Every era has its dominant representations. Just as landscape painters
of previous centuries captured and expressed new modes of perceiving
history, corporate advertisers now devise the imagined landscapes of
global capitalism. Advertising functions as an omnipresent discursive
form, publicly assembling and circulating the predominant tropes of our
era. This project is based on the premise that corporate advertising's
landscapes help shape our epoch's imaginative conceptualizations of the
spatial relations, the temporal flows, and the cultural geographies that
correspond to the emergence of a high-tech global economy.
In Landscapes of Capital Robert Goldman and Steven Papson examine how
corporate television ads from the last fifteen years have organized
predominant images, tropes and narrative representations of a world in
transition. The volume takes particular interest in how relations of
space, time, speed, capital, technology and globalization are
narratively represented in advertising. Goldman and Papson skillfully
demonstrate how Capital represents itself at a moment of critical
historical transition - the passage into high-tech globalization and the
crises associated with it. They argue that corporate ads can be read to
reveal how Capital represents itself and the world that is being
wrought - in terms of the signifiers it prefers and the stories it
tells.
