ADVERTISING
CONSTRUCTS REALITY


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Coperta: ALEXANDRA BARDAN
Redactor: BOGDAN HRIB
Tehnoredactor: DAN MUȘA
Comanda nr. 31 / iunie 2014
Bun de tipar: iunie 2014
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FRUNZĂ, SANDU
Advertising constructs reality / Sandu Frunză
Tritonic, 2014
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Sandu Frunză
Advertising constructs reality

RELIGION AND ADVERTISING
IN THE CONSUMER SOCIETY

ADVERTISING
CONSTRUCTS REALITY

Sandu Frunză


About the author: Sandu Frunză teaches courses on religious
imaginary in advertising, ethics in advertising, relational ethics,
deontology of political communication, biopolitics, religion and
ideology, post-Holocaust philosophy. He is professor at the Department of Communication, Public Relations and Advertising,
Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj, Romania. He is author of several books, out of which more recent are: Dumnezeu și Holocaustul
(Contemporanul, 2010), Comunicare etică şi responsabilitate socială
(Tritonic, 2011), Ethical Reconstruction of Public Space through Rethinking of the Relationship among Philosophy, Religion and Ideology
(PUC, 2013), Advertising and Administration under the Pressure of
Ethics (SUERS, 2014), Comunicare simbolică și seducție (Tritonic,
2014).

37
44
49
57
57
63

77
91
91

Fetishism, commodity and advertising
A circumscription of the fetish concept
Fetish commodity
Fetish and the consumption of goods and ideas
Taboo, interdictions and advertising
The significance of taboo

25
25
31

19

7
12

7

Seduction and advertising
Awaiting seduction
Seducer is in turns seduced
The world of objects and the seduction
of the artificial as ineffable
Objects’ seduction
Abundance as original seduction


Advertising constructs reality
A symbolic construct of reality under the sign
of the fragmentary
Advertising, initiation and consumer culture
Advertising and the culture of eschatology always
announced and always postponed

Table of Contents


162
171
183
197

Final thoughts: the return of authenticity

References
Index

147
147
155

117
117
122
134

94

107
113

Political advertising and the rediscovery
of intersubjectivity in the public space
Advertising and intersubjectivity
Secularization – a catalyst of the sacred’s energies
Ritualizing image consumption and the seduction
of communication

Postmodern totem and advertising
Recovery totemism in advertising
Totem and advertising representations
Totemism and postmodernism

Taboo, fetish and transgression
Taboo and the world of interdictions
Interdictions and the ethical conditioning of advertising

Advertising is the last refuge of mythic, symbolic and ritualistic
behaviors. It proves to be today the repository of the sacred par
excellence, despite appearing in the form of imaginative constructions that some find difficult to associate with the sacred or with the
religious. Advertising language, expressed in prints, performances
and especially in advertising clips, proves to be a kind of concentrated story with the capacity to turn into a significant story. It constructs reality as a microcosm, in a similar way to that in which
grand narratives used to construct reality as a macrocosm.
Important with this story is not the narrative dimension, as it
only provides support for a manifestation related to the interior
construction that mythic thinking reveals in symbolic structures. It
is not the narrative structure that renders advertising the feature of
mythic remnants’ repository, but the ineffable of contents, the inexpressible preserved in language, the inward attitude (determined

by the presence of the sacred) towards a certain mode of perceiving
reality.
Mircea Eliade often underscores the importance of the story
(in a broader sense, of literature) to postmodern man. It is not at
all accidental that in the preface to Images and Symbols, Georges
Dumezil speaks about Eliade as an author that was and remained

A symbolic construct of reality under the sign of the fragmentary

Advertising constructs reality


Georges Dumezil, ”Prefață” in Mircea Eliade, Imagini și simboluri.
Eseu despre simbolismul magico-religios, translated by Alexandra Beldescu,
(București: Humanitas, 1994), 7. On literature see also Mircea Eliade, Nașteri
mistice, translated by Mihaela Paraschivescu, (București: Humanitas, 1995),
173.
2
Mihaela Paraschivescu, The Critical Reception of Mircea Eliade’s Works
in the United States of America (PhD dissertation, University of Bucharest,
2012), 72.

1

a writer and a poet.1 Such a statement not only sums up the idea
that Eliade uses a type of writing that is close to literature, namely
to story and poetic and symbolic creativity, but also the idea that
the history and philosophy of religions may provide the grounds
for continuous redefinition and resignification, and even for new
initiatory ordeals to postmodern man. If Eliade takes the scholarly

and the literary equally seriously, as Mihaela Paraschivescu notes,
it is also because “literature conjures imaginary worlds with their
own laws, and certain qualities of time and space that are not unlike the sacred space and time”.2
Nowadays, the Western human being no longer lives in a mythic universe, nor has the opening necessary to evaluate his/her existence and significant gestures in terms of fundamental histories,
nor has a clear representation of the ways the sacred connects him/
her to cosmos, while personal history relates not only to the history
of the world, but also to that of the whole universe. Postmodern
human being (especially in the West) is yet in the situation of not
succeeding to leave the sphere of religion, although free from its
constraints, and at the same time lacking the power to rediscover
himself/herself as living in a significant cosmos. On the one hand
incapable to understand history as a history in process under the
pressure of the sacred, on the other, living life under the sign of
the fragmentary, daily routine, inexpressive surrounding signs and
formal or mechanical gestures, the postmodern human being lacks

8 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols. Studies in Religious Symbolism,
translated by Philip Mairet, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 25.

3

the power to internalize the image of cosmos as theophany. He/
she cannot overcome the fear of rediscovering life values from the
perspective of a cosmos full of sacrality, speaking in images, assimilating the human being through cyclical feelings and infusion
of tempting freedom. Western human being no longer has the patience to listen to the story that the world around tells while casting
light against the turmoil of life. On rare occasions does postmodern human being sense that it is actually the story one would like
to tell of oneself when, cut off from daily life, regains the strength

to find oneself.
Probably the way out of the current crisis for postmodern man
will take the happy form described by Mircea Eliade as harmonizing the Western world with non-Western civilizations so as to agree
upon the need to rediscover the cognitive value of symbols, which
supposes accepting religious pluralism and genuine axiological
systems’ diversity. Rediscovery of symbolic thinking starts from
the premise that it is “part and parcel of the human being”; images, symbols, myths meet a profoundly human need for internal
probing and orientation to the mystery of life and to the depth of
the image understood as a beam of signification. Image plurality,
the multiple layers of existence it may introduce, the capacity to
capture in a unique synthesis the concrete, the abstract, and at the
same time the symbolical, constitute the knowledge instrument3
that Western man needs to relearn to use with much more creativity. Considering that the camouflaged, sometimes degraded, forms
of the sacred and myth at the foundation of symbolic thinking
have found very good preservation grounds in literary texts, Eliade
proposes reevaluating the part that the story plays in contempo-

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 9


5

Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, 14.
Mircea Eliade, Aspecte ale mitului, translated by Paul G. Dinopol, foreword by Vasile Nicolescu, (București: Univers, 1978).
6
Lance Strate, ”The Cultural Meaning of Beer Commercials”, Advances
in Consumer Research, Volume 18 (1991), 115.
7
Lance Strate, ”The Cultural Meaning of Beer Commercials”, 115.


4

rary man’s life.4 We shall not call on Eliade’s distinction between
myths and fairy-tales.5 Much more significant seems to be the
way in which he perceives the importance of mass media in taking over the mythical structure of images and behaviors. The fact
that mythical heroes shape contemporary human behavior, mythical structures stimulate individuals’ wish to become better, the fact
that the symbolic thinking challenge is sensed as a personal need to
participate in what is deemed significant, these and many more are
an indication that mythic story may influence the way of thinking
and guide types of behavior.
But today, the myth doesn’t belong only to certain areas of human creation, “myths are expressed in many different ways: in
the stories we tell, the games we play, the books and newspapers
we read, and in the television programs and commercials that we
watch”.6 In the spirit of our analyses, we can say that the myth is
“the term that is used to refer to the cultural meaning of an image,
theme, or any other type of sign… a myth is not a falsehood or fairytale, but an uncontested and unconscious assumption that is so
widely shared within a culture that it is considered natural, instead
of recognized as a social convention”.7
We are interested especially in two aspects of Eliade’s analyses:
1) the fact that myth directing human being towards the real serves
as a guide which helps man abandon the ordinary, the conventional, and join in the construction of reality starting from what is real,
true, significant, 2) the fact that myth provides an experience of
something totally different, therefore an opening, an initiation, a

10 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed, (London: Sheed & Ward, 1959), 456.

