Seminars precede the plenary lecture. Students encounter one problem and one text pairing in depth before hearing the full comparative argument. This sequencing is deliberate: students arrive at the lecture with a stake in the argument — they have already worked on one instance of the pattern the lecture will generalize. Do not invert the sequence under timetabling pressure.
Each seminar follows the same internal arc: a warm prompt to surface intuitions (without yet providing theory), a reading-anchored task in pairs or small groups, a close-text task on a specific cultural object, a structured disagreement that holds two competing positions simultaneously, and an exit ticket that names the bridge to the lecture. The arc is designed to move from intuition to argument to genuine uncertainty — the exit ticket should leave students with a question, not an answer.
The structured disagreement is the most important and most difficult moment in each seminar. Its purpose is not to produce a winner. It is to demonstrate that the theoretical vocabulary can hold genuine tension, and that sustaining that tension is more intellectually honest than resolving it prematurely. Coach students to argue the position they find less congenial; the goal is to strengthen the weaker argument, not to confirm the stronger one.
The central risk in this seminar is that students will slide into a consumer critique ("Dove is hypocritical because it's owned by Unilever") rather than a structural one ("the campaign elaborates the discourse it claims to disrupt"). The consumer critique is not wrong, but it is insufficient and will short-circuit the Foucauldian analysis. When this happens, redirect with: "Yes — and what does that tell us about the relationship between the authentic body and the commodity form? What kind of subject does the authentic body produce?"
The Get Out sequence is likely to generate strong affective responses. This is productive, but manage the room carefully: the goal is to move from feeling to structural analysis, not to treat the film as a vehicle for discussing racism in general. Keep the question focused on the dispositif — what is the Armitage household as an assemblage of practices, discourses, and spaces that produces a particular kind of subject (the post-racial Black guest)?
The Banet-Weiser reading is the most theoretically demanding for students at this level. Scaffold it: the key argument is that authenticity is a brand value, not an escape from brand logic. Once students have that sentence, the Dove analysis follows naturally.
Distribute index cards. Students write (not discuss) their answers to: "What does the Dove Real Beauty campaign want you to feel about your body? Write the feeling down before you name it."
After five minutes, ask two or three students to share. Do not theorize yet. Collect the language: notice which words come up (authentic, real, natural, accepted). These will anchor the Foucauldian analysis later.
Screen three Dove ads in sequence (2004 "Evolution," 2013 "Real Beauty Sketches," 2023 "Turn Your Back"). In pairs, students work with Foucault's "The Subject and Power" to answer: What body does each campaign produce? What discursive conditions make that body thinkable? How does the body the campaign produces change across twenty years?
Pairs should be working directly in the text — finding Foucault's specific vocabulary (discourse, subject, power/knowledge) and applying it to the ads. Circulate and push for specificity: "Where in the ad does the discourse operate? What moment produces the subject?"
Bring pairs back together. Take one ad per pair; build a composite analysis on the board. Key question to close: "Does the discourse Dove participates in change across these twenty years, or does it deepen?"
Re-screen the sunken place sequence from Get Out (approx. 2:30). Ask students: "What is the Armitage household as a dispositif? Map the apparatuses — the objects, the discourses, the spatial arrangements, the gestures — that produce the post-racial subject."
Students work individually for five minutes, then share in the full group. Build the map on the board: the dinner party conversation, the "we would have voted for Obama" moment, the architectural layout of the house, Missy's hypnosis as the clinical apparatus, the sunken place itself as the condition of the successfully interpellated subject.
Key question: "What does the Armitage household need Chris not to see? And what in the film's own preferred reading — the horror-film genre, the surface-level 'escape' plot — also needs the audience not to see?"
Divide the room in half. Side A argues: the Dove campaign is feminist counter-discourse — it challenges conventional beauty standards and has demonstrably changed the representational landscape of advertising. Side B argues: the Dove campaign is ideological intensification — it opens a new site of discursive management of the female body, extends the apparatus into the register of authenticity, and produces a more sophisticated consuming subject. Use Banet-Weiser to supply both sides with vocabulary.
