The assemblage of British politics’ breaking point

Abstract

This paper investigates the UKIP Breaking Point advertisement, which appeared prominently during the Brexit referendum campaign and used a documentary photograph of Syrian refugees, implying that they were migrating to Britain. We chart the assemblage through which the transformation of the image occurred: starting as Jeffrey Mitchell’s documentary photograph, charting news of the journey of a group of refugees, but becoming appropriated as an advertising image and ultimately an expression of political notoriety. The controversy generated by the advertisement serves as an example of advertising's meaning becoming a source of unpredictable contestation as different interests clash to define the image’s ‘real’ meaning. Rather than take advertising as a managed process, with meaning directly encoded and carefully crafted by producers, a cultural politics of advertising perceives advertisements as comprised of raw material whose meanings are ambiguous, negotiable and politically charged. Through this lens, advertising images are contextualized by a process of production and consumption, partly shaped by the producers of the advertisement, but also largely mediated by responses of the wider public, creative fields from where the original image was produced, and by unforeseen factors, such as when texts become overtaken by events and appropriated by intermediaries. Breaking Point, in other words, presents a perfect example to illustrate that advertising is not merely a passive channel that represents but is instead an assemblage able to shape engagement and (coercively) infer meanings and draw distorted patterns from different social worlds.