Ghost in the Wire

What would it mean to inhabit the populist position, to be embedded within it? Given the multitude (not that Multitude) of populist movements out there, how are we to know which movement or which position is authentically communist? How are we to claim that a movement is populist when our goal is to then direct that movement into a communist, revolutionary proletarian subjectivity, thus sublimating whatever will of the people to the vision of a particular plebs (Bat's implied "us")? And do we really want to side unflinchingly? Aren't there many times when we want to flinch, when we should blink and break off our support?

Let me suggest two general principles, both of which return us to what is both particularly important and particularly lacking in Laclau's recent work on populism.

First: Populism isn't merely a political or revolutionary strategy; rather it is the recipe for all remotely democratic political operations. As such the exploration and definition of populism is an ontological, not a teleological exercise. Any take on populism that treats it as (merely) a revolutionary potential continues the split by which the people act independently of the state, and as such maintains a dialectical operation at the heart of political thought, one that makes any confrontation with the state more difficult precisely because of its ontological concreteness. But if we come to understand that the "people" are articulated via floating signifiers, just as they themselves structure their demands and their interests via these signifiers, and do so against and with the horizon of the state, we can properly understand that the two groups are themselve hetergenous to each other, just as they are heterogenous within themselves. Rather than players within a dialectical exchange, the people and the state articulate each other because of the insolvency, the lack, implied by any empty signifier, and as such we never have a situation where either the people or the state somehow sublimate the other. So while populism is (often) something to champion, we need to understand that we're championing something that is already intrinsic to the political order (Le Colonel knows this, precisely because her defense of activism is much more grounded, much more partial than Bat's or K-Punk's or Jared's radical approach), not something extrinsic to the system and that can therefore usher in a truly revolutionary event. Long story short, and this applies to Zizek's arguments as well, it is a mistake to think populism is something to be either purely celebrated or purely maligned because populism is what structures democratic politics as such, and so the question is rather how does populism structure the political, and - and this one's hugely important - how do particular populist movements operate, and to what effect?

Second: We need to be cautious when it comes to embracing populism simply because, well, it's populist. Lynchings in the American south were populist affairs just as surely as was the Civil Rights movement. Ross Perot acted every bit the populist, charts and big ears and all, and he hardly offered an agenda that progressives or socialists would find appealing. So clearly some populisms are more equal than others, and the task of championing is more difficult than initially thought. One solution to this difficulty is to follow Bat sympathetically, and to think that either those "bad" populisms are not populisms at all, or rather that those "bad populisms" provide precisely the location where intellectuals should be working to convert them into good populisms (i.e. communist revolutions). I think this is ineffective, to say the least, and dangerous to boot. The other solution is one of rhetorical specificity and contingency, where we try to pay attention to the ways particular populisms antagonize the social order, and use our critical acumen to chart the choices and effects of signifiers deployed in those antagonisms. As I noted in a previous post, one of the major limitations of Laclau's work is that he offers nothing by which we might differentiate structurally a populist movement bent on progressive reform from a populist movement of incipient fascism. The task then is not unflinching support but rather on-the-ground engagement and critique, one wedded to facts and aims and rhetoric of particular demands/populisms, and that brooks no insipid distinctions between rhetoric and ideology, or between the eventual revolutionary potential of a movement and its more immediate demands.

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That may be all from me on this issue for now. I want eventually to articulate some objections to one other category of responses, one predicated on an embrace of "posthegemony," but I suspect I'll have plenty of opportunity to do so in future discussions, and so I'll wait for them, or until a flash of interest and an opening in my schedule appears unbidden.