INTRODUCTION

Where in the modern world do we locate politics and political communication? What counts as political discourse? It is obviously too restrictive to identify “the political” with an explicitly political sphere and with people acting as explicitly political agents. Indeed, this would paradoxically mean evading some of the central political issues of modernity: A concern that politics, or “real politics,” is disappearing from public life, migrating to and invading other social spaces, colonizing and interfering in them. As several papers in this project show, the study of political communications seems haunted by the suspicion that the explicitly political has been emptied of meaning and reduced to mere appearances: Real politics happens – is sought or inflicted – elsewhere.

We must therefore start from a broader sense of the political and look at the manner in which public discourses on social ends and social means are distributed across different social spheres, and indeed at ways in which an explicitly political realm is displaced by or relates to other realms. In particular, this chapter starts from an extraordinarily longterm theme within modernity, the idea that consumerist discourses continually displace or replace real politics, or that consumerism represents for many a valued freedom from politics, a retreat from the political as a compromised sphere. This argument is presented from many different positions but always rounds on the same point: that modern subjects experience “discourses through and about objects” (Leiss et al. 1986) as a more satisfying or convincing mode of articulating the good life than they do the public sphere of action and speech.