4 Editorial

Jorinde Seijdel
6 Political Populism
Speaking to
the Imagination
Merijn Oudenampsen
::PoliticsasArt
olthc!mpossiblc
Te Case for
a rcampolitik
in the USA
Stcphcnuncombc
40 Te Italian
Anomaly
Berlusconi and
Semiocapitalism
Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet
50 Neoliberal
Xenophobia in
the Netherlands
Construction
of an Enemy
Jolle Demmers and
Sameer S. Mehendale
60 Populism and
the Empowering
Circulation of
Myths
Yves Citton
70 On Populist
Politics and
Parliamentary
Paralysis
An Interview with
Ernesto Laclau
Rudi Laermans
open
144 Books
144
Stevphen Shukaitis, Imaginal Machines:
Autonomy & Self-Organization
in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
Armin Medosch
146
Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson (eds.),
Curating and the Educational Turn
Ilse van Rijn
148
Marina Vishmidt and Metahaven (eds.),
Uncorporate Identity
Anthony Iles
150
Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines:
A Concise Philosophy of the Machine
as Social Movement
Sebastian Olma
153
Maria Hlavajova, Sven Ltticken and
Jill Winder (eds.), The Return of Religion
and Other Myths: A Critical Reader
in Contemporary Art
Ernst van den Hemel
155
Personalia
158
Credits
84 Column
Populism without
Popularity
Nina Power
86 The Spirit
of Mntzer
A Critical
Consideration
of Political
Mythology
Wu Ming
106 Te Myth
of Modern Politics
An Impossible
Constitution
Aukje van Rooden
114 Populism
Comments on a
Democratic Desire
Willem Schinkel
122 Artists
Contributions
122 The X-Factor
Foundland
134 Visual
Distortions
Luisa Lorenza Corna
and Lynda Dematteo
open open
Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination 4 Editorial 5
editorial
JORINDE SEIJDEL
THE POPULIST IMAGINATION
ON THE ROLE OF MYTH, STORYTELLING
AND IMAGINARY IN POLITICS
Some may have forgotten, but
politics still always is imagina-
tion, the capacity to dream collec-
tively, to tell stories; politics
still always accommodates a form
of mythology. If we want to take
populism seriously as a political
force, we must above all consider
it in the light of these aspects. At
the same time, we must ask ourselves
the diffcult question of why our own
politics no longer can appeal to the
imagination. With this provoca-
tive statement, guest editor Merijn
Oudenampsen sums up the theme of
Open 20 in his introductory essay.
Sociologist/political scientist
Oudenampsen (b. 1979, Amsterdam)
conducts research on Dutch populism,
and among other things is working on
a book on populism and the politics
of symbols. He is also the editor of
Flexmens.org, which reports on eve-
rything that makes life unpredict-
able migration, war, art, crisis,
modernity, and the housing market.
Perhaps someone of his generation
is precisely the one who should pose
this urgent question about politics
and the imagination, someone who
can go beyond the moral, rational
and politically correct standpoints
of traditional criticism, and far
beyond the protest generation of
1968, in considering and questioning
the current populist spectacle.
In the Netherlands, the formation
of a new cabinet has been going on
for months at the time of this writ-
ing, not lastly because of the promi-
nent position that populist Geert
Wilders and his Party for Freedom
(PVV) have acquired in the formation
process. However, this issue of Open
is not specifcally about populism in
the Netherlands, but also about its
current manifestations in the USA
(the Tea Party) and Italy (Berlusconi
and the Lega Nord), and about the
success of left-wing populism in
Latin America. The contributions
steer clear of the often all-too-easy
moral evaluations of populist party
programmes, or of passing judgments
on populist leaders. Populism is not
regarded here as a sickness, as
Le Monde recently opined in a piece
on the political situation in the
Low Lands, but as a manifestation of
the need for a politics that is not
merely based on public management
and a rational assessment of inter-
ests (Oudenampsen). People have a
desire for a new political discourse
with room for the imaginary and for
appealing stories. Not as a denial or
simplifcation of the complex social
reality, but as a recognition of its
mythical quality. This irrevocably
concerns the failure of modern poli-
tics, the emptiness of Western democ-
racy, xenophobia, neoliberalism and
the role of the media. But above all,
this issue of Open is a plea for a
more imaginative politics that empha-
sizes the importance of new, crea-
tive ways of thinking.
Thus the American sociologist
Stephen Duncombe argues for a dream-
politik. Politics should be the art of
the impossible, says Duncombe, and
for this we need tools and methods
that inspire people to dream them-
selves, instead of being subject
to the dreams of their leaders. He
shows how the artists/activists the
Yes Men and Steve Lambert organ-
ize political acts of imagination
that simultaneously shake people
awake and give them an opportunity
to momentarily drift off into a
dream world. The Italian theorists
Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet
go into Berlusconis media populism
and explain his success through a
historically determined religious-
cultural undercurrent, in which the
image is divine. Political sci-
entist Jolle Demmers and writer
Sameer S. Mehendale analyse how, in
the Netherlands, fantasizing about
purity and moralizing over culture
and citizenship has interacted with
the neoliberal market and the media
in giving rise to xenophobia.
Yves Citton, literary theorist,
pleads the case for new emancipatory
myths as a way out of the capital-
ist system, seen as crisis and not
as being in crisis. Rudi Laermans
interview with the Argentinean
political theorist Ernesto Laclau,
author of On Populist Reason (2005)
covers Latin American left-wing
populism and populism as an inherent
dimension of a democratic politics.
In the column, British philosopher
Nina Power declares that we must
again appropriate the concept of
popularity as a way of countering
the depressing populism we currently
are witnessing. In a discussion
on mythopoesis, the Italian writ-
ers collective Wu Ming critically
assesses its activist role in the
demonstrations against the G8 summit
and the IMF in Genoa in 2001.
Aukje van Rooden, Dutch philoso-
pher, says that the greatest myth
of our contemporary politics is the
assumption that it can function
without a mythological structure.
The rise of populist politicians is
accommodated by this faulty myth,
according to Van Rooden. Sociologist
Willem Schinkel contends that pop-
ulism should not be considered a
threat to democracy. In a time of
radical depoliticization, populism
is valuable as a mnemonic technique,
a reminder of the political, states
Schinkel.
In the pictorial/written con-
tribution by the graphic design
and research bureau Foundland,
graphic design is employed as a way
of researching the symbolism and
media representation of populism
and its leaders. In collaboration
with anthropologist Lynda Dematteo,
Italian graphic designer Luisa
Lorenza Corna analyses the visual
strategies of the populist movement
Lega Nord.
6 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Political Populism 7

On 28 August 2010, a startling specta-
cle took place in Washington, DC. This
day is engraved in the collective memory
of Americans as the day of Martin
Luther King. On 28 August 1963, he
gave his famous I have a dream speech
here. The address, delivered on the steps
of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd
of hundreds of thousands of demon-
strators, was part of the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom and
marked a high point in the American
civil rights movement. I have a dream
would become a sacrosanct part of the
pantheon of US history at least, after
the gradual institutional acceptance of
the claims of the civil rights movement
and after the never-solved murder of
King in 1968.
This symbolic day and this sym-
bolic place were seized upon this year
by the right-wing populist talk show
host Glenn Beck, epigone of the Tea
Party movement, in order to organize
an event around the slogan Restoring
Honor. The other Tea Party leader,
Sarah Palin, was equally in on the pro-
ceedings. The idea, according to Beck
during his show, was to claim the civil
rights movement in other words, to
give it a new political meaning, so that
the Tea Party movement could tread
in Kings footsteps and claim the sym-
bolic power and democratic legitimacy
of this moment for its own agenda.
Here we are dealing with a fascinating
politics of rewriting history that, as
evidenced by the many analyses of the
civil rights movement made by Glenn
Beck in his talk show (salient detail: he
has a degree in history), is conducted
very consciously.
Kings dream itself was already such
an operation. Of course, it was the
imagination of a new society, in which
the systematic discrimination against
the Afro-American population would
be undone, but this dream did not stand
on its own. Martin Luther King placed
his dream in the American dream,
referring to the ideals of equality in the
American constitution. According to
King, these ideals could only be realized
by constructing a welfare state that, in
the sphere of education, housing and
jobs, would make equality for the black
population more than a dead letter. I
have a dream was therefore a left-wing
re-articulation of the American dream,
in which, to use the terms of semiotics,
the signifer freedom was coupled with
the signifed expansion of the welfare
state. The dream of the Tea Party
movement claims the same word as did
the March on Washington freedom
but imbues it with a series of opposite
associations: anti-government, anti-tax
and anti-Islam. By placing his own
dream in Kings dream, Glenn Beck
overwrites it with his own meanings and
thus erases the old ones.
Like the Hollywood blockbuster
Inception, in which Leonardo di
Caprio descends layer by layer, dream
by dream, into human subconscious-
ness in order to plant an artifcially
created dream, what we have here is a
dream within a dream within a dream,
whereby one dream is used to give
another a new meaning. It is a fght for
the imaginary of American society, in
which a populist right-wing campaign
has set itself the goal of rendering
harmless a historical past of left-wing
Merijn
Oudenampsen
Political Populism
Speaking to
the Imagination
Contrary to what
many people might
think, politics
involves imagina-
tion, storytelling
and the creation of
myths. According to
sociologist Merijn
Oudenampsen,
guest editor of this
issue, recognizing
this truth is abso-
lutely essential if
we are to under-
stand and learn
from populism as
a growing political
force.
8 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Political Populism 9
protest, and of appropriating its sym-
bolic power.
The signifcance of this episode
extends beyond the polarized rela-
tions in the USA. Glenn Becks speech
symbolizes a sweeping reversal of roles
that has taken place in many Western
societies. Appealing to the imagina-
tion was an essential characteristic of
the cycle of protest movements in the
1960s and 1970s not for nothing All
power to the imagination! is still the
most famous slogan of the May 68
revolt in Paris. At the time, it signifed
a form of liberation: the possibility of
a radically different society, the casting
off of existing, rigid role patterns, the
breaking open of old identities: race,
sex, class, etcetera. People imagined
a new future in order to annihilate
the past: Cours camarade, le vieux
monde est derrire toi (Run comrade,
the old world is behind you), another
of those slogans from 68. Nowadays
right-wing populist movements Geert
Wilders PVV in the Netherlands, the
Lega Nord in Italy, or the Tea Party
movement in the USA, to name but a
few are storming the political stage
and in turn enlist the imagination to
fght the status quo. They do so in an
opposite direction: instead of a new
future, they imagine an idealized past.
The Tea Party movement, for example,
dons historical costumes from the time
of the Boston tea party, and the Lega
Nord organizes large-scale events with
knights in armour and the accompany-
ing heraldry; Geert Wilders steps into a
rowboat in his campaign flm and foats
through a pastoral Dutch polder land-
scape with the indispensable windmill in
the background. Right-wing populism,
instead of dismantling existing role pat-
terns and identities, is about the accen-
tuation of these categories by placing
the norm on a pedestal, which results
from the appeal to ordinary people, or
the stereotypical femininity of a hockey
mom and the viral masculinity of a
Berlusconi, or the theme of autochthon
versus immigrant.
The remarkable aspect of the
current situation is that people on the
left of the political spectrum react to
this new politics of the imagination by
calling for rationality and realism. It is
an illustration of the analysis Stephen
Duncombe put forward earlier in his
book Dream: the ideological inheri-
tors of the May 68 protest slogan of
Take your desires for reality are now
counselling its reversal: take reality
for your desires. The left and right
have switched roles: the right taking
on the mantle
of radicalism
and progressives
waving the fag of
conservatism.
1

As the Martin Luther King example
shows, these politics of imagination and
storytelling are not limited to populism;
these can be found to a greater or lesser
degree in almost all historical political
movements. However, the use of imagi-
nation and storytelling is an essential
ingredient in populist politics. After all,
without imagination, it cannot appeal
to the people a prerequisite for pop-
ulism, as we shall presently see.

We row against the current is the message Geert Wilders conveys in this
PVV campaign commercial.
1. Stephen Duncombe,
Dream: Re-imagining
Progressive Politics in an
Age of Fantasy (New York:
New Press, 2007).

10 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Political Populism 11
Populism: Imagining the People

Although in some countries almost the
entire political game revolves around
the threat of right-wing populism, until
now very few people seem to take that
same populism seriously as a politi-
cal force. This comes to the fore most
clearly in the (hardly productive) dis-
qualifcation of populism as demagogy,
simplism, gut politics and the like. In
many cases, the word populist is used
as a simple insult, which sooner shows
a lack of intelligence of those who use
it than of those who are accused of
it; after all, it does not produce much
more than moral self-gratifcation.
Another curious commonplace regard-
ing populism is that it simply means
the peoples wish is our command, or
rather, a sort of direct (gut) democracy.
Political elites in particular comment
on populism in this condescending
manner. This accusation is frst of all
remarkable because it makes abun-
dantly clear what the established
parties notion of democracy is: you
vote, we rule. Secretly, of course, it is
no news that democracy always means
guided democracy;
2
it is only some-
what nave to make
this explicit in the
expectation that
it will result in a change of electoral
fortunes. It is also remarkable in that
the populists claim that they speak
for the people is swallowed uncriti-
cally which allows populists to present
themselves as the democratic opposi-
tion and to sideline the political estab-
lishment as alienated from ordinary
people. This commonplace notion of
populism prevents us from seeing what
we are discussing in this text: the role of
imagination and storytelling in populist
politics.
There are many different interpreta-
tions of the concept of populism. The
prevailing academic consensus is that
it is an extremely intangible phenom-
enon that is diffcult to defne. Isaiah
Berlin once said that populism has a
Cinderella complex, there is a shoe in
the form of populism, but no foot to ft
it. As the label of populism is bandied
about so often, I would think it more
realistic to turn this statement around:
there is a wealth of populist feet, in all
sorts of shapes and sizes; however, there
is no populist shoe with a ft that can
accommodate this diversity. Nonethe-
less, with a bit of effort one can draw a
minimal consensus from the cacophony
of scholarly observations on populism,
namely that populism is a politics
that speaks in name of the people and
opposes itself to the establishment.
Regarding the so-called people,
however, there is something special
going on with populism: the term is
never equivalent to the entire political
community, there are always groups
that are excluded from it starting with
the establishment, of course. This split-
ting up of the political community into
different components is precisely where
the essence of populism lies, according
to Ernesto Laclau in his book On Popu-
list Reason: An institutional discourse
is one that attempts to make the limits
of the discursive formation coincide
with the limits of the community. . . .
The opposite takes place in the case of
populism: a frontier of exclusion divides
2. See Jacques Ranciere,
Hatred of Democracy
(London: Verso, 2007).
society in two camps. The people, in
that case, is something less than the
totality of the members of the com-
munity: it is a partial component which
nevertheless aspires
to be conceived as
the only legitimate
totality.
3
Lets look at a recent example. In
the American elections of 2008, we wit-
nessed two different ways of appealing
to the people. Barack Obamas cam-
paign was an example of institutional
discourse. In his speeches he appealed
to the entire American population,
with the American dream as unify-
ing symbol. On his website you could
obtain stickers: Latinos for Obama,
Gays for Obama, Dog Owners for
Obama, Labor for Obama, Farmers
for Obama you name it, there was
a sticker for it, or a Facebook group.
On the other side of the political spec-
trum, the Republicans John McCain
and Sarah Palin also appealed to the
American people, but in a radically dif-
ferent manner. They spoke of the real
America (small town America, the
heartland and the silent majority are
comparable concepts), setting it against
the unreal America, that of the liberal
elite. We fnd the same discourse in the
Tea Party movement. Here we see the
populist logic, whereby one component
the pure, unspoiled rural or subur-
ban America becomes a symbol that
serves as a substitute for America as a
whole. The logical conclusion of this
type of discourse is that certain com-
ponents of the community are excluded
from the people, and hence from polit-
ical legitimacy.
In the Netherlands, the same typi-
cally populist operation takes place
with an appeal to virtual categories
such as Jan met de pet (the average
Joe), ordinary people, or the hard-
working Dutch. These are symbolic
elements that function as a substitute
for a political community as such and
stand in opposition to other elements
(for example, the estranged left-wing
elite and Moslem immigrants or welfare
recipients and profteers) who are
excluded from political legitimacy. An
illustration of these front dynamics
in Dutch populism is the speech given
by Geert Wilders during the debate
on the national budget for 2009, in
which he declares that the Netherlands
under prime minister Balkenende is
a state of two Netherlands, that of
the subsidy-guzzling elite, and of the
hard-working ordinary people who are
forced to swallow the consequences of
the elites failing multicultural policy:
The Balkenende state is a state of two
Netherlands. . . . On the one side is
our elite with their so-called ideals. A
multicultural society, outrageously high
taxes, the insane climate hysteria, the
unstoppable Islamisation, a Brussels
super state and senseless foreign aid. . . .
This is the left-wing canal belt and their
sticky friends. The other Netherlands,
my Netherlands, consists of the people
who have to pay the bill. Literally
and fguratively. Who are robbed and
threatened. Who are weighed down by
the harassment of street terrorists, bur-
dened by high taxes and who yearn for a
social Netherlands. These are the people
who have built up
our country.
4

3. Ernesto Laclau, On
Populist Reason (London:
Verso, 2005), 81.
4. The speech can be found
on the website of the PVV:
http://www.pvv.nl.

12 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Political Populism 13
ernment bureaucracy, a welfare state
that no longer functions for ordinary
people but only for foreigners and the
left-wing cultural elite, concerns about
crime and a judicial process that is too
soft, the problems in the depressed dis-
tricts and with urban renewal, etcetera.
In many cases, these are storylines that
do not have anything to do with inte-
gration per se, but do resonate with its
theme. The populist technique revolves
around the charging of a person or an
issue with such symbolic connotations,
bringing together different storylines
around a face or a slogan. Ambigu-
ous symbols are used for this purpose,
the empty signifers; the notion of
freedom we came across earlier with
Martin Luther King and Glenn Beck
is a good example: it is such a fexible
concept that it can be articulated for
both the expansion and reduction of
government. The so-called vagueness of
the populist discourse is therefore not
an indication of its underdevelopment.
Precisely because of its vagueness, pop-
ulism can be a very advanced technique
for binding together an extremely het-
erogeneous electorate with very hetero-
geneous demands.
What we can conclude from a
reading of Laclaus work is that pop-
ulism is not so much about giving
voice to the will of the people for
that remains largely a virtual concept.
It is more about giving form to the
people and the will of the people, and
about constructing an internal frontier,
through the creation of images and the
telling of stories: frst of all, through
negative identifcation, by placing
certain groups out of the community,
the so-called constitutive outside. The
people take form by the disqualifca-
tion of certain groups, by determining
what they are not. Being opposed to the
liberal elite, or the estranged elite, and
to the Other (the enemy) in the Dutch
case usually Moslems (terrorists), or
immigrants provides an identity for
an otherwise formless and very hetero-
geneous electorate that shares no clear
ideology or policy preference in the
positive sense. Moreover, populisms
symbolic politics in the positive sense
revolves around the appropriation and
politicization of cultural symbols that
might be able to express this limited
idea of the people. This brings us back
to the beginning of this article, the
politicization of the Boston tea party in
order to reduce the essence of America
to an anti-tax and anti-government
sentiment.
Is the electorate so uncritical and
malleable that it will swallow every-
thing that it is offered from the political
arena? Of course not. This is a recipro-
cal relation; as long as the images are
good enough, as long as people recog-
nize themselves in the rhetorical fgures
presented to them the average Joe,
the hard-working, taxpaying, ordinary
people then the chance that they will
adopt the corresponding worldview
is greater. This is a process of ideo-
logical manipulation that the French
philosopher Althusser once described
as interpellation.
5
Althussers famous
example is a police
offcer who yells
on the street, Hey,
you there! Those
who feel personally
A front divides society into two camps:
the Netherlands of the left-wing elite
and that of the ordinary taxpaying
citizens, the people. It is the plebs
a relatively excluded and under-
valued part of the community that
are declared to be the only legitimate
populus. The front that is produced
between the elite and the people
through this technique is what Laclau
calls the internal frontier.
This last concept shows an inter-
esting similarity with the idea of the
democratic gap between citizens and
representative politics. It is a view often
heard: the widening confdence gap
between people and the political system
is the reason for the rise of populism.
However, Laclau points to an opposite
causal relation: populism is not so much
an expression of this gap, but actually
aims at producing it. Geert Wilders, for
example, misses no opportunity to show
that he is not one of the government
types in the Hague with their backroom
political talk and mores, while at the
same time continually hammering away
at how far the reality in which politi-
cians and administrators live is removed
from the reality on the streets, what-
ever that might be.
If we follow Laclaus reasoning
further, the democratic gap, by defni-
tion, can never defnitively be closed. In
his view, society is not totalizable: it
cannot be neatly summed up in univer-
sal common denominators or simpli-
fed into a series of social classes with
corresponding needs and demands:
in fact, there is no such thing as the
society, he claims, in an unexpected
variation on Thatchers famous slogan.
Consequently, society can never be
represented in its entirety. So there
are always political demands from the
population democratic demands, says
Laclau that fall outside the boat, that
are not politically represented, with
political dissatisfaction as the result.
As long as this dissatisfaction exists in
separate pockets as long as it can be
handled differentially, to use Laclaus
term everything goes smoothly. In
other words, as long as the democratic
gap is comprised of a lot of different,
singular gaps that are separate from
one another, this dissatisfaction cannot
crystallize. As long as peoples dissat-
isfaction about traffc jams does not
mix with their dissatisfaction about
derelict neighbourhoods, or dissatisfac-
tion about bureaucratization is sepa-
rate from that about crime, political
dissatisfaction is divided throughout
the society but fnds no crystallization
point. However, as soon as a series
of demands remains unfulflled and a
connection is created between these
demands what Laclau calls the chain
of equivalence through a political
discourse, then it can happen that one
of the demands appoints itself as a
symbol for all of the other unfulflled
demands. This is the populist moment
in Laclaus theory. Thus populism
revolves around the transformation of
singular democratic gaps into one col-
lective gap, a crystallization point of
political dissatisfaction.
One example of this is the way in
which the theme of integration in the
Netherlands is charged with very dif-
ferent meanings as a symbol of a larger
dissatisfaction with politics: failing gov-
5. Louis Althusser, Ideol-
ogy and Ideological State
Apparatuses, in: Lenin
and Philosophy and other
Essays (New York/London:
Monthly Review Press,
1971), 121-176.

14 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Political Populism 15
prevailing idea in Marxism that people
are politically formed by their material
circumstances and their rational con-
sciousness of that fact (if people did not
understand their own interests, that was
due to a form of false class conscious-
ness, on which few words were wasted).
Myths, says Sorel, enclose with them
all the strongest inclinations of a
people, of a party or of a class.
8
Just
as with Laclaus
populism, Sorels myths served to con-
struct an internal frontier, in order
to advance socialisms war against
modern society and to further broaden
the gap between workers and capital-
ists. We therefore can consider Sorel
one of the founding fathers of modern
populism.
Sorels writings would have a very
important infuence on both the left
and the right. At the time of his burial,
both the Soviet Union and fascist Italy
offered to pay for a mausoleum. One of
the most famous of Sorels readers was
Benito Mussolini, who claimed: I owe
most to Georges Sorel. This master of
syndicalism by his rough theories of
revolutionary tactics has contributed
most to form the discipline, energy and
power of the fascist cohorts.
9

Mussolini used
the idea of the
Sorelian myth for
his own project, that of building fascism
out of the mythical re-enactment of
the Roman Empire. At the same time,
on the other side of the political spec-
trum, we fnd another famous reader
of Sorels, the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci. He was imprisoned under
Mussolinis regime, at which time he
wrote his famous Quaderni del Carcere
(Prison Notebooks). One of its most
important sections, called The Modern
Prince, is a refection on Machiavelli,
in which he remarks that the fgure
of the prince in the work of Machi-
avelli must be understood as a mythical
symbol: Machiavellis Prince could be
studied as a historical example of the
Sorelian myth, of a political ideology
expressed by the creation of concrete
phantasy which acts on a dispersed and
shattered people to
arouse and organize
its collective will.
10
And so we arrive at the description
of the contemporary political leader
as a myth, a body of images capable
of evoking instinctively . . . all the
strongest inclinations of a people, of a
party, of a class. The prince in Machi-
avellis classic work thus becomes a
form of branding, which focuses on
the irrational passions of the popula-
tion with the help of mythic images.
Think of Obama as the embodiment
of the American dream, of the hope
of redemption; Putin as the embodi-
ment of the Russian bear; Berlusconi
as the ultimate mediacrat and symbol
of Italys irrepressible virility, and so
forth. The fgure of Wilders can also
be studied as an instance of the Sore-
lian myth. The Dutch foundational
myth has its origins in the Netherlands
eternal struggle with water. Creating
the polders from the water; the fooding
of the land as a line of defence under
William of Orange; the polder model,
inspired by the culture of consensus
arising from the district water boards;
the fooding of 1953; the colonial past
7. Georges Sorel,
Refections on Violence
(Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press,
1999/1908), 118.
9. Quoted in the introduc-
tion of Refections on Vio-
lence by Georges Sorel, ibid.
8. Ibid., 115.
addressed acknowledge the police offc-
ers authority. According to Althusser,
the same process takes place during
peoples ideological formation: they feel
personally appealed to, addressed by an
ideological exposition that they make
their own. Interpellation is an ideologi-
cal recruiting process, whereby images
and storylines are used to ft peoples
everyday world into certain political
interpretive frameworks by describing
concrete, actually existing situations.

The Role of Myths

At the beginning of this article, I
referred to the way in which the imagi-
nary of American society based on
cultural symbols such as the Boston
tea party or the American dream
becomes the subject of political strug-
gle. This is in line with Claude Leforts
proposition that every society creates
an imaginary image of itself, and that
in a democratic society this self-
image is the subject of continuous con-
fict. Lefort draws this conclusion from
a reading of Il Principe by Niccol
Machiavelli (1469-1527). In this
famous book, in which Machiavelli sets
out the power tactics and strategies that
a political ruler of his day ought to have
at his disposal, he states that one of the
most important functions of the prince
lies in his refective capacity: providing
society with an image of its identity.
In the monarchies of that time, the
prince literally embodied power and, as
such, held up to society a unitary self-
image, a mirror. In democracy, says
Lefort, this imaginary place of power is
empty, a terrain of continual confict.
6

A society stages
itself, imagines
itself and under-
stands itself by way
of the confict in the political domain.
In a certain sense, therefore, we should
understand politics as a theatre play, a
form of telling stories about the iden-
tity of a society. In a monarchy, by def-
nition, there was only one performer;
nowadays, a number of politicians fght
over who can tell the best story on the
political stage.
The thinker who placed the great-
est emphasis on the importance of this
kind of story for political practice was
the French syndicalist Georges Sorel,
who published his famous Refexions
sur la Violence in 1906. The most
interesting theme in this book is the
mobilizing power of social myths.
According to Sorel, these can surface
as national myths, such as the legend
of the French Revolution, or as myths
of particular political movements, such
as the leftist myth of the inevitable col-
lapse of capitalism. Myths must not be
judged on their sense of reality, but on
their effectiveness in bringing together
a populace that otherwise is divided
and heterogeneous. The myth of the
American dream has a comparable
function. Sorel himself argued for the
myth of the general strike, which he
described as a body of images capable
of evoking instinctively all the senti-
ments which correspond to the different
manifestations of the war undertaken
by Socialism against modern society.
7

With this emphasis
on irrationality,
he broke with the
6. Claude Lefort, Democ-
racy and Political Theory,
translated by David Macey
(Cambridge: Polity Press,
1988).
10. Antonio Gramsci,
Prison Notebooks (London:
Lawrence & Wishart,
1971), 126.
16 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Political Populism 17
Election poster promoting Hendrikus Colijn, a conservative politician of
the 1920s and 30s; the helmsman will have to steer the ship of state
through the pre-war crisis.
The image that Rita Verdonk used to launch her political party, Trots op
Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands).
18 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Political Populism 19
In one campaign commercial, a seagull fying overhead morphs into the logo
of the PVV, symbolizing the freedom (vrijheid) referenced in the name of
the party.
An example of the PVVs use of symbolic imagery: a lighthouse fgures pro-
minently in this campaign commercial for the European elections of 2009.

20 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination
of the Dutch East India Company all
of these are vital elements of the Dutch
national identity. We recognize some
of this symbolic material in Hendrikus
Colijn, an authoritarian politician from
the 1930s, and in todays Rita Verdonk.
Here, the sea symbolizes danger in
a classic manner and the ship is the
nation, on which the skipper looks to
the horizon and steers the people to
safety. Wilders makes his appeal to
the mythical past in his political pro-
motion flms, where in two flms he is
portrayed on a beach, one time as an
indomitable fgure facing a danger-
ous surf, peering towards the horizon,
with the turbulent sea symbolizing
danger from the outside (most likely the
tsunami of Islamization) and another
time standing beside a lighthouse (a
reference to rescue and his capacity
for orientation), or sitting in a rowboat
in a pastoral polder landscape, where
he cheerfully announces he is rowing
against the current. At the end of one
of the flms, a seagull fying overhead
suddenly transforms into the party
logo, the seagull of the PVV, symbol of
the freedom for which the PVV stands.
It looks like a childrens exercise for the
recognition of visual metaphors.
How do we deal with these mytho-
logical aspects of politics? The Italian
writers collective Wu Ming, which has
applied itself to the development of
contra-myths, makes a useful distinc-
tion between technifed myths la
Leni Riefenstahl, which lull people to
sleep, and authentic myths, which leave
peoples critical reasoning power intact.
Their own contribution to this issue
shows that the latter requires a con-
tinual questioning of the self.
In conclusion, this article is not
really so much about making a moral
judgment. Nor is it a plea for a return
to a politics that limits itself to ration-
ality, simply because we would feel
more comfortable with that. As the
average psychologist knows but politi-
cians, scholars and the media still do
not seem to comprehend man is far
from being a rationally thinking crea-
ture. What the protest generation of
1968 was aware of, what the current
populist movements are also thoroughly
aware of, is that politics involves more
than public management and a rational
assessment of interests. Some may
have forgotten, but politics still involves
imagination, the capacity to dream
collectively, to tell stories; politics still
contains a form of mythology. If we
want to take populism seriously as a
political force, we must above all con-
sider it in the light of these aspects.
At the same time, we must ask our-
selves the diffcult question of why our
own politics no longer appeal to the
imagination.
:: pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible :

!nhisday,ttovon8ismarckwas
knownlorthcpracticcolrealpolitik:a
hardhcadcdandhardhcartcdstylcol
politicsthatcschcwcdidcalsinlavour
olthcadvantagcousasscssmcntol
rcalconditions.Politics,in8ismarcks
words,wasthcartolthcpossiblc.8ut
Gcrmanys!ronChanccllorrulcdat
thccndolalongcraolopcnautoc
racy,whcrcthcdcsircsolthcpopulacc
mattcrcdlittlc,ilatall.Vhatwasrcal
isticthcnisnotrcalisticnow.Todaythc
crowdisinthcsaddlc,asthcAmcrican
publicrclationspionccr!vyLccwarncd
busincsslcadcrsinthcrstdccadcsol
thctwcnticthccntury,andpoliticsmust
cmbraccthcdrcamsolthcpcoplc(a
lcssonnotlostonaccrtainlcadcrola
latcrGcrmanRcich).
+
Furthcrmorc,
realconditions
havcchangcd.
Todaysworldis
linkcdbymcdia
systcmsandawash
inadvcrtisingimagcs,politicalpolicics
arcpackagcdbypublicrclationscxpcrts
andcclcbritygossipisconsidcrcdncws.
Morcandmorcolthccconomyis
dcvotcdtomarkctingandcntcrtain
mcntandthcpcrlormanccolscriptcd
rolcsinthcscrviccscctor.Tcimagi
naryisanintcgralpartolrcality.Real-
politik nowncccssitatcsdreampolitik.
Sowhatsortoldreampolitikisbcing
practiccdinthcus~inthctwcntyrst
ccntury:Lctsbcginwiththcprcsi
dcntialcampaignol8arackbama.
Noprcsidcntinrcccnthistoryhas
sosucccsslullychanncllcdpopular
Amcricanpoliticaldrcams.Ronald
Rcaganwasthclasttodoso,buthis
drcamollimitcdgovcrnmcntathomc
andmuscularintcrvcntionabroadwcrc,
altcrthrccdccadcs,shattcrcdbythc
lccblcstatcrcsponsctothcdomcstic
disastcrolHurricancKatrinainNcw
rlcansandthclorcigndcbaclcol
thcwarin!raq.AsAmcricansawokc
lromthisconscrvativcnightmarc,
bamaandhisadviscrsconjurcdup
acompctingandcompcllinglantasy:
ChangcandHopc.Changclromwhat
wasandhopclorwhatwouldbc.
Tcbrillianccolbamasdrcam
olwasitsabsolutccmptincss.Ncarly
anyonc,nomattcrwhatthcirpolitical
bclicls,couldcurlupinsidcitandlall
aslccpwithcontcntmcnt.Tistcch
niqucoldreampolitikisnotancwonc.
ValtcrLippmann,politicaljournalist
andadviscrtoncarlycvcryAmcrican
prcsidcntlromTcddyRooscvcltto
LyndonJohnson,outlincdthispracticc
backin+::inhismastcrworkPublic
Opinion. Hccallcditthcmanulacturc
olconscnt.Tcproccdurcissimplc:
inordcrtoorganizcthcmyriadand
oltcnconictingdcsircsandintcrcsts
olvotcrsinapopulardcmocracy,savvy
lcadcrslcarntomobilizcsymbolswith
whichpcoplccanidcntily.Tcbroadcr
andcmpticrthcsymbolthcbcttcr,as
itmakcslorabiggcrtcntwithinwhich
totagrcatcrnumbcrolpcoplcs
individualdrcams.Tctrickis,asLipp
mannwrotc,tosiphoncmotionoutol
distinctidcasandthcnchannclallthat
cmotionintoaunilyingsymbol.
:
Tat
symbolandallits
ncwlollowcrscan
thcnbcrclinkcd
toaparty,platlormorpolitician.8y
owningthcsymbol,youownthc
pcoplcslantasics,andilyouownthcir
+. !vyL. Lcc, addrcssbclorc
thcAmcricanlcctric
RailwayAssociation, +o
ctobcr++6, citcdinStu
artwcn, PR!(NcwYork:
8asic8ooks, +6), .
Stcphcnuncombc
PoliticsasArtol
thc!mpossiblc
Te Case for
a rcampolitik
in the USA
Adominantmovc
mcntinlcltistpoli
ticshasalways
cmbraccdascnscol
rcalityasopposcdto
drcamsandimagina
tion.TcAmcrican
sociologistStcphcn
uncombcargucs
instcadloradream-
politik,which,unlikc
rcactionarypopulist
lantasics,canactivatc
thcimaginationwith
impossiblcdrcams.
Tcymakcitpossiblc
tothinkoutolthc
boxandtowondcr
whatanaltcrnativc
worldandadicrcnt
attitudctolilcmight
bclikc.
:. ValtcrLippmann, Public
Opinion(NcwYork:Frcc
Prcss, +), +8, ++.

: pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible :

lantasicsthcnyouownthcirconscnt.
Givcnthccxhaustionolncoconscrv
ativcidcalsandthcascoolGcorgc
V.8ushsprcsidcncy,vcrylcwAmcri
cansdidntdrcamolchangcin:oo8.
Andwhoisntlorhopc:Vhat!hopc
lorandwantthcworldtochangcto
mightbcvcrydicrcntlromamiddlc
Amcricansuburbanitcdclcctinglrom
thcRcpublicanParty,butwccanboth
cmbraccthcdrcamolhopcandchangc.
Mobilizingthcscabstractions,8arack
bamawoninalandslidc.8utthcrcs
alatalawtothcmanulacturcol
conscnt:ancmptysymbolcanrcmain
cmptyloronlysolong.Vhatiswidcly
intcrprctcdasbamascxccssivcpolit
icalcautionincnactinganyrcalchangc
mightbcbcttcrundcrstoodasasavvy
undcrstandingolthismcchanicsolthc
manulacturcolconscntonccpowcr
isobtaincd.bamadclaycdgiving
substancctothcdrcamloraslongas
possiblcbutsooncrorlatcrpolitical
dccisionshadtobcmadcandrcal
policicscnactcd.Andthisiswhcnhis
popularityplummctcd.Ashisadmin
istrationcscalatcdthcwarinAlghani
stanhcbctraycdmydrcamolpcacc,
andwhcnhcpasscdthchcalthcarcbill
hclostmylimitcdgovcrnmcntloving
middlcAmcricandoppclgangcr.
Tcdisjuncturcbctwccnthcdrcams
conjurcdupbybamaandthcdisap
pointingpoliticalrcaliticshcsdcliv
crcdhashaddisparatcccctacrossthc
politicalspcctrum.Libcrals,lorthc
mostpart,havcgivcnupthcirdrcams.
Tcysupportthcprcsidcnt,notwith
thcinitialcmotionthatbamahad
onccmastcrlullysiphoncd,butinstcad
withadispiritcdscnscolncccssity.Tc
popularright,onthcothcrhand,has
loundsomcthingtodrcamaboutagain.
Noplaccisthisphantasmagoricrcnais
sanccondisplaymorcthanwiththc
TcaParty.

rcamsolthcPast

PcoplcinthcTcaPartydrcamolbcing
Amcricanpatriotsolthcpast.And
thcylovctodrcssthcpart,sportingtri
corncrhatsandwcaringcolonialgarb,
wavingAmcricanagsandholding
alolttcabags.Asthcirnamcand
dominantsymbolsuggcst,thcscpcoplc
honcstlyandcarncstlythinkolthcm
sclvcsasthcidcologicalhcirstothc
SonsolLibcrtythatdumpcd8ritish
tcaintothc8ostonharbour.(Social
istsarcTodaysRcdcoats,rcadsasign
attachcdtoatricorncrhatataTca
Partyprotcst.)TcTcaPartyspolitics,
atthcirmostcohcrcnt,adhcrctothis
scllstylization.JustasthcAmcrican
colonistsrallicdtoghtanintrusivc
govcrnmcnt,thcTcaPartymustcrs
itstroopstoprotcstthccxpansionol
govcrnmcnthcalthcarcandintcrlcr
cnccinthclrccmarkct,justasthc
ashpointlorthcAmcricanRcvolution
wasunlairtaxation,sotoo,dothcTca
Particrsrailagainstgovcrnmcntlcvics,
ashingthcirlavouritcsign:Taxcd
noughAlrcady.
8utthcrcsaproblcmincquating
thcpoliticalgricvanccsolcightccnth
ccnturyAmcricanrcvolutionaricswith
todaysTcaPartyactivists,anditisa
rcvcalingproblcm.Tcpatriotsolthc
pastwcrcnotprotcstinggovcrnmcntor
taxationpcrsc,thcywcrcrilcdupovcr
rulcbyforeigngovcrnmcntandtaxation
Obama/Hope, poster by Shepard Fairy, 2008.
Tea Party protest, ca. 2010.

:6 pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible :

without representation. Today,howcvcr,
thcrcisausgovcrnmcntmadcupol
clcctcdrcprcscntativcs.Givcnthis,thcrc
arctwowaystoundcrstandthcTca
Partyslaultyanalogy:onc,thcyrcally
arcthcignoranthicksthatlibcrals
bclicvcthcmtobcandnccdtobc
cducatcdinbasicushistory,ortwo,Tca
ParticrstrulybclicvcthatthcFcdcral
Govcrnmcntisalorcignbodyandthcir
clcctcdocialsdontrcallyrcprcscnt
thcm.GivcnthcTcaPartysobscssion
withprovingthatPrcsidcntbamawas
notborninthcus~,itssalctobcton
intcrprctationnumbcrtwo.
PartolthcTcaPartysrclusalto
acknowlcdgcthclcgitimacyolthc
currcntusgovcrnmcntisjustsour
grapcs.Altcrooddycarsolconscrva
tivcrulc,thcrightlostthclastclcction
andlostitbadly.!tsnotunrcprcscnta
tivcrulc,asthcymightlantasizc,its
thatthcothcrsidcsrcprcscntativcs
won.Tatshowadcmocracyworks.
8utthcrcssomcthingmorcatstakc.!t
isntjustpoliticalrcprcscntationthat
TcaParticrslcclalicnatcdlrom,itis
culturalrepresentation.
Youcanspcndwcckswandcring
thcvastmcdiascapcandnotsccasca
olmiddlcagcd,middlcAmcrican
whitcncsslikcaTcaPartyrally.vcr
thcpastoycars,partlyoutolpolitical
conccrn,partlyoutolsomcdcsircto
accuratclyrcprcscntthcchanginglacc
olAmcrica,butmostlyinanattcmptto
rcachasbroadanaudicnccaspossiblc,
thcculturcindustryhaslargclyrcjcctcd
suchblandhomogcncity.Tcstarring
rolcsinmosthitdramasstillgotothc
straightwhitcguyandgirl,butthc
showwouldsccmincomplctcwithouta
couplcolcostarsoladicrcntcolour.
Andwhilcwhitcsstilldominatcposi
tionsollactualauthorityinthcmass
mcdia,cvcrylocalncwscasthasthcir
othcranchor.!tsbccnalongjourncy
lromthcnovcltyolNatKingColcin
thcmid+ostothcroutinizcdmulti
hucdcastingolashowlikctodays
Survivor,butwhatthcAmcricanaudi
cnccwatchcs,andthushowthcyscc
thcirworldandimagincitspossibilitics,
hasbccnirrcvocablyaltcrcd.icr
cnccisnolongcrdicrcnt,anddivcr
sity,albcitinitsmostbanallorm,is
whatAmcricanshavccomctocxpcct.
8cncaththiscthcrcalmcdiarainbow
thcrcuscdtobcplaccswcrconcmight
rcliablyndjowlywhitcguysplaying
promincntrolcs,oncolthcmbcingthc
nationscapital.Tcncamcthcbama
notsoVhitcHousc.
Takcourcountryback!isa
commoncryataTcaPartyprotcst.
8ack.8acktoatimcwhcnwhitcpcoplc
wcrcrmlyinpowcrandthoscolothcr
raccskncwthcirplacc.8utalsobackto
animaginaryAmcricathatwasalmost
cntirclywhitcaswcll.TcaPartyrallics
thccostumcs,thcoutragc,thcprovoca
tivcrhctoricarcsothcatricalbccausc
thcyarethcatrc:awaylordisacctcd
whitcpcoplctorcprcscntthcmsclvcs
inamcdiatcdworldthatnolongcr
rccognizcsthcm.TcTcaPartylolks
havcanasccntundcrstandingthatthcy
arcoutolsyncwiththcculturaldrcams
olAmcrica.TisisasubtcxttoSarah
PalinsappcalstothcRcalAmcrica.
8utthcproblcmlorthcTcaPartyis
thatamulticulturalAmcricaisnota
mcrcmcdialantasy,itsadcmographic
rcality.Andithasbccnlorsomctimc:
CrispusAttucks,thcrstpatriotkillcd
inthc8ostonMassacrc,wasblack.!n
arcccntCaptainAmcricacomicbook
agroupolprotcstcrsisshownholding
aloltsignsthatrcadTca8agTcLibs
8clorcTcyTca8agvou!Captain
AmcricaandhisAlricanAmcrican
sidckickFalconlookdownonthc
crowdinthcstrcctanddismissthcmas
ajustabuncholangrywhitcpcoplc.

Vhcnyouvcbccn
disscdbyCaptain
Amcricayouknow
yourconthclosing
sidcolhistory.
8ypasscdbymulticulturalAmcrica,
TcaParticrsarcattcmptingtorcsur
rcctamythic(whitc)pastthroughtri
corncrhatsandcolonialgarb.Tcymay
lookridiculous,butthatdocsntmcan
thcyarcnotdangcrous.Tcalicnation
thatTcaParticrslccllromthcdomi
nantlantasicsanddcmographicrcalitics
olthcus~iscxactlywhatmakcsthcm
sovolatilc.Tcyhavcnoscnscolidcn
ticationwiththcmajorityandlittlc
rccognitionfromthcmajority,andthcsc
arcthcconditionsthatbrccdincivility,
violcnccandpcrhapscvcntcrror.!l
thcmajoritydocsntcxistinthcdrcam
worldolthcTcaParty,thcnviolcncc
againstthcmisnotquitcrcal.And,
paradoxically,whcnthcdrcamworldol
thcTcaPartyisnotrccognizcdbythc
majority,whatbcttcrthanviolcnccto
makcthcmnoticc:8utthcirdrcamhas
noluturc.Nodoubtthcrcwillbcclcc
toralshocksandviolcntoutburstslrom
thcTcaPartyovcrthcncxtlcwycars,
butinthccnditwilldisappcarlikc
FathcrCoughlinsNationalUnionlor
SocialJusticc,thcJohn8irchSocicty,
thcKuKluxKlanandthcmyriadothcr
manilcstationsolthcpopulistradical
rightinthcus~thatpromiscdadrcam
olthcpast.

rcamingthcFuturc

Sowhatisthcaltcrnativc:!sthcrca
practiccoldreampolitikdistinctlrom
thcrcactionary,andultimatclydoomcd,
popularlantasicsolthclarrightand
thcmanulacturcdconscntolthc
politicalclitc:!thinkso.Youwillnot
nditamongthclibcrallclt,vacil
latingasthcyarcbctwccnasupportlor
bamarationalizcdbythcrcaliticsol
thcprcscntandrccxivccriticismolhis
policicswithnocountcrinspirations
ocrcd.8utonthccrcativclringcsol
thclcltanothcrtypcoldrcamingis
takingplacc.
n+:Novcmbcr:oo8,Ncw
Yorkcrsawokctoaspccialcditionol
thcNew York Times,handcdoutbya
lcgionolvoluntccrsatsubway,busand
trainstationsacrossthccity.iv~gw~v
vxbsscrcamcdthchcadlinc,lollowcd
byanarticlcrcportingthatustroops
wouldimmcdiatclywithdrawlrom!raq
andthatthcuxwouldtakcrcspon
sibilitylorrcbuildingthcsocialand
politicalinstitutionsolbothcountrics.
Tisncwswassurroundcdbyrcports
dcclaringpassagcolaMaximumVagc
Law,thccliminationoltuitionatall
publicunivcrsitics,abanonlobbying,
andatimclincdctailinghowprogrcs
sivcsgaincdpowcrinVashington,bc.
vcnthcadvcrtiscmcntscnvisioncd
autopicluturc:apicturcpcrlcctlull
pagcadlorxxon,withthctaglinc:
Pcacc.Anidcathcworldcanprot
. Captain America, #6o:
(NcwYork:MarvclUni
vcrsc, :o+o). Prcssurcdby
conscrvativcs, Marvcllatcr
apologizcdlorthcirpor
trayalolthcTcaParty.
:8 pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible :
lrom,plcdgcdthcmultinationalto
apacicandcnvironmcntallysound
luturc.TcTimesslogan:AllthcNcws
TatsFittoPrint,
wasaltcrcdloronc
daytorcad:Allthc
NcwsVcHopcto
Print.

vcr8o,ooocopicsolthclaux
Times(thcorganizcrs,inlabulistlorm,
claimcdovcramillion)wcrchandcd
outacrossthccityandlorwardcdto
nationalandintcrnationalncwsrooms,
whcrcncwsolthcncwswasthcn
sprcadaroundthcworld.Tcprojcct,
thcrcsultolthcclandcstinclabourol
hundrcdsolcontributorslacilitatcdby
artist/activistsAndy8ichlbaumolthc
YcsMcnandStcvcLambcrt,apolitical
artistwithahistoryolutopianintcr
vcntions,wasmcantasanimaginary
actolpolitics,orrathcr,apoliticalact
olimagination.Tcprcgurcdluturc,
howcvcr,wasnotmcantasamagical
translormation:cachcvcntrcportcdin
thcpapcrwasdcscribcdasthcrcsultol
cvcrydaycitizcnspushingloramorc
progrcssivcagcnda.Yctthccxpcricncc
wasmcanttobcmagical.Tcrcalismol
thcncwspapcrwassingularlyimprcs
sivc:thcpapcr,thctypc,thclayout,cvcn
thctoncandstylcolthcarticlcsand
adsthcmsclvcswcrccraltcdtocrcatc
abclicvablcproductolanimaginary
luturc.Tcorganizcrshopcdtomakc
pcoplcstopand,loramomcnt,cntcr
adrcamworld.Tcchallcngcisntto
makcpcoplcthinkthatthcwarisa
badidca,sinccmostpcoplcalrcadydo,
8ichlbaumcxplaincdatthctimc.Tc
challcngcistomakcpcoplclcclitcan
bcovcrnow.Hccontinucs:Vcwantcd
pcoplctorcadthisandsaytothcm
sclvcs,Vhatil:

Verfremdungseect,orVhat!l:

Vhatil:tostatcthcobviousisa
qucstion.!tisaqucstionthatdisrupts
thclantasy,itasksthcpcrsonrcading
thcTimes torcalizcthatwhatthcyhold
inthcirhandsrcprcscntsadrcam.Tc
strikingvcrisimilitudcolthcncwspapcr
wasintcndcdtoconvcyascnscollclt
possibility.Noncolthisiscurrcntly
truc,coorganizcrStcvcLambcrt
cxplaincd,butitsallpossiblc.

8ut
thcscnscolpossi
bilitythatthcpapcr
hopcdtocvokcis
complicatcd,lorat
thcsamctimcthcrcadcrwasmcantto
feelthcpossibilityolpcaccandjusticc,
shcwascxpcctcdtoknowthatthiswas
justadrcam.
8crtolt8rccht,thcgrcatGcrman
communistplaywright,cxpcrimcntcd
withthistcnsionbctwccnillusionand
awarcncssinhisqucstloraradical
thcatrc.8rcchtwashorricdabout
thcabilityolmostthcatrctosuckthc
spcctatorintoanillusionandhavc
thcmvicariouslydrcamsomconcclscs
drcam.Traditionalthcatrcmadcspcc
tatorsintopassivcrcccptaclcs:adumb,
obcdicntmass,wcllsuitcdlorlascist
mythologicsorthcdcmocraticmanu
lacturcolconscnt,butnotthcradical
translormationolsocicty.8rccht
wantcdhisthcatrctocrcatcactivc
subjcctswhowouldthinkcriticallyand
actpolitically.Hisdramaturgicalsolu
tiontothisproblcmwasVerfremdungs-
eect,oralicnationccct.Alicnation,
. Forthccomplctcspccial
cdition olthcNew York
Timesscchttp://www.
nytimcssc.com.
The fake-edition of The New York Times, 12 November 2008, a project by
Andy Bichlbaum (Yes Men) and Steve Lambert. Times Special Edition Photo
Bureau.
. Andy8ichlbaumand
StcvcLambcrt, pcrsonal
intcrvicw, :oNovcmbcr
:oo8,CNNintcrvicw, +
Novcmbcr:oo8.

o pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible +

: pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible
andparadoxcs.Tcgrandcstoncbcing
thctitlcitscll.Utopia,composcdol
thcGrcckou(no)andtopos(placc),
isaplaccthatis,litcrally,noplace.!n
addition,thcstorytcllcrolthismagic
landiscallcdRaphaclHythloday(or
Hythlodacus),lromthcGrcckHuthlos,
mcaningnonscnsc.Sothcrcadcristold
astoryolaplaccwhichisnamcdoutol
cxistcncc,byanarratorwhoisnamcd
asunrcliablc.Andsobcginsthcdcbatc:
!sthccntirctyolMorcsUtopiaasatirc,
ancxcrciscdcmonstratingthcabsurdity
olsuchpoliticallantasics:risitan
carncstcorttosuggcstandpromotc
thcscdrcams:
Tcrcscvidcncclorbothsidcs.First
thccasclorthcsatiricalintcrprcta
tion:inadditiontothcproblcmatic
namcsgivcnthcplaccandthcnarrator,
Morc,inhisdcscriptionolthcisland
olUtopia,mixcspossiblcpolitical
proposalslikcpubliclyhcldpropcrty
andthclrccdomolspccchandrcli
gionwithsuchabsurditicsasgoldand
jcwclcncrustcdchambcrpots.Assuch,
oncmightargucthatMorcccctivcly
dismisscsasridiculousallpolitical
drcams.Frccdomolspccch:Vcllthat
isaboutasabsurdastakingashitina
goldchambcrpot!nthcothcrhand,
Raphaclournarratorisnamcd
altcrthcArchangclRaphaclwhogivcs
sitctothcblindandguidcsthclost.
ArguinglorMorcspoliticalsinccrity,
oncmightproposcthathcuscsthc
absurdtoscriouslysuggcst,yctatthc
samctimcpoliticallydistancchimscll
lrom,political,cconomicandrcligious
drcamsthathclavoursbutthatwould,
inhistimc,bcconsidcrcdpoliticaland
rcligioushcrcsy.Frccdomolrcligion:
Morcmightplausiblyplca:Cantyou
scc!waskidding:
8ut!thinkthisorthodoxdcbatc
aboutwhcthcrMorcwassatiricalor
sinccrcobluscatcsrathcrthanclarics,
andactuallymisscsthcpointcntircly.
TcgcniusolMorcsUtopiaisthatisit
bothabsurdandcarncst,simultancously.
Anditisthroughthccombination
olthcscsccminglyoppositcwaysol
prcscntingpoliticalidcalsthatamorc
lruitlulwayolthinkingaboutdream-
politikcanstarttotakcshapc.Foritis
thcprcscntationolUtopiaasno-place,
anditsnarratorasnonsense,thatopcns
upaspacclorthcrcadcrsimagination
towondcrwhatanaltcrnativcsomc
placcandaradicallydicrcntscnsibility
mightbclikc.
8ypositinghislantasysomcplaccas
anoplacc,Morccscapcsthcproblcms
thattypicallyhauntpoliticaldrcam
scapcs.Mostpoliticalimaginarics
insistuponthcirpossibility:positing
animagincdluturcoraltcrnativcasthe
luturcorthealtcrnativc.Tisassurancc
guarantccsatlcastoncolscvcralrcsults:
Abrutalizationolthcprcscntto
bringitintolincwiththcimagincd
luturc.(Stalinization,YcarZcrool
thcKhmcrRougc)
Apoliticaldiscnchantmcntasthc
luturcncvcrarrivcsandthcaltcrna
tivcisncvcrrcalizcd.(Post+68
lclt,thccurrcntimplosionolthcus
RcpublicanParty.)
Avainscarchlorancwdrcamwhcn
thcpromiscdoncisntrcalizcd.
(ndlcssconsumptionolproductsor
lilcstylcs.)
Livinginalic.(Actuallycxisting
Socialism,TcAmcricanrcam.)
6. TomasMorc, Utopia,
cditcdandtranslatcdby
\.S. gdcn(NcwYork:
ApplctonCcnturyCrolts,
+), 8o.
inMarxistaswcllascommonparlancc,
hastraditionallyhadancgativcconno
tation:thcprolctariatwasalicnatcd
lromthcirlabourjustasthcTcaParticr
isalicnatcdlromthccontcmporary
culturcolthcircountry,thcstrugglc
lorbothistoovcrcomcalicnation
andrcgainpowcrandcontrolovcrthc
lorcignobjcct.8rccht,howcvcr,thco
rizcdthatalicnationmightbcuscdasa
positivclorcc:amcanstoshakcpcoplc
outolthcircomlortablcintcgration.
Troughabattcryoltcchniqucslikc
givingawaythccndingolaplayatthc
bcginning,disruptingdramaticsccncs
withsonganddancc,havingstagc
handsappcaronstagc,andcollapsing
thclourthwalltohavcactorsaddrcss
thcaudicncc,8rcchtworkcdtoalienate
hisaudicncc.!nstcadoldrawingpcoplc
intoascamlcssillusion,thcplaywright
strovctopushthcmwayandrcmind
thcmthatthcywcrconlywatchinga
play.!lthcaudicnccwantcdrcalaction,
ilthcywantcdthcworldtochangc,
thcycouldnotrclyuponarttodoit
lorthcmthcywouldhavctodoit
thcmsclvcs.
Ancndtowarsandajustcconomy
arcnotimpossiblc,nomattcrhowlar
wcsccmlromthcscgoalstoday,butthc
Timesrcportingthisaslactualncwsin
:oo8isanimpossibility.!sawrsthand
thccognitivcdissonanccinpcoplcs
laccswhcnthcywcrchandcdacopy
olthcncwspapcr:rstsurprisc,thcn
intcrcst,thcnrcalizationthatwhatthcy
hcldinthcirhandswasnotgcnuinc
allinthcmattcrolscconds.Tisrapid
rcalizationonthcpartolthcaudicncc
thatwhatthcyhadbccnrcadingwas
alakcwasnotapoliticallailurcon
thcpartolthcprojcct,itisthcsccrct
olitssucccss.8yholdingoutadrcam
andrclusingcntrysimultancously,thc
spccialcditionolthcTimes crcatcd
thcconditionslorpopularpolitical
drcaming.

UtopiaisNoPlacc

Tistcchniqucwaspionccrcdncarly
ooycarsagoinUtopia, Tomas
Morcsstoryolalarolandthatwas,
wcll,utopic.nthislantasyisland
livingandlabourisrationallyplanncd
lorthcgoodolall.Tcrcisadcmo
craticallyclcctcdgovcrnmcntand
pricsthood,andlrccdomolspccch
andrcligion.Tcrcisnomoncyand
noprivatcpropcrtyorprivatclyhcld
wcalth,andpcrhapsmostutopianol
all,thcrcarcnolawycrs.MorcsUtopia
wascvcrythinghissixtccnthccntury
uropcanhomcwasnot:pcacclul,
prospcrousandjust.For,asMorc
writcsinhistalc:
Vhcnnoonc
ownsanything,all
arcrich.
6
Utopia,howcvcr,isacuriousbook,
twobooksrcally.8ook!iscsscntiallyan
argumcntmadcthroughRaphacl,thc
travcllcranddcscribcrolUtopiaol
why8ook!!thcactualdcscriptionol
thc!slcolUtopiaispoliticallyusclcss.
Raphaclcxplainsthatrulcrsdontlistcn
toimaginingsothcrthanthcirown,and
uropcansarcrcsistanttoncwidcas.
!ndccd,Raphaclinsiststhathisown
storywillsoonbclorgottcn(which,ol
coursc,isaclcvcrrhctoricalstratcgyto
makcsurcitisnot).Tcbookislullol
suchsccmingcontradictions,riddlcs

pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert, 2007
A Project of the San Francisco Arts Commission's Art on Market Street Program. | www.sfartscommission.org/pubart/projects
Funded in part by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and CBS Outdoor.
Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked architects, city planners and transportation engineers, "What would you do if you didn't have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy,
politics - or physics?" Ideas fromthese conversations were then merged, developed and perhaps mildly exaggerated by the artists to create this poster series.
Steve and Packard would like to thank:
Peter Albert, SF Municipal Transportation Agency
Prof. Nezar AlSayyad, Dept. of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Prof. Timothy P. Duane, Dept. of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Drew Howard, SF Muni Light Rail
Attend a public panel discussing future visions for San Francisco, cosponsored by Livable City and the San Francisco Arts Commission! Find out about a project booklet designed
by the artists! Go to: www.sfartscommission.org/pubart
Jennings courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, SF | Lambert with support fromEyebeam, NY
John Peterson, Public Architecture
TomRadulovich, Livable City, BART
Seleta Reynolds, Fehr & Peers
Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert, 2007
A Project of the San Francisco Arts Commission's Art on Market Street Program. | www.sfartscommission.org/pubart/projects
Funded in part by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and CBS Outdoor.
Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked architects, city planners and transportation
engineers, "What would you do if you didn't have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy,
politics - or physics?" Ideas fromthese conversations were then merged, developed and
perhaps mildly exaggerated by the artists to create this poster series.
Steve and Packard would like to thank:
Peter Albert, SF Municipal Transportation Agency
Prof. Nezar AlSayyad, Dept. of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Prof. Timothy P. Duane, Dept. of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Drew Howard, SF Muni Light Rail
John Peterson, Public Architecture
TomRadulovich, Livable City, BART
Seleta Reynolds, Fehr & Peers
Attend a public panel discussing future visions for San Francisco, cosponsored by Liv-
able City and the San Francisco Arts Commission! Find out about a project booklet de-
signed by the artists! Go to: www.sfartscommission.org/pubart/projects
Jennings courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, SF | Lambert with support fromEyebeam, NY
SAN FRANCISCO WILDLIFE REFUGE
NEWWILDLIFE
REFUGE AREA
CARNIVORES
HUNTINGGROUND
ANTELOPE/DEER
MEADOW
REDWOODS
GRASSLANDS
KEY:
1. Buffalo
grasslands
2. Market Street
redwood forest
3. Whale breeding
grounds
4. Mission Creek
daylighting
5. Zoof tops
6. Animal release
point
Cheetah running
tube
"We can and should restore the
landscape, but how far do we go?
California was once the Serengeti
of North America, with lions,
mastodons, cheetahs.We're missing
those large mammals today."
- TomRadulovich,
Livable City, BART
What if you turn this
around and not take over
the streets with the zoo, but
take over the rooftops? Each
roof could have a different
zoo experience.
- John Peterson,
Public Arcitechture


Green Space and Multipurpose Train, posters for a future San Francisco,
according to a concept by Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert, 2007.
6 pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination Politics as Art of the Impossible
us,thcirimaginationsarcconstraincd
bythctyrannyolthcpossiblc.8yvisu
alizingimpossibilitics,Jcnningsand
Lambcrtcrcatcanopcningtoask:
Vhatil:withoutclosingdownthis
lrccspaccbyscriouslyanswcring:Tis
iswhat.
Mostpoliticalspcctaclcsarc
constructcdwiththcintcntolpassing
olantasylorrcality.Tclunctionol
thcNazirallicsinNurcmbcrg,sospcc
tacularlycapturcdinLcniRiclcnstahls
Triumph of the Will,wcrctosubstitutc
animagcolpowcr,unityandordcr
lorthcrcalityolthcdcprcssion,chaos
andinghtingthatplagucdintcrwar
Gcrmany,usprcsidcntGcorgcV.
8ushslandingonanaircraltcarricrin
aightsuittodcclarcmissionaccom
plishcdin!raqwasthcattcmptto
tradcthcactualityoladisastrousand
soontobcprotractcdwarlaunchcdby
acombatshirkingprcsidcntlorthc
lantasyolcasyvictorydcclarcdbya
noblcwarriorchicl.Tcscarclascist
spcctaclcs:thcluturcisimagincdby
clitcsandthcnprcscntcdasalrcadyin
cxistcncc.thicalspcctaclcopcratcs
dicrcntlybyprcscntingdrcamsthat
pcoplcarcawarcarcjustdrcams.Tcsc
arcactsolimaginationthatprovidc
visionsolwhatcouldbcwithoutcvcr
prctcndingthcyarcanythingothcr
thanwhatthcyarc.Prcscntingitscllas
whatitactuallyis,thislormollantasy
is,ironically,truthlulandrcal.!tisalso
unnishcd.8ccauscitisprcscntcdas
onlyanactolhumanimagination,not
arcprcscntationolconcrctcrcality,
cthicalspcctaclcrcmainsopcntorcvi
sionorrcjcctionand,mostimportant,
popularintcrvcntion.Jcnningsand
Lambcrtspostcrsarccxcmplarsol
cthicalspcctaclc.
Standinginlrontoloncolthcir
postcrsonastrcctcorncryousmilcat
thcabsurdidcaolpracticingTacKwon
oonyourtrainridchomc.8utyou
mayalsobcgintoqucstionwhypublic
transportationissounilunctional,
andthcnaskyourscllwhyshouldnta
publictransportsystcmcatcrtoothcr
publicdcsircs.Tiscouldsctyourmind
towondcringwhythcgovcrnmcntis
sooltcninthcbusincssolcontrolling,
instcadollacilitating,ourdcsircs,and
thcnyoumightstarttocnvisionwhat
atrulydcsirablcstatcmightlooklikc.
Andsoon,adinnitum.Jcnningsand
Lambcrtsimpossiblcsolutionslikc
MorcsUtopiaandthcspccialcdition
olthcNew York Timesarcmcansto
drcamolncwoncs.
Tcrcsadominantstrainolthc
lcltthathasalwaysargucdlorapoli
ticswithoutdrcams.!nthisvision,
thcmasscs(lcdbythclclt)willwakc
upandsccthctruth...anditshall
makcthcmlrcc.!nthclamouswords
olMarxandngcls:Manisatlast
compcllcdtolaccwithsobcrscnscs,his
rcalconditionsollilc,andhisrclations
withhiskind.!tsanicclantasy,but
thatsallitisandcvcrhasbccn.vcn
Marxandngclsimplicitlyrccognizcd
thisbybcginningthcirManifesto with
thcchimcraolcommunistincvitability:
Aspcctrcishauntinguropc
8
!n
thclantasylucllcdworldwcinhabit
todaythcdrcamolapoliticswithout
drcamsisa
prcscriptionlor
politicalimpotcncc.
Tcqucstionis
. Allpostcrscanbcvic
wcdanddownloadcdlrom
http://visitstcvc.com/work/
wishyouwcrchcrcpost
cardslromourawcsomc
luturc:/.
VhatMorcproposcsissomcthing
cntirclydicrcnt:hcimagincsanaltcr
nativctohissixtccnthccnturyuropc
thatisopenly proclaimed to be a work
of imagination.!tcannotbcrcalizcd
simplybccauscitisunrcalistic.!tis,
altcrall,noplacc.8utthcrcadcrhas
bccninlcctcd,anothcroptionhasbccn
shown.Assuch,thcycantsalclyrcturn
tothcsurctyolthcirownprcscntas
thcnaturalncssolthcirworldhasbccn
disruptcd.nccanaltcrnativchasbccn
imagincd,tostaywhcrconcisorto
trysomcthingclscbccomcsaqucstion
thatdemandsattcntionandachoicc.
YctMorcrcsiststhcshortcircuitingol
thisimaginativcmomcntbyrclusingto
providcarcalisticaltcrnativc.Assuch,
thistcchniqucoldreampolitikrcsists
thcsimplcswappingolonctruthlor
anothcr,alcltdrcamlorarightdrcam,
communismlorcapitalism.Asnoplacc
Utopiadcnicsthccasy,andpolitically
problcmatic,optionolsuchasimplc
choicc.!nstcad,thcqucstionolaltcrna
tivcsislcltopcn,andspaccisopcncd
toimaginc:Vhynot:Howcomc:
Vhatil:

Artolthc!mpossiblc

!wasdrawnintoworkingonthclaux
Times(!wrotcthccopylorsomcolthc
advcrtiscmcnts)byoncolthcorgan
izcrs,StcvcLambcrt.Alcwmonths
carlicrLambcrtandhiscollaborator,
PackardJcnnings,hadaskcdmcto
writcthccataloguccssaylorasct
olstrcctpostcrsthatwcrccommis
sioncdanddisplaycdbythccityolSan
Francisco.Tcsclargclormatpostcrs,
illustratcdinthcstylcolairplanc
cmcrgcncyinstructionsanddisplaycd
onilluminatcdkiosksononcolSan
Franciscosmainthoroughlarcs,ocrcd
passcrsbyimagcsolthccitysluturc.
8utnotjustanyluturc:anabsurd
luturc.Skyscrapcrsarcmovablcso
citizcnscanrcarrangcthcircity.A
commutcrtrainisturncdintoagrccn
markct,lcndinglibraryandmartial
artsstudio.Alootballstadiumismadc
intoanorganiclarm(andlincbackcrs
intohumanploughs).Tccntirccity
istranslormcdintoawildlilcrclugc.
ForinspirationPackardandLambcrt
askcdcxpcrtsinthccldsolarchitcc
turc,cityplanningandtransportation
loridcasonhowtomakcabcttcrcity.
Tcscplanswcrcthcn,inthcirown
words,pcrhapsmildlycxaggcratcd.
!tiscxactlythis
cxaggcrationthat
makcsthcscartists
imagcssopoliti
callypowcrlul.

JcnningsandLambcrtsplansarc
unrcalizablc.Acitycouldbccomcmorc
grccnwithadditionalpublicparksand
communitygardcns,buttranslorming
SanFranciscointoanaturcprcscrvc
whcrcoccworkcrstakcthcirlunch
brcakncxttoamountaingorillalamily:
Tisisntgoingtohappcn.Andthats
thcpoint.8ccauscitisapatcntimpos
sibilitythcirlantasicsloolnoonc.Tcrc
isnoduplicity,noscllingthcpcoplc
alalscbillolgoods.Yctatthcsamc
timcthcscimpossiblcdrcamsopcnup
spaccstoimagincncwpossibilitics.
Tcproblcmwithaskingprolcssionals
tothinkoutsidcthcboxandimaginc
ncwsolutionsisthatwithoutintcrvcn
tion,thcyusuallywont.Likcmostol
8. KarlMarxandFrcdcrick
ngcls, Te Marx-Engels
Reader, :
nd
cdition, cditcd
byRobcrtC. Tuckcr(Ncw
York:Norton, +8), 6,
.
8 pcn:o+o/No.:o/Te Populist Imagination
. Fragmcntsolthiscssay
havcappcarcd, inaltcrcd
lorm, inPlayboymagazinc,
Te Nation, thccxhibition
cataloguclorVishYou
VcrcHcrc:Postcardslrom
urAwcsomcFuturc, and
rcam:Rc!magining
ProgrcssivcPoliticsinan
AgcolFantasy.
notwhcthcrdrcamsshould,orshould
not,bcapartolpolitics,butwhatsort
oldreampolitikoughttobcpracticcd.
Vhatisnotnccdcdisalcltcquivalcnt
olthcccntcrscynicalmanulacturcol
conscnt,orarcplicaolthcrcactionary
phantasmagoriasolthcright.Norisit
dcsirablctowaitlorandlollowthcncxt
progrcssivcsaviourwhopronounccs:
!Havcarcam.Vhatisnccdcd,il
wcarcscriousaboutthcpotcntialol
populist(un)rcason,arctoolsandtcch
niqucstohclppcoplcdrcamonthcir
own.8ismarckmighthavcinsistcdthat
politicsisthcart
olthcpossiblc,
butamuchmorc
powcrlulcasccan
bcmadctodaythat
politicsisthcartol
thcimpossiblc.

