Феномен номадизма в англоязычной предвыборной политической рекламе начала XXI в.

Abstract

With the advent of the postmodern era in the second half of the XX c. - the beginning of the XXI c. humankind faced such global challenges as informatization and digitalization of different spheres of life. The human need for “digital detox”, expansion of the world view and self-development resulted in popularization of the phenomenon of nomadism. The aim of the present article is to reveal means of realizing the phenomenon of nomadism in political campaign advertising. Nomadism is approached by us from the perspective of postmodern philosophy and is defined as a social strategy of counteracting modern problems, centred around movement through space and time. The research material is texts of English-language political commercials published before the 2020 US presidential elections on the candidates' official YouTube channels. The material was chosen because the political campaign discourse and the discourse of political advertising draw upon resources of marketing communication which includes manifestations of nomadism. In the course of the research, we selected texts with a retro-component which vividly illustrates the essence of nomadism, that is movement in space and time. The authentic examples were transcribed by us. In the article nomadism is treated from the point of view of the postmodern theory of nomadology developed by the French philosophers in the 1970s. Nomadism is described as a form of opposing orderliness, structurality and linearity of the “polis”. The main value of nomadism is freedom of movement in space and time. The nomadic culture has a rhizomatic character which manifests itself in the blurring of borders, deterritorialization and hybridization and determines the nomad's movement: they move without a specific aim and without a given direction. An analysis of the empirical material yielded that political campaign advertising has a rhizomatic character that manifests itself in the following discourse features: horizontality, blurred identity, hybridity, clip-like structure, virtuality, ecologicity and arithmetic organization. A range of verbal and non-verbal means of realizing each of the discourse features is revealed and described, for example, the non-linear presentation of information, the use of wide-meaning vocabulary, montage effects and etc. In a number of commercials two main nomadic motifs were detected, i.e. the journey motif and the motif of investigation. It is concluded that rhizomaticity of political campaign advertising is to be referred to means of increasing the persuasiveness of a message.