Introduction
What Is A Populist Aesthetics Anyway?
Lisa Wedeen
Does populism have a specific aesthetics? This paper begins to address this question by interrogating what we mean by the term. If we take a capacious version of “populism” to index a celebration of “the people” and of popular sovereignty, then multiple aesthetic traditions can be identified with the different versions of populist politics. As Sofia Rosenfeld points out, at the heart of a broad popular-sovereignty version of populism is a vision of the plain, hardworking people who “know best and are the most virtuous. They collectively have a kind of instinctual, practical knowledge of the world that is particularly suited to the political sphere” (2019, 99–100). Combining a sense of revelation—exposing the conspiracy, for example—with the promise of restoration (Make America Great Again), populist narratives of all kinds depend on an affect-laden narrative style that embraces “truths of the heart” and a search for instances of authenticity (102). They find aesthetic instantiation in the exultation of the crowd, the masses, the ordinary people, the volk.
Taking a narrower version of populism, however, by homing in on its tendency to reject expertise, makes identifying a specific populist aesthetics more difficult. Is there something particular about irreverence, opposition to the wonk or the scientist or to conventional habits of deference that produces a distinct aesthetic? In the twentieth- and twenty-first-century US, for example, anti-expert populism is powered by a variety of moods: it can be angry and defensive (such as the avowed racism of outsider populists like George Wallace, Richard Nixon, or Donald Trump) or conservative and toxically cheerful (like Ronald Reagan). But do these multiple moods nevertheless fold together such that the rejection of expertise comes with an identifiable aesthetics of its own? I am not sure just yet.
This paper will explore this question while noting how oddly easier it is to consider the reasons for populism’s resurgence and the traction it has gained than it is to identify its specific aesthetics. In the contemporary era, neoliberal reforms—as varied globally as they have been—have arguably helped generate new technical-managerial elites, new valorizations of expertise, and, consequently, new populist reactions to it. The tensions laid bare between neoliberal technocrats championing the recalibration of the welfare state and older claims to a national popular sovereignty may have helped produce a new populist vision of solidarity. Sometimes cynically deployed by elites promising to eradicate corruption, this populist version of solidarity is often suffused with ressentiment, and it frequently puts forward a nativist version of the national, where, at least in right-wing versions, the enemy expert is also the Other.
Contemporary populisms also tend to suggest that ordinary people can be leaders or celebrities, in claiming that everyone sees that the usual channels of authorization are untrustworthy. My second speculative suggestion for populism’s traction looks at the emergence of social media innovations, asking in particular how the sheer velocity with which information circulates in the Internet age may have shaped new strains of anti-expert sentiment. Certainly, the unceasing whirl of (over)information makes it easy for people to move on to something new the instant a favored narrative fails (Wedeen 2019). Does the social media revolution make it easier for populisms to provide outlets for intensified emotions, fabricated stories, and inflated personal fantasies? These questions prompt me to suggest that one way to explore what a contemporary populist aesthetics (of the anti-expert type) looks like is to analyze the figure of the social influencer.
Panel 1: Populist Aesthetics, Affect, and Emotions
Since the rise of right-wing parties and populist movements in Poland in the last two decades, their agenda dominates the public debates by centring around the Catholic Church, the protection of “traditional values” and “restoration of the natural order”, pushing a populist cocktail of anti-EU, anti-feminist, anti-progressive, and anti-abortion rhetoric. However, political struggles over conception, contraception, and pregnancy termination are longstanding in Poland. “Contemporary Women’s Hell …”, under this title the leading Polish women’s NGO FEDERA published already in the mid-2000s its arousing report on abortion access in Poland, a country with one of the most restrictive abortion law in the European Union. After the conservative PiS party won the elections in 2015, ongoing efforts of the Catholic Church and fundamentalist pro-life actors, such as the foundation “Pro –Right to Life”, to ban all abortions dominated the public debates. Despite the biggest protests in Poland’s post-communist era, a new draconian law making the majority of abortions in Poland illegal went into force in early 2021.The feminist initiative “Abortion Dream Team” stands against this ban by organizing demonstrations and informing women how to obtain medical abortion. The rule-breaking and provocative collective with an almost “celebratory” attitude towards abortion aims to start a new public conversation about the Polish “war on abortion” and the reality of abortion in Poland, unburdened by the language of stigma, morality, or politics.
