Populism as Political Theology: An Antropological Perspective

William Mazzarella, University of Chicago, IRCPL, Columbia University April 23, 2019.

Note to reader. This piece was written as a talk that I gave at Columbia University in the spring of 2019. I reworked it slightly in order to give it another outing in the spring of 2020, but the global pandemic intervened. Given that I now have some extra time, as it were, to develop the ideas sketched here, I’m opening it up to your reading and commentary.

William T. S. Mazzarella is Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College; and Chair of the Anthropology Department, University of Chicago. He earned his PhD at the University of California Berkeley. Prof. Mazzarella writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity, critical theory, affect and aesthetics, ritual and performance, and the occult shadow of the modern. His books include Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003) and Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (2013). He was co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (2009), and editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (2016). His most recent book, The Mana of Mass Society (2017), brings classic anthropological writings on magical efficacy and charismatic agency into conversation with critical-theoretical takes on marketing, aesthetics, and the commodity image.

I hope you’ll indulge me. I have the feeling that in what follows I will, more than once, be stating the obvious. But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something about the present moment that cries out for this kind of movement back over very familiar ground. A bit like when we retrace our steps, looking for something that we’ve lost. As if precisely because everything looks so familiar, it’s easy to miss something that should be obvious but isn’t. Something that’s hiding in plain sight.

You’ll notice as I go along that I won’t really be defining my key terms: “populism” and “political theology.” I’ve made this choice quite intentionally, on the principle that definition is too often a way of stopping thought rather than starting it. A way of convincing ourselves that stable points exist in a world of movement and that processes can be reduced to things. My approach will instead be to speak, as it were, in the neighbourhood of these terms, to see what they might yield when they don’t know we’re looking at them. That said, I do want to say something about why I chose to include the term “political theology” in the title of this talk.

Carl Schmitt’s theory of political theology is perhaps the most well-known. For Schmitt it’s about the way religious concepts get thinly secularized so as to be able to do work as political concepts. There will be a moment or two in my talk when examples of that pop up. But that’s not really what’s animating me. Another version of “political theology” is when we’re looking at the mobilization of overtly religious concepts for political ends. Again, that’s not irrelevant to what I want to talk about today, but it’s also not quite it. I’ll confess that as I was thinking about this talk, as I was drafting it, I began to wonder whether I had made a mistake by committing to the notion of political theology, when my intuitions didn’t seem to want to line up in the right place. But then it’s often exactly when one is in this kind of mood that clues appear.

I came across a passage in a chapter by Claude Lefort called ‘The Permanence of the Politico-Theological?’ It resonated precisely not by giving me a definition I could work with, but rather by seizing me and leaving me feeling at once addressed and unsettled. I’ll give you the whole passage near the end of my talk. But for now I just want to extract one line from it and let it sit for a few seconds. I will then try to find my way back to it during the next 45 minutes or so. This is how Lefort’s line goes: “Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create.”

Anyone who takes up the topic of populism immediately finds themselves in a place where not only definitions but above all judgments are expected: good populism or bad populism, democracy or tyranny, hope or despair. For better or for worse we are living in politically urgent times. It can easily feel like there’s no time to waste. My own sense is that if scholars have something to contribute as scholars, then it has everything to do with insisting on the importance of slowing down. Insisting on a different kind of attentiveness. On retracing our steps and looking again. And that in turn requires a kind of quietness amid all the noise – which is not at all the same thing as quietism.

So today I’m retracing my own steps back to the question of representation. Why representation? Because very often, when people try to explain the populist wave that’s been sweeping the world in recent years, they say that populism is the result of a crisis of representation. Usually what’s meant by that is that people don’t feel represented by existing political institutions, and so arrangements that have been relatively stable for some time becomes unstable and are called into question in the name of the unrepresented. The unrepresented may be the silent majority of the conservative imagination. Or they may be the potentially revolutionary ‘part of no part’ – Jacques Rancière’s term for those who are constitutively excluded by a given political order. In mainstream democracy-talk, the word representation generally comes paired with the word participation. And then it’s as if the two exist in a zero-sum relationship: more representative democracy means less participatory democracy and vice versa.

I will in fact be talking quite a bit today about representation and participation. But not in the sense that I just described. Instead, I want to offer the following proposition. Maybe it’s not so much that we’re dealing with a crisis of representation as a crisis in representation. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all that perhaps the issue is not only that people don’t feel represented. More than that: very often the movements that are described as populist seem impatient with representation as such. If representation means mediation, then populist movements seem to strain past mediation, as if they might seize the political directly, immediately.

This is not at all an original thought. It comes up with some regularity in the populism literature. For example, Robert Samet writes: “Populism attempts to resolve the problem of representation by collapsing the divide between government and the governed. The claim of every populist movement is to embody the direct, unmediated will of the people” (1). Or in the words of Margaret Canovan, in populism “there is a strong anti-institutional impulse: the romantic impulse to directness, spontaneity, and the overcoming of alienation” (2). Clearly, this populist push toward immediacy isn’t always pretty. Its idiom is often summary violence, vigilante spectacles of instant justice (3). Thomas Blom Hansen suggests that populist violence can serve as a sort of currency, a general medium of equivalence for people who are disappointed by or excluded from other economies. And of course this kind of summary violence, this kind of public violence, can generate powerful spectacles and significant sites of enjoyment (4). Any kind of efficacy, any power to act that exceeds or short-circuits the law tends to be intensely charismatic. And it can be justified in the name of the people. Consider the words of one of Hansen’s informants, a local politician: “The majority of people are with me, they support me, so what right do they have to charge me with any crimes? I am just speaking for what my people feel” (5).

OK. So there’s this element of pushing past representation, past mediation toward a feeling of immediacy, toward a feeling of unmediated efficacy and presence. But then there’s also something else, something that Canovan calls the “redemptive” dimension of politics – a dimension that she associates especially with populism. Redemption, from the Latin redimere, meaning ‘to buy back.’ But what is populism buying back? And at what price? If the resonances here are Christian, then is some kind of unaccountable sacrifice implied? Usually the implication seems to be that what is being redeemed is ‘the true promise of democracy,’ ‘the will of the people’ or some such. But if you’ll let me lean on Lacan, I want to propose that what is being redeemed is ‘what is in representation more than itself.’ Now I know this is a bit of gnomic phrase, but I have a feeling that it’ll get us back to this question of representation and participation and how we might be able to think those concepts a bit differently. What is in representation more than itself.

Not so long ago, I foolishly undertook the task of writing a review article for Annual Review of Anthropology on the ‘Anthropology of Populism.’ In that article I wrote that populism dreams of “a direct and immediate presencing of the substance of the people, and as such a reassertion, a mattering-forth of the collective flesh – where the matter is at once the sensuous substance of the social, the flesh, and the meaningful ways in which it comes to matter” (6).

I’m not being romantic about this. Obviously, this mattering forth of the collective flesh has taken on some pretty ugly forms in recent years. Writing in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president, Mick Taussig stressed the corporeal aspect of Trump’s appeal. Taussig observed: “The bland, boring predictability of president-lawyers like Obama and the Clintons now have little to offer voters hungry for red meat.” Trump was the rousing alternative: “Here was a man all body” (7). The question then becomes: do we recoil from all visceral, all fleshy embodiments of the social just because some of the most visible ones are so repulsive? Or do we consider other ways in which that matter can matter?

Part of what I want to say is that what we are calling “populism” is something that we can only partly make sense of as long as we remain with the usual vocabulary of political theory: terms like democracy, the people, the state, and so on. When we say ‘populism,’ I want to suggest, we are registering a kind of eruption, a bleeding through of the sensuous substance of the social into the conceptual space that we usually talk about in the ordinary language of politics. When I say ‘mattering forth’ and ‘bleeding through’ I don’t mean that the sensuous substance of the social isn’t there all the time. In fact, no political order can function without inciting and containing this sensuous substance in a more or less routinized way. Every political order needs what Eric Santner calls a “formation of the flesh.” But it’s in moments of rupture – moments of, for example, populist upsurge – it’s in these moments of rupture when those formations of the flesh come unstuck. Or to put it in my own terms, when the incitement of the flesh comes unstuck from its containment. And that’s when the representations that we are used to understanding as conventional signs reveal their reliance on a vital collective archive. When the resources of that archive, what I’ve elsewhere called a mimetic archive, that’s when those resources become available for redemption. That said, if that mimetic archive is us, if we are not substantially separate from it, then it’s also not entirely clear who is redeeming what from whom.

