Advertising as Capitalist Realism
Advertising, as the early agency Lord and Thomas put it, is "salesmanship in print." It is just that simple, just that complex. Understanding advertising entails understanding the difference between personal and printed or broadcast communication; the differences entailed in the "decontextualization" of thought and feeling that systems of mass communication make possible. With the invention of writing in human history, anthropologist Jack Goody observes, "Speech is no longer tied to an occasion: it becomes timeless. Nor is it attached to a person; on paper, it becomes more abstract, more depersonalized." For Goody, this opens the way to science, to the growth of criticism, and to a more tolerant attitude toward one's own frame of reference. But the same forces that enable people to see themselves as individuals independent of social and traditional contexts make people susceptible to the appeals of mass media, including advertising. This is an openness or susceptibility qualitatively different from the householder's vulnerability to the direct sales pitch. Among other things, it connects the consumer not only to an item for sale and a person selling it but to an invisible, yet present, audience of others attuned to the same item for sale and the same symbols used to promote it. The advertisement, like the sales talk, links a seller to a buyer. Unlike the sales talk, it connects the buyer to an assemblage of buyers through words and pictures available to all of them and tailored to no one of them. Advertising is part of the establishment and reflection of a common symbolic culture.
The Eloquent Language: Hindustani in 1940s Indian Cinema
The Hindi–Urdu debate that raged in pre-independence India was to find a new medium for articulation in the arrival of the talkies—or sound in cinema—in the 1930s. Yet the inclusive register of language most commonly employed in films—both historically and currently—suggests that cinema largely sidestepped the vitriol and bright-line divisions that characterized the literary and publishing worlds. This article investigates some of the linguistic strategies employed by scriptwriters, lyricists, and producers in Hindi–Urdu–Hindustani cinema of the 1940s. It examines scripts, lyrics, and poetry to explore the (de-)linking of linguistic and religious or class identities; the relationship between poetry and filmic lyrics in the person of the poet-lyricist and in the texture of their presentation; and the potential and limits of this oral/aural medium in the context of its written paratexts. Ultimately, it suggests that cinema afforded an inclusivity with respect to language, allowing for a “crystallization” of filmi Hindustani, though this was far from a foreordained process.
Landscape Into Art
This text shows how man has attempted to convert the complexity of natural appearances into the unity of an idea: by symbols, by curiosity about facts, by fantasy to relieve his fears of by belief in a Golden Age or order.