This pro-choice activism serves as the backdrop for the investigation of the logics of (re)presentation and (re)negotiation of gender in Poland by taking the nexus of politics, religion, affects and aesthetics into account. Based on the methodological triangulation of participant observation and discourse analysis, the contribution addresses imageries, symbols, and codes of pro-life and pro-choice activism and analyses demonstrations and visual protest media by drawing on approaches to the mechanisms of visualisation and emotiveness as cultural practices. Finally, the study aims at a critical discussion of (anti)feminist protest and its political power(lessness) to create transformative social change in a time of rising populism, cultural backlash, anti-genderism and religious fundamentalism in Europe. “(Don’t) Make Abortion Great Again”: Aesthetics and Affects in the Polish “War on Abortion”
Agnieszka Balcerzak
In contrast to their career in the rest of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], continue to thrive as a highly successful electoral and cultural force in Kerala. Popularly known very simply as the ‘party’, an important aspect of the party has been its populist streak even though its official discourse has been of procedural reason. The populist streak often manifests in myriad ways, such as the myths and cultic adoration built around its leaders, such as E.K. Nayanar, V.S. Achuthanandan, or the current chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan. Other populist rhetoric include occasional branding of Indian judiciary and democracy as bourgeois, and a strong ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric in which the ‘them’ is a powerful other variously identified as CIA (Central Intelligence Agency of the US), or the media syndicate, or the government of the Indian Union, etc. In my PhD research, I am looking at the quotidian aspects of the party with a focus on the role on aesthetics in manifesting the party on a day-to-day basis. Usually the communist party is studied only with reference to its history and policies, and it has seldom been interrogated on the affective energies it generates in the everyday. For my research I look at the role of the party posters, hoardings, portraits of leaders hung in houses belonging to party members, as well as the rituals connected to party conferences as sites in which these affective energies are generated and realized. Taking my cue from Christopher Pinney’s corpothetics, I study the bodily engagement which fulfils the party aesthetics as the practice through which the party makes itself felt for its supporters. At the workshop I propose to discuss my ongoing work on the portraits of the yesteryear leaders of the party which are hung in the houses of some party supporters. A part of the myth around the leaders, these portraits occupy places which are in other instances reserved for pictures of gods. By drawing on the concept of darshan, that is ritualistic and worshipful viewing of deities, I will endeavour to place the affectivity of these portraits in a wider cultural milieu. Analyzing the Corpothetics of Communist Iconography in Contemporary Kerala
Anagha Anil
Being seen in post-revolutionary Nicaragua: authoritarian populism, protagonism, and the enjoyment of visibility
Luciana Chamorro Elizondo
In 2007, former revolutionary commander Daniel Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua, leaving behind the red and black and cries of “fatherland or death,” in favor of a fuchsia pink color palette and a renewed discourse centered on “love.” This aesthetic shift was orchestrated by his communications director and wife, Rosario Murillo, who argued that revolutionary aesthetics had become associated with the “pain of war and death.” Murillo reimagined Sandinista aesthetics and the state’s communications apparatus to offer the youth a sense of “protagonism,” transforming the revolutionary injunction to sacrifice for the fatherland into a mandate to enjoy the “new times” and “produce prosperity” more attuned with Nicaragua’s ongoing process of neoliberalization.
Based on two years of ethnographic field research among Sandinista supporters in the pacific of Nicaragua (2016-2018), this paper examines new Sandinista aesthetics as the form and substance of populism in Nicaragua. Specifically, I trace the experiences of a group of young pirate taxi workers who strive to make themselves ‘seen’ in the eyes of Sandinista municipal and national authorities by adopting the new Sandinista aesthetic register in often spectacular ways. Though they are not rewarded with sought-out taxi concessions to legalize their operations, being “seen” in the new Sandinista register offers pirate taxis workers aproximity to power and a form of mass-mediated specularity that is thoroughly enjoyable, authorizing them to exercise violence against Sandinismo’s putative enemies with impunity. I argue that the populist logic in this context offers identity without the promise of intersubjectivity, that is, visibility without recognition.
Animating Grievances: Theorizing Populism from the Ground Up
Robert Samet
Widespread discontent is the starting point of every populist movement, yet the subject of grievances remains strangely peripheral to the literature on populism. No discipline is better positioned to address this lacuna than anthropology. Drawing on my research among journalists in Venezuela, this paper develops an argument about the materiality of grievances and the complicated ways in which that materiality is mediated. Starting with grievances is a bottom-up approach to populism that bridges the general and the specific, the theoretical and the empirical. Grievances allow us to move between different scales of analysis and to track the performative iteration of populist movements as they change over time. They also provide a more solid footing for a notoriously protean pattern of political mobilization, which can allow us to distinguish the particular qualities of particular populist movements — their sincerity, their class composition, their political trajectory, and so forth — in ways that can also help us draw better, more empirically grounded conclusions about them.
