AMERICAN ADVERTISING & THE SCIENCE OF SIGNS
Robert GoldmanFall 2008
Howard 371
Office hours: WF: 1:30-3:00 P.M. Th 10:00-2:00 P.M.; and by appointment
Advertising offers us familiar cultural texts that can be used to pry open critical questions about society, culture, ideology and power over the last century. Advertising is a cultural form that permits the exploration of critical social theory in conjunction with the study of semiotics. Rather than treat advertising as trivial, I contend that advertising has developed into a dominant discourse in contemporary capitalist society -- a discourse, which today, shapes our culture just as profoundly as religion and schooling did in previous eras.
Never before in human society has there been such an abundance and concentrated density of visual images. Whether we remember or forget particular images we routinely take them in, decipher them, and move on, all in the wink of an eye. We are, however, so habitually accustomed to being addressed by advertising images that we can easily become indifferent to their full significance. We take them for granted and they become part of the climate of our lives. Although we may accept, reject, sneer, or shrug our shoulders at any given claim made by an ad, we generally accept, without reflection, the total system of advertising images. We have, in other words, become habitual interpreters.
Since advertisements routinely intrude into our consciousness, it seems appropriate to return the favor and intrude into their space -- to disturb them. Instead of habitual interpretation, we shall slow them down so that we may critically interrogate this cultural form. This course focuses on developing social and cultural theories of ads, and more generally, of commodity culture. We shall try to do so by developing a critical methodology for reading, and situating, commodity culture.
Books:
John Berger, Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars, 1978.
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Robert Goldman & Stephen Papson, Sign Wars. New York: Guilford, 1996.
Robert Goldman & Stephen Papson, Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. London: Sage Publications, 1998.
Course Outline and Readings
On Meaning & Ideology in Photographic Images
John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Chapters 1-4.
John Berger, "Appearances," pp.83-129 in John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Looking. Pantheon, 1982.
Toward A History & Theory of Commodity Culture & Advertising
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: advertising & the social roots of the consumer culture, pp.23-109. McGraw-Hill, 1976.
T.J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: advertising & the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930," pp.3-38 in R. W. Fox and T.J.J. Lears (eds), The Culture of Consumption. Pantheon, 1983.
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, pp.xv-24; 52-87; 117-284; 335-363. University of California Press, 1985.
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," pp.217-251 in Illuminations. Schocken, 1969.
Susan Willis, "Unwrapping use-value," pp.1-22 in A Primer for Daily Life. Routledge, 1991.
Bernard Gendron, "Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs," pp.18-36 in T. Modleski (ed), Studies in Entertainment. University of Indiana Press, 1986.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the meaning of style. pp.91-127. Methuen, 1979.
Jean Baudrillard, "The Order of Simulacra," pp.50-86 in Symbolic Exchange & Death. Sage, 1993.
Jean Baudrillard, “Advertising,” pp.164-196 in The System of Objects. Verso, 1996.
Celeste Olalquiaga, “Holy Kitschen,” pp.36-55 in Megalopolis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992.
Reading Ads or How to Break the Code
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp.129-54.
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, pp.1-89.
Robert Goldman, "The Mortise & the Frame," in Reading Ads Socially, pp.61-84. Routledge, 1992.
Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," pp.128-138 in Stuart Hall et al., (eds), Culture Media and Language. London: Hutchinson & Co. 1980.
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, Part II, pp.99-179.
Myth & Metacommunication in the Society of the Spectacle
Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," pp.109-159 in Mythologies. Hill & Wang, 1972.
Richard Herskovitz, "The Shell Answer Man & the Spectator," Social Text, 1979, 1:182-85.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1967. #1-72 (chs.1-3). http://www.nothingness.org/SI/debord.html
Commodifying difference: the appearances & appropriations gender & race
Judith Williamson, "Woman is an Island: femininity & colonization," pp.99-118 in Tania Modleski (ed) Studies in Entertainment. Indiana University Press, 1986.
Susan Willis, "Gender as Commodity," pp.23-40 in A Primer for Daily Life. Routledge, 1991.