But hold on: isn’t this whole dream of immediacy inherently suspect? Surely it’s obvious that, in social life, there’s no such thing as immediacy? Surely we start from the assumption that everything is mediated? And isn’t there something especially suspect about juxtaposing terms like redemption and immediacy? Doesn’t this all smell a bit fascist? The queasy stench of what Theodor Adorno mercilessly used to lambast as ‘the jargon of authenticity’ (8). Certainly, the redemptive tone of populist movements is often dismissed as regressive – as a kind of backsliding into theological atmospheres that shouldn’t have any legitimate political place in modern mass democracies.

Bruno Latour, for one, has no time for any immediacy-talk. “A demon haunts politics but it might not be so much the demon of division – this is what is so devilish about it – but the demon of unity, totality, transparency, and immediacy. ‘Down with intermediaries! Enough spin! We are lied to! We have been betrayed!’ Those cries resonate everywhere, and everyone seems to sigh: ‘Why are we being so badly represented?’ Columnists, educators, militants never tire of complaining of a ‘crisis of representation.’” Latour goes on to suggest that politicians today are peddling an impossible fantasy: “It might also be the case that half of such a crisis is due to what has been sold to the general public under the name of a faithful, transparent and accurate representation.” And this is Latour’s clinching claim: “We are asking from representation something it cannot possibly give, namely representation without any re-presentation, without any provisional assertions, without any imperfect proof, without any opaque layers of translations, transmissions, betrayals, without any complicated machinery of assembly, delegation, proof, argumentation, negotiation, and conclusion” (9).

This sounds so reasonable, so sensible. There is no outside of representation – surely that’s obvious. What’s more, it seems especially ironic that populists should be conjuring dreams of immediacy, given that populism – like modern democracy itself – is an inherently mass-mediated thing. If populism produces a cult of immediacy, then that can only be because it’s so thoroughly mediated. As Peter Worsley wrote fifty years ago, in one of the first sustained inquiries into populism, the idea that there could ever be a direct relation between the people and the leadership in a complex, large-scale society “must, inevitably […] be predominantly sheer mystification or symbolism” (10).

But then one would have to ask: if it’s so obvious that immediacy is a fantasy – and perhaps even a politically dangerous fantasy – then why is the fantasy so powerful? Why does it persist so tenaciously? If representation without re-presentation is impossible, then why do we have to keep saying so? It must be that people keep getting it wrong. It must be that people are dupes. It must be that people are simply deluded when they feel that glow around a leader, when they fail to see that politics can only ever be – to quote Latour again – “opaque layers of translations, transmissions, betrayals” and so on. An understandable delusion, perhaps – people are desperate, people are angry, people want to make themselves present – but a delusion nevertheless.

This is very much the liberal line on populism. As a good liberal, one understands the populist seduction, one maybe even empathizes with it. But one is scrupulously careful not to condone it. The liberal line seems all the more reasonable, all the more ethical even, because the forms of actually existing populist politics are so often so very hateful: racist, xenophobic, queer-phobic, alter-phobic in every possible way. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to take this step from the obviously objectionable political content of right-wing populism to a wholesale dismissal of the redemptive critique of representation. Perhaps there’s an opening here to thinking differently not just about politics but about social life more generally.

Raymond Williams’ Keywords is often a useful place to turn when something doesn’t feel quite right. And sure enough, Williams has an entry on the term ‘Representative’ (11). Williams shows that, as early as the 14th century, the noun ‘representative’ took on a double meaning in English. One meaning is the one we usually intend by the term today: the idea of a representative as a stand-in, a substitute for some absent other. For instance, the politician as stand-in for the people. The other meaning of ‘representative’ takes us in the opposite direction. There, ‘representative’ means something that actually manifests or embodies what it represents. Williams’ point is that these two meanings persist uneasily side-by-side in our uses of the term: a representative is at once something that compensates for an absence and that makes something present.

Now this ambiguous relation between absence and presence is, one might say, a characteristic symptom of the sovereign entity known as “the people” in modern democracies. This is a symptom that many theorists, all the way from Ernst Kantorowicz through Claude Lefort to Eric Santner and Jason Frank, have tried to theorize. When you have a sovereign monarch under god, you have a body that is two bodies. There is the body that is a contingent, mortal human being. And then there’s the body that is the immortal, sacred manifestation of the social order, the social body. But with the democratic revolutions, when the monarch’s head gets chopped off and the people become sovereign, what will embody them? Lefort’s answer is: nothing. Democratic ethics, says Lefort, depend on insisting that the place where there was once a royal body is now an empty place. This is Lefort’s famous formula: “The locus of power is an empty place, it cannot be occupied – it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it – and it cannot be represented” (12). Or perhaps we should say that it can be represented, in fact it constantly is represented in various ways, but no representation will ever be adequate to it. No matter how big the crowd that masses in Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park, it can only stand in for the sovereign people. It can never be the sovereign people.

But then if we take Williams’ etymology seriously, a representative, a representation actually does a kind of double work: it both stands in for an absence and it makes something present. Is there something in there that can help us to think about the populist demand for immediate presence? Perhaps it’d be useful now to come back to this idea that I invoked just now: the idea that populism reminds us of ‘what is in representation more than itself.’ Perhaps we now have one way of imagining what that means: the way that representation at once substitutes for something absent and makes something present. A deferral and a mattering-forth. I said a little while ago that I thought that these moments of populist upsurge were a kind of bleeding through of a sensuous social substance into the conceptual field that we usually define as ‘politics.’ I now want to suggest that we can think of this ‘mattering forth,’ this ‘bleeding through,’ as a radicalized kind of participation. By ‘radicalized’ I don’t mean that it’s necessarily of the left or, for that matter, of the right. It has nothing to do with political coloring. By a radicalized form of participation I mean something in representation that activates its vital substance, from root to branch. So, again, something like ‘what is in representation more than itself.’

Sometimes provocation comes from unexpected places. More than a hundred years ago, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl wrote a book in which he developed a theory about the difference between so-called primitive and so-called civilized ways of thinking. The book was translated into English under the now-rather-hair-raising title How Natives Think. At first sight, Lévy-Bruhl’s book traffics in the worst kind of colonial clichés. Civilized people, he claims, think conceptually, logically. Their way of approaching the world is analytic, separative. Civilized thinking, according to Lévy-Bruhl, is representational thinking, if by ‘representational’ we mean thinking that takes a step back, that insists on critical pause. Thinking that understands that there is a difference between the word and the world. Thinking that insists that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Primitive thinking, on the other hand, Lévy-Bruhl argues, fails to make that distinction between word and world. If civilized thinking separates things, then primitive thinking jumbles them all up. Primitive thinking is magical thinking. In primitive thought, word and world participate in each other; they share in the same substance. Words are not just signs. Or perhaps I should say, signs are not just signs.

Rather, because words participate in what they name, words can also act on what they name. Signs don’t just refer to the world; they make worlds. They summon powers.

I don’t need to go into all the ways in which this distinction is a rerun of classic Christian debates about transubstantiation: Does the wine of the Eucharist merely represent Christ’s blood? Or does it actually participate in Christ’s blood? Still, the theological comparison is important, because it helps us to see that the story that Lévy-Bruhl tells, a story that is ostensibly a story about differences between civilized and primitive ways of thinking, is actually a debate about an ambiguity that is internal to modern ways of apprehending the world. I use the word ‘apprehending’ here advisedly; apprehending means understanding, but it also means seizing or arresting. And there is that nervous undertone too – the apprehensive mood. A way of apprehending the world also implies a way of grounding authority. And at the same time an anxiety about the groundlessness of that authority. The authority of the church and the authority of the secular state.

In fact Lévy-Bruhl himself makes all this quite clear, if only in passing, and only right at the very end of his book. After hundreds of pages designed to hammer home his point about the yawning gap that separates primitive from civilized thinking, Lévy-Bruhl turns around and remarks that the kind of substance-participation that is supposed to be the mark of primitive thinking is also alive and well in so-called civilized societies – and, as it turns out, precisely in religion and politics. He writes (and I’ve added emphasis to a few passages): “Collective representations which express a participation intensely felt and lived, of which it would always be impossible to demonstrate either the logical contradiction or the physical impossibility, will ever be maintained. […] The vivid inner sentiment of participation may be equal to, and even exceed, the intellectual claim. Such, in all aggregates known to us, are the collective representations upon which many institutions are founded, especially many of those which involve our beliefs and our moral and religious customs. […] [T]he collective representations of the social group, even when clearly prelogical and mystical by nature, tend to subsist indefinitely, like the religious and political institutions of which they are the expression, and, in another sense, the bases” (13).