Panel 2: Populist Activism & Spectacle
‘Free speech capture’: Qur’an-burning, free speech and the far-to-populist right-wing continuum in Norway
Sindre Bangstad
In the 2020 Is Free Speech Racist?, the media studies scholar Gavan Titley argues that free speech has over the course of the past twenty years undergone a process of ‘capture’, whereby far- and populist right-wing political formations, politicians and activists have tapped into «freedom of speech’s ideational force», «weaponized free speech», and aimed at creating «space for racist speech as a beleagured expression of liberty» and posited «racist discourse as a contribution to democratic vitality» (Titley 2020: 105, 99, 104). In the northern European country of Norway, with its 5 million inhabitants and estimated 4.2 per cent of the population of Muslim background, no organisation has mastered the far-right ‘capture of free speech’ more successfully than the far-right and anti-Muslim organisation SIAN or Stop The Islamisation of Norway (Bangstad 2016). Established in 2008, SIAN has since it first introduced public Qur’an-burning as part of its transnationally inspired ‘free speech reportoire’ at a demonstration in its stronghold in the city of Kristiansand in Norway’s Southern Bible Belt in 2019, toured Norway under heavy and costly police protection deemed necessary to protect its exercise of ‘free speech’ in Norway. In a by now highly predictable media ritual, Norwegian liberal academics with privileged access to power circuits and public media in Norway will routinely appear in the media to defend SIAN’s hate speech and public desecration of the Qur’an in the name of free speech against anyone questioning the vast allocation of public resources to protect a small far-right fringe group. At the same time, attempts to get Norwegian police to investigate and to prosecute SIAN for racist hate speech under Norwegian General Penal Code § 185 on hate speech (2015) in the aftermath of their public demonstrations have with few exceptions failed.
In this presentation, I explore the public debate about free speech and its limits in Norway after 2011, using Titley’s analytical framework and unique ethnographic data from a study undertaken in the aftermath of SIAN’s Qur’an-burning in Kristiansand, Norway on Nov 16 2019.
The Spectacle of Demonstration: Anti-Netanyahu Protests During the Coronavirus Crises
Ruthie Ginsburg
The coronavirus crisis revealed the vulnerability of shared space, especially as a space for civic actions. The media, during lockdown and social distancing, become the main channel for maintaining social connections. This article deals with demonstrations in Israel during 2020 which sought to overcome policies through visuals and digital media’s affordances.
The first part focuses on Debord’s spectacle theory as a means of understanding people’s alienation from their everyday life and meaningful political existence. His forceful argument was established on television, but changes are now manifested in new-media practices of social movements. Images, with enchanting power, were perceived as numbing, distancing people from real life; now they act as channels for political imagination. Digital culture may connect people to political action rather than dissociate them.
The second part examines photographs from three different demonstrations, showing the figuring of political imagination as spectacle and how visual rhetoric mediated the social movements’ reasoning. The first is drawn from the Black Flags movement, responding to the chaotic conduct of Benjamin Netanyahu, in the wake of corruption allegations. The drone documentation, providing bird’s-eye imagery, shows a public gathering in a grid as a representation of civil order. The second picture is from a Zoom-based demonstration that enabled under-represented people to participate from home. The third is from the Balfour demonstrations – a staged Instagram image, fashioning an ideal portrait of the protestors and an idealistic vision of the state. These examples demonstrate how social movements’ agendas are consolidated via visual technologies.
Populist Aesthetics and Image Politics after 9/11: Emotion and Affect in the Iranian Diaspora
Cathrine Bublatzky
The 9/11 attacks had a profound impact on global media politics and the representation of Muslim communities around the world. The media coverage of the terrorist events and their international political aftermath as a spectacle gave rise to new forms of Islamophobia and populist activism in everyday society. What did it mean to be a Muslim refugee and migrant in Germany at that time? How did the global media coverage of Islamist terrorism and war spectacles affect one’s emotional self-perception when one suddenly goes from being a victim of an Islamist terror regime to a suspect and perpetrator in the external perception? Who is a victim, who is a perpetrator, when, where and for whom? Focusing on populist activism, image politics after 9/11 and the mundane, this article explores the emotional affect these events have had on life in the Iranian diaspora. By tracing the rise and popularity of populist activism, which is closely intertwined with media dynamics and aesthetic practices in everyday life, I provide insights into the situation of an Iranian artist and activist in post 9/11 Germany, who herself struggled for recognition and visibility for her resistance against an Islamic regime in this time.