8


mode releasing man from common, ordinary existence, and helping in the decision to have and to be in a certain way. These elements are increasingly part of media communication. In this process, symbolic communication plays a significant role.
In traditional thought we note that the function of symbols is
to reveal unity and continuity between several areas of the real: “to
primitive man, every level of reality is so completely open to him
that the emotion he felt at merely seeing anything as magnificent
as the starry sky would have been as strong as the most ‘intimist’
personal experience felt by a modern; for, thanks chiefly to his
symbols, the real existence of primitive man was not the broken
and alienated existence lived by civilized man today”.8 Beyond this
integrating dimension, we should note that symbol also brings in
break and difference. Perhaps this is due to the phenomenon that
Eliade describes as the hierophany and symbol solidarity. From
this perspective, we understand that important to modernity is the
function of symbol to provide a communication medium, to open
pluralist signification and to separate differently perceptible realities. Advertising relies first of all on this dimension of difference
but typically participates in the integrating action for the existential
coherence of the individual who makes choices somewhere at the
intersection of rational and irrational.
Advertising takes into account a feature of the present humanity: one refuses totality, the imaginary of totality and the totalizing
spirit so as to better perceive the fragmentary, to enjoy pieces of
reality marked by specific elements of one’s existence, to creatively
valorize the possibility to construct one’s own world of reality fragments.

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 11


Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth. The Religious Meanings of Initiation
in Human Culture, translated by Willard R. Trask, (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1958), xv.
10

Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, 3.

9

Advertising uses something inherent to human soul: the passion for initiation. Even if it is but a desacralized version, it is no
less essential to the modern human being’s condition. It meets the
need for involvement, knowledge and renewal that makes up an
ambiguous whole, camouflaged by wish, satisfaction and immediate pleasure. Profane initiation, whose messenger advertising is,
relies on new culture elements. The new culture cannot avoid the
need for free action, the presence of unpredictable elements and
the need for transformation in the imaginary realm, typical of any
initiation.
In its traditional sense, initiation meant participating as a hero
in the rewriting of a sacred history that used to provide the initiated with access to various modes of understanding and assuming reality. In Eliade’s view, initiation “reveals the almost awesome
seriousness with which the man of archaic societies assumed the
responsibility of receiving and transmitting spiritual values”.9 In
both traditional and modern terms, initiation supposes in addition
to participating in the religious life, the individual’s development
as participant in his/her own culture. One of the most significant
assertions about initiation is that it is “a fundamental existential
experience because through it a man becomes able to assume his
mode of being in its entirety”10.
In Eliade’s analyses of initiation we should note two aspects.
Firstly, elements of a nostalgia and initiatic behavior may be found
in the imaginary and oneiric life of postmodern man. In this sense,
a series of creations by contemporary man, despite deemed to be

Advertising, initiation and consumer culture

12 | SANDU FRUNZĂ


14

13

12

11

Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, 135.
Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, 132.
Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, 134.
Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, 128.

profane and recognized as such, “in fact contain mythological figures camouflaged as contemporary characters and offer initiatory
scenarios in the guise of everyday happenings”.11 Secondly, reflections on initiation indicate that the human being “is not given”, but
rather becoming as result of the shaping pressure and action of an
initiated group of community elders whose purpose is to reveal to
newer generations the deep meaning of life and to stir their wish to
take part in culture.12
Consequently, from the perspective of advertising language,
we may state that the alienation the researcher finds as indicated
by the anthropological analysis of traditional societies continues
to the alienation phenomena noticeable in contemporary man.
Although based on similar symbolic structures, it materializes in
different cultural forms. These symbolic structures are deeply camouflaged in the contemporary human being of secularized society.
The fact that sometimes the rites we recognize in modern man’s
life may denote “a deplorable spiritual poverty”, or that we notice
“extreme spuriousness of these pretended initiation rites”13 or that
“the initiatory scenarios function only on the vital and psychological plans” does not in the least contradict contemporary man’s profound need for initiation, and all these we find in limit situations

and in the ordeals he/she is subject to: “in the spiritual crises, the
solitude and despair through which every human being must pass
in order to attain to a responsible, genuine and creative life”.14 Indeed, human existence itself is an initiation process, initiatory gestures and practices are present in the most diverse circumstances of
life, some seemingly lacking in any initiation.

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 13


The initiating dimension of advertising may be seen both inside
the symbolic construction and outside at the level of an instance
proposing the terms of initiation. This way, advertising plays the
role of a story that creates the symbolic framework of initiation
and proposes as a transcendent authority the choice terms, preference direction as well as the means to satisfy wishes. “The seed of
eternity” that the advertising clip proposes is a way to rewrite the
history of initiation under the sign of the significant fragmentary.
Initiation is not connected to totality and integration into cosmos as
in traditional societies, but a way by which history becomes sequential, individualized and generator of personal satisfaction. Offer and
demand mechanisms replace largely the myth-ritual mechanisms.
Advertising is an effort for direction in culture as any initiation plans to be. It reflects and permanently nourishes the symbolic dimension of consumer culture. In a world in which spiritual
values are pushed to a secondary level, this new culture proposes
investing this spiritual dimension into our relationship with things.
Moreover, advertising proposes accepting cut-outs in the totality of
things following the religious model in which objects of immediate
reality become entirely different in their sacralization process while
they become hierophanies. They are cut off from the rest of the objects and proposed for consumption as products of special quality.
They become wholly other as compared to the rest of the products
because they are consecrated by the advertising discourse. Their
story, told in an advertising creation, has the role of directing preferences toward a certain product by our initiation in the special
world of that product. This initiation multiplies endlessly in the
consumer culture, and the new type of consecration and initiation

is the base of this culture.
The multiplying possibility ad infinitum of objects that may
be consecrated brings to consumer culture the idea of transcen-

14 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

dence present at the level of the product that multiplied in a reality fragmenting and offering to us endlessly. It is this reality of the
fragmentary that we live in immanence is the one offered to us as
a transcendent reality. Continuous production of objects consecrated by the advertising discourse is what constitutes a substitute
to revelation. It is a revelation which, however disenchanted in its
contents, still keeps remnants of the sacred since it is achieved not
only with things but also with the human being in its position of
subject consumption.
The presence of transcendence casts a new light on things.
Transcendence attracts also a form of intersubjectivity. Thus, due
to advertising we sometimes get to transfer our mode of being with
people to our connection to things. There is in this connection a
sort of combination between what we call possession rapport to
things and the intersubjective relationship we transfer to them.
This way, sometimes things become part of our dialoguing subject,
and other times we go so far as to give things the quality of subject
accompanying us in the world. However, this reification of intersubjectivity is not foreign to traditional man either. It is true that
this form of connecting with things is perceived by modern man as
a form of human alienation, but the history of ideas shows that in
different cultures and eras there were collectivities that cultivated a
special relationship to things especially as fetishes, totems or idols.
Yet, each of these had a milieu of manifestation dominated by a
certain form of spirituality. Even more, they belonged to the manifestation of a symbolic conscience of the world in which man saw
himself/herself as participant in religious life. Our puzzlement as
modern people is related to our uncertainty as moderns that contemporary man still keeps in the connection to things something

of the authenticity added or induced by the presence of the spiritual
element. Even if we do not doubt that contemporary man is capable

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 15


of symbolic investment and creation, there is always a question as
regards the forms taken by our distance to things lest we become
dependent on what other theorists have identified as the fake needs
created for us by consumer culture.
Without losing their economic dimension, products appear
as symbolic goods. This finality may be intentional, sought and
achieved by advertising people or simply an effect of the presence
of advertising language with its mythic and symbolic load. Whether they are put there intentionally or not, whether a consumer receives, becomes aware and rationally apprehends the presence of
such structures, the effect it produces is important. That the message of symbolic structures affects only the deep level of our conscience does not impact the penetration force of mythic-symbolic
structures upon communication and behavior models. The relationship of the subconscious, conscious and transconscious is as
ambiguous in this case as the one between irrational, rational and
superrational. This happens, as a matter of fact, in the case of any
cultural creation, and advertising culture is no exception in this
sense.
The reality constructed by advertising implies a new rapport to
value systems. Perennial values are held back due to the secondary part of classical values in contemporary man’s life. As classical culture increasingly leaves room to mass culture, similarly with
values we are in the presence of a phenomenon largely maintained
by advertising: value volatility as a principle in the creation of new
value systems.
When Nicu Gavriluță identifies among mass media creators a
special category of professionals in democratic culture, understood
as mass culture, he was right to place the pleasure of consumption
among the essential elements of this culture. The new communication techniques contributed by mass media in its classical form as


