Decoding Visual Texts:

The process of decoding visual texts is, like language, learnt in early life, an immediate, cognitive, system of perception, which establishes our place in the surrounding world. However, as John Berger argues, seeing has never been ‘a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli.’ Determining what an image ‘means’ or what it is ‘about’ involves more than one level of understanding, as we perceive what is literally denoted while, often simultaneously, accessing cultural codes to interpret what this may connote.

Simplicity and Transparency:

In his essay, Rhetoric of the Image, Barthes attempts to ‘submit…the image to a spectral analysis of the messages it may contain’ using the advertising image, which he argues is ‘formed with a view to the optimum reading’ and thus perhaps more explicit in the information it conveys than other images, often on the surface appearing to be transparent in its production of signification.

This quality of ‘simplicity’ is clear in the fact that advertisers, as Trevor Pateman has noted, don’t have to do much to compel us to recognize something as an advertisement. Advertising has ‘entered the mainstream of life’,i Berger's words, forming a vast superstructure to which we have become so accustomed that we rarely question or notice the extent of it’s impact.

Dynamic Images:

In societies with such a density of visual messages advertisements are rarely identified in isolation and retrospection, but rather in a context where they have been anticipated, in a projective activity, as provided by Schank & Abelson’s theory of script-based understanding, where a script is ‘a pre-determined, stereotyped sequence of events that defines a well-known situation.’

Although we are in theory the active agents in this system, publicity images surround us in a way similar to language; inescapable, not limited to one medium but existing in all, giving them, as Williamson argues, an ‘independent reality’ as they ‘constitute a world constantly experiences as real’, and giving us the impression that we are static, they are dynamic reinforced by the fact that they ‘belong to the moment’, and are constantly altered and renewed.

Defining Advertising:

The American Market Association defines advertising as ‘any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, good or services…to inform and persuade the selected market.’ This presentation or promotion inevitably addresses all readers/viewers as potential consumers, showing them sights of what they may possess.

Seeing and Possessing:

This analogy between possessing and ways of seeing is not restricted to publicity images. All images, to some extent, depict ‘things’ which in reality are buyable. Images necessarily and automatically reduce everything to the equality of objects.

Levi-Strauss argues that ‘For Renaissance artists, painting was…an instrument of possession…the pictures represented a microcosm in which the proprietor…had created within easy reach and in as real a form as possible, all those features of the world to which he was attached.’ Levi Strauss further argues that ‘this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or…spectator…constitute[s] one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization.’

Freedom of Choice:

However, advertising might be, and often is, construed as being closely related to freedom, offering a choice, offering the customer the freedom to choose between one product and the next.

This seems obvious to the extent that freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer does mean that one brand will compete with another, and it is the customer who, as the ‘active agent’ has to make a personal choice.

However,arguing against the idea of consumer freedom, Berger maintains that ‘every publicity image confirms and enhances every other.’ Rather than being ‘merely an assembly of competing messages’ offering the customer the freedom to choose, publicity is ‘a language’ always being used to make a single general proposal.

Promising Transformation:

Advertisements persuade us to transform ourselves, and by extension, transform our lives, by buying something ‘more’ that will make us richer, even as it, monetarily, makes us poorer. The result is what Kellner calls a ‘commodity self, which sees buying and consumption as a solution to problems and consumerism as a way of life: the ‘good life’ in contemporary capitalism.’

Suggesting Dissatisfaction:

Implicit within this ‘single purpose’ are the mechanisms that enable it to function. Clearly, the only way for advertisements to motivate us to transform is to suggest, implicitly, that we need transformation: that we are less than perfect. Thus, in its promise of transformation, the advertisement must, to some extent, engender a feeling of dissatisfaction in the customer, a feeling of being less than she/he could be. This dissatisfaction lends power to the advertisement’s offer of an improved alternative.

Power to Acquire:

This idea of buying an improvement works on two levels. On one level it promises that costumers’ previous dissatisfaction will disappear as soon as they buy the product, on another level it flatters the customer by suggesting that having the power to spend money on this product, they are worthy of being transformed, and through the product, will become worthy in their own right.

