The political logic of populist hype: the case of right wing populism’s ‘meteoric rise’ and its relation to the status quo

The term ‘populism’ has become ubiquitous in today’s politics and media. No longer a clichéd spectre haunting Europe, populism appears to have become a practical reality in the wake of Brexit, Donald Trump’s victory in the United States, and the French presidential elections. It appears that the people have spoken and that their wish is for reactionary right-wing politics. Through a mix of discourse analysis and psychoanalysis, and taking examples from the United Kingdom, the US and France where populist waves have appeared to weaken and even break liberal defences, this article argues that the seemingly irresistible rise of the 'populist right' has acted as a political logic. In this view, the disproportionate coverage of such a rise, with its accompanying potent mobilisation of affect, including its implied characterisation as the alternative to the status quo, has pre-empted the contestation of some troubling norms animating the regimes of liberal representative democracy and political economy. By doing so, the hype around right-wing populism has impoverished democratic discussion, leaving little space for the essential reassessment of the system itself, instead aligning the debate along a rather stale and unproductive divide between a liberal human rights elite and loosely-defined middle class on the one hand, and a reactionary 'people' subject to authoritarian passions on the other.<br/

Ideology as blocked mourning: Greek national identity in times of economic crisis and austerity

This article approaches the 2010-2014 economic crisis in Greece from the perspective of loss and mourning, critically exploring what questions and insights this provokes. We argue first that the rhetoric of mainstream political and media elites has been instrumental in framing responses to the Greek economic crisis in patriotic terms, a frame subsequently adopted by groups from across the entire political spectrum, whether part of the establishment or not. We then draw on discourse theory and psychoanalysis to argue that attachments to the dominant austerity and anti-austerity responses to the crisis can be understood-at least in part-in terms of a failure (or not) to properly articulate and thus mourn the nationalist-inflected loss associated with economic dislocation. We sketch out two ideological pathways in the discourses of austerity and anti-austerity, which we designate as symptomatic of ‘blocked mourning’: a melancholic pathway that seeks to contain loss through self-blame; and a pathway of ressentiment that seeks to contain loss by attributing its cause to a series of ‘others’. We argue that blocked mourning bears a direct relation to the ideological grip of the austerity and anti-austerity discourses, and that we can better appreciate the character and strength of their affective pull by drawing out the fantasmatic aspects of the narratives expressing Greek national and economic identity. Conversely, we argue that a critique of ideology can be understood in terms of the preconditions for mourning, whose satisfaction would make possible a less invested relation to the fantasmatic guarantees underpinning the austerity/ anti-austerity narratives. In this view, a critique of ideology proceeds by bringing to light those factors that could facilitate a more open and deliberative articulation of loss, so as to transform and pluralize collective responses to the economic crisis

Critical fantasy studies

Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the category of fantasy, from a theoretical point of view. Importantly, however, I also argue that the qualification ‘critical’ in Critical Fantasy Studies captures something about how such studies can draw out the normative, ideological, and politico-strategic implications of psychoanalytic insights and observations, and thus become part of a broader enterprise in critical theoretical and empirical research

Microfoundationalist Reconciliation: The Fundamental Fantasy of Neoclassical Economics—Some Reflections on Yahya Madra’s Late Neoclassical Economics

Using neoclassical thought as his entry point, Yahya M. Madra offers a vital prolegomenon to a recalibrated critical political economy. Madra’s reinterpretation of the economic field pivots around what he calls the theoretical-humanist problematic, suggesting that an ontologically inflected recharacterization of economic thought is essential to any serious development of progressive alternatives to dominant mainstream forms of political economy. After outlining the constituent elements of theoretical humanism and some of Madra’s key conceptual moves, this essay explores several analytical, normative, and ideological implications of such a redrawing of the boundaries of economic thought. Madra’s intervention opens up at least three lines of inquiry regarding the theoretical-humanist problematic: the relative amplitude of tensions internal to different economic approaches in its orbit, including their capacities to resist or escape its gravitational pull; how it circumscribes the scope of concrete, normative visions; and how everyday practices and identifications reinforce or depart from related ideological fantasies underpinning it

‘Two for joy’: Towards a better understanding of free associative methods as sites of transference in empirical research

This paper explores the relation between transference and free association in the production of data in sociological and social research. Drawing on Laplanche’s notion of the analyst as a provocation for the transference and Lacan’s understanding of the analyst as cause of desire, we map transference as a condition for free association and theorise an ‘enigma of participation’ in research. We develop these ideas through a discussion of two astonishing moments in recent research interviews. We propose that free associative interviews can be understood as sites of transference that help us to glimpse the unconscious in social and political discourse and offer insights into the (im)possibilities of subjective change

Anti-populist fantasies: interrogating Veja's discursive constructions, from Lula to Bolsonaro

