Destroying the Political Enemy’s Image: Cancellation Strategies in Visual Texts during the 2023 Argentinean Electoral Campaign

Abstract

In the context of a highly fragmented and polarised political space based on an adversarial logic characterised by a conception of the political opponent not as a legitimate rival, but as an enemy to be destroyed, this article studies the social discourse underlying the production of a corpus of visual campaign texts collected in fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the final round of the 2023 presidential election. We adopted a semiotic perspective with a special focus on the strategies for cancelling and destroying the image of the political enemy that can be identified within them. Specifically, we drew on Jean-Marie Floch’s model of four types of valorisation – or axiologies – regarding automotive advertising discourse, and we propose a semiotic square consisting of four strategies for destroying the enemy’s image, as demonstrated in the corpus: practical, ludic, utopic and critical. The analytical work allowed us to account for how cancellation practices in the context of an electoral campaign can be analysed from broad categories and logics, which awards meaning to this enunciative praxis based on destruction, which in turn leads to the production of new meaning.