Driving these forces of motivation is the negative space of anxiety. Berger expresses this as ‘the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.’ In suggesting that the power to spend money will carry the customer through to the promised transformation, advertisements simultaneously work on the anxiety of being no one, of being, in Berger’s words, ‘literally faceless’.

Not having the power to buy the product that will transform you, make you stand out, make your life perfect, and erase all dissatisfaction, you become invisible.

And since advertisements work on the idea that to live is to attract attention, to be visible, to be seen living, the power to spend becomes the power to live, and to have the power to spend is to have the power to become desirable. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, the reality of class bias is obscured in advertisements, because, as Williamson argues, they persuade us to feel ‘that we can rise or fall in society’ precisely according to our ability to buy a particular product, which will increase our social status automatically, ‘replacing class with the distinction made by the consumption of particular goods.’ The idea of money is sublimated into an image or lifestyle, which the advert implies we can ‘buy’ using the product itself so that the object is a currency or a bridge to reach a better world.

An Improved Mirror:

Advertisements work on persuasion rather than declaration. Potential costumers are persuaded of the value and power of the product by being shown people who have apparently been transformed. These people are visible as a result of their transformation: shown to be desirable and enviable, they are the improved alternative to themselves customers are looking for.

Glamour:

Glamour is proved and constituted by the status of being envied. The power of glamour resides in the supposed completeness which those who are glamorous experience. And of course, since they are complete, they no longer need recognition or reassurance. After all, as Berger points out, to be envied depends precisely on ‘not sharing your experience with those who envy you.’ To be glamorous is to be different, because better, than others, to be perfect and complete. The glamorous, again in Berger’s words ‘look over the looks of envy which sustain them.’

They are to be observed with interest (and envy) but can never be seen to observe others with interest, since this suggests they are less enviable, that they can envy others, that they still have dissatisfactions despite buying the miracle product. Thus, the more distant the glamorous are from the consumer, the greater the illusion of their power, and of the power of the product, which extends this promise of glamour, encapsulated by the enviable, to all potential customers. Having the power to buy the products which will erase any dissatisfactions, and thus having the reassurance of the ability of possessing, the ability to no longer be ‘faceless’, customers are encouraged to imagine themselves as becoming glamorous. They are encouraged to imagine themselves-as-they-will-become, having brought the product, which will transform them into objects of envy for others, and will justify their being satisfied with themselves.

Reality:

Berger maintains that in encouraging the customer to feel dissatisfaction, and then to feel the need to become enviable, the advertisement steals a person’s love for themselves-as-they-are, and then offers it back ‘for the price of the product.’ More than simply employing subtle techniques to persuade the consumer to buy a product, advertisements exploit real anxieties, fears, desires, and hopes. Glamour, Berger argues, ‘cannot exist without personal social envy being a wide spread and common emotion.’ Advertisements are only powerful and effective because they use reality, because, Berger says, they feed upon the real.

Needs and Gaps:

At the most basic level, advertisement works on natural needs and a natural appetite for pleasure, showing the products they promote as actual objects, capable of improving your life in themselves and to be enjoyed in themselves. However, advertisements have never been ‘just’ transmitters of functional product information. Rather, they are transmitters of social symbolic information that contributes to the shaping of cultural tendencies within society. As Williamson notes, advertising ‘feeds of a genuine use-value’. However, at the same time they exploit the customers ‘need for a social being…and human meaning.’

Advertisers generate systems of meaning, prestige and identity by associating their products with certain lifestyles and values so that commodities become important adjuncts to interpersonal relations, in their communicating of social information to others. Williamson argues that attaching meaning to products is in fact the adverts essential role, saying that ‘ads have to translate statements from the world of things…into a form that means something in terms of people.’

A Currency of Signs:

Advertisements are not simply transparent vehicles carrying a message, and it is ‘too simple to say that ads reduce people to the status of things.’ Rather, they ‘set up connections’ creating or making use of ‘systems of exchange’ which can then be used as given, and once a connection is made it can be translated the other way, and in fact, becomes self-evident.

