Publicidad y cultura: la comercialización de la protesta

Abstract

This article studies the mechanisms of absorption through which the system of consumption is able to assimilate antagonistic discourses and practices which earlier sought to defy its cultural hegemony. Consumer society is nourished by novelty and constant change in order for everything, in essence, to remain the same. This characteristic explains the use its makes of contradictory objects and symbols that are recontextualized to communicate different meanings. Capitalist bricolage serves to understand how different discourses are reordered to endow them with new meaning. Promotional culture is a privileged observation platform of forms of expression characteristic of different social groups. This is how a dialectical tension is manifested between old forms of expression now recycled into forms of mass consumption and the constant creative search for ways of cultural expressivity that endow the new forms of rebellion with meaning.