40 Open 2010/No. 20/Te Populist Imagination Te Italian Anomaly 41
Franco Berardi
Marco Jacquemet
Te Italian
Anomaly
Berlusconi and
Semiocapitalism
A study of contem-
porary Italian
society reveals
social and political
trends that are still
developing else-
where in the world,
according to
Franco Berardi
(philo sopher) and
Marco Jacquemet
(communications
specialist). Te
success of Silvio
Berlusconi can be
explained by forces
that arose during
the Counter
Reformation and
the baroque and
never actually lef
industrialized,
Catholic Italy.
Since the transi-
tion to the semio-
capitalistic system,
in which the
linguistic element
is dominant, they
even have become
obvious again.
In his book Vuelta de siglo, Bolivar
Echeverria argues that the emergence
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries of the modern era is better under-
stood if we dont confate all historical
changes into one single model, but
diferentiate between two conficting
and interweaving paradigms.
1
Te
frst paradigm was
developed by the
dominant bour-
geois vision of modernity based on
the Protestant ethic and the territorial
centrality of industrial production.
Te other vision of modernity emerged
from the Counter Reformation and
the baroque. Tis second modernity,
he argues, became subordinate and
marginalized when industrialization
reduced the social feld to a process of
mechanic production and reproduc-
tion, elevating the former paradigm to
become the sole depositor of modern
subjectivity.
Te nineteenth-century bourgeoisie
was strongly rooted in a local terri-
tory because the accumulation of value
could not be separated from the build-
up (and expansion) of material pro-
duction derived from the confictive
cooperation of workers manual skills
and capitalists entrepreneurial and
fnancial skills. Echeverria remarks that
since the sixteenth century the Catholic
Church has created a diferent strain of
modernity, based on imagination and
deterritorialization. Te spiritual and
immaterial power of Rome has always
been based on the ideological control
of the imagination, but this infuence
was hardly considered by the pragmatic
ethics of industrial culture.
Catholic Spain of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries was the harbin-
ger of a non-industrial brand of accu-
mulation, based on a massive robbery
of the Americas. Tis strain of moder-
nity was marginalized afer the mili-
tary defeat of the Invincible Armada
in the naval war with the British
Empire, which led to the economic and
political decline of Spain. Te afrma-
tion of Northern European capital-
ism opened the way to the Industrial
Revolution and to the industrial pro-
duction of material goods. Protestant
modernity defned the canon, but the
baroque strain of modernity was not
erased: it went underground, tun-
nelling deep into the recesses of the
modern imaginary only to resurface at
the end of the twentieth century, when
the capitalist system underwent a dra-
matic paradigm shif towards postin-
dustrial production.
Tis new production sphere, which
we have called semiocapitalism, is
centred on the creation and commodi-
fcation of technolinguistic devices
(from fnancial products to sofware to
backroom service communication) that
have by their very
nature a semiotic
and deterritorial-
ized character.
2

With the emer-
gence of a semio-
capitalist economy,
economic pro-
duction becomes
tightly interwoven
with language.
3

While the territo-
rialized bourgeois
1. Bolivar Echeverria, Vuelta
de siglo (Mexico DF: Biblio-
teca Era, 2006).
2. See: Franco Berardi,
Marco Jacquemet and
Gianfranco Vitali: Ethereal
Shadows, Communications
and Power in Italy (New
York: Autonomedia, 2009);
Franco Berardi, Precarious
Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism
and the Pathologies of the
Post-alpha Generation (New
York: Minor Compositions,
2010).
3. See Christian Marazzi,
Capital and Language: From
the New Economy to the War
Economy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2008); Paolo
Virno, Multitude: Between
Innovation and Negation
(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2008).
42 Open 2010/No. 20/Te Populist Imagination Te Italian Anomaly 43
economy was based on the iconoclastic
severity of iron and steel, postindus-
trial production is based instead on
the kaleidoscopic, deterritorialized
machine of semiotic production. Tis
is why we can speak of semiocapital-
ism: because the commodities that are
circulating in the economic world are
signs, fgures, images, projections and
expectations. Language is no longer
just a tool for representing economic
process, it becomes the main source of
accumulation, constantly deterritorial-
izing the feld of exchange. Speculation
and spectacle intermingle, because of
the intrinsic infationary (metaphoric)
nature of language. Te linguistic
web of semioproduction is a game of
mirrors that inevitably leads to crises
of over-production, bubbles and bursts.
We need to understand the social
implications of the two diferent strains
of modernity: the relationship between
the industrial bourgeoisie and the
working class has been a relationship
based on confict but also on alliance
and mutual cooperation. Te dynamics
of progress and growth stemming from
the physical space of the factory forced
an agreement between the two fun-
damental classes of industrial times,
industrial workers and industrial bour-
geoisie. Tis agreement was based on
collective negotiation, and led to the
creation of the welfare state. Te bour-
geoisie and working class could not dis-
sociate their destiny, despite the radical
confict opposing salary and proft,
living time and time of valorisation.
A new alliance seemed possible
between labour and capital in the last
decade of the twentieth century. Te
experience of dotcom enterprises was
the expression of this alliance, allow-
ing for the extraordinary technologi-
cal progress of the digital sphere. But
this alliance was broken when fnan-
cial power prevailed over cognitive
labour. Te predatory behaviour of
the fnancial class has flled the empty
space of aleatory value. When language
becomes the general feld of produc-
tion, when the mathematical relation
of labour-time and value is broken,
when deregulation destroys all liabili-
ties, predatory behaviour becomes the
norm in the feld of competition.
Tis is what has happened since neo-
liberal politics has occupied the scene
of the world.
Deregulation, the frst principle
of the Chigaco School, destroyed the
political and legal limits to capitalist
expansion. But deregulation cannot
be understood as a purely political
change. It has to be seen in the context
of the technological and cultural evolu-
tion that has displaced the process of
valorisation from the feld of mechani-
cal industry to the feld of semiotic
production. Te relation between
labour time and valorisation has
become uncertain, undeterminable.
Cognitive labour is hardly reducible to
the measure of time. It is impossible
to determine how much social time
is necessary for the production of an
idea. When the relation between labour
and value becomes indeterminable, the
power in the global labour market is
the pure law of violence, of abuse. No
more simple exploitation, but slavery,
pure violence against the naked life of
the workers of the world. Violence has
become the pre-
vailing economic
force in the neo-
liberal age.
4
Vio-
lence of the Italian,
Mexican, Russian
organizations that
command the
market of narcot-
ics, weapons and
prostitution, and
invest in the fnan-
cial market. Call it
mafa or whatever,
the fact is that in
Mexico, as in Italy, as in Russia, fnan-
cial markets, mediascapes and political
power are in the hands of people who
gained power from lawlessness and
violence. And this is not to mention
the role of corporations like Halibur-
ton or Blackwater in the usa: fuelling
wars and destroying lives, jeopardizing
countries because this is their business,
a business that needs war.

Deterritorialization and
Reterritorialization

Starting in the 1970s, the shif to
immaterial production in the global
economy eroded the bourgeois iden-
tifcation of wealth with physical
property and territorialized labour.
Contemporary capitalism is governed
by laws that do not resemble those of
the glorious era of industrial work, and
by relationships that do not resemble
the discipline and work ethic of terri-
torialized production that dominated
the world of classical industrial capital-
ism. Tis was the Protestant capitalism
defned by Michel Albert as Rhenish
because its ideal geographical space
was the Rhur area, the industrial area
of Germany near the French border.
5
Recent decades
have witnessed a
profound transfor-
mation, beginning with the disconnec-
tion of the fnancial networks from the
material economy. Te foundational
moment of this process was the arbi-
trary decision made by us President
Richard Nixon to abandon the Bretton
Woods system established in 1944. In
1971, Nixon decided to abandon the
gold standard, thus creating the self-
referentiality of the us dollar. From
that moment on, money fully became
what it already was in essence: a sheer
act of language. Money is no longer
a referential sign that refers back to
a lode of commodities, a quantity of
golden metal, or any other given good;
rather it is a factor of simulation, an
agent capable of setting in action proc-
esses both arbitrary and independent
from the material economy.
Te semiocapitalist economy is
a system of full indeterminacy: the
fnancial turn of the economy and the
dematerialization of production have
led to a degree of market unpredict-
ability and uncertainty unknown in
the history of industrial economy. In
the industrial production process, the
determination of the value of a com-
modity can be based on a reliable
element: the amount of work socially
necessary to produce that commodity.
But this is no longer true in the sphere
of semiocapital, where the main factors
in the production of goods are cogni-
4. In his book Gomorra,
Roberto Saviano identifes
the mafa system of southern
Italy essentially as a form
of postbourgeois capitalism
where murderers are not
just a malignant outgrowth
on a healthy body, but
the body itself. Te word
Camorra doesnt exist; its
a cop word, used by mag-
istrates and journalists. It
makes the afliates smile, its
an experts term, relegated
to history. Te word in use
to describe clan members
is System . . . Organized
criminality directly coin-
cides with the economy, the
dialectics of commerce is the
bone structure of the clan.
Roberto Saviano: Gomorra
(Milan: Mondadori, 2006),
48.
5. Michel Albert, Capital-
isme contre Capitalisme
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1991).
44 Open 2010/No. 20/Te Populist Imagination Te Italian Anomaly 45
tive labour, language and imagination.
Under this new model, the criterion of
valorisation is no longer objective, and
no longer quantifable on the basis of a
fxed referent. Labour time no longer
serves as an absolute touchstone. Lies,
violence and corruption are no longer
marginal excrescences of economic
life, but tend to become the alpha and
omega of everyday business manage-
ment. Economic power belongs to
those who possess the most powerful
technolinguistic dispositifs. Govern-
ment of the mediascape, dominance
of sofware production and control
over fnancial information: these are
the contemporary sources of economic
power.
Te semiocapitalist mode of pro-
duction has engendered the formation
of a new class of social actors, who
are dominating the global economy,
the lumpenbour-
geoisie.
6
Tis class
can be defned in
opposition to the
old bourgeoisie
and its values of
thrif, attachment
to property and
industriousness.
Te afectio soci-
etatis of the old
entrepreneur has
disappeared, as
the new capital-
ists do not build
their fortunes on local enterprises, but
on ephemeral fnancial investments
that have no relationship to a specifc
territory.
As ofen happens, the powerful
process of deterritorialization that
underlies the formation of semiocapi-
talism instigates a cultural efect of
reterritorialization: a nostalgia for the
old age of ethnically homogeneous
communities, identitarian aggressive-
ness and Catholic fundamentalism.
In contemporary Italy these dialectics
have been embodied by the experience
of the Lega Nord, a political formation
that is part of the Berlusconi govern-
ment and is deeply rooted in the indus-
trial northern regions of the country.
Te Lega Nord is the main expression
of the culture of reterritorialization,
and it is also the political representa-
tion of the dynamic entrepreneurship
that is producing most of the national
wealth, and has based its remarkable
electoral success (between 20 and 30
per cent in the northern regions) upon
the rhetoric of territorial rootedness
and the populist claim that migrant
workers are responsible for the eco-
nomic impoverishment of the working
classes. But the display of afection
to local culture and interest should
largely be seen as mythology. Tose
entrepreneurs who blame globalization
because it is destroying the local com-
munity have grown rich investing their
capital in Romania, and are exploit-
ing the competition between migrants
and local workers as a way to lower the
average salary.
Te dynamics of neoliberalism have
marginalized the traditional bour-
geoisie, replacing it with two distinct
and opposing classes: the cognitariat,
that is, the precarious and fragmented
labour of intelligence, and the manage-
rial class, whose only competence is its
competitiveness. Taken to its extreme,
as evident in increasingly larger
regions of global capitalist produc-
tion, competition becomes the armed
removal of competitors, the armed
imposition of one supplier, and the
systematic devastation of everything
that does not submit to the proft of the
strongest.
Te neoliberal phase of capitalism
appears to be an interminable and
uninterrupted process of deregulation,
but in fact it leads to the exact oppo-
site. As the regulations that set limits
to the invasiveness of the principles
of competition are removed, hard and
fast automatisms are introduced in
material relations between people, who
become more enslaved as the enterprise
becomes freer. Te process of deregula-
tion unremittingly removes the rules
that bridle the mobility of productiv-
ity and hinder the expansive power of
capital. One by one
the advances of
capitalist deregula-
tion eradicate the
cultural and juridi-
cal conventions
of modernity and
bourgeois law. Tis
is why capitalism
has turned into a
predatory system:
Splattercapitalism,
the end of bour-
geois hegemony
and of the enlight-
ened universality of
the law.
7

Anomaly

In order to better understand the
Italian anomaly one should go back
to the Catholic Counter Reformation
that reinstated the primacy of the reli-
gious over the secular realm: the deep
substratum of Catholic culture resists
productivity and bourgeois efciency.
Te Counter Reformation remained
deeply engrained in the Italian social
imagination throughout modernity
and manifested itself in all its reaction-
ary force at decisive moments in the
life of the country. During the Neapoli-
tan Revolution of 1799, the enlight-
ened bourgeoisie was isolated and
defeated thanks to the complicity of the
people with the power of the Bourbon
House, the ally of the church. From
the 1800s onwards, the alliance of the
church with the rural classes acted as
an antibourgeois conservative force
opposing attempts at laicization of
national life. In the years that followed
the Second World War, the Christian
Democrats were the dominant politi-
cal force, representing the mediation
in a permanent equilibrium between
capitalist modernization and religious
backwardness.
However, it would be wrong to see
the laxness that derives from the spirit
of the Counter Reformation as a purely
regressive and conservative energy.
In the 1970s the Italian anomaly
was the expression used to underline
the peculiarity of a country where
social movements went on afer 68
and marked the social scene for over
a decade. In the 1970s the workers
resistance produced structures of mass
6. Marx speaks of the
lumpenproletariat in order
to describe the lowest
stratum of the industrial
working class, including also
tramps and criminals. Te
lumpenproletariat corrupts
proletarian values, and is
unable to accept any kind
of political organization.
Te nouveaux riche who
are emerging in the present
age of the global fnancial
economy may be identifed
as lumpen because they do
not share the moral and
political values of the old
industrial bourgeoisie, and
their wealth is not from
the patient accumulation
of labour and property, but
by sudden enrichment and
fnancial hazard and also
ofen from criminality.
7. Splatter is a horror flm
subgenre that deliberately
focuses on graphic portray-
als of gore and violence.
Splatter tends to display an
overt interest in the vulner-
ability of the human body
and the theatricality of its
mutilation. I call splatter the
interconnection of economy
and spectacular crime,
which is a special feature of
mafa and camorra. In this
context, splatter refers to the
corruption of social sensibil-
ity when crime, no longer
a marginal function of the
capitalist system, becomes
a decisive factor for deregu-
lated competition. As in a
Quentin Tarantino movie,
torture, homicide, child
exploitation, the drive to
prostitution and the produc-
tion of instruments of mass
destruction have become
irreplaceable techniques of
economic competition.
46 Open 2010/No. 20/Te Populist Imagination Te Italian Anomaly 47
organization and fuelled revolts against
capitalist modernization. Te Italian
anomaly was based on the persistence
of workers autonomy and social con-
fict. Italy underwent a long cycle of
proletarian struggles that embraced
anti-modernism in a dynamic and
paradoxically progressive way.
In that long wave of social con-
ficts we fnd a constant and recurring
element: the refusal of the subordina-
tion of life to work. Tis refusal was
manifest in a manifold of diferent
ways: frst of all as Mediterranean
idleness, the privileging of sensual-
ity and social life over productivity
and the economy. In the 1970s this
refusal fourished as a political act of
insubordination and resistance against
capitalist exploitation. So this concept
could be inserted in the framework of
progressive political strategy. Workers
refused the efort and repetitiveness
of mechanical labour, thus forcing
companies to keep restructuring.
Workers resistance was an element
of human progress and freedom, as
well as an accelerator of technological
and organization development. Con-
trary to the Protestant idea of progress
as founded on work discipline, the
autonomous anti-work spirit that
claims that progress, namely techno-
logical progress, is based on the refusal
of discipline. Progress consists of the
application of intelligence to the reduc-
tion of efort and dependency, and the
expansion of a sphere of idleness and
individual freedom.
Te refusal of capitalist exploitation
was not peculiar to Italy, of course. All
around the world workers demanded
wage increases and more free time for
their lives. However, in Italy this insub-
ordination transformed the anarchic
spirit of southern plebs into an explicit
and politically relevant issue: auton-
omy of everyday life from capitalist dis-
cipline. Did young rebel workers who
in the 1970s came from Naples and
from Calabria to the northern factories
embody the individualist and anti-
modernist populism that character-
ized the 1799 counterrevolution, and
led Neapolitan people to oppose the
enlightened bourgeoisie? Yes, in part.
But they expressed also the realization
that the society of industrial labour was
nearing its end, and the consciousness
that industrial labour was a remnant of
the past, and that new technologies and
social knowledge were opening up the
possibility of the liberation of society
from the burden of physical labour.
Te idea that modernization and
corruption are not in contradiction
is deeply entrenched in the Italian
cultural landscape. In the 1980s, in
the midst of the international afrma-
tion of neoliberalism, Italy gave life
to a curious experiment in political
economy. Afer defeating the workers
movements, in the Craxis years the
dominant baroque ethics tolerated
embezzlements, corruption and mafa
as a complement of economic develop-
ment. Te Italian politician Bettino
Craxi and his Socialist Party (PSI), who
entered the political scene of the 1980s,
were representative of a convergence
of the spirit of Counter Reformation
with a cultural openness towards neo-
liberal modernization: modernization
and corruption came to be seen as
complementary. Te Communist Party
rebelled against Craxi not because
he was opening the way to neoliberal
politics, but because he was tolerat-
ing corruption. Actually Craxi, who
opened the way to Silvio Berlusconi,
his personal friend, had sensed what
was to come with the afrmation of
the neoliberal agenda. As neoliberal-
ism made the old regulations of the
welfare state redundant, every protec-
tion built by society against capitalist
aggression was doomed to collapse.
Italian cathocommunism, in its agony,
desperately clung to the ethical ques-
tion: instead of opposing neoliberal-
ism, which destroys the welfare state,
reduces wages and imposes a culture of
competitiveness, the late communists
opposed corruption, immorality and
illegality. Paradoxically they defended
the Protestant ethics that was being
dissolved in the culture of the new
capitalist class of predators.

Aleatory Rules

Simulation and fractalization are
essential baroque categories. In Neo-
Baroque, Omar Calabrese claims that
the postmodern style recuperated aes-
thetic and discursive models that frst
emerged in the 1600s.
8
In the shif to
postmodernity, the
rationalist balance
of industrial archi-
tecture gave way to the proliferation
of points of view. Baroque was essen-
tially a proliferation of points of view.
While the Protestant rigor produced
an aesthetic of essential and austere
images, baroque declared the divine
production of forms to be irreducible
to human laws, be they of the state,
politics, accounting or architecture.
Berlusconis success can be partially
explained by this ever-present under-
current in Italian culture. He under-
stood perfectly that politics cannot be
reduced to following rules, because in
politics there are no rules. Part of the
secret of Berlusconis success in poli-
tics lies precisely in the use of excess.
Te excessiveness of the declarations
and actions of his government was a
deciding factor for its electoral suc-
cesses. Events that exceeded the frame-
work of predictability, tolerability and
codifed political behaviour acted as
catalysts for consternation and indig-
nation while creating a safe passage
for government legislation, dilapida-
tion of collective property, abolition
of workers rights, and imposition
of discriminatory and racist laws.
Tis technique of excess is now well
tested: you have to talk big, very big,
in order to then enact what is essential
for the accumulation of power and
the privatization of social spaces. A
minister would take on the role of the
unmanageable provocateur and would
propose to bomb the ships carrying
migrants to Italian shores. He gener-
ates scandal, but also an entertaining
distraction. Soon enough another
minister, more moderate and realis-
tic, demands military control of the
borders; which is followed immediately
by a zealous functionary who carries
out the forced deportation of Ethio-
pian and Sudanese asylum seekers by
intercepting them in international
waters and sending them back, without
8. Omar Calabrese, Let
neobarocca (Bari: Laterza,
1989).
48 Open 2010/No. 20/Te Populist Imagination Te Italian Anomaly 49
giving them the chance to fle their
asylum claims.
Berlusconis language appears to
be best suited for ridiculing rather
than denying or restating the truth.
His intention is to unveil the hypoc-
risy of political rules. For Berlusconi,
the meaning of words can always be
reframed, so much so that he is used to
denying his own public statements the
day afer making them. In his actual
role of prime minister, Berlusconi has
ofen pretended to give his approval
to the words of the President of the
Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, even
though these words blatantly contra-
vened his own actions or the legisla-
tive activities of his government. Te
political word is devalued, ridiculed,
captured in a semantic labyrinth where
it can mean the opposite of its meaning
found in dictionaries. Taking ofence
at his informality, vulgarity and his
shallow lies is not an efective reac-
tion; on the contrary it strengthens
Berlusconi and his regime because the
electorate understands him better than
his political antagonists, and they sym-
pathize with him.
According to common sense, politi-
cal language has always concealed
reality and provided hypocritical cover-
ups to the arbitrariness and arrogance
of the rich and powerful. Berlusconi
paradoxically reveals this hypocrisy.
He represents the rich and power-
ful, showing that the law is capable of
nothing; he represents the rich and
powerful as he laughs at the hypocrisy
of those who pretend that everyone
is equal before the law. We all know
that everyone is not equal before the
law; we know from experience that the
wealthy and powerful can aford expen-
sive lawyers, impose their interests, and
conquer spaces of power inaccessible
to the majority of the population. But
this is usually hidden behind the smoke
screens of legalism and juridical for-
malism. Berlusconi clearly states: I do
what I want, and laugh at the legalists
who want to oppose their formalities to
my will. Let me do my work! Now that
the power of making and unmaking the
law lies in his hands, he uses it to show
everyone the impotence of the law. Like
Humpty Dumpty, Berlusconi knows
that what matters is not what words
mean, but who owns them. Meaning is
decided by the master of words, not by
semantic tribunals. Te interpretation
of law is decided by its master, not by
courts of law.
Berlusconi is transforming Italian
institutions step by step, slowly, one
linguistic reframing at a time. A good
majority of Italians share his ideas
without realizing that he is slowly
eroding their civil liberties. In order to
take away civil liberties, an authoritar-
ian regime usually needs a coup and
the violent establishment of a dictator-
ship. People may be unable to oppose
the regime, but they are aware of what
happened and can start resisting it.
With Berlusconi the semantic defni-
tion of a coup has been reframed:
instead of transforming state struc-
tures through one decisive, violent,
and absolute action, he is relying on a
myriad of small, undetectable modif-
cations of state institutions (yesterday
the public media, today the judiciary,
tomorrow regional power). When
these institutions are transformed one
by one in a slow, almost homeopathic
fashion, it is hard to see these changes
as indexes of a dictatorship and mobi-
lize a democratic opposition. But
Berlusconis media populism does not
need an antiquated and blunt tool such
as dictatorial power. When a media
mogul turned politician can modify
state institutions according to his will
and interests by simply exerting his
absolute control over technolinguistic
machines (from media networks to
gossip magazines, from advertising
agencies to poll-taking agencies) he
doesnt need to set up a dictatorship.
50 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Neoliberal Xenophobia in the Netherlands 51
Jolle Demmers
and Sameer
S. Mehendale
Neoliberal
Xenophobia in
the Netherlands
Construction
of an Enemy
In the following
essay, political
scientist Jolle
Demmers and
writer Sameer S.
Mehendale argue
for the necessity
of recognizing the
relationship
between xeno-
phobia and neo-
liberalism and of
gaining an under-
standing of the
complexity of that
relationship. In
the case of the
Netherlands, the
rise of xenophobia
is part of a
broader process:
the largely
market-controlled
takeover of sym-
bolic forms of
collectivity in an
increasingly
atomized society.
Throughout Europe, xenophobic
and cultural racist repertoires have
become prominent across the entire
spectrum of politics. Generally, this
xenophobic turn is understood as
reactive: to September 11
th
, to the
Madrid and London bombings, to
the increased inux of non-Western,
illegal immigrants. This is certainly
true here in the Netherlands, which
recently seems obsessed with pro-
tecting the indigenous against the
foreign. What we will argue, however,
is that neither radical Islam nor
immigration numbers is responsi-
ble for why the
Netherlands, once
considered so
progressive and
open-minded, is
now among the
most restrictive
and punitive in
the EU when it
comes to asylum,
integration, family
reunication and
deportation poli-
cies.
1
We propose
to look beyond
salonfhig truisms
about the new cul-
tural racism as a
product of ethnic
entrepreneurs or
as the outcome of
media regimes of
representation.
While the mobiliz-
ing properties of
these phenomena
must be recog-
nized, the crux is something different
and more fundamental.

How did this change occur? How did
a once (seemingly, at least) relaxed,
tolerant, progressive country turn
into one of the toughest hardliners in
Europe when it comes to the issues of
immigration and ethnicity?
Since the marriage of the socialists
and the liberals represented by the
Netherlands Purple Cabinet of 1994,
one of the main divisions within post-
Second World War political debate
how to run the economy ended
with widespread consensus that neo-
liberalism was inevitable, the uncon-
tested new normalcy. Major, if largely
silent, transformations during the
1990s in the realms of the economy,
governance and media were rapidly
turning the Netherlands into a fully-
marketized society: patients turned
into clients, public space into private
opportunity, job security into ex-
work, subcontracting and outsourc-
ing, citizens into consumers. These
processes, however fundamental to
the everyday life of the Dutch (affect-
ing education, welfare, housing, child
care, health care, work stability, pen-
sions, social security) nonetheless
failed to engage the public. Both the
accepted inevitability (the countrys
economy is in a dismal state, some-
thing has to be done) of the imple-
mented policies, plus the complexity
of neoliberal technologies of power
control of the image-world crucial
among them and its hugely diverse,
case-specic consequences upon the
lives and futures of individual citizens,
1. In recent years, Human
Rights Watch, Amnesty
International and the
European Commission
have criticized various
aspects of Dutch immi-
gration policies as inhu-
mane and discriminatory
towards non-Westerners.
These punitive, criminal-
izing practices include the
open-ended (some lasting
more than a year) deten-
tion of migrant minors,
families with children, and
torture victims in cramped
conditions of up to six
persons in a cell, with
little communication with
the outside world, and
an integration process
with costly compulsory
exams and a hierarchy
of countries of origin,
effectively blocking family
reunication of people
of Moroccan and Turkish
origin. See: Discrimination
in the Name of Integration,
Migrants Rights Under the
Integration Abroad Act,
Human Rights Watch
(May 2008); The Neth-
erlands: The Detention
of Irregular Migrants and
Asylum Seekers (June
2008), Amnesty Interna-
tional EUR 35/02/2008;
Evaluation of the Family
Reunication Directive,
Commission of the EU,
2008, 610/3 (October
2008).
52 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Neoliberal Xenophobia in the Netherlands 53
limited not only the forms of possible
resistance but even the conceptuali-
zation of experience. In mainstream
society, neoliberalism was not dis-
cussed, let alone politicized or con-
tested: its benets were simply too
obvious. The longstanding denition
of ideology was fully realized: They
do not know it, but they are doing it.
An essential element of the neo-
liberal project is atomization under
the rubrics freedom, progress and
efciency what Bourdieu has called
a programme of the methodical
destruction of collectives.
2
In order
to reach the neo-
liberal utopia of a
fully commodied
form of social life, all collective struc-
tures that could serve as an obsta-
cle to the unfettered rule of capital
are called into question: the state,
increasingly locked in a global regime
of competing states; work groups,
through the individuation of labour
and wages as a purported function of
individual competences; collectives
that support the rights of workers;
even the family, which loses part of
its control over basic patterns of con-
sumption through the constitution
and targeting of market age groups.
In our analysis of how neoliberalism
has affected Dutch public imagination,
an understanding of the erosion of
earlier modes of collectiveness (both
real and imagined), and their replace-
ment by new liquid forms of belong-
ing, is crucial. In particular, we focus
on the disintegration of two preemi-
nent icons of post-war Holland: social
welfarism and merchantness.
Our discussion of the demise of older
forms of collectiveness, and the rise of
new forms of belonging, begins with a
brief history of modern Dutch societal
structures. Until the 1960s, as a result
of religious and political clashes in the
early twentieth century, Dutch society
was characterized by a system of vol-
untary social apartheid, within which
different vertically organized com-
munities (pillars) lived parallel lives,
each with their own social institutions
and represented by their own set of
political elites.
3
Dutch generations
born in the middle
two-thirds of the
twentieth century
grew up belonging
to one or another
more-or-less dened pillar, roughly
classied as Protestant, Roman Cath-
olic, Socialist or Liberal, each with its
own political party, church, sporting
club, union, news-
paper, broadcast
organization,
housing corpora-
tion, school, uni-
versity and senior
citizens home.
4

After the 1960s, however, a process
of de-pillarization began, within which
welfarism, steadily gaining ground
since the Second World War, now rose
to prominence as a national identier.
The accompanying omneity of wel-
farist policies, attitudes, and beliefs
were to set the Netherlands apart
from most other Western countries,
in particular from the USA. In its
remade image, the Netherlands stood
out (particularly in its own eyes) as a
bastion of civilization and urbaneness
juxtaposed against the crude winner-
take-all mentality from across the
Atlantic, its sense of moral superior-
ity importantly shaping the collective
imagination of the nation.
5
The per-
sonal individualism
of the Swinging
Sixties was above
all a cultural phe-
nomena, rooted in
the assuring socio-
economic collec-
tives of the welfare
state.
Over the past two-plus decades,
however, the welfarism project has
lost ground, and is now actively in
reverse: slowly in the 1980s, due in
part to the decades economic crisis;
with greater speed and ideological
vivacity in the 1990s, with the defeat
of communism and the rise of neo-
liberalism. Achievements such as the
longstanding social safety net were
now presented as outdated, pamper-
ing, inefcient. As the new ideologi-
cal certitudes demanded, slowly but
steadily the state retreated from the
public domain, handing its institutions
including the emblematic national
railways, postal service and telephone
company to private ownership.
Quite literally, public space was over-
whelmingly commodied (Amster-
dams central post ofce was turned
into a shopping mall), reducing the
state to its bureaucratic, monitoring
and surveillant core.
Another fading national identier,
one with proclaimed ancient roots,
is the Dutch business sense. Indeed,
this centuries-old national symbol
may have provided fertile ground for
the new ideology of neoliberalism,
combining with the economic crisis of
the1980s (when unemployment hit a
post-Second World War record high)
to explain a rapid implementation
that might be described as a national
embrace. But the new forces proved
treacherous, for in the end globaliza-
tion disconnected the Dutch ethnos
from its earlier symbols of entrepre-
neurism. Neoliberalism turned the
Netherlands national-multinationals
into fully globalized corporations and
engineered a surrender to the market
of its once-prided state enterprises. In
2007, during a seminar at the Holland
Financial Center, the then Dutch Minis-
ter of Finance, in defence of neoliberal
ideology and reacting to public concern
about yet another national-multina-
tional going global, remarked: The
sale of Holland is a myth that leads
to an unwarranted Orange feeling,
laying normative claims on the Orange
feeling as he dismisses it, but at the
same time acknowledges its exist-
ence. We, too, note the discomfort and
uneasiness this double-sided transfor-
mation is causing among many sectors
of Dutch society. With the implementa-
tion of neoliberalism, certain segments
of the economy certainly prospered,
while the ip-side realities of the gold
coin were at best considered collateral:
Amid the consumption boom of the
1990s, beggars and the homeless began
to show their faces on the streets of the
Netherlands. And with them, looming,
for the rst time in recent memory, the
fear of falling.
2. Pierre Bourdieu,
Firing Back: Against the
Tyranny of the Market
(London: Verso, 2004).
3. Arend Lijphart, The Pol-
itics of Accommodation:
Pluralism and Democ-
racy in the Netherlands
(Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968).
4. As a member of, for
instance, the socialist
pillar, you would vote for
the Social Democratic
Labour Party, watch the
programmes of the VARA,
read the Vrije Volk, and
send your children to a
state university.
5. This shift from pillar
to welfarist state was
both symbolized and sig-
nicantly reinforced by
the establishment of the
NOS (Dutch Broadcast-
ing Institute), a national
coordinating and facili-
tating institute that also
broadcast the daily news,
sports and reporting on
other events of national
importance.
54 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Neoliberal Xenophobia in the Netherlands 55
This erosion of national collective
identiers in the context of neolib-
eral atomization opened up spaces
for the production of new symbols
of othering and belonging, rapidly
lled and exploited through the
recently marketized media. To fully
understand the role that commercial
media played in this new dynamics,
it is important to sketch the major
changes during this period in the
Dutch broadcasting system. Until
1988, Dutch TV consisted of two
public channels where various broad-
casting companies, representing dif-
ferent pillars and catering to a more
or less specic audience, could broad-
cast their programmes, the amount of
air time for each pillar based on the
size of its membership. The advent
of the neoliberal order, however, saw
the dismantling of the legal barricades
that had safeguarded this specic
public broadcasting system. New leg-
islation allowed for the introduction
of commercial channels, and by the
second half of the 1990s seven new
commercial stations had appeared.
Segmented, ideologically and reli-
giously based broadcasting made way
for market populism, with the new
TV channels rapidly entering into a
battle for ratings, outbidding each
other in vulgarity and coarseness. In
this context it is interesting to note
that the tsunami of eviction shows
(where an individual is othered and
eliminated by the remaining group)
that has swamped the world this past
decade started in the Netherlands
with the show Big Brother.
The new market media catered to
the looming societal uncertainty and
corresponding need for predictability.
These were readily captured in icons
and incidences (often short-lived)
of collectiveness and belonging, par-
ticularly around issues of safety and
criminality, as repertoires of Us/Them.
The mid-1990s became the time of
massive silent marches and popular
ceremonies honouring victims
of street crime in what became a
national obsession with what was
coined senseless violence. Here the
images and practices of collectively
mourning an innocent victim served
as instant satisers for the atomized
citizens need to belong. The focus
on random violence, however, failed
to offer a durable enough dichotomy,
and in the search for more lasting cat-
egorizations of togetherness and oth-
ering, ultimately the ethnos proved
more resilient.

