PRODUCTIVE DECONSTRUCTION
I am ultimately proposing an approach that allows students to locate their subjectivities in relation to advertisements and subsequently produce their own responses to the messages and visions they find– a process that actively engages them in articulating a re-visioning of culture itself. Advertisements are particularly useful in these purposes for two reasons. Their visual and textual interplay often reward complex analysis, but their size and accessibility also allow students a narrower focusing point while developing their skills (unlike the broader palettes of an entire magazine or episode of a television program). As for these re-visionings, it is probably clear by now that I am not talking about the standard academic paper. To produce a critique or commentary on an ad’s message, in a form similar to (or based off of) the ad form itself, is to make a statement that turns the visual and textual powers of the ad form against themselves– not from a misguided and unrealistic “destroy consumerism” perspective, rather this approach fosters stronger analysis through doing. Further, the familiarity of ad conventions to anyone living in a capitalist society, combined with the distribution powers of the internet, gives student projects a chance to reach actual audiences (and possibly even be responded to and become generative of dialogue).
This idea that I’m calling “productive deconstruction” draws heavily from the works of both Frank Farmer and John Friske. Farmer writes that “our [cultural] critiques must also seek to discern the possible in the actual, to discover within the imposed limits of our present situation, those hoped for contexts where people might feel less helpless, fearful, and bereft of meaning” (202). In other words, “any critique of social reality must entail a social imaginary as well” (203). Friske takes these ideas even further in his attempt to highlight popular culture as a site where the public (thought of as the subordinate to the power of the media) finds infinite paths of resistance in the way they choose to create meanings for themselves out of popular culture’s texts. Since much of popular culture is engaged with for pleasure, the consumer will take advantage of the sign’s slippery nature and construct meanings that work in their best interests.
To make popular culture work in the subordinates’ interests, Friske asserts that they must ultimately provoke a fantasy. He writes, “such a fantasy is no escape from reality, rather it is a direct response to the dominant ideology and its embodiment in social relations. The challenge it offers lies both in what meanings are made and in who has the power and ability to make them” (319). In practice, students can take their grammars of design and produce fantasies that reshape ad culture into a “social imaginary.” They do not stop at a semiotic reading that settles for pointing out the evils and ills of an ad; instead, they engage with semiotic possibilities to produce a response ad that re-imagines the messages currently broadcasted by the dominant ideology of the ad industry. As I mentioned before, these new ads will be readable by virtually anyone in the culture already accustomed to reading ads; and the distribution possibilities inherent in sites like Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many others, can get these “social imagineries” in front of the eyeballs of actual audiences.
At this point, a fair criticism could point out that although this process could produce better visual/textual composing skills in students, it does little to address my previous concerns about CCS forcing students to be negative and cynical about cultural items they enjoy. What’s to stop a student from thinking, “oh, I just have to produce a visual bashing of something and I’ll satisfy my instructor’s desire?” My answer lies in how the instructor chooses to frame a specific assignment. If you present the class with a selection of video game advertisements (including the aforementioned one for Hitman) and order them to construct a response ad that comments on the sexism . . . then yes, you will be tying student hands and doing very little in the name of asking them to personally locate their subjectivities within ad culture. In fact, framing any assignment as “find the problem in this set of ads and re-imagine it differently” is almost certainly going to force students into binary thinking. This brand of prompt forces students into a Modern subject position where they will merely flip the binary to appease their instructor.
One way to avoid this binary thinking is to use something like Bruce McComiskey’s position statements. McComiskey’s goal is to have his students “establish their own position[s] in the middle ground among competing texts . . . [to] articulate the points of intersection among both the texts themselves and their own cultural experiences” (357). This goal is achieved by having students write about texts (say a range of advertisements or a range of essays) by acknowledging what ideas work or are good, while simultaneously resisting what is bad or problematic. Additionally, these articulations and ultimate re-imaginings must constantly be related back to the student’s personal experiences. In this manner, students are encouraged to inhabit the grey areas and simultaneously attempt to understand how they’ve been constructed into these positions.
Anyone familiar with Adbusters Magazine has an idea of the kinds of response ads that are possible with these assignments. Adbusters is an organization consisting of a “global network” of
artists and activists who specialize in visual reformations of culture for the purposes of critiquing (and hopefully toppling?) the power structures of global capitalism and consumerism. Their spoof ads and magazine pages often employ the juxtaposing of images and text from found media into new formulations filled with critical argument. As I have proposed, these ads consistently use the visual conventions of traditional advertising– with only a quick glance it may be virtually impossible to tell that some of them are parody. The use of layouts, logos, slogans, and succinctness speak to audiences who are accustomed to viewing and absorbing the genre of advertisement itself. To achieve new meanings they may: place familiar signs in new contexts (see the McDonald’s logo used as an electrocardiogram reading), place familiar characters in new suggestive situations (Joe Camel moved into a hospital bed), or substitute new imagery into a familiar design context (the hairy
extended male belly in a fashion ad). Each of these examples may appear relatively simple in design and execution (as an advertisement needs to be); however, the meaning making process for the audience involves a complex interplay of recognized design conventions, cultural references, and textual analysis. In fact, I’d suggest the final product should look effortless and obvious, which is in no way a reflection of the time and strain required by the student to develop a similar idea that can be represented in this manner.
