ABSTRACT

This chapter examines advertising and the signifying practices of postmodern cultural political. Benetton's integration of signification with cultural politics is resonant with the postmodern aesthetics of some contemporary forms of politics. Postmodern cultural citizenship proclaims the demise of modernist, stable categories of self-identity. It is precisely this freeing of subjects, from traditional categories of being, that is celebrated in postmodern cultural politics. Cultural theorists often highlight the controversial images of dying AIDS patients, renegade soldiers brandishing human bones and environmental catastrophe, so as to exemplify the heightened dramaturgy of the United Colors brand. An often neglected contribution to the United Colors political proselytizing is The Sunflowers advertising campaign launched in 1998. The Sunflowers campaign featured photo-realist images taken at the St. Valentin Institute for the disabled, located in Ruhpolding in the southwestern part of Bavaria. Roland Barthes describes how the analogical perfection, which defines common-sense readings of photographic imagery, depicts it as a message without a code.