the heartland.
Project One
Fun with Ad Analysis
Assignment for Tuesday
Read over the instructions for ProjectOne (and the example executions posted at the bottom of that page) and chapter 2 and 3 of They Say/I Say (28-47). Compose the first paragraph (or two, if you're up for it) of an ad analysis and post it to the FourthResponse page before 9 AM on Tuesday.
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