This working group explores the hegemony of theory for the 2020s, in the period of emergent populism and hybrid media. It seeks to enhance knowledge on hegemony from a (post-)Gramscian perspective. Since its publication in the mid-1980s, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy became a central text in rethinking mobilisation and political struggle, but also for envisioning left politics and democracy. While both theorists have been central for thinking populism as logic and political practise, this group seeks to discuss – besides their theories on populism, populist movements and parties – also the backbone of their thinking: the theory of hegemony. It is increasingly vital to investigate the societal and political transformations, and the intersection between politics and communication, including their practices and financial logics. We particularly invite papers touching on issues of social media, memory, political economy and democracy, questions of populism, left or right, and new forms of democracy. We also warmly welcome papers on Gramscian hegemony theory more widely.
Jos papereita on tarpeeksi, keskustelemme myös suomeksi suomenkielisistä. Erityisesti näitä papereita toivomme hegemonianteoriaan liittyen.
Chairs:
Emilia Palonen, University of Helsinki emilia.palonen@helsinki.fi
Ilana Hartikainen, University of Helsinki, ilana.hartikainen@helsinki.fi (communicates in English)
Papers
Title: The Visible Virus: Andrej Babiš’ Response to Covid-19 Reflected in Prague
Presenter: Ilana Hartikainen
Abstract: The Czech government issued one of the fastest and harshest responses to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, closing the borders to leisure travel, enforcing a quarantine across the entire country, and mandating that no one left home without a mask. This had an immediate visual impact on the Czech capital of Prague, where streets normally packed with tourists were suddenly emptied. This situation briefly reversed in the late spring and summer, when first locals began utilizing the reopened city space, and then the Czech government opened the borders to tourism. Partly spurred by this opening, however, the pandemic roared back for a second wave beginning in September, and the openness of the city space has since been in flux; while tourists are gone and lockdowns continue, the national unity that the city’s emptiness represented has disappeared, and protests have emerged contesting the lockdowns. The city’s fullness has thus become a reflection of Czech PM Andrej Babiš’ response to the pandemic. While the nation rallied around the government early on, this unity has disappeared, and Babiš’ popularity has plummeted. Relying on a methodological framework of post-foundational rhetoric performative analysis, this paper will use data gathered from social and traditional online media to explore how Babiš’ Covid-19 response has been articulated in the city space, and how perceptions of his success or failure are directly tied to the emptiness or fullness of the city in imagery shared online.
Title: Gramscian Culture War: Building Mnemonic Hegemony in Poland and Hungary
Presenter: Katalin Miklóssy, University of Helsinki, Aleksanteri Institute
Abstract: The paper discusses how and why the leftist theoretician Antonio Gramsci became relevant in current national conservative administrations in Poland and Hungary. By aiming at firm cultural hegemony, the power elite in these countries launched a ‘cultural counter-revolution’ in 2016. The culture war is fought simultaneously against the European liberal traditions and the domestic opposition. The practical and efficient means of this endeavor is a thorough institutional transformation, combining, on the one hand, the restructuring of institutional basis and the manning the leading positions, on the other.
The paper argues that the attack against cultural institutions is targeting the introduction of a new era – in the Gramscian sense. Due to the current regimes’ nationalism, one of the key areas of this struggle is conducted in the field of memory politics. The identity building project has to rely on an acceptable interpretation of meaningful history, which on its turn has to achieve the position of mnemonic hegemony. This goal is driven by polarizing mnemonic perceptions to become a simplified black-and-white, right-or-wrong choice for the people.
The paper compares two country cases that apart from their obvious convergent political goals and applied means, they display significant divergencies due to their mnemonic traditions. Poland is leaning on legislative procedures whereas Hungary trusts manic institutional reforms as its main instrument.
