Let us wind up this discussion with some “finger-licking” chocolate advert slogans:
Chocolate commercials, whether Cadburys, Five Star, Snickers, Dairy Milk or Japp, seem to play with the body-spirit paradox - eating chocolates makes you so ecstatic and crazy that the quantifiable world of material sensibility hardly matters. Interestingly, chocolate as an eatable that has a materialistic presence (like the body has), which can be seen, smelt, licked and eaten, imagines itself as the Inner, as the spirit. It is so good to eat that you forget the logic of practical world, you go crazy, importantly you forget that it is a material good that will melt in your mouth, that once chewn will mix with your saliva and travel down your gut. The chocolaty craziness is boundless happiness, unrestricted excitement that it defeats its material existence. It then goes on to make the consumer transcend the rules, constraints, values of appropriateness and sense of the world outside. The Inner prompts you to kick the butt of the Outer.
It is an interesting commercial ploy: a piece of chocolate sells better when it is projected not as a piece of chocolate, but as more than that. It is not chocolate but the chocolatiness that is to be sought after. But even chocolatiness has a beginning and end. It stays in your mouth for a minute, may be. Unlike, say, the experience of listening to good music, it wont stay forever in your memory. You don’t recall it at will, such as an A.R. Rahman song. Its experience is fairly limited to its life inside your mouth. So its subjectivity, its selfhood, (as the chocolatiness is promoted by the adverts) is neither an Inner nor an Outer.
It is the body that can be eaten, but it is not just the eatablility that makes it work, it is the experience of eatability and of enjoyability. To signify this, most of the chocolate adverts visualise plenty of distruction - the Suresh-Ramesh twins who crazily disrupts the world around them annoying their father and pleasing many others, even stopping a thief and running away with the money of bank robbers; the Afro-American who pushes cars down a gorge after feeling hyper-energetic having eaten Japp, the Cadbury’s girl who erupts inside a cricket stadium, runs to the ground to dance wildly, the “kiss-me” Dairymilk Silk that dangerously associates kissing to eating, with lips smeared with chocolate (or dark blood?), and so on. The destruction and disruption begin with the crunchy, chewy death of the body of the chocolate piece, the spirit of chocolatiness is evoked, it embodies the eater and then unveils boundless wrecking and tearing down around the world. But the spirit always belongs to the body, it cannot live outside it, it comes alive when the body is destroyed but it always has to coexist with order of the bodiness. So these commercials sign off with showing a peaceful orderly world after the consumer is done with his business.
The problem of the subjecthood of chocolatiness is that it it cannot be claimed, seen or shown. It needs a substitute - but to realize it the substitute needs to self-destroy and then disrupt the orders outside. The body is its subjecthood, but the body is not its subjecthood as well - it’s subjectivity is the ‘body’ it projects and the body it annihilates; in the meeting point between the emergency and annihilation it appears.
And so the self-annihilate or annihilate button is always on. The non-stop process of coming-to-be and not-coming-to-be enables it to be limitless, enables the eater to feel limitless and enables the eater to change the world as limitless.
The limitlesness is played with in ads where having extra bigness in a dress (Perk commercial) or cutting of the extra length of trousers (Five Star commercial) is a confusing affair. In the Perk ad, two lean and stout girls tease a shop keeper by presenting one another while he fishes out a small or extra large top, fitting their supposed size. It makes sense since finding the prefect size is always a hassle, even if they give you options of various measurements and sizes to choose from: it just doesn’t fit perfectly and so your are always on the lookout for the right one, annoyingly. But the extra length of a Perk chocolate is not a measurement; it is not a precise size; it goes beyond it, since it is an experience that stands for the subjecthood of the eatable. In the Five Star ad, the brothers, chewing the chocolate, keep asking the tailor to cut short the pair of trousers. The more they eat the more they find the length of the trouser growing. They get into trouble ultimately, since the world and its sizes are quite “absurd”.
Ads such as Lotte Choco Pie playfully look at the unseeability of life as a problem - the naughtiness of trouble-making kids in a classroom, the loneliness of a young man on his birthday night, the ungettable silence in a park as the girl keeps chattering to the boy, all these are first resized, visually, with the coming-to-be of the choco pie and then challenged with the chocolate. So it is called “life ka pause button”. So life is the unseeable entity and the choco pie makes it a seeable one. You sit bored in a classroom, but how do you see boredom? When you respond to it with a choco pie. It pauses boredom and by pausing it freezes the moment, for the concerned boredom-maker of a teacher to see and laugh at it. It pauses loneliness as a young man who sits listlessly in his room - as friends stream into his room carrying aloft the choco pies with small candles lit on them, he realises what he hasn’t been seeing so far, that, yes, he was lonely but not anymore more.
It makes one wonder how you may understand boredom and loneliness otherwise - you can see a yawning kid, with sleepiness written all over his face. But that is not boredom, that is only the expressions of a bored kid. The same with loneliness. You need the opposite emotion, the visualised opposite emotion, to realize it, to bring it in a seeable fashion to you. It pauses “life” by making life realizable, by counterpositing it.
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