Political Advertising in the Crossroad of Political Pragmatism and Political Ideology

Abstract

The study of political advertising so far could be an exemplar of the schism that permeates the whole study of political communication nowadays; the schism between the politics of pragmatism and the politics of ideology. This paper comes to counter-argue that the study of political advertising can become an exemplar of the reconciliation of these two different areas of concern in so far as we do justice to the ontological status of discourse in political communication. This means that we should not take discourse to be a derivative of electoral design, as the legacy of modernization has taught us, but to be the primary locus where all strategies of political communication are meaningfully articulated. It is not, however, the articulation on the basis of political philosophy (ideology in liberal political theory) and for the reproduction of the social order (ideology in critical cultural studies) that grasp the ideological potential of contemporary, aestheticized and managerialized, political communication. It is rather, as I will argue, drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory, the re-contextualization of symbolisms from the past, interwoven with the precarious institutional interests and asymmetries of the present, which lies at the heart of the ideological potential of political advertising. It is, therefore, a discourse-based analytics of ads that we need so as to grasp the conditions of possibility for this potential.