[ecrea] CFP: Metapolitics and Metapolitical Discourse: conceptual and empirical investigations into populism and (anti-) democracy

status: CfP Call for papers
symposium/lecture
Metapolitics and Metapolitical Discourse: conceptual and empirical 
investigations into populism and (anti-) democracy
27.09.2017-27.09.2017
University of Navarra

As traditional democratic procedures and institutions are coming under 
increasing pressure in a context marked by highly mediatized cultural, 
political and economic crises, the notion of democratic politics itself 
faces challenges from the left, the right and the radical centre. 
Metapolitical projects on different sides of the political spectrum are 
gaining support and attention. At stake is a potential restructuration 
the public sphere itself. Metapolitics is a label for those modes of 
politics that seek to change established modes of political practice, 
both in democratic and anti-democratic ways. The question to be asked is 
if, how or to what extent contemporary metapolitical projects across the 
political spectrum present democratic or anti-democratic political 
fantasies. We will consider as metapolitical any project that aims to 
re-structure the face of the public realm as well as its institutional 
and discursive constituents and the associated modes of politics. This 
means that we distance ourselves from the New Right who has claimed this 
notion in order to designates its anti-egalitarian political strategy 
and goals. We welcome contributions that reflect on the notion of 
metapolitics and/or metapolitical discourse and offer concrete analyses 
of specific metapolitical projects. Contributions from the fields of 
ethnography, communication sciences, sociology, political science and 
discourse studies are all welcome. Potential subjects to be addressed 
include, but are not limited to:

•	Online and offline tactics for pursuing metapolitical agendas (e.g. 
political use of trolling, blogging, shit-posting) •	The political 
discourses, logics and rationalities of right and left wing populist 
projects and fantasies.
•	Participatory experiments and the search for new modes of democratic 
politics on the left. •	‘De-politicizing’ or ‘post-political’, 
neoliberal, bureaucratic and/or technocratic projects in the radical centre.
•	Emerging forms of governmentality linked to new metapolitical projects.
•	Modes of citizenship and politics articulated across different media 
formats. •	Metapolitical effects of transformations in the public realm 
and in the media-system.
•	Discourses on democracy in relation to (social) security, immigration, 
work, privacy, corruption and asylum articulated across media.
•	…

Within the discourse of the New Right, metapolitics refers ironically to 
the pursuit of a Gramscian cultural hegemony. The idea that metapolitics 
is about politicization also appears on the left in the work of Alain 
Badiou who wrote in favour of philosophy as a metapolitics that does not 
hide behind the veil of ideological neutrality. Moreover, Jacques 
Rancière used the term in reference to those philosophies that 
misrepresent the nature of politics by positing something more essential 
outside of it (e.g. class struggle in Marxian metapolitics). Our use of 
the term is at once broader and more specific than these approaches. We 
welcome contributions from any theoretical, methodological or 
disciplinary background, but we would ask that contributors reflect 
explicitly on the potentially problematic use of the notions 
‘metapolitics’ and/or ‘metapolitical discourse’ in discourse studies and 
in the social sciences at large.  The goal of this symposium is to 
explore the potential of a broad notion of metapolitics for 
understanding contemporary attempts to reconfigure the face of the 
public sphere. Keynote speaker will be Massimiliano Capra Casadio who 
will talk about The genesis and use of the concept of metapolitics in 
the French New Right.

This symposium is being organized by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze as 
part of the Spanish MINECO project FFI2015¬65252¬R titled ‘El “demos” en 
el imaginario de la nueva politica: el debate sobre la voluntad popular 
en el discurso público en Europa’.

Contact person: Jan Zienkowski
email: (jzienkowski /at/ unav.es)


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