Right-wing populists, especially those who don’t shy away from religious appeals, are of course particularly good at evoking this kind of affect. Against the disenchantment of secular liberalism, they conjure a vital continuity of substance. Consider the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s riposte to his secular rivals when he said “For them the Ganges is a mere river. For me, Ganga is Ma” (14). Note here how Modi’s line is at once pious and affectively lavish; also the way it code-switches between the river’s secular-sounding English name and its sacred-sounding Hindi name, between, we could say, representation and participation. It would be too easy here simply to explain this effect simply in terms of an explicitly religious politics. The more interesting question is to understand how this element of charismatic participation can just as well erupt in the most apparently ‘secular’ places.

In fact, ‘charisma’ is an originally theological term that we use today, generally in so-called secular contexts, whenever we want to describe those moments when something sublime seems to emanate from, to shimmer through, something human-made. Emile Durkheim argued that this was what ritual was for: to evoke and routinize this kind of charismatic emanation. And for Durkheim, without routinizing these powers we would have no durable social life. Mick Taussig picks up on a passage from Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life where Durkheim writes: “in general a collective sentiment can become conscious of itself only by being fixed upon some material object; but by virtue of this very fact it participates in the nature of this object, and reciprocally, the object participates in its nature” (15).

Now of course we have all kinds of critiques of how this kind of thing is a mystification, how it is the ground of ideology, idolatry and fetishism, and so on. All these critiques present themselves as tactics of de-alienation, ways of putting humans back in control. But two things seem important in this passage. First, the principle that society can never be, as it were, self-sufficient, that it can never be immediately present to itself (this, by the way, is also an article of faith for Claude Lefort, who insists that no society is self-immanent). Durkheim’s point is that any kind of consciousness is only possible through the detour of a representation. But also, and this is crucial, that this representation works by participating in the substance of what it represents. And in that way it does that double work that both Raymond Williams and Lévy-Bruhl, in their very different ways, noted: at one level the representation is a stand-in for something that is in itself absent; at another level and at the same time, it makes that thing present. And I think it’s worth underlining here that Taussig’s point in reading Durkheim is to tell us that modern social theory, secular as it seems, is actually organized around an occult kernel. Taussig writes: “the epistemic basis of the science of sociology [that Durkheim] was forging depends completely on an unacknowledged yet profoundly magical notion of magical correspondences” (16). Taussig is talking here about the magic of participation – again, ‘what is in representation more than itself.’ And this is a scandal for thinking democracy because, after all, leaving magic behind is part of what is supposed to separate liberal democracy from divine kingship.

I was talking a little while ago about Claude Lefort’s formula for an ethics of democracy – the empty place of power. Let me just revisit what Lefort wrote: “The locus of power is an empty place, it cannot be occupied – it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it.” Lefort’s formula would seem to be explicitly designed to push back on any move toward a totemic revival, any attempt to reinstall a charismatic representation in the place of the people.

At one level this is just a pragmatic necessity. There is no circumstance in which the entirety of the people can be manifested as such – hence it becomes, in a secular way, sinful to try. But there’s more to it. Any attempt to represent the people directly isn’t just fraudulent because it takes a part and makes it stand in for the whole. There’s also the problem of the affective dimension of the sign, which is to say the problem of participation. Or to put it another way: it’s not just the fact that I might identify with a representation of the people; it’s also that I might enjoy that identification –and enjoy it intensely. Lacan had one name for that kind of deliciously rapacious (17) enjoyment: he called it jouissance. Durkheim called it effervescence. So then a question opens up here about popular sovereignty – the sovereignty of the people. What happens when that enjoyment, that jouissance, that effervescence no longer has a clear point of focus in a totemic sign or in the body of a monarch? What happens when that enjoyment is, to use Eric Santner’s expression, no longer incarnated but rather ‘ex-carnated’? When the sovereignty of the people doesn’t so much become an abstraction as a kind of distributed flesh? (18). Santner’s expression – ex-carnation – doesn’t mean a sublimation of what was previously the body of the monarch. If anything, it means the opposite: that the sensuous social substance precipitates or falls out of an earlier formation of the flesh and is now at issue everywhere. Loose affect. Le corps morcelé. And because what we call populism is, I think, a renewed claim on the flesh of the people, populist politics has a way of poking its finger right into the bruise.

But why is the bruise so sensitive? Jason Frank points out that the problem of how to embody democracy ritually in what he calls a “living image” of the people goes back at least to the French Revolution. This is what he writes: “The revolutionary festivals aimed for a kind of theatrical non-theatricality, an effort to make the people present to themselves, but purportedly without artifice and corrupting mediation, and through this revolutionary self-regard to instill into the senses and the heart of the people the civic myth and religion of popular constituent capacity” (19). In other words, the aim of the ritual and its images was to remind the people of their power – but their power as a potentiality, something always in process, something always becoming, something immanent. The danger, and this is where the anxiety about idolatry rears its head, is always that an image will come to stand in for the people not as a constituent capacity aimed at the future, but as a constituted thing already completed.

Two hundred and thirty years after the events he is describing, Frank still considers the warning necessary, perhaps more necessary now than ever: “It is a mistake,” he writes, “to see crowds, assemblies, and mobs as direct expressions of such [popular constituent] sovereignty – they remain an image and potent political representation…but a living one.”

Yes, great – a living image. But then what is this “living”? What is this “life” that an image takes on? Where does it come from? What does it feed on? A Marxian fetishism argument would say that the life comes from us. We are the ones who do the work that breathes life into what would otherwise be a dead letter, an inert sign. But then why is it that some letters, some signs are more able to provoke our desires, our imaginations, than others?

Ernesto Laclau argues that populism is the alliance, against a common antagonist, of a diverse series of demands in the name of the people. And such an alliance only becomes possible, Laclau argues, because of a sign that resonates. A sign that binds. A sign that is general enough to cover the diversity and yet particular enough to come alive. I say ‘come alive,’ but it’s not until very late in his life that one gets the sense that Laclau is all that concerned with the element of effervescence – the living part of the living image. Laclau’s partner and collaborator Chantal Mouffe has, in recent writings, pushed this point further, arguing that populism, whether on the left or on the right, can’t live by deliberation or even agonism alone; it has to be animated by an affective supplement, a libidinal investment. In short, it has to awaken ‘what is in representation more than itself.’ But isn’t this a violation of the ethics of the empty place of power? Isn’t this just the worship of graven images all over again? Then again, if any world has to be affective in order to be effective, then how can that affect find a focus in an empty place? As Mick Taussig once asked: “how is it possible to emote an abstraction?” (20).

Clifford Geertz refers to “the inherent sacredness of sovereign power” (21). And if sovereign power is inherently sacred, then, Geertz adds, it follows that “A world wholly demystified is a world wholly depoliticized” (22). Note what Geertz is saying here. He is not saying that a demystified world is a disenchanted world. That would only be a tautology. He’s saying something more than that: that a demystified world is a world without politics. For Geertz, the element of participation is not a magical, manipulative add-on; rather, without it, we have no politics (23). It is, to modify our phrase, ‘what is in the political more than itself.’

We are now exactly at odds with the secular-critical line on populism. I’m thinking here, for example, of Andrew Arato’s complaint that populism, with its charismatic images, amounts to a regressive re-enchantment of hard-won secular principles. Arato insists that any kind of living image of the people, any kind of mattering-forth of sovereignty-as-body masks an authoritarian impulse, that it flirts with a “justification of dictatorship” (24). The populist hunger for a new body, a body of the people to replace the body of the king, is, for Arato, inherently antidemocratic. It amounts to an ethical failure: the failure to live with the empty place of power. Which, in turn, is a failure to be properly secular, which is also to say properly modern, and to fall back, instead, on the aesthetic force of what Arato deplores as “rhetorical devices bereft of rationality” (25). Or, not to put too fine a point on it, to fall back onto magic, onto the superstition of substance. Fall back, precisely, because what’s being assumed here is a linear historical progression from superstition to reason (26). And if one is committed to this argument, then the cure can only be more, and more vigilant, secularization. Arato doesn’t mince his words. The only cure is, he writes, “the further secularization and disenchantment of political concepts, the preservation or the reestablishment of the secular and rational character” (27). In that respect, at least, the great Dalit leader B R Ambedkar would have agreed. In a 1949 speech to the Indian Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar declared: “Bhakti [which is to say devotionalism] in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.” Now Ambedkar certainly had good reasons to be skeptical of the ideology of Hindu devotionalism. But the straight line he then proceeded to draw from devotional ritual to hero-worship to political degradation to dictatorship is no less ideological.

