Robert Goldman & Stephen Papson 
Landscapes of Capital 

Every era has its dominant representations. Just as landscape
painters of previous centuries captured and expressed new modes of
perceiving history, corporate advertisers now devise the imagined
landscapes of global capitalism. Advertising functions as an
omnipresent discursive form, publicly assembling and circulating
the predominant tropes of our era. This project is based on the
premise that corporate advertising’s landscapes help shape
our epoch’s imaginative conceptualizations of the spatial
relations, the temporal flows, and the cultural geographies that
correspond to the emergence of a high-tech global economy.

In Landscapes of Capital Robert Goldman and Steven Papson examine
how corporate television ads from the last fifteen years have
organized predominant images, tropes and narrative representations
of a world in transition. The volume takes particular interest in
how relations of space, time, speed, capital, technology and
globalization are narratively represented in advertising. Goldman
and Papson skillfully demonstrate how Capital represents itself at
a moment of critical historical transition D the passage into
high-tech globalization and the crises associated with it. They
argue that corporate ads can be read to reveal how Capital
represents itself and the world that is being wrought D in
terms of the signifiers it prefers and the stories it tells.

Table of Content

Detailed Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

1.Mapping the symbolic landscape of corporate capital

2. Dreamworks of the ‘new economy’

3. Landscapes of fictitious capital

4. The social relations of production in the network economy

5. Landscapes of speed: blurred visions of capital

6. Deterritorialized and reterritorialized: the semiotic
architecture of capital

7. The cultural geography of the corporate imaginary

8. Mapping the terrain in a sign economy

Bibliography

About the author

Robert Goldman is Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College and Stephen Papson is Professor of Film and Representation at St. Lawrence University.