Contemporary Images of Consumption: How Advertising Defuses Radical Critique

Abstract

Contemporary Images of Consumption: How Advertising Defuses Radical Critique This paper examines how the contemporary capitalist system through advertising commodities absorbs new forms of critique into its mechanisms of reproduction. In particular it examines a series of colour advertisements published in English national newspapers during the spring of 2008 which incorporate ‘green’ themes within their marketing rhetoric. The method used involved a detailed analysis of prominent advertisements for a range of products: cars, trainers, electrical appliances and chemicals. The interpretative approach utilized combined two strands of hermeneutical inquiry. The first involved an examination of the detailed phenomenal field properties of the advertisements themselves. The second involved the application of discourse analysis to the images within the context of the ‘new economic sociology’.