Something curious happens in these attempts to grapple with the living image of the people. It’s as if we end up being pulled back and forth between extremes. On the one side, there is the image of the authoritarian leader, sumptuously fused with the people, with the land, the leader’s very name an incantation of community: “Indira is India!” “Fidel!” “We are all Evo!” Groups of Modi supporters turning toward the camera at the same time, masked, every one of them wearing his face. This kind of thing is often described in terms that really haven’t changed since Gustave Le Bon lambasted the idiocy and childishness of crowds back in the late nineteenth century. A political science article on Latin American clientelism, published in 2004, contains these lines: “As mere people-in-the-plaza, we get caught in [the leader’s] sway and are glad to give them our devotion, relieved that the king has come to save us, comforted that we are able, at last, to surrender our troubles to a higher being” (28). Nothing new here, then. Even though the overall orientation of the article would count as progressive; when it comes to charisma, it’s just the same old participation-as-regression. A regression back into childhood, away from mature political judgment. But how do we tell the prophet from the demagogue, being that they summon the same powers?

Faced with this deep ambiguity, it often seems that the only way to save charisma, the only way to make it seem progressive is to imagine it as a kind of radical immanence, an absence pregnant with the possibility of becoming. World-making powers gathered and waiting to happen. But not yet. The pure potentiality of the multitude. Think the images of Occupy, the crowds of the Arab Spring, and so on. These too are powerfully energetic and charismatic images. If the charismatic leader is a figure of plenitude, a figure of frightening fullness, then these corresponding figures of democratic crowds are radically empty in the sense that their charisma depends on their standing for pure potentiality, for the assembled flesh as such.

Tom Mitchell makes this point in his essay on images of Occupy. He argues that the images of both Tahrir and Occupy shared “a conspicuous insistence on an anti-iconic, nonsovereign image repertoire.” It’s as if these images insist, Mitchell argues, precisely on representing nonrepresentation. The emphasis is on “the figure of occupation itself.” Unlike the personality cults of populist leaders, these images are, Mitchell says, “not those of face but of space; not figures, but the negative space or ground against which a figure appears.” Through assembly, a clearing opens. The Occupy movement, Mitchell says, “refuses to describe or define in any detail the world that it wants to create, while showing this world in its actual presence as a nascent community” (29).

Something deeply troubled lives here, in this place where the social substance matters forth into a space that can be recognized as political. And in fact this ambivalence has to do, precisely, with substance, with what it might be, where it might be in relation to what we understand as the social and the political, and what it might become. As an anthropologist, it’s interesting to me that we have lots of dynamic ways of thinking about substance and its potentialities when it comes to societies that we can categorize as, in some respect, ‘Other.’ But when it comes to theorizing the mass democracies of the Global North, it’s immediately as if substance becomes a principle of inertia. I find the following take on substance, from Amy McLachlan’s work on the indigenous Uitoto people of Colombia, both beautiful and resonant: “Substance […] is the foundation of possibilities for affective resonance and transformation, for being affected in the dynamic attunements that constitute moral and generative intersubjectivity. It is a question, an open and urgent problem of cosmological, ecological, social and moral organization” (30).

At one level, McLachlan is making an argument about a specifically Uitoto conception of substance. But there is actually no reason to think that the way she renders substance is any less applicable to the forces and openings that give rise, for example, to US or Indian democracy in 2020. Obviously, different folk understandings of what makes and activates social life are at work in each of these situations. But I would also suggest that our academic folk theories of democracy seem oddly – I want to say anxiously – invested in making something that is full of unruly life seem as inanimate as possible. And as always when something is disavowed, the symptoms aren’t long in coming. Consider the ambivalence of Slavoj Zizek’s responses to populism. In one article, tellingly called ‘Against the Populist Temptation,’ Žižek goes out of his way to warn us against the risk of granting any kind of positive substance to the figure of the people (31). In that piece, it’s as if he’s strictly committed to observing the ethics of the empty place. But then a few years later, responding to Occupy Wall Street, Žižek goes exactly the other way. By placing a ban on the image of the people, he asks, are we not simply being good self-castrating liberals? (32).

A few minutes ago, while thinking with Tom Mitchell on the anti-iconic images of Occupy, I said “Through assembly, a clearing opens.” A clearing opens. I want to pause and linger with this phrase for a little bit – sensing that the phrase itself might signal a moment of clearing in my talk. And this brings me back to the passage from Claude Lefort that I promised you at the beginning. Because that passage, too, is about an opening, a clearing.

This is what Lefort writes: “What philosophical thought strives to preserve is the experience of a difference which goes beyond differences of opinion (and the recognition of the relativity of points of view which this implies); the experience of a difference which is not at the disposal of human beings, whose advent does not take place within human history, and which cannot be abolished therein; the experience of a difference which relates human beings to their humanity, and which means that their humanity cannot be self-contained, that it cannot set its own limits, and that it cannot absorb its own origins and ends into those limits. Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create. Philosophy says the same thing, but religion said it first, albeit in terms which philosophy cannot accept” (33).

When I first read it, this passage hit me with great force although I was unable to explain why. In fact, each of my attempts at explanation seemed to miss whatever it was that resonated, seemed to reduce it. I suffered the usual scholar’s impulse: that is, I tried to locate Lefort’s words in a theoretical landscape. To note and acknowledge and perhaps develop possible resonances with Heidegger’s ontological clearing, Lacan’s mirror, Deleuze’s plane of immanence, Arendt’s space of appearance, the Freudian unconscious and so on. But then I realized that this is exactly the wrong thing to do, exactly counter to the spirit of the passage. Because what stirs and unsettles me about Lefort’s words is that they insist on a difference that, as he puts it, “goes beyond differences of opinion.” A difference that relates, he says, human beings to their humanity, “and which means that their humanity cannot be self-contained, that it cannot set its own limits, and that it cannot absorb its own origins and ends into those limits.” This is not to say that the thinkers that came to mind don’t grapple with precisely these questions – some of them do. But it is to say that I would be missing the point if I simply herded the provocation that I had experienced in reading these words back into their terms – and in so doing, tamed the provocation, settling it within an already familiar economy of thought. Just as political theorists all too often tame the provocation of populism, trying to force it back into the schema of democracy as we think we understand it, only to find that it insists on sliding around, both agreeing and refusing, appearing now as the very lifeblood of democracy, now as its nemesis.

Not surprisingly, my second impulse was to find a social scientific interpretation of Lefort’s phrase – specifically of his statement “that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create.” From a sociological standpoint, by which the social is the taken-for-granted baseline, by which the social is what makes everything, the statement doesn’t make any sense. Or rather: it can only be read as symptomatic of another, underlying truth. Perhaps it “really” means that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it doesn’t know it has created. Or that it hasn’t created, but its predecessors did. Or that it hasn’t precisely created but rather maybe deposited. Or maybe it’s that human society hasn’t created it because it wasn’t human before it encountered it. Or something.

You can see the problem. Each interpretive gesture is an attempt to do away with what, from a social science standpoint, feels impossible in this sentence. Unless we are to allow it its own truth – a truth that might then have to be called something like “theological.” And then we would, in sociological terms, simply be mystified. Except that, as I was arguing a little while ago, there is this peculiar occult element of participation right in the middle of Durkheim’s canonical sociology of religion.

Ostensibly, according to this theory, religion is supposed to be a ‘reflection’ of society, which is, as Durkheim puts it, sui generis, unique unto itself, irreducible. But actually, there is this mimetic leakage right at the core of the whole thing, this substantial participation that flows both ways, between society and the image that, to use Lefort’s terms, allows society to “open on to itself” by being “held” by it.

Like so many of those who write about populism, Lefort warns of the totalitarian potential that lives in this theological dimension of the political. But unlike the secular critics of populism, he doesn’t conclude from that that our only hope lies in doubling down on the project of rationalist disenchantment. This is what feels true to me in these lines of Lefort’s. They are neither rationalist nor romantic. They acknowledge that the vital and the fatal come from the same place, even as the possibility of hope depends on our being able to parse one from the other, step by step, day by day. And in this work, we are, I believe, always animated by archives that are not of our making, but by which we make ourselves.