Run the disagreement for twelve minutes. Then: ask each student to switch to the other position and continue for three minutes. The goal is not to resolve the disagreement but to demonstrate that both positions can be sustained with the theoretical vocabulary, and that the tension between them is more analytically productive than either resolution.
Students complete the exit ticket card (below) individually in five minutes. Collect before they leave. Preview the lecture: "In the plenary, you'll see this argument — that subjects are produced by discourse, not reflected by it — applied to three more cultural domains: national identity advertising, hip-hop, and postmodern fiction. Come with your Dove analysis in hand. You'll recognise the pattern."
Name one discursive apparatus — from advertising, medicine, education, or social media — that has shaped how you understand your own body or identity. In two sentences, describe the subject it produces.
In Foucault's terms: what is the preferred reading of the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign? What does that reading require you not to see?
Collect cards. Review before the lecture. Students who have answered Prompt B with the consumer critique ("Dove is hypocritical") rather than the structural critique need one-on-one follow-up before the plenary.
The Althusser reading is dense and students frequently misread it as a conspiracy theory — as though ISAs were deliberately designed by a ruling class to deceive workers. The essential corrective: Althusser does not require intentionality. The ISA reproduces ideology not because its agents are cynical but because ideology is the condition under which social relations are lived. Teachers teach because they believe in education; priests minister because they believe in faith; Bell Canada runs "Let's Talk" because it has genuinely internalized wellness discourse. None of this requires deliberate deception. It requires something more unsettling: sincere participation.
The Bell "Let's Talk" analysis tends to generate discomfort among students who have found the campaign personally meaningful or who have mental health experiences they associate with it. Handle carefully: the Althusserian critique of the campaign is not a critique of mental health advocacy. It is a critique of the specific institutional form that advocacy takes when it is annexed to a corporate brand. The argument is about the apparatus, not about the people it addresses.
Saunders' "Jon" is the most important text in this seminar and should get the most time. Push students past the comedy — the story is genuinely funny — to the philosophical question: is there a Jon beneath the advertising language? Althusser's answer, and Saunders' implicit answer, is that the question is malformed. There is only the Jon the apparatus has produced. That is not nihilism; it is a precise description of what ideology means.
"What national feeling have you been trained to have? If you are Canadian: what makes you feel Canadian — not what you believe Canada is, but what feeling gets activated? If you are not Canadian: what national feeling have you been trained to have about your own country, or about Canada from the outside? Write for five minutes without editing."
Ask two or three students to share. Note the language — particularly the verbs. "Trained" is the operative word. Ask: "Who or what did the training? Where did it happen?"
Screen the Molson Canadian "I Am Canadian" rant (2000) and the Tim Hortons "True North" ad (2009) back to back. In groups of three, students work with Althusser's interpellation scene to perform the following analysis for each ad: (1) Identify the subject being posited — who is being hailed? (2) Name the attributes assigned to that subject. (3) Identify the retroactive justification — how does the ad make it appear that the subject already existed, and that the attributes merely describe what was always true?
Groups report back. Build a comparison on the board: how does the "I Am Canadian" subject differ from the "True North" subject? Note the chronological gap — 2000 vs 2009 — and ask: what has changed in the construction of Canadian national identity in that decade? (Answer you are building toward: the multicultural national subject has replaced the mono-ethnic one, but the container — corporate nationalism — is identical.)
Screen the Bell "Let's Talk" 2020 television spot. Ask students individually: "Map this campaign onto Althusser's typology of ISAs. Which ISA is Bell Canada occupying? What does it do to mental health discourse to relocate it within this apparatus?"
Discuss in full group. Key analytical moves to surface: Bell is inhabiting the function of the medical/therapeutic ISA without any of its institutional authority. The campaign produces a subject who relates to their mental health through the mediation of a telecommunications brand — who, in discussing their mental health, participates in Bell's community. The discourse is not false. The discomfort is in the institutional relocation.
