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

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:
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 CEOs 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

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.

Review :
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.