Organizing Glass-Eating Sango Priests: Time, Space, and the ‘Grassroots’ in Everyday Populist Activism
Sa’eed F. Husaini
If populist rhetoric opposes ‘the people’ to the ‘elite’, where and when do ‘the people’ emerge? This paper attempts to unpack an exhilarating performance organized in 2016, by party activists belonging to a ‘grassroots’ branch of Nigeria’s ruling party, the All-Progressives Congress (APC), in the predominantly ethnic Yoruba state of Ekiti. The event featured inter aliaa glass-eating, fire-breathing Sango priest, as well as an audience of frightened and delighted party activists from across the other wards of the local government area (LGA).
However, in addition to their capacity to flabbergast and entertain, I argue that such forms of cultural-nationalist spectacle nourish the seeds of populist politics during the electoral off-season in African multi-party democracies. Such performances serve to spatially orient the political “expression of the ordinary people as opposed to the elite, and articulate attitudes precisely of those people who are excluded from power and wealth” (Barber 1987). In so doing, they produce and sustain the populist conception of the ‘grassroots’, imbuing specific locales with renewed political (even organic andecological) significance. Furthermore, serving as routinized temporal practices that mark the long, off-cycle period between elections, such spectacles also interrupt time, establishing a new record of presence, authenticity and belonging in the shared archive of historical memory.
While the re-discovery of populism in the study of African electoral democracies (Resnick 2013, Cheeseman and Larmer 2013) has focused on the electoral rhetoric of charismatic leaders, this work calls for are-examination of the everyday (if spectacular) associational practices of local party activism without which populist rhetoric – both online and offline – would lack its mobilizational force when election campaign season resumes. Finally, focusing on parties’ routine ‘physical presence “on the ground”’ (Postill 2018) illuminates that populism is still sustained by popular “offline communicative practices” that may never go viral.
Panel 3: Populist Digital Encounters & Media
In the Slipstream of Popular Culture: On Self-Documentary Practices of Right-Wing Influencers in Germany
Robert Dörre
For some years now, a group of German YouTubers has been attracting attention, because some of their common practices in social media include a clandestine way of speaking that is linked to right-wing populism and a group-specific argot that is full of discriminatory expressions of all kinds. The central figure of this clique is Max Herzberg, who has achieved dubious fame on social media under the pseudonym Adlersson. However, the nonconformist play with “irony and inside jokes” (Nagle 2017) that characterizes many subcultures on the Internet strategically prevents the clear political attribution of the terms and phrases used by the group.
Surprisingly, many of the group’s videos, as well as those of similar groups, look and sound at first glance like conventional YouTube-Videos: Those channels do not shoot dry political speeches but weave their ideology almost casually into formats such as reviews, tutorials or video blogs. However, these circumstances do not make the videos any less misleading or harmful. They are able to move in the slipstream of popular media practices and are therefore often much more influential than the contributions of the openly right-wing scene.
Those groups also succeed in interpreting current events from a right-wing nationalist point of view without framing it as openly political content. Thus, narratives and counter-narratives emerge that have in common an “opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc.” (Nagle 2017) and are therefore credited for their provocative nature by fans and supporters. With reference to Thomas Weber’s concept of the media milieu (Weber 2017), the presentation aims to analyze the significance of popular aesthetics for the phenomenon of populism and the resonance space social media opens up for the viewers of such videos.
Persuasive Sensations: Muslim Image-texts and YouTube preaching as populist religious communication
Simone Pfeifer
This contribution explores the relation of populism, religion, and aesthetic sensation, focusing on ethnographic work on Muslim everyday life and YouTube Preaching in the German-language context. In this presentation I analyse religious image-texts and videos and the pious and media critical engagement by different (female) viewers as a form of “populist religious communication”. I use the notion of “populist religious communication” with reference to Birgit Meyer’s “aesthetics of persuasion” to explore the different meanings and connections between the particularly attractive potential of these videos/images and the appropriations and understandings in everyday life situations. This helps to understand the process of how (religious) authority and truthfulness is recognised and integrated in people’s everyday lives, focusing on the embodied and sensual aspects of this process, where image-texts or the voice affect in particular ways. In this process of mediation of what is being articulated (also in aesthetic means) and what is being heard or seen depends on the interpretations of the listener/or viewer. Though this particular attention it becomes obvious how religious manifestations are sacralising everyday political interactions in a very subtle way and affectively lead to simultaneous practices of inclusion and exclusion in society. The analysis helps to better understand the relationship of religion, sensation and politics not as separate fields but intricately intertwined.
