Posterous

Every three years the institution of the election poster gives us an object lesson in psychogeography, remaking the country into red zones, blue zones, contested zones. A sign erected on a private fence or put up at one’s window makes an uncomplicated political statement: this is a Tory household, a Labour household, a Green household; the sum of many such statements can mark an entire town or suburb, making class visible in a manifest way. As for the posters in public and commercial spaces, they too make concrete the geographical distribution of the parties’ efforts: who concentrates where, pushing which messages; just as importantly, who is absent, and must be assumed to be working to shore up their consensus elsewhere.

But posters aren’t just the equivalent of little coloured flags on a map. They also carry their own meanings, which seldom coincide entirely with the plea to vote for party X or candidate Y. For instance, the inclusion of John Key on most of National’s posters – including the ones in support of individual candidates on the list – makes the Prime Minister’s portrait from the shoulders up the common design feature of the party’s campaign, hence both the leit motif and palimpsest of its core messages. Conversely, the absence of Phil Goff’s from Labour’s posters marks a forced departure from the campaign style of Clark’s era. I think it’s fair to say that Labour scrambled in search of a new approach, going from the horribly wrong

to the horribly, horribly, oh dear god, really?, horribly wrong

before settling for a fairly punchy and consistent design for both the candidate and the party posters, the latter relying largely if not exclusively on propositional statements as opposed to imagery. One message in particular has come to characterise the campaign above all others:

But even looking at Labour’s full complement of posters what is striking is the almost complete absence of the party’s social justice platform, in spite of the fact this is arguably the strongest it has been for some time. Save for the $15 hour minimum wage initiative, even the policies aimed at the most disadvantaged are sold as lifestyle enhancers.

The reason behind this choice may have to be sought in an utterly depressing poll released earlier this month that revealed to what extent centre-left voters support the vindictive Tory approach to beneficiaries, but the discomfiting fact that the New Zealand middle class still won’t forgive the poor for Rogernomics is also an index of the continuing abdication of moral leadership on Labour’s part. Having chosen not to raise the spectre of inequality, let alone address its root causes, Labour has forced itself to wage the election on its opposition to the sale of a minority shareholding in the public power companies that it ran for a decade under the state-owned-enterprise model, that is to say as de-facto private companies tasked with extracting maximum profits from their customer base. It then proceeded to affect great surprise that a public that remains opposed to privatisation won’t be more forcefully swayed by a policy difference that is technical at best.

The key to a different poster campaign, therefore to a different campaign more generally, could have come from Labour’s quite remarkable 20-minute opening television address, which promoted its current front bench and policies against the backdrop of the history of the party and its unwavering commitment – but for the notable exception of the Lange-Douglas years – to a coherent set of social democratic principles. I honestly thought at that point that the party might pick up the theme and go for a retro line of posters. We might have seen this again

(1957)

or this,

(1938)

or a variation on this,

(Messrs Savage, Fraser and Nash, 1954)

and it might have sparked a useful conversation on the history of the social contract in New Zealand, and what appealing to that pre-neoliberal past might actually mean and entail. Strong policy initiatives that build on that tradition and on those values – such as the introduction of a capital gains tax – could then have been promoted within an appropriate ideological framework, instead of being measured against the very narrow parameters of poll favourability, which naturally counselled against mentioning them at all, as any other new tax would.

National’s posters, but for the ubiquity of the drongo-in-chief, are roughly specular to Labour’s in terms of content, and peculiarly (perhaps even studiously) unimpressive and bland from a visual point of view. The most notable exception is a poster reminiscent of the infamous campaign orchestrated in 2005 by John Ansell.

Road-building is just about the only area these days in which the Tories allow themselves some swagger, and are unafraid to enthusiastically publicise how beholden they are to their backers. Even so, the poster is curiously ambiguous, allowing people who might be sceptical of the thaumaturgic effects of great roading projects to see virtue in the stance of the bloke who stands in for Labour. We’re quite a ways away the odious divisiveness of this.

By contrast with both major parties, the Greens aren’t the least bit shy when it comes to making claims that are not so much ideological as downright existential. This, remember, is the party that in 2008 tied its fortunes to those of the planet

and entrusted an Aryan-looking, Missoni-clad child to instruct us to vote for them, or else.

This year’s offering picks up in a slick, self-assured manner right where the previous campaign left off. In this instalment the child has been replaced with a friendlier model and the hope for the survival and continued employment of humankind has taken the concrete form of the coupling of green jobs and clean energy – the new economy made in Obama.

These are the dominant messages that vie for our attention and play against each other in our cities and on our rural roads. Juxtapositions can be hard to interpret: is this a clash of incompatible worldviews, or a glimpse of tomorrow’s coalition?

