Geist for sale: A neoconsciousness turn through advertising in contemporary consumer culture

Dialectical Anthropology

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 107-124

  Viser, Victor J ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 28444479360     PISSN: 03044092     EISSN: 15730786     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. B. Russell, Philosophical Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), pp. 153-154.
2. M. Greene, "Natural Life and Subjectivity," in P. G. Stillman ed., Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 94-117.
3. See also, T. Pinkard, "Hegel on History, Self-Determination, and the Absolute," in A. M. Melzer et al. eds., History and the Idea of Progress (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995).
4. H. Koren, Marx and the Authentic Man (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1967).
5. J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (New York: Longman, 1943).
6. K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, B. Fowkes trans. (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 165.
7. J. Sinclair, Images Incorporated: Advertising as Industry and Ideology (London: Croom Helm, 1987) p. 2.
8. This is a notion analogous to Lacan's concept of the "transitive relationship" whereby the self becomes a subject with an identity by means of its relationships to symbolic codes. In this narcissistic mode of Subject/Other relationships, the code becomes the Other where the Subject, ex-centric to the signified (the person or cultural axiom/concept posed by the Other), finds its own signifying place (the self as signifier). In this way, Lacan posits the possibility of alienation vis-à-vis a relationship of self to self. See J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, A. Sheridan trans. (New York: Norton, 1977).
9. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I & III (New York: International Publishers, 1947), pp. 13-14.
10. E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, J. S. Churchill and L. E. Eley trans. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
11. It is for this reason that individuals occasionally experience a certain depression when attempting to reconstruct a materialized memory through commodity purchase and do not achieve the mediated representation of that depicted potential reality (e.g., clothes, automobiles, fast-food, etc.).
12. V. Hubinger, "The Present: A Bridge Between the Past and the Future," in V. Hubinger ed., Grasping the Changing World: Anthropological Concepts in the Postmodern Era (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17-34.
13. E. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 104.
14. Russell, Philosophical Essays, p. 156.
15. E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, J. N. Findlay trans., (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p.553.
16. G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, R. Livingstone trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 48.
17. Some theorists use the term "base" to speak of a society's economic foundation, its mode of production; thus, the base/superstructure model. However, I find the term infrastructure_to be more definitive of those primary elements that organize a specific society in terms of its economy. The term superstructure, as used here, is referring to those social elements that are resultant of a specific mode of production. These include politics, law, mass media/telecommunication, religion, art, etc.
18. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith trans. (New York; International Publishers, 1971).
19. C. Buci-Glucksmann, "Hegemony and Consent," in A. S. Sassoon ed., Approaches to Gramsci (London: Writers and Readers, 1982), p. 119.
20. J. Hoffman, The Gramscian Challenge: Coercion and Consent in Marxist Political Theory (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 77.
21. C. Boggs, The Two Revolutions: Antonio Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
22. V. Viser, "Commodification as a System of Signs in the Contemporary Historical Bloc," Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 19 (1996), pp. 109-127.
23. See also E. Morera, Gramsci's Historicism: A Realist Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1990).
24. E. Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975).
25. F. Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in H. Foster ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111-125.
26. I am appropriating the term "autonomic" from its more common usage in the field of neurophysiology as a description for that part of the human nervous system which cannot be classified as either within the peripheral neural network or within the central nervous system. To clarify its usage and operationalization in the present study in identifying a particular mode of capitalism, I refer to Nathan and his observation that "all sorts of sudden events and chronic stresses alter the balance of the two parts of the autonomic system. Both parts are continuously played upon by emotions." See P. Nathan, The Nervous System (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1969). For Nathan, these "two parts" are the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system; for us, they are the infrastructure and the superstructure.
27. For more on "autonomic balance," see also J. Andreassi, Psychophysiology: Human Behavior and Physiological Responses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 330.
28. L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, B. Brewster trans. (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 162.
29. R. W. Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998), pp. 21-41.
30. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, B. Brewster trans. (London: New Left Books, 1970).
31. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, Ibid., p. 90.
32. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, Ibid., p. 313
33. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 141-143.
34. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 189, emphasis in original.
35. In the same vein as Adorno's subject/object discussions, where the object can be realized only by a subject but is always something other than the subject. However, as Adorno points out, "a subject...is from the outset an object as well." See T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, E. B. Ashton ed. (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 183.
36. T. Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, Pleasure (London: British Film Institute, 1980).
37. A. Callinicos, Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976), p. 66.
38. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, p. 47.
39. P. Preez, The Politics of Identity: Ideology and the Human Image (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980).
40. O. Klapp, Collective Search for Identity (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).
41. O. Klapp, Collective Search for Identity Ibid., p. 22, emphasis added.
42. I. C. Meijer, "Advertising and Citizenship: An Essay on the Performative Power of Consumer Culture," Media, Culture, & Society, Vol. 20 (1998), pp. 235-249.
43. O. Klapp, Opening and Closing: Strategies of Information Adaptation in Society (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
44. Preez, The Politics of Identity, pp. 34-37.
45. D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 12-13.
46. In his later ethnography of the British punk movement of the late 1970's and early 1980's, Hebdige indicates that the punk style (tattooed or pierced body, skin-head or Mohawk haircut, etc.) was a means by which youth culture attempted to interrupt this information flow. Through alteration of the one thing they did own - their bodies - the punks "resisted" existing in a state of domination; they formed an identity based not upon a complimentary but a contrasting reflection of the self vis-à-vis the other. See D. Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Routledge), pp. 29-32.
47. F. Inglis, The Imagery of Power: A Critique of Advertising (London: Heinemann, 1972).
48. L. Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
49. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 19.
50. J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, C. Levin trans. (St. Louis: Telos, 1981).
51. H. Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 133.
52. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, M. Milligan trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 136-142.
53. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 50.
54. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 122.
55. Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion, p. 186.
56. See for example, R. Rust and R. Oliver, "The Death of Advertising," Journal of Advertising, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 71-77;
57. J. Twitchell, Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
58. Twitchell, Adcult USA, p. 247.
59. Russell, Philosophical Essays, p. 153.
60. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Volumes I & II (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950), pp. 364-367.