16 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

15
Nicu Gavriluţă, Antropologie socială și culturală, (Iași: Polirom,
2009),192. See also Sandu Frunză, Comunicare simbolică și seducție. Studii despre seducția comunicării, comportamentul ritualic și religie, (București: Tritonic, 2014).
16
Matei Călinescu, Cinci feţe ale modernităţii. Modernism, avangardă,
decadență, kitsch. Postmodernism, (București: Univers, 1995).

well as in the new media and new communication technologies,
all serve this pleasure. The products of this culture are comforting,
pleasant, and easy. They are readily internalized as they come to
satisfy wishes often taken as innocent pleasures that the individual
affords although convinced of his/her inauthentic position toward
great, classical culture. Even risking inauthentic knowledge, understanding, and experience, the individual internalizes such easy
values triggered by the cultural outcomes typical of the new society
based on communication. He/she is stimulated by the whole cultural milieu of every day, maintained by participation to the consumption of such goods. This cultural milieu is created, maintained
and imposed by the mass media.15
Although this culture mostly exploits the involvement in visual
reception (therefore not critical thinking, aesthetic interpretation,
existential valorization, and all kinds of expertise), it shapes the
types of choices made by various categories, from the individual
trapped by media cultures to members of an elite culture playing
the social game of a complicity with consumerism.16 Most often it
is about sequential choices reflecting a situational behavior. This
situational thinking is stimulated by the way in which advertising
and advertising language construct reality during communication.
Advertising is the one that in the postmodern world is the deposit
and revealer of the mythological structures of the sacred. Its role is
also to disclose various areas of the real, even if this reality is constructed or downright manufactured. As part of media communication and culture, advertising is important through the very fact


ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 17


17
Ștefan Bratosin, Mihaela Alexandra Tudor, Iacob Coman, „La pratique du sacre dans le world wide web: une experience innovante de la norme”,
Science de la Societe, no 81 (2010): 128.
18
Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, Mitologii, fantasme și idolatrie. Meditații și
flashmob-uri, (București: Editura RAO, 2011), 33. Pretty suggestive for the
way individuals become captive in mass culture are the thoughts from Vasile
Sebastian Dâncu, Politica inutilă, (Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2007), 230-235.

that its manifestation in classical version or in virtual environment
keeps in the logic and internal representation elements that we associate to the sacred, although they are manifested today as parts of
an essentially lay culture.17
Significant is the importance attributed by the current culture
to symbolic communication, be it the metaphorical dimension of
communication or the deep structures of human consciousness,
brought up by the imaginary and activated in real life through
imaginative creation. In this respect, Vasile Sebastian Dâncu associates myths and metaphorical language in communication with a
light cast over the soul of postmodern man, subject to our temporal
rhythm, to reality perceived in its immanence, and to mass culture
released with a shout of freedom from the classical culture pressure.18 Symbolic communication becomes thus the field of a social
ritualization, of emotion manipulation by use of mythic imaginary, of symbolic integrity by consecration in communication acts.
In this context, advertising discourse appears as the harmonious
framework of language, thought and action resignification. Perennial symbolic forms combine with postmodern man’s relative reception and symbolic assumption. We may explain this way why
some secular culture forms receive maximal charge and constitute
a source of consecration in support of choice direction and celebration, as elements typical of communication in public space.
Most theorists of the sacred nowadays insist that myths, rites,

symbols in postmodern man’s life are either simulacra, or debili-

18 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

We live in a time of rapid change and spectacular transformation in communication techniques. The unstoppable optimism of
communication development is shadowed by the very eschatological feeling dominating the end of the 20th century and especially
the beginning of the third millennium. Western man is a human
being constructed around the idea of Christ’s death and resurrection as a new start, with hope for the better as with any beginning,
and with a fear intrinsic to any new experience. This ambivalence is
also part of the attitudes and feelings of postmodern man as it has
always been of human beings. It is connected to the structure of
ambivalence that we find in the entire history of religions as part of
the human experience in front of the sacred. Communication technique development does not fall outside this ambivalence either.
Therefore, we may note that in addition to perceiving technological
development as miraculous, postmodern man wonders about the
threat that it may pose to human development. Despite awareness

Advertising and the culture of eschatology always announced
and always postponed

tated degraded forms as compared to what they represented in and
for traditional societies. In this respect, they are deemed inauthentic forms of manifestation of the mythical-symbolic conscience or
of the sacred. Even if in anthropological or religious studies’ perspective these appear as degraded forms, at the personal experience level the degradation reflects positively in new experiences of
various modes of perception, understanding and representation of
the sacred. Advertising brings into advertising discourse and in the
individual conscience a horizon full of significance, constructed to
resemble postmodern man.

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 19



Aurel Codoban, “Comunicarea construiește realitatea. Interviu cu
Aurel Codoban realizat de Timotei Nădășan”, in Timotei Nădășan (coord.),
Comunicarea construiește realitatea. Aurel Codoban la 60 de ani, (Cluj: Idea,
2009), 9. On the way Aurel Codoban sees this construct I have reflected in
Sandu Frunză, “Does communication construct reality? A New Perspective
on the Crisis of Religion and the Dialectic of the Sacred”, Revista de cercetare
şi intervenţie socială, vol. 35 (2011): 180-193, and in Sandu Frunză, “The relational individual in a communication built society. Towards a new philosophy
of communication”, Transylvanian Review, vol. XX, No. 3, (Autumn 2011):
140-152.

19

that gradually “communication constructs reality”19, there is the
postmodern man’s failure to accept the implacable subordination
of the whole existence to a totality perceived as a threat to freedom
and authenticity.
We may wonder whether the almost instantaneous possibility to send messages is not causing loss of the deep dimension of
communication. Excessively instrumenting communication and
enhancing its impersonal nature may lead to losing its authenticity.
Postmodern man is justified to wonder whether keeping a surface
connection is not limiting access to the real texture of significance.
If we were able to note that postmodern man becomes captive in
communication media and pushes to a secondary plane the communication content, we would agree that the drama of the death
of communication is in full process. At the same time, if we could
note that due to the extraordinary development of communication
media and their maximized function, postmodern man communicates excessively and cannot control message abundance, being no
longer capable to receive and respond to the flow of communication requests, we might also say that he/she lives in full process announcing the death of communication. Also, were we to note that
postmodern man communicates only because he/she cannot help
communicating, being addicted to communication, we might say

that, for various reasons, he/she is part of communication reaching

20 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

its end, and as a human being finds his/her own end in the captivity
of communication.
The special value of advertising in the communication based
society is that, integrated within life and economy frames, it has
the capacity to combine communication media with communication content in a unitary compound in which ritual, symbolic action and contents typically humane internalize each other. Not all
advertising creations belong to this advertising genre, those that do
not rise to meet these requirements are either marginal creations
or do not count as advertising creations, even if they may count for
marketing purposes. Without being a supporter of the natural selection theory, I may state that a thinking mode that does not take
into account this reality will gradually eliminate itself from the advertising market unless aware of the need to assume the new types
of relations instituted by advertising in postmodern conscience.
This role of advertising is also related to the fact that in a consumer
culture in which the religious seems to be no longer part of communication at the offer and demand level on which the market is
built (be it for products, images or ideas), advertising is the one that
produces a kind of invasion of significance, a continuous values
restoration in the context of values’ volatility, and not least, it provides a new construction of the real translated into a new revelation
of the sacred.
Thus, in an era in which the sense of finitude is becoming almost a form of religiosity, it is speculated by communication media
and daring enterprisers on the apocalypse announcement market
or on the ideas market as regards the means by which postmodern
man might cleanse, illuminate and even attain perfection.
What should be learnt from such enterprising spirits is the way
in which they speculate the relation between what is esoteric, enigmatic, impenetrable, and the postmodern human need for con-

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 21



Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority,
translated by Alphonso Lingis, (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, 1979), 23.

