Making sense of political ideology in mediatized political communication: A discourse analytic perspective

Political discourse becomes more and more ‘mediatized’ nowadays but, as I argue in this article, mediatization should be considered neither as a testament to ‘de-ideologization’ nor as a restyling of the ‘inherently ideological’ contemporary political communication. Ideology, I claim, is a potentiality of mediatized political discourse and as such, it rests with the generic capacity of the latter to recontextualize symbolisms from the institutional past serving the ordering of the institutional present. How is the recontextualization of symbolic meanings facilitated by the aesthetic and affective qualities of different media genres? In what ways does recontextualized discourse serve the neoliberal order of the present? Lying at the heart of the ideological analysis of political communication, these are questions which can be insightfully addressed through a discourse analytics of mediatization as the one I apply here on two political advertisements from the Greek general election of January 2015

Political advertising in the crossroad of political pragmatism and political ideology

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

Ideology in the age of mediatised politics: from ‘belief systems’ to the re-contextualizing principle of discourse

Mediatized politics is often associated with a metamorphosis of politics; a shift from philosophical fermentations to effective media campaigning and from rational argumentation to personal appeals, sound-bites and dramatic effects. The question this article raises is whether this alleged metamorphosis allows some space for ideology to emerge and play any role in contemporary politics and, if so, what the implications for the study of political ideology in the age of mediatization are? As I will argue, to study ideology in the context of mediatized politics is not to make big claims about the survival or demise of some ‘grand’ belief systems but to analytically address the potential of political discourse, as it is articulated through several media genres within specific socio-political contexts, to re-contextualize symbolisms from the past serving the effective exercise of political power in the present. I will further illustrate this attempted revisionism by briefly examining three televised political advertisements, which I take as an example of mediatized politics, by the American Democratic Party for the 2008 presidential election in the US, by the British Conservative party for the 2010 general election in the UK and by the Panhellenic Socialist Movement for the 2009 parliamentary election in Greece, respectively

Ideology in the age of mediatized politics: a study on the aesthetics and politics of charisma, ordinariness, and spectacle from the 2015 election advertising campaigns in the UK and Greece

This thesis seeks to explore the place and role of ideology in political communication under conditions of mediatization. Exploring the place of ideology, as I will argue, involves exploring the ways political meaning is produced through the mediatic practices of personalisation, conversationalisation and dramatisation, while exploring its role involves exploring the ways political power is exercised through these practices. Particularly, the thesis builds upon an analytics of mediatization according to which ideology lies in, the textually-discursively organised and ordered, performative capacity of mediatic practices to recall and rework institutional symbolisms from the past serving the institutional exercise of power in the present, or the recontextualizing dynamic of media performativity. To operationalise this analytical approach, the thesis employs a paradigmatic case study; the study of political advertisements produced by the two major political parties in Greece and the UK in the run-up to the January and May 2015, respectively, General Elections. The empirical analysis seeks to demonstrate that central to all the ideological mediatic practices is the fusion of the private with the public through different aesthetic regimes, such as the authenticity of charisma, the intimacy of ordinariness, and the ritualism of spectacle, each emerging invested with its own recontextualizing dynamic – the politics of mission, everyday life and belonging. Each, in other words, has its own capacity to emotive-cognitively and spatiotemporally rework institutionally symbolic meanings from the past enacting different forms of institutional agency (e.g. partisan or cross-partisan) and ordering (e.g. displacement, temporalisation or eternalisation) in the present. The overarching contribution of this analysis is to argue/establish that we cannot gain a full understanding of how political parties’ ideology is renegotiated nowadays without a critical interrogation of the recontextualizing dynamic of mediatic performances. Nor can we gain a full understanding of how parties and other political institutions ideologically deal with the pragmatic challenges of the present without a critical interrogation of the aestheticity and affectivity of (mediatized) political discourse

The communication of horrorism: a typology of ISIS online death videos

In this article, the authors theorize the communicative logic of ISIS online death videos—from the burning and shooting of individual hostages to mass battleground executions. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s reflections on contemporary violence, they demonstrate how ISIS’ digital spectacles of the annihilated body confront Western viewers with horror— or rather with different “regimes of horrorism” (grotesque, abject and sublime horror). These spectacles of horror, the authors argue, mix Western with Islamic aesthetic practices and secular with religious moral claims so as to challenge dominant hierarchies of grievability (who is worthy of our grief) and norms of subjectivity. In so doing, the authors conclude, ISIS introduces into global spaces of publicity a “spectacular thanatopolitics”—a novel form of thanatopolitics that brings the spectacle of the savaged body, banished from display since the 19th century, back to the public stage, thereby turning the pursuit of death into the new norm of heroic subjectivit

‘Finding Old Sikyon’, 2015: A preliminary report

The project “Ancient Sikyon” is a cooperation between the Ephorate of Antiquities of Corinth, the National Museum of Denmark, the Danish Institute at Athens and the Institute of Geoscience of the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel. Conceived as a five-year project, its main aim is to identify the exact location, the major features and the urbanistic development of the city, prior to its relocation in 303 BC to a plateau nearby. This, however, is intended to serve the greater purpose of answering general questions of Archaic and Classical urbanism and the structure and organization of a famous centre of art and culture in comparison with other such centres like Corinth and Athens. The first year of research has already brought important information about the topography and material culture of Ancient Sikyon, which is presented in this preliminary report

Discovery and characterization of a thermostable and highly halotolerant GH5 cellulase from an Icelandic hot spring isolate

Journal ArticleCopyright: © 2016 Zarafeta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.With the ultimate goal of identifying robust cellulases for industrial biocatalytic conversions, we have isolated and characterized a new thermostable and very halotolerant GH5 cellulase. This new enzyme, termed CelDZ1, was identified by bioinformatic analysis from the genome of a polysaccharide-enrichment culture isolate, initiated from material collected from an Icelandic hot spring. Biochemical characterization of CelDZ1 revealed that it is a glycoside hydrolase with optimal activity at 70°C and pH 5.0 that exhibits good thermostability, high halotolerance at near-saturating salt concentrations, and resistance towards metal ions and other denaturing agents. X-ray crystallography of the new enzyme showed that CelDZ1 is the first reported cellulase structure that lacks the defined sugar-binding 2 subsite and revealed structural features which provide potential explanations of its biochemical characteristics.This work has been carried out in the framework of the HotZyme Project (http://hotzyme.com, grant agreement no. 265933) financed by the European Union 7th Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013, an EU FP7 Collaborative programme