Minority Targetting: From Racist
to Culturalist

In the economically prosperous
1990s, the neoliberal consensus
within mainstream politics and the
accompanying loss of even the illu-
sion of a national economy left the
cultural eld as the main battleground
for political constituency-building and
opened a market for ethnos-based
politics. Minorities soon became the
ash-point for heated public dis-
course which marked the invasion
of Others, the building of mosques,
the headscarf, the burqua, and the
handshake into sites of contestation.
Finally, the nation could vent its long-
felt discomfort
with the ever-
larger numbers of
allochtonen, so
the story went.
6

It is important to
point out differ-
ences between
the high level of
such symbolism
in national politics
and the practi-
cal, depolarizing
approaches of
local authorities.
A case in point
is a controversy
between the
national leader
of the Labour
Party and the
Labour mayor of
Amsterdam, the
latter allowing his
street coaches to
not shake hands
with members of the opposite sex
because of (Islamic) religious mores.
The national leader loudly protested,
stating that in this country, the
handshake is the norm, conveniently
forgetting that the countrys chief
rabbi had refused to shake hands with
women for time immemorial (a fact
nobody ever politicized).
Of course the question of minori-
ties and foreigners different things,
but almost always conated in public
discourse was not new on the Dutch
political agenda. However, the logic
and form of minority-targeting was
now fundamentally different from
that of earlier decades. The 1980s,
with economic decline and high levels
of unemployment, had seen the more
classic type of scapegoating: The
Netherlands is full; They are stealing
our jobs; They abuse our social secu-
rity system. However, xenophobic
repertoires did not prove expedient
as political mobilizers, and the issue
of migration was only taken up for-
mally by a small nationalist party, the
Centre Party (CP), and carefully kept
out of mainstream politics. In those
days racism was still simply racism,
readily countered by the anti-racist
discourse of the post-war era. The
CPs bashing of Surinamese immi-
grants and guest workers from Italy
and Spain, and later from Turkey and
Morocco, was described by most in
the political class as provincial and
inferior, something that belonged to
the past. In line with this, the states
1980s immigration policies dened
integration solely in socioeconomic
terms, supporting the idea of integra-
tion with identity retention.
In the 1980s, migrants were pre-
sented as a threat to the order of the
nation, to its socioeconomic security.
Increasingly now, however, migrants
are portrayed as a threat to the
nature of the nation, to the essence
of Dutchness. In the context of soci-
etal atomization and the loss of collec-
tive standards, the consumer-citizen
has become increasingly sensitive to
the drawing and maintaining of iden-
tity boundaries. And since we can
only exist in relation to what we are
not, there is a now-ourishing market
for the ritualization and eviction of
6.This is how the Dutch
institutionalization of dif-
ference works: You are
either an autochtoon or
an allochtoon. An allo-
chtoon is a person living
in the Netherlands who
has at least one foreign-
born parent. The Central
Bureau of Statistics
(CBS) makes a distinc-
tion between a Western
(one might substitute
civilized) allochtoon
(a parent from Europe,
North America, Oceania,
but also Indonesia and
Japan) and a non-Western
allochtoon (Turkey, Latin
America, Asia and Africa).
The terms are common
and widely used, although
in everyday parlance only
those from the non-West-
ern group are labeled as
allochtonen, and the theo-
retically non-existent third
generation of allochtonen
is still generally covered by
the term (for example, the
city of Rotterdam ofcially
speaks of third-generation
allochtonen, individu-
als who have at least one
foreign born grandpar-
ent). In 2008, the CBS
counted 1.8 million non-
Western allochtonen in a
population of 16 million.
According to the CBS, the
Netherlands has a total of
850,000 Muslims.
56 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Neoliberal Xenophobia in the Netherlands 57
the Other no matter his or her Rot-
terdam or Amsterdam birthplace, no
matter how uent his or her Dutch
and well-behaved his or her manners
which clearly legitimates segrega-
tion and antagonistic group dynamics
on the ground.
In the neoliberal era, minority-
targeting has not only become both
socially meaningful and politically
functional, it has also changed form:
from racist to culturalist, something
that has highly complicated the for-
mulation of a counter-argument. The
culturalist defence that people are
equal, cultures are not or we are
not against Muslims, we are against
Islam did not have any of the emo-
tionally charged and messy connota-
tions that associated racism with the
Netherlands traumatic Nazi-occupied
past. Even the Dutch High Court in a
recent verdict concerning the abuse
of article 137c has adhered to this
logic, that by insulting the Islam one
not necessarily insults Muslims (the
latter being an offense).
The rst mainstream politician
advocating this turn to cultural racism
was the then-leader of the right-
wing Peoples Party for Freedom
and Democracy (VVD), who in 1991
argued for a tougher assimilationist
stance on immigrant integration. The
overrepresentation of allochtonen in
crime statistics and unemployment
were no longer to be understood as
related to their marginalized, under-
class position, but instead were to be
framed in cultural terms, particularly
the purported incompatibility of Islam
and Western Democracy. The only
successful strategy, the VVD claimed,
was to drop political correctness and
cultural relativism and to pressure
migrants to conform.

Freedom as Boundary

The emerging market of identity
politics was now to code incidents of
urban violence and criminality com-
mitted by young people of North
African, and particularly Moroccan,
heritage, and reported instances of
the repression and abuse of women,
as symbols of a clash of cultures
(pre-modern Islamic tribalism versus
Western civilization). Repeatedly,
these acts were framed as character-
istic of the bounded community of
Moroccans (which became the synec-
doche for all Islamic allochtonen). By
the end of the millennium, any unto-
ward local incident concerning immi-
grants (or Dutch-born allochtonen),
but in particular Moroccans, became
national news. Moreover, it was now
their alleged incapacity to deal with
freedom, and the unfreedom char-
acterizing Muslim culture, that made
them uncivil, unintegrated citi-
zens. More and more, the hard-won
freedoms of the real (meaning auto-
chthon) Dutch secularism, individu-
alism, sexual liberality, homosexuality
and even pornography were jux-
taposed against Muslim immigrants
unfreedoms on these same terrains.
Increasingly, integration was to
require the adoption of these specic
moral choices integration instrumen-
talized to a specic cultural grounding
as a precondition for citizenship. As
Judith Butler rather understatedly
noted regarding the Netherlands: So
a certain paradox ensues in which the
coerced adoption of certain cultural
norms becomes a
requisite for entry
into a polity that
denes itself as the
avatar of freedom.
7

Following on the heels of sexual
freedom as an instrument of coercion
and boundary-drawing was the invoca-
tion of freedom of speech, particularly
including the freedom of gross insult.
In the public domain, a combination
of a dead-serious anti-Islam political
discourse and a popular culture of
ridicule, accusing Muslims of lacking
resilience and a sense of humour,
now openly displayed the pervasive
underlying cultural racism of Dutch
society. Added to this is the dynamics
of the electoral system: a parliamen-
tary system of proportional represen-
tation as in the Netherlands lacks the
imperative to counter majority (read:
autochthonous) sentiments. Electoral
logic compels the major parties to opt
for the majority vote: reaching out to
the allochtoon minority could prove
counterproductive. Hence, there is
also a certain electoral rationale to the
current setting of polarization.
Although some sectors in the
political arena immediately welcomed
the VVD chairmans assimilationist
discourse as brave and outspoken,
for several years it largely remained
a right-wing issue, inuential but not
dominant. This changed in 2000 with
the publication in one of the Nether-
lands major national newspapers of
a watershed essay by a journalist of
socialist stock, a somewhat incoher-
ent, mildly assimilationist piece but
with an emblematic title: The Mul-
ticultural Drama.
8
The essay argued
that the integra-
tion of immigrants
had failed, that the
policy of multiculturalism had locked
up migrants in their inward-looking
communities, creating an apathetic,
isolated underclass. It emphasized the
need for unconditional assimilation of
migrants through the (coerced) learn-
ing of Dutch history and language.
Here, nally, left and right discourses
on integration merged: the similarities
between the leftist essay of 2000 and
the right-wing position of 1991 were
such that the former VVD chairman
referred to it as a feeling of dja v.
9

More and more,
failed integration
was identied as the source of soci-
etal malaise in the Netherlands. Multi-
culturalisms death rattle echoed in all
corners of the public domain.
This blurring of right and left polit-
ical positions, rst in the economic
realm and then also on the highly
mediatized issue of minority/immi-
grant integration, resulted in a kind of
cultural-nationalist bidding war, with
the new eponymous political party
of Pim Fortuyn leading the way. His
populist anti-Islam and anti-estab-
lishment rhetoric, greatly enhanced
by the September 11 events, found
fertile ground among the Dutch elec-
torate: political correctness was out,
Islam-bashing in. The media, needless
to say, loved him he was automatic
7. Judith Butler, Sexual
Politics, Torture, and
Secular Time, The British
Journal of Sociology,
vol. 59 (2008) no. 1, 4.
8. Paul Scheffer, Het
Multiculturele Drama,
NRC Handelsblad,
29 January 2000.
9. NRC Handelsblad,
20 May 2000.
58 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination
ratings. Fortuyn presented a puzzling
merger of old antagonisms and new
style: a former socialist, part-time
academic, a dandy who toured the
country in a Bentley-with-chauffeur
and two lap doggies, talking in sound
bites (I say what I do and I do what
I say), who declared Islam a back-
ward culture but aunted his sexual
encounters with Moroccan boys.
In the polls, his party skyrocketed.
Holland seemed to be on the brink of
a new order.
A key to Fortuyns rapid rise
was the incapacity of the old-style
politicians in the Purple Cabinet
to respond to the new populism.
Although they had been largely
responsible for the economic transfor-
mations of the 1990s, they never rec-
ognized the silent discontent it had
caused. The economy was booming,
there was no reason to worry, they
thought. When it came to issues that
fed into the exclusionist repertoires
building up in society, such as the
arrival of large numbers of asylum
seekers in the 1990s, they seemed
unable or unwilling to deal with them.
Obsessed with enacting the coalitions
mantra Work, Work, Work, they had
no feel for the new depression and
needs created by the neoliberal trans-
formation, leaving all the gut issues
to Fortuyn.
The week before the elections,
Fortuyn was murdered. The elections
went ahead, and his List Pim Fortuyn
(LPF) won a stunning victory of 26
seats, which obliged the Christian
Democrats (CDA) and right-wing
VVD to form a coalition. But the
new partys members were a hastily
assembled bunch with little real polit-
ical savvy, and the revolution quickly
zzled out. The government lasted 86
days, and in the following elections
the LPF lost most of its voters. The
heritage of Pim, however, lived on,
actively embraced by a series of split-
off factions of the VVD but also within
mainstream politics. Cultural racism
remained ascendant.

Neoliberal Xenophobia

In the atomized society of the Neth-
erlands the search for new forms of
togetherness has translated into a
turn to the ethnos, with fantasies of
purity and the moralization of culture
and citizenship. Abiding to the logic
of the market, the media reiterates
and so enhances this societal process.
Where the neoliberal project has,
largely unnoticed, abolished the col-
lective standards and solidarities of
the post-Second Wrld War era, the
faces of immigrants have served as
ideal, identiable ash points for new
repertoires of belonging and othering.
Neoliberalism may be technically
agnostic on matters of culture and
race, but the neoliberal project is
well-served by the permanent con-
struction of an Enemy (either within
or without) who can satisfy the oth-
erwise alienated consumer-citizens
need for inclusion and belonging. For
the time being, at least, the current
Dutch marriage-of-convenience
between cultural racism and the
neoliberal project is certainly not an
unhappy one.
60 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths 61
Damned if you do (condone pop-
ulism)! Damned if you dont
(denounce it loud enough)! Between
populist slogans and the denuncia-
tions of populism, it is often hard to
see which ones are more distressing.
It is impossible not to be extremely
worried by the rise of xenophobic,
nationalist, racist agendas collected by
political analysts under the vague cat-
egory of populism. Yet, it is equally
impossible navely to adhere to the
elitist contempt for the masses that
implicitly fuels the vast majority of
todays condemnations of populism.
1

It is usually in
the most main-
stream media that
one hears the most
sanguine denunciations of populism.
Political analysts, it seems, enjoy tell-
ing the stupid masses how stupid they
are, and the stupid masses enjoy being
told about their collective stupidity (or
rather their neighbours). So goes the
(anti-)populist Punch and Judy show,
as if it was a structural feature of the
mass media, rather than a corruption
of democracy.
If we really want to believe that
the people, united, will never be
defeated, however, we better locate
some intelligence brewing in this col-
lective power. Does this collective
intelligence merely result from being
united? Of course, the strength of an
organized movement is superior to the
mere sum of its individual parts; but,
no truly progressive politics can be
built on the assumption of the stupid-
ity of the individual members of the
multitude. Rather, as Jacques Rancire
has stressed for a number of years, it is
the very trademark of progressive (and
democratic) politics to hold frm to the
presupposition of the equality of intel-
ligence among all humans.
2

How can we
then simultane-
ously claim the
principle of equal-
ity of intelligence,
and account for
the fact that equally intelligent voters
end up massively subscribing to intel-
lectually disgusting agendas? A frst
intuitive answer suggests a distinc-
tion between populism, conceived as
a valuable ability to connect with the
feelings and perceptions experienced
by (large segments of) the people, and
demagogy, conceived as a ruthless
attempt to exploit these feelings and
perceptions, to hijack them through
the shrewd art of storytelling, only to
promote purely self-interested goals.
If we want to explore this distinction
a little further, I believe we should
mobilize an economy of affects and a
mythocracy of narratives in order to
carve a representation of the political
process where both the strength of
populism and the dangers of dema-
gogy appear under a more empower-
ing light.

Affective Importance

Whether people march and chant
together in the streets, or whether
they nod at the same sentence heard
on tv (each viewer separately in his
private apartment), a sociopolitical
movement is made up of people who
Yves Citton
Populism and
the Empowering
Circulation
of Myths
Yves Citton,
author of
Mythocratie.
Storytelling et
imaginaire de
gauche (2010),
analyses the
vari ous affective
levels that moti-
vate socio political
movements
and argues that
they should not
only be recog-
nized but also
taken seriously.
Against that
background it
becomes possible
to understand
current populist
developments
more clearly, and
even to learn from
them. By creating
new myths that
are emancipatory,
we can steer the
future of our
society in a better
direction.
1. Exceptions must be
made, of course, in par-
ticular for Ernesto Laclaus
book, On Populist Reason
(New York: Verso, 2005).
2. Jacques Rancire, The
Ignorant Schoolmaster:
Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation (Stanford:
Stanford University Press,
1991) and Disagreement:
Politics and Philosophy
(Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1998).
62 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths 63
move together. The political question
is: what makes them move together?
What motivates them to take the
streets or to stay home, to select
this demagogue rather than a more
responsible candidate in the voting
booth? This motivation needs to be
analysed on at least four levels.
The frst one is the affective level.
We move because we are affected by
impressions coming from the outside
world and by the tensions they gen-
erate in us, in relation to the needs
experienced by our bodily and mental
machine. More than three centuries
ago, in part III of his Ethics, Spinoza
attempted to provide a geometrical
account for the dynamics of our affec-
tive reactions, laying the groundwork
for an economy of affects to which
many thinkers contributed later
on.
3
Since affects
merely express a
relation (of ease/
joy, unease/sad-
ness or appetite/
desire) between an
individual and the
environment that surrounds and con-
stitutes him, an affect cant be wrong.
If you feel hungry, you are hungry.
It may be bad for your health to eat
more, you may be wrong in your iden-
tifcation of what is lacking, but the
feeling of hunger becomes a reality as
soon as you experience it.
Beyond issues of mere survival
(need for food, water, heat), the affec-
tive level manifests itself through a
perception of degrees of importance.
Our affects concern and defne what is
important to us, the things that mat-
ter. Here again, we may be dreadfully
wrong in identifying what really mat-
ters, but we have to cling to the fact
that something in our given situation
matters: something we can not or will
not tolerate, something we can not or
will not do without. The presupposi-
tion of the equality of intelligence, at
this basic level, means that we should
trust people when they feel, say or
show that something is wrong, or that
something important is missing.
Whether it comes in the form of
analgesic medication, mind-enhancing
drugs or It doesnt really matter
statements, the denial of what some
people actually feel paves the way
to demagogical recuperations. When
you tell people they are wrong to feel
worried about crime, insecurity, losing
their income, paying more taxes, hear-
ing their neighbour speak foreign lan-
guages or perform strange practices
you are wrong: your telling them it
is not important will not cause them
to stop feeling that it matters. They
will go to someone who will (pretend
to) listen and provide them with this
most basic form of preliminary agree-
ment (and respect): yes, I hear what
you feel and Ill try to respond to it
(rather than denying your affects).
Beyond mere politeness or manipula-
tive role-play, such a response needs
to be anchored in a fundamental pos-
tulate: in most cases, there is a good
reason why people feel what they feel
even if we fail to see it up front, and
even if we cant account for it with
satisfactory explanations.

Epidemiocracy

A long tradition of political thought,
where once again Spinoza can be
claimed as a landmark, characterized
politics as an interplay of affects. Only
dreamers, we can read at the begin-
ning of the Tractatus Politicus (1677),
believe politics to be a matter of
rational calculation about a nations
best interests: we humans, in most of
our daily moves, cannot help but react
affectively along the coincidental asso-
ciations traced by our imagination.
While it is supremely valuable to act
on the basis of rational understanding
(intellectus) when we manage to mas-
ter causal explanations (which should
be our highest goal), we are all neces-
sarily tossed around by the coinciden-
tal associations of our imagination.
More importantly, this tossing
around cannot be understood as an
individual phenomenon, but needs
to be understood along collective
lines. The imitation of affects (imi-
tatio affectuum) is the most preva-
lent mechanism Spinoza referred to
when he attempted to geometrize our
emotional-social life paving the way
for John Stuart Mills complaint that
people like (things) in crowds, for
Gabriel Tardes Laws of imitation and
for Ren Girards mimetic desire.
Apart from extremely basic needs
(hunger, thirst, etc.), my affects are
never merely my affects, but always
ours. My spouses sadness makes me
sad; seeing my neighbour afraid is
likely to foster my fears.
We therefore need to study a sec-
ond layer of motivations, an epidemic
level, where each of us is moved by a
variety of collective movements. This
variety often pushes us in contradic-
tory directions, but they always push
us in numbers. Populist and non-
populist politics alike (whatever the
latter might mean!) are fuelled by such
contagions, structuring all democra-
cies as epidemiocracies.
At this second level, it would be
possible to make somewhat stronger
claims to show that one could be
wrong to feel what one feels. Insofar
as our individual lives follow their iso-
lated course, I am likely to be misled
by my neighbours fears: his allergy
towards being stung by a bee certainly
matters to him, but my adopting his
fears causes me unnecessary stress.
Yet, in our increasingly interdepend-
ent and interwoven world, I am just
as likely to be affected by what affects
my neighbour, my contemporaries,
my fellow-humans. At these two basic
levels, therefore, if populism refers
to a capacity to connect with peoples
affects, to hear them, to listen to them,
and to provide a response that is per-
ceived as relevant to the importance
of the matter, then we should try our
best to be as populist as possible.
Tyrants, kings, exploiters can show
contempt for epidemiocratic affects
at their own risks! Self-proclaimed
democrats cant, and shouldnt.

Narrative Structures

Affects, in themselves, appear as
unbound energy. Desire may push me
towards an object, fear may pull me
away from it. But apart from the most
3. For more on this, see
Yves Citton and Frdric
Lordon, Spinoza et les
sciences sociales. De la
puissance de la multitude
lconomie politique
des affects (Paris: di-
tions Amsterdam, 2008/
republished in paperback
in 2010).
64 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths 65
simple examples (refex, instinct),
affects only become effective in
pushing us in this or that direction
when they are integrated into a nar-
rative structure. Hunger, lust, envy,
commiseration, hope, hate will cer-
tainly push me to act, but I wont be
able to enter into any specifc action
until I can integrate my possible
moves within the structure provided
by a narrative or a story. From Aristo-
tles Poetics all the way to the 1970s
structuralists, a story has been mini-
mally described as constituted by an
initial state of affairs (a beginning)
evolving (through a middle part)
into an altered fnal state (the end).
We constantly (although implicitly)
refer to narrative structures in order
to make sense of our experience. My
current (provisionally fnal) situation
makes sense insofar as I can see how
it results from previous situations,
along transformations that are due
partly to my intentional moves, partly
to chance encounters. I can only act
insofar as I imagine my future possible
moves as operating transformations
leading to a (provisionally) fnal state,
which I want to reach or to avoid.
It is on this third narrative level
that affects become integrated into
explanations about the past, and into
actions for the future. I feel thirst, I
remember I have not drunk for a few
hours, I can foresee that, if I manage
to boil myself some water and throw
some dried leaves in it, I will enjoy
a nice cup of tea. I hear the govern-
ment is accumulating huge defcits, I
have the experience of balancing my
monthly budget, and I fear I will have
to pay more taxes. I hear stories about
factories closing down in Europe and
companies outsourcing to China,
and I feel anxiety about my job. I see
reports of killings on the tv news, I
see pictures of dark-skinned suspects,
and I develop fear against immigrants
from the South.
The stories we hear generate
affects, as much as they are needed to
integrate our moves into future paths
of action. As it was practically impos-
sible to separate the frst affective
layer from the second epidemic layer
(since we mostly feel in crowds),
similarly, it is practically impossible to
separate the two epidemic-affective
layers from the third narrative layer.
In most of our experiences, we feel in
and through stories.
It is crucial, however, theoretically
to distinguish this third level, because
it introduces a much greater distance
than the two previous levels between
our actual conditions of living and
the orientation of our life-experience.
While the reality of my affects can
never be denied, the connection is
much looser between what really
causes my affects, on one side, and,
on the other how I account for them
in my narrative of the past, and how
I plan to act upon them in the future.
Here again, we should presuppose the
equality of intelligence: nobody nar-
rates his experience in totally extrava-
gant terms. Since most of us manage
to live most of our lives outside of
mental asylums, we do, in most of our
moves, manage to connect fairly well
(fairly effciently, fairly rationally)
to our actual conditions of living. It
would therefore be fair to say that
there is a good reason why people tell
themselves (or each other) the stories
they tell. And here again, we would
be well inspired to give more credit
to populist narratives: if they were
totally disconnected from reality, peo-
ple would not buy them.
Yet, there are countless ways to
narrate any experience. The framing,
the editing, the wording of the narra-
tive are crucial to its meaning. And,
as any literary scholar knows, apart
from deceivingly simple and uninter-
esting cases, it is ludicrous to claim
that one narrative is more true than
another: they can be both equally
true, and yet lead the reader in sym-
metrically opposed directions. Was
Antigone merely giving proper burial
to her brother, in a private act of care?
Or was she threatening the civil order,
by not respecting Creons edict? Each
character has his or her good reasons
to justify actions that nevertheless
head for a violent clash.

Mythical Attractors

Since none of our lives follow an
isolated course, since we feel in num-
bers, since, more often than not,
our stories are recycled from stories
we heard, read, watched, received
from someone else, narratives like
affects must be conceived on a col-
lective basis. They have their own
existence outside of our individual
subjectivity, they pass through us,
temporarily inhabiting us, before
moving on, in fows and in permanent
metamorphoses. In other words, they
have their own epidemiology, their
own opportunism, like viruses and
infections.
At a fourth level, we must con-
sider the collective nature of stories
as constituting political attractors.
Independently of what Antigone her-
self (had she been a historical fgure)
could have experienced and narrated,
her transformation from an obedient
girl to a rebel has become a myth, a
free-fying story which has managed
to attract countless readers and view-
ers attention, providing them with
a ready-made narrative structure.
Among all the stories that we host (or
sometimes generate), some feature the
rare property of encapsulating and
accounting for a whole block of rela-
tions defning a moment of our expe-
rience. Such narratives attract us like
a potential sexual partner attracts our
gaze, like the light attracts the insect,
like a pleasant melody catches our ear,
or like a tasty dish pleases our palate.
They make sense.
Sociopolitical life has always been
maddeningly complex: the geometry
of collective affects is bound to thwart
any computing capability. The only
way to make (some) sense out of this
chaos, today as yesterday, is to resort
to myths. Rational calculation of our
objective limitations and interests
helps us make certain types of deci-
sions (for example, how many barrels
of crude oil can be drawn, from which
countries, for how long, at what
price?). But even if we stick to physi-
cal data and predictions, the carpet is
very soon pulled from under our feet
(how much nuisance will be produced
66 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths 67
in terms of greenhouse effects by the
consumption of that amount of oil?).
When human affects, tastes, decisions
are brought into the picture, we have
no choice but to resort to myths to
understand our past, interpret our
present and imagine our future. Like
it or not, myths remain our best bet
to orientate our
development, by
mobilizing the
power of political
attractors.
4

Towards an Empowering Circulation
of Myths

We are now in a position to revisit the
question-accusation of populism, and
to understand more precisely where
it is to be located within our four
layers of political orientation. I will
summarize my conclusions in four
general theses, which I will use briefy
to address some of the concrete issues
most commonly associated with pop-
ulism.

1. Populist discourses relay social
pressures and tensions that are accu-
rately perceived (but insuffciently
articulated) by large segments of the
multitude.
The common view expressed by tra-
ditional political analysts can be vali-
dated on at least one point: populism
hijacks real issues, to which it offers
simplistic solutions, and for which
more complex explanations need to
be provided.
Example: even if populist tough-
on-crime policies are misled and mis-
leading, people are right to feel that
their modes of life are increasingly
under threat. It would only be half-
wise to remind them that no previous
generation has led a more (materially)
secure living than ours (in the rich
Western countries): both the generat-
ing causes of crime and its perception
express the growing fragility of our
individual forms of life. As we fnd
ourselves increasingly interdepend-
ent, as our growing common power
induces a growing awareness of our
individual powerlessness, we (rightly)
feel more exposed, and we are (logi-
cally) attracted to politics of fear. It
is therefore accurate to portray pop-
ulism as providing bad solutions to
real problems and to call for a better
(less simplistic) rearticulation of the
(complex) issues at stake.

2. It is not suffcient to attack populist
myths with accurate facts and rational
arguments: (reactionary) myths need
to be overcome by (emancipatory)
myths.
Since human agency necessarily relies
on narrative structures, and since
political life necessarily relies on
mythical attractors, those who are
unhappy with populist mystifcations
should see it as their main task to sub-
stitute bad myths with better (more
attractive) myths.
Example: the anti-tax fanaticism
on which countless populist move-
ments have ridden over the last 30
years (from Margaret Thatcher to the
current Tea Party) has been fuelled by
countless stories of welfare queens,
tax evaders, blood-sucked entrepre-
neurs and arrogant bureaucrats. Even
if such stories are generally mythical
and mystifying, people are right,
here again, to regard the cumbersome,
sometimes obsolete and often oppres-
sive machinery of the state with the
greatest suspicion. A vicious circle has
simultaneously increased the services
expected from public institutions,
reduced their relative funding and,
as a consequence, proven they were
unable properly to do their job.
Populist anti-state feelings need to
be re-appropriated and reoriented by
new myths expressing our growing
need to develop common institutions
capable of providing the high levels of
care we have been led to expect. The
perceived failure of the privatization
of the British railroad system, the need
for universal health care coverage in
the USA, the call for an unconditional
guaranteed income among European
Greens, the demand for the enforce-
ment of environmental standards
worldwide may all (partly) rely on
myths: all the same, they all sketch
stories paving the way for new modes
of taxation, new promotions of com-
mon goods, new forms of collective
agency well beyond the bureaucratic
structures of the existing (national)
state. But we need myths to fght
myths, if we are to reshape the politi-
cal agenda.

3. In order to distinguish emancipa-
tory myths from reactionary ones, it is
less important to measure how mythi-
cal they are than to consider in which
direction they push our collective
development.
If demagogical agendas need to be
denounced, it is not because they
rely on myths (simplifcations, exag-
gerations, fctions), but because they
mobilize bad myths, that is, politi-
cal attractors that promote policies
resulting in a decrease of our col-
lective agency, either due to the sui-
cidal nature of their injunctions, or
due to the injustice they impose on
some of us.
Example: even if the most vocal
denunciations of populism tend to
come from those who speak in the
name of the rational calculation of
our best interests (orthodox econo-
mists and other expert engineers of
market-based mechanisms), I would
cite the hegemonic reference to gdp
growth as a typical case of populism.
For understandable reasons, we all
want to have more means at our dis-
posal. Hence, we are fundamentally
right to hope for an increase in our
Gross Domestic Product. The prob-
lem with using gdp growth as the
fnal word of any political argument
is not that it is mythical in nature. Of
course, it relies on a tale, on a fan-
tasy we tell ourselves (Accumulate
more material means and you will be
happier!).
The question, however, is not to
decide how realistic or unrealistic
this tale happens to be. gdp growth
is the best example of what Bruno
Latour calls a factish: the mixture
of a fact (it is calculated by scientifc
procedures autonomous from our
subjectivity) and a fetish (its eff-
ciency relies on the collective agency
made possible by our believing in
4. For more on this, see
Yves Citton, Mythocratie.
Storytelling et imaginaire
de gauche (Paris: ditions
Amsterdam, 2010).
68 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths 69
it).
5
The problem
with the current
hegemony of gdp
growth is not that
it refers to a myth, but that it acts
more and more as a bad myth: its
short-term bias pushes mankind in
productivist and consumerist direc-
tions that threaten to ruin the very
basis of our survival on this planet.
It is demagogical insofar as it prom-
ises people to fll their pockets with
wealth, while it simultaneously pulls
the (environmental, social and men-
tal) rug from under their feet.

4. Emancipatory myths best emerge
from a media structure that favours
a bottom-up circulation of myths,
fuelled by a well-rounded circulation
of information and knowledge.
The elitist bias disqualifying the
beliefs of the masses in the name of a
superior rationality to be cultivated
by decision-makers could easily be
replaced by an equally elitist bias
asking intellectuals to provide the
people with good myths. Against
such a temptation, it may be useful
to remind ourselves of the collec-
tive nature of myths, which rarely
emanate from individuals, but cir-
culate within a (sub) culture in a
truly endemic fashion. Even if the
determination of what constitutes a
good or a bad myth is bound to
be confictual, since the evaluation
of the direction in which it pushes
us presupposes the determination of
goals and values which constitute the
very stuff (and battleground) of poli-
tics, one could propose a structural
criteria to evaluate the formation of
(populist and demagogical) myths.
Demagogy can be described as a
top-down action, by which a (would-
be) leader mobilizes powerful media
channels and networks from the
speakers place on the Greek agora
to the primetime spot on the nightly
tv news in order to spread a myth
within a population. By contrast, one
could expect emancipating myths
to emerge bottom-up from within a
population, endemically. Unsurpris-
ingly, the most important and basic
political struggle concerns the struc-
ture of the mediasphere: demagogy
may be the inevitable companion of
a highly centralized, highly vertical-
ized, highly monopolized structure
(illustrated nowadays by Berlusconis
Italy). Those who really want to fght
demagogy would therefore be well-
inspired to do their best to promote
a mediasphere in which myths can
circulate bottom-up, from grassroots
activists (right and left), coalescing
from below into wider and wider
movements. Obviously, the result of
such a coalescence of myths will be a
function of the quality of the informa-
tion and knowledge circulating at all
levels of this mediasphere.
Example: it is easy (and fashiona-
ble) to mock and discredit the promo-
tion of diversity, cultural hybridization
and creolization as hollow and
hypocritical injunctions (while equal-
ity would often be a more serious
demand). Yet, in a historical moment
when institutional suspicion, violent
rejection and outright hate target so
many (legal or illegal) immigrants, it is
extremely important to do everything
we can to favour the bottom-up com-
munication of stories among the vari-
ous sectors of our increasingly mixed
populations. For one Roma rapist
instantaneously portrayed on all of
Berlusconis channels, how many
un-broadcasted stories of humane
gestures, personal assistance, fruitful
collaborations, interdependence, soli-
darity, active resistance, community
of fate uniting newcomers and past
settlers? Creolization is no less a myth
than ethnic purity, but it requires the
invention of new (transversal) chan-
nels of communication in order to
gather its attractive momentum.