Title: Theorizing Hegemony, Populism and Polarisation for the Era of Hybrid Media Systems
Presenter: Emilia Palonen (University of Helsinki)
Abstract: Hybrid media systems era and the mainstreaming of affective politics globally is central for contemporary political theorizing. It is tied to the emergence of populism, polarisation of societies through new political divisions rather than interests. This paper draws from the existing critical theorists that contributed to related conjunctures: Walter Benjamin who was discussing mechanical reproduction, arcades, and the layered momentary flashing past, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe whose work was influential in addressing new social movements and theorizing hegemony. The post-Gramscian reading of hegemony here implies mobilisation and establishment of new constellations of meaning that in turn can need to me maintained and questioned. It has been highly influential in the alt-right sphere where social media, new forms of reproduction, and ideological state apparatuses, to follow Althusser, meet. Post-Marxists theory is mobilising more on the right than the left, but it is also necessary to consider the need to speak in terms of hegemony and political meaning making cross the political spectrum, beyond essentialist readings. The paper proposes makes several theoretical contributions: (a) it reveals how the re-emergence of alternative hegemonic projects and emergence of populism has not only brought politics back to politics but questions how we conceptualise democracy as “demography” of socio-economic distinctions; furthermore (b) it operationalises the Laclaudian concept of populism into a truly anti-essentialist analytical formula through which the us-them/what-to-be-opposed and affectivity can be disentangled; (c) it unveils the logic of political polarisation as bipolar hegemony where two sides co-constitute each other generating consensus inside; (d) discusses how populism is indeed momentary rather than constant dwelling on its emotional appeal is related to the critical flaneur, Now-Time as temporal and spatial experience; finally (e) it connects the theorists with the immediacy and hype of hybrid media systems era. In sum, it develops on the dimensions of performativity and hegemony that emphasises political meaning making. This set of theoretical interventions, quickly introduced, enables same theoretical devices to be explored across the globe rather than to be tied to the parochial contexts of people-vs.-elites or particular traditional party systems, or the mechanical reproduction over the digital era.
Title: Mainstreaming populism and the EP2019: a Laclaudian approach to topic modelling
Presenters: Emilia Palonen, Juha Koljonen and the HEPPsinki working group
Abstract: Studying populism from a comparative angle with a Laclaudian approach has been a challenge that would require new conceptualisations and methodological insights. We introduce a conceptualisation of populism that would be useful in these comparative contexts, reducing the Laclaudian approach into a heuristic form at the core of it is an understanding of the role of affects and the performative process of constituting “us” and “the frontier”. This formula is operationalised in our comparative context. Twitter data on the European Parliamentary elections in 2019, was analysed with several analytical tools for several member states. We developed a unique way to use LDA topic modelling from a Laclaudian discourse theoretical, post-foundational perspective. We studied mainstreaming populism not in particular isolated topics but in an overall spread rendering the method useful for mapping a discursive field and its different nodal points. For a radically anti-essentialist perspective, comparison highlights populism’s contingent contents, even the concept of “us”.
Title: Amerikkalaiset valitsivat presidentiksi Miehen- eivät hiirtä! Huhtasaaren retoriikka ja retoriset keinot Uuden Suomen blogissa
Presenter: Laura Parkkinen, University of Jyväskylä
Abstract: Populistinen kieli ja populismi ovat olleet 2000-luvulla suosittuja tutkimuksen kohteita yhteiskunnallis- humanistisessa tutkimuksessa. Eräänlaisena uutena ilmiönä, josta tutkimusta ei juuri ole, ovat kuitenkin populistinaiset, jotka ovat samalla tehneet populismia hyväksyttäväksi (kts. Kaltwasser ja Mudde 2015). Harvoissa tutkimuksissa (Meret 2013) on analysoitu populistinaisten arvoja. Nicolas Guillet ja Nada Afiouni (2016,14) puhuvat äärioikeiston diskurssin banaalisaatiosta, joka on tehnyt äärioikeistoa hyväksyttäväksi. Tähän liittyvät populistinaiset ja heidän käyttämänsä kieli.