20

sumption. Therefore, the mystery surrounding any content aimed
at the significant horizon defining human condition becomes part
of consumer culture in a communication act in which one is in
fact urged and determined to turn upon oneself, to find oneself,
to invest in personal development in relation to a transcendence
that one finds impossible to imagine unless watching oneself in a
mirror of the infinite. This is the essence of the eschatological prophetism in the beginning of the third millennium.
I think that a good way to explain the meaning of eschatology as
an open concept may be the one provided by Emmanuel Levinas. In
his philosophy, “the eschatological vision… does not envisage the
end of history within being understood as a totality, but institutes
a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality”.20
In other words, eschatology should be viewed as a relation, as an
intentionality of a different kind. It aims for a new mode of understanding transcendence and authenticity. It proposes to exceed the
classical mode of understanding significance and values in contrast
to the idea of totality, and accepting break as a moment bringing us
the possibility of significance without context. The idea of the break
may be associated to the fragmentary and the significance it may
introduce to a relational perspective that puts together communication and ethics. The ethical moment of the relation with the other
is seen by Levinas as a moment of a revelation in which the idea
of totality is substituted by the idea of transcendence which takes
the shape of the Infinity that may be read in the face of the Other.
The importance of eschatology for Levinas derives from fact that

it permits a break of totality by a “gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other”. This concept of transcendence

22 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

21

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 24.

is expressed in the term Infinity. The idea of infinity is important
as it brings with it the outburst of subjectivity.21 On the one hand,
the idea of eschatology is relevant to postmodern man as it makes
possible charging every moment with full significance ever since
it is produced, and on the other, its importance derives from the
feeling of subjectivity release, which has a creative function against
the dynamic and significant in daily life. This way, fully valorizing
the elements triggered by the acute way in which postmodern man
lives the eschatological feeling, advertising creates an event with
every promoted object. This supposes escaping the rigid system of
totality and its integration into a relational history, that of the infinitude. It is a history in which the fragmentary and the eventful
enjoy full authenticity.
The special importance of advertising in the eschatological context lies among others in its being a continuous regenerating source
of intersubjectivity, values and authenticity (leaving aside the religious dimension, with the apocalyptical fog surrounding postmodern man). Despite their volatility, advertising values provide
consumer society with resources to move from eschatological anguish to resignification and life renewal as regards the mechanisms
of symbolic form and content seduction promoted by advertising
language. Beyond market value, economic, social and political relevance, advertising has a special cultural value, and even an artistic and spiritual one in some of its creations. This culture includes
some of the most diverse areas of creation. Relevant in this sense is
the way in which advertising is manifested in mass culture and even
in some intermediary spaces of various subcultures. It becomes an
important presence in cultural spaces in which only elites’ culture
usually occurs, as for instance the classical art spaces in art galler-


ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 23


ies or museums. One way to integrate the economic culture, free
market culture and elitist culture is materialized in exhibitions and
festivals of advertising creation, that increasingly become part of
artistic acts in which postmodern human creativity valorizes the
nostalgias of the original and of the authentic. Advertising creation
is more and more associated with classical culture connected to
academic institutions or to those outside the economic or the commercial, having only a spiritual existential rationale, as the ecclesial
one. In this sense, the break between advertising agencies’ workshops and artists’ personal studios is no longer as wide, as a series
of incompatibilities diminish very much.
Additionally, advertising is an instrument to construct reality. In this respect, it considers the reference significance of certain communities, it takes into account what is important to target
groups. Advertising has especially the function to act upon individual conscience, to culturally found consumers’ preferences and
shape each person’s choices in the context of a consumer culture in
which consumption content may be a self-identification element as
well as an indication of an existential or social position, but also a
tool for the construction of authenticity.

24 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

The term seduction covers a wide range of feelings, expectations, and modes of being, having and possessing. The complexity
of the seduction concept makes it hard to define. For this reason, to
understand the concept well it is preferable to delineate seduction
and the world of relations it supposes. We shall proceed as follows
to delineating seduction as an essential part of the relations defining
the human mode of being in the world. Seduction involves the integer human being conceived as a corporal and a spiritual being. Both
the biological and the spiritual dimensions engage human beings in
ethics, economy, politics, art, etc. Seduction does not refer only to

the things we associate with intimate relationships and eroticism; it
marks all communication fields and is an instrument indispensable
to advertising communication, propaganda and biopolitics.
Although seduction acquired negative connotation in the history of ideas by association with eroticism, promiscuity and with the
imaginary relating to guilty desire, temptation, uncontrolled abandonment, subjugation and loss of autonomy, we have chosen to use
seduction here as a positive concept operating in ethics, communication and politics etc. Despite the fact that, as Jean Baudrillard
showed, “for religion seduction was a strategy of the devil, whether
in the guise of witchcraft or love. It is always the seduction of evil -

Awaiting seduction

Seduction and advertising


Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, translated by Brian Singer, (Montreal:
New World Perspectives, 2001), 1.
2
Mark Jeffreis, The Art of Business Seduction, (Hoboken, New Jersey:
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010), 1.

1

or of the world. It is the very artifice of the world”1, in the present
analysis we take seduction away from the pressure of evil and of the
negative. What is left is a part of the religious charge that associates seduction to a privileged relational sphere. Once contaminated
by the religious, concepts as well as things remain in relationship
with it, keep an existential penetration even if sometimes the ethical sense is reversed. As in the case of cultural contagion, realities
getting in such contact gain a new dimension that situates them
in a special registry of existence, different from those that are not
subject to the contagion phenomenon. Similarly, in the case of seduction, in postmodern man’s life it separates itself from the negative religious content but keeps those elements that accumulate as

something positive in any manifestation of the sacred.
An interesting mode of bringing to light the way seduction
functions is Mark Jeffreis’ book The Art of Business Seduction: 1)
he starts from a contextualization of seduction in a familiar universe: the erotic seduction; 2) then he expands this universe of the
impossibility to resist seduction by calling on every memory of a
person whom we could not resist because the person knew exactly
what to say and do at a certain time; 3) next, he urges us to face
our own imagination to put ourselves in a business environment
and in a position in which we hold the power of making others
admire, respect and wish to serve us; 4) finally, he turns this imaginary into a promise, plays with our imaginary and connects this
promise to a path that seems easy to everyone. This power, Mark
Jeffreis says, may be gained and put to work “by reading my book
and educating yourself in the Art of Business Seduction.”2 In this

26 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 78.
Moshe Idel, “Despre tainica prezență a celui ascuns”, in Cristina
Gavriluță, Sacrul și califonizarea culturii. Șapte interviuri despre religie și globalizare, (București: Paideia, 2008), 154.
4

3

context, seduction supposes an emotional registry, a relational one,
and an imaginative one correlated to the self-image. Ultimately, it
implies the thinking registry with its projected options rendering
seduction power. It is therefore a game of power that promises special powers attained in an initiatory way directing our preferences
and behavior.
It is not about a self-education effort but rather an initiation effort implied by what Baudrillard called “the secret of appearances”.
Considering that “seduction begins in secrecy, in the slow, brutal

exhaustion of meaning which establishes a complicity amongst the
signs”3, an initiation process is necessary to be able to grasp significance and manipulate it. The play of presence and appearance is
thus mediated by the ineffable caused by the presence of the secret.
We also need to distinguish between secret and mystery. As Moshe
Idel notes, in the Christian world we are used to the presence of
mystery. Unlike the secret, the mystery is a secret accepted for being unreachable, present but never explainable, sensed as known
but at the same time lacking the key to knowing it. Unlike the mystery, the secret is the one that leaves room to initiatory action as it
represents a kind of complexity that may be deciphered and even
learnt: “a secret is something you do not know. You may know it
but you simply do not have the key. However the key may be given
to you and then the secret is no longer a secret”.4
Mark Jeffreis proposes an initiation way that involves communication and seduction techniques summed-up in the phrase
L-WAR (Listen, Watch, Anticipate, React) aimed at synthesizing a
way of business life in which winning one’s trust and keeping it

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 27


7

6

5

Mark Jeffreis, The Art of Business Seduction, 191.
Mark Jeffreis, The Art of Business Seduction, 192.
Mark Jeffreis, The Art of Business Seduction, 193.