Notes

1 Samet 2013: 537, n4.
2 Canovan 1999: 10.
3 I’m thinking here with Daniel Smith’s (2004) ethnography of the Nigerian vigilante group, the Bakassi Boys.
4 Hansen 2017, 2018.
5 Hansen 2019.
6 Mazzarella 2019.
7 Taussig 2017. In many respects, Achille Mbembe’s (1992) classic take on obscenity as political aesthetics prefigures this line of argument.
8 Adorno 1973 [1964].
9 Latour 2005: 26.
10 Worsley 1969: 246.
11 Williams 2015 [1976]: 206ff.
12 Lefort 1988 [1986]: 17.
13 Lévy-Bruhl 1966 [1910]: 344, 347. For an extended reflection on this theme, see
Mazzarella 2017.
14 Quoted in Sinha 2017: 4166.
15 Durkheim 1912, quoted in Taussig 1992: 126.
16 Taussig 1992: 126.
17 I borrow the phrase from Patsalides and Malone 2000: 124.
18 Santner 2011, 2015.
19 Frank 2015.
20 Taussig 1992: 111.
21 Geertz 1983: 123.
22 Ibid.: 143.
23 See also Benite et al, eds 2017.
24 Arato 2015: 51.
25 Ibid.: 44.
26 The progressivism of Arato’s vision is unmistakable and consistent: he prefers Lefort over Laclau because Lefort thinks that political theology is like training wheels for the politically immature.
27 Ibid.: 31.
28 Taylor 2004: 215.
29 Mitchell 2012: 9, 12.
30 McLachlan 2019.
31 Žižek 2006.
32 Cited in Mitchell 2012.
33 Lefort 1988: 222-223.

The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement

William Mazzarella, Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2019. 48:45–60

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA; email: [email protected]

Abstract

This article suggests that although there is not much of an explicitly defined anthropology of populism, anthropologists have nevertheless been working for many years on the things we talk about when we talk about populism. An- thropologists should thus be exceptionally well situated to divert the debate on populism in creative ways. In particular, I argue that the term populism registers an intensified insistence of collective forces that are no longer ade- quately organized by formerly hegemonic social forms: a mattering-forth of the collective flesh. The article also shows why populism is such an awkward topic for anthropologists. In part, this discomfort has to do with a tension between anthropologists’ effectively populist commitments to the common sense of common people at a time when that common sense can often look ugly. In part, it has to do with how the populist challenge to liberalism both aligns populist politics with anthropological critiques of liberal norms and puts pressure on anthropology’s continued dependence on liberal categories for its own relevance to broader public debates.

OUR MAGIC

By late 2016, with the Brexit referendum in the bag and Donald Trump about to enter the White House, the North Atlantic anglophone anthropology world was in a tizzy. Now that the worldwide populist wave had finally crashed onto our shores, what were we to do about it? Introducing a Cultural Anthropology Hot Spots colloquium on the rise of Trumpism, Bessire & Bond (2017) announced nothing less than an epochal test: “How we respond to this challenge will define the future of our discipline.” This response would require a test of more than ordinary powers: “Our magic may not be up to such an unnerving task. But there is only one way to find out” (Bessire & Bond 2017). At that moment anthropology seemed, curiously, at once both more relevant than ever and almost entirely beside the point. The rising political tide was “anathema to anything and everything anthropological thought has ever represented” (Bangstad 2017a). All hands were now needed on deck to reclaim the public voice of the discipline.

Some suggested that we anthropologists needed to climb down from our ivory towers and get down to brass tacks:

The current rise of ethnic, racial, and religious prejudice throughout Europe—and the United States for that matter—are a call for action to us as academics.…While we should certainly continue our academic work to the best of our abilities, we also have a responsibility to engage our work with multiple publics, to unsettle and challenge the accounts of the political elites fostering xenophobia and nationalism.” (Stein 2016)

In Fischer’s (2017) irreproachable words, anthropology had to “reinvent itself as a vital public voice, activating society and supporting values of the social good for the contemporary worlds emergent around us.”

But what, concretely, might this reinvention involve? The white-hot anxiety of 2016 has by now receded, but the questions remain. Will anthropology’s engagement with populism require some kind of radical praxis? Is it time to reengage directly with questions of class? And if it is, then what do we do about the fact that class seems to have become an exceedingly poor predictor of political affiliation? How do we hold onto slow scholarship — “work that is both timely and takes time, and that is both empirical and imaginative” (Tamarkin 2018, p. 306) — in a world where whipping public affect into a state of normalized crisis is an elementary form of statecraft (Bangstad 2017b; Masco 2014, 2017)?

This article explores the deep provocation that populism poses to anthropology. Political sci- entists have in recent years developed a whole subdiscipline of populism studies (see, for example, Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017). By striking contrast, there is not much of an established anthro- pology of populism, although several anthropologists have written with the concept very much in mind (Albro 2000; Coronil 2008; Coronil & Skurski 1991; Hansen 2001; Holmes 2000; Kalb 2009; Mepschen 2016; Samet 2019; Samet & Schiller 2017; Sánchez 2001, 2016; Worsley 1969). I want to suggest, though, that in this regard appearances are deceptive and that anthropologists have, in fact, been working for years on many of the matters that matter most when it comes to talking about populism. One might also safely say that anthropology itself, methodologically if not always ideologically, tends toward a populist stance, habitually aligning with the common sense of the common people, investing hope in “unflagging popular ingeniousness” (Olivier de Sardan 2015, p. 151). This habit is part of the reason that the current worldwide populist wave puts pressure on the anthropological imagination, as the common sense of some common people is becoming increasingly hard to swallow (Falcone 2010, Marshall 2014, Shoshan 2016, Song 2013). But the populist provocation runs deeper than that. In putting pressure on liberal norms of pub- lic life, the provocation is both in league with anthropology—insofar as we are used to using the liberal as a foil for our critiques—and in conflict with anthropology—insofar as we nevertheless rely on liberal assumptions in making ourselves intelligible to broader debates.

WHAT IS POPULISM?

So what is populism? I need hardly add my voice to the massed chorus of those who have bemoaned the slipperiness of the concept. The diversity of phenomena that the term has been stretched to accommodate is truly staggering, from the Russian narodniks (or perhaps even the populares of Ancient Rome) and the US People’s Party of the nineteenth century, via mid-twentieth cen- tury titans such as Juan Perón and Getúlio Vargas, to the Trumpists and the Chavistas of the twenty-first century. And then there is the hopeless political promiscuity of the concept, routinely applied to Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, Viktor Orban, and Jair Bolsonaro as much as to Bernie Sanders, Podemos, Syriza, and the Occupy movement. Even within individual countries, the range can be confounding. Consider India, for example, which since the 1960s has seen left-leaning and neofascist authoritarian populisms, agrarian populisms, and cinematically mediated regional populisms—quite apart from the question of whether M.K. Gandhi’s anticolonial mass mobilization might qualify as populist.

Political scientists have approached populism as a “thincentered ideology” (Mudde 2007) that can cohabit with any number of political positions, as a political strategy (Weyland 2017), and as a vivid political style (Moffitt 2016, Ostiguy 2017). All these perspectives share what Isaiah Berlin once called the Cinderella complex — the belief that “there exists a shoe — the word ‘populism’ — for which somewhere there must exist a foot” (quoted in Finchelstein 2014, p. 472). Against this definitional urge, one might usefully recall what Paley (2008b, p. 5) has written regarding the parallel desire to define democracy: “An anthropological approach is not about developing a somehow more precise set of mechanisms for determining whether a country is or is not a democracy. That would cordon off definitions of democracy precisely at the moment we seek to open them up.”

So it is with populism. The available definitions seem either too general, so that populism is, in effect, the assertive face of democracy as such (Laclau 2005, Rancière 2014), or too specific, so that only, say, the “classical” populisms of mid-twentieth-century Latin America really fit the bill (Finchelstein 2014). Samet (2019) tellingly prefers to enumerate what populism is not; it is not, he argues, inherently antidemocratic, not reducible to charismatic leadership, not aligned with any particular economic program, not exclusively a movement of the left or of the right, etc. Still, certain phenomena do seem to have a habit of popping up in the vicinity of populism talk: for example, a Manichean division of the population into a valorized majority us—the people—and a demonized minority them; a folksy or vernacular tone, coupled with an organicist emphasis on community and place; a suspicion of high-flown expert discourse and cosmopolitan rootlessness; and a powerful impulse toward bypassing mediating and moderating institutions and procedures in pursuit of an immediate, redemptive and affect-intensive presencing of popular sovereignty (Canovan 1999).

Speaking of affect, populism seems to excite its critics just as much as its adherents (Bilgrami 2018, Ostiguy 2017, Stavrakakis 2014). Populism is at once a descriptive and an overwhelmingly normative word. Hardly anyone calls themselves a populist. Rather, the term most often serves, as Jean Comaroff (2009) notes, as a weapon of “reciprocal defamation.” Faced with such intense antipopulist sentiments, we may wish to find ways of reliably differentiating progressive from reactionary populisms (Green 2017, Judis 2016, Mouffe 2018, Samet 2013, Samet & Schiller 2017). But perhaps it is worth asking a different question: What does the affective intensification around questions of populism tell us that we do not already know about our political investments? Rather than fixating on what differentiates good populisms from bad, perhaps we might ask why it is that they are frequently grouped together as tokens of a type.

