Jargon-filled crit: fun, not particularly useful.

I love me some cultural criticism and theory as much as the next gal, but sometimes I wonder whether anyone is thinking or just producing. For example, we can say "advertisements flatter you so you'll buy crap, yay capitalism," or you can add 100 more words and a gratuitous reference to a philosopher to get:

[Judith Williamson in Decoding Advertisements] uses Althusser as a frame for showing how ads interpellate us as certain kinds of subjects. The ads call out to us in certain ways, and we recognize ourselves as the sort of person they are hailing.  Williamson argues that “advertisements are selling us something else besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.”

A few paragraphs later, the writer concedes that "[a]dvertisements have always exploited this principle." Cool, so what value is added by wrapping this observation in theory jargon? Again, I love me some jargon, but if the point is to tell consumers, "hey, watch out, look what's being done to you without your even realizing it," maybe this isn't the most helpful phrasing:

[Williamson again:] Ads create an ‘alreadyness’ of ‘facts’ about ourselves as individuals: that we are consumers, that we have certain values, that we will freely buy things, consume, on the basis of those values, and so on. We are trapped in the illusion of choice… [Ads] invite us ‘freely’ to create ourselves in accordance with the way in which they have already created us.

[New Inquiry]