The network esthetics of Bolsonaro’s digital populism: between schismogenesis and plateau
Letícia Cesarino
This paper draws on early results from a multi-method project on far right networks on Brazilian Telegram, focused on pro-Bolsonaro groups and channels. It embraces a neo-Batesonian approach to agency and decision-making in Bolsonarism as occurring at the level of emergent cybernetic systems, spanning three main scales: platforms (non-human algorithms), ordinary users (human algorithms), and organized groups and influencers, which mediate between the two by seeking to introduce favorable biases in online environments.
This paper outlines a chronotopological model we developed based on a quanti-quali analysis of online behavior leading to offline pro-Bolsonaro Independence Day demonstrations on September 7th, 2021 and its aftermath. This model disclosed a peculiar network esthetics structured by: (i) a bifurcated spatiality operated by multimodal forms of ‘reverse mimesis’, which delimit the system around a double bind (the populist leader and his opposite); and (ii) an oscillatory rhythm across extremes – advance and retreat, radicalization and moderation – whereby rising positive feedback (schismogenesis) is simultaneously countered by negative feedback (plateau).
I argue that, through such paradoxical dynamics, Bolsonarism is able to maintain itself as a stable attractor in the Brazilian public sphere, not just by reducing uncertainty within its own internet-based publics, but by indirectly eliciting predictable responses from mainstream publics. I conclude by suggesting that Bolsonaro’s style of digital populism must therefore be understood non-linearly: its purpose is not to break away from the liberal democratic public sphere, as in an actual military coup, but to gradually corrode, from within, the conditions for its proper functioning.
Aesthetic Felicity: Narratological Approaches to the Aesthetics of Fact Checking, Counter-Narratives and Political Activism in Germany
Stefan Groth
“Truthiness” – the view that something is true because it feels true – and “stickiness” – the quality of information, e.g., memes, to gain traction, and enter circulation – have become unlikely key terms in debates on the validity of knowledge, specifically with regard to populist content in digital media in Germany. Both terms constitute qualities of “truth claims,” and introduce markers of plausibility based not on facts or verification but on aesthetic, affective, and contextual appropriateness.
The paper uses the concept of “communicability” (Briggs) to investigate German online media campaigns to counter “fake news,” populist content, and formats. Employing a narratological approach, it asks: Which aesthetic strategies are employed to prevent populist stories from becoming “sticky”? How are visual formats as alternative criteria of appropriateness countered or appropriated? How do fact checking and verification efforts make use of media formats to contest “truthy” stories?
Panel 4: Image Politics, Fake News, and Trust
Fake News of a Pogrom and Image Politics of Soap Opera: Reverse Dynamics of Populist Antedating and Continued Media Imperialism in India
Britta Ohm
Based on intermittent ethnographic fieldwork between 2002 and 2017 among journalists, producers, creative workers, and decision makers in various satellite broadcasters in India, my contribution will discuss the production of Hindutva/anti-Muslim populism within shifting postcolonial temporalities.
If we consider the terminology of ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’ etc. as essentials in the discursive orchestration and popular multiplication of right-wing truth-claims that have gained global cognition only with Donald Trump’s US-presidency from 2016 onwards (Murdock 2020), India has been ‘far ahead’ on this level of populism. Supported by a similar rhetoric of Narendra Modi, then chief minister of the state of Gujarat, large sections of TV audiences rejected the news coverage of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the state as ‘biased’ or ‘fake’. The broad popular attacking both of critical information and the authority of journalism, as well as the acceptance of local hate news, has been successful in preventing the violence from becoming established as a pogrom in public consciousness until today and has been instrumental in Modi’s rise to prime ministership (which puts critical journalists under permanent stress).
