Your Call Is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood

by Richard Hardack

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538177730
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	05/15/2023
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.48(w) x 9.05(h) x 1.08(d)

About the Author

Richard Hardack, who holds a Ph.D. and JD from UC Berkeley, has applied his love of history, law, and literature to projects such as his book, Not Altogether Human: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance; NASA’s History of the Juno Mission to Jupiter; and the courses he’s taught at Berkeley and Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges.

Table of Contents

1. A Conceptual Overview

2. The Zero-Sum Game of Corporate Personhood

3. You’re Soaking in It

4. He Can’t Be a Man ‘Cause He Doesn’t Smoke the Same Detergent Pack as Me

5. The Nature of Corporations

6. Pumpkins and Sugarplums

7. The Animated Corporation

8. Truth and Soul

9. Your Call is Very Important to Us

10. There’s No Their There

11. You Can’t See the Corporation for the CE's

12. Unpersoned

13. Buy with Confidence

14. Habeas Corporation

15. Paranoid Desires

16. The Gap Between Signifier and Signified

17. It’s All Theater

18. Corpography

19. Corporate Exceptionalism

20. Anonymous Autonomy

21. When Texas Executes One

22. Immortality and Impersonation

23. Corporations Have No Souls

24. Extremely Hostile Takeovers

25. A Little Less Than Kin

26. And Now the Words from Our Sponsor

27. New and Improved: The Zero-Sum Game of Corporate Personhood

28. The Whole World is An America, A New World

29. The Transcendental Franchise

30. Advertising Makes the World Uniform: The New World as the Whole World

31. Warning Signs

32. Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Trust and Spam

33. Advertising Creep: The End of Public Space

34. The Age of Advertisements: What’s Your Sign?

35. Sponsored Language

36. I’m Not an Actor, But I Play One on TV

37. Pretty Lies, Unclean Hands

38. The Rise of the Impersonation State

39. I Have Met the Alien

40. Corporations Cannot Speak

41. A Marketplace of Rights

42. Commercial Personhood

43. Advertisements Against Myself

44. The Self as Ad

45. Schadenfreudian Slips: Ad Copy and the Culture of Envy

46. Pop Ups and Pin Ups: Advertising Sex and Violence

47. The Art of Lying

48. Needs and Wants

49. Farewell Welfare

50. Ask Your Advertiser if Advertising is Right for You

51. Living Outside the Market?

52. How Soon is Nowhere?: Advertising Academia

53. Grave-keepers

54. Imagine a World Without Advertising

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Richard Hardack approaches the topic of corporate personhood through a unique perspective that focuses on the primary means by which corporations attempt to capture our attention—their use of advertising. His lucid and nuanced discussion ranges across history, law, literature, philosophy, and popular culture to provide a novel analysis of this timely subject.

Simon Stern