Political campaigning has become increasingly reliant on new political technologies like polling, mass media advertising, direct mail, phone calls, public relations consultants, and social media (Ginsberg Reference Ginsberg, Ferguson and Rogers1984). What does this highly visual aesthetic domain of elections mean for political subjectivity? This essay examines presidential campaign ads to discern cultural symptoms of transformation in political subjectivity that can be detected emerging over time in the aesthetic composition of televised and online presidential campaign ads. I find two paradigmatic modes of political subjectivity today that began to emerge strongly in the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon. The first is a subject at ease with the no longer hidden mediality of communication, and with communication expressing little other than communication’s potential regardless of the content or truth of what is being communicated. It is a subject at ease with interpretive pluralism and the communication of whatever. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers to this as “whatever being” (Agamben Reference Agamben and Hardt1993). The second paradigmatic political subject is whatever being’s doppelganger. Its roots lie in Nixon’s “southern strategy” to appeal to the “Forgotten Man,” George Wallace’s appeal to northern suburbanites and southern segregationists, and Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 campaign for president. Whatever being’s doppelganger enjoys its anger and resentful attachments. These subjective dispositions, joined in Nixon’s Reference Nixon1968 television advertising, compose the two paradigmatic modes of political subjectivity in contemporary presidential campaign ads.

To begin, what was displaced by contemporary political arrangements? In the 1960 presidential election, both John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon aired ads in which they supported civil rights (“Debate 2”; “Harry Belafonte”; “Civil Rights”). Nixon, for example, argued that protecting civil rights was important because “it is right and just.” Additionally, failing to defend civil rights meant a weakened capacity to compete with communism. Moreover, he stated that the “whole world is watching us.” “When we fail to grant equality to all, that makes news, bad news for America all over the world,” Nixon asserted (“Civil Rights”). Nixon felt compelled to argue for the importance of civil rights protection as Kennedy did. This felt compulsion indicates the existence of a symbolic order, one oriented to the horizon of social democracy (Zizek Reference Žižek1997a, 63; 110-111). ^{Footnote 1}

The existence of a symbolic order, and its ideological content, is different from what one might personally tell oneself or one’s personal opinion expressed anonymously to a survey researcher. The symbolic order refers to belief, what one believes others believe, or what one believes one must express for the “big Other.” The symbolic order points to the existence of authority. “Symbolic efficiency,” or the efficient functioning and meaning of law, linguistic claims, or performative speech acts, all manifest the power of the symbolic order (Zizek Reference Žižek1997a, 110; Dean Reference Dean2009, 63-64). The symbolic order refers to “keeping up appearances” (Zizek Reference Žižek1997a, 26). Though one may dislike the person who is the judge or police officer, if one responds in the expected way to persons wearing a robe or badge in their official, public role, that is evidence of a symbolic order (Zizek Reference Žižek1997a, 63, 120). When Nixon argues that civil rights must be respected because it is right and because we are being watched by the “whole world” (i.e., the “big Other”), this demonstrates the efficient functioning of a symbolic order. The substantive convergence between Kennedy and Nixon on civil rights shows the symbolic order requires their protection such that when the civil rights movement manifested a contradiction at the level of appearances, the state machinery moved to remedy the contradiction through legislation, court rulings, greater material enforcement, and institutional reform of policing (Passavant Reference Passavant, Di Leo and Mehan2014, 42-46).

Barry Goldwater’s campaign commercials from the 1964 election are significant for contributing to changes in the symbolic order and its corresponding political subjects. In two very similar commercials—“Morality” and “Moral Responsibility”—Goldwater describes and condemns crime and urban rioting. “Morality” opens with a series of television clips of crime, riots, and police using force against rioters to dramatize the issue visually for the viewer. The narrator asks Goldwater what he thinks about the country’s “lack of moral leadership,” to which Goldwater responds, speaking into the camera, by urging immediate action to “restore proper respect for law and order.” Once Goldwater is finished speaking to the viewer, the narrator then inserts the slogan Goldwater used to conclude his campaign ads for that election: “In your heart, you know he is right” (“Morality”).