Appropriating Systems:

By providing the product with an image drawn from the outside world, an advert creates a difference between the product it promotes and others in the same category. In order to do this, the advert must appropriate a relationship that already exists in a culture, and use it to give social meaning to it’s product, which initially has no meaning, and as Williamson points out ‘must be given a value by something which already has value to us’ something which ‘already means’ and as a ‘known correlative’ is ‘our stepping stone’ to believing in the value of the product. The advert can do this in two ways. On the one hand, it can juxtapose the product with a given social signifier so that the customer is forced to assume some sort of equality between the two. Alternatively, it can portray an image of novelty that is attached to the product. However, this has value only in contrast to the more typical style. Thus, in both cases, adverts rely on pre-existing systems of signification, using distinctions that exist in society in reality to create distinctions between the products they promote.

In some cases, the product can become so linked with it’s image that it not only becomes inseparable from it, it also takes over the reality on which it at first depended on for it’s meaning, as the product becomes the sign of itself.

Relevance:

Material/Non Material:

More than a mirror of consumer needs and aspirations, advertisers are also generators of what are very often unnecessary ideals. Commodities, as Kellner points out, have come to function as ‘communicators and satisfiers’ informing and mediating social relations, setting themselves up as knowing what an individual needs to become popular or successful, at the same time inducing them to buy particular products to achieve these goals. In creating these structures of meaning and differentiation, Williamson sees publicity as replacing functions ‘traditionally fulfilled by art or religion.’

Leiss, Kline and Jhally take this point further as they emphasize the way consumerism has come to serve as a ‘projective medium into which we transfer the intricate webs of personal and social interactions’, leading to a world where, as Williamson says, ‘relations between people increasingly take the form of relations between things’ and where people are identified not with what they produce as workers, but what they consume as buyers.

Identi-Create:

Thus, all adverts encourage customers to create their identity through consumer goods. Expressing this, Williamson argues that as consumers we are forced to ‘relate to one another through the language of our possessions.’ We become what we consume, and in setting up a structure in which people and products are interchangeable, Williamson seeing adverts as ‘selling us ourselves.’

This is reinforced by the fact that an advertisement has no subject. The people it shows us are only there to validate the claims made about the product, as proof that transformation is possible. This leaves a gap, a space that draws in the spectator, who becomes, according to Williamson ‘both…subject and object.’ For advertisements to succeed in making products into signifiers of a ‘higher ideal’ rather than simply signifieds, they must work through receivers ‘for whom and in whose system of beliefs they have a meaning’ and who as a result of this perceived meaning, complete the circuit of relevance. A subject becomes ‘not a simple receiver but a creator of meaning’ as the advertisement requires them to be so, because in order to make sense, they must work through the receivers.

To put it another way, an advertisement makes meaning for the receiver, and through the receiver. One the one hand we automatically decode its address to us ‘it means to us’, while simultaneously, being cast in the role of it’s creators, since ‘it assumes that it means to us’ therefore it must mean. ‘We give meaning to ads and they give meaning to us.’ Williamson argues that the subject is locked into this process that is ‘devoid of meaning… except in so far as meaning is always assumed through…it’s perpetual translation.’ So that, in the same way as the component values of ideology can function only in their being assumed as already existing, the subject functions as an object in being addressed as already an object. The subject operates in the space or ‘field of transaction’ which the advert has drawn them into, requiring them to link between the signifier and the signified, a link which is not there in the ad, but is implicit in it’s construction. This places us in the space of the signified.

Totemism:

Once products are signified as different from other products, they then become signifiers of difference. This transaction of meaning leads on to signifying our difference, as we differentiate ourselves from others according to what we consume, leading to human symbolism, as people are described by what they mean rather than what they are. The object is seen as differentiating between ‘totemic groups’. Although these objects are neither natural nor naturally different, they are given the ‘natural’ status, so that it seems impossible not to see them as a means of signifying our difference. We must feel that we already belong to a certain group, and this recognition motivates us to buy the product, as we see ourselves as the kind of people who would use this brand. The regrouping of society in terms of consumerism takes place at the expense of both the recognition of the real issues of class difference, and at the expense of the idea of individual human difference.

At the same time however, an ad must speak to the subject as uniquely individual. Paradoxically, the adverts must appeal to the subject’s uniqueness, while at the same time submerging that individuality into the idea of a totemic group of same-brand users. As Williamson puts it:‘In constituting you as part of a group, ads must nevertheless address you as an individual.’