Push to: "What would mental health advocacy look like if it were not annexed to a corporate brand? What ISA would it inhabit instead? What subject would that produce?"
Read aloud two short passages from Saunders' "Jon": the passage in which Jon describes falling in love with Carolyn, and the passage in which he mourns the death of a fellow focus-group resident. Both passages are composed almost entirely of advertising language — brand names, focus-group vocabulary, product-preference metaphors.
Ask students to work in pairs: "Is there a Jon beneath the advertising language? Does the story give us any evidence of an interior life that precedes or exceeds the discourse? If so, where? If not, what are the implications?"
Bring pairs back together. The structured disagreement here is implicit: some students will argue that Jon's love is genuine — that the advertising language is a medium through which real feeling moves. Others will argue that the advertising language is the feeling — that there is no substrate beneath it. Hold both positions. Ask: "Does Althusser's account force us to one answer or the other? Or does it complicate the question itself?"
Students complete the exit ticket card (below) individually. Preview: "In the plenary, you'll see Althusser's hailing traced across the history of hip-hop — a genre that has spent forty years negotiating the relationship between counter-discourse and the commodity form. Come with your analysis of the Tim Hortons subject in hand."
In two sentences: write the preferred reading of the Tim Hortons "True North" ad. Then in two sentences: write the oppositional reading that the preferred reading has to work to suppress. Do not hedge — argue both positions as strongly as you can.
What is the ISA that Bell "Let's Talk" is occupying? In one sentence, name it. In one sentence, describe what the campaign does to the discourse it inhabits.
Review the preferred/oppositional pairs before the lecture. Students who cannot write a genuinely strong oppositional reading (who hedge it into irrelevance) need prompting on what it means to argue against the grain of a text.
This seminar handles race and commodification directly. The room's demographic composition will affect how discussions land; be alert to dynamics in which Black students feel positioned as representatives of hip-hop culture or as adjudicators of authenticity debates. The analytical framework — Hall, hooks — should do the work of keeping the discussion structural rather than personal. If the discussion becomes testimonial rather than analytical, redirect to the text: "What does Hall's model tell us about this specific moment in the Nike ad?"
The Nike-Kaepernick analysis tends to produce strong disagreement about whether the ad is cynical. This disagreement is productive but needs to be theoretically anchored: the question is not whether Nike is cynical (a question about intention) but what the ad does structurally to the gesture it encodes (a question about the apparatus). Hall gives you the vocabulary for the latter; push toward it.
hooks' essay is the most demanding reading in the unit for students who have not encountered critical race theory. Scaffold the key argument before the seminar: the appetite in white consumer culture for Black expressive culture operates as a form of consumption that simultaneously desires and forecloses the political content of what is being consumed. The music is purchased; the politics are not.
The lyric archaeology task requires students to have done the reading carefully. If they haven't, do a brief close reading of the "99 Problems" second verse in the room — it is short enough to work through together, and the legal-procedural precision of the verse is more visible on a second reading.
"Has a corporation ever used a political gesture that you cared about to sell something? Describe what happened and describe the feeling. Was the feeling different from straightforward contempt — and if so, how?"
Take two or three responses. The goal is to surface the affective complexity of the commodification of dissent — the fact that it often produces not simple cynicism but something more mixed: admiration for the gesture, discomfort at the container, uncertainty about whether the discomfort is justified. That complexity is what Hall and hooks are trying to theorize.
Screen the Nike "Dream Crazy" ad in full (approx. 2:00). In pairs, students apply Hall's three reading positions to the ad: (1) Dominant reading: what does the ad say if you read it within its preferred framework? (2) Negotiated reading: what do you accept, and what do you resist? (3) Oppositional reading: what does the ad require you not to see, and what becomes visible from outside the preferred framework?