Goldwater’s ad ran against the ideological grain of its era’s symbolic order. At the time, crime was associated with socio-economic deprivation, but Goldwater represented crime in moral rather than sociological terms, and implied the importance of using force to suppress it. Goldwater’s viewers were likely to understand these ads in racial terms, with “crime” and “riots” standing in for “blacks” and “civil rights.” 1964 was the first of several years of civil disorder in poor, predominantly black urban areas during the 1960s. Additionally, US News & World Report editor David Lawrence wrote editorials in the year prior to the 1964 election condemning the civil rights movement by accusing “Negro ministers” of leading demonstrations that resulted in the “disturbance of the peace, arrests, bloodshed, and death,” calling for politicians to “deplore or discourage” the now-famous March on Washington as it was being organized, and represented the civil rights demonstrators as violent mobs whom he associated with crime (Lawrence Reference Lawrence1963; Reference Lawrence1964). Although Nixon’s Reference Nixon1968 campaign became notorious for its successful deployment of a Republican “southern strategy” using symbols like “law and order” and “crime” to rally racist and anti-civil rights sentiments without using the overtly racist language of segregationists, we can see how Goldwater (and Lawrence) helped create this political arrangement (Beckett Reference Beckett1997, 30-31).

The narrative voice in these campaign ads weakened the symbolic order, with catastrophic effects for those whose symbolic identities were secured by that order. Being a “citizen” or an “American” drew meaning and value from this symbolic order oriented to the horizon of social democracy. “Civil rights” also drew normative meaning from that symbolic order. Whatever one’s personal feelings, to be a citizen or an American meant that one regulated one’s public statements, if not one’s votes, in accordance with the norm that racism was backwards, and a personal prejudice to be repressed, in order to be taken seriously in rational political discourse. Whatever one’s “personal” fantasies or attachments, they should be kept private and not be part of normative public or political discourse.

When the Goldwater campaign’s narrator says, in the “Morality” commercial dramatizing, or perhaps inciting, an imaginary fantasy of crime and riots, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” the narrator has transgressed the unwritten rules of the symbolic order by openly encouraging personal biases or prejudices to be the basis of political decision making. Slavoj Zizek describes this violation as being “catastrophic.” It can lead to the “disintegration of the social substance,” demonstrating the system’s “vulnerability” (Zizek, Reference Žižek1997a, 28). This violation of the gap between personal attachments and the symbolic order also leads to the “aphanisis of the subject: the subject loses his/ her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates” (Zizek Reference Žižek1997a, 188). The Goldwater campaign rendered vulnerable the political subject of social democracy by eroding the symbolic order that supported this subject.

The Goldwater campaign ads were deeply at odds with the symbolic order of the era. And he lost in a landslide. Johnson was more attuned to the symbolic order. The Johnson campaign aired commercials touting his legislative successes, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Accomplishments”). It represented Goldwater as completely outside responsible public discourse in the now-famous “Daisy Girl” ad (among others), and by publicizing the support by Robert Creel, of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, for Goldwater (“Peace Little Girl [Daisy]”; “KKK”). The symbolic order continued to function efficiently. But it wouldn’t for long.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several vectors of change could be identified for market purposes, on the one hand, and for political purposes, on the other, and the Nixon campaign aggressively took advantage of them. With the widespread use of zip codes, growing use of credit or other customer cards, and computers, in addition to the recognition of distinctive consumer tastes (“youth” or generational consumer tastes), market mentalities shifted from an orientation to mass markets to niche markets. By the 1970s, the “mass market was now disaggregated into ‘lifestyle segments’ or ‘clusters’ ranked according to the nation’s 42,396 zip codes, all of which were sorted by affluence” (Parenti Reference Parenti2003, 103). The 1968 Nixon campaign was working along similar lines, accumulating voting behavior data and correlating it with consumer tastes to help target the Nixon campaign’s advertising efforts most effectively (McGinniss Reference McGinniss1970).

According to Joe McGinniss’s The Selling of the President 1968, Nixon built his “whole campaign around television” (McGinniss Reference McGinniss1970, 79). To do this, the “ad men” were made a central component of the campaign, and, by working with Kevin Phillips’s expertise in parsing the market of American voters into ever more narrow and finely defined demographic groupings, the campaign sold America an image of Nixon it found appealing. Or, the ads projected an image that particular niche markets of Americans associated with other images it found appealing much like advertisers might produce commercials for Lark cigarettes (83). The reader is told, “It’s not what’s there that counts, it’s what’s projected… carrying it one step further, it’s not what he projects but rather what the voter receives” (31). The cover of the book is an image of a box of cigarettes with Nixon’s face on them.

The revelation that Americans were sold a president the way that they were sold any other commodity is the shock value of this book first published in 1969. Marking the symbolic break inaugurated by the Goldwater campaign, politics was not based on good faith or authenticity, but was becoming understood as being just as insincere as any other commercial endeavor seeking to manipulate consumers. Rather than citizens bracketing personal preferences to enter the symbolic order of normative legitimation, now politics as promoted by the Nixon campaign would be more reflexively about the expression of preferences—or affective attachments and enjoyment—and the cultivation or exploitation of enjoyment’s associations.

