Politische Plakate in der Schweiz des 20. Jahrhunderts

The present paper dealt with the use of the poster as a means of propaganda in the political ideology of the 20th century in Europe and the USA. Initially, a brief historical approach was attempted to the conditions under which the poster was created, with references to the first designers as well as to its evolution from an advertising to a propaganda tool. The approach then focused not on the stylistic features of the posters but on an attempt to interpret the successful process of capturing the propaganda message. For this reason, it was chosen to clarify terms such as communication, ideology, propaganda, the collective unconscious and the psychology of the masses, as well as their application to the communication model, emphasizing the importance and role of the poster in this process. A brief review of basic historical phenomena of the 20th century with reference to the coexistence of political ideology and posters confirms the above allegations which are summarized on the conclusions chapter. Keywords: lithography, poster, propaganda, ideology, communication, collective unconscious, psychology of the masses. Aristotle University Thessaloniki - Coursework - Winter semester 2022

2016

The perception of politics and society appears to be deeply affected by their visual representation. This seems especially obvious under contemporary living conditions, taking into consideration the common use of electronic (mass) media and the importance of pictorials for their control as well as in regard to their content. Attention and awareness in contemporary politics and society are to an important part based on visual strategies. Hence, the reconstruction of these strategies in several fields of political and social relations is the topic of the contributions to this edition. To place visuals in the focus of research and analysis seems nevertheless not yet common or self-evident in Social Sciences. The so-called Visual or Pictorial Turn (Mitchell 1994)-following the Linguistic Turn of the sixties and the Cultural Turn of the eighties-had up to now a far stronger impact on Cultural Sciences, Philosophy and History than on the Social Sciences. Let us therefore briefly recall some of the key concepts that can be considered as points of reference and as common ground. This brief recall should also allow for a better understanding of the positioning of the contributions to this journal against their methodological and theoretical background. Visual approaches in Social Sciences pay special attention to the role of images for the constitution of societies and their political representation in general (Bernhardt et al. 2009; Raab 2008, 2014), and to (political) communication in mediatised worlds in particular. Social and political practices that rely on vision, pictorial presentation and representation, image production, iconic styles, iconographic tra

Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War, 2009

During the 15 years of civil war (1975–90), political posters filled the streets and charged the walls of cities all over Lebanon. As the ongoing war formed an intrinsic aspect of everyday life in Lebanon, the graphic signs and political rhetoric of posters became a prevalent sight/reading that shaped the cityscape. The political parties strove to legitimize and sustain their political struggle while battling for power and territorial control. Their military engagement on the battlefronts was coupled with a relentless battle of signs and symbolic appropriation of territory through extensive poster production and distribution. How to make sense of political posters’ nature of operation in the context of civil war? How does one poster, out of many on the same wall, hail to a specific person and at once be contested by another? If we begin to rethink the concept of propaganda and question the models of communication on which its various definitions are built, perhaps we could move beyond the reductive notions of ‘mass persuasion’, ‘coercion’ and ‘deceit’. We could then undertake a more complex examination of the posters as inscribed in the socio-political institution of political communities during civil war time. In this chapter, I present the limits of the concept of propaganda and argue for alternative theoretical tools, which allow me to advance a conceptualization of political posters as symbolic sites of hegemonic struggle over meaning and political discourse.

2021

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Election Posters Around the Globe, 2017

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Gil Bartholeyns (eds.) Politiques visuelles, Presses du réel , 2016

Unpublished English version of:“Le couteau entre les dents : héritages visuels et appropriations symboliques dans une affiche électorale de la droite populiste” Gianni Haver, 2016. pp. 79-105 in Gil Bartholeyns (eds.) Politiques visuelles, Presses du réel

Yale French Studies, no. 122, 2012

Historians of nineteenth-century France have often characterized the changes in modernity (both in relation to public life and urban spaces) as resulting in the withering of public engagement with politics and the atomization of the individual. This sense of disengagement from public life was particularly acute in the decades after the humiliating defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the harsh suppression of the Paris Commune (1871) and the intense commercialization of Paris following Haussmannization. The reasons for the de-politicization of nineteenth century “public culture” are varied and include the withdrawal of the bourgeoisie from the public sphere, the rise of the commercial mass media, and the encroachment of capital into every facet (and space) of daily life. Rather than consider the overarching economic issues related to the development of capitalism, Carter’s essay instead discusses another, less frequently examined, cause for the de-politicization of culture and the rise of individual (as opposed to collective) spectatorship: police interference and political pressure. In the case examined here—political posters displayed in the streets of Paris in the 1880s and 1890s—the deliberate actions of agents of the municipal police and their dispersal of crowds that gathered around posters were attempts to eradicate expressions of political dissent as well as to prevent the collective reading that had historically been associated with the poster. These police actions were the result of a wider perception that the city space had been dramatically transformed and potentially radicalized by the greater distribution of textual and pictorial posters during these decades. As Carter argues in her essay, the revolutionary potential of the poster— established by a legacy of the political poster extending back to the French Revolution— and the poster’s mode of collective spectatorship made it subject to greater scrutiny, censorship and public debate in the period after the passage of the 1881 Press Law (loi de press, 29 juillet 1881). Ultimately, Carter analyzes—through an examination of archival material and contemporary press articles—the poster’s mode of reception and its political message as having earned its reputation as a subversive object that required surveillance and scrutiny even after its display had been authorized under the new Press Law. That process of surveillance, monitoring and, above all, the dispersal of crowds by the Parisian police around posters lead, in Carter’s analysis, to the decline of the political force of the fin-de-siècle poster.

Communication, politics & culture, 2012

To m a ž D e ž e la n a nd Ale m Ma k suti ! Abstract Election posters are a visual means of communicating political messages to a large audience, and they are an important print medium for political communication that is directly controlled by political actors. Posters have played a large role in election campaigns for the past two centuries, and as a result, this trend continues in many countries today. The legacy of socialism and the rule of the Communist Party made posters even more important in Slovenia, due to the medium's significant function in the propaganda machinery. By employing the informative-persuasive framework (Mueller & Stratmann 1994), we analysed the nature of electoral competition in Slovenian poster campaigning as well as the extent of its (dis)continuity with posters from the period of communist monism. Based on the content analysis of 841 posters from the communist and noncommunist periods, we observed that Slovenian posters in the post-1991 democratic era reflect patterns of poster campaigning characteristic of liberal democracies and demonstrate a clear break with posters from the communist regime. Those patterns confirm the general assumption that dominant political actors employ more persuasive poster campaigning, while the less established devote more attention to informative activities. !

in Francophonie, 6 (Dec. 1992), 35-42. ISSN 0957-1744