topics: |  philosophy | aesthetics | art | advertising | econ

John Berger is a Marxist art historian/painter, who is also a
Booker prize winning novelist (novel "G", 1972)

Extensive excerpts

In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images
every day of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently. In
no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of
images, such a density of visual messages.

One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and
for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or
expectation. The publicity image belongs to the moment. We see it as we turn
a page, as we turn a corner, as a vehicle passes us. Or we see it on a
television screen while waiting for the commercial break to end. Publicity
images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually
renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they
refer to the past and always they speak of the future.

We are now so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely
notice their total impact. A person may notice a particular image or piece of
information because it corresponds to some particular interest he has. But we
accept the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of
climate. For example, the fact that these images belong to the moment but
speak of the future produces a strange effect which has become so familiar
that we scarcely notice it. Usually it is we who pass the image - walking,
travelling, turning a page; on the TV screen it is somewhat different but
even then we are theoretically the active agent - we can look away, turn down
the sound, make some coffee. Yet despite this, one has the impression that
publicity images are continually passing us, like express trains on their way
to some distant terminus. We are static; they are dynamic - until the
newspaper is thrown away, the television program continues or the paster is
posted over.

Publicity as Manufacturing

Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which
ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient
manufacturers - and thus the national economy. It is closely related to
certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of
enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons
of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of "The Free
World." For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they
in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.

It is true that in publicity one brand of manufacture, one firm, competes
with another; but it is also true that every publicity image confirms and
enhances every other. Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing
messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the
same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this
cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only
makes a single proposal.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by
buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way
richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.

Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have
apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of
being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of
manufacturing glamour.

Advertising is not Pleasure

It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits
to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely
because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths,
sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by
working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real
object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in
that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the
pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will
become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more
remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity
can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is
proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it.

Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always
about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by
the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him
envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be
enviable? The envy of other. Publicity is about social relations, not
objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as
judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

Becoming the object of envy

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not
sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with
interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become
less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more
impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others)
of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed
happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this
which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. The look
out over the looks of envy which sustain them.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys
the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into
an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving
herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love
of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the
product.

Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through
images that society's belief in itself. There are several reasons why these
images use the language of oil painting.

You are what you have

Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private
property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you
have. It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of
post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.

Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the
future. It cannot itself supply the standards of its own claims. And so all
its references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional. It
would lack both confidence and credibility if it used a strictly contemporary
language.

Publicity needs to turn to its own advantage the traditional education of the
average spectator-buyer. What he has learnt at school of history, mythology,
poetry can be used in the manufacturing of glamour. Cigars can be sold in the
name of a King, underwear in connection with the Sphinx, a new car by
reference to the status of a country house. In the language of oil painting
these vague historical or poetic references are always present. The fact that
they are imprecise and ultimately meaningless is an advantage: they should
not be understandable, they should merely be reminiscent of cultural lessons
half-learnt. Publicity makes all history mythical, but to do so effectively
it needs a visual language with historical dimensions.

Lastly, a technical development made it easy to translate the language of oil
painting into publicity cliches. This was the invention, about fifteen years
ago, of cheap color photography. Such photography can reproduce the color and
texture and tangibility of objects as only oil paint had been able to do
before. Color photography is to the spectator-buyer what oil paint was to the
spectator-owner. Both media use similar, highly tactile means to play upon
the spectator's sense of acquiring the real thing which the image shows. In
both cases his feeling that he can almost touch what is in the image reminds
him how he might or does possess the real thing.

Spectator-buyer vs Spectator-owner

Yet, despite this continuity of language, the function of publicity is very
different from that of the oil painting. The spectator-buyer stands in a very
different relation to the world from the spectator-owner.

The oil painting showed what its owner was already enjoying among his
possessions and his way of life. It consolidated his own sense of his own
value. It enhanced his view of himself as he already was. It began with
facts, the facts of his life. The paintings embellished the interior in which
he actually lived.

The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied
with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with
his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life
will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.

The oil painting was addressed to those who made money out of the
market. Publicity is addressed to those who constitute the market, to the
spectator-buyer who is also the consumer-producer from whom profits are made
twice over - as worker and then as buyer. The only places relatively free of
publicity are the quarters of the very rich; their money is theirs to keep.

Anxiety and Sexuality in Advertising

All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get
money is to overcome anxiety. Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity
plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing. Money is life. Not
in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital
gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the
sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The
power to spend money is the power to live. According to the legends of
publicity, those who lack the power to spend money become literally
faceless. Those who have the power become loveable.

Publicity increasingly uses sexuality to sell any product or service. But
this sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol of something presumed
to be larger than it: the good life in which you can buy whatever you
want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable;
occasionally this is the explicit message of publicity, usually it is the
implicit message, i.e. if you are able to buy this product you will be
lovable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.

