Review of Mihnea S. Stoica, Populismul în Europa. Dezvoltare istorică, discurs politic ş i sus ţ inători ai dreptei radicale.

Studies point out that populism, a concept still in dire need of clarifications, resembles more of a rhetorical strategy than a fully-fledged ideology. Actually, populism has become a concept so frequently used that its orginial meaning seems to have been lost, leaving it as an empty shell, at least from an ideological point of view. I argue that in spite of this – or rather as a means of compensation – populism uses a very robust mythological apparatus, (...) creating narratives that allow voters to easily understand its messages. The current article underlines that in an attempt to over-simplify its discourse, populism makes use of all four political myths identified by Raoul Girardet. The conspiracy myth represents the main element revolving around the populist discourse. Politicians who embrace this rhetoric denounce a secret society that is rigorously organized, the actions of which defy morality, using all means to attain political power. The other three political myths, i.e. the myth of unity, the myth of the savior and the myth of the golden age, act together only as a counterweight for the first. The paper also points out that the success of Euroscepticism lies in the fact that it represents the perfect embedding for such myths, and that the EU needs to generate its own narratives if it hopes to confront the so-called “populist temptation”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article explores how neoliberal and populist elements were initially fused in US political talk to legitimize the expansion of corporate power and socioeconomic inequality that has occurred over recent decades. Applying neo-Gramscian critical semiotic analysis to speeches, news texts and legislative statements about the 1981 Reagan economic plan, I illustrate how a distinctive neoliberal-populist discourse articulates signs of ‘the American people’ with signs of market individualism, and further connects these signs to the neoliberal political project’s (...) policy moves to roll back state protections and deliver large tax cuts. Neoliberal populism is a paradigmatic instance of what Stuart Hall has termed the ‘trans-coding’ of distinct semantic elements to form a new hegemonic discourse. Through neoliberal-populist signifying processes, people who are deemed unable or unwilling to inhabit market-centric subjectivities, or to promote policies defined as ‘free market,’ are ideologically drawn outside the perimeters of social esteem and political legitimacy. These processes have created obstacles to imagining a unified, politically effective opposition to the neoliberal project in the United States. Moreover, by ideologically constructing ‘the American people’ as anti-statists in the realm of economic and social welfare policy, neoliberal-populist discourse makes it difficult to articulate democratic values and practices with the state as a mechanism through which greater economic equality and substantive democracy could be realized. My analysis illuminates the immediate historical roots of a public discourse with deep anchors in popular common sense which continues to pervade official US policy talk. The cultural resonance and political influence of neoliberal-populist discourse help to explain the persistence of the neoliberal project in the USA. (shrink)

Electoral manifestos represent tools of political communication which do not only inform the electorate upon the fundamental values of a party, but which also legitimize future actions that the party might undertake once in power. The electoral manifesto of the European People’s Party, drafted before the 2009 European elections brings together the main elements which define the action plan of the party. Religious values lie at the core of the Christian-democratic ideology. But given the dynamic of politics and the (...) sometimes sudden shifts in the preferences of the electorate, manifestos can rapidly become out of touch with the needs of the voters. The current paper will analyze how much of what the EPP Manifesto contains on issues related to religiosity is truly in line with the general opinion of the Christian-democratic electorate in four European countries:Austria,Bulgaria, The Netherlands andPortugal. Moreover, using data collected through the Vote Advice Application data, the paper will also tap into the differences which still persist (or which are fading away) in the attitude of the right-wing versus the left-wing electorate on the issues related to religion. Communicating with the electorate is the main key in attracting those who share the ideas and values of a party. But what if the core ideas of a party are slowly becoming unappealing for its own electorate? (shrink)

After years of progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, since 2012 Europe is facing a so-called gender backlash – opposition directed to issues related to reproductive policies and abortion, violence against women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) rights and gay marriages, gender mainstreaming and sex education at schools as well as antidiscrimination policies. In this article, firstly, by taking the anti-gender developments as point of reference, I examine the emergence of anti-gender movement in Europe via (...) the use of what I call troll science. Troll science is based on (distorted) scientific arguments moulded into populist discourse, creating an alternative narrative on the conceptions of gender equality. Similar to troll accounts posting provocative, superfluous and even off-topic messages on social media to start arguments and quarrels aiming to distract, troll science, I argue, creates an alternative narrative opposing the scientific facts and discourses (i.e. climate change, evolution, vaccination and gender theory). Later, I discuss the emerging conservative troll-scientific discourses and the gendered public normative order of Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party) government, under the New Turkey. I previously argued that New Turkey and the society under the party’s rule perpetuated by a new set of standards create an alternative narrative on the conceptions of gender equality through troll-science narratives. I concluded by showing how such ideological discourses help create emotional echo chambers – enabling its fast distribution and acceptance by the ideologically conservative groups. Contribution: This paper contributes to the Special Collection Gender Justice, Health and Human Development with the theory of troll-science it introduces to discuss the alternative and anti-gender scientific discourse that is dominating academia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The objective behind the present article is two-fold. Firstly, departing from the assumption that distance and salience dynamics are key to both functioning and impact of the media, we aim to present a new theoretical perspective on social media discourse understood as both product and process – Media Proximization Approach – and thus shed light on the exploratory potential of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies paradigm. In J. Flowerdew, & J. E. Richardson, Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis. Routledge) emphasizing (...) both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of digital communication. Secondly, identifying various dimensions of proximization within social media, we will discuss their role in creating a conducive environment for the spread of populist ideologies, and, more generally, changing the communication dynamics between the primary and secondary definers. Data-wise, the article focuses on current social media discursive practices concerning Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in the context of rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. Two YouTube videos recontextualizing the speech along with the accompanying comments will be discussed here to show how political discourses get remediated in social media where their ‘prosumers’ imbue them with new form, function and emotionality. (shrink)

