Advertising and Consumer Citizenship by Cronin Anne M.; Cronin Anne M;

Author:Cronin, Anne M.; Cronin Anne, M; [ANNE M. CRONIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Vision, knowledge and transparency

I want to emphasise the importance of the concept of transparency in the context of my study of advertisements and my analysis of the constitution of ‘the individual’ and ‘the citizen’. In Chapter 1 I discussed Diprose’s (1994) argument that the positing of the self as ‘transparent’ to others is required for constitution of both self and other. It establishes a system of equivalences, or means for translation, which ensures the (hierarchical) discursive ‘dialogue’ between the self and the other. That is, transparency enables the process of recognition to occur, which, in turn, confers the status of selfhood on (certain) entities (Diprose 1994). Transparency, then, functions as a visual metaphor for the legibility or the ‘absolute understanding’ of the other (ibid.: 54). In these processes, the assumed dialogue and recognition which occurs is in fact ‘a monologue which subsumes differences under norms already in place’ (ibid.). This monologue refuses women, racialised groups, lesbians and gays and the working class the status of full selfhood in their own right. They form the space-off, or ‘elsewhere’ of representation, beyond the discursive frame of conventional knowledge. Yet their presence can be implied from what is visible within the frame and from the movements back and forth over its boundaries. This is a space of contradiction; these ambiguous entities are both assumed to be ‘transparent’ and ultimately ‘knowable’, yet also invisible in their own right. In a discussion of the widespread invocation of ‘the feminine’ in the signification of male subjectivity, Elspeth Probyn (1993) argues that this contradictory discursive production of femininity does not allow a space for theorising the ontological and epistemological complexities of ‘being women’:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.