plays an important part in the seduction process. Trust supposes
cultivating a relational openness, even in cases that appear as deadends, since L-WAR is a never-ending story. It proves its potential in

the fact that “L-WAR in business allows you to care for your potential client, your boss, your team, your customer, your target”.5 From
this perspective, trust proves to be an interpersonal relationship
that ought to be maintained in each possible case. It supposes constantly holding one’s attention, exercising the art of seduction even
by practicing what Jeffreis describes as “the jealousy effect”. Faithful
to the conviction that people need to be reminded more than to be
constantly trained, he urges the seducer to: “Use great storytelling
to plant those seeds of jealousy. I want people to conclude that they
absolutely need you. You want them discovering, through your stories, that you are still successful and very much in demand. Once
they hear that others use you, they will want to use you as well.
No one likes to miss out on opportunities, and you need to keep
on letting them know that you are great!”6 An important aspect in
the art of seduction is mastering the ways and networks of communication with the others. For this reason, one concern should
be the awareness that “Seduction is a two way street—sometimes
you actually need to give people permission to be seduced”.7 Therefore, the seduction game means the seducer places himself/herself
in the situation of the subject of seduction. The trust relationship
supposes a dynamics of roles. The milieu favorable to seduction is
communication. In communication, the seducer and the seduced
may permanently valorize each other. This is another reason to
contribute to the development of a network structure in which
the game of seduction should manifest in forms of daily relations

28 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

9

8

Mark Jeffreis, The Art of Business Seduction, 193.
Mark Jeffreis, The Art of Business Seduction, 13.


and interpersonal life, in economics, politics, etc. The seducer is
permanently for cultivating an ever broader communication domain. Mark Jeffreis shares his experience: “I noticed a fascinating
dynamic when I reached out to people with whom I had not corresponded for quite some time. I nearly always got a reply, but more
than that—I started getting messages saying things like, “Oh, I was
just thinking of you—could you come in and help us on this?” or
“Funny you should write, we were just putting together some ideas
on an event which we would like your help on.” Was I really superlucky with my timing? Was I simply reminding them of my existence? Or was it something else? I believe that it was a combination
of both of those things, but also something else. People generally
feel a little guilty when they don’t communicate for a while and it
puts them off reaching out. So, you need to be the big person here
and remember that, in the end, being well-connected is a form of
wealth”.8
To Mark Jeffreis L-WAR is a state of war not just with the competition but with the individual’s own habits, with his/her own personality exacerbated by past success, with his/her previous mode of
communication, planning, selling or reacting. Seduction supposes
a constant capacity to change reference, tactics, and storytelling of
oneself or of others. This change is caused by the need to be successful before the competition, whether it is individuals or companies, the need to have market success by increasing sales, the need
to meet the competition in means of communication, sophisticated
manipulation techniques, image marketing in the consumer culture.9 Mark Jeffreis warns us: “your success in becoming a master
of seduction will require commitment, strength, and dedication…
if you are willing to put in the effort, you’ll see results and experi-

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 29


11

Mark Jeffreis, The Art of Business Seduction, 14.
Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive. The Mystique of Seduction,
(Berlin: Black Swallowtail Publishing, 2009), 4.
12

Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, 187.

10

ence success and pride on a daily basis”.10 In the case of L-WAR it
is an invisible war in which the seducer should attain and exercise
the capacity to Listen, Watch, Anticipate, React. The process is a relational one and involves a joint construction in which the subject
engages the others in his/her “war”.
Seduction also corresponds to an expectation of the state of being seduced or being a seducer. Consequently, it is the milieu of a
relationship stimulating reciprocity. Seduction’s beneficial character is highlighted by Taylor Truth in the reciprocity relation that
it supposes: “seduction has something to teach us, and that if we
learn to understand its principles, we can not only enrich our own
lives, but those of others”.11 Both for the seducer and for the seduced it is important to not fail fulfill this expectation. One way of
fulfilling it is to persevere in learning the art of seduction.
It is the expectation that makes the seducer and the seduced
very similar. But it also differentiates them. They are similar and
yet different as the world of representation constitutes differently
around each of them. Although it uses a common language, seduction influences the two differently. Seduction operates within
expectation and differentiation “for if all language can do is imply
that one thing is like another thing, then the tasks of representation are infinite, and knowledge, which necessarily makes use of
language, is irremediably provisional and precarious”.12 This way,
seduction becomes a quest for authenticity and continues redefining existential authenticity.
In the world of communication, seduction does not pertain to
knowledge or possession, it is a practice aimed at the will to situ-

30 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

14

13


Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive, 6.
Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive, 50.

Seduction is a mode by which the seducer enriches his/her own
world and at the same time participates in the creation of the other’s world. Thus, seduction is a communication act in which each
participant enriches the other’s world and at the same time his/her
own. A special type of sensibility plays and attracts special types
of connection that are shared, the seducer and the seduce let each
other be captive in a relationship that may become contagious and
ever broader by multiplying connections. The higher is the quality of these experiences, the greater the seduction capacity, and the
more intense the seduction.14
We should mention here how Taylor Truth perceives the attraction phenomenon, implicitly the seduction act. Attraction supposes
things escaping a person, not engaging the person directly or even
things that in reality have nothing to do with the seducer’s person.
Moreover, elements interfere that pertain to abstractions, harmony
seeking, adaptability, power relations or those configured in com-

Seducer is in turn seduced

ate in a certain existential order and to act according to the logic
operating in its open horizon. It helps bring together theory and
practice into the act of engaging in the world and transforming the
world. Taylor Truth is justified to state that “Seduction is all about
doing what you want to do. It is not about knowledge. It is not
about manipulation. It is not about attaining all that you think you
should”.13 This implies that seduction is an existential experience in
which seducer’s freedom to do what he/she will is only limited by
the freedom of the seduced – together being in joint action. Seduction is subject to this intersubjective conditioning.


ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 31


16

Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive, 25.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller
(New York: HILL and WANG, 1975), 42.
17
Delia Cristina Balaban, “Myths, Archetypes and Stereotypes in Contemporary Romanian Advertising Communication”, Journal for the Study of
Religions and Ideologies, vol. 9 issue 26 (Summer 2010): 246.
18
Guy Debord, Societatea spectacolului. Comentarii la societatea spectacolului, translated by Ciprian Mihali and Radu Stoenescu, preface by Radu
Stoenescu, (Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cărții de Știință, 1998), 33.

15

plex, hard to control relations. The importance of such elements
suggests that the seducer most likely does not seduce through the
things that make us perceive him/her so, but rather through what is
hidden behind appearance, through the ineffable within.15
According to a stereotype we cultivate as regards advertising,
we usually say that the individual is merely seen as a consumer in
advertising. Giving it a negative connotation, we feel close to the
idea that “the stereotype is the word repeated without any magic,
as though it were natural, as though by some miracle this recurring word were adequate on each occasion for different reasons,
as though to imitate could no longer be sensed as an imitation”.16
However, beyond this negative valorization of “as if ” we should accept that “the role of stereotypes in advertising, as in other public communication types, is to simplify and to structure reality”.17
But we note that the stereotype may be also used in support of an
imaginative construction that benefits from the mechanisms of seduction and creates a new relationship between the individual as

consumer and advertising as communication milieu and product
offered in the communication process.
We may notice at the best the systematization and integration
value of the stereotype in the political advertising. If we accept that
“though separated from his product, man is more and more, and
ever more powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world”18,
we have to see that integration in the political space supposes sub-

32 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Pierre Bourdieu, Economia bunurilor simbolice, translation and preface by Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, (București: Meridiane, 1986), 218.
20
Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, Politica inutilă, (Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2007),
174-175.
21
Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, Mitologii, fantasme și idolatrie, 44.

19

ordinating individual acts to a stereotype conduct. This need results
from the fact that stereotype is in the structure of modern political
mythology. Analyzing this mythology we find that exception, excellence “consist in being what you are without being ostentatious
or emphatic, manifesting the wealth of means in the economy of
means”19; integration in the political culture space supposes, however, adhering to a stereotype role that is premade by political communication means. Political advertising transforms the stereotype
into an important piece among the instruments of seduction.
As we shall see in one of the following chapters, a condition
for success in politics is the politician’s need to adapt to a certain
role, to a certain stereotype. In a book which states that it handles
the solidarity and hope mystique, Vasile Sebastian Dâncu stated
that “in all political communication, the great mass of the successful politicians follow recipes in order to submit to the audience’s

expectations”.20 The fact that the political space and public demand
predispose to conformity to certain patterns of conduct, to certain
stereotypes, does not exclude the fact that masses need exemplary
patterns or exemplary leaders to follow. As Vasile Sebastian Dâncu
pointed out in one of his study, “humanity never ceases the illusion
of seeking exceptional people, the belief that some have received
the gift of changing the world, of leading down the history road”.21
Aurel Codoban has an interesting idea about seduction in politics as in his view political ideology itself (especially the political
platform) may turn into a stereotype. He notes that with the fall of
communism in Eastern European countries, ideology is imagology,
it is carried through not by personalities of political creed but by

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 33


22
Aurel Codoban, “Manipulare, seducție și ideologie ostensivă”, Journal
for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, vol. 2 issue 4 (Spring 2003): 137.
23
Aurel Codoban, “Manipulare, seducție și ideologie ostensivă”, 134.
24
Aurel Codoban, “From persuasion to manipulation and seduction. (A
very short history of global communication)”, Journal for the Study of Religions
and Ideologies, vol. 5 issue 14 (Summer 2006): 156.

characters in the world of arts, literature, culture whose image is valorized by the public and who easily interact as symbolic image with
the public. These do not communicate a political platform differentiated ideologically because they do not have it and because the public
does not demand it either. The political platform and the related conduct function as a stereotype accessible to the public after the models imposed by television programs. To Aurel Codoban, “ostensive
ideology” is what works in this situation, and “ostensive ideology,
imagology is in fact advertising: commercial, political, and cultural.

