9.1Variations of Audiovisual Figurative Meaning-Making

The comparative perspective taken in this chapter for the concluding discussion of the gained findings does not aim at presenting the developed emergent figurative meaning as an expression of entrenched cultural patterns of thinking in the respective language, i.e., in Polish or German. This study cannot put forward such an assumption as its data basis is too small and because such an equation of the level of use and the systems level of language amount to a generalization that the analysis does not target. Due to its film-analytical focus in respect to a specific presentational form, historical facts as well as peculiarities of the respective political and election system in the two countries are of minor relevance for this study and therefore only slightly taken into consideration. In comparing the commercials, they play a role to the extent that the analyzed campaign commercials occurred in the context of parliamentary elections in both countries that resulted in the formation of a new cabinet and the designation of a new head of government. Both the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Poland are the heads of government in both countries. In this light, one campaign commercial of the incumbent and one of a challenger each were subjects of analysis. With the SPD and the CDU in Germany, and the PO and the PiS in Poland, the analysis refers to the (currently) two strongest parties in both countries. The objective of the comparison is, however, neither to extract party-specific positions or patterns of thinking from the figurative meaning found in the campaign commercials, nor to ascribe them to a culture-specific political or historical background.

In summary, the comparison of the campaign commercials’ conception and content-related orientation aims to look at the role of the candidates in the election campaigns (i.e., incumbent and challenger). In this manner, the drawn conclusions remain close to the data. Significant differences between the two political systems render a simple equation impossible. They are, however, neither the aim of this study and therefore only briefly mentioned in the following: in Germany, the Chancellor is elected by the members of the Bundestag, while in Poland, the Prime Minister is appointed by the President of Poland. The two Polish parties PiS and PO are significantly younger than the German parties SPD and CDU. Apart from this, Poland’s party system compared to Germany’s is characterized by a strong discontinuity, e.g., with regard to the array of political parties, the balance of power among them, the formation of fractions and electoral alliances. Having clarified that, observations and insights that result from a concluding synopsis of all four analyses carried out in this study are presented and discussed below, not least with regard to their implications for cognitive-linguistic research and analysis of figurativity in political contexts of use.

The detailed analysis of the interplay between language and audiovisual staging in each of the four campaign commercials has led to accounting for the temporal, attentional, and experiential configurations of figurative meaning, i.e., where in the campaign commercial figurative meaning emerges and becomes activated, if this happens in particular moments only or continuously and consistently, what kind of sensory-motor and affective experiences are evoked and how they are modulated over the course of time. As such, figurativity in campaign commercials has been demonstrated to not unfold in the same manner as audiovisual illustrations of verbal metaphorical expressions, as often taken for granted. Instead, the analyses clearly show in what diverse ways figurative meaning emerges: through verbal figurative expressions that are activated through audiovisual images, through audiovisual representation, and through affective experiences that are orchestrated by audiovisual movement-images (i.e., cinematic expressive movements). These different ways have turned out not to occur in pure form but rather to intertwine over the course of time and thereby to develop figurative meaning dynamically to an overall figurative theme. A closer look at that interplay and its particular temporal, attentional, and experiential profile, allows for qualifying the overall process of audiovisual figurativity’s dynamic unfolding in more detail on the level of the whole campaign commercial. In their case study of the dynamics of metaphorical meaning in two examples taken from conversational interaction, Müller and Tag attempt to develop an argument along these lines:

Both examples also differ with regard to their respective foregrounding patterns. The first case is characterized by a condensed and mainly simultaneous foregrounding pattern, with a steady and fast increase of foregrounding of metaphoricity realized in a short amount of time. Meanwhile, the second example shows a highly complex simultaneous and linear foregrounding pattern that extends over a longer time span. (Müller and Tag 2010, 110)

However, they do not follow up on this observation in terms of drawing potential conclusions with regard to the implications of these different patterns for the situated context of use. This study takes this step by addressing the question of the emergent image of the promoted political candidates and the level to which they are made tangible and comprehensible. This is precisely what has turned out to be the main aspect of figurativity in campaign commercials: it literally creates an image of the candidates by making them available for being experienced and understood in a particular manner. In concrete terms, Angela Merkel is experienced and understood in terms of a powerful sovereign with civil roots who is close to the people; Donald Tusk as a leading builder under pressure asking for an extension of the deadline in order to finish his uncompleted project; Jarosław Kaczyński as a door opener for the so far segregated and excluded citizens, thereby making for participatory equality; and Frank-Walter Steinmeier as his Germany plan as a sober and realistic answer to existential questions. The reconstruction of these emergent figurative meanings that give rise to situated images of the four candidates from a dynamic view and transdisciplinary perspective, provides a basis for qualitatively comparing and differentiating the campaign commercials on a well-founded basis from the viewer’s perspective. Admittedly, these emergent figurative meanings are not suggested to reflect actual psychological and physiological processes. Instead, they are grounded in a philosophical and phenomenological account of embodied meaning-making (cf., Müller and Kappelhoff 2018, Müller and Schmitt 2015; see also Johnson 2007).

