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THEORY : PAULO FREIRE
To begin,
I would like to argue that the theory of Paulo Freire (1971, 1972) provides
strong rationale for educators to study advertising. He saw education for liberation
as the essential calling of the educator. This belief included a specific
worldview and some central concepts. The worldview understood society as
dual, as actually two societies. He referred to these societies as the oppressor
and the oppressed society, but he also used terms such as director/dependent,
author/silent, subject/object, and invader/invaded. Concepts of central
interest to educators studying advertising are "possessive consciousness" and
"cultural invasion".
POSSESSIVE
CONSCIOUSNESS
Freire described the psychology of the oppressors as
believing themselves to be the only humans, while they conceive of all others
as things. The oppressors understand through a "possessive consciousness" where
"to be is to have". Through domination and violence, they "transform all
into an aspect of their purchasing power". They treat nature and the labor of
others as objects; they "in-animate everything". He described the possessive
consciousness as a form of sadism. (Freire, 1972, pp.43-45)
Oppressors
must deposit myths "indispensable to the preservation of the status quo"
into the culture of the oppressed. These myths are the legitimizing beliefs of
a free society -- ideas that one is free to work, quit, change jobs, become
an entrepreneur, that one is treated equally by institutions, that elites earned
their status through hard work and charity, that the oppressed are lazy,
that technology solves all problems, and that private property is natural.
(Freire,1972, p.135) Oppressors manipulate the oppressed mainly through belief:
the oppressors must "anesthetize the people so they will not think", and "inculcate
individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success". The
oppressed must believe in "the possibility of their own ascent" as individuals
only, with no vision of collective action. (Freire,1972, p.144)
In spreading possessive consciousness, oppressors must treat ideas like alienation,
domination, liberation, humanization, and autonomy as ridiculous or
dangerous. "Attracted by the lifestyle of the director society", the dependent
society is never truly committed to the lived reality. The dependent society
has the values of the director society and is unable to formulate the ideas
that would end dependence. (Freire, 1971, p.3) In the alienated cultural processes
characteristic of dependent or object societies, there is no authentic
thought: "Reality does not correspond to the reality being lived objectively
but rather to the reality in which the alienated man imagines himself to be".
(Freire, 1971, p.20)
CULTURAL
INVASION
In
order to spread possessive consciousness to those who possess
little, oppressors must promote cultural invasion. The invaders "penetrate
the cultural context of another group in disrespect of the latters potentialities;
they impose their own view of the world upon those they invade and
inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression". Freire calls
this process "an act of violence". Invaders author, choose, mold, act.
This leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded. They see
reality with the outlook of the invaders; they want to be like the invaders.
(1972, p.150)
Cultural invasion involves a parochial view of reality,
a static perception of the world, and the imposition of one worldview upon another.
Central to both possessive consciousness and cultural invasion is "the
illusion of deciding" when decision-making power is outside the invaded culture.
The oppressed must believe themselves to have freedom, to have control
over their lives. Choices in consumption are the freedoms available for the oppressed,
while for the oppressors are reserved production decisions that define
societys possibilities. (Freire, 1972, p.159) The oppressors "study all the
possibilities which the future contains in order to 'domesticate' it and keep
it in line with the present". (Freire,1971, p. 20)
Freire saw the
logic of cultural invasion as much advanced in mass societies like the United
States. "In mass societies, ways of thinking become as standardized as ways
of dressing and tastes in food. Men begin thinking and acting according to the
prescriptions they receive daily from the communications media rather than
in response to their dialectical relationship with the world". Behavior is automatized.
Technology emerges as a New Divinity, as a cult of worship. (Freire,
1971, p.49)
Freire did not see technology as necessarily evil, but
he believed that the Right mythologizes science and technology by subordinating
to its own ideology, "using them to disseminate information and prescriptions
in its effort to adjust people to the reality which the communications
media define as proper". The Right, which has the power to direct how communication
technologies are structured into society, invents new forms of cultural
action only for domination, to indoctrinate people in a mythified version of
reality. Crucial to the Right in this task is an elite who think for it. Freire
believed that fundamental to change was an elite that did not promote possessive
consciousness through cultural invasion, but instead denounced the myths
and proclaimed a new reality... (Freire, 1971, p.46)
EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION
Here is where Freire
differs from a strict Marxist. A Marxist understands the culture as the superstructure
reflecting the economic base. Mostly due to class interest, those
with the privilege of creating culture will promote the values necessary to
maintain the status quo. Economics drive culture. Freire believed that the
potential existed for the culture to drive economics. People could create a culture
that transcended economic interest and promoted human evolution. For culture
to transcend, elites must seek to become engaged in social reality. Elites
must begin to see the laborer not as an abstraction but as an equal. The
Arts must find inspiration in the hard life, not merely celebrate the comforts
of luxury. Elites must join with the popular masses in all realms of culture--
literature, the plastic arts, theatre, music, education, sports. (Freire,
1971,p.39-40)
And among the elites, he saw educators as holding a crucial
role in cultural transformation. In this time before the transformation,
he saw education as having a fundamentally "narrative character"; that is,
the narrative subject (teacher) talking to the listening object (student).
While being narrated to, the student becomes lifeless and petrified. Freire declared
that "education is suffering from a narration sickness". (Freire, 1972,
p.57) The idea of filling up students with the contents of the teachers narration,
the banking concept of education, viewed the student as consumer antithetical
to the meaning of education "to draw ou"t. Here again in Freire's
thinking we see the subject/object dynamic paralleled with the production/consumption
dynamic.
Education must give students the tools to be creators
of their own reality. In an education that orients one to the world, subjectivity
and objectivity are united, and students acquire a critical perception
of reality. (Freire, 1971, p.6)
What Freire called "potential consciousness"
sounds a lot like what is presently referred to as "metacognition".
He believed education could be structured to bring out "perception of the previous
perception. . . knowledge of the previous knowledge". Students become
aware of their own cognitive processes. Once one can reflect on ones own perception,
one can move from being submerged in reality and emerge from reality.
When one realizes ones potential consciousness, one can act to transform the
world. (Freire, 1972, p.75)
Freire in fact defined education as cultural
action for freedom, "a dramatic unity of denunciation and annunciation".
Education "denounces what in fact is. . . to formulate a type of education
which corresponds to the specifically human mode of being, which is historical".
"We must seek through reflective action to achieve that announced future
which is being born within the denunciation". (Freire, 1971, p.20)
This
means that as educators we must not merely denounce aspects of our culture
that limit our students potential. It is not enough to denounce the advertising
billboard; we must announce a future where advertisers spend their community-level
advertising dollars in sponsorship of mural projects, community publications,
and cultural events. It is not enough to denounce the nearly complete
commercial control of our public airwaves; we must announce a future where
children have access to cultural production and distribution. A positive
vision must accompany any negative denunciation. Though we have undergone a heightened
awareness about the extent of manipulation in our culture, it has resulted
in a cynicism that is ultimately self-defeating. At this point, advertising
is so sophisticated that it incorporates peoples cynicism about advertising
to create engagement. Freire would argue that in order to achieve potential
consciousness we need historical understanding. A history of advertising
will be necessary so that we may understand how it has evolved to express our
fears about manipulation. It is only after such historical understanding that
we may announce a future where advertising is not in conflict with the goals
of the educator.
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