Assembly Contra Populism: Elementary Aspects of the 1974 Bihar Movement’s Assemblyist construction of the ‘People’

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Contested Narratives and Discursive Battles

Abstract

The foundational principle of modern Republics—‘sovereignty of the people’—is a mythic ideology but also the normative grounds of legitimacy (Canovan 2005). All constitutionally legitimate authority is derived from the ‘people.’ The ‘people’ is endowed with a normativity—what Jason Frank calls a “constitutive surplus”—that makes it perpetually a site of political claim making (Frank 2010). At the same time, it is a mythic ideology because ‘people’ has no determinate empirical reference and is always constructed as a unity that subsumes internal division and conflict (Morgan 1989; Rosanvallon 1998; Olson 2016). As such it is always open to creation, dissolution and contestation. The ‘people’ is thus a fundamental politico-discursive battleground of modernity—a potent field of contentious politics (Laclau 2005; Gartsen 2009; Reed 2020). Surprisingly, a great lacuna of social movement theory on collective identity has precisely been its avoidance of the master subjectivity of modern politics: the ‘people.’ This paper aims to address this lacuna in collective identity and social movement theory by examining how the politics of assemblies generate and constitute the political subjectivity of the ‘people.’ Specifically, I want to suggest that there is a distinctive assemblyist modality of constructing the ‘people’ that is visible empirically in many anti-governmental movements (often against populist governments) where bodies assemble to occupy public space and claim peoplehood. After outlining my conceptual framework to analyze the ‘people,’ I shall present my archival research of the Bihar movement of 1974 in India to outline the dynamics, utterances and performative practices of assemblies. These assemblyist practices of the Bihar movement discursively constituted, and performatively enacted a collective subjectivity of ‘people’; a ‘people’ that was emergent, processual, and in opposition to the ‘people’ claimed by the government.

Author

• Udeepta Chakravarty, New School For Social Research