Elements of Protest

Politics and culture in Laclau's theory of populist reason

Datos Bibliográficos

ID18955331
AutoresOliver Marchart (0000-0002-1632-4929, autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen26
Número2-3
Páginas223-241
Fecha de publicación2012-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502386.2011.636194
OpenAlexW1601656992
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas17

By taking Ernesto Laclau's recent book On Populist Reason as its starting point, the article sets out to establish a critical dialogue between Cultural Studies in the Birmingham tradition and political discourse analysis in the Essex School tradition. It is argued that Laclau's notion of antagonism (as a name for the logic by which differential elements are articulated into chains of equivalence) might be useful as the 'missing link' explaining the passage from micro-political forms of resistance, as analyzed by Cultural Studies, to macro-political hegemonic formations, as analyzed in the Essex School tradition. In addition, Laclau's recent theorization of the 'minimal units' of protest discourse – identified by Laclau as demands – may prove productive not only for Cultural Studies but also for discourse analytically informed New Social Movement research. Keywords: populismPeronismdiscourse analysisEssex SchoolNew Social Movementsantagonism Acknowledgements The arguments of this article were developed in the context of a research project generously supported by the Swiss National Research Foundation. Notes 1. I deliberately leave aside here the controversially debated question whether or not, or to what extent, a decline in political motivation and effectivity can be determined as a general trend within the field of Cultural Studies. 2. There have been some exceptions to the rule which, however, did not manage yet to establish a wider dialogue between Cultural Studies and political theory and science; see particularly (Finlayson and Martin 1997 Finlayson, A. and Martin, J. 1997. Political studies and cultural studies. Politics, 17(3): 183–189. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Street 1997 Street, J. 1997. Politics and Popular Culture, Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar]; Dean 2000 Dean , J. 2000 Cultural Studies & Political Theory , Ithaca and London , Cornell University Press . [Google Scholar]; Bowman, 2007 Bowman, P. 2007. Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics & Intervention, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [Google Scholar]). 3. For an extensive critique of the marginalization of the macro-political in Sub-cultural Studies see Marchart (2003 Marchart, O. 2003. "Bridging the micro-macro-gap. Is there such a thing as post-subcultural politics?". In The Post-Subcultures Reader, Edited by: Muggleton, D. and Weinzierl, R. 83–97. New York and Oxford: Berg. [Google Scholar]). 4. It goes without saying that populism here is understood in the political sense developed by Laclau in his recent book, not in the critical sense given to 'cultural populism' by McGuigan (1992 McGuigan, J. 1992. Cultural Populism, London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). 5. For Laclau's theory of name and naming, one of the most important theoretical innovations in his book On Populist Reason see Laclau (2005 Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason, London and New York: Verso. [Google Scholar], pp. 101–107); for a discussion of the implications of his theory of naming see Marchart (2005 Marchart , O . 2005 In the name of the people. Populist reason and the subject of the political , Diacritics , vol. 35 , no. 3 , pp. 3 – 19 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 6. While this is an important point to make, Beasley-Murray tends to restrict the resulting notion of the political – ass the strategic and the organizational – to questions of the state in the narrow sense. Yet, the political, at least from the perspective of a Laclauian theory of populism, is much wider notion that cuts across any topographical differentiations of society into clearly definable regions such as 'the state' and 'civil society'. 7. It should be added that, despite some earlier reservations, in the more recent work of Stuart Hall (1997 Hall, S. 1997. "The centrality of culture: notes on the cultural revolutions of our time". In Media and Cultural Regulation, Edited by: Thompson, K. 207–238. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. [Google Scholar]) the concept of the cultural tends to become co-extensive with the concept of the discursive in Laclau's sense, which is not that surprising anyway since the cultural has often been defined, in the Birmingham tradition, as that dimension of the social where social meaning is produced, reproduced, altered and challenged. 8. There is nothing particularly post-structuralist to this insight. Already in Antonio Gramsci's initial formulation of hegemony theory, Gramsci is aware of this fact – without being a post-structuralist. When he speaks about hegemony as the construction of what he calls a "political will" or "common or collective will", Gramsci does not take this political will – which is absolutely indispensable for any hegemonic project – to be the source of a hegemonic effort; rather, it is precisely what has to be constructed, it is the desired outcome of the articulation of a hegemonic project. From a discourse analytic point of view, then, one may claim that it is the discursive articulation in and by itself which has an organizing function – and what is organized through discursive articulation is the identity of the protest movement. 9. It should be noted that there is no value claim involved here, "democratic" simply means, in Laclau's terminology, differentially articulated (while "popular" means equivalentially articulated) and has nothing to do with democracy as a political regime. 10. The same must be said with respect to the classical sub-cultural studies approach and a certain reluctance or inability to theorize the counter-cultural function of protest formations. As long as subcultures are supposed to remain on the level of 'symbolic resistance' or 'resistance through rituals' they will remain within the sphere of micro-politics. Only when these rituals enter a chain of equivalence they become politicized. Hence, to restrict the analysis to matters of "style" and "aesthetics" rather than political mobilization will necessarily lead to a depoliticized account of subcultures

Contentious politics · Epistemology · Hegemony · Political science · Politics · Social movement · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Social Media and Politics