The literature on populism often proposes that populist energies are symptomatic of one or another fundamental contradiction in the structure and/or process of mass democracy. Populism, on this reading, is a kind of political pharmakon, at once lifeblood and poison. Take, for example, the highly charged Spanish-language term el pueblo, which in Latin America suggests at once the valorized, authentic people and the object of elite condescension (Skurski 2015). Populism both renews and corrupts the democratic order and is, as such, ambiguously both inside and outside formal politics (Arditi 2003). Populism radicalizes the performative paradox of democracy: It seeks not just to express but rather directly to embody the will of the very people that it simultaneously, performatively brings into being (Frank 2009, Samet 2019). Populism expresses the structural scandals of democracy: the presumptive sovereignty of the unqualified, the tension between liberty and equality, the apparently lockstep parallel growth of mass enfranchisement and administrative opacity (Appadurai 2007, Canovan 2002, Rancière 2014).

THE LIBERAL SETTLEMENT

I suggest that, these days, “populism” is a word that we reach for when we sense the possible breakdown of what I call the liberal settlement [For a general discussion of settlements as analytics, see Mazzarella (2017, p. 10)]. The liberal settlement was the imaginary division of the world after World War II into a zone — the “free world” — where the norms and forms of liberal democracy were presumed to be hegemonic, and a zone — the communist countries and the “developing world” — where they were not. With the passing of state socialism around 1990, the line was redrawn, roughly speaking, between the Global North and the Global South. One of the effects of the current populist wave is the blurring of that line, a line that was, in any case, always more ideological than empirical and always riddled with returns of the repressed. The kinds of markedly illiberal practices that were popularly supposed to be signs of the Global South’s liberal lag (i.e., residual “savagery”) are now explicitly acknowledged as ordinary political currency in the centers of the Global North.

But is there anything really new about this predicament? Is not the agitation over populism just one more iteration of “the familiar Eurocentric practice of granting world-historical significance and generalizability to a phenomenon only when it occurs in Europe and North America” (Chakravartty & Roy 2017, p. 4074)? Is not all this just a matter of middle-class folks suddenly feeling troubled by realities that have always defined nonelite lives (Mepschen 2016, Mouffe 2018, Nugent 2012, Tambar 2016)? As one of Muir’s (2015, p. 311) Argentine interlocutors puts it, “‘We middle-class people now know what the poor have always known.…Things are fucked.”’ Why should we pay any special attention to these middle-class folks, until recently contemptuous (if not terrified) of unruly crowds, just because they have now themselves decided to take to the streets (Sitapati 2011, Tambar 2009)? And why should anthropologists, of all people, be surprised? As the heralds of “theory from the south” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2012), have we not long anticipated precisely such illiberal homecomings?

The problem is that a vague, generic liberalism has long served anthropologists as a reliable critical foil against which the nonliberal (illiberal? postliberal?) practices of our informants could be granted the culturally situated integrity that the other social sciences—as well as the rest of the world—have generally denied them. At the same time, and paradoxically, this same generic liberalism (tolerance, diversity, rights, etc.) has also been the default currency of whatever broader public intelligibility anthropology has managed to achieve. Decades ago, the ambivalence played itself out around the tension between so-called primordial sentiments and the secular, modernizing aspirations of newly decolonizing nation states. More recently, anthropologists have spoken of multiple or vernacular modernities, “disjunctive democracies” (Holston & Caldeira 1998) in which liberal pieties cohabit with illiberal pragmatics. But now, insofar as we face the problem of analyzing and explaining the current populist wave, the wavering of the liberal settlement means, first, that we are no longer able to sustain the fiction of an actually existing normative liberalism against which the difference of our informants’ life-worlds can be measured and, second, that the project of making anthropology more relevant to public debates about the political present can no longer, if we are seeking any real intellectual yield, latch onto a tacit liberal shorthand.

Anthropologists continue to do what they are best known for: redeeming (or at least holding space for) the situated integrity of political practices that other social scientists too often dismiss as corrupt, cynical, or entirely instrumental (Anjaria 2016; Björkman 2015; Duno-Gottberg 2015; Hansen 2005, 2019; Holston 2009). But how, today, are we to defend the redemptive potential of populist protest against the pragmatics of (neo)liberal statecraft, while at the same time refusing the slide into blood-and-soil purity politics (Holmes 2016)? That such violently reactionary claims to place are intellectually entangled with anthropological culture theory is yet another reason to think twice about the terms of our public interventions (Banks & Gingrich 2006, Gutmann 2002).

The pressure is beginning to tell. As Rosa & Bonilla (2017) note, the real opportunity to theorize politics differently too often collapses back into a defensive reassertion of the old liberal norms. This defensive maneuver is driven by the parallel conjuring of a new spectral savage, this time at home: the figure of the Brexiteer or the Trump voter, which, as Martin (2016) points out, “smacks of the kind of pillorying of allegedly ‘irrational’ beliefs that anthropologists would be the first to challenge in most other contexts” (see also Harding 2017, Smith 2017, Walley 2017). Against this reactive liberal posture, we may yet again point out all the ways in which Euro-American liberalism — in practice as in imagination — has always been constitutively exclusionary, indeed actively racist, not just in the imperial expansion of “normative democracy” (Nugent 2008) but on its home ground as well. Likewise, anthropologists have been consistently attentive to the ways in which the ostensibly universally tolerant spaces of civil society are always already— constitutively—defined by intolerant exclusions. To fall back on liberal basics, then, is to refuse to take these exclusions seriously.

MATTERING FORTH THE COLLECTIVE FLESH

The point is not just the one that has been made over and over again: that the normative liberal conception of the public sphere silences nonwhite, nonmale, nonstraight voices. That norm has, in any case, never adequately described actually existing publics, in the Global North or anywhere else. As Cody (2015, p. 55) remarks, “[T]he forms of mass mediation characteristic of industrial society have intersected with modes of collective social life that do not correspond to the coolly cultivated stranger sociality attributed to reading publics.” Rather, what the word populism marks is a challenge to mediation as such. Populism puts pressure on the liberal settlement by dreaming of a direct and immediate presencing of the substance of the people and, as such, a reassertion, a mattering forth of the collective flesh — where the matter is at once the sensuous substance of the social, the flesh, and the meaningful ways in which it comes to matter (Santner 2016). The liberal settlement did not just carve up the world into liberal and nonliberal zones; more subtly, it also effaced the presencing of the people that, within the republican tradition, had always intimated the possibility of revolution. Liberalism oscillates between an (anxious) invocation and a (scornful) abjection of the affective and corporeal substance of social life. Witness, when it comes to imaging popular sovereignty (in itself an abstraction), the restless oscillation between hopeful figures of the people and the ominous Gestalt of the crowd (Chakrabarty 2007; Chowdhury 2019; Gaonkar 2014; Hansen 2005, 2019; Mazzarella 2010b; Sánchez 2016; Tambar 2009; Tambiah 1996).

Analytically, then, our task is not to welcome the collective flesh into spaces from which it has hitherto supposedly been excluded. Rather, the collective flesh has always been the ground of the social and, therefore, of the political. The task, therefore, is to track the specific ways in which any given social and therefore political formation is always built on a (necessarily vain) attempt to manage — which is to say to mediate and thus to organize — collective sensuous potentials. To speak of a mattering forth of the collective flesh, then, means to note the moments in which the affective and corporeal substance of social life makes itself felt as an intensification that exceeds or has fallen out of alignment with prevailing institutional mediations. Such intensified affect is not just a problem of the regressive enchantments and retarded modernity of the postcolonial “magical state,” as has sometimes been implied; it is, rather, a general predicament of social life as such, albeit one that smoothly functioning social dispensations tend to occlude (Cody 2015, Coronil 1997, Mbembe 1992). By the same token, the mattering forth of populism does not so much invalidate liberalism per se as remind us that what we have been used to calling “liberalism” involves its own projects of inciting and containing public affects.

In the Euro-American world, two endings have arrived together: We see the end of neoliberal hegemony (which is not the end of neoliberalism) along with its postpolitical, technocratic-administrative hubris (Sandel 2018, p. 358; Bilgrami 2018; Kalb 2009); and at the same time, the fantasy of postracism has also collapsed ( Jackson 2008, Rosa & Bonilla 2017; compare for Latin America, Coronil 2008, Duno-Gottberg 2011, Perelman 2017). In short, a broadly renewed politicization goes hand in hand with a reassertion of the (raced, classed) precarities, susceptibilities— but also vitalities—of bodies. This doubling is not surprising. Many analyses of the current populist wave remark on the sense that formerly stable mediating institutions (political parties, unions, civil society, experts, banks) seem to have lost much of their authority.