SYRIZA is the first radical left party in Europe which managed to seize power through a strong inclusionary populist and anti-austerity discourse. In this paper, we examine the political discourse articulated by SYRIZA in power (2015-17) through Laclau’s theory and “Populismus” approach and we utilize the lexicometric tool of “Populismus Observatory” to search the frequently appeared words in Alexis Tsipra’s discourse. “Populismus” is a research project and an open access web-based Observatory at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (School (...) of Political Science) that analyzes populism through a discursive methodological framework. The simple lexicometric analysis can help us to sketch a statistical outline of the discourse, followed by theoretical scrutiny. Our aim is to find if SYRIZA transforms its rhetoric after the conquest of power (January 2015) and which central signifiers tends to use and avoid. Furthermore, we argue that the concept of “crypto-colonialism” can explain the dominance of egalitarian populism in the Greek politics but we question the use of the term for any inclusionary populist case. Moreover, we underline the failure of SYRIZA to fulfill the popular demands and we seek out the reasons of this fiasco. Finally, we try to answer to the following question: Does the case of SYRIZA prove that populism fails wherever it comes from (right or left)? (shrink)

One of the main difficulties facing students today is how to contextualize the post-1990 world. Bringing the Nation Back In: Citizenship, Space, and Culture in Europe and the United States takes as its starting point a series of developments that shaped politics in the U.S. and Europe over the past thirty years: the end of the Cold War, the rise of financial and economic globalization, the creation of the European Union and the development of the postnational. This volume argues we (...) are now witnessing a break with the post-1945 world order and with modern politics. Two competing ideas have arisen--global cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and populist nationalism on the other. The former emerged in the 1990s and is characterized by discourses on globalization, feminism, and postcolonialism, among others. The latter, which emerged after the Great Recession of 2008-2009, consists of a reactionary nationalism that in the years that followed swept to power in the US and several European countries. The present volume argues this polarization of social ethos between cosmopolitanism and nationalism as a sign of a deeper political crisis, which it explores from different perspectives. Rather than taking sides the aim here is to diagnose the origins of the current impasse and to "bring the nation back in" by expanding what we mean by "nation" and national identity and by respecting the localizing processes that have led to national traditions and struggles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iconicity, Romance and History in the Crónica SarracinaMarina S. Brownlee (bio)Though seemingly alien discourses, romance and historiography are perennially linked. Far from offering an atemporal imaginary universe that bears no resemblance to historical specificity, romance is constructed as a response to it. Rather than simply projecting for the reader the naïve appeal of a prelapsarian escapism from the harsh realities of history, romance involves a continuous and sophisticated reinvention (...) of itself as a response to an ever-changing historico-political configuration. It is, in fact, a reciprocal relationship. We frequently see history appropriating romance paradigms explicitly, as, for example, when Bernal Díaz chooses to present Spain’s New World conquest and colonization as a continuation of the exploits of Amadís [see Gilman].Whatever form it takes, romance is committed to the celebration of a coherent system of socio-political values. This extra-textual frame of reference can take a variety of forms—from political propaganda that offers a self-aggrandizing depiction of the nobility or patron for whom the text is produced, to escapist fantasy—futuristic or archaizing. It is nostalgia for the lost world of chivalric romance which Cervantes embodies in the figure of Don Quijote, a foolish old man driven mad by his obsession with this perennial literary form. Cervantes is rightly credited with a brilliant and programmatic use of romance constructs to communicate the ongoing historical crisis of the Spanish empire. A byproduct of this romance scrutiny of history was his invention of the modern novel.Testimony to the long-standing interaction between romance and history in Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, is evident in the fact that its first romances were based on history, the so-called “romances of antiquity.” In those texts historical figures and events are evoked for the purpose of legitimating the present, vernacular poets as they celebrate the empowering myths projected by their society, as well as their own literary endeavors by invoking venerable Latin models. The well known translatio studii et imperii topos offers such allegory of empire.At the same time, the confrontation of romance and historical representation can also have a destabilizing effect, and this is programmatically explored in Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina (c. 1430). His text ponders the possibilities of romance and historiography in an obsessive manner and he accomplishes his task by examining representation of the most iconic figures associated with the fall of Spain in 711, namely, La Cava and her father, Count Julián, King Rodrigo, and Pelayo, the messianic hope of the Reconquest effort which would last nearly 800 years.Of related and perhaps even broader importance, Corral’s text merits careful reading because its exploration of iconicity related to Spain’s fall offers meditations on the workings of ideology, which inevitably proposes “imaginary or formal solutions to unresolvable contradictions” [Jameson 79]. Ideology—its unmasking—is intriguingly posited by Corral in powerful ways.If we turn to Corral’s text, we find a work offering an extraordinary consideration of history and romance—their profound interaction—whose full title reads, La crónica [End Page 119] del rey don Rodrigo con la destrucción de España (The Chronicle of King Rodrigo with the Destruction of Spain). My interest in the Crónica here is primarily to consider the mechanisms by which it gestures boldly toward what Žižek has described as the project of the postmodern critique of ideology—though it is clearly a recurring cultural constant—namely to “designate the elements which point towards the system’s antagonistic character, and thus ‘estrange’ us to the self-evidence of its established identity” [Žižek 7]. A reading of the Crónica provides an extended paradigm of such estrangement.Iberia is the area of the Mediterranean which underwent the most protracted encounter between Christianity and Islam, and the events of the Moorish invasion of 711 constitute Spain’s unique foundational subject-matter—on a par with the Troy legend and with King Arthur [see Deyermond 355]. Like them, the retelling of 711 is all about forging mythic connections in order to legitimize empire in a temporally remote time-frame. What interests me in this essay is... (shrink)

The article is devoted to populism as a political phenomenon and as an object of analysis in po- litical theory. The focus is on the debate around the definition of populism. The article reviews various approaches to the study of populism, particularly ideological and discursive approaches. The author also analyses populism from the point of view of the normative theory of democracy and discusses the issue whether populism is a threat to liberal democracy or (...) a correction of it. The problem of defining ‘the people’, a key populist concept, is considered separately, and it is concluded that nationalist and populist discourses essentially intersect, so it is impossible to separate them completely. The article argues for a discursive approach to populism. Populism’s primary feature is a claim to speak in the name of the people. Populism is an element of the representative demo- cracy and represents both its constant potential and a menace to it. Populism also appeals to the claim for democratic legitimacy that is a basic normative demand in modern societies. It is logi- cal to consider populism not as the essential characteristic of a political actor (party, movement, leader) who is or is not a populistic but as the aggregation of the populist repertoire, a combina- tion of its elements and their orientation. (shrink)