All is advertising”.22 When he states that ideology functions based
on image, manipulation and seduction, he means that “seduction is
more like manipulation than like falling in love. Why? In the case of
seduction we still deal with the crowd. Seduction is between individuals. But individuals belong to the crowd. Manipulation is essentially linked to the gathering crowd, modernity’s crowd.”23 Seduction
is described by the author in the wider context of the development of
communication based society and of his conviction that nowadays it
is communication that constructs reality. Thus, “after postmodernism and in the context of globalization this new model of communication became more than visible, became bright and radiant, and this
because globalization, through mass-media and the new technologies, has pushed further the implementation of manipulation and the
techniques and procedures of seduction in political communication
and advertising. The new theoretical model of communication and
the new practical skills of communication, which emphasize both
the relational aspect of communication, come together”.24

34 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Michel Foucault, Ordinea discursului. Un discurs despre discurs, translated by Ciprian Tudor, (București: Eurosong & Book, 1998), 40-41.

25

The power of stereotypes is so great that sometimes the seducer
and the seduced are judged from the perspective of a stereotype.
However the beauty of seduction is the very fact that the world
of stereotype-associated appearances may generate infinite representations. Where does stereotype take its symbolic resources? A
possible response may be with the manifestation of the sacred in
postmodern man’s life. In this sense, we may bring in a perspective
similar to the one that explains “the original experience theme” in
Michel Foucault: “it supposes that at the foundation of experience
(even prior to experience configuration into cogito), there would be
some preliminary significance, in a way already uttered, that would
travel the world, order it wound us and open it from the very beginning toward a kind of primitive recognition”.25 The sequential

almost mechanic world of rituals as well as the integration scheme
of stereotypes have the capacity to let themselves filled with an
infinity of representations and symbolic contents. They represent
some kind of empty forms that get full of content in the dynamic
process of seduction.
Another important aspect in the economy of seduction is the
cultivation of pleasure. Pleasure brings increased confidence and
the more it is cultivated, the more benefits it brings at the level of
confidence, especially in self-confidence and self-respect. Pleasure
has the merit that it makes possible separation from things that
appear external and concentration on what is essential at a given
moment so as to obtain maximum efficiency, creativity and satisfaction upon meetings objectives. Although postmodern man
is seduced by the idea of getting as high a degree of delight and
pleasure as possible, we should note that there are authors alerting
to the fact that “bliss does not constrain to pleasure; it can even

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28

27

26

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 52.
Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive, 55.
Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive, 61.

apparently inflict boredom”26, as other authors view pleasure as

something secondary or lacking in importance in the seduction
process. At the same time, communication techniques (made to
play by seduction and by pleasure cultivation in order to overcome
the difficulties that the professional faces in the daily work) “come
together to create a kind of superforce that is more powerful than
most problem-solving techniques one could imagine”.27
Another interesting part of seduction is the one about exercising seduction for seduction’s sake. Seduction in itself is perceived
by Taylor Truth as value and is integrated in a major experience,
may it be about making communication a capturing exercise or
about an exercise in patenting sexual tension. The positive experience of seduction, as well as of implied pleasure, supposes directing these special energies to a communication zone in which the
complete human being is engaged, as biological and as a spiritual
being. All kinds of experience supposed by seduction may converge into a powerful feeling in which seduction itself may appear
as the most important reality constructed in the communication
act. Seduction does not merely imply exercising special power over
another person, but patenting that power in shared participation
by the seducer and the seduced. Each brings his/her own world,
expectations and feelings thus participating in the construction of
a reality they have in common.28
Seduction has another important role: both the seducer and the
seduced fulfill the wish of being loved. This totally special type of
connection brings about the idea of fulfillment through the other,
of alterity lived as a chance of one’s own fulfillment. It brings the
feeling of freedom that may only be lived together, in a relationship

36 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

30

29


Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive, 62.
Taylor Truth, What We Find Attractive, 79.

We note with Baudrillard a reverse of roles. Against the background of debates on the disappearance of the subject, or at least
on the centrality of the subject in postmodern culture, he theorizes
a movement of seducer’s symbolism crossing from individuals’
world to objects’ world. Also, Baudrillard places seduction in the
area of the artificial and of the simulacrum letting us understand
that this is precisely the realm functioning as deposit of the sacred.

The world of objects and the seduction of the artificial as ineffable

of reciprocity, even if in a hierarchy between those involved in the
mystery of seduction. This mystery contains that type of significant
experience (which may contribute to creating something that appears significant) and that deciphered as love. One of seduction’s
finalities is precisely that of seeking, obtaining and keeping love.
Seduction is a way to bring love to real life.29 Love is the experience of constant deepening, and we find this continuous exercise
also in seduction. It is described by Taylor Truth: “You may look
at life a new way, interact with others differently and, hopefully,
find satisfaction with yourself and others just the way that they are.
However, as a final word, I must mention that there is no end to
this journey. To start this journey of seduction means to never finally attain, but to always continue to grow. To always find something beautiful that you have overlooked, to always more deeply
understand that there is more to seduction than meets the eye. So,
never have the intention of abandoning your quest. Rather grow
the desire to always keep it close to you”.30 Seduction is submissive
both to intersubjective conditioning and to a special conditioning
on behalf of the ineffable.

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32

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 90.
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 2.
33
Aurel Codoban, Amurgul iubirii. De la iubirea–pasiune la comunicarea
corporală, (Cluj: Idea Design & Print, 2004), 72.
34
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 81.

31

One of the initial premises is that “Men… are never seduced by
natural beauty, but by an artificial, ritual beauty - because the latter is esoteric and initiatory, whereas the former is merely expressive. And because seduction lies in the aura of secrecy produced
by weightless, artificial signs, and not in some, natural economy
of meaning, beauty or desire”.31 Such assertions may be expanded
to individuals’ relation to products. Offered by consumer culture,
products become the object of seduction and at the same time a
seducing subject. Things, like beings, are not seductive in their nature, but, according to seduction laws, in what adds to them from
the outside, as a super-added reality. Thus, seduction does not pertain to the intrinsic structure of things or beings, “never belongs
to the order of nature, but that of artifice - never to the order of
energy, but that of signs and rituals”.32 This special situating of the
seducing object, the object that substitutes the subject, was what
Aurel Codoban had in mind when, commenting on Baudrillard,
he notes in the latter’s approach that “seduction remains relational,
because it aims for a subject even if that who aims makes himself/
herself an object: a subject gives itself as an object, but as the object
– secret, miraculous, strange – that is missing to the other to be
whole. This means being ready to serve the other as object”.33 Actually, Baudrillard sees things and beings from the perspective of a

communication process in which the seducer and the seduced play
a ritual and each constantly changes parts, always situating in the
other’s place. In this endless ritualistic exchange the distinction between active and passive, external and internal, subject and object,
seducer and seduced disappears. 34

38 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Aurel Codoban, Amurgul iubirii, 72.
Jean Baudrillard, Celălalt prin sine însuși, translated by Ciprian Mihali, (Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cărții de Știință, 1997), 44.
37
Jean Baudrillard, Celălalt prin sine însuși, 47.
36

35

The artificial is invoked here only to emphasize the presence
of something distinctive as compared to the natural. Its presence
leaves open grounds to the manifestation of the apparent, the simulacrum, and especially the secret and miraculous. It supposes a
ritualization of communication and an initiation, which proves
once again that “seduction lives in and from communication, and
its reality is only one of communication.”35
One of Jean Baudrillard’s assertions contradicting common
sense expectations is that in the center of seduction is not desire
but defiance. He starts from the premise that while the individual
can oppose desire, defiance engages the individual beyond the reality principle, beyond the possibility to not respond to seduction.36
Contrary to what psychoanalysis prophesies, in this perspective
“seduction is not of the order of fantasy or repression or desire”37,
but it rather aims for exercising power. From the view of advertising discourse, what is important here is the way in which Baudrillard argues the relation between power and seduction. While
power is conceived as a mode of mastering meaning, seduction is
an exercise in the appearance game.

