Brother can you paradigm

Sister, can you paradigm? Would you please explore the provenance of this wordplay? The paper acknowledged another college while printing the pun. Boldface added to excerpts by QI : 1. Claude Jr. The final six lines of the twenty-eight line work were the following: 3. Come now, can you operationalize, Quantify and conceptualize? Can your output be machine-read? Have you a code in your head? Are you adept at research design— Brother, can you paradigm? A note accompanying the poem above stated that the journal editor was told about the piece by Jack L.

Walker of the University of Michigan. It is a prose that conjures hilarious scenes in a twinkle, moves mountains, fashions landscapes, and kills whatever it fixes with a baleful eye. It is a total system; it puts it all together. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation.

Volume Article Contents 1. The context. Constitutional guardianship under the impact of the crisis. Christian Joerges Christian Joerges. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Select Format Select format. Permissions Icon Permissions. The Hoover Company may have chosen to use language popular at the time, and to speak of a Freedom. The CNN message is cast in the language of rights, reminding us of our Right to Choose again playing on the political ring that the phrase currently has.

In either case what we see happening is the commodification of political discourse. The language of political ideals, of rights and freedoms, is being highjacked in order to dress purposeful commercial action in stolen clothes.

Whether dressed as a freedom or a right, a commodifying logic appears in pure form, unconnected to any particular product. Yet it is a logic we met before in particular cases, which tied the promise of freedom to cigarettes or soft drinks. It is a logic that commodifies, and pedestrianizes, political ideals by putting them in the service of commercial salesmanship. In that sense, we seem to have struck upon just another instance of the vulgarizing impact of American culture, corroborating a point made by so many European critics of American mass culture.

A word like choice, when left unspecified, sits uneasily astride the divide between the political and the economic spheres. Precisely there, it seems, lie the secrets of the appeal that so many American commercial messages have had, domestically as well as abroad. Exploring frontiers of freedom, of children rebelling against parental authority, of sexual freedom, of freedom in matters of taste and in styles of behavior, American consumer goods have been instruments of political and cultural education, if not of emancipation.

Generation upon generation of youngsters, growing up in a variety of settings in Europe, West and East of the Iron Curtain, have vicariously enjoyed the pleasures of cultural alternatives conjured up in commercial vignettes.

They have been using American cultural language and have made American cultural codes their own. To that extent they have become Americanized. If anything, those at the receiving end of American mass culture have adapted it to make it serve their own ends.

They have woven it into a cultural language, whose grammar, syntax and semantics—metaphorically speaking—would still recognizably be French, Italian, or Czech. All that the recipients have done is make new statements in such a language. Surrounded as we are by jingles, posters, neon signs, and billboards, all trying to convey their commercial exhortations, we all at one point or another ironically recycle their repertoires; we quote slogans while bending their meaning; we mimic voices and faces familiar from radio and television.

We weave them into our conversations, precisely because they are shared repertoires. Used in this way, two things happen. International repertoires become national, in the sense that they are given a particular twist in conversations, acquiring their new meanings only in particular national and linguistic settings. Secondly, commercial messages stop being commercial. In this ironic recycling of our commercial culture we become its masters rather than its slaves.

American icons may have become the staple of a visual lingua franca that is understood anywhere in the world, yet their use can no longer be dictated solely from America. They care little about authenticity. Yet what one pays is the price of admission into a world of symbols shared by an international youth culture. Quite the contrary. They have transcended such trite connotations and restored American icons to their pure semiotic state of messages of pleasure and freedom.

Within this global youth culture, the icons youngsters carry are like the symbol of the fish that early Christians drew in the sand as a code of recognition. What is often held against the emerging international mass, or pop culture, is precisely its international, if not cosmopolitan character. Clearly, this a case of double standards. Then, all of a sudden, the defense is not in terms of high versus low, as one might have expected, but in terms of national cultures and national identities imperiled by an emerging international mass culture.

There is a further irony in this construction of the conflict, contrasting an emerging global culture seen as homogenizing to national cultures seen as havens of cultural diversity.

In the real world, of course, things are different. There may be a hierarchy of taste cultures, yet it is not a matter of higher taste cultures being the more national in orientation.

It seems to be the case that this hierarchy of taste cultures is itself transnational, that indeed there are international audiences who at the high end all appreciate Beethoven and Bartok, or at the low end all fancy Madonna or Prince. Yet in a replay of much older elitist tirades against low culture, advocates of high art see only endless diversity where their own taste is concerned, and sheer vulgar homogeneity at the level of mass culture.

They have no sense of the variety of tastes and styles, of endless change and renewal in mass culture, simply because it all occurs far beyond their ken. From the point of view of American mass culture traveling abroad, in many cases the exploration of cultural frontiers is taken to more radical lengths than anything one might see in America.

Similarly, in the Netherlands, in a poster and TV campaign sponsored by the government, inviting in small print people to become organ donors and to wear a donor codicil, we see a young couple making love, both naked, she sitting on his lap, curving backwards in rapture.

To them the campaign would not appear as the outcome of a process of Americanization taken a few daring steps further. Nor for that matter would another poster campaign, again sponsored by the Dutch government, on behalf of safe sex. Graphically, for everyone to see, couples are shown, taking showers or engaged in similar forms of foreplay.

Shocking stuff indeed, but nor is this all. Yet another frontier is being explored, if not crossed: in addition to hetero couples, gay couples are shown. In a sense we have come full circle. Where the Hoover Company advertisement drew on republican language to claim the freedom of the advertiser, we now see advertising space being reclaimed for statements pro bono publico. If democracy is a marketplace, it has become inseparable from the economic market.

The perfect illustration of this was being pasted all across the Netherlands, in January Intertextuality abounds. But there is more. Playing on the classic version of the Four Freedoms the poster rephrased them as follows: freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of choice, and—Levi's —freedom of movement.

The third freedom, as we have seen, already makes the transition from the political to the commercial; the fourth, political though it may sound, is meant to convey the greater room of movement provided by the baggier cut of the The picture illustrates the point by showing the unmistakable bulge of a male member in full erection, casually touched by the hand of its owner. Clearly, the semiotics of American commercial strategies have been taken to lengths, so to speak, that are inconceivable in America.

Americanization then should be the story of an American cultural language traveling and of other people acquiring that language. What they actually say in it, is a different story altogether. Navigation — Plan du site. American Studies Journal. Sommaire - Document suivant. Rob Kroes. Plan Internationalizing American Studies. Cultural Imperialism and the Freedom of Reception. Advertising: The Commodification of American Icons.

Internationalizing American Studies 3 The internationalization of American Studies can mean various things. Photograph by the author. Notes 1 D. Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds. Alves, T. Cid, and H. Ickstadt, eds. Huizinga, Amerika levend en denkend: Losse opmerkingen Haarlem: H. Tjeenk Willink, The video for the that I referred to earlier was made by a British agency for the European market. Haut de page.

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