Far-Right Ecologism explains how the ongoing mainstreaming of the far right has prompted greater engagement with a range of topics, including the environment. Behind the façade of vote-winning strategies, the far right has provided a substantive ideological engagement with the natural environment. Building on the nationalist bent of early green thought and the perceived nexus of pristine nature and cultural purity, Far-Right Ecologism has ideologically adopted the green elements of other ideologies, such as conservatism and fascism, but also of those (...) considered to be 'thin-centred', such as nationalism and populism. Through an authentic experience of learning from the Eastern European, post-socialist realms, this book explores the ideology, ecological discourse, and policy proposals behind the increasing impact of far-right actors on environmental politics in Hungary and Poland. Each chapter begins with stories from the interviewees to illustrate how the far right in Hungary and Poland attempts to permeate environmental politics and even forge partnerships with green actors through specific, local-based policy contributions. Drawing on the findings from a range of sources, such as electoral programs, ideological texts and manifestos, social media and public speeches, policy proposals, and more than forty in-depth interviews with far-right representatives, this book also assesses epistemological and methodological challenges in examining the environmental dimension of far-right, post-socialist politics. The book will be valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the far right, environmental politics and Central Eastern Europe. (shrink)

Gender ideology has quickly developed as a response to fostering human rights, especially in the case of gender equality. Gender policy thus became a political and ideological instrument that subjects human rights to another contest – a new form of crusade pursued by anti-gender movements which advocate traditional and conservative ideologies against gender equality and gender theories. In this paper, we seek to track and map the recent development of anti-gender movements and their mobilisation. We apply critical discourse analysis (...) to several doctrines of antigenderism in order to understand the global popularity and mass appeal of these movements. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the increasing success of the FPÖ, the Austrian Freedom Party commonly classified as a right-wing populist party. Analyzing the possible causes of this incremental success, I especially focus on the party’s communication strategy. My thesis is that the discursive strategy of the FPÖ revolves around the unwarranted identification of persons and practices depicted as a benevolent and salvific “we” artificially set against a malevolent and dangerous “they”. This identification is unwarranted because it lacks (...) any modulation of level and logical articulation. Once thus constructed, the discursive strategy of the FPÖ includes, on one hand, the irremediable conflict of “we” and “they” and, on the other, the equalisation of “they”, so as to construct networks of guilty complicity among all subjects extraneous to the “we” represented through the leader’s will. (shrink)

In Turkey, populism has a homogeneous structure that includes opposing ideologies stuck between right-wing and left-wing views. In the political structure in Turkey, ‘us’ and ‘the other’ are created through populism and an exclusionary attitude towards political rivals is adopted. The present study analyzes the populist issues and populism communication processes of 4 candidates on Twitter ahead of the presidential elections in Turkey. The posts (n = 727) made by the candidates on their Twitter (...) accounts between March 10 and 10 April 2023 were analysed using the content analysis method. As a result of the study, the approaches of the political candidates towards economic, political, cultural and social issues on Twitter were analysed within the framework of populism. The topics addressed by the candidates on Twitter during the election process varied according to the candidates’ positions in power and opposition. On the other hand, it was found that the political candidates defined their populist communication style on Twitter based on the themes of ‘champion of the people’, ‘the man on the street’ and ‘sincerity’. (shrink)

In current political analysis, as well as in discourse, the term populism has become an ‘umbrella term’, embracing a large number of concepts and phenomena. One risk underlying this conceptual stretching is that the term falls into the trap of ‘all-nothing’ and becomes so elastic that populism is used to improperly describe a wide and unrelated variety of phenomena. Some political phenomena might share some characteristics with populist movements but are nevertheless characterised by ideological elements (...) and political projects that are very much in line with the traditional left/right split, as in the case of the new radical right. This article proposes a distinction between the conformational populism typical of some populist parties and the contagious populism typical of the radical right. We argue that in the latter, populism becomes another tool in the arsenal of parties with clearly established identities. Using a comparative approach, we evaluate the programmes, ideological foundations, conception of the people and positions of the 5 Star Movement, The League and the Rassemblement National to illustrate this distinction. (shrink)

Although 'populism' has become something of a buzzword in discussions about politics, it tends to be studied by country or region. This is the first book to offer a genuine cross-regional perspective on populism and its impact on democracy. By analyzing current experiences of populism in Europe and the Americas, this edited volume convincingly demonstrates that populism can be both a threat and a corrective to democracy. The contributors also demonstrate the interesting similarities between right-wing and (...) left-wing populism: both types of populism are prone to defend a political model that is not against democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Populism in Europe and the Americas offers new insights into the current state of democracy from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. (shrink)

The politics of nativism directed at Catholic immigrants in 19th-century America offer a fruitful comparative perspective through which to analyze the discourse and the politics of Islam in contemporary Europe. Anti-Catholic nativism constituted a peculiar North American version of the larger and more generalized phenomenon of anti-immigrant populist xenophobic politics which one finds in many countries and in different historical contexts. What is usually designated as Islamo-phobia in contemporary Europe, however, manifests striking resemblances with the original phenomenon of American (...) nativism that emerged in the middle of the 19th century in the United States. In both cases one finds the fusion of anti-immigrant xenophobic attitudes, perennial inter-religious prejudices, and an ideological construct setting a particular religious-civilizational complex in essential opposition to Western modernity. Although an anti-Muslim discourse emerged also in the United States after 11 September, it had primarily a geo-political dimension connected with the ‘war on terror’ and with American global imperial policies. But it lacked the domestic anti-immigrant populist as well as the modern secularist anti-Muslim dimensions. This explains why xenophobic anti-Muslim nativism has been much weaker in the United States than in Europe. (shrink)

Populism is described in this volume as an umbrella term covering a number of commonly seen political phenomena, i.e. ‘American populism, Russian Narodniki, European agrarian movements, and Argenti...