Appellation:

Adverts make certain assumption about their receivers that cannot be questioned by us since we are trapped in an illusion of choice, as adverts ‘invite us ‘freely’ to create ourselves in accordance with the way they had already created us.’ This means that subjects have to exchange themselves for the subject the ad creates for itself – the imaginary assumed spectator spoken to. We are addressed as a certain kind of person, who is already connected with the product. In this way, adverts ‘create an ‘alreadyness’ of facts about us.’ This means that ultimately there is only ever one receiver in the advert, and this ad-created receiver applies to all of us and to none of us, as every subject becomes the subject ‘you’ already in the address, already existing in a totemic group centered on the product. Every receiver must step into the space the ad creates and must become the ‘totemic identity which the product must be endowed with in order to mean.’

We can only transfer meaning in the ad at the price of being appellated by it as a certain kind of subject who can transfer the meaning because they are part of the products totemic group. In this process we feel as if we are active since we translate the meaning, but in being appellated as the imaginary ad-created receiver, we are passive objects, rather than subjects acting out freely the dictation of a coherent ego. Our creation of meaning as ‘active’ receivers, and the adverts appellation of us as passive objects happen simultaneously. As we are portrayed as part of a totemic group, we are given the attributes connected with it, we are given a totemic identity, and thus we are projected as buyers precisely because since we have the ‘given’ beliefs implied in the totemic group, we must act in accordance to those beliefs and buy our totem.

Unique You:

Simultaneously, ads speak to us in terms of our individual identity which must recognize as linked with the product, while at the same time performing this same function for everyone who comes within it’s reach. There is only one unique identity that we must step into and assume. While it reassures us of our uniqueness, it places us in a group, and it reaches out to every potential customer with the same message. The advert thus assumes both a coherent ego in position to compare itself to others, and, because there are ‘others’ it suggests an implicit difference – people who are not like you, not part of this totemic group. The adverts address of different people as imaginary subjects means that the subject can’t identify with other spectators, since the precondition of being appellated as unique means that the subject is the single unique individual addressed. Any person in the advert, is portrayed as part of ‘our’ totemic group, and so is ‘inevitably made part of us, a sort of alter ego.’

Split Personality:

As it has become more difficult for the advert to simply claim that a subject is ‘like this’ it implies instead that the subject has many sides to their personality. This is positive, but at the same time it exploits the illusion of a fragmented ego, unified and united, made coherent, by the product, which claims to represent all our different personalities, the elements that in their totality create us. Publicity sets itself up as presenting us with the object of desire. But in trapping us within it’s created implied subject, the one subject possible, it is exploiting the subject’s need for meaning and coherence, and presenting us with this coherence. The object of desire is actually the self.

Re-unifying Self with Image:

The advertisement makes use of the subjects desire to become re-united with itself, with it’s mirror image, once it has entered the symbolic realm, constantly seeking to return to the imaginary, coherent sameness of being at one with the world around it. This is impossible since the subject, in its self-appellation, perceives itself as different. We can recognize that the mirror image is meant to symbolically signify us, but for it to signify us it inevitably can never be us. It is distant precisely because it is portrayed as a reflection of us, something which is intended to mean us. Since it means us, it is clear that it can never be us. We are kept in the trap of gazing at the mirror image which because it symbolizes us, can never be us, because we cannot step outside the space the ad has created, in constructing it’s one receiver. Lacan: the ego is constituted…when the subject fastens himself to an image which alienated him from himself, so the ego is forever irreducible to lived identity. Adverts ‘offer us an image of ourselves which we can aspire to but never achieve.’ Thus, what an advert does is to show us the fictional creation of an impossibly unified self as a symbol of ourselves, as an image meant to attract our desire for coherence and meaning, suggesting that we can become the person portrayed. But, at the same time as we step into this space and identify with ‘our’ improved image, we are aware that merging with this objectified image is impossible, because it is set up as an image of ourselves. It suggests it is the same as us, while being undeniably and inevitable separate and different from us. ‘An ad dangles before us an image of the Other but invites us to become the Same.’ The subject is placed in the impossible position of blindly striving after what is unattainable, and so the desire is ‘constantly replenished because never fulfilled. We want to merge with, be a part of, something which only signifies to us when separate from us.’ ‘The lack is what it wishes to fill and at the same time it is always careful to leave gapping in order to survive as desire.’ Christian Metz We pursue imaginary, lost objects. The advert implies that we can recreate ourselves. Using these imaginary lost objects we can re-unite ourselves with our appropriated image. ‘Our face is always other in the mirror, yet it is ours, so why shouldn’t these faces become ours?’ Things belonging to the subject –skin, hair, face, or even lifestyle, kitchen, wallpaper – have been appropriated by the advert, which presents an improved, different, therefore separate, reflection of these things and suggests that ‘in order to get back these lost objects, you must buy them and recreate yourself’ as your appropriated image in the ad. (So you don’t buy soap, you buy back your healthy skin.) In buying products with certain desired images we are recreating and rebuilding ourselves, and our lives. ‘We are both product and consumer’ in that while we consume the product we are the product. We are sold ourselves. ‘Our lives become our creations through buying, an identikit of different images of ourselves created by different products.’