The first considerable difference that shows up from the overall picture of all analyses is the one between the campaign commercials of the CDU, the PO, and the PiS compared with the SPD TV campaign ad. While the first three exhibit a clear intertwining of the two main modalities, language and audiovisual staging, and their respective dimensions of figurative meaning-making, the latter basically makes use of only one way, i.e., the multimodal (illustrative) activation of verbal figurative expressions through audiovisual images. In this respect, the former ones display a higher degree of composition of language and audiovisual staging as compared to the latter. The SPD campaign commercial actually gives the impression that language and audiovisual staging instead run parallel and barely intertwine with each other: this shows up in the clear predominance of language over audiovisual staging and the lack of consistent and sufficiently activated figurative meaning. As a result, a tangible image of the respective candidate emerges in the case of the first three campaign commercials, whereas in the case of the SPD campaign commercial, the candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier remains vague and inconsistent. This clearly indicates that language and audiovisual staging cannot be separated from one another and that a static and simplistic conception of audiovisual figurativity as mere depiction of verbally expressed imagery is far from reality. Instead, there is need for a dynamic perspective that accounts for the temporal, attentional, and experiential dynamics of audiovisual figurative meaning in a situated media context.

Even among the three campaign commercials that give rise to a tangible image of the respective candidate, remarkable differences become apparent. Juxtaposing the PO with the CDU and the PiS campaign commercial demonstrates that the former’s overall figurative theme emerges and unfolds primarily in language. The scenario of an uncompleted construction site and Donald Tusk as its leading builder is mainly unfolded monomodally through language. On this basis, it is further concretized through audiovisual images and affectively qualified through audiovisual staging. In contrast, the CDU and the PiS campaign commercial display no such predominance of language and instead an equal or stronger role of audiovisual staging that – without explicit verbal figurative expressions – makes present realms of experience that are related to others: in the case of Angela Merkel, it is the sensation of absolutist sovereign power and stability through visual composition, sound, and camera movement; in the case of Jarosław Kaczyński, it is the image of inclusion and exclusion and door opening as well as the sensation of releasing tension and providing balance.

A closer look at the particular temporal, attentional, and experiential profile of audiovisual figurative meaning-making of all four campaign commercials reveals further noteworthy variances. The PO TV campaign ad exhibits a condensed and pointed stepwise progression of audiovisual figurative meaning that increases noticeably in the second half through multimodal activations of the construction scenario and the explicit verbal mentioning of emergent figurative meaning (“four difficult years are too little in order to realize the plan of building a strong and rich Poland”). The PiS campaign commercial, on the other hand, features a prolonged and constantly high-grade activated profile to establish (through audiovisual representation) and elaborate its overall figurative theme throughout its entire course. Only at two points (in the middle and at the end) is it also verbally explicated through the faded-in slogans whereby the emergent figurative meaning is elaborated and foregrounded. The CDU campaign commercial displays a similar prolonged, but more complex profile as both dimensions of audiovisual figurative meaning-making (i.e., multimodal activation of figurativity and the affective experience of cinematic expressive movement) unfold continuously in an interrelated manner over its course. What is remarkable is that the audiovisual metonymies play a double role: on the one hand, they unfold figurative meaning simultaneously (e.g., Merkel’s verbal expression ‘empower families’ corresponding with the image of a baby) and, taken together, they linearly foreground the principle of contiguity and the central metonymical link between Merkel and the German people over the course of the commercial. Quite different is the profile of audiovisual figurative meaning in the SPD campaign commercial where it unfolds in an extremely condensed and rather simultaneous pattern of single foregrounded but isolated moments of activated metonymicity that, however, do not compose a coherent image.

Generally speaking, the SPD and the PO campaign commercial, and the CDU and the PiS campaign commercial appear similar to each other and stand in opposition to the other pair. The predominance of language in the former two takes shape in condensed forms on the micro level and thereby develops a higher degree of explicitness of the emergent figurative meaning. This is due to the direct relation between language and audiovisual staging in the SPD TV campaign ad and the monomodal elaboration of metaphorical meaning in the PO campaign commercial. In the first case, the audiovisual images relate closely to the verbal expressions with which they create an audiovisual metonymy. Thereby, these metonymies have a clear, explicit, and as such rather illustrating character that leaves little room for interpretation which is indeed not intended because the SPD campaign commercial wants to argue and create unambiguous precedents. In the case of the PO campaign commercial, the room for interpretation is a bit more open due to the less direct audiovisual depiction of the imagery: the viewer is never shown a building site as a whole but always single images that activate the construction scenario. Nevertheless, due to the predominant elaboration through language and the subdominant role of audiovisual staging, the emergent metaphorical meaning first and foremost plays out in an explicit manner.

The predominance of audiovisual staging and almost complete absence of language in the CDU and the PiS campaign commercial, on the other hand, takes shape in prolonged and highly activated forms on the micro level and thereby develops a higher degree of subtlety of the emergent figurative meaning. In the latter of the two, language plays a subdominant role: it merely serves to explain the audiovisually evoked metaphorical scenario of inclusion and exclusion. Because the faded-in language does, however, not relate directly to the audiovisual representation, as in the case of the SPD campaign commercial, the emergent figurative meaning of the PiS campaign commercial develops in a rather subtle manner. In contrast, the CDU campaign commercial exhibits a balance between language and audiovisual staging that takes shape in interconnected simultaneous and extended forms on the micro level and thereby develops a balanced interplay between explicitness and subtlety of the emergent figurative meaning. Language unfolds both simultaneous explicit metonymical meanings, but concomitantly points beyond it and foregrounds the non-explicit principle of contiguity. Furthermore, language makes figurative meaning explicit in patches (e.g., “I was not born a chancellor” which exhibits an alternation between ‘I’ and ‘we’ in the first contemplative part, or the final slogan “We have the power”). However, it primarily relates less directly to the audiovisual images, wherefore a balanced interplay between language and audiovisual staging, between explicitness and subtlety shapes the emergent figurative meaning.