In recent years, especially after the outbreak of the economic crisis, the phenomenon of populism has returned to the forefront. Populism is all around us, on the front pages of the newspapers, in the political repertoire, in academic papers. Politicians, journalists and researchers discuss this phenomenon, try to define it, examine its principal features and analyse its relationship with democracy. A large part of the mainstream parties and politicians have succeeded, through a strong anti-populist rhetoric, in (...) consolidating the idea that populism is a dangerous ideology. Technocrats, mainstream media and many researchers blame the anti-establishment parties and argue that populism is an ‘irrational’ phenomenon that threatens politics and society. But is that really the case? In this article, we examine anti-populism after the economic collapse in Greece (2008/09) and Argentina (2001) to highlight the danger that derives from this kind of discourse. Our main goal is to find the chief characteristics of anti-populist discourse in both countries in order to emphasize its problematic and controversial perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays, but I will strive to reply, directly and indirectly, (...) to their primary concerns.First, it should be noted that I take a pluralistic conception of 'Daoisms' as my point of departure. This is necessary since Daoist studies have been hampered by overly ahistorical and one-sided definitions that prioritize one philosophical or religious moment (such as skepticism or mysticism) in historically complex and varied transmissions that encompass a multiplicity of texts and perspectives. Due to the fact of the plurality of incompatible kinds of Daoism in Chinese antiquity and in subsequent history, my text considers a range of early Daoist and Daoist-related perspectives in the context of their potential consequences for environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics. Consequently, my approach is primarily philosophical without limiting any text to being exclusively philosophical, religious, or rigidly committed to one perspective, which would be untrue to the sources themselves.Second, examining distinctive tendencies (modifying Graham 1989 and Liu 1994) in the Daodejing 道德經, the Zhuangzi 莊子, and related texts enables us to articulate distinctive and conflicting ecological, ethical, and political paradigms. In place of constructing a mythologizing ideological construction of 'Chinese culture' and Daoism as intrinsically 'Green', a familiar essentializing tendency that has provoked skepticism regarding the very possibility of Daoist environmental philosophy, my book provides a different 'critical Daoist' strategy. This alternative entails that Daoist exemplars can be deployed as therapeutic models in the present, while at [End Page 792] the same time confronting their ideological codifications and uses. Early Daoist sources have roamed on long intercultural journeys. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi have provided elements for European thinking about civilization, technology, and nature from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger (Nelson 2017) to Peter Sloterdijk's 'Euro-Taoism' (Sloterdijk 1989) to contemporary progressive Green movements (Joshi 2022) and even ecofascism (Lubarda 2020). Similarly, in the current Chinese context, Green Daoism has both critical and authoritarian ideological functions in visions of 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生態文明) (Schönfeld and Chen 2019) and fears of a 'green leviathan'. Accordingly, it is not accidental that my anarchistic and participatory democratic interpretation of one key thread, which I call 'ziranist' and clarify below, in early Daoist and Wei-Jin mysterious-learning (xuanxue 玄學) discourses, has led to the most intense discussions and controversies about this book. These include the contributions by Li, Suzuki, and Indraccola that propose questions and alternative possibilities concerning agency and responsiveness, authority and self-determination, freedom and fate, and adaptation and intervention, as well as purposive techniques and anti-purposive uselessness.Third, this hermeneutical strategy points toward the tertiary aspect of our preliminary definition of Daoism. It does not primarily name a philosophical theory or a religious worldview. It concerns shifting, overlapping, and diverging ensembles of discourse and practice. This is not the vague ahistorical idea of 'a way of life' but rather refers to how philosophy is enacted through a specific configuration of—to adopt early Greek expressions—logos as dis-course (e.g., argumentation, hermeneutics, logic, rhetoric), ethos (e.g., comportment, orientation, a way of dwelling), and praxis (practices of the self, with others, and with things and nature). Thus, the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi collections can be analyzed textually and conceptually as having multiple threads (drawing on a variety of authors and sources) that form constellations in the received texts with better and worse historical, practical, and conceptual readings. My interpretive strategy in this discussion, which does not exclude other approaches, is that these texts express forms of practical instead of merely speculative philosophy. They are suggestive of an ethos of relational freedom, irreducible to rules and techniques, which dismantles hypostatized experiential and linguistic fixations, including moralistic fixations, in order to freely encounter the myriad things and enact and practice the dao in one's own singular way.'Critical Daoism', therefore, serves as a pluralistic, diagnostic, and practical designation... (shrink)

Being concerned with conflict and its role both in providing democratic regimes with salutary forms of innovation and in enhancing the capacity of societies for self-government, this dissertation examines Machiavelli's thought on "revolution" in the Discourses. This dissertation develops three arguments: that Machiavelli's notion of conflict includes not only conflict between socioeconomic groups but conflict between political leaders; that Machiavelli's version of the mixed republic reflects not merely the channeling of contending social forces but the institutionalization of change so (...) that the quintessential virtu of a well-ordered republic is its ability to recruit responsible leaders whose individual ambition for public recognition is directed to the common good of the political community; and that although Machiavelli was aware of the power of public imagination in creating a change of regime, his vision of redemption in the Discourses remains far from a populist mode of revolution that can be identified with the emergence of one revolutionary class through indoctrination. ;Each argument appears as a heterogeneous body of thought. But this dissertation argues that there is common ground in terms of temporizing with or delaying a radical change through class upheaval. We may learn from Machiavelli's antityrannical and republican thought on revolution that the wisest policy for treating revolution is not simply avoiding impending dangers by extraordinary measures in a dire emergency but also making use of the spirit of new political actors by election, accusation, and rivalry between political leaders in normal times. And, if Machiavelli's redemptive politics is analyzed in an arena free from the simple antinomies of liberalism versus republicanism, what Machiavelli's thought on revolution in the Discourses may have to offer us is that a broad notion of revolution---one that includes the nature of hostility among human beings, the cycle of regimes, and the creation of a new political order---helps us react better to conflict and deal with its political consequences in multiple forms straightforwardly; and political solutions of social and economic questions, such as the mixed republic and the role of prudent leaders in its actualization, should be emphasized. (shrink)

