A "RADICAL" STARTING POINT
It is difficult to take the field’s pulse in a present moment, but I suspect this culture studies approach remains the dominant paradigm for bringing advertisements into the composition classroom. Some of the well-documented criticisms of CCS are worth mentioning, considering that my call to integrate visual rhetoric into the use of advertisements simultaneously attempts to address them. Frank Farmer asserts that cultural criticism “appears to rest on the presumed blindness (or inattention) of ordinary people, whom, we are led to believe need considerable help in seeing” (187). Such approaches are therefore often seen as “elitist” and “authoritarian.” John Trimbur takes this critique a step further, lamenting the self-appointed “hero” role of an instructor “who liberates students from the error of their ways and reveals how and why students ‘objective interests’ reside in radical social change” (112). Bruce McComiskey suggests that within Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric “students are not encouraged to deconstruct binary oppositions but only to discover them” (355). All three authors paint a problematic portrait of culture studies; one part condescending to a student’s ability to have a complex relationship with texts, and one part as potentially akin to a “banking model of education” as Friere ever had nightmares about.
The CCS approach still struggles to find ways to accomplish cultural critique without simultaneously forcing students to take hostile stances towards cultural items that they often derive pleasure from. Recall the story in bell hooks’ Teaching to Trangress where she recounts: “I have not forgotten the day a student came to class and told me: ‘We take your class. We learn to look at the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class. And we can’t enjoy life anymore” (42). It would be difficult to make a case that anyone’s primary entertainment and joy depends on commercials; however, this fact can make them even trickier to use in the classroom. Harp too much about the “evils” of ad culture and risk the bored stares of savvy students whom “duh . . . already know this.” Treat them as too powerful constructors of identity and risk becoming the guru-overseer leading the ignorant flock to enlightenment. Treat them as simply fun or hip texts and ask yourself what the point of such activity is at all.
Diana George’s work, in particular, has focused on how focusing on the visual is pointless if done solely to make a dull class more interesting or make less-verbal students more comfortable (21-22). George notes that visual analysis of ads has existed in classrooms since the late 1940s, but “that practice did not always . . . include careful consideration of how images, layout, or graphics actually communicated meaning” (21). Lanham similarly suggests we approach “advertising not [as] something we look through as persuasion, but look at as patterns for its own sakes” (74).
Therefore, the “radical” proposal is this– we leave behind our “enlightened” fears that ads control and manipulate an easily duped public. We cease to view ads solely as doctrines of consumerism that prey on our weaknesses and inabilities to make up our own minds. Instead, we view ads as the earliest adopters of a combined visual and typographical approach to meaning making; and are therefore, excellent texts to highlight a form of composing that draws on students’ abilities to compose in a world of mixed media communication. Additionally, most articles that directly address visual rhetoric have stressed the importance of focusing less on textual reception and more on textual production (Blair, 1996; George, 2002; Hocks, 2003; Wysocki, 1998). That sound you hear is the pained gasps of a thousand hardcore CCS instructors as they realize I am about to propose actually having students produce advertisements (and therein, I suppose, turn them into drone-like gist for the capitalist mill).
This is not the place to dispel fears that ads are ideologically dangerous by nature, or that mass culture produces mindless consumers too passive or dim to recognize the system they’re engaging with (though someone seeking arguments against these positions could seek out John Fiske’s Television Culture and Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You). As I’ve noted, such extreme positions (where these beliefs manifest in teaching awareness as the end goal) lead to the exact brand of passivity that the positions decry. Instead of a “down with capitalism” battle cry, I propose (like cultural critic Henry Jenkins) to balance consumption with production and participation. Such engagement makes consumption “a topic of public discussion and collective deliberation; shared interests often lead to shared knowledge, shared vision, and shared action” (Jenkins 222). Engaging ads on their own terms has the potential to not only increase students’ concepts of composition but to simultaneously produce more personal critiques with more complex positions towards consumerism and culture.
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A Grammar of Design