Advertising as a colonial discourse: Reading the diamond advertisements with lacanian critical psychoanalysis

Globalisation is a multidimensional concept with economic, political, cultural, technological and ecological components. The often neglected dimension of globalisation is its history, especially the history of colonialism. Globalisation is an intertwined phenomenon of complex processes starting with geographical discoveries and extending to the present day. Although colonial relations were initially established with weapons and territorial occupation, discourses have always accompanied this construction in all its phases. Colonialism is the formation of a discourse and constructs colonial subjects by placing them in a system of representation. At the stage of globalisation that colonialism has reached today, the new discourse tool is advertisements and they construct the consumer subject as a new colonial subject typology. In this sense, within the scope of this study, advertisers are defined as new civilising missionaries and advertising as a 'colonial discourse'. By reading the phenomenon of globalisation in historical continuity with Lacanian psychoanalysis, this thesis argues that unconscious desire plays a major role in both the establishment and maintenance of such a capitalist global order. Since advertising discourses function for the manipulation of desire and exploitation in connection with unconscious mechanisms, the concept of idvertising instead of advertising is proposed for the concept of advertising in the study. Since diamonds, as an example of an ideal fetish-object, are closely linked to the reproduction of the socio-political sphere and colonial relations throughout the history of globalisation, diamond ads were chosen as the sample in this study. In this thesis, Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to criticise capitalist ideology through diamond advertisements.