Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times

Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times traces daringly transgressive convergences between cultural politics and global advertising media. It engages with a range of interpolations between cultural politics and advertising technologies including: the governmental rationality of neoliberal vistas, transgressive aesthetics and the cultural politics of representation, the political sign-economy of citizen branding, techno-political convergences between the social and political, and the marking of a new exciting geo-political terrain for cultural politics in global times. Tracing global advertising practices to the cultural politics commonly manifested in the postmodern political caesura of advertising, this book makes use of extensive case studies, whilst drawing on the work of Baudrillard, Giroux, Foucault, Castells and Latour to illustrate the manner in which advertising continues to revolutionize the political sphere. As such, it will be of interest to a range of readers across media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Contents: Preface; Introduction: liberal vistas and the political economy of the sign; Part I Governmentalization of Visual Culture: Governing neoliberal vistas and the cultural politics of economic life; Governmentality and the political economy of the sign. Part II Postmodern-Political Caesura: Inversions in the political economy of global signs; Aesthetic disruptions in the cultural politics of representation; Semiology of time in postmodern cultural politics. Part III Geo-Political Caesura: Political economy of citizen branding; Aesthetics as the transgressive politics of the self. Part IV Techno-Political Caesura: Technoscapes and the geo-politics of global advertising; Conclusion: towards a transgressive techno-political caesura; References; Index.

Dr Pamela Odih is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths University of London, UK