We also learn from The Selling of the President that the content of commercials is being produced with careful attention to aesthetic technique and detail. Different commercials were made for different media markets. For example, one for New York City focused on a teachers’ strike, while another for Buffalo emphasized crime rates (McGinniss Reference McGinniss1970, 15, 9). This manner of aesthetic production weakens subjective experiences of a common social order. Today we may expect to be manipulated through communications media and enjoy being exposed to the means of artifice. At the time, however, Hubert Humphrey’s advisers thought that Nixon hid behind his communications effort: when communications were “too slick,” they failed to communicate the man, and instead became the “communication of the communication” (McGinniss 1970, 133).

Humphrey’s campaign commercials were largely conventional in aesthetic form. They were resonant with the social democratic symbolic order. They often showed Humphrey speaking live to an audience, and his campaign deployed well-known Americans giving Humphrey their endorsement—formats typical of the 1950s and earlier races of the 1960s. In terms of content, Humphrey advertised his support for civil rights, for doubling spending for the War on Poverty, and argued that one does not build a better America by building more jails because he did not believe that “repression alone builds a better society” (“Civil Rights; “Law And Order”).

Nixon’s ads were aesthetically more innovative than Humphrey’s. “Unite,” for example, utilizes a collage of images of smiling, happy individuals and couples that metamorphoses into a mass of people before melting into several photographic stills of Nixon smiling (“Unite”). The ad creates a visual association between personal happiness, mass happiness and Nixon as the representative of aggregate personal happiness. Another ad shows a series of still photographic images of young children, beginning with a baby and its mother, and moving on to children who might be four through seven years of age complemented by playful music in the background. The narrator makes a pitch for Nixon, with the hook that a child must not become the “victim of a system that feeds his stomach but starves his soul” (“Child’s Face”). The viewer is encouraged to exchange social and economic programs improving material wellbeing for affective attachment. Yet another is masterly for its lack of semantic content or purpose aside from its vacuous support for Nixon. Again, the viewer is exposed to a montage of still photos. There is a visual back-and-forth between shots of a smiling Nixon or one where he is reaching out to shake a hand in the crowd, and hands being extended from a crowd trying to reach out for Nixon’s hand. A visual tension is created—will Nixon and the people reaching out their hands for Nixon connect? Nixon performs the narrative voice-over for this commercial, which refers to getting things “done,” while not specifying what ought to be done. “I am asking not for your gifts but for your hands,” is the ad’s hook. Once hands have been joined, the commercial concludes with an image of a campaign event (and what appears to be confetti falling from the sky) with a banner over the event: “Nixon’s the One” (“Reach Out”). The ad cultivates desire for organic unity among the people and with its leader, though the purpose of the unity, aside from its support for Nixon as the leader, is left empty.

These ads leave the viewer enjoying a happy, obviously mediatized, unity that is communicated associatively. The exposure to associative visual compositions that do not represent normative purposes, truth claims, or substantive justifications, captures and promotes a distinctive mode of being at ease in a highly mediated environment. Associative composition—especially visual association—is a powerful dimension of artistic expression and branding (Crouch Reference Crouch2004, 26, 37). What Humphrey strategists thought might fail for getting lost in the “communication of the communication” in fact appears to have “succeeded” in composing a subjectivity Giorgio Agamben has called “whatever being.” This subjective orientation becomes even more evident today as subjects are embedded in relations of intense, inescapable communications media combined with market competition (Passavant Reference Passavant2007; Reference Passavant2010; Reference Passavant, Di Leo and Mehan2014; Dean Reference Dean2010). This subjectivity is indifferent to symbolic identities that compel commitment, respect for authority, or political divisions, and instead expresses “belonging itself” associating whatever singularities (Agamben Reference Agamben and Hardt1993, 1-2). Whatever being exposes the mediality of communication through recombination or recirculation, engendering an experience of a “communication of a communicability” without presuppositions (Agamben Reference Agamben, Binetti and Casarino2000, 58-59). This mode of subjectivity is at ease with the communication of … whatever.