There are two problems with using Adbusters as an example. First, we view their parody ads without the context of their creators and why they chose to create this particular re-imagining of culture. In the classroom, the student position statements (seeking to personally acknowledge the complexity of a situation) can provide extra insight into how students negotiated the readings on the subject and the experiences of their own lives. For example, a student creating something akin to the McDonald’s parody may write about how they agree fast food serves an obvious cultural need, and they may even assert that the existence of such food says
more about a quality of modern existence than it does culinary taste. Perhaps they might even write about their frustrations in not having any other options to fast food (a common problem for dorm-dwelling college students). However, suppose one of the course’s readings (or a viewing of a documentary like Supersize Me) convinced the student that the fears of health issues trumped all these other concerns. The ad alone would suggest a powerful and visually compelling argument, but the accompanying position statement would illustrate the ability to tackle multiple sides and personally prioritize what is most important to them.
The other problem with Adbusters as an example is the organization’s clear ideology. The ideology is not a problem in and of itself, but if students are shown models that only tow the “down with corporations” and “evils of consumption” lines, then they might sense that their productions should be similar. Such student suspicion will possibly put us back in ideological-banking mode with production thrown in for good measure. Therefore, we should expect and champion the student who writes of their grandfather’s death from cancer, who then subsequently produces something akin to the “Joe Chemo” ad. At the same time, we should be open to the student who thinks smokers know and accept the risks and therefore finds such ads condescending and ill-received. If this student produces an ad that somehow celebrates the right to choose, and by virtue endorses tobacco companies, some culture studies instructors may have to fight the urge to see this as a student buying into the propaganda of big business.
Likewise, if a student sees the violence against women in the Hitman advertisement as an easily ignored (perhaps even laughable) example of “sex sells,” then we should be open to them ignoring the feminist-style reading our own deconstructing eyes. Perhaps they are an avid gamer themselves and would rather argue that gamers need to remain aware of the split between fantasy and reality. This take might end up producing an ad more akin to this:
Such a response ad does not completely decry video game violence (therein avoiding the binary of a culture either accepting it or removing it), but instead calls for recognition of video game as fantasy with no logical expectation to represent the full spectrum of human experience. Perhaps nothing in their personal experiences leans them towards the feminist reading (likely discussed in a position statement). Instead of punishing the student for not taking this critical path, a pedagogy of productive deconstruction acknowledges their right to ignore this reading of video game ads, as long as they are capable of producing a response that somehow re-imagines what they see in the existing ones. In this sample, we find not a damning of video game’s narrow view of reality, rather a call to keep that unrealistic worldview of video games in mind so it does not filter over to one’s actual life.
Looking at the ad from a visual and design perspective, we see that the production decisions not only reinforce this message but also add additional layers of meaning to it. By splitting the images down a centered vertical axis, the eye is forced to take in both images simultaneously before likely heading back upwards to catch the first line of text. The staggering of these words across the two pictures ensures that the viewer will link the two pictures in their minds and view them as intimately connected (further reinforced by the similar shapes of the autopsy table and the decorative coffin). The pictures are slotted in their places not only by an audience’s sense of chronology (we move from death to burial in time like our eyes move from left to right in reading), but the lines of the autopsy work like the staggered text to move the eye over to the coffin. Finally, the coffin’s lines point directly to the ad’s viewer– a method designed to personalize the ad’s ominous feeling before the eye moves downwards to the main message.
Once we realize this ad is about video games, we may notice that the font choice is as equally cold and technological as the type on an old computer monitor– we realize that the text is the closest thing we have to an electronic feel in the ad, and the mixture of that feel with the visuals from real life further enforces the ad’s message of reminding gamers to not let the two mix. The ad’s textual message in the bottom bar may first seem to suggest a simple “video game violence is bad” argument. However, the “play smart, not numb” finale defies the expectations that the ad will encourage us to take this simplistic stance. We are in fact encouraged to keep playing (therin celebrating the student’s personal pleasure in being a gamer), but to not become “numb” to death and take that feeling into real life. The final message is also encoded in short and clever wordplay, which highlights that the student has recognized the importance of that convention to the ad genre.
Obviously, to truly know that the student is composing with visual and rhetorical purpose, some form of written justification will be needed. This is why I find it best to imagine assignments like this as containing three components: the position statement, the visual production, and the written analysis of their own work. For the student, these three-parts encourage a process of analyzing, personalizing, producing, and reflection. For an instructor, they aid in evaluative decisions. By looking at the output of all three parts, an instructor can evaluate if the visual argument shows evidence of the student’s ability to synthesize personal experience, textual analysis, and design conventions.
