[ecrea] New book: The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on „the People” in Late Modern Democracy

Book announcement
I am happy to share with you the publication of my book:
Péter Csigó: The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on „the People” in Late 
Modern Democracy (CEU Press, Budapest, 2016)

If interested, please visit the book’s website : 
http://popularspeculation.com
The common critique of media- and ratings-driven politics envisions 
democracy falling hostage to a popularity contest. By contrast, the 
following book reconceives politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty 
contest that alienates itself from the popular audience it ceaselessly 
targets. Political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about 
the popular expectations they seek to gratify, and thus do not follow 
popular public opinion as it is, but popular public opinion about 
popular public opinion.

This book unravels how collective discourses on “the popular” have taken 
the role of intermediary between political elites and electorates. The 
shift has been driven by the idea of “liquid control”: that 
postindustrial electorates should be reached through flexibly designed 
media campaigns based on a complete understanding of their 
media-immersed lives. Such a complex representation of popular 
electorates, actors have believed, cannot be secured by rigid 
bureaucratic parties, but has to be distilled from the collective wisdom 
of the crowd of consultants, pollsters, journalists and pundits 
commenting on the political process.

The mediatization of political representation has run a strikingly 
similar trajectory to the marketization of capital allocation in 
finance: starting from a rejection of bureaucratic control, promising a 
more “liquid” alternative, attempting to detect a collective wisdom 
(of/about “the markets” and “the people”), and ending up in self-driven 
spirals of collective speculation.


Contents
Introduction: Collective Speculation in Mediatized Populist Democracy

Part 1 : The Speculative Media System
Chapter 1: Speculation and Liquidity in Mediatized Politics and 
Marketized Finance Chapter 2: The Rise of the Fifth Estate Chapter 3: 
Theorizing Collective Mythmaking on Media and Markets
Part 2 : The Cultural Autonomy of Neopopular Mythmaking Chapter 4: 
Mythicizing Popular Media in Academia Chapter 5: The Myth of “Active 
Control” in Media-Interpreting Industries
Part 3 : The Counterperformativity of Neopopular Mythmaking Chapter 6: 
When Being Popular Is Dangerous: The Case of a Myth-Driven Political 
Campaign Chapter 7: Latent Events in a Postnormal Media Environment
Conclusion: The Dialectic of Liquid Modernity and the Crisis of Democracy


contacts : (hellocsigo /at/ gmail.com)
https://independent.academia.edu/PeterCsigo
https://www.facebook.com/peter.csigo

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