Landscapes of Capital: Representing
Time, Space, & Globalization in
Corporate Advertising

• Representing capital: invisible and benign
  • Landscapes of perpetual change
• Constructing the new global landscape
  • Scapes of globalization
• Grand narratives and global representation
• Narratives and representation revisited
• The grand narrative of sign value

II. Global Capital

New Economic Formations

• Restructuring capital scapes
  • The dark side of capital
  • The dark side eclipsed
  • Decay & renewal
• The juggernaut of capital renovation
• Downsizing
• Just-in-time production
• Discipline and punish
• Decontextualized labor
• The disappearing state

• Global currency
• Tracking commodification
• ...the most elusive commodity of all: an idea
• Hypercommodification
• Hypercontradictions
• The death of Marxism

Social Relations of Production

• The new centurions
• Risk and status
• Performance anxiety
• Casino cyborg
• The new organization man
• Time-bind mom
• Executive dad
• The modern nomad
• The digital generation
  • Faces of generation d
• "I will not be a cog"
• The missing world poor
• Portraits of third world poverty

Information Economy

• Representing the internet era
• The Infolightenment
• Slogans in the informational/global economy
• Software, productivity and competitiveness
• Electronic markets' sign wars
  • Market heaven
  • A theology of market forces
  • A theology of immediate gratification

III. The Semiotics of Advertising

Sign Formulas and Branding

• Branding the corporation
  • Logo as ad
  • Blending opposites
  • Color as correlative
  • Iconic equivalence
  • Embedding
  • "Come Together"
  • The Death Star
• Metacommunication & hailing

• Camels
  • Sunset over the pyramids
  • The road to Cairo
  • Cocacolonization
  • Are you ready?
  • The pharaoh's garage
  • Desert traffic jam
  • Invest in a camel
  • Solar powered camel
  • Bad metaphor
  • Don't buy this car
  • The Bedouin of GE
• Speed
• Globes as Capital
  • Abstracted globes
  • Reading globes
• Religion
• Eyes
• Gazes
• Hands
  • The handshake of capital
  • Precapital deals
  • What are we doin' here?
  • The global handshake
  • Signifying possibility
  • Gestures of human concern
  • Hands of parental care
  • Hypersignifiers of expressivity
  • The finger of knowledge
  • The panoptic finger
• Children
  • Feed the children
  • Corporate paternalism
  • The cure
  • High tech classroom
  • Techno-metaphor
  • Child prodigy
  • The obnoxious visionary
  • Unfettered imagination
  • We care
  • Harmonious music
  • Cynicism of legitimation
  • You can't buy love
  • Harmony of technology
• Work

• The montage
  • Cisco: serialized monologue
  • WorldCom: serialized social order
  • MCI: the end of social ranking
  • Akamai: aestheticized seriality
  • Microsoft: accelerated empowerment
  • Ford: gesturing humanism
• The testimonial
  • Philip Morris: angel of hope
  • Shell: environmental activist
  • T. Rowe Price: investing in volunteerism
• The ethnography
  • IBM in Africa
  • IBM in Italy
• The joke

IV. Grand Narratives Reanimated

Contradictions of Development

• Developmental monumentalism
• Modernity goes everywhere
• Orientalism
• Investment in the periphery
• Help from above
• Technology against poverty
• Virtual colonialism

Stories of Science and Technology

• Signifiers of technoscience
• Cornucopia: the promise of biotech
• The pharmaceutical fountain of youth
• Morphing miracles
• Global song of technology
• Better things for better living
• Technological utopia
• Capitalizing on ecology
• Mythologizing science

Reason and Progress

• Jetmakers
• Flight: metaphor of human achievement
• Forever new frontiers

V. Landscapes: The Geography of Capital

Abstraction and Deterritorialization

• Representing space
• Ad cartography
• Global panorama
• Decontextualized sunsets
• Virtual place
• Placeless places
• The landscape of microtechnology
• Cyberspace

• Imagined communities
• Moral landscapes
• The post-state landscape
• Singing Japanese
• The African imaginary
• Cultural Transvestism

• The skyscapes of capital
  • Global Cities
  • Towers
  • City of the Future
  • City of the Future 2
  • Virtual Cities
  • City of capital
  • Nodes & Flows
  • World Trade Center
• Capital's shrine

VI. Speed: Conquering Time and Space

• Time-Space Compression
• Representing time
• Speed of capital
• Flashspeed
• Friction-free flow
• The speed of daily life
  • Saving time & accelerated consumption

Working Bibliography