When we make advertising products using religious, mythological, magic or symbolic elements, we keep from the universe
of meaning as much power as it may still reach us. The power of
meaning remains from religion in a camouflaged manner of a diffuse sacred determining a camouflaged presence of meaning so
that we no longer rely on a minimal version of meaning. On this
minimal presence of meaning the world of appearance is built, the
world that makes an object seem different, more important than

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Pierre Bourdieu, Despre televiziune. Dominația jurnalismului, translated by Bogdan Ghiu, (București: ART, 2007), 28.

38

other similar products. In advertising language we use this minimal version of power accompanying meaning in order to valorize
the central elements of seduction. In other words, we use the meaning remnants to valorize appearance, the image of things manifesting as an appearance in the daily reality.
To make this appearance present, advertising borrows the instruments already existing in communication. For example, advertising borrows from television what Bourdieu called “evoking the
habitual so that people realize how unusual it is”.38 In this respect,
advertising is part of a philosophical effort to reconstruct the daily,
it is a philosophy of the daily, of the ordinary that becomes extraordinary to serve what is ordinary as part of our daily life. This way,
advertising proves: 1) its power to build a significant reality distinctive from the monotonous reality of daily life, 2) the capacity to
manipulate elements adding to the object or product to transform
it into something totally different as compared to the objects or
products’ class it is part of, 3) the power to transform what is banal
on products’ market into entities of special value for the category
of consumers it addresses, 4) the capacity to institute a special relational order including the construction of values, mentalities, orientation modes in the world of economic and spiritual exchange,
5) the power to create special needs that the individual assumes
as ways to reach a reasonable standard of consumption and of increased consumption, without their perception as false needs or
individual domination by consumption. All these virtues of advertising become part of postmodern man’s culture.
Usually, under the label ‘postmodern’ we include a great variety of phenomena: “the rejection of the intellectual and cultural

assumptions of modernity in the name of “will to power” (Ni-

40 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by W. Kaufmann,
(New York: Vintage,1967).
40
Georges Bataille, Erotism. Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary
Dalwood, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986).
41
Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics”, in Basic Writings, D. Krell
(ed.), (New York: Harper Row, 1977).
42
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982).
43
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.), (New York:
Pantheon, 1984).
44
Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, XVI
45
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacre și simulare, translation by Sebastian Big,
(Cluj: Idea Design & Print, 2008).
46
Jean Baudrillard, Celălalt prin sine însuși, 48.

39

etzsche39), “sovereignty” (Bataille40), an “other beginning” (Heidegger41), “différance” (Derrida42), or a “different economy of
bodies and pleasures” (Foucault43)”.44 In terms of the impact of advertising upon postmodern man we may include in the long list of
postmodern thinking ingredients also appearance or simulacrum

(Baudrillard45).
According to Jean Baudrillard, “surface, appearance, this is
the space of seduction… All the strategy of seduction consists in
bringing things to pure appearance, making them radiate and exhaust themselves in the appearance game”.46 This strategy is based
on a ritualistic game that the author perceives as a way to produce
things in the order of shared appearances. Thus, the advertising
role is to make things come out of their anonymity, make them
subject to our choices, integrate them in our life’s experience.
An aspect not to be neglected is that of the need to ritualize
consumption. It needs to take into account Pierre Bourdieu’s note
that “ritualistic practices, guided by a kind of sense of compatibilities and incompatibilities leaving many things undetermined, may
perceive the same object totally different, within the limits of the
most surprising incompatibility,… or different objects in identi-

ADVERTISING CONSTRUCTS REALITY | 41


47
Pierre Bourdieu, Simțul practic, translation by Rodica Caragea, afterword by Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, edition editor Dan Lungu, (Iași: Institutul
European, 2000), 23.
48
Jean Baudrillard, Celălalt prin sine însuși, 52.
49
Jean Baudrillard, Celălalt prin sine însuși, 56.
50
Jean Baudrillard, Celălalt prin sine însuși, 62.

cal mode”.47 Consequently, in the consumption ritualization process we may establish identity relations that should make a new
product familiar, we can establish clear delineation between very
similar products or we may create ambivalence relations. We cannot exclude that based on the ambiguity of the relationship, this

could attract different consumer types, undecided or seeking a new
product starting from something seemingly known, but with new
elements to make it a desirable product.
One of Baudrillard’s statements (paradoxical in terms of the
classical association of seduction to desire and pleasure) is that desire does not exist from the seduction’s point of view, that seduction
is not desire but rather “it is the one playing with desire and playing
desire”.48 Thinking of the relationship between desire and defiance,
we note with Baudrillard the existential character of seduction. The
individual exists only when seduced. He/she thus integrates a different reality, based on a different logic that derives from the original seduction, functioning as a precedent of the quality of seducing
and being seduced. What seems different by comparison with the
original seduction is that in the new perception of reality, “evoking
seduction means deepening our object destiny”.49
One of the most provoking assertions by Jean Baudrillard is
that in consumer society “in the center of the world no longer is the
subject’s desire, but the object destiny”.50 In this context, advertising
encourages a kind of regression to objects’ order. That advertising
has a spectacular evolution from information to persuasion aiming
for guided consumption does not seem too impressive to Baudril-

42 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Jean Baudrillard, Sistemul obiectelor, translation and afterword Horia
Lazăr, (Cluj: Editura Echinox, 1996), 108.
52
Jean Baudrillard, Sistemul obiectelor, 112.
53
Jean Baudrillard, Sistemul obiectelor, 112.

51


lard as he notices that basically, consumer is relatively immune to
the advertising message and its manipulation possibility. Another
aspect is worth mentioning in his opinion: advertising facilitates
integration to objects’ system. Moreover, it is itself integer to the
objects’ system in its dual capacity of discourse on consumption
and as consumption object.51 Under this double mark (discourse
on the object and the object as such, which means it may be consumed as a cultural object), advertising is important in what adds
to objects: the warmth by which objects “give themselves, look for
us, surround us and prove they are in deep appearances and in
their own effusion. We are targeted and loved by objects”.52 Without the existence of advertising we would be in the delicate position of inventing reasons for ourselves to love, to buy. Therefore,
we find in Baudrillard’s analysis the tendency to attribute advertising a mythic, symbolic, religious dimension. In a world in which
this dimension associated to the sacred has disappeared or is only
marginal, advertising plays the part of a soteriological substitute,
receives a salvaging character: “if the object loves me (through advertising) I am saved. This is how advertising may… appease our
psychological fragility: through immense solicitude, in response to
which we internalize the instance soliciting us – enormous firm
manufacturing not only goods but also communicative warmth, in
other words, the global consumer society”.53 Thus, seduction submits both to intersubjective conditioning, to a special conditioning
by the ineffable, and to the conditionings in objects’ world – invested in postmodern culture with qualities that were reserved once
only to the subject.

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Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998), 159.
55
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 159.

54


Baudrillard speaks about a “mystic of solicitude” in which
view in consumer society absolutely everything becomes a service in such a way that in providing a product a personal service
is provided to each customer. The individual is in the middle of a
genuine “conspiracy of devotion and goodwill”. What appears as
a bridge for personal development and interhuman communication is deciphered by the author as a way of deteriorating interhuman relations, a false production of intimacy, an excess of the
symbolic, a simulation of personal relations where nothing seems
to be intimate or personal.54 This communication mode is part of
a mythological dimension both of advertising and of consumer
society. In view of this mythology, objects are no longer destined
for consumption but are part of a symbolic thinking associated to
gifts. Objects are meant to serve someone, they have a personal
function and significance. This way they are part of a “total ideology of personal performance”. As Baudrillard so vividly describes:
“it is in the sun of this solicitude that modern consumers bask.”55
Such statements support the conviction that advertising no longer has only the economic function to promote sales, or increase
profit, but assumes additionally a mythology of gift, of gratuity and
of service. The fact is illustrated by Baudrillard in examples like
the special price cuts, promotions, contests, or through the many
small items used as gratuities in promoting products. Moreover,
advertising itself is conceived as part of a gift mythology as while
objects are sold, advertising is offered. It offers itself freely, apparently uninterestedly, full of warmth or familiarity, after the model
of parents’ presents received by children passively. Advertising thus

Objects’ seduction

44 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

2013).

