Populisms within Regimes of Post-Truth and Post-Political Strategies

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on “the People” and the Popular in Networked Media Cultures

Abstract

This paper begins with the Gramscian formulation of a national popular in the service of left populist movements. It asks first if such a formulation is possible any more in the post-mass audience/-market era of media and cultural fragmentation and networks. If it is possible, it asks, how has the formation of such a “culture” and the identity of a “people” through it changed? How do versions of “the people” and “the popular” even become visible, audible—sensible—today? It critically examines recent debates about “participatory culture” to rehearse the affordances and constraints of new media technologies for exercising collective will. It then asks what populisms, instead, might look like through the prism of societies of control and what Bernard Stiegler has called psychopower. It argues that media (especially journalism) has been transformed such that they no longer can easily be seen as facilitating a “regime of truth” (Foucault) but regimes of post-truth and truth markets, which may be not threats but necessities to the future of liberal democracies and their partitions of the sensible. Within such conditions, “populars” may gain, as always, contingent recognition but risk being “managed” through post-political or anti-political strategies of professional political communication (big data predictive analytics of political marketing, branding and public relations), though the ends of these instrumentalisms are not guaranteed. A look at the recent French cases of the movement for gay marriage Marriage Pour Tous (Marriage for All) and their reactionary counterpart the Manif Pour Tous (a Protest for All), both of which received wide public attention and registered policy effects, are used to probe the changes and obstacles of the new communication and cultural terrains.

Author

• Jayson Harsin, CUNY-Baruch College