And what of the placing of ACT at ground level, literally at the feet of its life-giving coalition partner?

ACT’s posters are at a premium, at least in Wellington, the baffling aesthetic of the few that I’ve seen reflecting its state of utter confusion

whilst another party languishing in the low single digits yet flush with cash projects a clean, confident image as it tries to position itself as the viable right wing fringe of the Parliament of 2014.

New Zealand First produced the poster version of a non-sequitur

Image by edmuzik

which was later made slightly more intelligible by means of a piece of recession-era bricolage

whereas the party that I used to be proud to support with my membership got an old sign out of storage, in an apparent, stubborn refusal to gift any of its twelve remaining votes to Mana. (Really? Come on guys.)

And this, at least in the capital, is the unimpressive extent of it, in keeping with the level of the political conversation and a campaign that struggled to take off after the Rugby World Cup and thereafter to generate much interest, its conclusion largely seen as foregone and quite possibly not all that important. In fact, the claim in my opening paragraph notwithstanding, I’ve walked through suburbs in which the signs of the campaign are all but absent – disconcertingly so. To step into them from a more densely marked area is like stepping into a place of indifference, or into another time, barely a week from now, when these very forgettable posters will start to be forgotten.

The image that will stay will me the longest may well end up being one that I nearly failed to notice, up Vivian Street, of a series of grievances against the Tory government struck on little square medals and hung on a fence that is popular amongst the knitters of graffiti. Incongruously small, the medals dangle in the wind without making much noise, like niggling complaints in lieu of the outrage that nobody musters. No-one will bother to take them down before Saturday, when people go to the polls. They will still be there next week, and likely the week after, waiting for other grievances to be added on and to start dangling along.

(more election posters from earlier this year)

The Election

The local section of the newspaper that I picked up before boarding my flight back to New Zealand includes a full four pages of mortgagee sales published by order of the tribunals of the court of appeal of Milan. Each of those adverts – about the two-bedroom apartment in via San Giovanni Bosco complete with cellar and garage, or the basement workshop in via Francesco Brioschi – tells a story that clashes with the image of Milan as the industrious and prosperous capital of a region that is firmly coupled to the locomotive of Europe; a region that combines the creativity and capacity to innovate associated to Italy-the-brand with the efficiency and raw GDP power of Germany.

Perhaps Milan has been all of those things, but it is also, and altogether more transparently, a city that banks on its past and continues to build as if it was booming in the hope that the people will come and vindicate (that is to say, rescue) that narrative.

The streets near my mother's house have been disembowelled to extend the storm-water drains and the sewers needed by CityLife, the vast new development next door, on the grounds of the old trade exhibition complex to which the suburb still owes its name, Milano Fiera. With a typically Lombard entrepreneurial haste, at the end of Mum's road they're building the fifth line of the underground while the fourth still languishes in its planning stages. Whereas the word factory survives mostly in its metaphorical sense, the city is a construction site literally as well as figuratively: and not just the place where we plan for the Expo of 2015 or erect ever steeper walls against outsiders.

Lega Nord is one of the key forces in government, both nationally and locally. The poster above, whose slogan I'm sure I don't need to translate for you, is the only piece of electoral advertising that they have put out for the mayoral election scheduled (at the time of my writing this) for today and tomorrow. Nothing about the business of governing; nothing about the party's views on economic development or social policy. Two words are the summation of an entire worldview: we want to keep being us, without them.

It is not just the wilful ignorance of history that staggers – the Milan of the economic miracle, of Rocco and His Brothers, was a city whose wealth largely rested on integrating and exploiting immigrants and their labour – but also that this message is not only tolerated by the community, but can be reliably expected to translate into votes. Just how many, and for just how long, are both pertinent questions, but there can be little doubt that the strategy will work this time too, and provide the Right-wing coalition with the votes it needs to retain power (probably) or lose but still split the vote right near the middle. Meaning that even in the most optimistic of scenarios, Milan will remain the capital of intolerance that I discussed here and reviled here.

Nothing that I have seen on this last trip persuades me that the city has earned the right to reject that title quite yet. But the experience of witnessing the last two weeks of a crucial campaign fought concurrently on the national stage was captivating nonetheless. And since I happened to do a lot of walking – which is something I still enjoy a great deal in the old hometown – I ended up with a rather large collection of images, some of which I want to share with you.

The theme of immigration and multiculturalism ploughed into by the Lega Nord poster was but one of the dominant threads, which also found expression in the occasionally puzzling offerings of prominent journalist and reformed Arab person Magdi Allam, for whom the aim of making the city once again a capital of integration

means that we should never see again images like this one:

Manolo Lusetti of Berlusconi's party won the trophy for the crudest signifier of a candidate's religious affiliation.