From an overall view on all forms of the interplay between language and audiovisual staging on the micro level there arises a tendency on the macro level either towards language or towards audiovisual staging or equally to both of them. These three different dominance phenomena in the two dimensions of audiovisual figurative meaning-making (i.e., predominance of language over audiovisual staging; balance between language and audiovisual staging; predominance of audiovisual staging over language) that have been introduced in Chapter 5 can now be attributed to the campaign commercials under discussion. In Figure 17, their allocation to the respective TV campaign ad is illustrated.

The three forms of audiovisual figurativity are not understood in terms of distinct, mutual exclusive categories but as a continuum with smooth transitions between the single forms. This becomes particularly evident in the case of the PO campaign commercial that displays a predominance of language over audiovisual staging as does the SPD campaign commercial to be sure, but its language and audiovisual staging are more strongly interrelated than the latter’s. That is to say, while the PO campaign commercial is language-induced, the SPD campaign commercial is language-driven. Therefore, the PO campaign commercial is not completely assigned to the form of predominant language, like the SPD campaign commercial, but instead between it and the balanced interplay of language and audiovisual staging.

Hence, from the SPD, across the PO and the CDU and, finally, to the PiS campaign commercial, an increasing degree of subtlety and of the temporal, attentional, and experiential extent of audiovisual figurative meaning-making can be stated. On this basis, and due to the detailed transdisciplinary analysis, it is now possible to examine the four campaign commercials qualitatively on a well-founded basis from the viewer’s perspective. In contrast to previous studies that proposed that Polish campaign commercials were unprofessional compared to German ones (e.g., Musiałowska 2008), they have turned out to equally give rise to elaborate figurative meaning and thereby make the promoted candidate tangible and comprehensible like their German equivalents. Remarkably, the campaign commercial of the Polish PiS makes for an even more tangible image of its candidate Jarosław Kaczyński than the campaign commercial of the German SPD. Although the former unfolds figurative meaning primarily through audiovisual representation and affective experience orchestrated by audiovisual movement patterns, the few instances of language are well-composed with them and thereby give rise to a consistent and vital image of Kaczyński. In the SPD campaign commercial, on the other hand, language is barely related to audiovisual staging: apart from single, isolated moments of activated figurativity, no consistent idea and image of the candidate emerges. The dynamic approach to audiovisual figurative meaning-making thus offers deeper insights into the meaning-making process of campaign commercials than surface analyses of the represented or linguistic content and used audiovisual techniques. The findings of the campaign commercials of the two major German and Polish parties could be further complemented by analyses of campaign commercials of the minor parties in Germany and Poland in order to test Holtz-Bacha and Kaid’s (1993) hypothesis that they were unprofessional and boring due to conventional patterns and production technique as well as long text passages. Such a comparative analysis, however, goes beyond the scope of this book and is subject to further investigation.

Another, more basic factor that has an impact on the process and thus also on the form and quality of audiovisual figurative meaning in campaign commercials is their limited duration, which gives rise to rather short-termed patterns in general. Nevertheless, slight differences and variations among the four campaign commercials stand out: those with a shorter duration (i.e., PiS and PO with 30 respectively 45 seconds) exhibit a more pointed meaning-making process, whereas those with a longer duration (i.e., CDU with 90 seconds) tend to display a wider extension and unfolding of figurative meaning.124 This also becomes apparent in the complexity of cinematic expressive movement patterns: the PiS and the PO campaign commercial consist of only one expressive movement unit (emu), whereas the CDU TV campaign ad features two emus and thus a small dramaturgy. By contrast, the SPD campaign commercial consists of only one emu, but this one addresses the viewer in a rather restrained manner because it is overshadowed by language and displays a low degree of composition. Hence, the mere number of emus does not reveal anything about the way and intensity of affectively addressing the viewer.

Apart from this, the respective movement qualities are an influential factor as well as the interplay of dominant and subdominant articulatory modalities of audiovisual staging that compose it. In this respect, the CDU, the PO, and the PiS campaign commercial all address the viewer in an intense manner, but vary in view of their respective degree of explicitness or subtleness: while the movement qualities in the PO and the PiS campaign commercial are strongly foregrounded in the underlying music and visual composition, they are in the CDU campaign commercial rather subtly staged in the visual composition, underlying music, and camera movement which has to do with the rather calm and moderate quality itself. As the SPD campaign commercial unfolds a mainly heterogeneous audiovisual movement pattern that could at best be described by an alternation of dynamics (through the quick succession of shots illustrating the goals of the Germany plan) and rest (through showing Steinmeier speaking to the camera), it is primarily the dynamic sequences125 that address the viewer more intensely than the calm ones. However, this kind of addressing amounts primarily to a short-term attentional and sensory-motor experiential appeal.

