1 p. DISCONTENT is the foundation of the western capitalist countries, satisfied only by CONSUMPTION

Discontent is called FREEDOM, and its motive engine is Comparison, Disguised as Human Rights. If "He" has it, it's my right to have it too. This explains the Philistine Zombies that inhabit the West

If you misuse language to call “Envy” as Equal Opportunity, Democracy and Human Rights, you are misinformed, or are you just disguising your covetousness tendency.  Capitalism has certain inherent problems and certain definite tendencies, which you (right now) readily play along with.   I will attempt to explain it here., (in 1,800 words).

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: and freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings of people and the publicity neon lights of the cities of capitalism, are the immediate visible sign of 'The Free World'.

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. Every publicity image confirms and enhances every other.  Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, this car and that car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal, that each of us can transform ourselves, and our lives, by buying some new mouthwash or another car.

ENVY IS THE DRIVING FORCE

“This buy 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 those lovely 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.

Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it can never offer a real object of pleasure, which it doesn’t contain. The more convincingly a publicity would convey 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 are the chances of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity that 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 become.

Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable?  IT IS ONLY THE ENVY OF OTHERS.

Publicity is about social relations, not about 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.

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 back with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused (zombie) look of so many glamour images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.  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.

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

ANXIETY IS YOUR MOTIVATING EXPERIENCE

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 a 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 lovable.

Luxuries, before they were anything else, are a celebration of private property. As an art-form they 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 past standards into the future. It cannot in itself supply the standards of its own claims. And so, all its references to quality are bound to be a retrospective and traditional. It would lack both confidence and credibility if it tried to use a strictly contemporary language.

These vague historical or poetic or moral 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.

Publicity increasingly uses sexuality to sell any product or service. But this sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it is: the good life in which you can buy whatever, and whomever you want. To be able to buy (sex) is the same thing as being sexually desirable. 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 loveless.

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 fantasies of the spectator buyer. Its essential application is not to reality but to your daydreams.

GLAMOUR IS A MODERN INVENTION

Ideas of grace, elegance, authority amounted to something apparently similar but fundamentally different. 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 becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes; and then joins the political struggle for a full democracy, which entails amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which is compounded with his sense of powerlessness, self-dissatisfaction and 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 daydreams.

The interminable present of meaningless working hours is balanced by a dreamt of future in which imaginary activity pretends to replace 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. 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 we could be).

PUBLICITY IS THE SURROGATE FOR REAL 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 we are doing to 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 for you.

The entire world becomes the scenery, (a stage setting) for our fulfillment in the 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 our same lacky.  According to publicity, to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict.  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.  Publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just so far as if nothing else is happening. For publicity all real events are exceptional and happen only to strangers.  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 of it.

The fact that publicity is eventless would be immediately obvious if it did not use a language which makes tangibility, an event in itself. Everything that 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 other 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 be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

Publicity is the life of the western 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 desirable - and what is not desirable.

How do you, yourself, relate to this publicity in your own life, when you think about it?  What will you do differently from now on?

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