Susan Bordo, “Hunger as Ideology,” pp. 99-116 in The Consumer Reader, ed., Julia Schor and Douglas Holt, NY: The New Press, 2000.
bell hooks, “Eating the Other,” pp.341-357 in The Consumer Reader, ed., Julia Schor and Douglas Holt, NY: The New Press, 2000.
Eric King Watts and Mark P. Orbe, “The Spectacular Consumption of “True” African American culture: ‘Whassup’ with the Budweiser Guys,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, v.19, no.1, March 2002, pp.1-20.
Advertising in an Age of Accelerated Meaning
Robert Goldman & Stephen Papson, Sign Wars, pp.1-186.
Recovering Opposition
Goldman & Papson, Sign Wars, pp. 187-255.
Goldman & Papson, Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh.
Representations of Time and Space in a Global cultural economy
Robert Goldman, Stephen Papson, and Noah Kersey, “Speed: Through, Across, and in—The Landscapes of Capital,” Fast Capitalism, 1.1, 2005, http://www.fastcapitalism.com
Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Representations of Global Capital, 2004. http://www.lclark.edu/~goldman/global/
Shane Gunster, 'Second Nature': Advertising, Metaphor and the Production of Space, Fast Capitalsm, 2.1 2006, http://www.fastcapitalism.com/
Contradictions of a Commodity Culture
Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992. pp.xi-24.
Robert Goldman & Steve Papson, Sign Wars, "Sneakerization and Hyperculture," pp.256-274.
Robert Goldman & Steve Papson, Nike Culture, pp.169-185.
Mark Dery, "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing & Sniping in the Empire of Signs," http://www.markdery.com/archives/books/culture_jamming/#000005%23more
The Course Structure & Assignments:
This course emphasizes the social and cultural character of ads. Critical analysis of advertising culture cannot be conducted as a monologue, but as a dialogue among active readers and writers, speakers and listeners. This class is based on student participation and student conversations both inside and outside of class. Your participation grade is based on informed participation (that you attend class having done the reading, and that you regularly contribute based on your familiarity with the texts). Participation also includes being an active voice in the written discussion and analysis fora that your groups will undertake on Moodle. The most overt measure of non-participation is whether a student is absent from class sessions. Three absences will result in a grade reduction of one/half letter grade and so on, with each additional absence.
Moodle discussion groups. You should join together in groups of four. Each group will be asked to create a “totem” name for themselves – a simple example might be the “Bad News Bears” – along with a totem icon, your group’s symbolic image. Each week, each group will scan, digitize and post at least one ad (during the first few weeks, print, before moving on to tv) to analyze and discuss. Your participation counts for 25% of the total course grade. Please take note – I expect that every student will post a minimum of three times per week – and that these be good-faith efforts. Any student with fewer than 16 quality posts by week eight will receive a midterm deficiency report. Any student with fewer than 30 quality posts by the end of the term will fail this section of the course.
Another 25% of one’s grade is based on a series of advertising analyses. There will be eight such analyses. I will provide the conceptual and analytic angles for these advertising analyses. Everything you write for this course must be saved on a word processor, because you will want to be able to rewrite and develop your analyses. You will be asked to do these at a rate of roughly one per week.
The final ad analysis will ask you to perform a “decoding” assignment in which you will be asked to code ten advertising texts. These will be exchanged with two other students, who will critique the coding. Each student will then be asked to write a 1000 word reflection piece on the task of coding advertising texts.
The final assignment is a group research project that will be authored and presented to the class in the form of contributions to SOAN 370’s ongoing Web site. Small teams will be the focal point for both the analytic conversations and research that go into this product. All team projects must be approved by me. This year we have assembled a very large database of television ads that have been digitized and are avilable online for you to analyze. The finished research project will be assembled in the form of web pages. The document must have multimedia content and form. As a rough guide, I expect the finished group project to be at least the equivalent of a polished 10,000 word paper. The course reading list should constitute the basic working bibliography for your research project. Let me put this more directly: research projects submitted in this course must be grounded in the course readings! That does not mean you are restricted to those readings, but there must be some basis for your project in the course readings. This project will count for 25% of the course grade.
The final 25% of the course grade will be based on a comprehnsive final exam.