The overall comparison of all campaign commercials discloses further observations that are relevant to cognitive linguistics: metonymy plays a role in each of them to a varying extent. In the CDU TV campaign ad, it unfolds as a pattern that foregrounds the principle of contiguity and the central link of the candidate Merkel and the German people. In the case of the PO campaign commercial, it virtually forms an anti-pattern that highlights heterogeneity and makes Tusk’s workload and pressure tangible. In the PiS campaign commercial, metonymy complements and classifies the affective and representational contrast between excluded and included by qualifying the two shown groups as citizens and politicians. In the case of the SPD campaign commercial, metonymy serves for illustrating single goals of the Germany plan and concomitantly putting forward an individual perspective on them, i.e., what ‘good education’ or ‘families’ means and looks like (for Steinmeier). This clearly illustrates that metaphor is not the only figurative mode that plays a role in audiovisual figurative meaning-making and in making candidates tangible in campaign commercials. A more comprehensive view of figurativity that considers its various forms and configurations as well as the particular interplay of metaphor and metonymy is thus fruitful and desirable.

The imagery of a house or a building in general is a recurrent motive in all four campaign commercials, however, with a different role and with varying configurations. In the CDU TV campaign ad, it plays a prominent role in terms of Merkel’s office and as a remarkable boundary between inside and outside, past and present and future. As such, it supports her double role, i.e., the emergent figurative meaning of being both sovereign and having civil roots. The PO campaign commercial creates an entirely different image of a house or building, namely as an experiential scenario of a hitherto unfinished but to be realized vision of a future Poland. As such, it serves as an excuse and absolution for Tusk’s terminating office term and simultaneously as a justification for his re-election. In the PiS party’s campaign commercial, the building plays the most prominent role as compared with the other three campaign commercials: it provides the realm for experiencing and understanding politics, both in a negative (drawing a remarkable boundary between inside and outside) and in a positive way (open and big enough for everybody, transparent). The SPD campaign commercial, in turn, is the only one in which it is only marginally and shortly present, namely on the verbal level: as a metaphorical conceptualization of the Germany plan that is, however, barely activated (“The plan has substance and a good foundation”). This metaphorical expression is reminiscent of a stable and solid building or house, but it is not further elaborated and thus remains one among other heterogeneous verbal figurative expressions that form no consistent whole.

It would be going too far to speak of audiovisual and verbal instances of a conceptual POLITICS IS A HOUSE metaphor for this is not the line of thought that this study is following, i.e., to prioritize the conceptual system level against the level of use. Instead, it focuses on embodied meaning-making in a situated media context and not as an instantiation of a pre-existing mapping between conceptual domains. As such, it explicitly does not aim to make claims about the psychological reality, in terms of (un-)consciousness or deliberateness, of the analyzed emergent figurative meaning in the campaign commercials. With such a clear focus on the situated emergence and unfolding of figurative meaning, the analyses at best suggest the assumption of the house or building as a systematic metaphor in Lynne Cameron’s sense126 (2007, Cameron, Low, and Maslen 2010). However, the extremely small corpus of four campaign commercials that, moreover, originate from different elections in different countries in different years makes this hypothesis rather improbable.

9.2Campaign Commercials as Political Symbolizations

What kinds of insights can this study with its cognitive-linguistic research topic of audiovisual figurativity in four selected campaign commercials provide for political communication research? To begin with, the most obvious and certainly straightforward link between the two disciplines lies in the fact that

[…] politics is heavily depended upon communication between and among political actors, citizens, and the media, and even can be regarded a form of communication in itself, political communication research is highly relevant to modern societies […] Political communication research by its very nature is interdisciplinary and comprises scholars from a wide range of theoretical approaches, methodological backgrounds, and academic disciplines of which media and communication studies and political science are the most important, but by far not the only ones. (Reinemann 2014, 1)

However clear and self-evident this may appear – there is a long-lasting dissociation between the two disciplines. Although linguistics, verbal communication, and rhetorical analysis were highly relevant for the emergence of the field, they were replaced by social psychology, political science, and mass communication in the post-war phase due to a strong focus on the effects of media influence on society (Reinemann 2014, 9). Within political communication research this led to the dissociation between the humanities and the social sciences in favor of the latter, which had theoretical and methodological consequences:

This tradition […] established a long-lasting, dominant research paradigm marked by key concepts like opinion and attitude, the notion of political communication as a process, a strong focus on media effects as well as a preference for quantitative empirical research. (Reinemann 2014, 10)

In other words, those disciplines that deal with the basic conditions and principles of communication were (and still are) underrepresented in the research field. As a result, individual subdisciplines and approaches (e.g., politolinguistics, critical discourse analysis) have emerged on the part of the humanities that examine the field of political communication separately. Given its interdisciplinary nature as pointed out by Reinemann (2014), this isolation is regrettable as the research expertise of the social sciences and the humanities could complement each other in a fruitful way.

