Ways Of Seeing

Berger opens the chapter by stating that our lives are saturated in “publicity images.” (For the purposes of this guide, “publicity”, “publicity images,” and “advertisements” are synonymous). Berger also contends that this saturation is historically unprecedented. He observes that, although we may remember or forget these publicity images, they stimulate our imaginations during the fleeting moments in which we encounter them as we conduct our everyday affairs. Publicity images themselves also belong to a unique temporality: while they must be continually renewed and updated, they rarely speak to the present. Instead, they refer to either the past or speak of the future.

We have become so inured to the presence of publicity images that we fail to recognize their impact. They have become a passively accepted fact of our surroundings. In Berger’s view, this conditioning leads us to fail to recognize that, although it is we who pass the images—during our walks in the city, while turning a page, while watching television—it is these publicity images which actually pass us. In their frenetic cycle of renewal, they are dynamic while we are static.

Berger then points out that publicity/advertisement is often invoked as a public good which generates public good by increasing freedoms: freedom of choice for the purchaser, freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. Indeed, the proliferation of advertisements has come to be seen as a hallmark of ‘The Free World,’ and is a feature that distinguishes the Western world from, say, Soviet-era Eastern Europe. However, here, Berger crucially notes that, while advertisements are ostensibly designed to compete with each other, advertisements—even advertisements produced by competing firms—feed on each other in order to confirm and enhance each other’s legitimacy and presence. Ultimately, 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” (131). It proposes that each of us needs to transform our lives by buying another product. What’s more, it proposes that the act of buying will enrich our lives—although, paradoxically, we will have been made poorer by spending our money. In order to convince us of this proposition, advertisements show us images of glamorous people we are meant to envy who have apparently been transformed through the act of purchasing the advertised product. Indeed, for Berger, the very definition of glamour is the state of being envied. Fundamentally, advertisements manufacture this glamour.

Here, Berger notes that it is important to distinguish between the language of publicity and the pleasure or benefits which arise from the things that it advertises. By producing aspirational images and promising gratification through the acquisition of real objects that have yet to be attained, publicity never produces the actual pleasure that it tantalizingly hints at. It therefore concerns itself with the future-buyer, producing for the consumer an image of himself made glamorous by means of product acquisition. Advertisements thus train consumers to envy their own future selves, who could come into being through the purchase of whatever product is being advertised. Therefore, publicity is about social relations—not objects. It does not promise pleasure. Instead, it promises happiness: the happiness of being deemed glamorous (and therefore enviable) by others. Berger then specifies that a fundamental aspect of glamour is the manner in which it is not reciprocal. The glamorous are observed with interest but are absolutely uninterested in their observers. The more impersonal a glamorous figure is, the greater their glamour. This is the logic that lies behind the vacant, unfocused look of glamour advertising. Here, Berger provides two advertisements that demonstrate his point. He furthermore propounds that the underlying logic of the advertisement is to make the spectator envy a future version of themselves that could exist if they bought the advertised product—or, in other words, that advertisements steal a person’s love for him or herself, and then promises to sell that love back to them.

Berger then posits that there is a direct continuity between the language of publicity and the language of oil painting. For one, sometimes advertisements directly invoke well-known paintings. Secondly, advertisements often feature or reference sculptures or paintings as marks of prestige, wealth, and beauty. Thirdly, this act of figurative quotation invokes a cultural authority that is attached to oil painting within the popular imagination: oil painting is understood to be the province of the sophisticated and the highly cultured. However, more importantly than each of these points is the fact that advertising relies very heavily on the conventions and language of oil paintings, so much so that side-by-side comparisons of advertisements and famous paintings reveal prolific and striking similarities. Here, Berger provides several side-by-side comparisons that prove his point.

However, for Berger, the import of oil painting vis-à-vis advertising goes well beyond the issue of pictorial duplication. The true connection between oil painting and advertisements is the fact that they use the same set of signs to communicate very similar messages due to the fact that the two genres share an underpinning ideology: the ideology of capitalism and of consumer society. Oil painting was, first and foremost, a celebration of private property. It is therefore erroneous to conceptualize advertisement as the usurper of the visual art of post-Renaissance Europe: it is, instead, “the last moribund form of that [very] art” (139).

Berger then intimates that publicity is, essentially, nostalgic. Because advertisements, in themselves, cannot validate the credibility of their own claims, they must refer to the past through both references and their very methods of signification in order to produce any kind of legitimacy. They would lack both confidence and credibility if they were to invent their own contemporary language. Consequently, advertisements invoke what the general public has already learned to recognize as beautiful, royal, or enviable in order to successfully function: cigars are named after kings, the sphinx appears in an underwear advertisement, a stately country house forms the background of a car advertisement. Furthermore, the references that advertisements make need not be explicit nor demanding of a requisite learned understanding of the past. In fact, their vagueness and imprecision are part of the power of their subliminal messaging. Lastly, the development of cheap color photography enabled advertising to reproduce the tangible color and texture of products as only oil painting had been able to do prior. Color photography’s relationship with spectator-buyers is therefore directly analogous to oil painting’s relationship with spectator-owners. Both forms of media depict objects in hyper-detail that is designed to play upon the spectator’s “sense of acquiring the real thing which the image shows” (141).

