Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation

Images are usually multivalent, polysemous, and ambiguous; they mean too much at once. When it comes to visual images, isn’t there often something left over and something unsaid? Images pose dangers of misrepresentation. With corporate images the problem is heightened by the ambiguity of the corpora...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:REAL (Berlin, West) West), 2010-12, Vol.26 (1), p.75
Main Author: Trachtenberg, Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Advertising
Ambiguity
American literature
Corporate culture
Culture
DeLillo, Don
Eyes & eyesight
Fiction
Hegemony
Imagination
Intersectionality
Limited liability companies
Literary devices
Marketing
Misrepresentation
Morality
Propaganda
Publishing
Publishing industry
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Summary:Images are usually multivalent, polysemous, and ambiguous; they mean too much at once. When it comes to visual images, isn’t there often something left over and something unsaid? Images pose dangers of misrepresentation. With corporate images the problem is heightened by the ambiguity of the corporation in the first place, the fact that it owes its existence not to something describable as an object but to a legal process. At bottom the corporation has no inherent and definitive look. It can start out as one thing and quickly morph into another. Strip away trademarks, logos, typeface, color schemes, the entire branding apparatus of advertising, and what’s left? Is there anything there? The word corporation comes from the Latin, corpus or ‘body,’ which implies something tangible, fixed in space, a thing you can kick as well as see, a sensible thing. Yet begin to describe what a corporation is and you find yourself awash in abstractions like juridical or fictional persons, fictions consisting of imagined abstract relations among natural persons, relations fixed by a power that lies outside the body we want to describe. It’s the sight or image of exactly that intangible thing that we want to put into words.
ISSN:0723-0338