Happiness at any cost: a study on how the sense of completeness is built in contemporary history. / A felicidade a qualquer preço: um estudo sobre a construção do sentido de completude na publicidade contemporânea.
AUTOR(ES)
Maria Ligia Leite Arruda Lima
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2007
RESUMO
This study aims at analyzing how the sense of completeness is built in the contemporary advertising speech by seeking to shed light on the conditions underlying such a process. One of the devices used by the advertising speech is shown to be the promise of completeness, which is evidenced in the offering of a complete service, product or sponsor that will be able to complete the target audience via consumption. By firstly drawing upon the theoretical background of psychoanalysis, it is shown that by promising completeness, the advertisement intends to respond to the uneasiness inherent in the human condition through the offering of objects for consumption, thereby hiding the psychological experience of helplessness. The advertising pieces under study are understood as part of a capitalist social and historical context that institutes a specific way of establishing social ties, which privileges the relationship with the object of consumption. The analysis then proceeds to situate the contemporary advertising as a practice that both sets up sense matrices and contributes to the configuration and legitimization of the spirit of our age. Based on the theoretical and methodological framework of Speech Analysis, advertising pieces printed in a nationwide magazine were analyzed. The sense of completeness related to the notion of limitlessness was found to be a major feature in the advertising pieces under study, which promise to eliminate both the sense of incompleteness and the limits of being in relation to the world. This is achieved by conveying the ideas of unconditional freedom and access to the impossible since consumers are led to believe that via a product purchase they can be and have everything, wherever and whenever they want it.
ASSUNTO(S)
psychoanalysis psicanálise contemporary times contemporaneidade comunicacao análise do discurso speech analysis publicidade advertisement