Others of Nixon’s ads were differently oriented. Though these also functioned through associative visuality, they cultivated and captured subjects affectively attached to their resentment, who enjoy their anger at protesters, crime, and the urban riots that gained so much attention by 1968. In “The First Civil Right,” still photographic images appear, with increasing speed and set to dissonant music, of protesters, police shooting tear gas, the National Guard, guns with bayonets, riots, and the detritus of their aftermath, to produce a sense of chaos in the viewer. A male narrator then speaks sternly over the images, stating that it is time to take an “honest look at the problem of order in the United States,” and that the “first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.” The ad concludes with the narrator pledging “we shall have order in the United States” (“First Civil Right”). The commercial associates dissent and protest with violence and riots, then calls to mind the civil rights movement by using the phrase “civil right,” but redirects the connotations of “civil rights” away from equality and toward a more primary right be free from the violence of protest, associated with those advocating for civil rights in the commercial.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission’s report on civil disorder was released in March and became an instant bestseller (Raymont Reference Raymont1968). With its release, the New York Times editorialized that the Vietnam War should be de-escalated in order to “escalate the war against poverty and discrimination at home” (“Separate and Unequal” 1968). The Report recommended programs to address unemployment and underemployment, improving public education in ghettos, expanding and streamlining welfare, and redressing poor housing (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968). Mayors committed themselves to the Report’s recommendations, and when some perceived a slow response by the Johnson administration, the criticism was bipartisan (“7 Mayors” 1968; Madden Reference Madden1968). This is the social democratic ideological orientation of the symbolic order that crumbled with the election of 1968.

From the campaign trail in New Hampshire during primary season, Nixon stated in a radio interview, “One of the major weaknesses of the President’s commission is that it, in effect, blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the riots” (Semple Reference Semple1968). Receiving the nomination at the Republican National Convention, Nixon accepted it on behalf of the “non-demonstrators” who are “not guilty of the crime that plagues this land” (Nixon Reference Nixon1968). Even before Election Day, Time magazine referred to the 1968 election, with its emphasis on “law and order” that had become a “loaded catchall, with room for every suspicion, grudge, fear, resentment and jealousy,” as the “most corrosive campaign in memory,” fearing it could redirect the United States from the “goals of justice and equal opportunity” (The Nation 1968, 16-17). The symbolic order was weakened.

What is the significance of the weakening of the symbolic order? Law and truth claims lose their “symbolic efficiency,” and are either viewed as illegitimate or as indeterminate due to their openness to multiple interpretations. We see an increase in uncertainty, insecurity, or resentment. These effects result from a decline in the belief of subjects in the legitimacy of authority: don’t trust power, and don’t trust others to follow the rules or do what is right because they will take advantage of you. Don’t trust what “they” say. The rise of neoliberalism, and the proclivity toward using “market competition” rooted in self-interested pursuit of preferences to model government, or other forms of social relations, intensifies these consequences, as does the material experience of insecurity and growing inequalities.

The development of communicative capitalism, of capitalism as communicative production such that communicative domains have come to incorporate, mediate, arrange, fragment, and communicate virtually all spheres of life, likewise aggravates an experience of the decline of symbolic efficiency. Media rely on viewers logging on to leave a comment, tweeting to “share,” or tweeting comments to the program in progress, which are then scrolled at the bottom of the screen or are read by the hosts. Fox’s Shephard Smith’s program shows staff reading social media feeds looking for stories or comments that Smith can then “report” to viewers from the “News Deck,” thereby exhibiting the mediality producing “news.” ^{Footnote 2} This “synergy” created between users of social media and oligopolistic media manifests communicative capitalism: when we communicate, it is now a relation of capitalist production. The News Deck moves from sports to celebrity news or perhaps ethnic cleansing with each appearing on equivalent screens, encouraging the viewer to experience the flow of images as communicatively equivalent regardless of content. Those subjected to communicative capitalism encounter the communicative equivalence of all opinion along a common denominator of communicativity cultivating a condition of reflexivity without normativity: whether one is a scientist, a religious fundamentalist, a political strategist, or “Joe the Plumber,” no one’s opinion is “truer” than anyone else’s (Dean Reference Dean2010; Passavant Reference Passavant, Di Leo and Mehan2014). Everything is open to multiple interpretations. Since people have different opinions, some revel in the simple fact of interpretive multiplicity, others let the market decide, and still others feel under siege or in a state of war. Like Smith’s staff, we are exposed to the infinite communicative possibilities of communication when we re-mix and re-circulate the quirky visual associations we may have created when the White House released a photo of President Obama skeet shooting, though they told us not to (Suebsaeng Reference Suebsaeng2013). Even police create and communicate their own mash-ups of protester arrests, which no “big Other” kept them from doing, and is why we can’t trust them either (Dwyer Reference Dwyer2005). This is the decline of symbolic efficiency and the experience of the communication of communicability.