While political communication in the context of election campaigns has only become a research topic within linguistics in recent years (e.g., Cienki and Giansante 2014, Forchtner, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak 2013), “[t]he desire to understand campaign effects became a major driving force in the development of political communication research. Even today, a considerable amount of political communication research is done in the context of election campaigns” (Reinemann 2014, 4). In this, political communication is always established as the “strategic use of communication to reach voters directly through different forms of controlled communication or indirectly through the news media, or as different modes of communication and campaigning” (Strömbäck and Kiousis 2014, 110). It stands to reason that this presupposition is why most research carried out in this field takes meaning in the examined forms of communication for granted and therefore focuses on identifying and analyzing strategic and effective aspects on the level of content.

Political communication research on campaign commercials predominantly aims at the analysis of their contents and their effects on the spectators, respectively the voters (see Chapter 1). In this respect, the “hegemony of quantitative social science” (Delia 1987, 71) is most obviously manifest in quantitative content analysis (e.g., Holtz-Bacha 2000, Jakubowski 1998), illustrating the distribution of coded categories (e.g., parts of verbal language, elements on the level of representation, or single articulatory modalities of audiovisual staging) in the campaign commercials (mostly in the form of tables and diagrams). The concomitant abstraction and decontextualization of single formal and audiovisually represented elements and their comparative juxtaposition with other instantiations neglects their situatedness, emergence, and particular quality in a situated media context. Furthermore, the focus on the represented content does not take into account the media-specific mode of perception of audiovisual images (cf. Müller and Kappelhoff 2018) and the concomitant emergence of meaning through cinematic expressivity.

This work contributes to previous, quantitatively informed political communication research by involving the aspect of meaning-making in campaign commercials in consideration of the media specificity of audiovisual images. In doing so, it takes one important step back in examining and analyzing the TV campaign ads and asks for the conditions of how the so far exclusively examined, and taken-for-granted, visual representation and processes of fictionalization come into being (cf. Kappelhoff and Greifenstein 2016). From the transdisciplinary perspective taken in this book, it is through the figurative principle of experiencing and understanding one thing in terms of another that these two come into being in the first place:

This fictionalization can be reconstructed as processes of metaphorization. Indeed, one can view the formation of metaphor itself as a fundamental driving force of any fictionalization. Metaphor can be described as a process of changing, correlating, and projecting two different complexes of experience, sensory units, perceptual schemata, or sources of the image. If metaphor links two different realms of experience, then the processes of forming metaphors should open up a way to access the processes of fictionalization as arrangements of film experiences, which spectators concretely traverse in the process of seeing and hearing. (Kappelhoff and Greifenstein 2016, 184)

This link between the establishing of figurativity and the process of constructing a fictional cinematic world puts forward a constitutive and overarching meaning-making principle of audiovisual images: it is not realized through the audiovisual representation of reality but is only created in and through the viewer. Transferring and applying this idea to the analysis of campaign commercials and considering the spectator as meaning-maker in the process of viewing opens up an alternative complementary approach to the question of their experience. In this manner, campaign commercials are not ex ante regarded as abstract strategic tools aiming at persuasion but are first and foremost considered with regard to their mediality: namely, as a part and expression of political discourse. In other words, they are conceived of as audiovisual images that orchestrate the perception of viewers, thereby bringing forth a communicative situation and entering into discourse. Such an orientation to the process of seeing and hearing positions the TV campaign ads as an interactive form of meaning-making instead of focusing exclusively on the production side and its intentions.

This is also compatible with the notion of political “interpretational culture” [Deutungskultur] that Holtz-Bacha (2000) has adopted from Karl Rohe (1990). Holtz-Bacha uses the term in order to mark and classify campaign commercials as part of political culture through which competing proposals of sense and interpretation among the different parties within a political system become graspable, either resulting in the confirmation or the transformation of socioculture (Holtz-Bacha 2000, 16–21). Therefore, she refers to the campaign commercials as symbolic politics by which political parties attempt to define and construct political reality. Holtz-Bacha particularly emphasizes this aspect in order to justify her content-analytical access and the neglect of the effectiveness of the campaign commercials. The complete focus on the production side and its interpretative proposal, however, implies a separation or gap between the TV campaign ads and the viewers whereby the latter seems to be subjected to them from the start, merely relevant as a target audience and therefore only playing a passive role.

In contrast, the analysis of the emergence of audiovisual figurative meaning proceeds from a close link between the campaign commercials and the viewers that consists of their affective and cognitive addressing in a situated media context. As a result, the viewers are considered as being actively involved in the process of symbolization that occurs within the political interpretational culture (cf. Beichelt 2004, 155). It is them who bring into being and figure the candidates and parties, the points of view and aims in their own body when viewing the TV campaign ads. This reflexive perceptual experience of audiovisual images that is characterized by the bodily experience of a foreign subjective perception (Sobchack 1992) corresponds to the relation between the socioculture and the culture of interpretation. Socioculture refers to the taken-for-granted level of political culture that is not repeatedly brought into question, constituted by passed-on interpretative patterns as represented by everyday political life (Holtz-Bacha 2000, 18). These patterns are reflected and negotiated in a subjective perspective on the interpretational culture and can, in so doing, find their way into socioculture. Equally, the campaign commercials give rise to a fictional perceptual world that refers to the reality of everyday experience in the form of an as-if experience: “[W]e perceive a foreign way of sensing the world as if it were our own sense of perception, our feeling for the world.” (Greifenstein and Kappelhoff 2016, 188) That is to say, the construction of the world in the TV campaign ads as fiction relates to a shared experience of the reality, but it does so in a subjective, evaluative, and situated manner, and thereby reflects and transforms its reference object.