Former Prime Minister Koizumi's surprising victory within the Liberal Democratic Party in 2001 and his subsequent popularity as prime minister led to increased interest in the study of populism in Japan. In addition to Ōtake Hideo's prominent contributions, several others have also employed populism as a prism to study Japanese politics. Compared to the major debates on populism and particularly on the populist radical right in Western Europe over the last two decades, however, the study of (...) Japanese populism seems to be at a less mature stage. Lessons may be learned from the European literature for the community studying Japanese populism. This paper first summarizes the studies on Japanese populism. Then, the main discussions and arguments presented in the academic literature on the PRR in Europe are discussed. Next, this study evaluates how arguments found in studies of European populism can be exploited in further research on populist politicians and parties in Japan. The author recommends further studies on conceptual definitions, on the classifications of politicians and parties, and on explaining the emergence and persistence of these parties and politicians. The findings in this paper encourage and support further research on populism in the Japanese political system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth by Paul WoodfordPanagiotis A. KanellopoulosPaul Woodford, Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth (New York, Routledge, 2018)This book is provocative. And challenging. It is written with passion, aiming to induce controversy. And with good reason. For we live in times when populism professes an illusionary sense of community, invoking a seemingly 'anti-systemic' but highly hypocritical, racist, (...) and sexist discourse;1 in times where "bullshitting"2 has advanced to the highest governmental levels in many countries; in times where "authoritarian neoliberal statism"3 becomes the new status quo, inducing a scandalous increase of economic inequalities, forcing large populations to live precarious lives; in times where privatization of educational services in the context of market-oriented practices impose restrictive and ultimately unjust politics of accountability and performativity;4 in times where instrumentalization of educational ends has taken the lead, assisted by a systematic co-option and misappropriation of notions such as excellence and creativity;5 in times, finally, where spaces that allow for "the sharing (out) of the incalculable,"6 forging unknown potentialities in education, life, and thought, are being destroyed. In such times, Paul Woodford has stepped in, reclaiming his right to speak uncompromisingly.Hannah Arendt has written that "[w]hen men [sic] are deprived of the public space--which is constituted by acting together and then fills of its own accord [End Page 108] with the events and stories that develop into history--they retreat into their freedom of thought."7 Woodford refuses to retreat. He writes as a public intellectual of the highest order, committed to upset and not please those in power. A great service that his latest book performs is that it speaks daringly, stirring a debate that helps us all to do away with fear. For as Bertrand Russell has aptly said quite a long time ago, "[I]f thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men [sic] back."8Resisting the "melancholy of inner exile,"9 but not immune to possible accusations of left melancholy, understood as "a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present,"10 the author wrote a book that provokes music educators to actively think beyond their sealed and safe world of convictions that is based on ideology-free conceptions of music teaching. Estelle Jorgensen has long ago brought to our attention the urgency of this task: "in an era in which the mindset and political reality have changed dramatically, … there is an urgent need to revisit the political character of music education and the ways in which it needs to address the cultural issues of our day."11Along this pathway, Woodford's book encourages music educators to live and teach as public intellectuals, forging "a democratic purpose for music education"12 that acts against the "anachronistic and formalist conception of music that reduces music education to supply-side economics as children are conceived as either future professional musicians or consumers and not as citizens to be prepared in schools to participate intelligently in the political life of society."13 Woodford articulates a vision of music education "as preparation for adulthood and democratic and global citizenship."14 He strongly advocates an approach that balances performance and creativity-based experiences with a socio-historical study of the social, ideological, and cultural workings of different musics in a wide variety of contexts. He encourages music educators to teach "how music's structural properties and qualities contribute to the shaping of people's perceptions and understandings of themselves and their world,"15 "asking the who, what, when, where, how, to, with, or for whom, and, most importantly of all, why of music."16 He envisions a music classroom that exercises social criticism "directly and self-consciously"17 both through "learning how to make music"18 and through thinking about music. He sees this approach as a tool for raising students' consciousness. Woodford's ultimate vision of music education is one that casts it as a means for cultivating "a justice-oriented" approach... (shrink)

Radical right political parties are usually heavily male-dominated; accordingly, previous research has concentrated on the perspective of men. The present study aims to enhance the understanding of the worldview of women within radical right parties. Taking a critical discursive psychological approach, the study looks at how female populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland discursively negotiate the tension between the Nordic societal norm of gender equality, on the one hand, and the patriarchal ideology of populist radical (...) right parties, on the other. The analysis suggests that the female populist radical right politicians’ discourse is indeed highly ambivalent. The discursive tension between gender equality and a patriarchal politics is heavily intertwined with two further tensions: first, that of a societal norm against prejudice versus a politics based on xenophobia; and second, that of a culture that cherishes individualism versus a political pressure to homogenize the political or cultural ‘Other’. The study compares the discourse of female populist radical right politicians in the two country contexts. Moreover, it discusses the differences and similarities between this discourse, on the one hand, and that of male populist radical right politicians, on the other. Finally, it analyses the gendered and racialized categorizations accomplished by the discursive patterns, and elaborates on their societal implications. (shrink)