Regarding the question of subjectivity, one result is whatever being, subjectivity at ease with the communication of communicativity beyond meaningful content. Whatever being, however, has a subjective doppelganger, one bearing strong resemblance to the psychological portrait of the “Forgotten Man” (Campbell, Sahid, and Stang Reference Campbell, Sahid and Stang1969, chap. 4). Given communicative capitalism’s injunction to express oneself in a context of reflexivity without normativity, whatever’s doppelganger freely expresses its anger, resentments, and prejudices that the prior symbolic order would have required the subject to repress for normatively acceptable discourse. Everyone is biased, so my opinion is as good as yours, and if you don’t like it, then let the market or force decide.

Lacanian psychoanalytic theory represents socio-subjective relations structurally in terms of a triangle of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The Real is that which resists symbolization, which interrupts any symbolic order from functioning as a seamless totality. The Imaginary is the subject’s image of him or herself (I am a “man;” I am a “mother”). The Symbolic is the order of language, law, and what is “socially expected” (Zizek Reference Žižek1997a, 175). The decline of the symbolic order means that the Real, on the one hand, and the Imaginary and the fantasies with which it is related or which support enjoyment, on the other, will become more significant.

The significance of the presidential candidate’s television campaign commercial is diminished in favor of the communications of other groups and other communications media (particularly as governing has become co-extensive with campaigning, on the one hand, and Roger Ailes’s “Fox News” makes every day a campaign, on the other). ^{Footnote 3} These changed material conditions heighten the experience of a decline in symbolic efficiency. ^{Footnote 4} In this regard, the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” an “independent” 527 group that produced attack ads against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in niche media markets, is symptomatic of contemporary conditions of communications and associated modes of political subjectivity. ^{Footnote 5} As is well-known, several commanders and servicemen from other “swift boats” during the Vietnam War appeared in commercials raising questions about whether Kerry, a decorated swift boat commander who returned from Vietnam to add his voice to those criticizing the war, truly earned his medals of military valor. Their campaign against Kerry amplified gaps in the functioning of the military’s symbolic authority to question the legitimacy of his military decorations. The lack of efficiency of facts, truth, and military awards for heroism obviously points to the decline of symbolic efficiency. ^{Footnote 6} Additionally, the ads express enjoyment of resentful fantasies and the affective attachment of the other commanders to their resentment, which they use Kerry to exhibit. Their emotional animus makes apparent a sense of stolen enjoyment: “I would have enjoyed the status of a true war hero if Kerry hadn’t impugned the war;” “I would have enjoyed personal success if that liberal Kerry hadn’t manipulated criticism of the war to become a Senator;” “I would have enjoyed the affections of the men with whom I served if Kerry hadn’t stolen their affection, divided the corps, and prevented military unity.” ^{Footnote 7} The Swift Boaters are attached to Kerry’s existence; they enjoy using him to express their resentments. The Swift Boat campaign ads are significant because they rely on the weakening of the symbolic order and the decline of symbolic efficiency. The military is praised with frequency in contemporary political discourse, yet the Swift Boat campaign could still incite suspicion regarding Kerry’s military decorations due to a broader decline of symbolic efficiency. ^{Footnote 8}

While the Swift Boaters appeal to and express the political subjectivity of whatever being’s doppelganger, Barack Obama’s campaign advertising utilizes a logic of association (visual and discursive) to feed communicable images to whatever subjectivity. Obama’s 2008 “brand” is framed around “hope,” “change,” and “yes we can” (“si, se puede”), as illustrated in a music video released online produced by Jesse Dylan. The video features a number of celebrities performing an Obama speech arranged and accompanied by music written by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, interspersed with images and recordings of Obama delivering the speech. In contrast with Johnson’s campaign commercials identifying hard-fought contemporary legislative victories, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the video associates Obama with affectively moving fantasy images, such as the Declaration of Independence, the struggle against slavery, and Martin Luther King, Jr., using lyrics such as: “It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.” Or, “It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists, as they blazed a trail towards freedom: Yes, we can. Yes, we can.” Again: “and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land…. Yes we can heal this Nation. Yes we can repair this world…. I want change…. We want change…” (“Yes We Can” 2008). Though the video begins by aligning itself with unromantic modernity’s narrative of progress, as the lyrics reach the present, substantive content becomes evacuated in favor of “heal[ing] this Nation,” and “change,” creating an empty unity around Obama much as Nixon’s “Reach Out” ad aesthetically constructed an empty unity around Nixon as “Leader.” This purposeless “change,” indicative of the weakness of the symbolic order, creates an Obama image open to whatever association. Whatever subjectivity and its resentful doppelganger represent subjective dispositions arranged in Nixon’s advertising, and these have become more fully extended under contemporary conditions of communicative capitalism.