Outcome/Coming-Out

In the fall of 2008, as globally coor-
dinated national states were bend-
ing over and backwards to save the
banks (and global capitalism), reach-
ing deep in pockets that had previ-
ously been looted by the increasingly
arrogant greed of the fnancial elite,
we cruelly lacked a truly populist
movement, which could have united
the passionate rejections of fnancial
deregulation, the affective denuncia-
tion of the outrageous profts made
by traders and CEOs, and the ram-
pant disgust towards the profound
absurdity of a system piling stress
upon stress, and threat upon threat.
As 2010 exacerbates old fnancial
instabilities with new sociopolitical
crises, Etienne Balibar has good rea-
sons to write: We need something like
a European populism, a simultaneous
movement or a peaceful insurrection
of popular masses who will be voic-
ing their anger as victims of the crisis
against its authors and benefciaries,
and calling for
a control from
below over the
secret bargaining
and occult deals
made by markets,
banks, and States.
6

Such a peaceful insurrection, if it
is to take place, will certainly need us
collectively to invent new channels of
communication, to learn to listen and
relay new stories, to activate and fuel
new mythical attractors. The capital-
ist system is not in crisis: it is a crisis.
As such, it calls for an outcome both
a coming-out and an exit strategy.
Populism (in its traditional right-wing
as well as in its yet-to-be reinvented
left-wing favour) paves the way for
something else to come out of capital-
ism. It is up to us to let it harden into
a fascistic horror or to help new
emancipatory shapes emerge from its
meltdown.
5. See Bruno Latour, Pan-
doras Hope: Essays on the
Reality of Science Studies
(Cambridge, MA/London:
Harvard University Press,
1999). 6. Etienne Balibar, Europe:
Final Crisis?, text pub-
lished on the Internet on
22 May 2010. See also
Balibars refections on
Laclaus essay on populism
Populisme et politique: le
retour du contrat, in: La
proposition de lgalibert
(Paris: PUF, 2010).
70 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination On Populist Politics and Parliamentary Paralysis 71
Rudi Laermans

On Populist Politics and
Parliamentary Paralysis

An Interview
with Ernesto Laclau
A spectre is haunting Western
Europe, and it no longer bears the
name communism but populism.
Politicians and political parties
such as Wilders in the Nether-
lands, Le Pen in France, Berlus-
coni in Italy or the Vlaams Belang
in Flanders refer to the people
or the demos to legitimize what
is usually an extreme right-wing
programme that connects the
danger of Islam and the threat of
immigration to identity with such
things as globalisation, security
and the future of our social safety
net. This rhetoric is embedded in a
more general discourse that creates
a broader antagonism between
us and them, the people and
their adversaries. Us stands for
average hard-working citizens
who behave decently and have
common sense. Them stands
for the political establishment
and the left-wing church, who
squander money at the govern-
ments expense and deprive us,
the silent majority, of freedom
of speech through the imposed
morality of political correctness. In
this way, right-wing populism can
position itself as an ultra-demo-
cratic discourse, adept at aggre-
gating various complaints and
fears in the name of the people.
Whether its the European Union,
the uncertain future of the pension
system, the credit crisis, the rate
of taxation, or simply the ever-
growing queues on the motor-
ways, it is always connected to
the discrepancy between us and
them. They do not listen to us;
they ignore the will and identity
of the people. This discourse
not only simplifes the political
arena; it also relates the people
to a charismatic leader who seems
to literally personify its presumed
desires. Le Pen, Wilders, De
Winter or Berlusconi profess that
they give the silent majority a
voice, while in fact they actively
articulate it by ascribing very
diferent complaints, demands
and desires to the discrepancy
between us and them. All of
this is facilitated by the mediatized
audience democracy, in which
self-appointed mouthpieces of the
people can directly address the
individual citizen in prime time
with well-chosen one-liners. In the
Netherlands, frst Pim Fortuyn and
then Geert Wilders proved in this
way that a populist politician can
appeal to a broad spectrum of the
population without the support of
a consolidated party machine.
Latin America is in the grip
of a completely diferent kind of
populism. Of a left-wing persua-
sion, it is buoyed by a combination
of three factors: the mobilization
capacity of various grassroots
movements, the recruitment power
of the mass media, and the rhetor-
ical allure of a charismatic leader,
la Evo Morales, Lula da Silva or
Hugo Chvez. Unlike in right-
wing Europe, the contradistinc-
tion between us and them is not
primarily articulated culturally,
but economically, which would
72 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination On Populist Politics and Parliamentary Paralysis 73
RL: In Western Europe, a resurgence of populism can be observed,
particularly of the extreme right-wing type. What is your perspective
on this development?
EL: I think that the prospects in todays Western Europe are rather
unpleasant. All the governments in Western Europe are reacting to the
crisis with extreme neoliberal formulas of adjustment. Zapatero has just
passed a set of draconian measures and you know what is happening in
Greece. In Germany the situation is also relatively unsustainable, and
in England the relationship between Nick Clegg and David Cameron
is quite feeble because there exist strong tendencies within the Liberal
Democrats to reject the coalition agreement and the way it is imple-
mented. So the situation is bad, and this all the more because the social
democratic parties, which are the only viable alternative at the moment
in Eastern as well as Western Europe, do not have any alternative plan.
These conditions fuel extreme right-wing populism. If you dont have
an alternative to the system, people who feel a need for such an alterna-
tive move to extreme ideologies, whether they are right-wing or left-
wing. Take the example of France. There existed a classical discourse
of opposition, which was that of the Communist Party and the red belts
of the industrial cities. This world has disintegrated as a result of the
seem to make Latin American
populism a descendent of Marxist
thought. Or is this precisely not
the case, because the populist
antithesis between the people
and the establishment difers
thoroughly from the antagonism
between a dominated or exploited
class and a propertied class?
For political theorist Ernesto
Laclau (born in 1935 in Buenos
Aires), this question sparked a
refection that would bring him
beyond Marx and prevailing
theories of democracy. The
populist appeal of Peronism
in Argentina was a reason for
Laclau to cast serious doubts
on the orthodox Marxist axiom
that all politics is essentially an
expression of economic class
diferences. Instead, populism
teaches that class politics is also
frst and foremost, a question of
discourse: the articulation of the
social space according to a specifc
dichotomy, which in populism
assumes a more general form than
in Marxism. In Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (1985), written
together with Chantal Moufe
and which co-initiated so-called
post-Marxism, this idea is further
elaborated through an appeal to
Gramscis notion of hegemony.
A hegemonic discourse, or
a discourse that strives for
hegemony, relates various dissat-
isfactions to each other: it homog-
enizes them by linking them
together as equivalent demands
in a chain of equivalence. This
simultaneously creates an antago-
nism between the people and
the establishment: on the one
hand, the equivalent demands are
represented as coming from the
people, which is thus discursively
construed and given a political
content, and on the other hand
these demands are contrasted to
the interests of those in power and
the groups connected with them.
The distinction between us and
them may be defned in class
terms, but this is only one possible
articulation. Every hegemonic or
contra-hegemonic discourse has
its characteristic central signifers
that connect or combine divergent
demands one of the meanings
of the verb to articulate and
thus give shape to the antago-
nism between us and them.
Precisely because a signifer such
as, for example, the working
class, the Dutch people, or, in
a liberal context, the citizen,
combines very diferent demands,
it acquires so many connotations
that it ultimately tends towards
meaninglessness, it changes into
an empty signifer. In short,
hegemonic politics comes down to
constructing a people by creating
an antagonism with the help of
versatile symbols.
After Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy, Laclau published several
collections of theoretical essays in
which he on the one hand dwells
upon specifc issues regarding the
theory of hegemony he developed
with Moufe and on the other gives
attention, among other things, to
the dialectics between universality
and particularity in light of the
identity politics that were strongly
taking hold in the 1990s. He thus
became an internationally much
heard and broadly respected voice
on the left, as shown by the debate
with the feminist theorist Judith
Butler and the Lacanian-inspired
political philosopher Slavoj iek
in Contingency, Hegemony, Univer-
sality (2000). In 2005, 20 years
after the publication of Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, Laclau
published On Populist Reason.
Rather than a faithful synthesis
of insights noted earlier, this is
a study that stands on its own in
which Laclau rearticulates the path
his thinking has taken in the mean-
time. One of the basic propositions
of the book is that populism is
neither an aberration of a demo-
cratic politics nor a danger to it
but, on the contrary, an inherent
dimension of it. Democratic
politics requires the construc-
tion of a people on the basis of
one or more empty signifers as
well as an antagonism between
us and them which is not to
say that every populism is also by
defnition democratic.
74 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination On Populist Politics and Parliamentary Paralysis 75
EL: What would be the empty signifer?
RL: In the case of Wilders Party for Freedom, freedom itself is a very
important signifer. Its made equivalent with being modern, tolerant,
secularized and at the same time with a certain idea of We the
Dutch.
EL: At this point we have to distinguish several things, such as ethnicity,
nationality, race These unifying signifers dont all function in the same
way since their modes of inclusion and exclusion are diferent. All of them
are without doubt right-wing, yet the logic behind the creation of these
identities difers. Thus in the Nazi discourse the eugenic component was
very important, whereas this is not at all the case in todays right-wing
movements. And a second thing is that its also important to distinguish
the logic of dichotomizing society in two camps from the ideologies
that invoke this logic: in Latin America the opposition to neoliberalism
mobilized around populist themes in the wake of the ascension of peasant
communities in Bolivia, the dynamic of the new social movements in
Argentina, or the grassroots mobilization in Venezuela. The latter would
have collapsed without the presence of Hugo Chvez as a unifying signi-
fer. So there are two levels at which popular mobilization takes place.
The same is happening in Ecuador with Rafael Correa, with Evo Morales
in Bolivia, with frst Nestor and then Christina Kirchner in Argentina,
and with Pepe Mujica in Uruguay. To some extent, Lula has managed
to create a similar situation in Brazil, clearly a more complicated country
than the others just mentioned. So overall the spectrum of politics in Latin
America is moving to the left, with populist logics.
RL: Hearing you mentioning all these presidential names reminds me
of the fact that in On Populist Reason, you stress the importance of the
name of the leader as a constitutive performative element in populist
discourse. Yet most political theorists of liberal democracy regard
populist leadership as quite problematic because it rapidly tends to
become authoritarian.
EL: Politics is constructed around two poles. One side is populism, the
other is institutionalism. The excess of populism leads to the dissolu-
tion of the social community, which is of course a disaster. Yet since an
excess of institutionalism results in political paralysis, one always has
to construct a balance between these two poles in order to have a viable
political system. This balance is created in diferent societies in diferent
ways. An excess of institutionalism more particularly leads to the parlia-
mentarization of power, which paralyses the executive. A typical example
was the Fourth Republic in France. The country became unmanageable
tertiarization of the labour market. The outcome was a unique system of
power in which the social democrats and the more conservative forces
did not difer very much from each other. The only political alterna-
tives were to be found on the fringes of the left and the right, yet it is the
right fringe that has progressively expanded. Many former voters of the
French Communist Party are today voters of Le Pen, a phenomenon that
is called gaucho-lepnisme. The reason is simple: if you want change in
some way, the precise way in which that change is going to happen and its
ideological framing become a secondary matter. And that is of course not
only the situation in France. The chances for a left populism are today in
Western Europe rather minimal. Populism is going to expand, but it will
be a populism of the right.
RL: You mean an ethno-populism?
EL: Not necessarily. Ethnic populism is important in Eastern Europe, but
I dont think you will have a populism of that kind in Western Europe.
Thus Le Pen is not someone who tries to recreate a national identity as
the sole basis of inclusion. Its not the ethno-populism that fourished in
Bulgaria or Romania during the interwar period. Its a rather compli-
cated matter, and I dont know how its going to evolve. What is clear is
that without a reconstruction of the left along a social democratic line
because communist options are already over its difcult to imagine how
a more democratic politics can come about.
RL: People like Le Pen in France or Wilders in the Netherlands make
an appeal to the identity of the French or the Dutch, which they posi-
tion as threatened by immigrants as well as the reigning political elites.
Yet you wouldnt speak of ethno-populism?
EL: No, because of a terminological question. Le Pen or Wilders are
not focusing on race as the central question. Le Pen is not claiming that
there exists a superior French race. He is saying something diferent than
ethno-populism: We are French people and we reject the immigrants.
The same goes for the Dutch right-wing populism of Wilders: its not an
ethno-populism but an anti-immigrant one. Maybe the situation is a bit
diferent in Flanders because there you have not only the theme of immi-
gration but also the relationship with the Walloons.
RL: Wilders and the Party for Freedom are a complex thing. Its a
populism that claims to defend our values, such as tolerance toward
homosexuals. There is thus a twofold reference, one to the supposed
values of the Dutch, so a nationalist reference, and a more general one
to the modern-liberal tradition.
76 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination On Populist Politics and Parliamentary Paralysis 77
with a takeover of bureaucracy or administration. Weber therefore
favoured a presidential regime based on the American model. In
comparison with a strict parliamentary system, a presidential regime
seems indeed to foster populist politics. One could perhaps be in
favour of a dual regime with a populist dynamic via the presidential
channel that is balanced by procedures and parliamentary control?
EL: Postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Leela
Ghandi, the great-granddaughter of Mahatma Ghandi who is professor
at the University of Chicago, have produced an interesting analysis
of if I translate it in my language the ways in which the signifers of
democracy create diferent institutional preconditions within diferent
societies. What could democracy mean in an Islamic society? What could
democracy be in the Latin American case, which I am trying to analyse?
They are dealing with the kind of topic that you mention. I think we
have to arrive at a more universal theory of democracy in which demo-
cratic demands are dealt with in all of their diversity, considering both
their dangers and possibilities. With our Eurocentric view we tend to
think that democratic demands can be handled in only one way. Yet at
the beginning of the nineteenth century liberalism was a very respected
form of political organization, whereas democracy was a pejorative term,
like populism today, because the notion was identifed with the govern-
ment of the mob or Jacobinism and related things. It took many revolu-
tions and reactions to reach the kind of relatively stable balance between
liberalism and democracy we still know today in the West. I think that
this kind of integration of democracy and liberalism was never reached
in Latin America. After they became independent, Latin American states
were organized as liberal parliamentary regimes, yet they were not the
least democratic because the democratic demands of the masses were
ignored. The mass movements that emerged at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century therefore expressed themselves predominantly not via liberal
channels but mainly through a form of nationalistic military dictatorship.
There existed a bifurcation in the democratic experience of the masses:
there was liberalism and there was democracy expressed through these
non-orthodox channels. Only after the experience of the horrible dictator-
ships of the 1970s arose the possibility of coupling the liberal-democratic
and the national-populist tradition. This construction is an uneasy thing
but I think no one in Latin America, neither Chvez or Morales nor
Kirchner or Correa, is advocating the dismantlement of the liberal foun-
dations of the state. In Latin America, we have, or are going to have,
democratic governments with a strong presidentialism. This is not the
case in Western Europe. Nevertheless, Western Europe needs some kind
and within this context Gaullism emerged, which was probably a moment
of populism. Several things that were not manageable by the disinte-
grating political system became again manageable thanks to the person-
alization of power. And then came the rebellion of 1968. It threatened
to disintegrate society since it proved difcult to transform this broad
mobilization and the many accompanying demands into a viable political
progressive alternative going beyond Gaullism. Only one man had the
sense of what was needed at that point, and that was Pierre Mends
France. When the mobilization started, he was giving a series of talks
in Chile. He interrupted his tour, went back to France, and said on the
radio that he was prepared to seize power if he was backed by the whole
left. He proposed the founding of a Sixth Republic on a left-wing basis
but did not succeed. On the one hand the Communist Party had a very
cautious corporatist politics of negotiation. The last thing in the world
they wanted was the emergence of a left-wing populism in France. On
the other hand the gauchistes were totally elsewhere with their slogan all
power to the imagination. What happened then, we have already been
speaking about. People didnt see that the mobilization of 68 could result
in a reorganization of French society. During the subsequent election De
Gaulle therefore won massively, but not because people were particu-
larly happy with him. For one year later, in the April 1969 referendum on
the proposed constitutional amendment, De Gaulle was defeated. In the
forced parliamentary election of 1968 people just didnt see how a new
politico-hegemonic arrangement could possibly emerge. So confronted
with the prospect of a complete disintegration they voted for De Gaulle.
Jacques Lacan once said that the two great leaders in French politics of
the second half of the twentieth century that he admired were De Gaulle
and Pierre Mends France. Slavoj iek has misinterpreted this statement,
saying that it showed Lacan was not at all left-wing. I think Lacan was
actually trying to say something diferent, namely that the only genuine
hegemonic projects that proposed an image of the states capacity to unify
French society were advanced by the right-winger De Gaulle and the left-
winger Mends France. But to reiterate the more general point: we need
a balance between populism and institutionalism. In the Latin-American
context this is perfectly clear. In the European context the lack of unifying
signifers, so of slogans or leaders, is going to be felt very much in the
next few years. And the risk is that they will be come from the right
RL: What you say reminds me of the analysis of Max Weber. In his
view, the administrative bureaucratic apparatus needs a strong leader
on top who receives a plebiscitee via election. Without that kind of
leader, the moment of true politics disappears because you end up
78 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination On Populist Politics and Parliamentary Paralysis 79
any foundation and that the moment of totalization is not a ground but a
horizon. Once you have this idea of a horizon, the moment of the political
comes to the fore.
RL: And for you this necessarily implies an antagonism?
EL: I have a twofold position on antagonism. When we wrote Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, we conceived antagonism as pointing to the impos-
sibility of the social order to constitute itself as a sedimented order. Later
on I had second thoughts. Antagonism already goes hand in hand with a
frst discursive inscription of somebody as an enemy that is already a form
of sedimentation. There is thus something deeper involved, a moment
of dislocation that prevents the existing structure from overcoming this
unstructured moment in one way or another. Lets take as an example of
a dislocating experience the crisis of the Weimar Republic in which the
middle classes lost their savings. You can say: Its forces of evil doing
this, or Its a punishment sent by God because of my sins. Whatever
form of inscription you choose is a second moment with regard to the
experience of dislocation, which does not necessarily lead to any form of
discursive articulation.
RL: The moment of dislocation can also just elicit particular claims
that are dealt with in an administrative way, so without the moment of
politics.
EL: There is no radical dislocation if the claims can be handled in that
mode. A radical dislocation happens in the moment in which you cannot
follow administrative ways.
RL: How would you then delineate administration from politics?
EL: Let me start with an example and then move on to the theoretical
approach of this question. Suppose you have a group of neighbours
asking the municipality to create a bus line that connects the place where
they live to the place where most of them work. If the municipality
accepts this claim, this is the end of the matter. The claim is discursively
inscribed and administered. But lets suppose the municipality does
not accept the claim. There is then the frustration of a demand, and an
inability of the institutional system to channel the demand. Now lets
further suppose that among or connected to these people whose demand
has been frustrated, there exist other demands that are also being frus-
trated, for instance regarding housing, health, security, schooling, and so
on. People start to have the idea that they have something in common,
in the sense that their demands are being opposed by a system that has
power but does not recognize them. That is a pre-political and pre-
of populist reconfguration of the social space in a democratic direction
since otherwise that space is going to be occupied by the horrible move-
ments we were speaking about previously by Le Pen, Wilders and his
Party for Freedom, and the like.
RL: Lets go the philosophical basis of your work. In your view, poli-
tics is not just a separate societal sphere but a necessary dimension of
instituting the social. Could you elaborate this idea a little bit?
EL: In my work I have tried to clarify the distinction between the social
and the political according to the Husserlian distinction between sedi-
mentation and reactivation. Whereas the social consists of sedimented
practices, the dimension of reactivation comes to the fore in the insti-
tuting moment and that is the political. Obviously, Husserl would not
have bought this argument. He would have conceived the instituting
moment as being that of the transcendental subject, which has in his view
an absolute constitutive priority. I consider the moment of reactiva-
tion as a moment of radical contingency. You have social institutions or
sedimented practices, but their institution or reinstitution does not have
a ground beyond itself. Suppose that you use a mathematical operation.
You dont remember the moment in which this mathematical operation
was mathematically grounded. So in the moment of sedimentation you
use practices that are simply established, whereas in the moment of reac-
tivation you go back to the original moment of institution. For Husserl,
this moment of institution would imply an absolutely grounding, tran-
scendental subject, whereas for me it points to a radical contingency that
defnes the moment of the political.
RL: And that moment appears in various kinds of struggle?
RL: Yes, I think that the instituting moment is continually reproduced.
The social is never completely ordered but society is also not something
that starts from zero. The two dimensions are constantly overdetermining
each other.
RL: Yet why call the instituting moment political? Because it involves
struggle?
EL: Yes, and that brings us to another aspect of my thinking. You have
read my joint work with Chantal Moufe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,
and subsequent writings. One of the defning ideas is that antagonism is
of central importance to the institution of the social. You have overall two
ideas on the social. Either it is a ground preceding everything else that is
happening, which implies that the social has a defnite meaning. Or it is
an Abgrund, in the sense of Heidegger, which is to say that the social lacks
80 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination On Populist Politics and Parliamentary Paralysis 81
RL: Because it still contained an implicit reference to the people and
their claims?
EL: Yes! Dont forget that the people can be constructed in various ways.
Thus the Long March of Mao constructed the people as something that
exceeded class. There was at that moment no possibility to say that they
all belonged to the working class or something of the kind. You had
predominantly people who were marginal, with destroyed daily lives
people who were dislocated, as we said before, because of the Japanese
invasion. All their demands that could not be met were reabsorbed around
the Red Army and communism. In that period, communism started to
signify in China something that had very little to do with what it meant
in the experience of nineteenth-century Europe, where it was associated
with justice and related things. The same can happen in discourses with
a completely diferent ideological orientation. Take the case of Musso-
lini and Italy in 1923-1924. When people observed that the state that had
emerged from the Risorgimento was disintegrating, they were looking
for some sort of radical re-foundation. The fascists have been able to
carry out that revolution whereas the communists failed. One could say
this is nonsense, since a true revolution would have been something
very diferent. Yet at some point, revolution became the central signi-
fer pointing to a radical reorganization of society, be it a fascist one.
When people realize that society is threatened with radical disintegration,
whatever kind of reorganization of society weighs more than the actual
ideological content framing it. The truth is that there were many people
moving from communism to fascism and vice versa during this period. In
1944-1945 the opposite process took place: the communist signifer started
to articulate a much wider series of equivalences than the fascist one
within the context of the German army occupying Northern Italy.
RL: Lets return to more recent times. You spoke of the populist char-
acter of the market discourse in Eastern Europe just after the fall of
communism. At that time, neoliberalism was already becoming a hege-
monic discourse in the West. During the 1990s neoliberalism spread
out in diferent ideological directions, including the left Im thinking
for instance of Tony Blairs so-called third-way politics. Was this kind
of neoliberalism also a populist discourse?
EL: No. I dont think Blairism was at any moment genuinely populist,
except perhaps in its very beginnings. The conservative regime was
disintegrating in the 1990s, so there was some kind of populist appeal
to Blairism. Yet what Blairism was providing later on was a continua-
tion of Thatcherism by other means. Eric Hobsbawm has written that
populist situation. Instead of the demands being administratively solved,
there is the emergence of a chain of equivalent demands not recognized
by the system. In this situation people will start feeling that there exists a
division of society between those at the top and those at the bottom. At
some point somebody starts interpellating people at the bottom against
the whole system. That is the moment in which the populist identity
arises. So you have all these demands foating there and some sense of
equivalence, or what I call an equivalential chain. And then there is the
crystallizing of the plurality of demands around one symbol that unifes
the chain. In most of the cases in fact I have not found a single example
in which this is not the case that symbol is the name of a leader. When
all this happens, the social space is divided into two camps. It can happen
with an ideology of the right, like you may observe in Flanders or in
Holland, or it can happen with an ideology of the left, like in Latin
America. The crucial point is that populism is not an ideology itself. It
is a form of constructing the political through the division of society in
two camps.
RL: And with an explicit reference to the people?
EL: Well, the people are precisely constructed through this chain of
equivalences.
RL: I had the impression that your early work on populism suggested
that it was necessary to refer to the people as a basic signifer that
keeps the whole chain of equivalences together, whereas in more
recent writings the empty signifer that installs a hegemonic discourse
can for instance also be the market, witness neoliberalism.
EL: After 1989 the reference to the market defnitely played that role in
Eastern Europe of the signifer unifying all demands. The market is actu-
ally a way of organizing the economy but in Eastern Europe the market
meant at that time many other things, such as catching up with the West,
the end of bureaucratic inefciency, freedom and the right to be diferent,
and so on. Everything crystallized around the signifer market but that
did not last long. People started realizing that the market was not an all-in
solution to all their difculties. This led to a disintegration of the anticom-
munist imaginary and the emergence of some kind of more pragmatic
arrangement in most Eastern European countries.
RL: So even if the market is the central signifer, you would still
speak of a populist discourse?
EL: It was a genuine populist discourse.
82 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination On Populist Politics and Parliamentary Paralysis 83
to be too optimistic because we may have consumerism as an ideology
and a social practice for a long time after the neoliberal formula has
stopped being efective. So overall consumerism and neoliberalism are not
necessarily linked. Before the crisis of the 1970s, there existed a consum-
erist attitude that was defnitely not a neoliberal one. Thatcherism and
Reaganism attempted to link these, and stated that consumerism, which
had already become a mass ideology, was compatible with self-regulated
markets without state regulations. That was the dominant ideology in
the 1980s and the 1990s. Things are diferent today. Consumerism as an
ideology is not exactly withering away but what is defnitely in decline is
the faith that neoliberalism is the best way to achieve consumerism. So my
point is that the logic of consumerism and the logic of neoliberalism dont
tend to coalesce in a coherent or necessary way. Lets suppose that they
dont, and also that neoliberalism does not deliver the goods and that even
the consumerist logic is put to the test. Many things may happen then,
for instance that people start realizing that they have to become subjects
of their own lives at diferent stages of organization. When this occurs,
consumerism is also put into question. I think that all these recent crises
not only reveal that neoliberalism is bankrupt but that the confdence
on which consumerism was based is also threatened. In such a situation
people can think of becoming a diferent kind of subject, and some hope
for another form of societal organization may emerge
Blairism was Thatcherism with trousers. It was exactly that. Very quickly
the mystic of Blairism was reduced to nothing and, with the Iraq war, it
simply disappeared.
RL: How should we then conceive neoliberalism as a hegemonic
discourse?
EL: The interesting phenomenon is that neoliberalism in its most crude
forms requires authoritarian methods. The restructuring of the Chilean
economy in a neoliberal direction by the Chicago boys required the
dictatorship of Pinochet. In Argentina, the economic plan of Martnez de
Hoz would not have been able to implant itself without the dictatorship
of Videla. But there exists another, more pervasive form of neoliberalism
that emerges when the parties that should have opposed these regimes
are permeated by their ideas. It happens all the time. The Blairism just
mentioned is a clear example. And today, the politics of readjustment
according to the most traditional norms of the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) are advocated by the socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The
neoliberal disease ultimately goes beyond the authoritarian form, by way
of negotiations. Argentina ofers an example to the contrary. After the
crisis of 2001 and the arrival to power of Nestor Kirchner, the country
completely broke with the formulas of the IMF and started up a more
pragmatic politics. The result is that Argentina is passing through the
actual crisis in a rather mild way, without having to appeal to any forms
of adjustment. Most Latin American economies are actually moving in
this direction.
RL: Is neoliberalism then predominantly hegemonic with regard to
active government and administration?
EL: Neoliberalism was only hegemonic among economic and political
elites. It never obtained hegemony over society as a whole.
RL: Some people would question this diagnosis on the basis of
phenomena such as contemporary consumerism, which can be linked
to the marketization of nearly everything, including politics. One may
consider neoliberalism not only as a method of politico-economic
government but as a broader ideological formation that re-articulates
nearly all social relations in terms of provider-customer positions.
EL: I dont think that there is such a continuity between neoliberalism
and consumerism. Consumerism is perfectly compatible with many forms
of the welfare state that neoliberalism opposes. It is true that in its most
hegemonic moment, neoliberalism rearticulated consumerism according
to its own logic. That is exactly what I think is collapsing. Not that I want
Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination 84 Column 85
column
POPULISM WITHOUT POPULARITY
NINA POWER
The culture of the recent deposed,
but all-too-undead New Labour
project may be summed up in a single
phrase: Populism without popular-
ity. What does this mean? It means
that the simulacrum of politics has
overtaken any possibility of genu-
ine social content, that the desire
to be seen to be doing something to
be approved of is greater than the
desire to actually do it. Politics
may well have been like this for
some time, we should say, but some-
thing subtle has shifted in the
transition from Thatcher to Blair,
at least in the UK: the USA has long
been entranced by presidents who are
equally at home on the big screen as
on the rallying stage (as Gil Scott
Heron put it in B Movie: Acted like
an actor . . . Hollyweird. Acted
like a liberal. Acted like General
Franco when he acted like governor
of California, then he acted like a
Republican. Then he acted like some-
body was going to vote for him for
president. And now we act like 26%
of the registered voters is actually
a mandate. Were all actors in this
I suppose.).
We all know about spin, about
style over substance, about how the
media frames the debate, where one
public slip can cost an election,
but what about the dire contradic-
tions unleashed by the desperate
attempt to appear popular without
the will to enact potentially unpop-
ular decisions? In Adam Curtiss
Century of the Self (2002), in an epi-
sode entitled Eight People Sipping
Wine in Kettering, a line describ-
ing New Labour focus groups, Derek
Draper, a former Labour spin doctor,
makes a valid point about the inco-
herency of the research generated
by such groups. Of course people
are going to say that they both want
better public services and to pay
less tax! But is there anything more
New Labour than asking people to map
out their contradictory desires and
then somehow pretending to be able to act
on them? The sheen of populism gives
everyone a good feeling: my voice
has been heard on the one side, were
listening on the other. The miasmic
fantasy of Cool Britannia that saw
pop stars mingle with politicians in
a weightless bubble of faddish fash-
ion and creative industry speak, was
pop music and the art world reveal-
ing their desperate desire to seem
appealing without necessarily arous-
ing any passion (it was about this
time that pop stars were suddenly
allowed to be just nice normal boys
and girls and no one was supposed to
worry about class any more).
Recent years have seen the arrival
of fash mobs distracted spectacles
of apolitical communities incredi-
bly quickly co-opted by ad campaigns
and spontaneous fake demands to
bring back old products (chocolate
bars, crisps) that people dimly
remembered from their childhoods.
These ironic displays nevertheless
hint at a subterranean desire for
both spontaneity and a more genu-
ine sense of belonging: popularity
without the need for populism. In
the twentieth century, the right-
wing, or, more broadly reactionary,
tendencies of political and social
life have historically been much
better at attempting to inculcate a
true populism (mass rallies, mass
use of propaganda cinema, etcetera),
although the Soviets were the frst
to see the potential of reproducible
poster art and an international cin-
ema (albeit in one country). Today,
in the USA we see the rise of the
Tea Party Movement, which seems
to want to directly fuse a horror of
taxation with a kind of deep psy-
chological resentment, and in the
UK the rise of the English Defence
League, a single issue popular
movement that objects to extrem-
ist Islam and looks and acts uncan-
nily like the racist mobs Ballard
depicted in his fnal novel Kingdom
Come. Trapped between a commodity
culture obsessed with creating fake-
popular campaigns, and Facebook-
organizing racist thugs, the future
of populism doesnt look great:
against this depressing populism,
our own recourse is to reclaim the
notion of popularity when and where
it emerges.
But how can we separate true
popularity from false? Is anything
allowed to be genuinely popular
without immediate recapture by media
and consumer culture? A hint here
would be to observe when and where
the numbers game is fxed, when pre-
cisely people dont want you know-
ing how many people are involved.
Every protestor and activist knows
that when the police give out their
fgures for protests its usually a
quarter to a half of the real num-
bers; the same goes for media cov-
erage the crowd was barely there!
Even in the arena of the basely
numerical (that is, all contemporary
human life), we can see the cracks
in the edifce of populism against
popularity. These moments of genu-
ine popularity may be overwhelmingly
motivated by anger and injustice,
but perhaps this is as good a start-
ing point as any, and perhaps the
only one we have available to us in
our current predicament.
86 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 87
Wu Ming

The Spirit of Mntzer

A Critical Consideration of Political
Mythology
To what extent is the political
use of myths justifed? Wu Ming,
a writers collective based in
Bologna, asks itself that question
in this kaleidoscopic self-critique.
The binding element is mythopoesis,
a radical politics of storytelling
that, says Wu Ming, must never
be beyond all doubt.
1. Marcos, Mntzer and Q (1994-1999)
It happened one chilly night of March 2001. It happened in Nurio,
in the state of Michoacn, Mexico, where all the indigenous tribes of
the country were gathered to demand an Indian Rights Act. It was the
third meeting of the National Indigenous Congress (Congreso Nacional
Indgena, CNI), largely a creation of the Zapatistas, those media-savvy
poetic warriors who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere out of
the depths of time seven years before. U2 were wrong, sometimes
something changes on New Years Day. Sometimes an army of bala-
clava-wearing Maya peasants occupy a city and get their message across
to millions of people. It occurred in San Cristobal de las Casas, in the
state of Chiapas, Mexico, on the frst of January 1994.
And there we were, seven years later, in the darkness on the edge
of Nurio, and the Zapatistas were there, Subcomandante Marcos was
there, for the indigenous meeting took place during the famous and
internationally covered Marcha por la Dignidad (March of Dignity).
The March: throngs of people travelling on battered coaches,
covering thousands of miles, from the backwoods of Chiapas to a spec-
tacularly crowded Zcalo, the biggest square in Mexico City. Twenty
days of travel, twenty days of poetry delivered by Marcos in seven alle-
gorical speeches called Las Siete Llaves (The Seven Keys).
Nurio was a stop on that journey, and we the Wu Ming collec-
tive were there as well, at least some of us. Marcos and the Zapatistas
were accompanied by people from all parts of the world, a multifarious
procession of journalists, activists, intellectuals, artists and parasites.
Wed come all the way from Italy as members of a bizarre delegation
whom the locals called los monos blancos, the white monkeys. That was a
pun, as mono is also Spanish slang for overalls. Back at home, we were
usually called le tute bianche, the white overalls. In a strange semantic
twist, a work garment had temporarily become a symbol of civil diso-
bedience, and many people used to wear it at demonstrations. We kept
the overalls on for the whole march, and they ceased being white long
before we arrived in Mexico City.

In the early/mid-1990s the Luther Blissett collective identity was created and
adopted by an informal network of people (artists, hackers, and activists) inter-
ested in using the power of myths, and moving beyond agit-prop counter-infor-
mation. In Bologna, my circle of friends shared an obsession with the eternal
return of such archetypal fgures as folk heroes and tricksters. We spent our
days exploring pop culture, studying the language of the Mexican Zapatistas,
collecting stories of media hoaxes and communication guerrilla warfare since the
88 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 89
Shown here on horseback is Subcomandante Marcos, spokesman for
the Zapatista movement, Chiapas, Mexico, 1996.
Portrait of Thomas Mntzer, engraving by Romyn de Hooge, 1701.
90 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 91
Zapatista guerrillas and masked civilians in Chiapas, Mexico,
January 1995. Photo Stephen Ferry/Getty Images
92 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 93
1920s (Berlin Dada stuf, futuristic soires, etcetera), obsessively re-watching
one particular movie, Slap Shot by George Roy Hill, starring Paul Newman as
hockey player Reggie Dunlop. We liked Reggie Dunlop very much, he was the
perfect trickster, the Anansi of African legends, the Coyote of Native American
legends, Ulysses manipulating the Cyclops mind. What if we could build our
own Reggie Dunlop, a trickster with a thousand faces, a golem made of the
clay of three rivers the agit-prop tradition, folk
mythology, and pop culture? What if we started a
completely new role play game, using all the media
platforms available at the time to spread the legend
of a new folk hero, a hero fuelled by collective
intelligence?
1
Henry Jenkins III

The communication strategies of the Zapatistas were a big infuence
on the LBP (Luther Blissett Project). What intrigued us most was the
way the Zapatistas avoided framing their struggle in any of the hope-
lessly worn-out twentieth-century modes of thought, and refused
old dichotomies such as Reformist vs. Revolutionary, Vanguard
vs. Masses, Violence vs. Non-violence, and so forth. The Zapatistas
evidently belonged to the left, but they seemed to refuse any linear,
traditional left-to-right-scale thought, and in a way that had nothing
to do with how some European fascists argue that they are neither
left nor right. The Zapatista language moved away from stereotypical
third-worldism: they put creative re-appropriation and use of old
myths, folk tales, legends and prophecies into a vision that encompassed
a new transnationalism (Huey P. Newton co-founder of the Black
Panther movement [eds.] might have called it Intercommunalism).
The community the Zapatistas talked about was an open one, it went
beyond the boundaries of the ethnic groups they spoke for. We are all
Indians of the world, they stated. They came from the most miserable
corner of the known world, and yet they soon got in touch with rebels
all around the globe.
The Zapatistas strategy of communication was based on the refusal
of traditional, camera-craving leaders. In the early days of theLevantami-
ento, Marcos stated: I dont exist, Im just the frame of the window,
then explained that Marcos was just an alias and he was a just a sub-
commander, a spokesperson for the Indios. He asserted that everybody
could be Marcos, and that was the meaning of balaclavas: the revolution
has no face because it has all faces. If you want to see the face under the
balaclava, grab a mirror and look at yourself, Marcos said.
Thats what Luther Blissett came out of. The Luther Blissett Project
was roughly a Five Year Plan and lasted from 1994 to 1999. Hundreds
of people, all over Italy and in some other countries, adopted the name
and gave contributions in terms of media hoaxes, radio programmes,
fanzines, videos, street theatre, performance art, radical politics and
theoretical writings. At least 50 agitators remained active in Bologna
from beginning to end. In 1995 some of them started to play with the
idea of writing a historical novel. That novel was to becomeQ.
As flled as we were with fresh Zapatista suggestions, we almost
immediately thought of recounting a peasant insurrection, nay, the
mother of all modern insurrections, peasant or not. The Peasants War
was the biggest popular revolt of its time, it broke out in the heart
of the Holy Roman Empire and was savagely repressed in 1525, one
year before the Spanishconquistadoresstarted their bloody invasion of
southern Mexico and destroyed the Maya civilization. The Peasants
War (1524-1525 in central and southern Germany) was a prefguring
event, in the same way its main agitator Thomas Mntzer was a prefg-
uring character. It was literally apre-fguration because the social order
that Mntzer and the revolutionary peasants envisioned was far ahead
of their time, indeed, its still ahead of our time, and yet it wasnt just
a collective hallucination followed by bursts of mass violence. Their
needs were real and their practice was rooted in the social reality of
their time. Their partial achievements were tangible: towns were
conquered, revolutionary councils were established and the power
structure was shaken from the foundations up to the princes rotting
teeth. They were defeated and massacred, but their legacy is still with
us, buried in the ground beneath our feet, and it may resurface every
time the social order is challenged from the bottom up. As to the
peasant leaders rhetoric, it still resounds throughout the centuries. In
many ways and voices, Mntzer still speaks to us.

