‘On Constellations of Populism’

‘On Constellations of Populism’ 

Oliver Simpson (Lancaster University) 

One of the consistently slippery and illusive aspects of populism for social and political research is specifying exactly what the term designates. Attempts to define populism as a political ideology often leave one with a definition so broad it seems to apply to all politics, or a definition so narrow it can be undermined with a few empirical examples. To be sure, populism is a highly politicized term, often used by apologists for the status quo who claim populism is an aberration of the “normal” operations of democratic politics.  The use of the term populism to conjure up the image of a dangerous and regressive mob presenting an external threat to the internal order ironically mirrors what is generally understood to be the populist framing of politics: to find an external enemy (refugees, immigrants, the poor) to which all social problems can be attributed. In this respect populism can be simultaneously attributed to the exterior and interior of politics today. In this context, rather than trying to resolve the paradoxes, ambiguities and indistinctions of populism as a signifier, I instead focus on and intensify these very inconsistencies and ambiguities as a productive feature for thinking populisms multiple instantiations across a range of historical, intellectual, and literary milieus. I argue populism can be understood as a constellation of concepts which are as follows: perversion, superstition, carnival, spectacle, sovereignty, the masses. My use of the term constellations I take in part from Walter Benjamin’s introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama in which he argues that in order to grasp an idea which cannot be directly represented one must explore the concepts that gather themselves around this idea (Benjamin 1995:37). Constellations then have their actual contents, the key concepts and a virtual excess, the idea of populism they animate, mobilise and refract depending on their proximities to one another within a given context. Populism is the virtual idea and the constellations of concepts I develop throughout the thesis are a map through which this idea can be understood and framed in a manner that is not reducible to the deadlock I outlined above characteristic of the contemporary political situation and the meaning of populism within it.

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