60


59

58

57

56

Jean Baudrillard, Sistemul obiectelor, 112.
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 165.
Jean Baudrillard, Sistemul obiectelor, 113.
Jean Baudrillard, Sistemul obiectelor, 115.
Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, O Românie interioară, (Cluj-Napoca: Eikon,

turns mythological in contents in a wider offer in which “the advertising game skillfully resumes the archaic ritual of token and gift…
All are for a transformation of the pure commercial relation into a
personal relationship”.56
Besides the personal dimension, the community one is important too. When he states that “the little daily gratuities assume the
dimensions of a total social fact”57, Jean Baudrillard showcases the
social function of advertising. This reinterpretation of the social
is an effect of interhuman relations construction according to the
gift mythology. The social and community function of advertising may be noticed also in the assertion that “if advertising were
blocked, each of us would feel frustrated as if before empty walls.…
We would feel that no one is looking after us”.58 Completing the
community dimension, social relations rethinking in terms of gift’s
symbolic thinking also indicate the political role brought about by
“products and advertising techniques’ dissemination: they replace
previous moral and political ideologies”.59 Thus, Vasile Sebastian
Dâncu’s statement „the market is the new God in our political and
social life”60 no longer seems exaggerated. On the contrary, it gains

newer, more positive meanings.
Unlike Baudrillard’s optimism displayed in his Objects’ system
(Ed. Gallimard, 1968), and continued in Consumer society. Myths
and structures (Ed. Denoel, 1970), already in Simulacra and simulation (Ed. Galilee, 1981), the confidence in the power of advertising
diminishes and even reflects a pessimistic view on it. Baudrillard
notes (with a certain metaphysical bitterness) that all possible forms

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Jean Baudrillard, Simulacre și simulare, 67. Published by Editura Galilee in 1981, the book contains interpretations that may be perceived as a new
optics in Baudrillard on advertising.
62
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacre și simulare, 68.
63
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacre și simulare, 69.
64
A few aspects of the postmodern eschatological mentality are included in Sandu Frunză, “Myth, Advertising, and Political Communication in Romania”, in Delia Cristina Balaban, Meda Mucundorfeanu, Ioan Hosu (coord.),
PR Trend. New Media: Challenges and Perspectives, (Mittweida, Germany:
Mittweida Hochschulverlag, 2013).

61

of expression, all possible activity forms converge toward advertising
and some exhaust themselves in it. Advertising is under the sign of
the fragmentary, of the epidemic, of the lack of depth, of entropy. It
is vaguely seductive and vaguely consensual, uses mass language induced by mass production and remains an unarticulated form, a low
form of meaning energy.61 Baudrillard believes that advertising as a
language imposing to the detriment of all the other languages has
an increasingly limited power as the fascination it had once is taken

over today by the digital and by computer language, “the miniaturization of everyday life by computer science… the psychotropic and
dataprocessing networks of the automatic piloting of individuals”.62
Thus, advertising is somewhere in its sunset. It no longer has the
role of communication and information, it is taken for propaganda
and politics, and it is one voice with the social and looses itself in
its exaltation. The virtues of advertising discourse are taken over by
computer language. The most significant thing that a philosopher
may anticipate in such a context is advertising disappearance.63
The rhetorical pessimism practiced by Baudrillard in such a
context may circumscribe to the intrinsic dimension of postmodern thinking. It implies the wider frame of the death of communication. Such eschatological perspective falls within a special valorization of myth of the eternal return as part of Western mentality
based on the idea of progressive history.64

46 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

Marius Babias, Recucerirea politicului. Economia culturii în societatea
capitalistă, translation by Cristian Cercel, reviewed by Vlad Moraru, (Cluj:
Idea, 2007), 45.
66
In the virtual world there is a lot of information on this phenomenon:
/>what-is-the-millennium-bug.htm; />html/chapterdbid/18940.html; />00725.html

65

The anguish caused in postmodern mentality by the idea of the
death of communication could be noticed in the years preceding
the third millennium in the phenomenon known as “Millennium
Bug”. Discussion on the apocalyptic would bring up “the fear of
the collapse of globally interconnected communication systems
construing users as a community of common fate, defenseless and
at the mercy of computers”.65 The Millennium Bug (also known as

Year 2000 problem, Y2K problem, Y2K bug) appeared as a computer programming issue in the 1960s and 1970s referring to the
way date was set-up and included to be displayed by computers
by use of only two figures representing years. Considering that
the date was included in a great number of files, a problem might
have appeared in the year 2000 as regards the display of the century or of the millennium. According to some estimates, 85% of
the computers in the entire world might have been affected by this
codification ambiguity, with the possibility starting January 1, 2000
that the computers should not function anymore. Additionally, one
believed that important economic sectors were to suffer, as well as
companies’ activity, governmental agencies’ activity, banking system, air traffic safety, all could have collapsed in the area of storing,
transactioning, communicating data and information.66 Marius
Babias would put the entire media initiative (occurring according
to the rules of action movie imaginary, and of fiction) under the
sign of an electronic exorcism that had been secularized to match

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70

69

68

67

Marius Babias, Recucerirea politicului, 45.
Marius Babias, Recucerirea politicului, 47.
Marius Babias, Recucerirea politicului, 40.
Marius Babias, Recucerirea politicului, 43.


a worldly image of the end of the world.67 The science-fiction image of man under computers’ threat was cultivated, and we perceive it as the image of man under the threat of communication
means. This communication threat was to undermine not only the
human being of consumer society but also communication itself
could have ended under its own domination as if in a kind of implosion of its own structures. From this perspective, “life becomes
crisis management”68, and in the center of this managerial action is
the idea that contemporary man exists as long as one continues to
find oneself communicating, exists as long as one construes oneself
as subject engaged in communication relations.69 The solution out
of Y2K problem and the improvement of communication means
after 2000, although proofs of human capacity to master communication instruments and technique do not remove from collective
imaginary the apocalyptic fear that might have come from the electronic communication networks direction. More so, we note that
the metaphor that is closest to the description of human condition
in this context is the image of the internet as “a wish machine producing communication designs”.70 This shifts discussion from the
human condition to the imaginary of the virtual world. The new
paradigm in which man is thought of is extremely favorable to a
nuanced understanding of advertising.
In Simulacra and simulation Jean Baudrillard ignored that advertising had a specific role in helping us turn real what is only virtual
and create immediate reality zones after the model of virtual reality.
Unlimited trust in the technological development of communication was, to a certain extent, blurred by the eschatological anguish

48 | SANDU FRUNZĂ

72

Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 196.
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 194.
73
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 165. At the same time, it is in
the logic of seduction that total satisfaction of the consumption need should

always be postponed considering that “Seduction promises something that it
cannot give: an entire, total happiness, without discontinuity and tiredness;
just like in movies, or in commercials!”, as Aurel Codoban indicates, “From
persuasion to manipulation and seduction. (A very short history of global
communication)”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, vol. 5 issue
14 (Summer 2006): 155.

71

To understand better advertising’s place in the consumer society
we may bring into discussion Jean Baudrillard’s statement (in 1970)
that consumer society did not produce new myths because it is “a
society with no other myth than itself ”.71 Although it perceives itself
as no myth creator, Baudrillard does not avoid myth as a fundamental dimension of consumer society, as a global system of interpretation, as a self-prophetic discourse, as a utopia in which abundance
and consumption “constitute our new tribal mythology”.72
In this context, advertising “is the prestigious image of affluence, but above all it is the repeated gage of the virtual miracle of
`something for nothing'.”73 For this very reason, advertising excess

Abundance as original seduction

of computer crisis in the year 2000. At the same time, the crisis was
overcome through human creativity and by man’s unstoppable wish
to communicate and socialize. And advertising is today one of the
most powerful instruments in communication and socialization.
Advertising is in the communication order “a wish machine” as
powerful as the Internet’s “wish machine”. Baudrillard’s optimism
based on “the computer fascination” is fulfilled not only in the communication forms through electronic means but also in advertising
language – often using the support of computer language.

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