But why tell that story again? Why write a historical novel on such an
anachronistic subject? What meaning could Thomas Mntzer and the
Peasants War have in the Roaring 1990s? Communism had been
defeated, democracy had won, belief in Free Trade was undisputed
to the extent that the French called it la pense unique, the only one
thought [allowed]. Market-centric neoliberal ideology was trium-
phant. Did we really want to write a novel on some long-forgotten
proto-communist bums? Yes, we did. In times of counter-revolutionary
hubris, at the peak of the greediest decade in history (as Joseph Stiglitz
called it), we thought such a book was more necessary than ever.
Very soon, we bumped into a work by German playwright Dieter
Forte, a 1970 drama entitled Luther, Munzer, and the Bookkeepers of the
1. Henry Jenkins III, How Slap
Shot Inspired a Cultural Revolution:
An Interview with the Wu Ming
Foundation, Confessions of an Aca/
Fan weblog, oktober 2006. See:
www.henryjenkins.org/2006/10/
how_slapshot_inspired_a_cultur.html.
94 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 95
Reformation.
2
It was an explicit allegory of the
1968 movement in West Germany. That text
had a powerful efect on us. It kick-started
the writing process.
To tell the truth, the Peasants War and Mntzers preaching were
just the beginning of the story we would tell. Q covers more than
30 years of European history, from 1517 (when Luther nailed his 95
theses on the door of the Wittenberg cathedral) to 1555 (the year of
the Peace of Augsburg). Those tumultuous years provide historians
and storytellers with a lot of pre-fguration and frst attempts, as radicals
of that age seem to have tried practically every revolutionary strategy
and tactic. If we listen attentively to what the sixteenth century has to
say, well encounter anarchists, proto-hippies, utopian socialists, hard-
core Leninists, mystical Maoists, mad Stalinists, the Red Brigades, the
Angry Brigade, the Weathermen, Emmett Grogan, Friar Tuck, punk
rock, Pol Pot and Comrade Gonzalo (of Perus Shining Path guerrilla
movement). A whole army of spectres and metaphors. Also, well fnd
all kinds of culture jammers, body artists, pamphleteers and fanzine
publishers. Our main character, the nameless hero, gets involved in
each and every subversive project he bumps into, from the Peasants
War to the Anabaptist takeover of the city of Mnster, from Jan van
Batenburgs terrorist sect the Zwaardgeesten to the Loyist community in
Antwerp, from book smuggling in Switzerland and Northern Italy to a
fnal escape from Europe towards the Ottoman Empire. The third part
of the novel echoes such Luther Blissett practices as the dissemination of
false news and the creation of a virtual character (Titian the Anabaptist)
with the purpose of bewildering the powers-that-be.
What we wanted to do was write a ferce and passionate book, a
book that was conscious of itself as a cultural artefact (nay, a cultural
weapon), but at the same time didnt raise the usual shield of post-
modern detachment and allegedly all-explaining irony. A novel
announcing the return of radical/popular narrative fction. The world
needed adventure novels written by folks who were serious about their
writing, folks willing to soil their hands without ducking responsibility.
In March 1999, the publication of Q was our fnal contribution to the
Luther Blissett Project, which ended at the end of the year.

2. Mntzer Mojo Rising, or: the Castle under Siege (1999-2001)

They say that they are new, they christen themselves by acronyms: G8, IMF,
WB, WTO, NAFTA, FTAA They cannot fool us, they are the same as
those who have come before them: the corcheurs that plundered our villages,
the oligarchs that reconquered Florence, the court of Emperor Sigismund that
beguiled Ian Hus, the diet of Tuebingen that obeyed Ulrich and refused to
admit Poor Konrad, the princes that sent the lansquenets to Frankenhausen, the
impious that roasted Dozsa, the landlords that tormented the Diggers, the auto-
crats that defeated Pugachev, the government whom Byron cursed, the old world
that stopped our assaults and destroyed all stairways to heaven. Nowadays they
have a new empire, they impose new servitudes
on the whole globe, they still play the lords and
masters of the land and the sea. Once again, we
the multitudes rise up against them.
3
Anonymous

The publication of Q was followed by an extended book tour all over
Italy (and Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland). We were
still travelling when the Battle of Seattle broke out.
It was 30 November 1999. That evening we arrived at Lodi, a small
town in Lombardy, and met readers at the municipal library. Instead of
talking about the book, we raved about what had just happened at the
WTO summit. We felt it was the beginning of something big. And big
it grew indeed. Very soon, the new movement erupted into a world-
wide challenge to the global institutions regulating free markets from
the top down: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the
World Trade Organization and other bloodsuckers.
2000 was a year of intense organization, protest and disruption of
important summits. The most relevant demonstrations took place
in Prague at the end of September, when thousands of demonstra-
tors ridiculed an IMF/WB joint meeting. We were there as well. At a
certain point, the movement decided that the showdown the litmus
test of its strength would be in the third week of July 2001 in Genoa,
Northern Italy, where a G8 summit was scheduled. It would be the frst
G8 summit since the election of George W. Bush as president of the
USA, and the frst with right-wing clown Silvio Burlesquoni as Italian
premier and grinning host of the event.
In the meantime, curious things were happening in Italy and else-
where. The ghost of Thomas Mntzer (none other!) was reappearing in
unexpected places. There was some sort of short-circuit betweenQand
the movement. Thanks to word of mouth and the Internet, the novel
had become an international bestseller. We began to see Mntzers
sentence Omnia sunt communia [All things are to be shared] on banners
and placards. We began to see quotations from Q used by activists as
e-mail signatures. In forums dedicated to the movement, people would
adopt such aliases as Magister Thomas or Gert-from-the-Well. It
2. Dieter Forte, Luther, Munzer and
the Bookkeepers of the Reformation
(Berkshire: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
3. Anonymous, The Multitudes Of
Europe Rising Up Against The Empire
and Marching on Genoa, 19, 20 and
21 July 2001. See: www.wuming-
foundation.com/english/giap/
Giap_multitudes.html.
96 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 97
was only the beginning of a strange, controversial, troublesome rela-
tionship between our literary eforts and the ongoing struggle. In the
months leading to the Genoa showdown, the names Wu Ming and
Wu Ming Foundation came to be associated more with agit-prop
activities than our literary output. It was mainly our fault, as we plunged
into the struggle so deeply that it became difcult to avoid confusion
of roles. For example, even if it had no byline, everybody knew we
were responsible for the epic appeal known asFrom The Multitudes of
Europewhich in the spring and early summer of 2001 was constantly
forwarded, Xeroxed, printed on leafets and journals, broadcast on the
radio, recited by actors, scribbled on walls and so on.
Quite obviously, Mntzer was one of the ancestors claimed by the
narrating we of the edict: We are the army of peasants and miners
that followed Thomas Mntzer. The Lansquenets exterminated
us in Thuringia, Mntzer was torn to pieces by the headsmen, and
yet nobody could deny it: all that belonged to the earth, to the earth
would return.

The text is a declaration of war. A political and historical war, but also a trans-
historical and trans-political one. The powerful of the Earth gathered in Genoa
for the G8 summit, as well as their educated and overpayed consultants and
collaborators, shall not have to face the people of Seattle, the students, the thugs
of the social centres plus some poor sods and freaks strumming guitars or breaking
windows. Or rather, all those people will be there, but together with them,
behind them, inside them an immense Army of the Dead will be marching. And
the text calls on those fallen ones, it makes a list of those troops covered with the
dust of centuries and dispersed by the wind of history, with the epic punctilious-
ness of Homers Catalogue of Ships.
4
Franco Cardini

Looking back, we think that Mntzers ghost, Q and as a conse-
quence the novels authors found themselves at the centre of the
mobilization because a general metaphor was taking shape in that
midst: ever more often, empire was described as a castle besieged by
a manifold army of peasants. That metaphor recurs in several texts
and speeches. Sometimes its explicit, very often its only implied, but
its there. Although it was inspiring and efective, the metaphor was
a misrepresentation. There was no real siege going on, as you cant
besiege a power thats everywhere and whose main manifestation is a
constant fow of electrons from stock exchange to stock exchange. That
misrepresentation would prove fatal in Genoa. We were mistaking the
powers formal ceremonies for the power itself. We were making the
same mistake Mntzer and the German peasants had made. We had
chosen one battleground and a supposed feld-day. We were all heading
to Frankenhausen.

3. Frankenstein in Frankenhausen (2001-2009)

I fought alongside men who really thought they would put an end to
injustice and wickedness on earth. There were thousands of us, we were an army.
Our hope was shattered on the plain at Frankenhausen, on the ffteenth of May
1525. Then I abandoned a man to his fate, to the weapons of the lansquenets.
I carried with me his bag full of letters, names and hopes. And the suspicion of
having been betrayed, sold to the forces of the princes like a herd at a market.
Its still hard to utter the name. That man was
Thomas Mntzer.
5
Luther Blissett

Thomas Mntzer spoke to us, but we couldnt understand his words.
It wasnt a blessing, but a warning. It is impossible to disclaim the
responsibility the Wu Ming collective had, at least in Italy. We were
among the most zealous in urging people to go to Genoa, and helped
to pull the movement into the ambush. After the bloodbath, it took
quite a while and a lot of refection on our part to understand our
own (specifc) errors in the context of the (general) errors made by the
movement. We had underestimated the enemy, and overestimated
ourselves. Clearly, something had gone wrong with the practice of
mythopoesis or myth-making from the bottom up, which was and
still is at the core of our philosophy.
By myth we never meant a false story, that is, the most banal and
superfcial use of the term. We always used the word for a narrative
with a great symbolic value, a narrative whose meaning is understood
and shared in the community (for example a social movement) whose
members tell it to one another. Weve always been interested in stories
that create bonds between human beings. Communities keep sharing
such stories and, as they share them, they (hopefully) keep them alive
and inspiring, ongoing narration makes them evolve, because what
happens in the present changes the way we recollect the past. As a
result, those tales are modifed according to the context and acquire
new symbolic/metaphorical meanings. Myths provide us with examples
to follow or reject, give us a sense of continuity or discontinuity with
the past, and allow us to imagine a future. We couldnt live without
them, its the way our minds works, our brains are wired to think
through narratives, metaphors and allegories.
4. Franco Cardini (historian),
LEspresso (weekly) 22 June 2001.
5. Luther Blissett, Q (Londen:
Arrow Books, 2004, frst published
in Italian in 1999).
98 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 99
Wu Ming is the pseudonym of an Italian writers collective
formed in 2000, a group with roots in a branch of the Luther
Blissett community in Bologna.
100 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 101
A demonstration of disobbedienti at the G8 in Genoa, 20 July 2001.
Photo Merijn Oudenampsen
102 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination The Spirit of Mntzer 103
At a certain point, a metaphor may sufer sclerosis and become less
and less useful, until it becomes void of all meaning, a disgusting clich,
an obstacle to the growth of inspiring stories. When this happens,
people have to veer of, looking for other words and images. Revolu-
tionary and progressive movements have always found their own meta-
phors and narrated their myths. Most of the time these myths survived
being useful and became alienating. Rigor mortis set in, language
became wooden, metaphors ended up enslaving the people instead of
setting them free. The following generation often reacted by negating
the past and developing iconoclastic attitudes. The vanguard of each
generation of radicals described the myths they inherited as nothing
more than false stories. Some demanded that the radical discourse be
de-mythologized, be it in the name of reason, political correctness,
nihilism or even plain stupidity (as in the myths-are-intrinsically-
fascist argument). No-one can erase mythological thought from human
communication, because its embedded in the circuitry of our brains.
Cognitive scientists and linguists such as George Lakof are proving that
beyond doubt. We think through metaphors and narratives.
Every iconoclasm eventually generates a new iconophilia, against
which new iconoclasts will rage. The cycle will be endless if we dont
understand the way these narratives work. The trouble with myths is
not their intrinsic falsehood, truth or truthiness. The trouble with
myths is that they sclerotize easily if we take them for granted. The fow
of tales must be kept fresh and lively, we have to tell stories by ever
changing means, angles and points of view, give our tales constant exer-
cise so they dont harden and darken and clog our brains.
This, of course, is an extremely hard task, for several reasons. First of
all, its too easy to underestimate the dangers of working with myths.
One always runs the risk of playing Dr Frankenstein or, even worse,
Henry Ford. We cant create a myth at will, as though on an assembly
line, or evoke it artifcially in some closed laboratory. To be more
exact: we could, but it would have unpleasant consequences.
Expanding some observations by Karoly Kerenyi (Hungarian-Swiss
researcher in the feld of Greek mythology), the Italian mythologist
Furio Jesi drew a sharp distinction between a genuine approach to
myths and a forced evocation of myths for a specifc (usually political)
purpose. Think of Mussolini describing the 1937 invasion of Abys-
sinia as the reappearance of the Empire on the fateful hills of Rome.
Kerenyi and Jesi called the latter strategy technifcation of myths.
Technifed myth is always addressed to those Kerenyi called the
sleeping ones, that is, people whose critical attitude is dormant, because
the powerful images conveyed by the technifers have overwhelmed
their consciousness and invaded their subconscious. For example, we
may fall asleep during the incredibly beautiful frst half-hour of Leni
Riefenstahls Olympia(1938).
On the contrary, a genuine approach to myths requires staying
awake and willing to listen. We have to ask questions and listen to what
myths have to say, we have to study myths, go looking for them in their
territories, with humbleness and respect, without trying to capture them
and forcibly bring them to our world and our present. It is a pilgrimage,
not a safari. Technifed myth is always false consciousness, even when
we think were using it to good purpose. In an essay entitled Letter-
atura e mito(Literature and Myth), Jesi asked himself: Is it possible
to induce the people to behave in a certain way thanks to the power
exerted by suitable evocations of myths and then induce them to
criticize the mythical motives of their behav-
iour?
6
He answered himself: It seems practi-
cally impossible.
In the heyday of the global movement (from Autumn 1999 to
Summer 2001), we tried to operate in the space between the adverb
(practically) and the adjective (impossible). We tried to use the adverb
to break open the adjective. We deemed Jesis answer too pessimistic.
We thought that opening the laboratory and showing the people how
we processed mythologemes the basic conceptual units, the meta-
phoric kernels of mythological narratives was enough to provide the
people with the tools of criticism. Correct distance from a myth was
our chimera: not too close lest we fall into a stupor, not so far that we no
longer feel its power. It was a difcult balance to sustain, and in fact we
didnt sustain it.
Because the problem is also: Who is the artifcer of mythopoesis,
the evocator, the obstetrician? It should be up to a whole movement or
community or social class to handle myths and keep them on the move.
No particular group can appoint itself to that ofce. At the end of the day,
we ended up being ofcials assigned to manipulate metaphors and evoke
myths. Our role became a quasi-specialized one. An agit-prop cell. A
combo of spin doctors. Sure, From the Multitudes of Europe could make
your nerves sing, it made you feel like going to Genoa right away, but
that was not enough. We never looked for ways to criticize the mythical
motives of our behaviour. Practically never cracked impossible.
At present, there is no alternative but continuing the work: we have
to continue the exploration, prick up our ears and approach myths in a
way thats not instrumental. We have to understand the nature of myths
without wishing to reduce their complexity and test their aerodynamic
properties in the wind tunnel of politics.
6. Furio Jesi and Andrea Cavalleti,
Letteratura e mito (Turin: Einaudi,
1968).
104 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination
What happened in Genoa was not a military defeat: it was a cultural
catastrophe. The tragedy was not being defeated in the street. The
tragedy was being defeated in the street and as a cultural wave. After
Genoa, the movement stopped being able to communicate in efec-
tive ways, and the media sucked all our blood. Less than two months
after Genoa came 9/11. The situation in the country and the world got
much tougher, and the metaphor of the siege turned upside down. In
2003 the Italian movement was already in a deep crisis. Not even mass
mobilization against the war on Irak could infuse new energy into its
body. At last, it regressed to a marginal presence, a presence occupying
the semantic space of traditional far-leftist discourse. The usual boring
role played by boring rules. A bunch of professional revolutionaries
took over what was left, made all kinds of mistakes and proved to
be immensely inadequate. Fossilized sub-Leninist tactics and strate-
gies resurfaced. A lot of time and energy was dissipated in intra-group
identity wars. Meetings became pathetic cock fghts. The majority of
sensitive, unregimented activists (especially women) got bored and
quit. We were among those who quit. We didnt give up the struggle,
far from it, but never again will we play Frankenstein with technifed
myths. And we keep going, and no defeat is defnitive, and hearts are
still beating.
106 Open 2010/No.20/Te Populist Imagination Te Myth of Modern Politics 107
Aukje van Rooden

Te Myth of Modern Politics
An Impossible Constitution

Unlike in pre-modern communities,
we consider our democracies to be
rationally constituted. Philosopher
Aukje van Rooden wonders whether
the greatest myth of contemporary
politics isnt our assumption that
we can function without a mytho-
logical structure. Perhaps that denial
is precisely what underlies the over-
whelming advance of right-wing
populist politicians.
Tere is absolutely no doubt that the stunning victories of right-
wing populist politicians in countries like Italy, Austria, Belgium,
Denmark and the Netherlands have sharpened the contours of
democracy in the past few years by putting the people the demos
of democracy at the top of the political agenda again. Te voice of
the people can count on growing interest, as shown by the unag-
ging dedication with which European popular referendums, opinion
polls or a countrywide debate in France on the identit nationale
are being organized and followed. No matter how fruitless these
initiatives at times prove to be, they nevertheless are expressions
of an important quest for what democratic sovereignty still could
or should be in this day and age. As a result of changing socioeco-
nomic, cultural and political relations in Europe, we are forced to
nd at least a provisional answer to that most fundamental of ques-
tions: What is a political community? Te fact that the voice of the
people our voice is central to its answer is not surprising. When,
as the French philosopher Claude Lefort claims, the constituting
of a political community in the rst place requires that it represent
itself, this means that in a democratic community it is we who must
indeed represent ourselves. Moreover, adds Lefort, not once and for
all, but each time anew, because in a democracy, self-representation
must in principle always be up for discussion.
1
As far as this is
concerned, we are living in an extremely
interesting time and place in twenty-rst-
century Europe. On account of the fact
that the European project is simultane-
ously a daily reality and the subject of
heated discussion, it is a work in progress
in which we ourselves are both the makers and what is at stake.
Although the problems that present themselves during the con-
stitution of a political community in todays Europe might come to
the fore more clearly than ever before, they are in fact inseparably
tied to each founding moment. Whats more, the act of constituting
a political community is strictly speaking impossible. Or at least,
so claims the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in an opinion
piece on the European constitution in Le Monde, LImpossible acte
constituant.
2
According to Nancy, our contemporary communities
dier from so-called primitive, pre-modern
communities because we no longer can or
want to consider them as the result of a
particular divine or cosmological development. Modern man, as the
historian Mircea Eliade says, knows that he himself is the maker of
1. See, in particular: Claude Lefort,
Le travail de loeuvre Machiavel
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972) and idem,
La question de la dmocratie,
in: Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe (eds.), Le retrait
du politique (Paris: Galile, 1983),
71-88.
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Limpossible
acte constituant, Le Monde, 29
June 2005.
108 Open 2010/No.20/Te Populist Imagination Te Myth of Modern Politics 109
history and indeed wants to be.
3
In other
words, in constituting his community,
modern man wont settle for a simple refer-
ence to a particular myth of origin, unquestioningly actualizing a
narrative handed down from generation to generation. Te found-
ing of a community, emphasizes Nancy, must thus be seen as an
imaginative deed, as the creation or invention of what is not yet a
given. Te Treaty for the Establishment of a Constitution for Europe
is illustrative of this, seeing as the dicult process through which it
has come about and is still developing clearly shows that the Euro-
pean people are not a given, but a people that are in the process of
constituting and creating themselves by
inventing their own idea or form.
4

Te dicult but also the most interesting aspect of this
invention is that a community must establish itself out of noth-
ing, in a vacuum, as it were; that is to say, amid the daily chaos of
opinions and interests in which it has no foundation upon which
it can lean as yet. Like Baron von Munchausen, our communities
thus have to pull themselves out of the swamp by their own boot-
straps. Seeing as there is no external, transcendent agency that can
authorize this deed, the founding process in our modern commu-
nities is always an act of self-constitution. Te we that undertakes
the representation of the idea or form of a community, is not a
pre-existing group, but only exists as such with that representa-
tion, with the letter and the spirit of the Treaty that draws the
boundary line between those who are part of that we and those
who are not.

Mythological Politics

We can therefore ascertain that our contemporary political com-
munities dier from primitive or premodern communities because
they are no longer mythological, because they no longer assume or
want to assume a myth of origin in their founding. Although this
is true to a certain extent, the opposite can also be defended, namely
that our contemporary political communities are above all based
on a mythological structure. Appealing to a myth after all, doesnt
that imply that you do not take a pre-given reality as your founda-
tion, but a ction a self-created, unfounded idea? Tis contrarian
perspective is oered in an important essay that not only turned
the prevailing view of the modern community upside down, but in
doing so also revealed its hidden working: Zur Kritik der Gewalt
by Walter Benjamin.
5
While it is true that
this essay, which is teeming with youthful
bravura, is strongly tempered by its own
era and here and there lacks conceptual
clarity, this in no way weakens the impor-
tance of its diagnosis of our contemporary political system.
Te contrarian stance taken by this essay can be summed up in
the proposition that our contemporary political orders knowingly
conceal the contingency of their origins, and that this concealment
assumes a mythological structure. In order to gain an understand-
ing of the entire signicance of this proposition, it is important to
realize that it is inspired by Benjamins notion that the constitution
of a community not only has something contingent about it, but
also and precisely because of that something violent. Because
the invented idea or form of the community could also have been
a dierent one, its actual institutionalization implies a moment of
unfounded coercion or exercise of power. According to Benjamin,
this coercive moment is not only present in the original moment of
founding, but also in every decision subsequently made in the name
of the established order by politicians, judges, police ocers and
the army. Te critique of violence that he proposes with this essay
must therefore be seen rst and foremost as a criticism of the hidden
violence of a political order. In line with the double meaning of the
German word Gewalt which means both violence and authority
this is not so much the brute physical violence of oppression here,
but the veiled, necessary violence of authority.
Te double meaning of Gewalt is a perfect illustration of the
ambiguity that characterizes the constitution of our modern commu-
nities and, in a certain sense, makes that constitution impossible:
namely, the ambiguity of the fact that the decision that establishes a
legitimized power can itself boast of no legitimized power whatso-
ever, because it is taken in a void in which the distinction between
legal and illegal does not yet exist. We could thus say that Ben-
jamins article calls attention to that non-legal void in which political
authority attempts to establish itself. In the violent action of this
political authority, he distinguishes two dimensions: that of law-
making (rechtsetzend) violence and that of law-preserving (rechts-
erhaltend) violence. According to Benjamin and this is one of the
crucial elements of his diagnosis these law-making and law-pre-
serving violences are not two separate and mutually distinct aspects
of a legal order but presuppose each other and thereby neutralize
each others violent nature. Terefore, claims Benjamin, this is a
3. Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de
lternel retour. Archtypes et rpti-
tion (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 158.
4. Nancy, LImpossible acte con-
stituant, op. cit. (note 2).
5. Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik
der Gewalt (1921), Gesammelte
Schriften II.1 (Frankfurt a/M:
Suhrkamp, 1977). Originally
published in Archiv fr Social-
wissenschaft und Socialpolitik.
110 Open 2010/No.20/Te Populist Imagination Te Myth of Modern Politics 111
matter of a circular movement, of a cyclical
logic in which foundation and preservation
have an interlocking relationship, which
one must call mythological.
6
But exactly what is the reason for label-
ling the working of our contemporary
political order mythological, and thereby
suggesting a resemblance between our
modern communities and those we usually
call premodern? Well, explains Benjamin
in his essay, we can only conclude that the
rule of law and the violence in our politi-
cal orders are related to one another in
a manner similar to that in pre-modern,
mythological societies because both appeal
to what we can call a destiny.
7
Although
the original decision that lies at the foun-
dation of our societies could also have been dierent, it is presented,
just like in earlier eras, not as a chance (Zufall) but as the result of
a particular destiny (Schicksal), that is to say, as a decision that could
not have come out any dierently.
8
Here, the temporal structure of
a myth combines with the linguistic struc-
ture of the future perfect in presenting a
community as something that will have
been so.
9
With the suggestion of destiny,
in other words, the power that is legiti-
mized by the act of foundation gives the
impression that the idea or form of the founded community was
predestined by history and written into the course of events. To put
it another way, a temporal and linguistic presentation such as this
disregards the decisive moment of political constitution and encloses
the open-endedness that in principal constitutes democracy in a
well-plotted story.

Te Myth of Politics

Te underlying mythological structure of destiny generally remains
implicit in our political orders, however, because it is cast in the
widely accepted form of instrumental rationalism. In other words,
the uneasy feeling of contingency is dispelled on account of the fact
that an indisputable goal has been set and that all of the measures
that are to be taken are considered necessary in order to achieve that
goal. Political slogans like clean weapons
and preventive war are not only the most
obvious but also the most evil expression
of this.
10
Although appealing to such an
instrumentalist structure is to a certain
extent inevitable if one wishes to engage in
politics, the thorny knot of this concealed
mythological structure lies precisely in the
fact that the distinction between just goals
and justied means on the one hand, and
unjust goals and unjustied means on the
other (for example between a preventative
war and an unnecessary, bloody war), can
only be made on the basis of the self-legit-
imizing order.
11
Te cyclical connection of
means and goals thus functions as a faade
that conceals the lack of an ultimate legiti-
mization of such a distinction.
It is this faade, created by the cycli-
cal logic of a myth, which impresses upon
us that we can forget what lies behind it
without qualms. Tis is what we can call
the mythic forgetting of the moment of
creation.
12
For what a myth does is to
create a new historic order for the pre-
cise purpose of elevating itself above the
contingency of history and of making its own contingency be for-
gotten.
13
In that sense, the working of a myth resembles that of a
promise. On the one hand, a promise is a way of oering a guar-
antee for the future, by which one indicates that the status quo of
what really counts will remain the same, because the idea or form
of the community will remain the same. But on the other hand, the
necessity of a promise also indicates the fact that it is impossible to
give that guarantee. After all, if it were certain ahead of time that
things would indeed be as people imagine them, then a promise
would be completely superuous.
14
Tis is also precisely where the
greatest danger of the upcoming populism lies. Te implicit prom-
ise to the people in the populist message,
that their will shall become law, starts
from the idea that the voice of the people
forms an indisputable political basis that,
if only it were heard, could be rendered
6. Ibid., pages 181 and 202, where
Benjamin speaks respectively of a
Zirkel and an Umauf. From page
197 on, he uses the term mythic
violence. Because he most certainly
is concerned about revealing the
logic of political orders and it is
this logic as such that is mythic, I
prefer to speak here of a mythologi-
cal rather than a mythic structure.
For that matter, in a work pub-
lished several years earlier, Zwei
Gedichte von Friedrich Hlderlin:
Dichtermut und Bldigkeit, Ben-
jamin himself makes a distinction
between the mythic and the mytho-
logical, whereby the pejorative
meaning he ascribes to the second
term corresponds to the meaning
given to the term mythic in Zur
Kritik der Gewalt.
7. For a more elaborate analysis of
fate in Benjamins Zur Kritik der
Gewalt, see also: Antonia Birn-
baum, Bonheur Justice. Walter Ben-
jamin (Paris: Payot, 2008).
8. Benjamin, Zur Kritik der
Gewalt, op. cit. (note 5), 199.
9. For an analysis of the linguistic
structure of myths, also see: Jacques
Derrida, Force de loi. Le fondement
mystique de lautorit (Paris: Gal-
ile, 2005 [1994]), 87-88.
10. We encounter a more implicit
appeal to such a structure in the
preamble to the Treaty for the
Establishment of a Constitution
for Europe (2004): Believing that
Europe, reunited after bitter experi-
ences, intends to continue along
the path of civilisation, progress
and prosperity
11. See Benjamin, Zur Kritik der
Gewalt, op. cit. (note 5), 181.
12. In his study on Benjamin and
Schmitt, Marc de Wilde speaks of
a mythic forgetting. See: Marc de
Wilde, Verwantschap in extremen.
Politieke theologie bij Walter Ben-
jamin en Carl Schmitt (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press,
2008). Also see Benjamin himself,
who in this connection speaks of
schwinden des Bewutseins (op.
cit., 190) and Derrida, who speaks
of a dngation amnsiaque (op.
cit., 113, see note 9).
13. To quote Hannah Arendt, a
political order founded on myth
pretends in this way to know the
mysteries of the whole historical
process, the secrets of the past, the
intricacies of the present, the uncer-
tainties of the future because of
the logic inherent in their respective
ideas. Hannah Arendt, Te Origins
of Totalitarianism (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973),
469. Arendt gives a denition of
ideology here that explains where
the troublesome aspect of a mytho-
logical politics lies.
14. Te ambiguity of the promises
structure can be traced back to that
of the future perfect tense in which
it is stated. Jacques Derrida unrav-
els this ambiguity in, among other
places, Psych. Inventions de lautre
(Paris: Galile, 1987), 190.
112 Open 2010/No.20/Te Populist Imagination
permanent. Instead of a subservient implementation of what is
given in history, however, this perpetuation is chiey the creation
of a given, and therefore of a past and a future.
Tus the complexity of the present and the uncertainty of the
future are precisely what force a political order to appeal to a mytho-
logical structure. In other words, the same non-legal void that ena-
bles the acrobatic leap of the modern self-constitution impels the
modern political community to a mythological cloaking of that void.
We could say that the biggest myth of our present-day politics is that
it thinks it can do without such a mythological structure, assumes
it can steer clear of the ultimate question of legitimacy by appeal-
ing to the making of rules, procedures and policy. Te false modesty
of this attitude is precisely what transforms the wondrous acrobatic
manoeuvre of modern self-constitution into dangerous pride.
114 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination Populism 115
Willem Schinkel

Populism
Comments on a
Democratic Desire

Willem Schinkel, sociologist at the
Erasmus University in Rotterdam,
does not consider populism a
threat to democracy. According
to him, populism in fact especially
has signicance as a means of
criticism, now that democracy is
so little criticized that every
dictator holds elections in order
to adorn himself with democratic
attire.
Populism includes the desire to replace political representation with
the presence of a presumed people. Populist desire is the desire
to replace the fundamental absence that characterizes democracy
with presence. Such a presence, which is still democratically medi-
ated, is only possible in a manner comparable to actually existing
socialism, through a party or person that is, in every way, the culmi-
nation or embodiment of the people. It is therefore no coincidence
that populism often champions assimilationism. Only for a perfectly
assimilated people can absence nevertheless guarantee presence, and
indeed via the medium of a party or person who embodies the people
in a one-to-one representation.
Although pop art does not have such a mimetic pretension, political
populism can be compared to it in a sense. Both populism and pop
art have a fascination for the readymade. Moreover, both have a
preference for repetition, and they share a mass consciousness and
a representation fetish in which the same thing is continually recon-
rmed. Warhols silkscreens make it clear what such repetition leads
to. They represent boredom with the object and an attendant aliena-
tion from the subject. The repetition of the object brings with it a loss
of meaning, and the obsession with its conrmation is precisely what
results in that loss. The trauma of the desire for the absent, which
has always been at the bottom of the obsession with presence and
representation, comes to the surface, and the meaningless surface is
generalized at the expense of a loss of indepth experience. Warhols
melancholy is highly comparable with populist melancholy. But that
melancholy is simultaneously the existential dimension of modern
democracy. Democracy is characterized by an empty position, an
interval. Democracy is a peripheral phenomenon: it occurs on the
periphery of a between, a fundamental difference, an absence. It
is the embodiment of a paradox, taking place between the apparent
opposites of presence and representation. It reconciles the people,
conceived as universal within political boundaries, with their partic-
ular representatives.
The gulf between the citizen and politics that respectable political
scientists and political philosophers problematize is therefore funda-
mental to the functioning of a modern democracy. The democratic
ideology is one of delegation and representation, of the replacement
of a presence (the people, the embodiment of the universal within
democracy) by a representation (the representatives of the people, the
embodiment of the particular, the derived). And the legitimacy rituals
of democratic politics, the elections, revolve around that replacement.
Democracy initiates an absence and sets up a politics that preoccupies
116 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination Populism 117
a desire that it must suppress. The desire for overlap, for a perfect
match between a presupposed but never actualized presence (the
people) and a representation (representatives of the people), is ulti-
mately democratic, but at the same time ultimately threatening for a
democracy that exists by virtue of the claim that it realizes this match,
and the simultaneous impossibility and even undesirability of doing so.
This is why Jacques Rancire can argue that the duality of democracy
consists of the fact that there is only one good democracy, the one
that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization.
3
The duality
of democracy is responsible for the populist
desire. The gap that is opened between the
(particular) representation of the people, and the people, imagined
as universal within political-demographic boundaries, nourishes a
desire to bridge that gap. This desire is ultimately democratic because
it epitomizes the most perfect essence of democratic ideology. And
at the same time it undermines democracy because it attempts to ll
the void that is essential for the functioning of democracy. As such,
populism contains a reference to the-people-as-one-part, pictured as
excluded or unheard, and the-people-as-a-whole, the embodiment
of democratic authority.
4
At the same time,
populism is an all-too-easy reproach aimed
at a politics wishing to legitimize itself a
reproach that simultaneously excommunicates large sections of
the people from the democratic community. Political legitimacy in
democracy is often a double bind: when democracy meets the populist
desire, it is always in danger of losing its distance, its between char-
acter, with the resulting charge of populism. On the other hand, when
populist legitimacy is lacking, the same critics can point to the gap
between the citizen and politics, to which they then unjustly ascribe
only negative characteristics.
Modern democracies have found a way of dealing with the duality
that, as it were bridging the two shores of a void, characterizes them,
by sublimating that duality. They have copied the difference between
the governing (politicians) and the governed (the people) within
politics itself.
5
The political arena also includes the governing (the
government) and the governed (the oppo-
sition). This deects the populist desire
to a less harmful preoccupation with the
political arena and its contingent players. The people generally are
more concerned with the spectacle between the government and
the opposition than with their own condition as a sovereign people
governed by politics as a whole (the government and the opposition).
itself with the correct replacement of that absence. Elections rst and
foremost thematicize the correctness of the mediation, the t between
absent presence and present representation. Democracy is rst of
all about mediation, and only secondly about goals. As a result, it is
constantly in danger of becoming a narcissistically inated mock game
of popular representation (mediation), even when long-term poltical
outlooks (goals) are expected to safeguard the survival of the people.
Democracy is thus a game of mediation. It is the most formidable
mass medium of modern times. Because democracy claims a correct
reection of the people, and thus a procedurally correct mediation,
it incites a constant desire for immediacy. I purposely say desire,
because the presupposition of a presence (the people), is what rst
of all operates here, with the people further remaining a virtual
but political category
1
always present in absence, always having
a presence on the grounds of claimed
representation. The people remain the
focus imaginarius of democracy; and particularly during elections,
when they are expected to speak, the people disappoint themselves
because they prove not to be a unity. As such, populism is in fact
the most fundamental form of the democratic desire for immediacy.
Hence the populist selectivity as to who really is one of the people:
immediacy is only possible where no difference needs to be mediated.
And hence the populist emphasis on immediate action, on seizing the
moment, decisiveness. That immediacy, however, is fundamental to
the paradox of democracy, which can only combine presence and
representation because of the presupposition of a procedurally correct
transition, a mediation that indeed condenses the people through
popular representation, but loses nothing of the quality and potential
of the people in the process for doesnt that guarantee lie within
the people themselves? Populism thus considers the indirect way
of democracy to be a problem, and seeks a more direct way via the
medium of charisma, plain language and decisiveness.