Pairs report back. The dominant reading is clear: Nike supports the courage to stand up for your beliefs. The negotiated reading typically involves some version of "but it's still selling trainers." The oppositional reading is where the analytical work happens: what the ad requires you not to see is Nike's supply chain, the conditions under which the trainers are produced, and the systemic racial capitalism that makes Kaepernick's protest necessary in the first place.
In small groups of three or four, students work across the three hip-hop texts. Task: "Track the disciplinary apparatus across 'Fight the Power,' '99 Problems,' and 'The Blacker the Berry.' What is named in each text? How is it named — what language, what rhetorical strategy, what relationship between speaker and apparatus does each text enact? How does the cost of naming change across twenty-five years?"
Key analytical moments to surface: "Fight the Power" names the apparatus from outside and in opposition — the speaker stands against Elvis, against John Wayne, against the radio. "99 Problems" names the apparatus from within the commodity form — the speaker is both the victim of the police stop and the subject of a commercially successful record. "The Blacker the Berry" stages the contradiction explicitly — the speaker is simultaneously the critic of anti-Black violence and the complicit beneficiary of the industry that exploits Black culture. The naming becomes more sophisticated and more painful as it becomes more self-aware.
The question: can a commodity — a cultural object produced within and for the market — function as genuine political counter-discourse? Side A argues yes: the Nike ad, whatever its corporate motivations, gave Kaepernick's protest a visibility and reach it would not otherwise have had; Kendrick Lamar's albums have brought structural analysis of anti-Blackness to audiences it would not otherwise have reached. Side B argues no: the commodity form neutralizes the political content by suturing it to the logic of consumption — the audience buys the politics along with the product, and in buying it, depoliticizes it. Apply hooks to both sides.
Run the disagreement for twelve minutes. Ask: does hooks resolve this? Her answer is subtle — she acknowledges the genuine pleasure and value of cross-racial cultural consumption while insisting on its structural dimension. The disagreement should not resolve cleanly.
Students complete exit ticket cards. Preview: "In the plenary, you'll see the question of what happens when resistance can only be expressed as style taken to its endpoint — a music and an advertising culture in which the horizon of the politically imaginable has contracted to the size of the market. Come with your Kaepernick analysis. It will be the pivot point."
Using Hall's vocabulary: what is the preferred reading of the Nike "Dream Crazy" ad? Name in one specific sentence what that reading requires the audience not to see.
Apply hooks' concept of "eating the Other" to one specific moment in the Nike ad. Whose desire is being addressed? What is being consumed? What is being refused?
Watch for students who answer Prompt A with "the preferred reading is that Nike supports athletes" — that is the content of the preferred reading, not the analytical account of how it operates. The answer should name the mechanism, not just the message.
This is the most conceptually difficult seminar and the one that will most reward a careful, unhurried approach. Jameson's argument is historically specific and students frequently mistake postmodernism for a synonym for "contemporary" or "ironic." The essential corrective: postmodernism is a diagnosis of a specific historical condition — the cultural logic of late capitalism — not a description of a stylistic trend. The John Lewis ads are not postmodern because they use animation or sentiment; they are postmodern because the sentiment has been decoupled from historical content and reconstituted as a commodifiable affect.
The DeLillo passage is the pivot of the seminar. Read it aloud in the room if at all possible. The prose is doing something structurally as well as semantically: the accumulation of the passage mirrors the accumulation of images it describes. Students who have read it will find the second encounter (in the seminar room) richer; students who have not read it will often find their first encounter transformative. Both outcomes are fine.
The trap music section will produce the most divergent responses. Some students will have strong personal or cultural connections to Future and may experience the Jamesonian analysis as dismissive or reductive. Acknowledge this tension directly: "The goal is not to diminish the music but to situate it historically — to ask what conditions of possibility produce an aesthetics of pure present, and what that aesthetics tells us about those conditions." Fisher helps here: capitalist realism is not a failure of the artists who operate within it. It is a description of the historical horizon they inhabit.
The final task — Fisher's "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" — should be given enough time to breathe. It is the seminar's most generative provocation and should not be rushed into a resolution.