While the Democratic Party's campaign for the candidate of the Left-wing coalition hang the slogan Long live the Milan that is not afraid above the head of the great late-18th century reformer Cesare Beccaria, author of On Crimes and Punishment.

However I was struck most of all by what I'm tempted to call the material semiotics of advertising, meaning not just the political messages themselves but also their physical layering and how they were interfered with.

It was not infrequent for a single one of the special hoardings scattered in their hundreds around the city to carry as many as a dozen posters, one covering the other and producing the millefeuille effect pictured above. Elsewhere the posters were not as neatly superimposed but overlapped one another, mixing faces and slogans and parties to the various coalitions.

Other times, angered vandalism broke down the messages beyond recognition,

or created a Russian doll-like arrangement of Berlusconi heads, featured on posters for and against,

or regaled the passer-by with a wryly nihilistic commentary on the state of the political conversation.

Yet other interventions played more subtly with the candidates' image, as in the case of this poster for Giulio Gallera, council group leader for Berlusconi's party (and who is one day going to be remembered for having gone to school with me), on which some witty soul placed a sticker declining the first person singular of the verb 'to mafia'. I'm not going to lie to you: I rather enjoyed this.

But the single most emblematic aspect of this material semiotics was to me the occasional surfacing, stuck to the metal of the hoardings themselves, of fragments of posters form other elections, glued so well as to be impervious to ripping either by vandals or the election officials who retire the displays at the end of each campaign. It's chiefly in that form that the old symbol of the communist party, whose gradual disappearance I touched upon here and especially here, makes an understated, (sub)liminal reappearance, as if to remind us of the language of another politics, not all that far removed in chronological time yet officially consigned to the status of archaeological detritus and simultaneously of ghost to be evoked whenever it behooves one to demonise the least pusillanimous factions of the Left.

It is because I am convinced that progressivism in Italy needs to connect with that erstwhile mass movement and its aspirations that I was pleased when Giuliano Pisapia won the nomination as mayoral candidate for a broad coalition of the Left against the incumbent Mayor, and looked forward to hearing Nichi Vendola, leader of Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà – the party that more than any other lays claim to that lineage – speak at the Arco della Pace a week ago in support of Pisapia.

That the supposedly conservative electorate of the city chose a candidate from the supposedly unelectable leftmost fringes of our party system was pleasing enough. That the coalition centred around that candidacy has forced Letizia Moratti, the incumbent, to spend 12 million euros on a re-election campaign that she ought to have barely needed to show up for – thus disproving those ideas about who is and isn't electable on the left of centre – doubly so. But I was especially impressed with how Vendola spoke in that historic venue, where I had heard Sardinian communist leader Berlinguer address a much larger crowd just shy of thirty years ago, when I was a child. Another man from the south who had come to Milan, the city that already fancied itself back then as 'Mittel-European', as well as the guarantor and custodian of the country's modernity itself, to speak of an alternative and in some respects antithetical notion of progress.

Vendola spoke of a Mediterranean that is not just a watery graveyard but also a political laboratory, and articulated a reformist project based on integration and environmentalism, on equality and the fundamental interrogation of the wealth of our nation and the value of our work. It was the most lucid speech I have personally heard an acting politician deliver in years. This man from the south, this openly gay man from the supposedly retrograde, close-minded south, currently serving his second term as governor of Puglia – one of the regions where the war that we wage against those poorer than us is at its most visible – came to the capital of Berlusconismo, with its mix of miserly self-interest and rampant xenophobia, and gave us a lesson on how solidarity is central to the notion of what it means to have an economy, and on how culture and even ideas about beauty intersect with the political in fundamental ways. All rhetorical flourish aside (not that I had a problem with that either), it was enormously pleasing to hear a national politician unafraid to tackle sexism or rape culture, or to come out in favour of general strikes. We have been told for a very long time, and not just in Italy, that those are third rails and therein lies political death.

I don't think that Milan will fall, not quite yet, but if it does, it will be a turning of the tide, a moment to be seized. With all my well-documented anguish for the present and pessimism for the immediate political future of my country of birth, I have never completely lost faith in our capacity to be some day that political laboratory, and fashion workable alternatives to what Vendola calls the 'feral globalisation' that is the unassailable paradigm of this stage of capitalism. We have a history of asking the right questions – a history whose signs can sometimes be recovered by scratching away at those hoardings.

PS I wrote this on a plane back to New Zealand via Singapore, at the same time as Francesca at Buchi nella sabbia was writing this lovely and absurdly flattering piece about this blog - to which, as I am currently in transit, I cannot muster a response other than linking gratefully to it. I was rather moved, not least by seeing one of my posts translated into my own language. Wonderful stuff.

An update is also in order: the results are in and they are looking very good - the Left is within sight of a victory that could be quite decisive.