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Shoes?
?
Cars?
? ? ?
Houses?
Clothes?
DESIRE
You
The customer must be remade in the image and likeness of the product
Not "textual idealism"
The Four Frenchmen of the Apocalypse
All knowledge is mediated thru language,
and language is a social construct
The ready-made society of the family
Your being is preceded by politics
No philosophy not already embedded in politics
Desire is socially created
Rooted in desire
Reality not static, but dynamic
Desire is socially created
2. "Power is knowledge" (Michel Foucault)
3. "Politics precedes being" (Gilles Deleuze)
But he has a degree from the Sorbonne
Is the Devil From Paris?
No!
4. Suspicion of "Metanarratives" (Jean-Francois Lyotard)
Four Propositions:
1. "There is nothing outside the text" (Jacques Derrida)
psychology, sociology, politics, mathematics, art, music, engineering, etc
it seeks to integrate all branches of human knowledge:
Advertising is the most "philosophic" of all modern disciplines
Each company can saturate the market
Overproduction leads to bankruptcy
Saturated markets
Competition becomes war-like
Two kinds:
War-like
"Everybody has one"
Consolidation
Economic Oligarchy
Game-like
Cannot survive on replacement or population growth
SOLUTION:
Let things wear-out faster
Very high capital costs
Very low unit costs
or release improvements slowly
Must produce in high volumes
so that customers must re-buy the product
Markets quickly become saturated
Two problems:
Competition
Shortage of demand
"Instilling in the buyer
the desire
to own something a little newer,
a little better,
a little sooner than is necessary."
-Brook Stevens, 1954
Capital-intensive, specialized machinery
High re-tooling costs
Not easily be switched to new product lines
Marketing, not production or design, becomes the strategic function
Necessary to "instill" the desire for ever-new things
IN the last 100 years...
The possibility of overproduction leads to the BUYOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE
hence, the primacy of advertising over production
Which leads to the need to create desire
SUMMARY:
What counts as "knowledge" is shaped within networks of political, social, and economic power
Academic journals
News media
Individuals do not create society...
society creates the individual, and does so for its own purposes
Design for the shortest length of time that consumers can be conditioned to accept.
"Explanation of Everything" (Myth)
Jesus gives us not a summa, but biography (mythos & logos)
Nor was it necessary to design products to last.
Science is no less a narrative than religion
ALL knowledge grounded in faith (myth)
blesses all that it touches
and this swooshitka
has no factories.
Makes no products
Nike makes
permanently discontented individuals."
Vance Packard
"The Waste Makers," 1960
debt-ridden,
to make us wasteful,
"The systematic attempt of business
Actual production is outsourced
they make...
Companies no longer make useful things,
Markets would quickly be saturated and demand would dry up
Since Desire is the product
Constant poverty
our industrial production system could not survive
becomes the lynchpin of the whole system
Forget who we are
Without such compulsive consumption
but as the creation of desire,
Forget what we own
Must re-buy what you already own
Advertising, understood not as persuasion
From...
One who takes responsibility for himself, his family, his community and his country
A Citizen:
"Coke is the real thing"
with a salable commodity
Identify an intangible desire...
Hyper-reality
If there is no "objective" reality,
then there is only the hyper-reality we create
to..
--or even subverting--
You are what you buy
but it does so for the purpose of manipulating
Advertising has supplanted philosophy as the chief integrator of the arts and sciences
one whose identity is derived from what he/she purchases
the human person and society
A consumer:
Propaganda -> "Public Relations"
Nephew of Sigmund Freud
Applied Freudian psychology to advertising
From W. Wilson to R. Reagan
Engineering of consent
Engineering of desire
We are all "philosophers" whether we wish to be or not
We do so in terms of some (implicit) philosophy
Allows for a critique of modernism
Establish "religious truth" on an equal basis with "modern scientific truth"
Radical Orthodoxy
These propositions undermine the liberal world order
Social reality not "objective," but created
Free choice is an illusion
People socially created to serve needs of those in power
Our "narratives" pre-judge all information
Philosophy is a reflection on the narrative
But prior to philosophy there is narrative ("myth")
We justify things in terms of the narrative
And then we use philosophy to rationalize the narrative
PM rejects modern notions of truth
But seems to regard this as the only notion of truth
Nihilism
But advertisers, like everybody else, need some way to rationalize their actions
It has found this justification within an interpretation of
post-modernism
Competes with religion
This is the job of advertising
except that which the consumer has been trained to assign to them
"Tolerance"
Scientism
The Cult of the "Experts"
We live in a material world which a purely objective science can explain, given enough time and funding
Science therefore is a "meta-narrative" capable of rendering judgment on every other account of the world
Self-interest as the prime political and economic principle
Rejection of all authorities in favor of pure rationalism
Radical individualism
Materialism, rationalism, individualism
Create a "hyper-reality"
Things have no inherent meaning,
Provide the necessary rationalization for advertising to serve the buyological imperative