However, despite this shared language, the function of publicity images is very different from that of oil painting, because the spectator-buyer occupies a social position that is highly distinct from that of the spectator-owner. While the oil painting showed what its owner had already attained and therefore confirmed and consolidated that owner’s sense of his own value, advertising aims to make the spectator-buyer perceive a lack within his or her life which can be remedied through the purchase of the advertised product. The oil painting addressed those that made money on the market. Advertisements address those who make up the market: those from whom profit is dually extracted, because they are simultaneously the consumers and the workers whose labor produces the very products that are being advertised. Consequently, the only places that remain relatively free of advertising are the provinces of the super-wealthy: their money, and theirs alone, is theirs to keep.

Furthermore, Berger contends that all advertising preys upon anxiety. Under capitalism, everything can be boiled down to the question of money. Therefore, to obtain money is to overcome anxiety. Inversely, having no money will render a person nothing and no one. Money is both the indicator of and the key to every human capacity. Advertising makes use of this ideological undercurrent in order to both stoke and exploit peoples’ fears of becoming nothing through their lack of spending power, and their desire to wield money as a means to become valid and lovable. Berger observes that, in his day, advertising had begun to increasingly use sexuality to play upon the idea that wielding money makes a person valid and lovable. Advertisements had begun to implicitly create the idea that the ability to buy something is synonymous with being sexually desirable, while the inability to buy something renders a person sexually undesirable.

Berger then contrasts the temporality of oil paintings against that of advertisements. He observes that an oil painting was painted as a depiction of its owner’s present state, in order to affirm and flatter that owner’s present image of himself, and to give his future descendants a depiction of his present self. In contrast, advertisements are designed to appeal to the future self of the spectator-buyer. Therefore, advertisements addressed to the working class often promise personal transformation, or a transformation of their relation to others, through the purchase of the product they advertise. Furthermore, although advertisements speak to an idealized future, that future is endlessly deferred and remains out of reach. Advertisements, then, do not derive their credibility through their power to grant buyer-spectators the ability to realize an ideal future. Instead, they enjoy credibility by relevantly appealing to the spectator-buyer’s fantasies. 

Berger then returns to the topic of glamour. He argues that glamour, in its contemporary instantiation, did not exist during the era of the oil painting. Subjects of oil paintings—while they might have appeared wealthy, beautiful, happy or lucky—did not possess identities that were wholly dependent upon being objects of envy (and therefore glamorous). This is because glamour fundamentally depends upon personal social envy being a common and pervasive emotion. Berger then asserts that contemporary American industrial society, which has progressed toward democracy and then stopped halfway there, is the optimal society for creating the pervasive emotion of envy. In this society, the pursuit of individual happiness has been trumpeted as a universal right. However, the existing social conditions prohibit the individual from feeling truly empowered. This produces a fundamental contradiction within the American democratic subject. There are therefore only two options for this subject: he joins the political struggle or a full democracy and the overthrow of capitalism, or becomes endlessly subject to an envy which, exacerbated by his sense of powerlessness, dissipates into persistent daydreams.

Advertising, therefore, exploits the gap between what this American subject of a half-realized democracy feels himself to be and what he would like to be. It does this by creating a corresponding gap between what it promises and what it actually offers. These two gaps then become one. This gap is then bridged, not by action or lived experience, but by glamorous daydreams. This process works in tandem with working conditions under capitalism. The seemingly endless expanse of time eaten up by working is ‘balanced out’ by the dreams of a future, in which the worker’s present passivity is replaced by imaginary activity: “[t]he passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self” (149). Advertising, therefore, turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. Consumer choice serves as a substitute for political choice. Advertising obscures the actual material conditions of inequality and compensates for that inequality through the diversion of spending money. It proposes an entire, closed philosophical system that explains everything according to its own terms and provides a means to interpret the world. The entire world, according to the terms of this system, becomes the setting for the fulfillment of advertisement’s promise of the good life. This world offers itself to us and is reduced to that which can be bought.

Here, Berger notes that the contrast between the closed philosophical system of advertisement and the actual condition of the world is often a very stark one—especially in news publications which often provide coverage of peoples’ destitution, tragedy, and suffering right next to the polished, fraudulent, and tantalizingly glamorous images of advertising.

What interests Berger, however, is not the moral shock of these juxtapositions, but the way in which these juxtapositions reveal that advertising is, fundamentally, eventless. Advertising, which situates itself in a future that is never fully realized, forecloses all possibilities for development and the fruition of the self. Because, according to its logics, all that actually happens occurs outside of itself, it renders true experience impossible. Also, advertising obscures this fundamental truth about itself by using a language that renders tangibility an event in and of itself. The object advertised is rendered in great sensory detail, awaiting acquisition. Because of this object’s lush tangibility, the buyer-spectator feels as if he can almost reach out and touch it. This imagined act of acquisition trumps all other possible actions, and renders the desire to possess as the only desire imaginable. Under capitalism, all human abilities or needs are made subordinate to the supreme desire to possess commodities. Advertising, thus, forecloses all imagination—producing a cultural system in which hope, satisfaction, and pleasure can only be fulfilled through the purchase and acquisition of products. Advertising is therefore both the life of the culture of capitalism and the sum total of all that is imaginable within that culture. Capitalism, in turn, sustains itself by exploiting the majority of its subjects. It achieves this exploitation by harshly and resolutely limiting the imagination of its subjects, and by dictating what is and is not desirable.