`` Hyperesthesia, Or, The Sensual Logic Of Late Capitalism ``

In his 1982 article, “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals,” Jib Fowles informs readers of various psychological human needs, defined as appeals. These appeals are used in advertising, to persuade consumers to purchase a product. Due to the prevalence of advertisements in today’s society, consumers have learned to block out advertisements. By using any of the fifteen appeals such as the need for sex, or the need for affiliation, companies can get into consumers’ minds, with hopes of selling their products. In other words, by appealing to consumers desires, the chance of marketing success

Fredric Jameson is admired as a standout amongst the most imperative and persuasive artistic and social pundit and theoretician in the Marxist convention of the English speaking world. In his work “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Jameson endeavors to portray the way of social creation in the second half of the twentieth century, the period of late capitalism, and to recognize it from different manifestations of social generation of going before capitalist periods. A generous part of Jameson’s “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” is committed to differential investigation of masterpieces and building design from what Jameson terms “high innovation” and postmodern works. He describes the postmodern mode of generation as a “social prevailing” in the wake of ideas like “depthlessness” or the concealment of depth, the fading of influence and pastiche, terms which as per Jameson identify with the postmodern type of production and experience.

Do you ever watch the Super Bowl for its commercials? Have you ever bought a more expensive product because you had seen its advertisement? If the answer is yes, then you might have been a victim of today’s marketers. Jean Kilbourne, the author of “Killing us Softly” stated in one of her lectures, “The influence of advertising is quick, cumulative and for the most part, subconscious, ads sell more products.” “Advertising has become much more widespread, powerful, and sophisticated.” According to Jean Kilbourne, “babies at six months can recognize corporate logos, and that is the age at which marketers are now starting to target our children.” Jean Kilbourne is a woman who grew up in the 1950s and worked in the media field in the 1960s. This paper will explain the methods used by marketers in today’s advertising. An advertisement contains one or more elements of aesthetics, humor, and sexual nature.

The truth is that as consumers we are prone to being taken advantage of and more specifically, ripped off. How this occurs is quite simple. It is the technique of persuasion that forces people to do things, believe things and in this case purchase things that are not necessary. Tactics to persuade people can range from rhetoric devices to the structure of the message itself. Rhetoric devices, such as logos and pathos, and the structure of the message come together to ultimately persuade people to buy into things that they normally wouldn’t buy. Pathos appeals to emotion and logos describes the idea of logical reasoning. Then comes the structure of the message itself which enhances an idea to its full potential. The main purpose of these techniques in literature is to serve as writing strategies to convey an idea in words. Two examples of authors utilizing writing strategies to persuade readers that stores and advertisers manipulate shoppers take place in “The Science of Shopping” by Malcolm Gladwell and “Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell” by Clifford and Hardy. The author of “Attention Shoppers” uses the writing strategies of pathos, logos and the structure of the writing better than the author of “The Science of Shopping” to persuade readers that stores and advertisers are manipulating shoppers.

Multimodal text plays a huge role in the entertainment industry, but how they promote and influence audiences to buy their products depends highly on how they present their advertisement. In the famous Old Spice commercial many rhetorical appeals are used, and although this advertisement little to realistically describes the product they are advertising, It's clever and subtle use of all three appeals, pathos, logos, and ethos, persuaded many people to switch to Old Spice and at the same time helped Old Spice reach its target audience, which is men.

The readers of both Moss and Watters are introduced to the manipulative skills corporations hold within their mega-marketing and idea processing backgrounds. Both authors introduce their mega-marketing topics as a negative and chilling idea, in which the products that big corporations are trying to sell are related to something much simpler in terms of the effect’s it will have on the human body. For instance, Watters states “these practices are the medical equivalent of what real estate agents do to sell vacation time shares” (514). In this statement, he is comparing the selling objectives of drugs to vacation homes, and how corporations can use the same tactics in order to mega-market and sell their products. Watters is bringing up the idea of drug companies encouraging and advertising the use of antidepressants, as they are trying to change the morals and thoughts of diseases and drug usages of other countries such as Japan. Moss would agree with Watters’ idea of corporations using their persuasive actions on consumers. In his writing, he states that the world and “culture [has] become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing” (Moss 260). Both food and drug corporations take a stand in mega-marketing, pushing their ideas into the minds of consumers. Although they do not focus on separate beliefs of

Jean Kilbourne shows that the major messages is that exhilaration come from products, and ads are guided customers away from what make them really happy. Every sentiments is used to sell something and leave shoppers romantic about the products.Advertisers exploit buyer's human desires for link, calmness,esteem, and

order to ascertain whether or not the roles of these concepts do help us to

Today’s society is faced with a plethora of media appealing to their emotional state by advertising the basic human need, to eat. The images that we see each and every day of our lives appear in media such as, magazines, billboards, television, during movies, and on the internet. These images are artfully recorded as film or photographs in such an advanced way that they tempt and tease our senses, inviting us to purchase and eat such a wonderful product (Cyberpat.com, 2013). Our senses are bombarded with messages constantly and are extremely sensitive to the messages they receive. The sense of sight and sense of smell are particularly sensitive and have a special connection with the processing of messages that affect the emotions Croy, Schirato and Webb, 2004). This is often referred to as The Hedonic Experiential Model. It is refers to the way consumers process information based on the concept that purchasing decision may be spur of the moment or irrational. This model reflects the emotions of the consumer, which more than likely, have been influenced by advertising or visual propaganda. (Clow) It is with little wonder that advertising or mass media propaganda, are expressed utilising the senses, and in particular, the sense of sight (Alden and Steenkamp et al., 1999).

