ANALYSIS:

Em que anno vive U.S.?

Advertisement.

This is an advertisement in Brazil from the 1930’s

for the international machinery company,
Caterpillar, which is still famous and successful
throughout the world. The advertisement is asking
“in what year does the U.S. live?” there is then
two illustrations depicting what was the U.S in the
1830’s (animal force and power was used for
labor) and what the U.S was presently in the
1930’s (labor used with machine power). The
advertisement says the U.S was a nation powered
by animal labor because they were unaware of
machinery power and now they are a “modern”
nation due to the use of Caterpillar machinery. The
advertisement asserts that they are in the 1930’s,
the progressive era or the “Caterpillar age”; “We
must produce better, faster, and cheaper” the
advertisement claims. This ad is an example of the
industrialization that was occurring within
nations across the world at the time due to
advances in technology. What this advertisement
is doing to sell its product through the eyes of
Foucault is using discourse to define what is
normal in a progressive nation and in a
progressive era as pictured by the United States
use of mechanized strength, and using that to
make countries using “old” technology, in this case
Brazil, feel isolated by classifying them as
unprogressive in comparison to the U.S. According
to Butler “dialectical appropriation and
suppression of the Other is one tactic…deployed
centrally in the service of expanding the
masculinist domain”. In this aspect concurring
with Butler’s theory, the marketing strategy is
using dominance which can be associated with
masculinity and strength by appropriating Brazil’s
use of animal force which is what the U.S was
doing a century ago. Through the suppression of
their identity and in making them feel lesser they
can sell their product because it is portrayed as an
attribute synonymous to the characteristics of a
nation known for its modernization and economic
success. In displaying the state of another country
who is becoming modern and ahead of its time
they are translating the idea that they too should
be evolving in the same way by buying these
“modern” technologies to “get with the times” of
progress in order to be seen as Freud would say
“civilized”.