In this light, the respective point of view, expressed in the campaign commercials and materializing as a bodily experience on the part of the viewer, can be understood as an exchange relationship between socioculture and interpretational culture and as a social practice of constructing political reality. In this sense, this study puts forward a cultural-science informed perspective on the exploration of the political (cf. Schwelling 2004, 12): it examines the TV campaign ads as communicative encounters and exchange between political parties and voters in their entirety and situatedness. This qualitative focus naturally goes along with a limited scope concerning the quantifiability and generalizability of the gained results. Nevertheless, it proposes a closer examination of supposed overall tendencies or recurrent patterns in the aesthetic arrangement of the campaign commercials that are mostly deduced from isolated abstracted elements (e.g., Holtz-Bacha 2000) by taking a closer look at their respective configuration and staging. In doing so, they remain embedded in their immediate situated context, i.e., the respective candidates, parties, election period, and political context to which they refer directly.

In this sense, the TV campaign ads are considered as audiovisual access to the political. By now, social sciences have treated images in political communication first and foremost with skepticism and have adopted a rather negative attitude in dealing with them (Hofmann 2004, 309). Symbolic politics – in contrast to ‘real’ politics – has mostly been conceived of and neglected as mere visual and make-believe presentation of political results (Hofmann 2004, 309), whereby their communicative reality-constituting function has not been taken into consideration. Marion Müller, however, explicitly points out that there is a nexus between political symbolizations and cultural self-understanding:

A society’s image production is a direct expression of its cultural self-understanding. From a cultural-sciences perspective images can be conceived of as sources for political structures and processes, opening up a qualitative access to the understanding of political-cultural patterns of reproduction and communication. (Müller 2004, 335; translation mine)

With regard to fiction films, Siegfried Kracauer has similarly argued the case for a critical media analysis in order to reveal inventories of social mentality. According to him, films do not reflect explicit beliefs but rather psychological dispositions, which he considers as deep layers of a collective mentality, located below the level of consciousness (Kracauer [1947] 1984, 12).

Campaign commercials take up these cultural collective dispositions and relate them to a subjective experiential reality. In these audiovisual descriptions and new descriptions of a shared world, the political community is questioned and related to the situated experiential reality of film-viewing. TV campaign ads thereby produce a thinking that measures the space of commonality (see Kappelhoff 2018). In this respect, the discourse taking place in the process of viewing the campaign commercials and the subject of this book is also relevant for comparative political communication research. Such a comparative perspective, however, neither refers to country-specific contextual conditions127 of political communication nor to supposed entrenched culture-specific concepts or ideas of politics. Instead, it refers to the respective description and new description of a shared world through subjective experience which only gives rise to the audiovisual representations and images of candidates and political parties as (figurative) meaning. Against this backdrop, the previous understanding of figurativity in political communication as a strategic persuasive tool or even as ideological tool of persuasion (cf. Androshchuk 2014) is questioned and reconsidered in the final section.

9.3Reframing Persuasion towards Meaning-Making and Understanding

The research discussions of campaign commercials (in the social sciences) and of figurativity in political communication (in linguistics) display one common feature: both are led somewhat one-dimensionally, videlicet foremost with respect to their strategic use for the purpose of persuading the addressee. Charteris-Black, for instance, declares right at the beginning of his book Corpus Approaches to Political Metaphor:

Metaphor is a figure of speech that is typically used in persuasion; this is because it represents a novel way of viewing the world that offers some fresh insight. Because metaphor is persuasive it is frequently employed discursively in rhetorical and argumentative language such as political speeches. (Charteris-Black 2004, 7)

Androshchuk similarly presupposes the occurrence of metaphors in political discourse as an intended influencing of the addressee by a speaker. According to him, the use of metaphor is never objective and rather expresses an individual worldview (Androshchuk 2014, 97). Based on that assumption, he formulates the main objective of the use of political metaphor as gaining influence on the consciousness of the audience and manipulating it by controlling thoughts, emotions, and behavior (Androshchuk 2014, 274). A similar epistemological interest guides Holtz-Bacha in her study of campaign commercials in Germany. Considering them as interpretational proposals of political parties for the voters, she focuses on strategies of images and arguments by which the parties try to give voters an understanding of their way of looking at things, their political programs, and their staff during election campaigns (Holtz-Bacha 2000, 230–231). A similar reasoning can be found with Dörner and Schicha (2008, 9) who state that the TV campaign ads are all about presenting the candidates and parties in the proper (positive) light in order to force the voting decision in a strategic manner.