Desires and Deferred Fulfilment:

Berger makes the point that advertisements ‘can never…afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it.’ For this reason, ads are never about the present. They are never ‘a celebration of a pleasure in itself’, because that will only isolate the spectator-buyer whom it inevitably excludes. Instead, they offer us the future, an image of improvement, making consumers envious of themselves as they might be. However, while advertisements speak in the future tense, the actual achievement of this future is always deferred. This leads Berger to conclude that publicity is not in fact about objects which we can posses. Rather, it is about social relations, offering, not pleasure (because the object itself is absent) but the happiness of being judged enviable by others. Williamson makes the same point is seeing consumers as poised between a desire for glamour and the knowledge that they can never achieve it, ‘that it is a myth.’ Thus, advertisements create a ‘real’ need, in that it makes spectator-buyers desire something, but it is a need that is ‘falsely fulfilled, in fact, sustained by its perpetual unfulfillment.’ Berger argues the same point from a slightly different angle, maintaining that publicity remains ‘credible enough to exert the influence it does’ because it is not judged by the real fulfillment of it’s promises but ‘by the relevance of it’s fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer.’ In this context, the gaps between what advertisements offer in reality, and the (always deferred) future it promises ‘corresponds with the gap between what the spectator buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be.’ According to Berger, this leads to the individual feeling powerless, and forces us to live in the contradiction between what we are and what we would like to be. Publicity encourages and exploits this contradiction, and so it’s ‘essential applicability is not to reality but to day-dreams.’ Yet, to repeat an earlier point, publicity feeds upon the real. It does not create these daydreams; rather it exploits them in suggesting to potential costumers that although they are not enviable yet, they could be, if only they buy this particular product. Discussing the credibility and influence of publicity, Jack Solomon puts it succinctly when he says that ‘advertising campaigns are exercises in behaviour modification.’

Making Meaning:

Publicity presents itself as placing the subject in a situation of freedom, giving us the impression that we are free to produce meaning for ourselves, in an active participation in transference of meaning. But, this implied freedom is still a position which is given to us by the advert, and the hermeneutic process through which we channel meaning are provided by the advert for it’s own decipherment.

The subject is only a part or link in the exchange system. Although we are constituted as the free and active creators of meaning, we are only discoverers of a meaning already pre-given by the ad. The missing piece in the jigsaw can only possibly, logically, have one shape. We do not deicide what the ad means, freely and actively, but we are given the pretence of active involvement which obscures the unchosen and passive involvement. We are merely filling it’s absences with the pre-determined meaning: both within the ad, by stepping into the one subject role which makes sense in terms of the ad’s construction, and in relation to the ad, by decoding it’s one message which cannot be changed.

The ideological illusion of our freedom is the idea that the ad allows interpreatation, that it invites, in fact, demands the spectator’s active involvement in order to produce meaning. The subject is cast in the role of the apparent producer/ creator. Yet we do not produce anything. Rather, we consume a solution pre-determined, and pre-constructed by the advert itself. Our freedom to create or find meaning is non-existent within this frame, since the meaning is bounded and restricted to the meaning the advert demands for itself.

