Body-centrism in advertising texts, or how we are inured to pain

Man has become a kind of prosthetic God.

Sigmund Freud

Abstract

Advertising is not only a channel for transmitting a message from a sender (customer/producer) to a receiver (consumer). It is also responsible for shaping the attitudes of its recipients. Analysis of advertisements for medicinal products enables us to perceive original codes of the representation of pain by means of the human body. Gestures are not only pain indicators. They also introduce values to the society, which has consciously become visually sick. Thus, pain symbols represent remission as a natural property of reality. The ways by which the media controls the human body in the context of the representation of pain are the key issue of this article. Pain as an emotion becomes a construct that requires a corporeal form. A pattern of behavior is also imposed through the object of the body. Certain postures and gestures of pain turn into indicators of social behavior for recognizing emotions. For that reason, visualization of pain into corporeal form becomes a simplified story device for advertising communication. The main tool of this research is the political and social approach combined with the semiotic method. The results open new dimensions of hidden texts that form diverse attitudes. Filters for the analysis incorporate feminist theory, esthetics as ideology, and new media as text.