[Commlist] Media Populism: A New Issue of Culture Machine

This is to announce the publication of vol. 19 of Culture Machine, 
guest-edited by Giuseppe Fidotta, Joshua Neves and Joaquin Serpe.

https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-19-media-populism/ 
<https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-19-media-populism/>

Culture Machine is an open access journal of culture and theory, and a 
member of the Radical Open Access Collective.

Below is an excerpt of Media Populism's Editorial Introduction:

"Parasitical, unstable, excessive, corrupt, inexact, threatening—the 
intellectual history of /populism/ is, to say the least, vexed. ‘Few 
terms have been so widely used in contemporary political analysis’, 
Ernesto Laclau famously observed, and ‘few have been defined with less 
precision’ (1977: 143). As populism has increasingly become ‘the 
preserve of political scientists’ (Rovira Kaltwasser /et al/., 2017: 10; 
Canovan, 1982), so too has its focus on political parties and movements 
become a default position in academic and popular thought. This 
orientation, today contested by many political scientists but 
nonetheless widespread, has the advantage of making populism visible, 
even measurable, through its analysis of speeches, polls, rallies, and 
electoral victories. At the same time, the narrow focus on parties and 
movements has created conceptual and epistemological barriers that 
continue to impede the emergence of new perspectives—on, for instance, 
the relationship between media and populism—that fall outside of 
political scientific frameworks, confirming Chantal Mouffe’s (2005) 
assertion that political theory alone is not equipped to answer 
populism’s contemporary challenges, even at an analytical level. Apart 
from the difficulty of disembodying populism from parties and movements, 
this approach remains closely allied to rational-choice assumptions, 
failing to embrace the /many/ affective and infrastructural dimensions 
that are constitutive of the political sphere. Overcoming these 
limitations has been, and still is, a major challenge to the study of 
populism. Responding to /Culture Machine/’s call to open up cultural and 
theoretical research beyond established paradigms, this special issue 
brings problems of media and mediation to bear on populist phenomena and 
debates.


Our point of departure is the idea that populism mediates, that is, it 
comes in between, channels or interrupts the ordinary operations of 
social and political life. However, in order to comprehend such 
processes, we need to take media and mediation seriously. As we argue in 
our companion essay, the prevailing approaches to populist media in 
political theory remain narrowly focused on what populists say and do in 
the media, as if the media was merely a container of information or an 
ideology to be debunked. In contrast, this special issue aims to bring 
media studies into conversation with debates in social and political 
theory, among other fields, and to explore the centrality of media, 
meant in a broader sense than just neutral channels for direct and 
unmediated exchange between demagogues and receptive audiences, for 
apprehending populism. In this respect, the essays collected in this 
issue move beyond the traditional scales and objects of populist 
research, placing questions of media and mediation front and center. 
Case studies range from zombies and pedagogy, video events and affective 
publics, counterfeit aesthetics and the internet ocean. Some of our 
contributors investigate forms of mediation that lend themselves more 
clearly to populist mobilizations. Others explore representations of the 
people in historically situated ‘new’ media. Others address the 
affective dimensions of populism as channeled through media aesthetics 
and platforms. Taken together, these interventions open up genealogical 
and multi-scalar perspectives on populism, while also speaking to the 
complexity of media populist forms and magnitudes, and their role in 
shaping contemporary political imaginaries."





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