Daniel Stockemer (Stockemer 2017, 41) kirjoittaa, että Marine Le Pen on tehnyt Front Nationalia (Rassemblement National vuodesta 2017) hyväksyttäväksi ja auttanut Front Nationalia ottamaan poliittista tilaa Ranskassa. Le Figaron vuoden 2013 mielipidekyselyn mukaan 54 % ranskalaisista piti Front National-puoluetta puolueena kuten muut. Vuonna 2011 Marine Le Pen valittiin Rassemblement Nationalen puheenjohtajaksi ja hän oli puolueen edustaja Ranskan presidentinvaalien toisella kierroksella vuonna 2017. Marine Le Pen häivytti puolueen stigmaa ja uudisti sen sanastoa. Sanojen uudistamista pidettiin semanttisena käänteenä (Crepon 2012, Alduy 2015,115).
Palonen ja Saresma (2016, 14) määrittävät populismin poliittiseksi tavaksi muodostaa merkityksiä ja vetää poliittisia rajalinjoja: populismi tuo ikään kuin uusia ääniä ja vaatimuksia politiikkaan. Populismi ei ole millään tavalla poikkeuksellista vaan pikemminkin tyypillistä politiikalle (Laclau 2005). Populistinen retoriikka vaikuttaa myös laajempiin keskusteluihin, eivätkä populistisuutta tuota vain populistit itse (Palonen ja Saresma 2005, 14). Benjamin Moffitt (2016) on määritellyt populismin performanssina, jossa kriiseihin tarttuminen ja niiden hyödyntäminen retorisesti korostuu.
Tutkimuspaperini vastaa kysymykseen mitkä ovat Laura Huhtasaaren retoriset keinot ja miten hän käyttää sukupuoltaan ethoksen tuottamisessa. Tutkimusmateriaalina on Uuden Suomen blogi 2012-2018. Retorisista keinoista esiin nousee esimerkiksi härskarteknik (uhriutuminen).
Tutkimuspaperini sijoittaa Huhtasaaren eurooppalaiseen populismiin ja osoittaa yhtäläisyydet amerikkalaiseen kristilliskonservatistiseen traditioon pikemminkin kuin esimerkiksi Rassemblemnt Nationaleen.
Avainsanat: ethos, diskurssi, populismi, populismin kieli
Title: Populism as a political logic and a discursive repertoire – debating the ontological and ontic dimension of populism
Presenter: Marina Vulovic (University of Helsinki) and Emilia Palonen (University of Helsinki)
Abstract: Populism, both as an analytical and a political concept, is widely contested in current scholarship. While some studies focus on the ideological “core” of populism, others try to investigate how it entangles with other projects, such as nationalism. However, fleshing out the meaning of populism as an ontological category, and its manifestations and sedimentations on the ontic level of social and political practice, has been neglected. Building on recent debates between Brubaker on the one hand, and De Cleen and Stavrakakis on the other, particularly on the relation between nationalism and populism, we put forward a conception of populism both as an ontological concept and as a “discursive repertoire”.
The former distinction made by De Cleen is based on Laclau’s (2005) understanding of populism as a political logic that (re-)draws political frontiers between an “us” and a “them”. The latter relies on the specific historic discursive and material sedimentations that De Cleen and Stavrakakis have already fleshed out in their research. By doing so, we attempt to bring in more clarity into a concept, the particular meaning of which has been the subject of great debate in recent scholarship. We maintain that thinking of populism in its ontological and ontic dimension solves many a conundrums when it comes to debating the “core” of populism, that is, articulating it as a logic that draws frontiers between “the people” and “the elite”. We argue that populism, as an ontological category, does not essentialize the “us” (the people) and the “them” (the elite). On the contrary, it is more fruitful to conceptualize populism as a political logic with a particular form, not a particular content (Palonen 2020, Populist manifesto). This means that populism as a political logic is necessary for any political project or ideology, be it democracy, authoritarianism, nationalism, racism etc. In turn, populism as an ontic category should be conceptualized in light of what De Cleen and Stavrakakis have argued, namely that populism is a “discursive repertoire with its historically sedimented significations”. These sedimented significations are anchored by the nodal points of the people and the elite and have informed much of the way we think about populism in modern times, especially about populism as a family of political parties.