In the place of these mediations, we see and feel a new hunger for immediacy: for the direct and unmediated apprehension and acknowledgment of embodied experience, for a presencing of the political. This terrain is often rough and painful; certainly the tonality of what goes on here tends toward the defiantly uncivil. As Jean Comaroff (2009) notes, “The fire of populism often excoriates the putative ‘sophistry’ of analysis, theorization, complexification.” In response, one may lament the coarsening of a once-civil public sphere, or one may consider the patrolling, policing violence these norms of civility inflict (Nyong’o & Tomkins 2018). But we are also seeing experiments with bringing democratic communication down to earth, with low-tech forms such as the Occupy movement’s “people’s mics” and popular assemblies (Garces 2011, Juris 2012, Razsa & Kurnik 2012) that draw on longer histories of scaling publicness back down to the body (Cody 2011, Mazzarella 2010a).

Under the liberal settlement, the mattering forth of the collective flesh, when it has not been ritually routinized, has typically been apprehended as dark matter: abjected as sacrificial excess, as the insufficiently civil substance of disposable, harmable (nonwhite and/or queer) bodies. The would-be smooth surfaces of technocratic postpolitics have always been rippled by symptomatic returns of the repressed: xenophobic outbursts, race and sex panics. When, in a now-classic article, Coronil & Skurski (1991, p. 290) observe that in moments of crisis “the body is defiantly risked,” it is tempting to retort that some bodies have always been chronically at risk and that the newfound political activation of the previously privileged, recently precarious middle classes risks effacing these longer histories of violence. To be sure, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that white democratization has long gone hand in hand with antiblack racism (Vickery 1974). And it is certainly not hard to conclude that a large proportion of the political movements that are today called populist thrive on bigotry if not outright fascism. But the reenfleshment of the political might also activate other embodied archives and, as such, effect a shift in the aesthetic formations by which our lives in common are “felt in the bones” (Meyer 2009, p. 5; see also Finkelstein 2019, Mazzarella 2017).

COAGULANT AND SOLVENT

The acknowledgment that there is something uniquely affect-intensive and corporeal about populism generally goes hand in hand with the proposition that the affect is a symptomatic expression of an underlying problem that, if it were fixed, would also tamp down the unseemly excitement. Consider what happens when, for example, well-meaning liberals do their best to understand radical rage, of the right or of the left, while being careful not to condone it. Here, populist affect becomes a symptom in the sense of a distorted surface expression of a real (read “sober”) underlying political reality: “the uncompulsory linking of sound questions with unsound anxieties” (Bilgrami 2018, p. 455). No doubt “legitimate grievances” are often channeled into “ugly sentiments” (Sandel 2018, p. 355). But we should not dismiss the possibility that xenophobic racism, for example, may not always be a displacement or a distortion of the kinds of social and economic problems that liberal governmentality is used to recognizing. As Hage (2016, p. 45, emphasis in original) puts it, “[W]hy can’t Islamophobia be a racist mode of coming to terms with a real threat, a threat to the colonial order, as opposed to the racist manufacturing of a nonexistent threat?…[I]f Western societies are feeling besieged, it might be because they are.”

Likewise, having acknowledged the affective intensity of the populist symptom, we should avoid dismissing it as either cynically instrumental (a mode of manipulation) or as tactically ornamental (political style as surface distraction). How would our analysis look different if we granted the symptom its own integrity, its own truth? We might note, to begin with, that we are all— opponents as much as adherents—fascinated by populist affect (Hall et al. 2016, Smith 2017). The populist idiom generally involves a “flaunting of the low” (Ostiguy 2017, p. 73), a “tabloid style” (Canovan 1999, p. 5)—in short, a defiant refusal to be politically polite. The populist politician is the “impolite guest” at the civic dinner party; his or her charisma thus has less to do with any specific political content than with the sheer fascination of “the element that ‘falls out’ of the gentrified system” (Arditi 2003, p. 27).

The lusty disinhibition of populist style is a direct provocation to a liberal ethics of self-control and deferred gratification. This apparent disinhibition is an important reason why populist style triggers such a strongly affective counterreaction, which in turn deepens the populist investment (Gusterson 2017, Mazzarella 2019). In a general way, by pushing back on the considerable antitheatrical puritan prejudice that continues to undergird mainstream liberalism, populism reminds us of the constitutive role of aesthetics in politics. But it does so in a characteristic way, which we might call a politics of immediation (Mazzarella 2006). That is to say, it pursues immediacy effects by mobilizing representations that are, paradoxically, supposed to signal an overcoming of the mediating detour of representation.

Latour (2005) emphasizes the self-defeating side of this dynamic (without identifying it specifically with populism): “We are asking from representation something it cannot possibly give, namely representation without any representation” (p. 26, emphasis in original). Frank, by contrast, figures the symptom as productively inherent to the tension between representative democracy and popular sovereignty: “The defining claim of populism emerges from the democratic necessity and impossibility of the people speaking in their own name.…Populism emerges as an event by exploiting this tension between the authorized representation of public authority and the enactment of popular power that proceeds without authorization” (Frank 2017, p. 631). But let us not forget that the political ambiguity of populist affect rests in no small part in the fact that this immediating urge is as likely to appear in the form of a revolutionary crowd as in that of an authoritarian leader who “resolutely casts representation aside [… and] returns to lay direct, unmediated claim to his nation” (Sánchez 2016, p. 13).

It is not surprising, then, that populist charisma tends to be expressed in one of two paradigmatic figures: either as the radical potentiality of the kind of clearing that a crowd can occupy qua popular assembly (Butler 2015, Graeber 2009, Mitchell 2012) or as the radical fullness of the body of a leader in which the people may find a palpable image of their own substance (Lomnitz & Sánchez 2009, Sánchez 2016, Taussig 2017). In both cases, representation is paradoxically deferred or denied by means of representation—either by figuring a new opening in which the event of the people can occur or by transubstantiation via the fetish-flesh of a leader. None of this means that we are living in a postrepresentational age, as some would claim. It suggests, rather, that the characteristically modern border between sign and substance (the separation that was at stake, for example, in the Protestant refusal of Catholic “magic,” as well as in any prejudicial discourse on the “primitive”) is blurring (Mazzarella 2017).

The effervescence associated with both of these scenarios is absolutely of the essence; it is constitutive, and it makes worlds. Nothing is as threatening to populist conviction as waning affect. Witness the crisis that besets popular uprisings as soon as the physical assembly proves difficult to sustain ( Juris 2012). Witness, likewise, the predilection of populist leaders for continual mobilization, the never-ending plebiscite of rallies and referenda. By the same token, however, populist jouissance is also powerfully destitutive: defiantly dissolving the institutional frames that its votaries, rightly or wrongly, see as obstacles to the presencing of the people. We might say, then, that populist enjoyment operates politically at once as a coagulant and as a solvent. In either case, the collective flesh is assembled and activated, and in both cases this assembly and activation are as much the content as the form of populism.

WORLD AND WAGER

Freeman’s analysis of Malagasy premier and dairy magnate Marc Ravalomanana’s political potency exemplifies such a populist activation of the collective flesh, in which a chain of identifications simultaneously matter forth the land, the nation, the people, and the leader:

The material process by which Ravalomanana gathers and absorbs the potential of the Malagasy land and people, and thereby comes to embody it, is mirrored in the democratic process that has made him leader.…His ability to coalesce material elemental power has led to his success in coalescing democratic political power. (Freeman 2007, p. 288)

Again, what comes alive here is more than the pragmatic-secular political meanings that we generally lend to the terms “representation” and “participation.” Rather, experienced as a vitally “physical connection” (Freeman 2007, p. 293) between land, people, and leader, this populist transubstantiation is experienced as a biomoral continuity (Michelutti 2013). This feeling of identification without remainder, this sense of quasi-sacred union, troubles many critics of populism, whether because it hints at political theology in a purportedly secular age (Arato 2015) or because it tends, if not toward fascism, toward intolerance of anyone who refuses the vibrant fusion (Müller 2016).