Screen one John Lewis Christmas ad — "The Bear and the Hare" (2013) recommended. Then: "Did you feel something? Write down the feeling before you analyze it. Then: where does that feeling come from? Is it yours? And does the question of whether it's 'yours' make sense?"
Allow students to sit with this for five minutes. The discomfort of not being able to locate the feeling — of not being sure whether it's genuine sentiment or the simulacrum of sentiment — is the Jamesonian condition. Name it as such once they share: "That uncertainty — the feeling that arrives before you've decided to feel it, that you can't quite claim as your own — that is what Jameson calls the waning of affect."
Screen two more John Lewis ads in sequence (2011 "The Long Wait," 2015 "Man on the Moon"). In pairs, using Jameson's essay: "Identify the historical content that has been evacuated from each ad. What remains in its place? What is the feeling a feeling of, once the history has been removed? How does the nostalgic content change across these three ads, and what does the change tell us about the historical conditions under which the ads were produced?"
Pairs report back. Key moves to surface: the 2011 ad invokes the experience of waiting and anticipation (the child waiting for Christmas morning, then giving his gift). The 2013 ad invokes childhood innocence and interspecies friendship. The 2015 ad invokes loneliness and connection. In each case, the historical referent — an actual childhood, an actual winter, an actual family — has been replaced with the aesthetic of those experiences. Pastiche: the blank imitation of an emotional form.
Read aloud the "most photographed barn in America" passage from White Noise (Chapter 3, the trip to "The Most Photographed Barn in America"). Then give students five minutes to read it again in silence. Ask: "What is DeLillo's argument in this passage? State it in one sentence. Then: can the argument be argued against? And is White Noise itself a postmodern novel or a critique of postmodernism — or is that distinction coherent?"
Full-group discussion. The passage's argument in one sentence: the accumulation of images of an object displaces the object itself; what we encounter is not the barn but the aura of the barn — the cultural significance that has gathered around it through its photographing. Murray's observation that "no one sees the barn" is the Jamesonian diagnosis stated in the flattest possible terms. DeLillo is not offering this as tragedy; he is describing it as the condition.
Play "Thought It Was a Drought" and "Stick Talk" from Future's DS2 (ninety seconds each is sufficient). Ask: "What is the temporal structure of this music? Does it invoke the past? Does it project a future? What kind of time does it inhabit? And is that a failure of imagination or a precise description of the historical horizon available to its speakers?"
Let the disagreement develop without adjudicating it. Some students will argue that trap's radical presentism is a form of refusal — a refusal to be consoled by nostalgia or motivated by a future that structural racism has made inaccessible. Others will argue that it is the end of history in its most complete cultural form: accumulation without narrative, presence without historicity. Fisher helps hold both: capitalist realism is not a choice but a condition, and the artists who operate within it are not failing — they are accurately perceiving the horizon.
Write on the board: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Ask students individually for two minutes: "Test this claim against all four domains we have covered in the unit — the advertising, the film and fiction, the hip-hop. Where do you find evidence for it? Where, if anywhere, do you find evidence against it?"
Brief full-group discussion — five minutes. Do not resolve it. Close with: "This is the question the lecture will be building toward. Come with your evidence."
Students complete exit ticket cards and hand them in. No preview for the lecture: the absence of a preview is intentional. Let the Fisher provocation be the last thing in the room.
In Jameson's terms: what is the nostalgia mode doing in the John Lewis Christmas ads? Name in one sentence the historical content that has been evacuated, and in one sentence the affective residue that remains.
Where in your own cultural life do you feel what Fisher calls the structural impossibility of imagining an alternative? Describe it specifically — a film, a song, a social media feed, a building, a habit. Is that feeling evidence of ideology's success, or of something else?
Prompt B is the most personal prompt in the unit and may produce the most revealing exit tickets. Students who answer with genuine specificity — who name a real cultural object and describe the experience with precision — are demonstrating the most sophisticated integration of the theoretical vocabulary. Look for these students in the lecture and follow up.