Hidden Message:

Adverts conceal aspects of their lack of multiplicity, of their pre-given meaning, by diverting our attention to the message, which is often made to seem ‘hidden’. Adverts function most effectively not by allowing meaning to be immediately and easily apparent, but by implying that we have to hunt for it, thus implying that we are acting as free and active agents. The message is seen as the prize of our solving the puzzle that is the advert, and this obscures the fact that there is only ever one message which has been constructed by the advert and that we only step into the absence of the receiver to make a link pre-made for us. The ‘absences anticipate the receiving subject’ so that the content or meaning can only be interpreted within ‘the promotional set-up.’

Often, an advertisement has no subject, no focal person who represents the improved version of the subject. In these cases, the advert extends ‘an invitation to reverse the mirror relationship…to become the figure who by their absence has ‘become’ us.’

The subject enters into a narrative which appears open and free, without an image which is different from us and yet set up as us, however this apparent freedom is in fact closed, because it demands that the subject step into the role of the absent presence in the ad. Sometimes a product is not even portrayed in the advert. Instead, there is a replacement, where something is used to signify the product, and this signifier is in fact itself an attribute that has been given to the product, and thus a signified of it. The product is given a value that it does not have in reality, and can never adequately represent.

Gendered Gaze:

Williamson:‘Women in media are entirely constituted by the gaze of the man.’

Erving Goffman: Most of the advertisements presenting men and women refer more of less openly to the traditional division and hierarchy between the sexes.’

Even when the man does not appear in the image, he is conspicuous by his absence, as the clues in the advert signify him, and often the woman is just another of these clues. Even in images of women that portray the female identity/ideal as free and powerful, the absence of the man defines and mediates the image, and allows it to exist.

The man’s presence expresses his attitude to the outside reality he exists in, and to his situation in relation to this exterior reality. The man’s presence is thus ‘dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies’, which allows him to be in control of his environment, and is exercised on others ‘what he is capable of doing to you or for you.’ In contrast, a woman’s presence, as Berger shows, ‘expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what can and cannot be done to her.’ A woman’s presence is seen as enclosed within the confined and confining sphere of self-scrutiny and inviting scrutiny. Being placed within this confined space comes ‘at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two.’ Williamson sees the man in the image as ‘a persuasive presence defining everything and in whose terms the woman must define herself.’ In part, a woman must see herself through a man’s eyes, as Berger maintains ‘she is almost continually accompanied by an image of herself’ so that her self is divided between being the surveyor of herself, being at one with herself, and as the surveyed object of the male gaze, ‘the sense of being appreciated by another’. Expressing this, Berger says: ‘men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at.’

Laura Mulrey in her analysis of the cinema’s system of representation sees it as offering men the position of the dominant spectator, the implied viewer who is seen as the ‘bearer of the look’ while women are enclosed within their sphere, as they are given the position of identifying with passive and objectified images of themselves. Women appear, while men act. Annemarie Dardigna makes this point as well. ‘It is ‘the order of thing’ created by men, in which the man acts and the woman just is.’

Marc Préjean: "The code that governs relations between the sexes gives the man …these ‘masculine’ properties...linked to the head," while women are seen as ‘rooted in the flesh and in nature’. Men having claimed the attributes and merits of culture, learning, and rationality, women are ‘confined to the animal and its attributes."

Interpreting The World:

It is clear that advertising has meaning beyond its one purpose. Or as Leiss, Kline, and Jhally put it, ‘advertising is not just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving merchandise off the store shelves but it is rather an integral part of modern culture.’ How far this goes, however, is arguable. Berger, pointing out that everything adverts show is there, awaiting acquisition, argues that ‘publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy’ as the choice of the products we buy takes the place of significant political choice. Whether or not we agree with this, we are forced to recognize that advertising does to some extent have the power to shape our lives, and that this power is impossible to avoid. Paradoxically, even as we explain it, we are taking part in the puzzle it offers us, we are playing our part as the ever-present potential consumer. We need a way of looking at ourselves, and ads give us this, we need to make sense of the world, and ads make us feel we are doing in making sense of them. Thus, publicity appropriate real needs in people which are given a false fulfillment. This is precisely why Berger sees as a kind of philosophical system, explaining everything in its own terms, and at the same time, allowing us to feel that we are explaining it.

‘It interprets the world (as) the entire world becomes a setting for the fulfillment of publicity’s promise of the good life…”