Advertising impels, reinstills and generates desire. Ads 'work' because of our desire to be individual, to be beautiful, to be hip and at the root of this: to be whole. But these are desires which can never be fulfilled, which we will forever be occupied in achieving because they are created in the perfect world of adverting.

Desire begins in Lacan's mirror stage where we want this impossible unification with our divided self, a unification which is impossible. Herein lies the creation of desire: "What lies at the root of this process of the Symbolic, that drives to efface itself, is desire. Desire is directed both at the symbol and at the unity with the symbol: thus it does not recognize the boundary between Imaginary and Symbolic. It blindly strives after the unattainable, constantly replenished because never fulfilled.... Desire must always make a leap, across that gap between self and other, in its attempt to unite them" (Williamson 1978:65-66).

The desire to be whole impels us to use advertising as a way to fill the gap. We search to relive that sense of unification, not just through commodities, but through the images which come to represent the commodity. Representations of the Other in advertising is a way for products to claim they can fulfill this desire for wholeness. Because these desires can never be satisified, advertising can continue to generate unfulfillable desire. As a consequence, we are kept preoccupied as the quieted masses, leaving the existing power structures unquestioned and unthreatened.