In this paper we draw on the concept of fantasy and the principles of political discourse theory to develop an analytical framework for the study of Veja's anti-populist discourse. As one of Brazil's most influential publications in elite policy-making circles, Veja exerts considerable influence over the way populist politics is portrayed and understood. By tracking the signifiers ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in the pages of this weekly magazine, our study affirms the distinctive virtues of adopting a psychoanalytically-informed perspective on political antagonism and ideology, treating fantasy as a core concept in the study of polarizing discourses generally and discourses about populism in particular. Far from remaining above the fray in its opposition to the discourses of both Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (and the Workers’ Party) and Jair Bolsonaro (and the Social Liberal Party), our critical fantasy study shows how Veja's pronouncements were both ideologically invested and normatively inflected

The political logic of populist hype: the case of right wing populism’s ‘meteoric rise’ and its relation to the status quo

The term ‘populism’ has become ubiquitous in today’s politics and media. No longer a clichéd spectre haunting Europe, populism appears to have become a practical reality in the wake of Brexit, Donald Trump’s victory in the United States, and the French presidential elections. It appears that the people have spoken and that their wish is for reactionary right-wing politics. Through a mix of discourse analysis and psychoanalysis, and taking examples from the United Kingdom, the US and France where populist waves have appeared to weaken and even break liberal defences, this article argues that the seemingly irresistible rise of the 'populist right' has acted as a political logic. In this view, the disproportionate coverage of such a rise, with its accompanying potent mobilisation of affect, including its implied characterisation as the alternative to the status quo, has pre-empted the contestation of some troubling norms animating the regimes of liberal representative democracy and political economy. By doing so, the hype around right-wing populism has impoverished democratic discussion, leaving little space for the essential reassessment of the system itself, instead aligning the debate along a rather stale and unproductive divide between a liberal human rights elite and loosely-defined middle class on the one hand, and a reactionary 'people' subject to authoritarian passions on the other.<br/

Beyond populism studies

Populism’ has become ever more ubiquitous in political analysis, to the extent that ‘populism studies’ appears on course to establishing itself as a field of research in its own right. This article warns about the dangers of such a development. Taking a discourse theoretical approach as our starting point – but also critically engaging with this tradition’s contribution to the hype about populism – we suggest that ‘populism studies’ (and the preoccupation with populism this field embodies) risks reifying populism by focusing on populism as a phenomenon ‘as such’, and through an over-reliance on the concept of populism to approach that phenomenon. This, we argue, hampers a nuanced and contextualized understanding of the exact role populism plays in different populist politics. This is not a call for abandoning the concept of populism altogether, but a call for de-centring the concept and for moving beyond academia’s ‘populist moment’

Navigating desires beyond growth: the critical role of fantasy in degrowth’s environmental politics and prefigurative ethics

As a critical environmental political project, the degrowth movement contests the hegemony of economic growth. Much scholarship has sought to unpack degrowth’s proposals to reduce matter and energy throughput and to promote socio-ecological justice, democracy and wellbeing. Few studies, however, examine how the movement sustains itself. In this article, therefore, we explore the role fantasy plays in the movement’s emergence and sustenance. We draw on semi-structured interviews and officially-disseminated documents to examine the discourse of degrowth through a Critical Fantasy Studies lens, arguing that fantasies structure supporters’ desires and sustain the energy lying behind their environmental politics and actions. We suggest that the fantasy of ‘mutual dependence and care’, in particular, affectively fortifies their efforts to contest economic growth’s hegemonic norms and, in doing so, bolsters degrowth’s distributed modes of political action while also allowing its members to cultivate a prefigurative ethics of engagement

Articulating the ‘How’ of Social Return on Investment: Foregrounding the Plural and Pluralizing Character of Its ‘Moments of Judgment’

Social accounting practices attribute value to an organization's activities beyond traditional economic conceptions of success. In assessing the merit of such practices, we argue that it is helpful to extend our analytical focus beyond questions of what is evaluated and who evaluates to how valuations are performed. Social accounting literature has already explored a crucial aspect of the “how question,” emphasizing the need to widen stakeholder input and engage in agonistic democratic deliberation beyond applying technical expertise. We extend these insights by drawing attention to an important dimension of the how question that remains underexplored, namely, where such deliberation can or should be applied and explaining why this matters. In doing so, we disclose the complexity and messiness of social accounting processes, as well as their normative and political significance. We deploy political discourse theory to highlight the virtues of focusing on where value is constructed along the social accounting chain, illustrating our contribution with examples drawn from our experience conducting a Social Return on Investment (SROI) for a not-for-profit organization. We present and unpack key decision-junctures in the SROI process, demonstrating the plural and pluralizing character of these “moments of judgment” by showing how contestability and normativity enter the valuation process, aspects that are often obfuscated by an over-reliance on, and the rhetoric of, the technical aspects of quantification and monetization. By foregrounding the contingency and subjectivity embedded in valuation practices, we argue there is a need to navigate agonistically, deliberatively, and pragmatically their plural and complex character