Two concerns need to be set aside before criticism can escape its literary chains and venture into mass culture. The first is the mistaken assumption that the products of mass culture are somehow less worthy of criticism, because they just aren’t all that complex or interesting:
We are accustomed to think of these subtleties in quasi-Pavlovian terms, as hidden stimuli that “turn us on” without our knowing it: nipples airbrushed into sunsets, lewd words traced into some ice cubes, etc. But this conception of the way ads work, and of the way we apprehend them, is much too crude. They function, not mechanically, but poetically, through metaphor, association, repetition, and other devices that suggest a variety of possible meanings. Miller, Boxed In (31)
In other words, there’s not as much distance between a poem and an ad as the poet would have you think. At least, not inasmuch as the critic is concerned.
The second assumption is that in order for a critic to establish that a meaning is evident in a text (wherein a text can consist of words or images or both), she must establish intent; i.e., she must not only convince you that the text means something, but that the author of the text intended it to mean so:
If criticism can demonstrate convincingly that a commercial uses certain strategies, then we can assume that those strategies are, in fact, at work, whether or not the advertisers might acknowledge them. Ibid. (32)
As with advertisements (or designs) as with poetry: the author’s intent is unknowable (perhaps even to the author) and irrelevant: once written down, the text takes on a meaning of its own.