These examples show that scholars in both fields of research repeatedly make recourse to an encroaching assertion and implementation of a subjective way of thinking and to the shrewd arousal of emotions in order to explain the persuasion of addressees. What is notable is that the discussion is thus from the first led in a critical and pejorative manner. Charteris-Black’s and Androshchuk’s works on metaphor in political language exemplify such a rhetorical political approach and moreover illustrate that the notion of persuasion is frequently used in an inconsistent manner and mostly vaguely defined. Referring to Garth Jowett’s and Victoria O’Donnell’s work Propaganda and Persuasion (1992), Charteris-Black puts forward a definition of persuasion that conceives of it as an “interactive communicative process in which a message sender aims to influence the beliefs, attitudes and behaviour of the message receiver” (Charteris-Black 2005, 9). Although he uses the term ‘interactive’, the further explanation clearly reveals that he subscribes to a unidirectional model of communication (i.e., a sender-receiver model; see Shannon and Weaver 1945) that is oriented towards one-sided communication instead of having both parts involved in mutual participation: “the active role of the sender is characterised by deliberate intentions” while “the receivers’ role is passive” (Charteris-Black 2005, 9; emphasis mine). With that said, the use of metaphors is exclusively linked to the sender and his purposes, and their persuasive effectiveness consists in the one-to-one eventuation of the intended impact on the part of the receiver.128

Petra Gehring has criticized such a one-sided conception from a philosophical perspective as falling short by making metaphors buttons that a rhetor, charismatic leader, or agitator can press in order to mobilize a multitude of people. In this respect, the power of metaphor is characterized as bearing too much impact wherefore it appears as an improper instrument for emotionalization and persuasion (Gehring 2015, 45). It is these aspects of insidiousness and inevitability that Charteris-Black uses for his argument as well:

Metaphor draws on the unconscious emotional associations of words, the values of which are rooted in cultural knowledge. For this reason it potentially has a highly persuasive force because of its activation of both conscious and unconscious resources to influence our intellectual and emotional response, both directly – through describing and analysing political issues – and indirectly by influencing how we feel about things. (Charteris-Black 2005, 30)

According to him, metaphor evokes an intellectual response by drawing on shared culturally rooted belief systems that are brought together with addressed political topics and thereby open up new ideas and fresh insights (Charteris-Black 2005, 20). Equally, it provokes emotional responses as the “associative power of language” always associated particular words or expressions with positive or negative experiences within a given culture (Charteris-Black 2005, 20). One example that Charteris-Black is drawing on is Margret Thatcher’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1987, in which she contrasted the policy of the British Labor party and the Conservative Party by linking them to death and life forces:

An evaluative framework is created by the contrast that is set up between two interaction chains of metaphor. The first is associated with the negative feelings aroused by death images and includes: cut the heart, snuff out, dying, sapping, decay; the other is associated with the positive feelings aroused by life images: spark, give back heart, growing, recovery, take root, sprang. […] Inevitably, these associations are likely to arouse powerful feelings. (Charteris-Black 2005, 18–19)

From such a perspective, metaphors are considered to execute a psychological constraint and determinism upon the addressees by drawing on a “pre-rational universe of not yet articulated worlds of feelings” (Gehring 2015, 45–46, 51; translation mine). The argument of culturally rooted underlying values and experiential patterns is used in a similar manner to Lakoff and Turner: ex negativo, it serves the purpose of suggesting that what is most subconscious or unconscious is most entrenched and therefore most activated and influential on human thinking (Lakoff and Turner 1989, 129). Such presumed collectively shared concepts on a systems level are nevertheless hardly vindicable and traceable. Furthermore, they do not necessarily have to hold for the individual level of language use. In this sense, the idea of linguistic determinism (i.e., the direct impact of language on the human mind) suggests paradoxically the failure of language as truthful argument and similarly its exploitation in bad faith (Gehring 2015, 51).

While the persuasive aspect of metaphor for Charteris-Black consists in subtly evoking particular associations and emotions regarding political issues and topics, Androshchuk goes one step further by arguing that such an evocation of conscious or unconscious emotions stimulates a specific line of thought that leads to a certain reaction or behavior on the part of the addressee (Androshchuk 2014, 10). In the first case, the persuasive influence refers predominantly to the understanding and perception of things; in the second case, it moreover leads to certain actions. What is hereby addressed – and partially confounded – on the basis of the same line of argument are entirely different levels of effectiveness (conceptual, psychological, behavioral). Notwithstanding the above, a conception of persuasive power as Charteris-Black and Androshchuk propose suggests that things were different without metaphor (cf. Gehring 2015, 48). As a result, the power that is attributed to metaphor is characterized as being a falsification that exerts manipulative influence on the addressee by forcing a specific view and opinion on a mass of recipients, in particular in the case of limited background knowledge about the addressed topic. Such manipulative circumstances, however, are rather tantamount to ‘dominance’ (Gehring 2015, 48), especially due to the unequal distribution of power among speaker and addressees: the unidirectional communication, the one-sided impact, activity versus passivity, producer versus recipient.

In his book Topos und Metapher (2007), Jörg Jost – from a pragmatic and rhetorical point of view – criticizes such a power gap in the conceptions of persuasion by adducing the dilemma of the perlocutionary act:

The speaker can intend persuading, but he cannot induce the perlocutionary effect (of having persuaded). The self-same cannot be achieved in a rule-governed way and by no means be constrained. This can be reasoned by the missing link of the perlocutionary act to conventionality and expectable (conventional) answers/reactions; in the case of illocutions, the speaker can anticipate them already in the stage of production. (Jost 2007, 160; translation mine)

Both social sciences research on campaign commercials and cognitive-linguistic research on metaphor (and metonymy) in political discourse, has generally focused one-sidedly towards the persuasive impact and not been taking that dilemma into account. As a way out of the self-same and with recourse to Aristotle, Jost proposes to consider the illocutionary act in regard to the achievement of the perlocutionary goal (i.e., persuasion).

