Your Call Is Very Important to Us

Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood

Richard Hardack

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9798765183083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In a unique exploration of how corporations appropriate the rights and identities of people, Richard Hardack unearths the unexpected consequences of corporate America's quest to dominate every aspect of our culture.
Not only do corporations govern our economy, but corporate personas define our identities and shape our relationships with people and the world around us. In a timely and wide-ranging study, Hardack recontextualizes the inordinate influence of corporations and corporate advertising as a legal, political, psychological, and sociological phenomenon. He connects a surprising array of topics, including advertising, pop culture, representations of nature, science fiction, legal history, the history of colonization and slavery, and the longing to transcend individuality, to show how the principles of corporate personhood—the idea that corporation are people—allow corporations to impersonate and displace actual people. Throughout, Hardack also provides a novel reassessment of the pernicious role and effect of advertising in our daily lives.
The book makes accessible a complex topic and integrates many pressing issues in the U.S., including the privatization of the public sphere; the escalating polarization of wealth and rights; unchecked corporate power, influence and monopoly; and the descent of political debate and policy into the language of advertising, branding, and entertainment. Hardack treats the assumptions that foster corporate personhood as both cause and effect, driver and symptom, of a series of transformations in U.S. society. Awakened to this foundational way corporations infiltrate most human activities and interactions, readers can better understand and safeguard themselves against systemic changes to the American economy, culture, and politics.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Chapter One. A Conceptual Overview
• Chapter Two. The Zero-Sum Game of Corporate Personhood
• Chapter Three. You’re Soaking in It
• Chapter Four. He Can’t Be a Man ’CauseHe Doesn’t Smokethe Same Detergent Pack as Me
• Chapter Five. The Nature of Corporations
• Chapter Six. Pumpkins and Sugarplums
• Chapter Seven. The Animated Corporation
• Chapter Eight. Truth and Soul
• Chapter Nine. Your Call Is Very Important to Us
• Chapter Ten. There’s No Their There
• Chapter Eleven.You Can’t See the Corporation for the CEOs
• Chapter Twelve. Unpersoned
• Chapter Thirteen. Buy with Confidence
• Chapter Fourteen. Habeas Corporation
• Chapter Fifteen. Paranoid Desires
• Chapter Sixteen. The Gap between Signifier and Signified
• Chapter Seventeen. It’s All Theater
• Chapter Eighteen. Corpography
• Chapter Nineteen. Corporate Exceptionalism
• Chapter Twenty. Anonymous Autonomy
• Chapter Twenty-One. When Texas Executes One
• Chapter Twenty-Two. Immortality and Impersonation
• Chapter Twenty-Three. Corporations Have No Souls
• Chapter Twenty-Four. Extremely Hostile Takeovers
• Chapter Twenty-Five. A Little Less than Kin
• Chapter Twenty-Six. And Now the Wordsfrom Our Sponsor
• Chapter Twenty-Seven. New and Improved: The Zero-Sum Game of Corporate Personhood
• Chapter Twenty-Eight. The Whole World Is an America, a New World
• Chapter Twenty-Nine. The Transcendental Franchise
• Chapter Thirty. Advertising Makes the World Uniform: The New World as the Whole World
• Chapter Thirty-One. Warning Signs
• Chapter Thirty-Two. Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam,Trust, and Spam
• Chapter Thirty-Three. Advertising Creep: The End of Public Space
• Chapter Thirty-Four. The Age of Advertisements: What’s Your Sign?
• Chapter Thirty-Five. Sponsored Language
• Chapter Thirty-Six. I’m Not an Actor, but I Play One on TV
• Chapter Thirty-Seven. Pretty Lies, Unclean Hands
• Chapter Thirty-Eight. The Rise of the Impersonation State
• Chapter Thirty-Nine. I Have Met the Alien
• Chapter Forty. Corporations Cannot Speak
• Chapter Forty-One. A Marketplace of Rights
• Chapter Forty-Two. Commercial Personhood
• Chapter Forty-Three. Advertisements against Myself
• Chapter Forty-Four. The Self as Ad
• Chapter Forty-Five. Schadenfreudian Slips: Ad Copy and the Culture of Envy
• Chapter Forty-Six. Pop-Ups and Pinups Advertising Sex and Violence
• Chapter Forty-Seven. The Art of Lying
• Chapter Forty-Eight. Needs and Wants
• Chapter Forty-Nine. Farewell Welfare
• Chapter Fifty. Ask Your Advertiser If Advertising Is Right for You
• Chapter Fifty-One. Living Outside the Market?
• Chapter Fifty-Two. How Soon Is Nowhere? Advertising Academia
• Chapter Fifty-Three. Gravekeepers
• Chapter Fifty-Four. Imagine a World without Advertising
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author