Populism: The Democratic Desire

But populism is not a phenomenon that
is external to democracy and threatens it.
Not only has populism become a standard
trope in regular politics, the populist desire
is actually the most democratic of desires.
2

Democracy is based on an absence that it
must ignore, and it simultaneously rests on
2. See: Rudi Laermans, Framing
the Sovereignty of the Democratic
State Sociologically: Reections
on the Political System, Contem-
porary Populism and Democracy,
in: Willem Schinkel, Globalization
and the State: Sociological Perspec-
tives on the State of the State
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), 83-105.
3. Jacques Rancire, Hatred of
Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 4.
4. See: Margaret Canovan, The
People (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2005), 65-90.
1. See: Ernesto Laclau, On Populist
Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 224.
5. See: Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik
der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a/M:
Suhrkamp, 2000), 97 et seq.
118 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination Populism 119
more ethnic-nationalistic character, but the contrast between the the
people and the elite makes it clear that this is not necessarily always
the case.
Boundaries are nevertheless fundamental to the people. The
people are located within a certain territory (a fact that gave rise
to the popularity of political geography in the nineteenth century).
Consequently, every socialism has until now been a national socialism.
And to this day, particular state communities in which geographic
boundaries are crucial are legitimized on the basis of universal
portrayals of humankind, such as the Enlightenment. As Rancire has
argued, the universal portrayal of humankind can serve to legitimize
the spread of democracy abroad, while mass protests and popular
culture at home are subject to political criticism and suppression.
These days the people might be even more strongly localized than
ever, now that the people in the city neighbourhoods are coming into
view as the new incarnation of the common people. The people who
populate democracy, the demos that is generally thought of as ethnos,
exist in a kind of limbo, a between condition, between particularism
and universalism. If nothing else, that
betweenness arises from the paradoxical
duality between person and citizen that has
been an explicit part of (at least) Western
political culture ever since the Dclaration
des droits de lhomme et du citoyen.
6

Populist Desire and the Democratic Ideology

Dualities of this sort endow the democratic political system with a
great measure of complexity. The productive aspect of a paradox is
the possibility of holding two seemingly opposite positions. Such para-
doxes can be made plausible through temporalization: by doing one
thing rst and then the other, but never doing both simultaneously.
During rituals of legitimization such as elections, the central focus is
the overlap between the people and their representatives; after the
elections, it turns to watery compromise and procedural distance as
regards the people. The populist desire springs from the constant
tension that exists between presence and representation, the people
and their representatives, absence and presence, universalism and
particularism. It is an extremely conciliatory desire, one that wont
stand for the procedural and sublimated forms of conciliation that
are the garb of democracy. It reminds democracy of a promise, but
also always threatens to make it painfully clear that the democratic
Populism does not escape that sublimation, however. A desire for
unity and the reconciling of the democratic duality cannot be captured
by duplicating that duality. In that sense, populism is a not harm-
less mnemonic technique of the democratic political system itself. It
reminds democracy of its original promise.

The Duality of the Populus: Person versus Citizen

Democracys duality, its intervallic nature that holds particularism
in a precarious balance with universalism, can also be found in the
modern concepts of citizen and the people. These, too, are charac-
terized by a fundamental dualism of particularism and universalism.
A person who is a citizen is always pictured as part of a collective.
The citizen is never really an individual, for the collective is precisely
what guarantees his or her status as a citizen. The modern concept of
citizenship could mask this by dening individual rights and duties
as characteristic of the citizen. But this made it clear that the modern
concept of personhood contains a duality. It compromises between
particularism and universalism. The individual has universal and
inalienable rights, but only in so far as, and as long as, he or she is a
citizen. This duality is necessary in order to guarantee individuality.
Only the universal individual is truly in-dividual, one and indivis-
ible, with a singular value. Every private individual derives singularity
from universality. Nonetheless, the citizen is bound by blood ties (jus
sanguinis) and geographic boundaries (jus soli).
Something similar is true for the modern concept of the people.
That notion also has a long tradition of duality, going back far before
modern times. On the one hand, the people are the populus, the
ruling part of the population, which for example formed the Roman
Senate in combination with the patricians. On the other hand, the
people in the sense of the common people are all of the subjects
of the state. The term can mean the society as opposed to politics
(the state). It can also refer to all people within a political context.
In the populist variant, it often refers to those who really are of the
people. And it can also refer to all people in general. Thus it was
possible for the American Declaration of Independence, with its we,
the people, to be a declaration made by a small club of regents on
behalf of the whole of a geographically bounded population, with the
nature and rights of human beings in general as its legitimization. And
in 1989, the universalist rallying cry of Wir sind das Volk could turn
into the particularist Wir sind ein Volk paradoxically enough with
the demolishing of a wall. The Dutch concept of volk also has such a
6. See: Giorgio Agamben, Homo
Sace:. Sovereign Power and Bare
Life (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998); Willem Schinkel, Na
de mens en de burger: de eigenlijk-
nog-geen-echte-burger. Over clado-
grammaticale atletiek en sociale
immuniteit, Krisis: Tijdschrift
voor actuele losoe, no. 3 (2009),
39-51.
120 Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination
promise implies an venir, that the promise can never be redeemed
and thus must remain a promise.
What the populist desire and democratic ideology moreover have
in common is a presupposition of the people, with all of the dualities
this entails. But in democracy, the denition of the demos is at stake:
democracy involves the rule over a demos that is resultant of that
rule. The political constitution of democracy is the institution of the
people. Democracy is a mass medium, but also a cybernetic machine,
full of feedback, performativity and strange loops. The people, as
the collective assumption of populist desire and democratic ideology,
are never the presence they are assumed to be. They are a public
that must always be assembled anew a public that always claims
to precede democracy. But the ultimate legitimacy of democracy
lies precisely in the claim that the people exist prior to democracy.
Therefore the populist desire, which shares that claim, does not funda-
mentally threaten democracy. On the contrary, it contributes to the
plausibility of the primordiality of the people.
Democracy is helped by a similar mechanistic scheme of cause
(the people) and effect (poplular representation). Its survival is based
on the denial of the fact that the people are a feedback effect of its
performance, combined with the mass media production of views,
opinions and preferences that make transparent what is presumed to
have existed all along. It is clear that the people, as a political collec-
tive that consumes its own views in the form of opinion polls, is a
temporal and spatial effect of legitimizing rituals such as elections.
When a populist desire shines through in this, the idea that it threatens
democracy is itself a contribution to a democratic ideology that is
blind to the threats that it holds for human life. The populist desire
is evoked by democracy itself, but it has a real purpose: it reminds
democracy of the fact that it is a promise and keeps the necessity of
alternative directions on standby. Should populism, in its practical
model, threaten democracy, it is therefore only because democracy
is complex enough to threaten itself. Such a threat can be seen posi-
tively, as a political mnemonic technique, which in a time of radical
depoliticization is a reminder of the political. In the midst of all the
differences of opinion, of debates about percentages of consumer
purchasing power or greater or lesser amounts of carbon dioxide,
democracy seems to have become an ultimately depoliticized but
nonetheless hegemonial concept that is so little criticized that every
dictator holds elections in order to adorn himself with democratic
attire. In such a time, the populist desire is perhaps one of the few
critical effects that democracy can call into being for itself.
Artists Contribution by Foundland

The X-Factor
The graphic design and research collective
Foundland (Ghalia Elsrakbi, Lauren
Alexander and Dirk Vis) conducts research
from within political and social develop-
ments through graphic design. They
translate complex issues in Dutch society
into accessible communications products,
such as posters and installations. The
editors of Open have asked them to make
a special contribution because of their
research into populism.
T
he visibility of politicians on television and in the media is ubiq-
uitous and continuous. Consequently politicians create a distinct
television persona for the public. Tey need to represent the ideas of
authenticity, trustworthiness and efciency, as well as feed into main-
stream expectations of entertainment, spectacle and beauty in order
to capture and hold public attention. Foundland presents a speculative
hand of power cards, dealing with a collection of observations connect-
ing reality TV to the populist tactics of Obama, Palin, Berlusconi, Ver-
donk and Wilders.
THE X-FACTOR
TELEVISION PERSONA:
POPULIST
POLITICIAN OR
REALITY TV STAR?
Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination 122
A
ce of Spades Berlusconi rules without consensus and on his own
terms. He represents an exaggerated, stereotypical male fgure, typi-
fed by his attitude towards women. He enlists support by behaving inap-
propriately, appealing to a specifc macho character of the Italian male.
Even in political speeches he reveals a naughty-boy nature in disregard
of the rules, which can count on popular appeal and draw him closer to
his public. In 2006 he went as far as selecting former topless model and
showgirl Mara Carfagna to serve in his parliament as Minister of Equal
Opportunities. Like an episode of Temptation Island, the afairs, cheats
and mistresses of the alpha male are played out under the media spot-
light. Money, sex and champagne are an explosive erotic game show on
television. However radical or scandalous his behaviour, Ace of Spades
continues to come out on top.
TRONISTA
THE BACHELOR
R
emodel your home, improve your body and experience instant
social edifcation. Reality TV has created a whole new platform
that allows the television producer to act as an instrument for social
change. If your state welfare system is not able to support your growing
middle-class family, not able to deal with your divorce problems, or
your childs medical emergency, there is always the option of applying
to one of the many reality TV productions, which make a spectacle out
of your misfortune, and make lots of money in the process. Te appear-
ance of ambassadors in this social gifing craze, like Oprah Winfrey, Dr
Phil and many others, has created a new phenomenon of social guid-
ance. Tey promote a healthy mix of spiritual awareness, real-life stories
and washing machine give-aways. Tey preach the gospel of health and
happiness, assuming the life of their public is not nearly as fulflled as
it could be. In 2008, for the frst time Oprah decided to put her infu-
ential name and billion dollar brand behind a political leader. While
Oprah encourages us to: Live your best life, Barack Obama provides
the Change you can believe in.
AMERICAN
IDOLS
G
uns, pencil skirts and snowmobile racing, all draped in a shiny
American fag. Te self- proclaimed hockey mom, John McCains
Republican presidential running-mate Sarah Palin, was used in the 2008
American election run-up in a calculated populist attempt to outshine
the democrats. It was hoped that her strong female presence would lure
female conservative voters away from Hilary Clinton. She represents
the Alaskan girl next door who married her high school sweetheart and
attends his snowmobile racing contests on weekends. In personality she
is the stereotype of a conservative, Christian Republican who also has
the charm of being a beautiful, slender woman in the Republican polit-
ical arena, hence her nickname Bible Spice. She is undoubtedly ditsy
and nave, but her unfailing confdence allows her to carry her own and
she has been known to voice her outspoken opinions sometimes to the
detriment of the Republican campaign message. For this reason, John
McCain fondly, and rather condescendingly, described these moments
as Sarah Palin going rogue. Not altogether coincidentally this became
the title of Palins new biographical bestseller. She embodies a combi-
nation of attributes of the all-American woman, to whom the average
middle-class folks can relate. She can dress up to sell her political ideas
or dress down to be a mom or a wife, the perfect beauty pageant winner.
Fear Factor
I
nciting fear and suspense grips a reality TV audience. Tink Fear
Factor, Rescue 911, Crime 360 and in the Netherlands, Spoorloos
and Opsporing Verzocht. In 2009 a reality TV programme called De
Inbreker (Te Burglar) was introduced on the AVRO broadcasting
network illustrating how easy it was to break into the regular Dutch
home. Te programme contestants were instructed on how best to secure
their home and possessions and were then subjected to a surprise break-
in to test the efectiveness of their burglar proofng. Such programmes
convince an audience that they are under threat, even in a country that
is particularly safe, like the Netherlands. Politicians employ much the
same simplistic methods to convince their most vulnerable public that
they are under continual external threat. Te introduction and repro-
duction of a phantom enemy is ever-present in political campaigns.
Rita Verdonk used a trashy and ridiculously overacted scenario for her
latest campaign promotion for her rightwing party Trots op Neder-
land (March 2010 elections), literally re-enacting crime as it supposedly
occurs on Dutch streets. Her use of music, amateur actors and scenario
resembles low-budget reality TV programmes like Rescue 911. Te
campaign video was widely ridiculed in the media, and was not very
efective judging by the results of the June 2010 parliamentary elections.
Geert Wilders in his latest campaign video combines his invasive,
brutal personality, which can be compared with Terror Jaap from De
Gouden Kooi with a more serious blend of imagery and manipulated
facts, in order to elicit fear. In his Partij Voor de Vrijheid promotion
video he uses ordinary stock footage of Dutch Muslims in combina-
tion with airplanes landing at Schiphol airport to conjure a fantasy tale
of Muslim invasion, infltrating and destroying Dutch culture. Unlike
Verdonk, his simplistic and crude approach functions as efective prop-
aganda which a large number of scared Dutch people are all too eager
to take in.
IK HOU VAN
HOLLAND
T
ulips, windmills, cheese, cows and clogs. One clich precedes the
next. Nationalistic TV game shows, like Ik hou van Holland (I
love Holland) bundle all clichs of the Netherlands into one package,
and ask Dutch celebrities to qualify their Dutchness by answering trivial
questions about their culture, narrowing down and redefning Dutch
identity in the process. Te logo of the television programme presents
Holland as the only country on the globe, epitomizing a self-centred
sense of nationalism. Linda de Mol, the Dutch blond clich, presents
the programme. Linda happens to be the sister of John de Mol, founder
of Endemol, one of the largest reality TV production companies in the
world. In 2008 it was made public that John de Mol had sponsored
the political campaign of Trots op Nederland, the right-wing, popu-
list party led by Rita Verdonk. Recently Berlusconis Mediaset added
Endemol to its media empire.
In much the same way as the game show Ik hou van Holland, Rita
Verdonks party Trots op Nederland uses well known national symbols
to appropriate Dutch identity. Identifying what is Dutch means disqua-
lifying the un-Dutch. Te faade of a nationalistic political campaign,
and perhaps also that of a game show, masks the manifestation of a
growing resentment against the Other.
Symbolic Fabrication
L.L.C. An eclectic set of political para-
phernalia clothes, jewellery, writing
materials, even a colouring book for
kids titled Lets Colour History that
allows parents to amuse themsel-
ves while teaching history to their
children is offered for sale to Lega
Nord sympathizers (a). The colouring
book allows for a dual interpreta-
tion that represents the partys entire
political vision. On the one hand
it symbolizes a totalitarian political
dimension: the idea of teaching its
version ofhistory by employing educa-
tion tools for kids; on the other the title
suggests maybe unconsciously the
alteration of the past that has cha-
racterized the Lega Nord movement
from the beginning. (In Italian the
verb colouring, if placed close to an
abstract noun, implies an exagger-
ation, an attempt at manipulating
reality according to ones desires and
interests).
L.D. The Lega Nord is a party,
perhaps the only one in Europe, that
attempts to redene national identity
in an ironical way, demonstrating
in the very process the obsoleteness
of that typically modern political
phenomenon of nationhood. The
name Lega Nord directly refers to a
symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, the
pledge of Pontida (4 April 1167),
which served as the founding act
for a league of medieval cities (the
Lega) situated in the Po valley. These
cities joined to resist the hegemonic
aspirations of the emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire, Frederic Barbarossa.
(a) Sentence from the back cover
of the book Lets colour history
available on the Lega Nord Party
website.
T
e
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ts

a
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d

i
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a
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e
s

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b
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ly

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e
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f
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y
VISUAL DISTORTIONS
VISUAL DISTORTIOSN
VISUAL DISTORTINOS
VISUAL DISTORTOINS
VISUAL DISTORITONS
VISUAL DISTOTRIONS
VISUAL DISTROTIONS
(a)
Open 2010/No.20/The Populist Imagination 134
Artists Contribution by Luisa Lorenza
Corna and Lynda Dematteo

Visual Distortions

The Italian graphic designer Luisa
Lorenza Corna is doing research at the
Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht on
the iconography and visual language of
political movements. The anthropologist
Lynda Dematteo has conducted extensive
ethnographic research on the Italian
party Lega Nord. Together they have made
an analysis of the visual strategies of
this populist movement, which in the
meantime has gained a considerable amount
of political power in Italy.
The pledge was a union for liberty
that aimed to put a stop to foreign
domination, at least that was the
meaning attributed to it afterwards by
the nineteenth-century Lombardy Ca-
tholics, who used the Pontida symbol
in their campaign for the constitution
of a confederated Italian state around
the papacy. The pledge consequently
became associated with the war of
national liberation, and when the
Austro-Hungarian Empire fell into ruin,
Pontida became the space where the
Catholic Church and the Kingdom
of Italy began to be reconciled with
one another in their aim for national
unication.
In the 1950s it was the turn of the
Lombardy separatists to appropriate
and pervert the symbol. Keeping the
semantic scheme intact, they simply
reversed its terms: the foreign power
that needed to be kept at bay was
no longer the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, but Rome itself, the southern
Italians, and foreign immigrants. In so
doing, they began an inverse process
of disarticulating the Italian national
myth. Even if they cannot make
history reverse its course, the elected
members of the Lega Nord do take
Italy back in time. They contest the
unication of the country and deride
the process of formation of national
identity in which education has been
one of the prime instruments. Hence
the attempt to teach another history
through a series of colouring books
for children is deeply ironic, and can
even be seen as a form of self-irony.
It begs the question whether the Lega
Nord activists themselves believe their
coloured narrative made of innocent
gures and grotesque episodes.
The Ostensible Transformation
L.L.C. In the poster for the 2009
membership drive of the Lega Nord
Party a group of militants walk
toward the sunrise while holding
hands (b). The symbol represents, in
a single gurative stroke, both the sun
and the party logo; furthermore its
signicance is twofold: it is an origin
that is also a destiny, a political
horizon. In the forefront a couple of
characters indicate the community to
be reached, they wear green clothes
and a set of Lega Nord gadgets.
The dressing up of the militants is
not accidental but rather an indi-
cation of a political identity that is
as-signed instead of being posses-
sed. Everything is superimposed
on an orange background vaguely
reminiscent of the articial sunsets of
seaside holiday postcards. On the
horizon it is not possible to make out
any goals to be conquered, or even
traces of mobilization and excite-
ment: a placid and articial scenario
accompanies the slow walking of the
peaceful community. For contrast
I have added an old poster of the
Italian student movement (c). It dates
just after 1968 when demonstrations
ared up everywhere in Italy, and
consequently a pressing need emer-
ged to represent these developments
in order to support them politically. A
multitude of enraged arms and closed
sts stretch out in front of the factory.
On the top, the slogan What do
we want? Everything! expresses
and radicalizes desire, the need for
ambition. The goal is everything that
one is not yet but would like to beco-
me. To quote Agamben, the people
are what always already is, as well
as what has yet to be realized . . .
It is what has in its opposite pole the
very essence that it itself lacks: its
realization therefore coincides with
its own abolition; it must negate itself
through its opposite in order to be.
1

The will to transformation described
by Agamben invests the people up
to the point of its elimination: it is the
cause of a mutation that compromises
the surroundings as much as the inner
nature of a social group. In contrast,
the Lega Nord poster suggests a
community that seeks to change the
world while remaining identical to
itself. Hence the viewer is deceived
into believing that transformation is
(b) When people like us
walk, they subdue history,
Poster Lega Nord 2009,
from www.leganord.org.
(c) Poster Centro Stampa
Movimento studentesco.

1. Giorgio Agamben,
Means Without End:
Notes on Politics (University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), 31. (b)
(b)
(c)
strictly an external event and that
history, inasmuch as it is something
out there (that is, not here, not
us), can be moulded, even reversed,
without personally affecting the com-
munity involved.
L.D. Despite the violence of its
discourse, the Lega Nord prefers
a representation of the people as
naturally good and wise. In 1996
during the staging of the declaration
of independence of Padania, Lega
Nord supporters created a human
chain next to the Po: activists held
hands along the banks of the river
symbolizing a people yet to come
as they stretched from the source of
the Po at Monviso to the Venetian
lagoon. More than ten years later
the Lega Nord appears to have
translated this founding event into a
poster calling for new people to join
its ranks. Like the river, the people
appear as a peaceful force, nothing
can impede its advance toward
the luminous horizon of Padania.
The leghismo is seen by some com-
mentators as an alternative religion
responding to the general disen-
chantment that has arisen among the
voters of the Christian Democracy
after its dissolution. The Lega Nord
has established itself on the Italian
political scene by ironically mimicking
the organization and communication
techniques of the big church party,
through a process of desacralising
mimesis. Certain techniques of the
past continue to operate but against
the political direction that they were
intended for, mocking the opponent.
To help disengage themselves from
the catho-communists the Lega Nord
leaders directs the Christian Demo-
crats own anti-communist propagan-
da against them, lumping together
Christian Democrats and communists
into one catho-communist enemy.
Visual Lag
L.L.C. During an interview at the
Lega Nord headquarters one of
the politicians in charge of party
communication admitted to having
used an old archive image for a
poster of the last European election
campaign the photograph in ques-
tion portrays the massive ight of
Albanians towards the Italian coast in
the early 1990s, when the migration
phenomenon reached its peak (d).
By revealing the time lapse between
the shooting of the picture and its use
in the campaign poster, the politician
clearly showed how the Lega creates
an articial of sense of danger con-
cerning migration ows. At the same
time, in spite of his witting forgery of
the real, the man seemed to belie-
ve in the truth of his own lies. The
boat, the horde represent the peril
of the foreigner he afrmed during
the interview, momentarily forgetting
what had been disclosed only a few
minutes before, namely, that the ima-
ge represented a situation not valid
anymore. It grotesquely magnied the
size of the problem (interview dated
13 May 2010). In her book Lying
in Politics, Hannah Arendt reports
an anecdote according to which a
sentry, on duty to watch and warn the
townspeople of the enemys appro-
ach, jokingly sounded a false alarm
and then was the last to rush to
the walls to defend the town against
his invented enemies.
2
This story
exemplies the perilous mechanism
at work within the Lega Nord party:
the success of their unrestrained
exuberance, which implies a constant
(d) We stopped the invasion,
Lega Nord Poster 2009,
from www.leganord.org
(the original poster is in full
colour).

2. Hannah Arendt, Crises of

the Republic: Lying in Politics
(New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1972,) 34
We stopped the invasion we created the invasion.
(d)
exaggeration and manipulation of the
information released, can lead to a
progressive erosion of the difference
between facts and ction in general.
If you type the Italian words sbarco
clandestino (clandestine landing)
in Googles search box, the same
photograph used for the poster will
appear as the rst result.
L.D. The campaign posters of the
Lega Nord give the impression of ha-
ving been thrown together at home.
This aesthetic aspect is opposed to
the marketing strategies employed
by the other political organizations
and contributes to the partys success
among those who reject the usual
style of political communication.
Even if these posters contain false
assertions they always seem, simply
through their form, more authentic
than those coming from the other par-
ties. This deceptive informality goes
together with a conscious refusal to
update imagery: some of the graphic
material still in use was drawn up by
the Lombardy independentists of the
1950s. A nostalgia for such a faded
universe permeates all their visual
references and aesthetic choices. As
the creators of these images afrm,
the goal is, above all, effectiveness:
the message should be immediately
perceived without a hint of subt-
lety; the most common clichs are
recycled.
3
These violently caricatural
representations just as effectively
seduce a simple public that take it
literally, as a more cultivated one that
is amused by the fake inventiveness
and can adhere to it without taking
it really seriously. The activists of the
Lega feed the fear of invasion by
presenting themselves as the victims
of an ethnocide. Some of them even
go as far as dressing themselves up
as redskins (Native Americans) in
the big assemblies of the party. They
fear being supplanted by migrant
workers on their own territory and
nd policies of exclusion and brutal
intimidation justied to avert such a
(e) John Hearteld with Chief
of Police Zrgiebel, From AIZ 8,
no. 37 (1929).
(other page)
Lega Nord T-shirt, detail.
Photo credit:
Tacca/Eurocyclope.

3. Roberto Iacopini, Stefania

Bianchi, La Lega ce lha crudo.
Il linguaggio del Carroccio nei
suoi slogan, comizi, manifesti,
(Milano: Mursia, 1994)
Within the enemys icon. development. Their symbolic uni-
verse is profoundly schematic and,
regardless of facts, reality must be
made to t into its framework. Such
ideological distortion of the real is in
itself violence, and often heralds the
eruption of a more tangible brutality.
Within the Enemys Icon
L.L.C. During the Lega Nords annual
meeting, a group of supporters sell
T-shirts representing the head of the
party, Umberto Bossi, dressed up as
Che Guevara. Under the face of the
leader the text EL GHE is printed,
in dialect Hes here among us,
instead of the original el Che. The
words reinforce (or force) the nexus
between the two characters and
raise some thorny questions: Who is
really here? Bossi or Che Guevara?
But why would one use the icon of
an opposite political force? In one of
his most famous photomontages John
Hearteld represents himself decapi-
tating the Chief of Police Zrgiebel
with a pair of scissors (e).The gesture
symbolizes a strategy underlying the
entire corpus of Heartelds work: di-
sempowering the enemy by mocking
his image.
In the 1950s, a time far removed
from the ideological and iconogra-
phic heaviness of the beginning
of the century, the situationists
playfully used the same device of
rearticulation: through the technique
of dtournement, symbols, images
and words could be displaced from
their original contexts, triggering a
(e)
Umberto Bossi El Che
pictures, pixels, scores
series of semantic shifts and new
juxtapositions. As Asger Jorn afrms:
Dtournement is a game born out of
the capacity of de-valorization. Only
one who is able to devalorize can
create new values. And only where
there is something to devalorize, that
is, an already established value, can
one engage in devalorization.
4

But the process of devalorization de-
ned by Jorn implies, above all, the
identication of symbols representing
something opposed to oneself which
could become a target of semantic
sabotage. The T-shirts sold by the
Lega Nord supporters cannot be
described as a parody of the enemy:
an ideologically opposed icon is en-
compassed within the physiognomy
of their leader. What we assume as
incompatible is here merged in one
graphic layer. The resulting effect is
double: on the one hand, Umberto
Bossi assumes the desired attributes
of the enemy: like Che Guevara he
wishes to be perceived as a fearless
popular leader. On the other, through
the iconic snatch, the Lega Nord
corrodes the credibility of left wing
symbolism.
John Hearteld, as much as situatio-
nists and contemporary subvertizers,
inltrated the semantic territory of
their enemies to attack their symbolic
power. But during those incursions,
the distinction between the self and
the other remains in existence, a
boundary that the Lega Nord dissol-
ves for its political benet.
Disguising the Real
L.D. It could appear dubious to
underline the playful dimension of the
xenophobic messages of the Lega
Nord, for it might seem that one
does not take them seriously enough.
On the contrary, it is in exposing
the workings of these small perverse
games set in motion by this party
(transgression, joker-like exaggeration,
comical dissimulation, reversibility of
accusations and media confusion) that
we might grasp something essential:
it is laughter that permits the leap
towards the intolerable. The discourse
of the leghista is carnivalized just
as much by its producers as by its
audience. This exaggeration is rst
and foremost a response to psycholo-
gical necessities, and only secondly a
strategic concern. The members of the
Lega Nord very sincerely think they
are not xenophobic. During the rst
months of my ethnographic inquiry
they often remarked upon my lack of
a sense of humour. They tried to ex-
plain to me that their supposed raci-
sm was a provocation meant to draw
the attention of the central government
to the number of social problems they
face. When I showed impatience
with the xenophobic jokes of my
interlocutors, I became their idiot
since I showed myself incapable of
distinguishing between what was just
apparent (their racism) and what was
real (the delinquency of foreigners).
For them, my ideological blindfold
simply kept me from going beyond
the anti-racist Vulgate. The confusion
was total. Certain statements made
by Giancarlo Gentilini, the former
mayor of Treviso, are exemplary here.
For the good for nothing foreigners,
he proposed to dress them up as
rabbits and do pim pim pim with
a rie. These statements are so
grotesque that we may nd it difcult
to take them seriously: above all they
discredit the speaker. The provoca-
tions of the representatives of the Lega
Nord are directed not only against
their political or foreign adversaries
but against reason itself. Their electo-
ral successes attest, against all forms
of sensible intelligence, to the incredi-
ble force of political pranks and the
satisfaction that one can derive from
these. Idiocy, for the ancient Greeks,
was a state of being that remained
outside the sphere of politics, it belon-
ged to the order of the pre-political
or the space forgotten by politics.
Withdrawing himself from society, the
idiot was fundamentally an asocial
gure. Faced with their most excessi-
ve declarations, my leghista sources
excuse themselves by claiming that:
It is the common people who are
like this. But why should the people
exclude themselves from the political
sphere? Such an attitude is nothing
less than an expression of a formida-
ble discrediting of the self and of the
people of which they form a part.
L.L.C The game Bounce back the
clandestine, in which the goal is to
reject all illegal immigrants trying to
approach the Italian coasts, recently
appeared on the Lega Nord Facebo-
ok page. A different score is assig-
ned to every boat according to its
capacity: the higher the number of im-
migrants aboard, the greater will be
the result obtained by the player able
to move it away. A foreseeable po-
lemic, stemming from both right- and
leftwing criticism, induced the web
administrator to remove the game,
while another application called
convert the communist maybe less
xenophobic but equally provocative
is still available on the Internet. As the
initial screen of the game suggests,
the sad and consumed leftist has
to be transformed into a happy-
sympathizer of the Lega Nord.
By touching the red character with
the mouse cursor transformed into
the sun on the Alps, the symbol of
Lega Nord the player becomes
the executor of a quasi religious con-
version: the communist will abandon
his unsatised identity to enter a new
political life.
Concealing the gravity of certain di-
scourses behind a playful appearan-
ce and a grotesque vocabulary can
be seen as a consolidated practice
of the Lega Nord. Bounce back the
clandestine solicits the player to per-
form a series of intrinsic racist actions:
the participant has to locate and then
expel the other, represented as a
dangerous quantity threatening our
territorial integrity. Through playing,
everyone is allowed articially to
implement the partys unjust policies,
but the obscenity of the gesture is
immediately dissimulated by the
virtual dimension of the space where
it takes place. The Lega Nords mem-
bers would assert that they are just
playing, but participating necessarily
implies a tacit agreement on the rules
of the game.
(f)
(g)
(g) Clandestine boat.
(h) Clandestine target.
(f) Subvertising, example.
From: http://www.ickr.com/
photos/lorentey/1395959951/

4. Elisabeth Sussman
(edited by), On the Passage
of a Few People Through
A Rather Brief Moment In
Time The Situationist
International,1957-1972
(The MIT Press, 1989), 142.
(h)
+ 20
144 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Book Reviews 145
book reviews
What does it mean to in-
voke the power of the ima-
gination when it has already
seized power (through media
ows and the power of the
spectacle)?

Imaginal Machines is a rich
source of information and in-
spiration for those interested
in the cross section of politics
and the arts. Politics and the
arts here are thought together
in a specic way expressed by
the title Imaginal Machines.
The imagination, Stevphen
Shukaitis writes, is a compos-
ite of our capacities to afect
and be afected by the world.
It is therefore not ahistori-
cal derived from nothing, but
an ongoing relationship and
material capacity constituted
by social interactions between
bodies. Shukaitis is particu-
larly interested in the develop-
ment of movements toward
new forms of autonomous
sociality and collective self-
determination. The radical
imaginary is thus not under-
stood merely as a fantasy or an
image, but along the lines pro-
posed by the leftwing philoso-
pher Cornelius Castoriadis, as
a radical self-instituting form:
the very capacity to create new
forms of social relations and
organisations that determine
the course of social and histori-
cal development.
Imaginal Machines is a sort
of intellectual travelogue that
explores other workers move-
ments which exist within a
secret drift of history se-
cret, because they were often
suppressed or renounced by
the ofcial organs of social-
ist movements such as parties
and trade unions. Those other
workers movements are those
who protested not just for fair
pay but for an altogether difer-
ent life, where the radical im-
agination unfolds at the nexus
between the self-management
of work and work refusal.
Shukaitis nds examples in
the history of autonomous
Marxism in Italy, the First
World War, forms of council
communism, the situation-
ists and hobo Surrealism.
The claim is not that all those
movements and initiatives
towards autonomy and self-
organization are somehow
identical, but that there are
resonant connections between
them, which are worthwhile to
investigate so that the knowl-
edge gained can be made pro-
ductive for current and future
struggles.
Shukaitis, however, is aware
that to invoke the imagination
as underlying and supporting
radical politics has become a
clich and that at some point
in history the recourse to the
imagination was no longer
enacting new forms of creativ-
ity, but continually circulating
forms that already existed and
perceiving them as newly imag-
ined. Those involved in crea-
tive insurgency involuntarily
nd themselves repeating the
slogans, postures, tactics and
gestures of struggles bygone.
The trouble is not only that
the products of the social im-
aginary that once seemed truly
revolutionary suddenly lost
their efectiveness, they also
have the unfortunate tendency
to turn against living strug-
gles. Capitalism has shown an
amazing capacity for what the
situationists called recupera-
tion, the adaptation of critique
and its creative expressions for
its own end. The current ver-
sion of capitalism, whether it is
described as post-Fordist or an
informational economy, relies
increasingly on the manage-
ment of carefully cultivated
images and on the mobiliza-
tion of the communicative
and creative capacities of the
workforce or the prosumer
people in their split double
Stevphen Shukaitis
Imaginal Machines: Autonomy
& Self-Organization in the
Revolutions of Everyday Life
Armin Medosch
Minor Compositions/
Autonomedia 2009,
isbn 978-1-57027-208-0
256 pages, price $ 16,-
identity of being producers and
consumers who not only nd
themselves exploited at work
but also during their free time
or leisure time. This is in fact
also productive time, not only
because consumption is neces-
sary for the valorisation of cap-
ital but because in the process
consumers produce the cultur-
al content of the commodity.
Shukaitis, here following the
analysis of immaterial labour
by Maurizio Lazzarato, is care-
ful to point out that capital-
isms increasing dependencies
on forms of symbolic labour is
nothing new in itself, but that
it has become more central in
the post-Fordist regime.
Added to that is another
problem, which is connected
but not identical to the one
just mentioned: Social strug-
gles do not die, but rather
are left in a zombied state
of indeterminacy where their
only desire is to turn against
themselves and eat the brains
of the living labour resistance.
However, what Shukaitis calls
Zombie politics and the
organisational gothic does
not lead to defeatism and the
overall pessimism that often
characterizes leftwing theorists
and tends to grant capitalism
too much agency and sees all
eforts and ways of resistance
and struggle as already sub-
verted and therefore without
any chance. There is no alien
spacecraft that has landed,
writes Stevphen Shukaitis, un-
leashing hordes of little green
men who are gnawing away
at the revolutionary imagina-
tion. There is still something
to be done: The task is to
explore the construction of
imaginal machines, compris-
ing the socially and histori-
cally embedded manifestations
of the radical imagination.
Shukaitis does this by provid-
ing examples of how exactly
recuperation works but also
how it, occasionally, can be
defeated. He gives ample space
to the technopranks of artists-
activists such as the Yes Men
who try to invert image ma-
nipulation techniques to tease
out the worst from underneath
the shining surfaces of infor-
mational capitalism. From
hobo Surrealism to pop-
cultural motifs used in urban
insurrections to groups such
as the Chainworkers in Milan
and the Euromayday initiative,
Imaginal Machines consists of
many interesting stories told
in such a way that the result is
a texture rather than simply a
text, a very open-ended under-
taking that has, as is stated in
the Introduction, neither a be-
ginning nor an end. The author
knows how to deal with heavy
concepts by not addressing
them frontally. It is rather more
like a lengthy reconnaissance
mission, weaving in and out of
side streets and dodgy alleys,
hacking through the under-
world of zombied concepts,
yet occasionally stumbling
almost by accident against the
wall of a fortied castle, that is,
one of those big, chunky, issues
that Castoriadis would have
called the aporias of capital,
or, as more traditional Marxists
would say, its objective con-
tradictions, which not only
bring capitalism occasionally to
the brink of total collapse but
make it also very difcult for
those who seek to change the
system to nd easy and con-
venient answers.
Weaving its revolutionary
patterns of thought in constant
dialogue with the concepts
and works of authors such as
Cornelius Castoriadis, Silvia
Federici, Toni Negri, Felix
Guattari, Stefano Harney,
David Graeber and others,
Imaginal Machines has been
praised not only for being
an instructive survey of im-
aginative left-wing politics but
also for its humour and wit
(Federici). This is a rare type of
praise for an otherwise very po-
litical book, which makes it all
the more recommendable.

