When we began this project we anticipated seeing plenty of science imagery because we had grown accustomed to recognizing science references in television ads. When we actually looked at the ads more closely -- frame by frame -- we realized that most of the references to science were really little more than glosses -- references made on the basis of tightly abbreviated signifiers and compressed meaning-systems. A gloss requires that viewers mentally re-expand on the wider relations of the subject being compressed. Glosses about science are built on assumptions. We might surmise that the viewing public already possesses sufficient recognition of the most common clichés regarding science and its role in our lives to make sense of the fleeting science signifiers that flash by in these ads.

We want to explore the use of some of these clichés and identify the criteria of science and technology invoked by visual clichés set to music. Corporate advertising often appropriates signifiers of science to build narratives celebrating the positive power of global capital. Lab technicians in white coats inspecting test tubes or peering in microscopes followed by a shot of the look of wonderment in the human eye visually attest to the commitment of corporate research and development. No matter how facile, the presence or absence of tightly abbreviated signifiers of science and technology can be telling.

We have noticed that absent from any contemporary list of common science signifiers is the imagery of the atomic era. The icon of the atom, electrons in orbit, that so predominated as an image of technological progress from the 1950s through the 1980s, has been banished in favor in the images of digital micro-landscapes and icons of DNA strands. This is not, we submit, accidental. Rather it reflects the fact that big Capital now finds more lucrative returns on investment in biotechnology and digital eelectronics than it does in physics labs.

It is clear in these television commercials that the corporation or some form of business unit is now represented as the center of the scientific world. The state, the military, and academia are absent in these ads.

The market dictates corporate science. And, according to corporate advertising that market is us -- our illnesses, our suffering, our desires for a better life. These problems are filtered through the market into the corporation where capital meets science. There is no pure science here. No science for the sake of science. The production of knowledge is contingent upon the estimation of potential future profits, even though the ads refuse to acknowledge that profit is a motive for developing new technologies.

In this scenario Francois Lyotard argues that knowledge is exteriorized from the knower. Knowledge doesn't reside in the knower but in the relationship between commodity producers and commodities. Consequently, "knowledge will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its 'use value.'" In other words, knowledge exists as commodified databases electronically stored in corporate vaults. It is this condition that dismantles the association of scientific knowledge with Enlightenment narratives. Commodified scientific knowledge controlled by the corporation developed to serve the continued diffusion of a consumer society violates the belief in rationality and universal humanism central to the Enlightenment project. Lyotard notes the demoralization of scientists, particularly in the university. However, reduction of the scientific project as a pure form produced by scientists autonomously searching for Truth does not necessarily mean that science is de-legitimized. Science blends with technology and becomes what Lyotard calls technoscience. Science is now based on performativity, as the corporation emerges as the locus of scientific research.

But does that mean the narratives that contextualized scientific discourse have collapsed? In the United States science became increasingly housed within corporate research labs or government installations during WW II. This relationship continued throughout the Cold War. The 1960's certainly saw the spread of critique that decried the loss of autonomy of the production of knowledge which included scientific knowledge, an autonomy that was more mythical than real. Was science ever de-legitimized? Perhaps within the university. Also, there have been pointed critiques of specific technologies that science has produced, i.e. nuclear technologies, napalm, agent orange. Nevertheless, technoscience continues to advance, even if these advances have become less evolutionary and harmonious than true believers had hoped. So while the gospel of science has been tainted by unintended consequences, Lyotard overstates matters when he suggests that scientific discourse has been reduced to but another language game. We are not arguing for a corporate science. We only note that corporations go to the well of signifiers of science to legitimize their practices and to build narratives that envision a 'better' future brought by science and its daughter technology. And we doubt that they would put so much stock in these signifiers of scientific mastery of nature if the public perceived science as yet another language game. Moreover, corporations have power through mediated discourses and are able to ensure a flow of media messages that link corporate practice, signified science, and social well-being.