This article argues that populism, both in its left-wing and right-wing versions, is a social pathology in the sense contemporary critical theorists give to it. As such, it suffers from a disconnect between first order political practices and the reflexive grasp of the meaning of those practices. This disconnect is due to populists’ ideal of freedom, which they understand as authentic self-expression of ‘the People’, rejecting the need for mediating instances such as parties, parliaments or epistemic actors. When (...) enacted in political practices and institutions, this ideal creates the conditions for undermining different forms of political freedom, including populist’s own ideal of collective self-expression, which they erode by fostering expressive domination. This all makes populism a self-defeating political ideology and bad candidate for advancing democracy in times of crisis. The article ends with a consideration of the advantages of this view compared to existing approaches to populism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Europe, an "Unimagined" Frontier of DemocracyÉtienne Balibar (bio)Translated by Frank Collins (bio)In my Berlin talk I spoke of the ever more massive and ever more legitimate presence in the old European states of people from their former colonies, and this despite the discrimination to which these people are subjected [see "Europe, Vanishing Mediator?"]. I added that this was the basis for a lesson in alterity that Europe can use (...) to define more uniquely its power (or lack of power—"puissance" vs. "im-puissance") in the world today. This idea might appear to be excessively optimistic, if not a delusion, but I wish to clarify what it means by examining the ideas of two Italian sociologists, Alessandro Dal Lago and Sandro Mezzadra. These two scholars have for a long time been engaged in analyzing the effects of postcolonial immigration in a Europe caught up in the process of globalization.In their essay "I confini impensati dell'Europa," they examine the way in which, in today's Europe, two meanings associated with "frontier" conflict with each other. They are referring to what Italian calls confini (which I would translate into French as frontières [English "frontiers"]) and frontiere (which I would translate into French as confins [English "confines"/"outer reaches"]).2 The end of the Cold War and the nullification of the Yalta agreements have reopened a historical and philosophical question with respect to the the very meaning we attach to the name "Europe." In the bloody wars that followed the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, that question took on a particularly dramatic form and prefigured other events of the same kind.Dal Lago and Mezzadra place this question in the context of the changes undergone by imperialism. The fight by the capitalist powers to control world resources and to impose a "Western-style" economic model upon the rest of the world is now becoming a full-scale battle that includes all the social, demographic, and humanitarian aspects that tend to impose a global constraint against the movement of peoples. This constraint is particularly felt in those "frontier-zones" in which political control coexists alongside military control (as in Yugoslavia), but where the two are violently separated. In these zones, men are at once displaced, forced into migration, yet also confined to house arrest. Here we are touching upon the profoundly equivocal nature of the "European" project:We can thus state that the frontiers of Europe have multiplied and diversified. As a consequence, the political concept of Europe has also significantly [End Page 36] fragmented. We might say that today there are as many distinct Europes as there are functions undertaken on the international stage by that nebulous continental entity. [...] This multiplication, however, cannot hide the chasm that separates on the one hand ideological or utopic pretentions to self-determination for the whole of Europe, and on the other the inescapable need strategically to align itself with the center of the Western empire, namely the USA. Recent global wars—such as the Gulf and Afghanistan wars—periodically remind us of this reality.[145]Dal Lago and Mezzadra go on to describe the self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in European discourse on identity and security, an ever more insistent discourse since the 1990s.3 This is true for the supporters of "populism" who, from Austria to Italy to Denmark have built their electoral successes on the concept of "unassimilable difference" and insecurity. It is also to be seen in the practices of European governments today and in the way civil societies are "conditioned." True, constructions that define identity (constructions identitaires) following the end of the Cold War have established nothing positive with respect to European identity, but they stigmatize a group of excluded people in order to mark the difference between Europe and the rest of the world. Essentially these refugees and migrant workers occupy that slot in society, both imaginary and real, of internal or domestic political enemies4 who are nothing more than a construct of the State. These people are seen as a threat to security while in fact having no security themselves.This defining of the immigrant in term of his alterity, as a potentially dangerous temporary guest... (shrink)

Populism describes those strategies which actors endorsing populist ideas must use in order to be considered populist. Typical populist strategies include the hijacking of state institutions; the development of clientelistic relationships with constituencies labelled the people, or employing certain rhetorical moves in which enmity between the people and a corrupt elite looms large. In this paper, I argue against tendencies to define populism according to a specific set of tactics that are supposed to flow directly (...) from populist ideas. Instead, populism should be understood in terms of a particular orientation, which grounds and justifies a range of strategies, all of which – nefarious or otherwise – should be considered populist. This orientation posits that enmity between ‘the people’ and an elite is a defining feature of political life, in part because it is responsible for serious failures in a country’s ostensibly democratic institutions. These failures create a degree of ambivalence with respect to these institutions’ claims to authority and obedience, and generate the perception that political actors thereby enjoy an expanded set of moral permissions. Finally, populists argue that elites prosecute revanchist projects aimed at resisting populist pathways to power and undermining them once in office. Populist strategies then are simply whatever range of tactics political actors use who accept the validity of that above orientation. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , (...) commonly referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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New Perspectives in Philosophy of Education seeks to build a bridge between philosophical reflection and socio-political action by developing a range of critical discussions in the areas of ethics, politics and religion. This volume brings together established authorities and a new generation of scholars to ask whether philosophy of education can contribute to political and social discourse, or whether it is destined to remain the marginal gadfly of mainstream ideology. The philosophy of education stands in danger of becoming (...) a neglected field at precisely the moment we need to be able to reflect upon the increasingly apparent costs of the technocratic attitude to education. While many of the educational policy discussions of recent years seem far-reaching and radical, critical debate surrounding these initiatives remain largely at a populist level. New Perspectives in Philosophy of Education provides contemporary responses to philosophical issues that bear upon educational studies, policies and practices, contributing to the debate on the role of philosophy of education in an increasingly fractured intellectual milieu. (shrink)

This paper critically examines how senior figures in the UK Labour Party and wider labour movement discussed the topic of immigration in the immediate aftermath of the UK's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Influenced by the Discourse Historical Approach, the paper is based on an analysis of 86 public interventions by Labour figures, over a 6-month period, delivered in speeches, articles and essays. The paper examines argumentative strategies adopted by Labour figures – including Members of Parliament, advisors (...) and trade union leaders – who called for stronger immigration controls from an avowedly ‘left-wing’ perspective. Foregrounding their commitment to progressive politics, Labour politicians argued that restricting the number of migrants entering Britain was democratic, anti-racist and an expression of the Labour Party's commitment to the interests of working-class people. Nevertheless, it is the contention of this paper that the Labour Party's rhetoric tapped into right-wing populist discourses which constructed immigration as a threat to the racialised privileges of a ‘white’ working class. (shrink)

In recent years, and especially after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, right-wing and left-wing populist parties and movements have enjoyed significant political success in Europe. One of these parties is SYRIZA in Greece. In this paper, we explore some of the particular characteristics of the political discourse articulated by SYRIZA in power. The core argument of the paper is that the Greek radical left party continues to express an inclusionary populist discourse after its rise (...) to power. We examine this issue by utilising the methodology of the Essex School of Discourse Analysis. Moreover, we attempt to substantiate the view that populism does not always have a negative connotation and is not deterministically associated with nationalism or racism. Furthermore, we try to establish whether the concept of "crypto-colonialism” is an important key to understanding the rise of inclusionary populism to power in Greece. Finally, we analyse various manifestations of Greek anti-populism in order to highlight the danger that derives from this kind of stereotypical discourse. (shrink)

In this paper I want to leave behind the failed attempts to think about populism as ideology, strategy, style, or even discourse. I will focus on the ‘conceptual battles of politics’ and their potential to influence actors to pursue and effect specific ends. Reinhart Koselleck and his ideas about conceptual history will figure prominently in my discussion, as will his concept of asymmetrical combat-concept as a means of unleashing a theoretical and political war. The goal is to demonstrate (...) that concepts have taken the place of weapons of war among political actors. (shrink)

