Abstract
The deployment of psychoanalytic insights in service of modern advertising techniques is a matter of historical fact. For precisely that reason, psychoanalytic theory offers a means to understand and expose what advertisements try to obscure as they influence individuals’ habits. This is particularly important when it comes to the corporations that egregiously harm the environment whilst deploying images of nature in television commercials. I argue that an understanding of Jacques Lacan’s clinical structure of perversion and Lacanian jouissance can serve to demystify and subvert modern advertising techniques. To support this claim, I examine both fictional examples of the advertising industry as well as various U.S. advertising campaigns.
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Notes
- 1.
Yannis Stavrakakis writes, “Fantasy is a construction that stimulates or causes desire because it promises to cover for the lack created by the loss of jouissance with a substitute, a miraculous object, the objet petit a” in The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 239.
- 2.
“If advertising attempts to stimulate, to cause our desire, this can only mean that the whole mythological construction it articulates around the product is a social fantasy and, furthermore, that this product serves or functions as an object that causes desire, in other words as an object-cause of desire, an objet petit a in the Lacanian vocabulary” (Stavrakakis, Lacanian Left, 238). See also Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998), 33.
- 3.
Mike Hannis writes, “Restrictions on marketing, broadly construed, would surely be among the most effective climate change mitigation measures available. They would, of course, also be good for our own mental and physical health” Hannis, “Discussion: Nature, Consumption and Human Flourishing,” in Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspective, Sally Weintrobe ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 218.
- 4.
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Morrow Quill, 1978), 45.
- 5.
Mander, Four Arguments, 120.
- 6.
Mander, Four Arguments, 125; emphasis in the original.
- 7.
Mander writes, “advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can only be obtained through commodities” (Four Arguments, 127; emphasis in the original).
- 8.
Mander, Four Arguments, 129; emphasis in the original.
- 9.
Colin Wright, “Perversion and the Law: From Sade to the ‘Spanner Case’ and Beyond,” in Perversion Now!, ed. Diana Caine and Colin Wright (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 229.
- 10.
Stavrakakis, Lacanian Left, 232.
- 11.
Stavrakakis, Lacanian Left, 232.
- 12.
Matthew Weiner, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, Season 1, July 19, 2007 (Los Angeles: American Movie Classics, 2007). Jacques Lacan writes, “The drive—the Freudian drive—has nothing to do with instinct” “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 722.
- 13.
Shane Gunster, “‘You Belong Outside’: Advertising, Nature, and the SUV,” Ethics and the Environment 9, no. 2 (2004): 4, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40339086.
- 14.
Paul Hoggett, “Climate Change in a Perverse Culture,” in Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Sally Weintrobe (London: Routledge 2013), 59.
- 15.
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 192.
- 16.
Stephanie S. Swales, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject (London: Routledge, 2012), 69.
- 17.
Swales, Perversion, xiii.
- 18.
Lacan posits, “all human sexuality is perverse if we carefully follow what Freud says” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome (2005), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 132.
- 19.
Fink, Clinical Introduction, 165.
- 20.
Gunster, “You Belong Outside,” 4.
- 21.
Gunster writes, “Ads wax poetically about the quiet virtues of isolation in contrast to the crowded, noisy streets of the city. ‘I never found the companion so companionable as solitude,’ notes a Chevrolet Blazer ad, approvingly quoting the words of Henry David Thoreau” (“You Belong Outside,” 7).
- 22.
This is, perhaps, also the jouissance of colonialism. Colonialism serves as a structural analogy to the SUV advertisement: to enjoy something is also to annihilate it.
- 23.
Gunster, “You Belong Outside,” 6.
- 24.
Gunster, “You Belong Outside,” 9.
- 25.
Gunster, “You Belong Outside,” 9.
- 26.
Gunster goes on to claim, quite rightly, that it is the signifier of nature itself that is the problem rather than the advertising strategies employed. That is to say, the image of nature as a pristine escape from the harsh urban landscape is a fantasy that enables advertising. To say that the SUV must be criticised or refused because nature must be protected is only to affirm the consistency of this fantasmatic signifier (“You Belong Outside,” 9).
- 27.
Fink, Clinical Introduction, 165.
- 28.
Written by Jane Anderson, Andre Jacquemetton, and Maria Jacquemetton, “The Gold Violin,” Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner, directed by Andrew Bernstein, Season 2, September 7, 2008 (Los Angeles: American Movie Classics, 2008).
- 29.
Likewise, when Don tells his son Bobby to urinate behind a tree and his daughter Sally subsequently says, “I want to tinkle outside,” one can immediately think of the specific circumstances of the Little Hans case with Sally blissfully unaware of what is at stake in her question (Perversion 69).
- 30.
John Keene, “Unconscious Obstacles to Caring for the Planet: Facing Up to Human Nature,” in Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Sally Weintrobe (London: Routledge, 2013), 147.
- 31.
For Lacan, pleasure and jouissance are mutually exclusive and antagonistic towards one another because jouissance entails traversing the pleasure principle. Lacan writes, “For it is pleasure that sets the limits on jouissance” “Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious ” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 319.
- 32.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 184.
- 33.
Lacan, Écrits, 319.
- 34.
Lacan, Écrits, 319.
- 35.
Steiner’s use of the phrase “death instinct” demonstrates the difference between his “post-Kleinian” and the Lacanian orientation. As I have noted, the Lacanian position would be to maintain a distinction between Freud’s use of trieb (perhaps more accurately translated as “drive,” but translated by James Strachey as “instinct”) and instinkt (“instinct,” referring to biological urges). For the purposes of my work, I will refer to what Steiner calls the “death instinct” as the death drive.
- 36.
John Steiner, “Discussion: Climate Change in a Perverse Culture,” in Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspective, ed. Sally Weintrobe (London: Routledge, 2013), 81.
- 37.
Keene, “Unconscious Obstacles,” 144.
- 38.
“The life instinct creates structure and meaning, and the death instinct attempts to destroy meaning and to create an amorphous uniformity in which no structure is discernible. It is really more accurate to consider the death instinct as an anti-life instinct, which is most vividly expressed through destructive attacks on goodness, truth and creativity” (Steiner , “Discussion,” 82).
- 39.
Mei Mei Evans writes, “Not only is the hegemonic concept of Nature a masculinist social construction, but one that is racist and heterosexist as well” “‘Nature’ and Environmental Justice,” in The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 191.
- 40.
Timothy Morton writes, “We are losing touch with a fantasy Nature that never really existed” “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 273, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.2.273.
- 41.
Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 30–31.
- 42.
Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2004), 162.
- 43.
Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire,” in Écrits, 319.
- 44.
Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, 23.
- 45.
Stavrakakis, Lacanian Left, 243.
- 46.
Andre Jacquemetton and Maria Jacquemetton, “Blowing Smoke,” Mad Men , created by Matthew Weiner. directed by John Slattery, Season 4, October 10, 2010 (Los Angeles: American Movie Classics, 2010).
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———. 2017b. Pre-Shaken Soda. iSpot.tv. Ad ID: 1659751. Accessed September 22, 2019. http://www.ispot.tv/ad/wEZe/directv-pre-shaken-soda-reward-card.
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Rivera, M. (2021). “Some people like…”: Misapprehension and Effacement of Jouissance in Climate Hostile Advertising. In: Burnham, C., Kingsbury, P. (eds) Lacan and the Environment. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8_11
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