Anthropologists have for several decades now been critiquing such immediating identifications between place, culture, and people, even as some of our informants continue to find pressing reasons to retain and revive them (Appadurai 1996, Gupta & Ferguson 1997). We have explored the many ways in which substance travels and is reinvented as affective relation across space: through networks, transnational connections, and virtual publics. Equally, a populist politics of immediation prompts anthropologists to retort that place and identity are never given, but rather always the outcome of historically specific “regimes of circulation” (Cody 2009; see also Bate 2009, Manning 2007, Spitulnik 1997). In fact, while at the level of ideological content, populism tends to celebrate authentic and immediate dwelling-in-place, its real homelands are the mass media. In the age of big data, we are, in a sense, being continually and virtually reassembled—often involuntarily so, as Kelty (2017) points out. The cloud, too, is an archive—a virtual companion species, perpetually and enigmatically in formation on behalf of projects that have yet to be defined.

Indeed, the populist mobilization of the collective flesh is necessarily grounded in archives of experience. These are the potentialities embedded in shared histories, memories, and forms of life that, when activated, will necessarily proliferate affective “surfeits” (Nakassis 2013) that far exceed any attempt to inscribe them in a singular ideological narrative. This archival density is, perhaps, why moments of populist upsurge can feel at once like rigid vulgarizations of public discourse and as wild destabilizations of previously reliable narratives. As Sánchez (2016, p. 405) puts it,

[P]opulist interpellations are always addressed to a highly mobile and volatile field that is not ‘real’ but itself a patchwork of already proliferating fictions and explosive social antagonisms.…If, then, all these myriad decisions at times seem to converge on the institution of some broadly shared identity such as the ‘people,’ at other times the populist letter simply does not reach its destination.

In any case this activation, this mattering forth of the archive is one reason why populist immediations are more than shortcut “pseudoconcretizations” of the political (Žižek 2006).

Without necessarily calling what they are studying “populism,” anthropologists have long been attentive to two modes in which populist mattering happens: as “integral” (Holmes 2000) claims to immediate identity between a people, a place, and a way of life; and as charismatic activations of shared terrains. These are, in fact, two sides of the same world-making coin. In the integral mode, shared worlds are asserted as already existing but under threat from outsiders or callous states; in the charismatic mode, shared worlds are brought into being through performative acts of wager. On the integral side, claims to autochthonous belonging include, today, the appropriation by white nationalists of the legitimating discourse of indigeneity (Evans 2012, 2017; Koch 2016). Meanwhile, in the last couple of decades, in Bolivia and Venezuela most notably, indigenous-identified populist regimes have been able to seize national power. This process has been a real departure from the way that autochthony has long been officially curated by Latin American cultural elites as the authentic substance of the nation (Sánchez 2001). Promising to move beyond both liberal-multicultural acknowledgments of indigeneity and long-standing nationalist tropes of mestizaje, the recent Latin American populisms of Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez have animated, among anthropologists as well as embedded activists, tentative hopes of a more fundamental “cosmopolitical” challenge to the ontology of liberal statecraft (de la Cadena 2010, Escobar 2010). That such hopes have largely been disappointed is perhaps not altogether surprising (Albro 2010, Grisaffi 2019, Postero 2017). But it would be a mistake to conclude that liberal governmentality remains our only real-political analytical horizon—or that charismatic leadership is necessarily what stands in the way of a “better” populism.

What might we gain by taking seriously the popular fascination with, indeed the intense enjoyment of, spectacular charismatic action—whether on the part of leaders beyond the law or of big men, vigilantes, and paramilitaries (Anderson 2018; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Hansen 2001, 2019; Smith 2004)? The disinhibiting discharge of pent-up frustration in such moments, especially when they come infused with a “low” disregard for civil gentility, is hard to miss. But if we stay at the level of disinhibition, then we are going to miss the world-making power of charismatic action. As Mbembe (1992, p. 14) reminds us, the fascinating “obscenity” of illiberal action is an activation of socially palpable potentialities: “The notion of obscenity has no moral connotation here; it harks back to the ‘radiation’ things can emit, to the headiness of social forms.” This headiness, in turn, illuminates and sustains collective worlds, by braiding affect and narrative: “[T]he work of power also involves a process of ‘enchantment’ in order to produce ‘fables’” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

This enchantment and these fables are often sustained in explicitly dramatic ways, for example through the sponsorship of festivals as social stages on which power brokers can appear at once as the charismatic patrons and the police powers of their performative dispensations (Mazzarella 2013; see also Albro 2000, Kaur 2003). But political brokerage is also tied into place making and world sustaining in more prosaic ways, through carefully calibrated wagers on the political potential of neighborhood exchange relationships (Bedi 2016, Björkman 2014, Evans 2012). As such, “latent charismatic potentials” reside in the gap between local resources and the talents of those who may be in a position to activate them. This is what Hansen & Verkaaik (2009) call “infrapower”— a kind of profanely esoteric ability to activate exoteric social environments. Hustlers and brokers “can read, master and ‘work’ the city to make it yield benefits, magical power and eros if one runs the risk and has the courage to ‘play’” (p. 22). Of course, entrepreneurial wagers may, and often do, fail. And if the “headiness of social forms” can both enchant and enchain, then we must also be prepared to acknowledge that none of us—not the people, not the leaders—may be the masters of the powers that we summon.

SURPRISING OURSELVES

The current populist wave is one of those rare moments that deserve to be called “world-historical,” not because it brings something substantially new into the world — it does not — but because it marks the moment when aspects of world making that have always been fundamental demand to be recognized as politically decisive. Finding a language for that recognition could be the task of a revitalized political anthropology.

We already have the tools. We understand style as political substance and have the semiological means to explain its efficacy (Hall et al. 2016, Hristova 2017, Lempert & Silverstein 2012). We are good at accounting for “the social construction of the people, the boundary practices that bring ‘the people’ to social life in particular local contexts” (Mepschen 2016, p. 63). While other disciplines might worry about whether universalizing concepts such as “democracy,” “property,” “citizenship,” or “liberalism” are adequate to situated, concrete experience, anthropologists fold the inquiry back onto the social grounds of the concepts. We like to show not only how universals are locally “vernacularized” (Michelutti 2007), but also how universals are themselves the particular, provincial products of vernacular circumstances that, in circulation, may become detachable from those circumstances (Campbell 2014, Hetherington 2009, Nugent 2008, Spitulnik 1997). The recent wave of infrastructure studies in anthropology can be understood as a development of this longer engagement with the circulatory forms that allow social life to be assembled and imagined across multiple medial scales (Anand 2017, Björkman 2015, Chalfin 2014, Larkin 2013).

Anthropologists are good at paying attention to dispositions and practices that other social scientists would generally dismiss as prepolitical or, at best, parapolitical—all the apparently informal sayings, doings, and feelings that in fact become decisive for formal political outcomes, especially in populist times (Das 2006, Gutmann 2002, Spencer 2007). We tend to look behind the scenes, focusing on the quotidian, ongoing groundwork that easily gets obscured by the more apparently eventful and spectacular dimensions of politics (Postero 2015, Samet & Schiller 2017). We are more likely to shy away from prediction than are other social scientists, perhaps precisely because we are more attuned to the lived complexities of political becoming. In Spencer’s (2007, p. 92) starkly memorable words,

There is no necessary and inevitable progression from a style of politics in which children are taught to sing that our side is good and the other side is bad, to a situation two decades later in which piles of defaced corpses by the roadside are an everyday sight. But we need to see the possible connections.

Even as the political urgency of our moment rightly reminds us of our disciplinary commitment to in-depth empirical fieldwork, we should resist the risk of sliding back into simple empiricism— not least when the acceleration and amplification of the news cycle, implacable partisanship, and cresting anti-intellectualism make it harder than ever to hold a space for the slow and open-ended work of interpretation. Unconscious processes remain fundamental to political life. The point is of course not that anthropologists somehow stand apart and know better. The point, rather, is that the founding principle of anthropology is that nothing about the social is self-evident. Too often, however, this radical suspension of certainty in our many ethnographic elsewheres has been sustained by a stable foil: some figuring of “the liberal state,” “the liberal subject,” and so on. Now that the liberal settlement is under populist pressure, this intellectual bargain is no longer sustainable. To cling to a reified image of the liberal—either as a foil in support of populist claims against it or as a haven against populist attacks on it—is to miss the challenge of the present.

What is the value of anthropological expertise in an antiexpert climate, especially when the rejection of expertise takes place in the name of the ordinary people whom anthropologists have generally claimed as their first and most important interlocutors? For anthropologists the temptation is, naturally enough, to find ways to matter again by rejoining or restoring a conversation whose norms and forms have already been enshrined as “civil” and “significant.” But what the mattering forth that we call populism tells us is that these norms and forms are already faltering. Other archives, other matters, are waiting to be activated.

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