With products such as Shamwow, Oxyclean, and the Bowflex, flooding our modern-day market, it seems as though today’s advertisement challenges the intelligence of the American populace with a single daunting task, to force people to stop thinking rationally. Intelligence is measured upon a variety of elements all stemming from rational thought; The Onion satirizes the seemingly infinite quantity of irrational thought in the world today, in an ad for a new and improved, $19.95 (plus shipping and handling), solution to any person’s foot problems. “MagnaSoles” depicts the gullibility of people by showing their reliance on various modes of the media to obtain information. In this case, lustrous qualities lure the customer, while other

As we are constantly exposed to mass media and popular culture in our modern society, the insidious nature of consumerism has allowed it to penetrate into every aspect of our lives, dictating our very beliefs, values and wants. Nearly every individual in our society subconsciously conforms to the shallow and superficial mindset that characterises our consumerist culture. This idea is highlighted by the following texts; the poem “Enter without so much as knocking” by Bruce Dawe, an extract from the sermon “The Religion of Consumerism” delivered by Peter House, the poem “Breakthrough” by Bruce Dawe, and the

A ‘commodity sign’ invests symbolic meaning in products or services as a signifier with an image as signified. In recent times, consumer culture is driven by our desire for superfluous wants, causing the production and consumption of commodity signs to become more specialised according to the notion of capital. Capitalism is characterised by economies that are based on open markets and the ethos of individuality over community. French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction 1984) introduced the schema of subcultural capital, which ‘confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder’ (Thorton, 2006: 100). Therefore people have the idea that they can buy subcultural capital, as it is seen as self-revealing, in order to impress people or become someone else (Frith, 1996: 5). Thus advertising was developed as a strategy in generating demand in a contemporary consumer culture. Mass marketing has split the unity of signifiers and signified into a language of appearances and images of which we realise as either visible, physical connections or indirect connotations to that which they represent.

Dave Ramsey, America’s most trusted financial adviser and a radio show host, once said, “We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.” (Ramsey). Ramsey’s quote reflects the state of consumerism that our society is going through. Most of us can easily relate to this quote, let’s be honest most of us have been there done that and then later question our genuine need for whatever we have bought. Regardless, if we feel guilty or not we ought to ask ourselves why and what made this purchase seems so important and necessary at the time. Although this might not come as a surprise to most of us, the answer would be the advertisement industry. In 2016, The United States has spent more than 198 billion U.S dollars on advertising, making America the leader in advertisement in the world (Statista). These ads are designed to force consumers to keep buying things that are unnecessary by sending subliminal messages and applying psychology to trick the consumer into a spending spree. In his short story, “Subliminal Man”, J.G. Ballard uses science fiction approach to illustrate to his readers the preposterous techniques that the advertising industry has been using to boost consumerism. Ballard believes that the consumer’s brain has been tricked into buying against their well, by using technology and applying subliminal technics. Ballard short story questions the effect of consumerism on our moral values, lifestyle, and behavior. Ballard claims that

This paper will discuss one of the "iphone 4 Face Time" commercial advertisements (HYPERLINK "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k) that I like most due to its ability to create emotional feelings inside me. "Iphone 4" is another appealing product of Apple, launched in 2010 along with several ads on television, newspapers and internet. Apple has a very old history of producing creative and subliminal ads that touch the heart of the consumers, as discussed in the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud (O'Shanghnessy and O'Shaughnessy 166).

In general, many of the most urgent theories of modernity, and by extension, the aesthetic revolution of modernism, focus on the development of capitalism and its relation to cultural form. This strain of economic criticism is especially valuable in grasping both the pains and promises of modernity. Additionally, this strain is an attractive approach because it provides a grounded historical method of periodization—each stage of capitalism has a dominant mode of artistic production. Fredric Jameson, in his highly influential Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), uses three stages of capitalism—competitive, monopoly, and multinational—to create his own corresponding schema of cultural periodization—realism, modernism, and postmodernism. However, in “The Existence of Italy” (1992), Jameson relaxes these categories somewhat by positing the existence of shorter cycles that follow the same trajectory of realism → modernism → postmodernism but occur outside the standard periodization, which is directly linked to specific capitalist phases. Here, “cycles” is the best description of this phenomenon because it reinforces their relationship to capitalism; Jameson bases his logic of larger periodization on long cycles of economic development. However, this logic’s timeline is closely correlated to the core countries of capitalism, which has enabled their cultural form to become the standard. Thus, I contend that the conjecture of shorter cycles can be utilized