This paper analyses the National Populist Challenges to Europe’s Center Right. It assesses the cases of the UK, Germany and France. It poses three questions for Europe: How will political integration be achieved and maintained? What policies will foster economic inclusion in the Eurozone? And, third, what are the best means to achieve economic solvency and growth. The paper make a case that neoliberal economic policies over the past decades have undermined some nations' public sector and have also (...) contributed to tensions between the geographical east and west of Europe. (shrink)

Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents a highly limited approach to the issue that is typical of many mainstream approaches within populism studies and liberal-democratic constitutional theory. Through a critique of Müller, the article develops an account of the historical emergence of authoritarian populism as a ‘long counter-revolution of the radical right’ against the values and institutions of the social-democratic welfare state. Focussing on the USA and UK, the article shows how, rather than being a novel (...) phenomenon emerging from the fringes in the 1980s and 1990s, authoritarian populism emerges from the middle of the twentieth century as a highly successful form of hegemonic struggle over the Republican and Conservative parties and over American and British societies. The political success of a highly contradictory ideological framework of the radical right has helped to largely normalise a language, rhetoric and imaginary of authoritarian populism and place it at the centre of contemporary politics and culture. By largely ignoring such a development, and the highly contingent nature of North Atlantic ‘democracy’, theorists and commentators like Müller fail to grasp the depth of the current authoritarian populist threat and offer only liberal-democratic mythology in response to the ranting and chanting of ‘fake news’. (shrink)

In the age of iDeology - in which individual access and participation to technology is about to replace the rich texture of religion, culture, tradition and political convictions - the social impact of media discourse only magnifies. This volume is an attempt to explore the influence of ever-available communication content on the minds and behavior of a population that has made the permanent and often obsessive use of communication technology a defining element of social orientation. Unlike the many accounts (...) that focus on the remarkably redefined patterns in the context of Western society - ranging from twittering Presidents to the emerging populist movements all over Europe - this volume portrays the situation from the frequently neglected perspective of the global periphery. As opposed to simply transfer and measure perspectives taken from a Western point of view, the clear intention of this volume is to provide ample space for the sincere and explorative consideration of local characteristics and settings of the different social, cultural and political contexts and therefore contribute to providing the ground for future research. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is important for educators in democratic education to understand how the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the United States and around the world can never be viewed apart from the affective investments of populist leaders and their supporters to essentialist ideological visions of nationalism, racism, sexism and xenophobia. Democratic education can provide the space for educators and students to think critically and productively about people’s affects, in order to identify the implications of (...) different affective modes through which right-wing populism is articulated. Furthermore, this paper points out that ‘negative’ critique of the affective ideology of right-wing populism is not sufficient for developing a productive counter politics. An affirmative critique is also needed to set alternative frames and agendas which endorse and disseminate alternative concepts and affective practices such as equality, love and solidarity. These ideas provide critical resources to democratic education for developing a culture and process of democracy that transcends the negativity of mere critique of either right-wing populisms or inadequate forms of democracy. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is important for educators in democratic education to understand how the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the United States and around the world can never be viewed apart from the affective investments of populist leaders and their supporters to essentialist ideological visions of nationalism, racism, sexism and xenophobia. Democratic education can provide the space for educators and students to think critically and productively about people’s affects, in order to identify the implications of (...) different affective modes through which right-wing populism is articulated. Furthermore, this paper points out that ‘negative’ critique of the affective ideology of right-wing populism is not sufficient for developing a productive counter politics. An affirmative critique is also needed to set alternative frames and agendas which endorse and disseminate alternative concepts and affective practices such as equality, love and solidarity. These ideas provide critical resources to democratic education for developing a culture and process of democracy that transcends the negativity of mere critique of either right-wing populisms or inadequate forms of democracy. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

One of the main goals of contemporary media, along with the experts and professionals, who speak in them, has been to explain complex issues and provide the audience with clear descriptions of social reality. This is mostly achieved by the production of ideologically useful interpretative schemes that facilitate understanding of the issues present on the media agenda. An important strategy of shaping the public opinion in the way in which public affairs and the activity of social life participants is framed. (...) Analyses of such practices have been conducted for over thirty years within various research approaches collectively referred to as framing analysis. This research provides several arguments helping one to develop a more critical perspective on the representations of social phenomena dominant in the media and discourses of symbolic elites (e.g. opinion writers, academics, experts, journalists, politicians), along with the analyses of the origin of such phenomena, moral judgements and preferred "corrective policies". One of the phenomena defined by the media in Europe as the most important one for the past several years, is the so-called "New Right". The aim of the paper is to analyse the interpretative schemes used by the journalists of four Polish opinion-forming weeklies and to describe the activity of its German manifestation – the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) social movement and the Alternative for Germany party (AfD). (shrink)

Oriented, descriptively, by recent liberal definitions of populism, this essay pursues a historical-materialist definition that grounds populist antagonisms in class struggles as ‘crystallised’ in the capitalist state. A critical assessment of Laclau’s early equation of populism and socialism inaugurates the reading of Poulantzas’s relational account of class and state as a nascent framework for a theory of populism, centred on the state and its ideological crystallisation of individualisation, the mental/manual-labour division and the ‘people-nation’. This framework is (...) then expanded to articulate the political-economic core of populist antagonisms, the specific character of ‘neoliberal populism’ today, and the potential, in relation to theories of ‘popular politics’ and a ‘communist people’, that left-wing populism might hold as a process of new political productions of class. This reading provides for a more expansive account of such movements’ potentials, beyond a threat to or correction of pre-determined democratic or Marxist schemas. (shrink)

Scholarship on the late fifth-century BC New Music Revolution has mostly relied on the evidence provided by Athenaeus, the pseudo-Plutarch De musica and a few other late sources. To this date, however, very little has been done to understand Athenaeus' own rale in shaping our understanding of the musical culture of that period. This article argues that the historical context provided by Athenaeus in the section of the Deipnosophistae that cites passages of Melanippides, Telestes and Pratinas on the mythology of (...) the aulos (14.616e-617f) is not a credible reflection of the contemporary aestheties and strategies of the authors and their works. Athenaeus is both following the structure of Aristotle's discussion of the topic of the aulos in Politics 8. 1341a-1342b and accepting the elite ideological position given there. Athenaeus' text thus does not provide evidence for the historical context in which late fifth-century authors were composing, but rather constitutes an attempt to illustrate Aristotle's argument with poetic examples from late fifth-century poets. (shrink)