At the same time, India has been reified in a traditional position as an object of imperial interests in the form of a market for Western media corporates that have profited from mediating Hindutva populism. The recent exposure of Facebook, and quite personally of Mark Zuckerberg, as consciously allowing for hate postings against dissenters and minorities represents an almost seamless continuation from the early 2000s and from (television) image to platform politics. Against the programming intentions of the then local management, Rupert Murdoch personally pushed for a series of soap operas on his Star TV network that cultivated, by ousting ‘ideological’ story-telling, unprecedented affective projection and narrative completion on the part of audiences. Fast hegemonising an upper-caste Hindu vision of ritualism and domestic life, the commercial mass phenomenon of these soap operas directly resonated with the rising visual and moral regime that Hindutva organisations popularised.
In fake we (dis)trust – vernacular language of resisting populism
Adrian Stoicescu
Against the backdrop the right-wing political parties gaining access to parliaments as opposition and even more so with the unpopular measures taken in the recent world pandemic context the public debate gets occupied with the dichotomy ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, arguing that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people (Mudde 2004: 543). In these words, populism shapes as a tool of pitting against each other two imagined categories of alleged supporters and challengers of the mainstream authority figures. However, the ‘pure group’ the populist speech targets may not always be so homogenous and clearly identifiable as envisaged and the entire scaffolding of arguments may crumble down against resistance acts of speech.
This contribution will look at the counter-populist discourse deeply embedded in the participatory media keeping in mind the ‘co-constitutiveness of media and conflict’ (Budka and Bräuchler 2020). The theoretical framework shaping my analysis takes root in the pragmatics theory of destructive rituals (Kádár 2013) and will investigate how the humorous visual-textual narrative can make an attempt to resist populism. In doing so, this contribution will first map the comic resources employed to create the affective defiance of populist speech, second identify the humorous portrayals created for the populists, and finally, look at how such comic instance shape into affective campaign virals (Postill 2014) against the populist speech.
Finally, seeing comic as both a cognitive and emotional process (Martin 2007), this contribution will also address the interconnectedness between the mirth and its content generation potential and the scornful attitude towards the fallacy of populist speech in the creation of a vernacular language of resisting it.
Antisemitism in Greece; how do populism and amnesia culture promote a dystopian aesthetic
Ioannis Stylianidis
In 2015 Syriza (radical left) won two main elections and ruled together with Anel (radical right) as a junior partner, by representing the first-ever governing coalition of left-wing and right-wing populist parties not only in Greece, but also in Europe. Both parties express their hostility towards globalization, anti-austerity stance and liberal capitalism and fear for the erosion of national identity, which is perceived with different narratives for each party; Syriza promote the patriotic left agenda and Anel express nationalistic right-wing rhetoric. The chaotic political agenda that was imposed has an impact on everything that is not considered as Greek, or fully Greek according to the ethnoreligious terms; Jews seems to be the victim of this policy. That might happen because in Greece the notion of ‘‘amnesia culture’’ is stronger. Post-war Greek authorities attempted to shape the country’s memory according to ethnoreligious views supported by the structures of the Greek-Orthodox Church. The post-war silence about the Holocaust in Greece seems to enable extreme acts of antisemitism in the Greek-Jewish culture and the relevant public sphere.
This paper seeks to discuss the representation of acts of vandalism and desecration of the Greek Jewish cultural heritage in the media, and how does the aesthetics of populism construct a liminal zone of memory, or in other words; a state of amnesia for the Jewish past. Moreover, this paper attempts to analyze the state of amnesia as a dystopic zone in the populist era. Living in the dystopia stage actually means poverty, exploitation disorder, impurity, violence and conflict. Every antisemitic act of vandalism on the Jewish cultural heritage can be a sign of a dystopian aesthetic in the public sphere or in other words a noir reality. The paper will present empirical data from the Greek media between 2015-2018.
Housing for the Apocalypse: Populist Aesthetics and Elite Fantasies in Prepping
Mona Schieren
Preppers equip their private homes or survival shelters for the apocalypse. Drawing on the reportage Inside Prepping published in an outdoor equipment magazine, this paper examines the forms of subjectivisation and populist aesthetics often underlying prepping and how dwelling is imagined in this context. This is compared with magazine articles on the construction of private bunkers during the Cold War and the TV docuseries Doomsday Preppers. The reportage pre-supposes isolation and individualisation as a solution. It triggers both enjoyment of end-time fantasies and fear, and suggests that these can be remedied by painstaking organisation and the acquisition of weapons for defence. However, existential fear potentials unleash regressive layers of affect, which subtly further nourish processes of (de-)civilisation. Fear of loss of control in the apocalypse awakens a desire to play out new power and elite fantasies of the future.
Cathrine Bublatzky 