[ecrea] CFP 'Against the elites!' The cultural politics of anti-elitism

*/Call for papers/*

*/‘Against the elites’: The cultural politics of anti-elitism in the 
current conjuncture /*

*/Conference, 26/27.10.2018 at the University of Göttingen/*

*/
/*

The current moment, with all the instability and openness characteristic 
of an interregnum, displays certain themes and contradictions repeatedly 
and frequently. These themes can be taken as entry points for an 
transdisciplinary analysis that seeks to disentangle the current 
conjuncture and its contradictions. One such theme is anti-elitism.

Having long been identified as a hallmark of political populism, 
anti-elitism can also be seen as a broader cultural and social pattern. 
It colours large parts of pop culture and media, such as the adulation 
of establishment-defying folk heroes and negative portrayals of 
authorities, rulers and ruling classes in film, comedy or music – the 
corrupt, flamboyant elites that stage the “Hunger Games” being just one 
prominent example. In the domain of cultural production and reception, 
anti-elitism is not only a matter of the content and form of 
representations, it is also connected to media technology and an ongoing 
re-distribution of power on that level. In recent decades, for example, 
rating and review systems on the internet have eroded much of the 
authority – and the material means – of “elite” or “elitist” culture 
journalism and programming in institutions such as public service 
broadcasting. In the crises of expert and scientific knowledge that are 
routinely diagnosed, and in calls for ever-widening participation, 
similar anti-elitist dynamics are at play.

In politics proper, however, it is especially parties and movements of 
the hard right that shape the contemporary situation through 
anti-elitist articulations: calls to “drain the swamp” in the U.S., 
anti-E.U./-Brussels rhetoric in Europe, attacks on “liberal elites” and 
intellectuals that are said to have lost touch with the population’s 
ways of life, or even conspiracy theories about plans by hidden elites 
to “replace” the European population with Muslim migrants. At the same 
time, democratic anti-elitism is part of the political left’s reason for 
being, and left-wing movements dissatisfied with Third Way social 
democracy muster a lot of their energies from agitating against the 
establishment, “the caste”, “the few”, the “one percent” et cetera.

Going from strength to strength, these iterations of the anti-elitist 
theme are re-configuring politics, knowledge and our understandings of 
the popular, in new and politically highly ambivalent ways. The 
conference aims to explore these dynamics in relation to on-going crises 
– usually labelled cultural, political and economic – and asks about 
their interaction, resonance and articulation. What, then, is 
characteristic of current anti-elitist rhetoric, idioms, affects, 
narratives and imagery in specific case studies? In what ways are 
elites, authorities and leaders being imagined, caricatured and 
criticized, and how are the popular and the common being positioned 
against it? How can we make sense of the cultural politics of 
anti-elitist articulations?

Inspired by classic and more recent work in conjunctural analysis, we 
are also interested in the ways in which anti-elitist articulations are 
related to collective experiences in various fields, such as experiences 
in educational and other state institutions, experiences of precarity 
and re-configurations of the workplace, of consumption practices, or of 
electronically mediated communication and other technologies. 
Qualitative and especially ethnographic research that takes into account 
the discursive and imaginary mediation of experience and avoids facile 
cause-effect assumptions seems particularly important in this context.

Rendering the ambivalences and ruptures in this theme visible, the 
conference asks about the meanings of anti-elitism in conditions that 
have been described as post-political, marked by a “disaffected consent” 
to “capitalist realism” – but which by now may have moved on to 
different paradigms. In focusing on anti-elitism, we seek to better 
understand the implications and effects of these phenomena, and also to 
inquire about the role of academic research and critical theory, which 
are often the target of anti-elitist polemics as well.

In a normative register, quite obviously, the dangers and the democratic 
potentials of anti-elitist articulations are difficult to evaluate. As 
the Frankfurt School argued decades ago, authoritarian, antisemitic and 
ethnic-nationalist implications of anti-elitist tropes are in many cases 
far from coincidental. On the other hand, cultural studies and hegemony 
theorists have often stressed the emancipatory nature of 
‘popular-democratic’ sentiments and movements. In what ways and in which 
situations are these framings helpful today, and what other concepts and 
perspectives are needed?

While the primary interest of the conference is in current conjunctures, 
historical approaches that shed light on these questions are also of 
interest. Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

  * ethnographies of anti-elite sentiments and articulations in a
    variety of settings
  * anti-elitist figurations in contemporary pop culture, questions of
    narration, visuality, and sound (including film and music, from
    rap/hiphop to country)
  * anti-elite rhetoric in political ‘populism’ (parties, movements) and
    its implications and backgrounds
  * anti-intellectualism: academic knowledge as a problem; crises of
    knowledge, representation, authorities, experts
  * residual/conservative gender politics and their project of “natural”
    gender/sexuality orders (vs. “artificial” elites?)
  * the history of anti-elitism as a reservoir of progressive movements,
    subcultures etc. (including queer anti-elitist aesthetics and politics)
  * spatial anti-elitism: periphery vs. centre; country vs. city; local
    vs. global
  * established and new media; campaigns against “elitist” public
    service broadcasting
  * the anti-elite theme in critiques of cultural policy and funding
    decision-making in the arts
  * aesthetic populism and pop cultural representations of the vulgar as
    gestures of rebellion against taste elites in fields like fashion,
    architecture etc.
  * sports (fandom) and anti-elitism
  * anti-elitist critiques of corruption, waste, inefficiency

Confirmed speakers include John Clarke (Open University) and Rebecca 
Bramall (London College of Communication).


Please submit presentation proposals (about 500 words) by 30 May 2018 
via email to Johannes Springer at (johannes.springer /at/ uni-goettingen.de). 
Questions and expressions of interest can be addressed to Johannes 
Springer or Moritz Ege ((mege /at/ uni-goettingen.de)).

_Conference conveners_: Moritz Ege, Johannes Springer (University of 
Göttingen, Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology); in 
cooperation with the Bonn/Göttingen/Kassel/Lüneburg network “Thinking 
(in) conjunctures”. Funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of 
Lower Saxony.

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