Archive for publications, November 2020

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

Mon Nov 23 14:38:35 GMT 2020




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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