146 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Book Reviews 147
Paul ONeill and
Mick Wilson (eds.)
Curating and the
Educational Turn
Ilse van Rijn
London/Amsterdam, Open
Editions/De Appel, 2010
isbn 978-0-949004-18-5
342 pages, 20.00
In the anthology Curating and
the Educational Turn, editors
Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson
have compiled a collection
of essays, polemic and poetic
statements, e-mail corres-
pondence and other sorts of
dialogs. The central focus is
the role and position of the
educational model as a pos-
sible turning point in the ma-
king of exhibitions. The whole
paints a heterogeneous picture
of a phenomenon over which
consensus has not yet been
reached. The strength of this
anthology is the diversity of its
individual standpoints but
that is also its snag. Doesnt
such a highly varied perspec-
tive in fact attest to a forced at-
tempt to bring together diver-
gent practices and positions?
Are we really experiencing an
educational turn? In their in-
troduction, ONeill and Wilson
examine the latter question
to legitimize the setup of the
book.
A curatorialization of edu-
cational models and practices
would seem to be emerging,
observe the editors. Whereas
debates and lectures, symposi-
ums, educational programmes
and discursive projects previ-
ously fullled a secondary
role in exhibitions, biennials
and, recently, art fairs, now
they have taken on a central
place in exhibition practice.
The list of initiatives based
on the educational format
is long and diverse: Daniel
Buren and Pontus Hultns
Institut des Hautes tudes en
Arts Plastiques (1996), the
Platforms of documenta 11
(2002), Be(com)ing Dutch:
Eindhoven Caucus, and unit-
ednationsplaza, to name but
a few. The ways in which edu-
cational models and strategies
are integrated vary; so too,
do the manners in which they
relate both to institutionalized
and formalized (art) academic
curriculums, and to a broader
(art) eld. ONeill and Wilson
see the curatorial as an activi-
ty with changing organizational
forms and ways of collabora-
tion. In their view, todays
curator brings about cultural
encounters without necessarily
positing an objective before-
hand or claiming a demonstra-
ble result afterwards. Curators
no longer label themselves
authors, but make exchanges
possible in which nonlinear
processes ofer dialogical re-
sistance to the prevailing order.
This notion of the curatorial
practice is also the books line
of approach.
The majority of the 27 criti-
cal contributions were writ-
ten especially for the book.
According to the initiators ,
four previously published es-
says have a prominent place in
the debate on the educational
turn, which is why they have
been republished here. Irit
Rogofs Turning clearly sets
forth the recurrent doubts
regarding the discussion at
hand: What makes the postu-
lated turn a turn? To whom
is the educational turn in the
curatorial practice directed?
And, what distinguishes turn-
ing as an active process, a
movement, an actual, critical
splitting of the components
comprising a practice from
the branding of a recognizable
style, which subsequently can
be efortlessly appropriated?
Based on a critical considera-
tion of two projects, Rogof,
after having dispensed with
the strongly missionary and
edifying educationalist outlook
of old, comes up with four
propositions to bolster the eld
of education: let us reorganize
education in terms of unlim-
ited potentiality (more is pos-
sible than you think) and ac-
tualization; the understanding
of crucial matters can become
an urgency; education must be
accessible; it can be the arena in
which challenge is written into
our daily activity. In art, she
says, education must be em-
ployed as a constituent force
and as a form of self-organiza-
tion and instituting oneself .
Not only the practice of
the curator, but also that of
the artist is characterized by
pedagogical methods and
instruments, according to
Dave Beech. Think of Andrea
Frasers performances, Mark
Leckeys lectures or the
Copenhagen Free University,
an institute initiated by artists
for critical and marginal forms
of knowledge. Or Tony Blairs
1996 phrasing of the three pri-
orities of British New Labour:
education, education, educa-
tion. How, in other words,
can the educational turn be
understood within the broader
context of recent social mod-
els? In his essay Weberian
Lessons: Art, Pedagogy and
Managerialism, Beech dis-
cusses Duchamp as the artist
whose readymades already
incorporated the Taylorist con-
cept of social redistribution of
labour and shared authorship.
This viewpoint might explain
the increase in the participa-
tion of the public, but it also
tends towards a rationaliza-
tion and disenchantment of
society. Beech interprets the
introduction of pedagogical
models in art as symptoms of
our modern bureaucratic soci-
ety and warns against treating
art as standardized cultural
capital.
This precarious balance be-
tween restrictive educational
models and the possibility of
development is emphasized in
several essays. Andrea Philips
reminds us of the way in which
Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri have indicated knowl-
edge to be immaterial produce;
collective intelligence and af-
fective work to be grounds for
exploitation. According to her,
we must consider what art and
design can generate, how they
can counterbalance macro
political regulations and what
they are capable of realizing
within an aesthetic practice.
We must engage with the
present, say both Marion van
Osten (in a discussion with
Eva Egermann) and Rogof.
Moreover, we should be scepti-
cal with regard to the educa-
tional turn, so as not to shift
real questions about the knowl-
edge economy and cognitive
capitalism to the art work. For,
wonder Stewart Martin and
Jane Graham, among others, to
what extent can an artist still
move freely and autonomously
within a practice dominated by
educational planning?
Based on his experiences
with unitednationsplaza, a
nomadic school inspired by
the concept for the cancelled
Manifesta 6 planned for 2006
in Nicosia, a divided Greek/
Turkish town in Cyprus, art-
ist Anton Vidokle suggests
that if we are to ofer a coun-
terbalance to the prevailing
economic political order, per-
haps we should combine two
models: that of the temporary
exhibition open to the public,
and that of the potentially in-
novative and experimental, but
closed school. Like Vidokle,
Charles Esche, citing historical
examples, points out the short
life granted to non-hierarchical
art academies that are not
focused on autonomy and au-
thority or a specialization. He
feels that the academic model
(What do we learn? How do we
learn?) and its implementation
should be studied carefully in
order to be able to improve it.
A collective agency conspic-
uously lacking in an art world
focused on individual results
and objects, particularly in the
Netherlands can function as
the basis for a structural revi-
sion of academic models. By
rejecting measurable results,
says Esche, the experimental
relation and presentation of the
production of knowledge as-
sociated with artistic works can
be considered anew.
Esche thus recognizes
the potential of education.
Whereas Simon Sheikh, for
instance, takes a reserved
position with respect to the
institutional rhetorical game
we are in danger of becoming
caught up in when speaking of
an educational turn, Esche sees
the posing of questions as an
essential educational force that
leads us out of an eventual in-
stitutional impasse. In that re-
gard, Esches contribution ts
perfectly with Paul ONeill and
Mick Wilsons aim of having
Curating and the Educational
Turn function as a Socratic de-
bate in which questions reign
supreme and answers do not
exist. The criticism that the
editors are out to propagate an
implicit viewpoint would thus
seem to be parried. The book is
arranged as a dynamic and in-
spiring compilation of perspec-
tives, for which there is (as yet)
no unequivocal answer.
148 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Book Reviews 149
In one of his various rants
directed at the irresistible rise
of the design professional a
review of Bruce Maus book
Life Style Hal Foster laments
our present era as one in which
the aesthetic and the utilita-
rian are not only conated but
subsumed in the commercial.
Now everything is designed.
Here, the avant-garde project
of arts dissolution into life
nds its apotheosis in con-
temporary design. For Foster,
what is more awful than the
annexation, the autonomy
or semi-autonomy of art is
designs indiference to that
which it subsumes: Not only
architectural projects and art
exhibitions but everything
from jeans to genes is regar-
ded as so much design. The
grammatical alignment here of
jeans with architectural pro-
jects (utilitarian) and art with
genes (human/sacred) should
be noted, it mirrors exactly the
rule of equivalence that capi-
talism commands and which
Foster hopes to wish away.
Conceptual design group
Metahaven more or less situate
their practice within this gram-
mar of conation and indifer-
ence that Foster rails against.
Yet it is possible to understand
this situation as structural
rather than willed. Taking as a
starting point this assumption,
that all is designed now and
that design is completely com-
plicit in the domination of all
human activity by commodity
exchange, Metahaven seek to
occupy this complicity, squat
it if you like. Acknowledging
that this situation makes criti-
cality and afrmation increas-
ingly difcult to separate, they
seek a merger between these
two poles, a mode of operat-
ing in the contradictory and
cramped spaces of neoliberal-
isms triumph, which, for bet-
ter or worse, tends towards
irresolution.
In Uncorporate Identity,
Metahaven map out problems
with corporate form, iden-
tity and democracy under the
tyranny of networked power:
Uncorporate Identity concerns
the relationship between an
organization and its tangible
forms. Rather than seeking to
unmask and expose the truth
behind the bland logos, brands
and PR projections of both
corporate and State forms,
Metahaven employ critical
and creative strategies to make
more present the opaque
power that drives these pro-
liferating abstractions. To ex-
amine what is hidden in plain
sight, we are told, involves the
deployment of two strategies
iconoclasm or defacement, and
crisis, what happens after an
organization fails yet its logos
survive. How exactly these
strategies are deployed and
developed is not completely
claried in the book, but they
do signal a move away from a
politics of opposition towards
overidentication, indiscern-
ability and the deepening of
contradictions.
Uncorporate Identity is
equally a critical anthology of
texts on the problems of net-
work power today, essays in the
cultural analysis of design and
a showcase of some conceptual
design projects turning around
related themes of the projec-
tion and subversion of this
power. It is one part Life Style,
one part S, M, L, XL one part
Empire. Contributions, in in-
terview form; from anthropolo-
gist Michael Taussig, architect
Pier Marco Aurelio and art
critic Boris Groys, network
theorist David Singh Grewal,
in ctional form; China
Miville, Keller Easterling, the
theoretical essays The Mirror
of the Network by Marina
Vishmidt and Metahavens
Europe Sans all make for
original and substantial read-
ing and help to lay out the
landscape Metahaven aspire to
analyse.
A preoccupation across
several contributions involves
establishing diferences be-
tween forms of network and
soft power. This inquiry in turn
supports the central argument:
All such forms of power, this
book argues, are matters of de-
sign. Metahavens projects are
less traditional design briefs in-
stead, taking the form of inven-
tive, self-initiated open-ended
surveys deploying critical
design in a framework closer
to conceptual art. Graphic
Marina Vishmidt and
Metahaven (eds.)
Uncorporate Identity
Anthony Iles
Maastricht, Jan Van Eyck;
Baden, Lars Mller Publishers,
2010
isbn 978-3-03778-169-2
608 pages, 44.90
design is the iteration of more
or less interchangeable basic
forms triangles, squares and
circles, design is a question of
powers transmission through
protocols, scenarios, architec-
tures and standards.
Of the projects presented,
Stadtstaat (2009) a proposal
for the merger of the European
cities of Utrecht and Stuttgart
into a regional city state, is one
of the canniest and fully real-
ized. It ts best Metahavens
proposal for speculative de-
sign, founded on the premise
that the projection of power
and the assumption of an image
are ways to create a world
and make it seem inevitable.
Stadtstaat is propelled into
theoretical presence by the lit-
erary device of an anonymous
exchange of letters between two
inhabitants and Friends. The
letters are displayed alongside
a series of posters, designs
for Stadtstaats Information
Architecture including:
Trust, a model for an online
social network, and Axis, the
Stadtstaat Interurban cor-
ridor, that is the renaming of
an existing highway between
the two urban conurbations, as
well as credit and voting cards,
a telephone directory and logos
for invented private-public
enterprises.
A more graphic and less
theoretically driven project,
LogoParc, consists of an ambi-
tious computer-simulated land-
scape of South Axis, a recently
established hotspot in the
global world of nance situ-
ated in Amsterdam. Metahaven
stripped away the glass skin of
existing buildings to expose a
grey theme park of undiferen-
tiated skeletal concrete forms
penetrated by the sedimented
ows of international capital
parodying the foreclosed pros-
pects of such nascent non-spac-
es after the 2008 nancial crisis
its redesign is characterized as
banlieue deluxe, Frankfurt
am Cheap or Dubai near the
Canals. Global and postmod-
ern space is modelled as an em-
battled space of grafti, walls,
peripheries, discourse inscrip-
tion and defensive form.
One of the important
terms that frequently reap-
pears across Metahavens
interviews and debates with
cultural intellectuals is conict.
Do you think conict can
be productive? they demand
of David Singh Grewal. The
question derives from a cen-
tral interest in the thought of
post-Marxist political theorist
Chantal Moufe. Moufes
contribution to the book is
taken from a talk given in
2007 at the seminar Regimes
of Representation, organized
by Metahaven in Bucharests
House of the People for-
merly Nicolae Ceauescus
Presidential Palace, now both
the seat of government and
a contemporary art gallery,
MNAC. Alongside Ernesto
Laclau, Chantal Moufe has
developed a theory of radical
democracy predicated upon a
mutation away from what they
understand as the Marxist over-
emphasis on economic deter-
minism and privileging of a es-
sentialist subject the working
class and towards a theory of
the constitution of social agents
privileging subjectivity and the
processes of identity formation.
At the centre of their shared
understanding of the political
as opposed to formal politics
is a current of under-acknowl-
edged, yet primary, antagonism
and conict. The democratic
resolution of politics and the
political, for Moufe, would
involve a way to acknowledge
on the one side the permanence
of the antagonistic element of
conict, and on the other side
allow for the possibility of its
taming. This would amount
to, in Moufes words, a third
type of relation.. . which I
have proposed to call agonism.
Moufe imagines the construc-
tion of institutions in which
conicts can come to the fore
without breaking a basic com-
mon bond and democratic
premise. Her formulation of
politics and the political in turn
underpins Metahavens ap-
proach throughout the book.
This has its limitations the
protocols, limits and aporias
of a competition between al-
ternatives within a conscripted
arena can be discussed and
subverted but not overturned
completely. Europes borders
and a Eurocentric view of
Western capitalism are out-
lined, critiqued but ultimately
afrmed. The complicity of
representational democracy not
only with the free market but
as a presupposition of capitalist
exchange per se is underexam-
ined and considered only as a
problem of power. The depend-
ence of formal equality upon
the presupposition that all la-
bours count equally and that, as
Marx asserts, ultimately money
is the power which brings
together impossibilities and
forces contradictions to em-
brace is entirely outside of this
purview. Apprehension of these
fundamentals would be key to
any further development of the
150 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Book Reviews 151
practical research Metahaven
wish to pursue. These insights,
which they come close to ap-
prehending in their pamphlet
White Night: before a manifesto
(unfortunately not reproduced
in the book), would bring them
closer to a non-identitarian
view of power and a design
analysis that sees in surface not
just the mirror of interchange-
able forms of abstract power
but a manifestation of social
relations driven and distorted
by the value-form.
Endearingly, the book is
ambitious and irreverent, most
problematically it is less than
transparent about Metahavens
need to market themselves as a
professional practice. It should
be no a surprise that these
parts do not make a whole
in toto, the reader will nd
neither a coherent theoreti-
cal programme nor the com-
munication of a robust design
practice, but they may nd
some gems, both in the form
of individual contributions and
projects, which disturbs exist-
ing forms of engagement with
these terms.
Is this about a machine?
This is the central question
Gerald Raunig asks himself in
his latest essay A Thousand
Machines.
1
After having read
through the 120 rather well
written (translated) pages
notwithstanding the overuse
of the term concatenation
one cannot help but won-
der. What is it exactly that
this concise philosophy of
the machine as social move-
ment as the books subtitle
promises wants to achieve?
Is it a commentary on the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari (as well as
Karl Marx)? A brief history,
etymology, genealogy of an im-
portant conceptual fragment of
Deleuzo-Guattarian thought?
An application of the notion
of the machine to a variety of
aesthetic practices? Or indeed
an attempt to theorize (as well
as perhaps inspire) a particular
type of contemporary social
movement by way of French
philosophy from the 1960s and
1970s?
The stylish little essay-ma-
chine that Raunig attempts to
construct wants to be all of the
above and possibly more. The
fact that it fails as a philoso-
phy of the machine as social
movement is rather secondary
as in the process it produces a
number of interesting insights.
But we are getting ahead of
ourselves.
The essay opens with a very
elegantly constructed literary-
cinematic triptych composed
of Flann OBriens novel The
Third Policeman, Claude
Feraldos unjustly forgotten
masterpiece Themroc and
Vittorio de Sicas famous neo-
realist adaptation of Ladri di
Biciclette (Bicycle thieves). In
many ways this tryptich, smart-
ly connected (or, as Raunig
and his translator would have
it, concatenated) by the refrain
of the bicycle, sets the tone
for the diferent variations of
the machine theme we will en-
counter later on in the text.
First, there is the process of
cycling as man-machine inter-
face, an assemblage dened by
the relationship of the merg-
ing ows of cyclist and cycle,
thereby dissolving both their
subjectivity. Then there is the
Fordist social machine whose
iconic representation is the g-
ure of Themroc the cyclist on
his way to the factory almost
merging with a cyclist-cow-
orker according to what seems
to be an exact timetable (they
meet in the middle of the road
leaning against each other for
the rest of the journey). Here
one gets the machinic relation
perpetuated by a mode of so-
cial organization formatting or
moulding its subjects (workers)
while extracting their lan vital
in order to transform is into la-
bour power (in Deleuzo-speak:
social subjection and machinic
enslavement). Simultaneously,
Themrocs animalistic rebel-
Gerald Raunig
A Thousand Machines: A
Concise Philosophy of the
Machine as Social Movement
(translated by Aileen Derieg)
Sebastian Olma
Semiotext(e), 2010,
isbn-10: 1-58435-085-7,
isbn-13: 978-1-58435-085-9
128 pages $12.95/9.95
(paper)
lion, his successful revolution-
ary regression into the primal
netherworld of mother- and
sister-fuckers is taken by
Raunig to relate to the post-
autonomous notion of exodus
as inventive political machine
(though it might as well just be
Feraldo taking the piss out of
it). Finally, the smooth machine
of bicycle thievery, operating
like a difuse, incomprehensi-
ble swarm is presented as an
ambivalent social machine with
the capacity to either create an
emancipative assemblage of
resistance to dominant forms
of subjectivation via solidarity/
invention/non-hierarchy or a
fascistoid assemblage based on
the same principles.
After this quite brilliant al-
legorical introduction of the
machine-theme, Raunig turns
to a theoretical elaboration of
the concept. He briey sketches
the etymological and cultural
development of the notion of
the machine from the Middle
Ages, arriving quickly at Marxs
Fragment on Machines, a
text that develops his inuen-
tial notion of real subsumption,
that is, a state of capitalist
development marked by the
full absorption of the physical
and intellectual potential of liv-
ing labour into the productive
machine. Particularly pertinent
in this context is the notion of
the general intellect, approach-
ing a fully developed capitalism
as a machine that objecties
(and thus alienates) the social
bodys entire intellectual capac-
ity in order to transform it into
a means of total domination/
exploitation. Raunig alludes to
a possible critique of such a to-
talizing notion of the machine
by way of a mere nod to post-
workerist Marxism: The con-
catenation of knowledge and
technology is not exhausted in
xed capital, but also refers be-
yond the technical machine and
the knowledge objectied in it,
to forms of social cooperation
and communication, not only
as machinic enslavement, but
also as the capacity of immate-
rial labour and this form of
labour, as especially (post-)
Operaist theory would later in-
sist, can destroy the conditions
under which accumulation de-
velops (25-26).
Clearly, this is a most inter-
esting statement that would
merit some elaboration. Are
there social processes at play
today that support such a
claim? To what extent does ma-
chinic theory and perhaps even
a machinic practice help to
confront a capitalist system that
clearly has become unsustain-
able? At this point, however,
Raunig refrains from a head-on
engagement with these ques-
tions, instead turning to an
elaboration of the machine as it
is found in the work of Deleuze
and Guattari, stressing the
relationship between streams
and ruptures of assemblages,
in which organic, technical and
social machines are concate-
nated (30). This is of course
correct. Machinic thinking,
as Raunig argues, provides an
ontology that moves beyond
the dichotomy man/machine,
resisting the (for instance
McLuhanian) simplication
of technology as extension of
human faculties, instead posing
the question (with Simondon)
of how man becomes a piece
with the machine or with other
things . . . (animals, tools, other
people, statements, signs or de-
sires) . . . in order to constitute
a machine (32). The machinic,
one might say, is the milieu of
transversal communication out
of which organization (forms,
bodies, structures, etcetera)
emerges.
However, as the connection
between postoperaist Marxism
and Deleuze/Guattari is cru-
cial to Raunig, it would have
been helpful to make it at the
beginning of the essay and
then quickly move beyond it.
It should have been his point
of departure for eshing out
his notion of the machine as it
is at work in within the mat-
ter of contemporary social life.
The more empirical chapters
on theatre machines, war ma-
chines and mayday machines
are rather a mixed bag in this
respect. They are only partly
contemporary and largely re-
main at the level of aesthetics.
It is only in his conclusion
that Raunig returns to the
question of real subsumption
and general intellect (largely
by repeating Paolo Virnos
well-known line of argument)
but as in the meantime hardly
anything has been conceptu-
ally added to matter, he cannot
really add anything new to the
discussion. This is frustrating
as the notion of the machine
seems to be an ideal vehicle for
taking the conceptual and prac-
tical puissance de linvention of
the two perhaps most impor-
tant strains of 1960s/70s politi-
cal thinking into the twenty-
rst century. What comes to
mind is Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negris treatment of
the contemporary metropolis
in terms of a machine (Hardt
and Negri 2009), that is, an
anorganic multiplicity consist-
ing of layer upon layer of pos-
sible productive encounters.
One cannot, of course, expect
152 Open 2010/No. 20/The Populist Imagination Book Reviews 153
the old guard themselves to
break through their conceptual
limitations. But someone like
Raunig could have. However,
doing so would have meant not
only to move beyond Marx but
also beyond Deleuze.
The problem that Raunig as
well as many of his Deleuze/
Guattari-inspired colleagues
have is one of being at once
too close and not close enough
to their masters. Raunig is too
close to their writing particu-
larly in his use of terminology.
One might say that he does
not properly translate their
machinic thinking into his own
theoretical project. This comes
clearly to the fore in his more
empirical chapters. These are
informative and at times even
fascinating chapters. However,
his extensive reliance on the
Deleuzo-Guattarian termi-
nological apparatus, without
being able to sufciently repro-
duce their machine of expres-
sion, makes it very difcult for
the uninitiated to grasp the
analytical force of machinic
thinking. The reproduction or
even application of Deleuzo-
Guattarian philosophy is of
course not the issue here as
such an endeavour goes con-
trary to their thinking. It is well
known that the French couple
dened philosophy in terms of
le survol, that is, a qualitative
movement of thought that ob-
serves while ying over thus
inventing concepts that allow
thought to co-evolve within its
own matter of concern. Hence
by not daring to stray further
from Deleuze and Guattaris
conceptualities, Raunig departs
from their perhaps most essen-
tial methodological demand:
conceptual creativity.
The return of religion is a
subject that has occupied
minds ever since the invention
of secularization. Today it is
often asserted that twenty-rst
century Westerners are being
confronted with an unexpected
return of fundamentalist, or
secularized, religion, which is
suddenly posing new questions
and dilemmas for our post-
modern, disenchanted, digital
era. This creates a widespread
feeling that we need to relate
to religion again. But doesnt
every era reinvent religion, both
its demise and its return? Is the
return of religion perhaps not
the rise of a new form of funda-
mentalism? Arent we running
the risk of believing in a myth?
Shouldnt we at least have dou-
bts about this so-called return?
These are central questions
in the collection of essays re-
cently published by the bak
(basis voor actuele kunst). The
title of the book, The Return
of Religion and Other Myths, is
as pertinent as it is confusing.
Does the characterization of
myth refer here to a repudia-
tion of religion and its return
(as the editors emphasize in
the foreword, religion is in
many ways still on the wane)?
Or to the functioning of the
return of religion (does the
present return of religion in
fact allow critical iconoclasm)?
In their introduction, the
editors approach the problem
from two sides: on the one,
there is the fundamentalist at-
tack on the image, the cartoon
dustups and Al-Qaeda, but
also Christian fundamentalism;
and on the other, the inspira-
tion that religion continues to
ofer for the contemplation of
the image, art and spirituality.
The present situation thus calls
for an interpretation of the role
of art in these modern debates.
And that immediately points
up the collections fundamen-
tal tension, that of being a
critical enquiry into the return
of religion, or its conrmation
even if simply by lling a vol-
ume with interesting analyses
of the relation between art and
religion.
The inevitability of the link
between religion and art is
what Jan Assman goes into in
his essay Whats Wrong with
Images? He emphasizes how
images, from the time they
Maria Hlavajova, Sven
Ltticken and Jill Winder (eds.)
The Return of Religion and
Other Myths: A Critical Reader
in Contemporary Art
Ernst van den Hemel
Utrecht: bak basis voor actuele
kunst, and Rotterdam: Post
Editions, 2009
isbn 978-946983-007-5
214 pages, 23
were rst banned (approxi-
mately 3500 years ago) until
now, are interwoven with reli-
gious worship. Assman is not
particularly interested in dis-
missing the return of religion,
but a better understanding of
its history might bring about
a way of relating to images
that learns from the past: The
solution seems not to be the
prohibition of images but the
acquisition of iconic literacy.
Therefore this is not so much
about negating myth as it is
about gaining insight into how
religion has determined the ef-
fect of images and still does.
In The Image as Crime,
Marc de Kesel emphasizes
that even in an overly visual
age such as ours, images are
still connected with the ban on
the image, at the boundaries
of the visible. Contemporary
art is also connected with the
mythical conrmation and
transgression of the ban on
imagery. The fear and fascina-
tion inherited from religion for
what lies beyond the image is
not so easily allayed: the return
of religion, true or not, will
again have to relate to this pro-
ductive fear.
Arnoud Hollemans On ne
Touch pas: (sic) On Copyright
and Iconoclasm makes a link
that exposes the selective work-
ing of myth: these days, there
is a battle going on between
the religious limitation of the
freedom of speech and the sec-
ular defence of this freedom.
However, in describing his has-
sles with the reuse of a porno
lm in a work of art, the author
makes a comparison between
the prohibition of images and
the vicissitudes of contempo-
rary copyright laws. When re-
ligious believers want to forbid
images, everyone brandishes
the secular freedom of speech,
but in European copyright law,
there is an almost religious
worship of the image that seri-
ously hinders that same free-
dom of speech: You could say
that the European law ignores
the second commandment in
favour of the idol. Beneath
the supercial return of reli-
gion Islam versus Christian-
humanist tolerance there
is a religious undercurrent,
the worship of the image. For
Holleman, too, the issue is not
so much about negating myth,
but about using it to continue
to make criticism possible, also
against itself.
The conversation between
Boris Groys and Maria
Hlavajova might present the
clearest view of the return
of religion in todays society.
Groys emphasizes the fact
that the idea of a return of
religion also was rife in the
nineteenth century. The impact
of the present return will de-
pend upon our current media
landscape. In a postmodern,
hyper-visual age in which a
meaningful horizon is up for
grabs, both religion and art
are potential alternatives. The
only question is which way it
will go. For Groys, in our dis-
enchanted and yet religious
era, it is important that we
gain insight into new forms of
fundamentalism.
The problem perhaps
becomes clearest in the art
project Beautiful City Book
List by Maria Pack. A list of
web links to mainly religious
books, based on personal pref-
erence, increases the tension
between the personal and the
public. The project purposely
does not answer questions
about truth, desirability or ca-
nonicity, but ofers new combi-
nations through the juxtaposi-
tion of all sorts of references.
The call for the meaning of
myth remains, also in the many
unstructured hyperlinks from
which the reader must make
his or her own selection.
The book succeeds in pre-
senting many diferent, fasci-
nating views on the connection
between religion and art. Most
of the essays, however, are
not about whether or not the
return of religion is a myth.
What gradually becomes clear,
and this might sooner be a
shortcoming of the spirit of our
times than of this collection,
is the necessity for dichotomy
as regards that myth: Is the
return of religion conservative,
or does it ofer the possibility
of criticism? If art indeed has
a connection with religion,
and embraces the return of
religious denitions of the
image, for example, it becomes
important to make a distinc-
tion between forms of thinking,
religious or artistic, that can
stimulate critical thought, and
forms of thinking that, in the
words of Groys, might con-
ceivably turn the twenty-rst
century into a fundamentalist
drama. Only when an alliance
can be struck between utter-
ances that give occasion for
critical intervention and those
that contribute to fundamen-
talism or play into the hands of
intolerance, can we truly point
to the myth of the return of
religion.
154 155
PERSONALIA
Franco (Bifo) Berardi is a writer
and media activist. He founded the
magazine A/traverso and worked for
Radio Alice, the frst free pirate
radio station in Italy. He teaches
at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan
and is cofounder of the e-zine rekom-
binant.org.
Ives Citton is professor of French
literature at the Universit de
Grenoble-3 in France. He recently
published Mythocratie. Storytelling
et imaginaire de gauche (2010) and
Spinoza et les sciences sociales (2008).
He is a member of the editorial
board of the journal Multitudes.
Luisa Lorenza Corna is a designer
alternately living and working
in the Netherlands and Italy. She
studied visual communication at
Central Saint Martins and history
of art at Goldsmiths University
in London. Since 2010 she has been
a researcher at the Jan van Eyck
Academie in Maastricht, where she
focuses on apparently divergent
visual clues that expose underlying
problems.
Lynda Dematteo is a research
fellow in anthropology at the
Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifque. Since 1998, she has
contributed to research within the
LAIOS (Laboratoire dAnthropologie
des Institutions et des Organisa-
tions Sociales EHES, Paris). She
researched the Lega Nord and in her
book Lidiotie en politique. Subversion
et no-populisme en Italie (2007)
developed a critical refection
on the nordismo of Lega Nord
militants that relies on an anthro-
pological analysis of inversion
rituals.
Jolle Demmers is an assistant
professor and cofounder of the
Centre for Confict Studies at
Utrecht University in the Nether-
lands. She lectures and writes
on confict theory, the role of
diasporas in violent confict, and
neoliberalism.
Stephen Duncombe is an associate
professor at the Gallatin School
of New York University, where he
teaches the history and politics
of media and culture. He is the
author of, most recently, Dream:
Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in
an Age of Fantasy (2007) and the
cofounder and codirector of the
College of Tactical Culture and the
School for Creative Activism in New
York City.
Foundland (Ghalia Elsrakbi, Dirk Vis
and Lauren Alexander) is a multidis-
ciplinary art and design practice
based in Amsterdam. The coworkers
have backgrounds in graphic design,
flmmaking, art and writing. Found-
lands approach focuses on research-
based, critical responses to current
issues linked to politics and visual
culture. www.foundland.org
Ernst van den Hemel is a doctoral
student in the history of christi-
anity and teaches literary theory at
the University of Amsterdam. He is
the author of Calvinisme en politiek.
Tussen verzet en berusting (2009). He
additionally is involved with the
squatted gallery Schijnheilig in
Amsterdam. www.schijnheilig.org
Anthony Iles is a writer and editor
based in London. He has worked for
Mute (metamute.org) and together
with Mattin coedited Noise &
Capitalism (2009). See: http://
www.arteleku.net/audiolab/noise_
capitalism.pdf. With Josephine Berry
Slater, he wrote No Room to Move:
Radical Art and the Regenerate City
(in Mute, October 2010).
Marco Jacquemet is associate
professor and chair of the
Department of Communication Studies
at the University of San Francisco.
His current scholarship focuses
on the communicative mutations
produced by the fows of multiple
languages, power relations, and
media texts in a globalized world.
He is currently writing a book based
on this research, called Transidioma:
Language and Power in the 21st Century.
Rudi Laermans is a full professor
of sociological theory at the
Faculty of Social Sciences at Leuven
University. His research and publi-
cations are primarily situated
within the domains of contemporary
social and cultural theory and the
sociology of art.
Armin Medosch is a researcher in
digital arts and network culture,
based in London and Vienna. His
latest projects include the
exhibition Waves and the collabo-
rative research platform Thenext-
layer. www.thenextlayer.org/
Sameer S. Mehendale is a novelist
based in Amsterdam. His publica-
tions include Heliosis (2002) and
Zuid, Noord-Zuid, Noord (2006). His
new book De Magistraat will come out
in 2011.
Sebastian Olma studied political
science, sociology and philosophy
in Leipzig, New York and London.
He holds a PhD from the Centre
for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths
College. He has published on
Vitalism, Autonomist Marxism, and
questions of social temporality and
creativity. Living in Amsterdam, he
works as a consultant/researcher.
info@thethinktank.nl
Merijn Oudenampsen is a freelance
researcher who focuses on populism
and urban development. Until 2009,
he was affliated with the Jan van
Eyck Academy in Maastricht, where
he researched populism within the
framework of the project Design
Negation. Currently he is working
on a book about populism and the
politics of symbols. His writings
can be found online and offine in de
Groene Amsterdammer, Metropolis M,
Denktank Waterland, Archined and Mute
Magazine.
156 157
Nina Power is a senior lecturer in
philosophy at Roehampton University
and the author of One-Dimensional
Woman (2009).
Ilse van Rijn is an art critic.
She works together with artists
and curators as a writer.
Aukje van Rooden is a philosopher
and literary theorist and works as a
postdoctoraal researcher at Utrecht
University. She obtained her PhD
from the University of Tilburg with
a thesis on the relation between
literature, politics and myth:
LIntrigue dnoue. Politique et littrature
dans une communaut sans mythes.
Willem Schinkel is senior lecturer
in theoretical sociology at the
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.
Schinkel@fsw.eur.nl
Wu Ming (full name: Wu Ming
Foundation) is a collective of
four writers currently based in
Bologna, Italy. They have authored
such historical novels as Q (under
the name Luther Blissett), 54 and
Manituana.
www.wumingfoundation.com
158
CREDITS
Cover Foundland
Open Cahier on Art and the Public
Domain
Volume 9 (2010) no. 20
Editors Jorinde Seijdel (editor
in chief), Liesbeth Melis (fnal
editing),
Guest editor Merijn Oudenampsen
Advisory council Daniel Birnbaum,
Nicolas Bourriaud, Brian Holmes,
Sven Ltticken and Gerald Raunig
English copy editor DLaine Camp
Dutch-English translations Jane
Bemont (editorial, texts by Aukje
van Rooden, Willem Schinkel, Merijn
Oudenampsen, introduction interview
with Ernesto Laclau, book reviews
by Ilse van Rijn and Ernst van den
Hemel)
Graphic design Thomas Bux and
Klaartje van Eijk, Amsterdam
Printing and lithography Die Keure,
Brugge
Project coordinator Marieke van
Giersbergen, NAi Publishers
Publisher Eelco van Welie, NAi
Publishers
Open is published twice a year
Open 21 will be published in May
2011
Editorial address
SKOR
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(IN)SECURITY (NO) MEMORY (IN)VISIBILITY SOUND
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