According to Aristotle’s rhetorical conception, rhetorical speech acts cannot be reduced to the formula […] ‘As a result of having said x, I have persuaded him’. That would mean to take the second step before the first, which is expressed in the illocutionary formula ‘Having said x, I have done y’ respectively ‘Having said x, I have reasoned. (Jost 2007, 162; translation mine)

As a result, the way to persuasion leads through reasoning or, in other words: “Persuasion is only possible through making oneself understood, respectively having understood leads the way into persuasion.” (Jost 2007, 161, 165; translation mine) Gehring equally argues in favor of such an orientation towards the preceding process of meaning-making and understanding with regard to the examination of metaphor in political discourse. In this light, she points to the close connection between politics and language: “Political action is at least implicitly conceived of as being constantly accompanied by linguistic action. Whoever conducts empirical research, has to consider politics in relation to horizons of meaning, not solely to behavioristic schemata.” (Gehring 2015, 49–50; translation mine) This book is a contribution to meet this claim and the proposal of a reorientation both within social sciences research on campaign commercials and linguistic research on figurativity in political discourse.

The dynamic approach to audiovisual figurativity does not focus on an intentionally acting producer and figurativity as a fixed meaningful product that is implemented purposefully and influences the (passive) recipient persuasively. As Gehring (2015, 54) has illustrated, such a conception ascribes certain helplessness to the political audience whereby the political space of reception appears to be a childlike one that requires care and does not harmonize with figurativity. Instead, the dynamic approach proceeds from an analysis of the material, i.e., from film analysis, which naturally does not rule out the skillful composition of audiovisual images by professionals but does not make it its starting point.129 It does not take figurative meaning for granted (i.e., as given) but focuses on the process of its ‘taking’ (cf. Johnson 2007, 75), i.e., its emergence in a situated media context to which it is inherently linked. In doing so, the dynamic approach takes one basic step back as compared to other studies. This step, however, gives direction to a modified understanding of the effectiveness and power of figurative meaning in political discourse.

Instead of thinking it from the first implicitly in contradistinction to an actual “suchness” [Sosein] (i.e., ‘reality’ or ‘truth’) by what it appears as a falsification of an alleged objectivity, the dynamic approach to audiovisual figurative meaning-making sets its reality-constituting potential as the benchmark. This way, particular situational-related configurations of possibilities come to the fore (cf. Gehring 2015, 48). In practical terms, that means that, for instance, the experiencing and understanding of Angela Merkel as a powerful sovereign with civil roots who is close to the people, leads to an image or idea of the German Chancellor as a “non-arbitrary possibility of reality” (Gehring 2015, 48; translation mine) that emerges in the process of viewing the campaign commercial. It is neither the reproductive reflection of an alleged objective reality, nor completely abstract or arbitrary; it has a reflexive character in its specific relatedness: by experiencing and understanding something in terms of something else, by experiencing a foreign sensation of the world as if it were one’s own (cf. Sobchack 1992). In this respect figurativity is a “machine of possibilities par excellence” (Gehring 2015, 49; translation mine). Through the temporal, attentional, and experiential dynamics the interplay of activated figurativity and the affective experience of cinematic expressive movement gives rise to

two emerging experiential realms that interact […] in film and audio-visuals. Both of these fields or realms are supposed to be imaginarily and perceptively present while spectators experience audio-visual media (films, TV shows, etc.). Notably, the mapping of those realms does not primarily build upon assumed similarities, but grounds in relations evoked by the concrete audio-visual context (Schmitt, Greifenstein, and Kappelhoff 2014, 2105).

It is in that sense that figurativity opens up possibilities for viewing spectators: the two emergent experiential realms provide them with the grounds for making sense of the candidates and their political program. In other words: viewers are enabled to construct audiovisual figurative meaning in a dynamic and embodied process “from the experiential qualities staged in each and every scene” (Müller and Schmitt 2015, 322). Such an enablement of vividness and insight through audiovisual figurativity entails in the first instance the construction of meaning and the ensuring of understanding before there can be talk of persuasion or attitude change. As Jost underlines, this holds equally true for communicative situations with primarily strategic and success-oriented action, such as campaign commercials: “The listener has to understand what the speaker is telling him; otherwise the strategic action cannot succeed either” (Jost 2007, 44–45; translation mine).

Conceiving of metaphor and metonymy in political communication (just as campaign commercials in general) as strategic, reality-simplifying, and falsifying attack on people’s minds (e.g., Androshchuk 2014, Charteris-Black 2005, Goatly 2007) by which a producer deceitfully forces his view and opinion on a mass of recipients, underestimates their productive reality-constituting possibility potential. Taking the self-same as a starting point for the question of what makes figurativity powerful, one arrives at a different conception of power: “From a modal perspective it is about forms of a relative ruling out of possibilities right up to enabling former impossibilities” in a situated context (Gehring 2015, 48; translation mine). What makes figurativity powerful then, cannot least be its specificity and relative adequacy (Gehring 2015, 54) in making politics palpable, vivid, and comprehensible.