Populism has become one of the most intensely discussed topics in both public debate and academic research. So far there has been no systematic argumentation theoretic analysis of populism, however. This paper is intended to provide first steps towards such an analysis by giving a full argumentation theoretic reconstruction of the political manifesto of the German right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). This allows to draw preliminary conclusions about the AfD’s argumentative strategy as exemplary for (...) right-wing populism. (shrink)

This article locates Ernesto Laclau’s populist reason as a point of departure to understand the contemporary democratic logic and its so-called ‘excesses’. It argues that, even if resourceful, Laclau’s findings can be supplemented with a theory of the imaginary as developed by Cornelius Castoriadis, as well as with key remarks from a discussion of the theologico-political as this was characterized by Claude Lefort. The aim is to construct an understanding on the political as it is structured by (...) language and the symbolic, presenting thus democracy and populism as two opposing sides of a foundational political myth. (shrink)

Revelation according to Schelling is not the possession of any institutional form of Christianity; it is not even bound to faith or confession. Rather, revelation disseminates itself freely and universally throughout history. It now inextricably permeates modernity. Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation does not look backwards to an event in the first century of the common era, it looks forward to the genuine singularity, the moment when humanity will become adequate to the divine subjectivity which lives in it, that is, the (...) penultimate eschaton proclaimed by Paul and the author or the Book of Revelation, the age of righteousness prior to the general resurrection.1 By bringing mythological consciousness to an end and drawing real limits to rationalism, revelation first establishes a free relation of the human being to the divine. At the same time, revelation liberates philosophy and culture from religion and inaugurates secular consciousness. History, according to the late Schelling, which he undeniably reads Eurocentrically, is moving toward this third age of revelation, in which all of humanity will pass over into absolute or true monotheism. With the universalization of the revelation, the free and philosophical appropriation of its content, all historical forms of religion will be overcome, including, it should be added, all historical forms of institutional Christianity. The complete secularization of the world will be achieved, and the sundered human community unified, without expense of historical or cultural diversity. (shrink)

In recent years, our understanding of Archilochus has been transformed by the discovery of a major new fragment from the Oxyrhynchus collection (P Oxy.4708), first published by Dirk Obbink. The new poem is not only the most substantial of Archilochus' elegiac fragments, but more importantly it is the first example we have of the poet's use of myth, for the surviving section narrates a mythological theme: the defeat of the Achaeans at the hands of Telephus during their first attempt to (...) reach Troy. Scholars have found the choice and handling of the myth surprising, and the role that Telephus plays within the poem has been a subject of controversy. Yet this debate has tended to dwell on the Telephus myth in its general form, rather than focussing on the details of how Archilochus presents him in this particular context. This article will explore the significance that Telephus could have had for a Parian audience, and will use this to investigate the political and rhetorical impact of his presentation within the poem. I will argue that Archilochus highlights the aspects of Telephus' story which connect him most closely with Parian local myth, and that he does so in order to enhance the poem's central message: criticism and implicit mockery of the mythological battle and, by implication, of contemporary Parian military strategy. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the ‘It's OK to be White’ Senate motion made by Australian far-right politician Pauline Hanson in 2018. Deliberately innocuous, the ‘It's OK to be white’ slogan was designed by online white supremacist groups with the intention of ‘triggering liberals’ and provoking outrage. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, I demonstrate that Hanson's ‘It's OK to be white’ motion was an act of calculated ambivalence, which served to address multiple audiences simultaneously. I argue that the motion provided Hanson (...) with a novel way to discuss so-called ‘anti-white’ or ‘reverse’ racism which succeeded in generating the desired controversy and media attention. I further argue that the success of the motion exposed the Australian media's illiteracy on contemporary alt-right/white supremacist tactics and discourses. I also critically examine the implications of the motion and Hanson's promotion of white victimhood narratives. Despite its innocuous framing, the ‘It's OK to be white’ motion represented the successful co-optation of a racist white supremacist political project, the implications of which should not be understated. This research furthers our understanding of the strategies and tactics employed by the far-right, as well as the interrelationship between the populist radical right and online white supremacist groups. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

What old Fascisms and new nationalisms circulate in the political spaces of Europe? Through an analysis of their split on immigration policy in 2003, this article examines the myths and ideologies of the two major far right parties in Italy, the Lega Nord and the Alleanza Nazionale. It argues that the anti-imperial mythology of the Lega, based on the defence of Lombardy against the Holy Roman Empire, has led it into a modernist politics of territoriality, borders and homogeneity. On (...) the other hand, the Alleanza Nazionale has used its Fascist heritage, and in particular the mythologizing of the Roman empire, to open up a postmodern imperial politics, involving the expansion of borders, and the incorporation of new peoples and territories. Through the use of interviews with militants and deputies, it looks at how the Alleanza has re-articulated imperial Fascist mythologies within a new pro-European Union discourse, while the Lega has maintained its role of protest against deterritorialization despite the seeming inevitability of the territorial integration. (shrink)

This study draws on a synergy of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies to scrutinize the portrayal of hackers in China Daily and The New York Times in the 21st century, primarily revolving around the main social actors and targets in hacking. This study demonstrates that both media share a positive transformation of the image-building of hackers in the 21st century. Besides, countries are salient social actors in hacker media discourse and the two media differ in their ways of constructing (...) them. The New York Times tends to have a negative other-representation and categorical otherness of specific countries through such discursive strategies as negative other-representation and group categorization, whereas China Daily is prone to insist on opposing the US hacking allegations in a defensive manner. Regarding major targets, China Daily highlights government websites whereas The New York Times emphasizes government websites, officials’ emails, large technology companies, and election infrastructure. The analysis shows that the two media’s different ways of framing hackers are underpinned by the ideologies behind them and the Chinese and US socio-political landscapes. This study can provide insights into how hacker discourse in media is represented in the 21st century and how national identities are constructed in the media representations of hackers. (shrink)