For publicity the present is by definition insufficient. The oil painting was
thought of as a permanent record. One of the pleasures a painting gave to its
owner was the thought that it would convey the image of his present to the
future of his descendants. Thus the oil painting was naturally painted in the
present tense. The painter painted what was before him, either in reality or
in imagination. The publicity image which is ephemeral uses only the future
tense. With this you WILL become desirable. In these surroundings all your
relationships WILL become happy and radiant.

Publicity principally addressed to the working class tends to promise a
personal transformation through the function of the particular product it is
selling (Cinderella); middle-class publicity promises a transformation of
relationships through a general atmosphere created by an ensemble of products
(The Enchanted Palace).

Publicity speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this future
is endlessly deferred. How then does publicity remain credible - or credible
enough to exert the influence it does? It remains credible because the
truthfulness of publicity is judged, not by the real fulfillment of its
promises, but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the
spectator-buyer. Its essential application is not to reality but to
day-dreams.

Glamour : A modern invention

To understand this better me must go back to the notion of glamour. Glamour
is a modern invention. In the heyday of the oil painting it did not
exist. Ideas of grace, elegance, authority amounted to something apparently
similar but fundamentally different. Mrs. Siddons as seen by Gainsborough is
not glamorous, because she is not presented as enviable and therefore
happy. She may be seen as wealthy, beautiful, talented, lucky. But her
qualities are her own and have been recognized as such. What she is does not
entirely depend upon others' envy - which is how, for example, Andy Warhol
presents Marilyn Monroe.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and
widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy
and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an
emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a
universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel
powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would
like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and
its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which
entails, amongst other thing, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives,
continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of
powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.

It is this which makes it possible to understand why publicity remains
credible. The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it
promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels
himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and
instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is
filled with glamorous day-dreams. The process is often reinforced by working
conditions. The interminable present of mean- ingless working hours is
"balanced" by a dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the
passivity of the moment. In his or her day-dreams the passive worker becomes
the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self.

No two dreams are the same. Some are instantaneous, others prolonged, The
dream is always personal to the dreamer. Publicity does not manufacture the
dream. All that it does is to propose to each one of us that we are not yet
enviable - yet could be.

Consumption as a substitute for Democracy

Publicity has another important social function. The fact that this function
has not been planned as a purpose by those who make and use publicity in no
way lessens its significance. Publicity turns consumption into a substitute
for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the
place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate
for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is
happening in the rest of the world. Publicity adds up to a kind of
philosophical system. It explains everything in its own terms. It interprets
the world.

The entire world becomes a setting for the fulfillment of publicity's promise
of the good life. The world smiles at us. It offers itself to us. And because
everywhere is imagined as offering itself to us, everywhere is more or less
the same. The contrast between publicity's interpretation of the world and
the world's actual condition is a very stark one, and this sometimes becomes
evident in the color magazines which deal with news stories. Overleaf is the
contents page of such a magazine. The sock of such contrasts is considerable:
not only because of the coexistence of the two worlds shown, but also because
of the cynicism of the culture which shows them one above the other. It can
be argues that the juxtaposition of images was not planned. Nevertheless the
text, the photographs taken in Pakistan, the photographs taken for the
advertisements, the editing of the magazine, the layout of the publicity, the
printing of both, the fact that advertiser's pages and news pages cannot be
co-ordinated - all these are produced by the same culture.

It is not, however, the moral shock of the contrast which needs
emphasizing. Advertisers themselves can take account of the shock. The
Advertisers Weekly (3 March 1972) reports that some publicity firms, now
aware of the commercial danger of such unfortunate juxtapositions in new
magazines, are deciding to use less brash, more somber images, often in black
and white rather than color. What we need to realize is what such contrasts
reveal about the nature of publicity.

Timelessness of envy

Publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just as far as nothing else is
happening. For publicity all real events are exceptional and happen only to
strangers. In the BanglaDesh photographs, the events were tragic and
distant. But the contrast would have been no less stark if they had been
events near at hand in Derry or Birmingham. Nor is the contrast necessarily
dependent upon the events being tragic. If they are tragic, their tragedy
alerts our moral sense to the contrast. Yet if the events were joyous and if
they were photographed in a direct and unstereotyped way the contrast would
be just as great.

Publicity, situated in a future continually deferred, excludes the present
and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible
within it. All that happens, happens outside it. The fact that publicity is
eventless would be immediately obvious if it did not use a language which
makes of tangibility an event in itself. Everything publicity shows is there
awaiting acquisition. The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other
actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses.

Publicity exerts an enormous influence and is a political phenomenon of great
importance. But its offer is as narrow as its references are wide. It
recognizes nothing except the power to acquire. All other human faculties or
needs are made subsidiary to this power. All hopes are gathered together,
made homogeneous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague,
magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of
hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the
culture of capitalism.

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity
capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define
their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by
extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved
by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.