Title: the Populist Body in the Age of Social Media: a Comparative Study of Populist and Non-Populist Representation
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Title: The Populist Body in the Age of Social Media: a Comparative Study of Populist and Non-Populist Representation Author: María Esperanza Casullo (UNRN-Argentina) [email protected] Abstract: Populist representation depends on the establishment of a charismatic bond between the leader and the followers. In the charismatic-populist relation, the body of the leader becomes the very signifier upon the trust and belief of the followers are inscribed--it thus becomes a symbol or signifer in Laclau's term (2005). The body of the leader thus performs three key functions: it mirrors specific 'low' traits (Ostiguy 2009) of the people (Diehl 2017); simultaneously, it must signify the exceptionality and distance of the leader from the followers; lastly, it must appropriate the symbols of power of the particular political position she is occupying. These tasks are performed through particular ways of dressing, talking, eating, etc. Social media has become a key locus for bodily self presentation, since it is used to create the appearance of intimacy and spontaneity through the distribution of 'candid' pictures, videos, and the like. This paper will analyse how the self-presentation of populist-leaders is conducted through Twitter and Facebook, what images they choose the disseminate and how they are re-signified by the audience. The paper will focus on the presidential campaigns of three Latin American politicians: Evo Morales and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (two populists) and Mauricio Macri from Argentina (who is not), as a way to establish a comparison between populist and non populist bodily image. Populist Representation: Performance, Body Synecdoque and Self-Transcendence With populism on the rise throughout the world, we are living in the midst of a surge in interest around the phenomenon of populist leadership. (Rovira Kaltwasser et al 2017, Heinisch, Holtz-Bacha and Mazzoleni 2017) . A crucial finding of this literature is the fact that populist leadership is more than a simply a strategy (Weyland 2001) or a set of beliefs (Mudde and Rovira 2015): it is a form of democratic representation that has its own mechanisms for legitimation and that can be as strong and durable as others. Among the current literature on the topic, a new set of works view it as being primarily a personal style that involves a certain bodily communicative grammar that is constructed through the leader’s behavior, voice, demeanor, clothing, hairstyle and the like. (Mazzoleni 2011, Moffitt 2015, Sorensen 2017, Ostiguy 2017, Diehl 2017) These pieces perform an important cst a light on issues that the literature on populism has often overlooked, for instance, the ways in which socio-cultural structures of meaning are transformed into political power and the ways in which personal performance becomes a mediation in the process of political representation. (Moffitt 2015; Ostiguy 2017) This paper expects to add to the ‘populism as performance’ school by pointing out and exploring one important overlooked issue: the leader’s body as the source of populist representation. The mechanism of legitimation is not programmatic allegiance nor electoral procedure but what I call synecdochal bodily representation. The power of populist performance is rooted in the fact that the followers believe that the very persona of the leader embodies their own identity not in an ideational but in a concrete, physical way. This particular belief is grounded on the leader’s bodily performance, which at the same time mirrors some of the follower’s stylized characteristics and distances the leader from them; the result is a dynamic tension between being of the people and being a charismatic exceptionality. By doing so, the body of the leader the leader’s body carries with it the presence of her followers in a transgressive manner. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, a conceptual discussion of the concept of representation in general, and of synecdochal representation in particular, is presented. In this first section the example of Evo Morales is discussed; along with a schematic representation of synecdochal representation as the bodily hybridization of symbols of closeness between the leader and followers, of distance between the two, and symbols of power. The second section presents a brief comparison between the self-presentation of Mauricio Macri and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (current and former president of Argentina, respectively). Finally, a re-conceptualization of populist representation is briefly presented in the final paragraphs. The Role of Bodily Synecdoche in Populist Representation 1 This paper adopts the sociocultural approach, that is, it views populism as a political performance that is always done in public rather than an party-politics strategy (Weyland 2017) or an ideology (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2015).1 One of the advantages of conceptualizing populist as a performance is that doing so brings the body to the forefront, since these distinct political modes of behaviour are always embodied “...modes of governance or ideological dispositions, [as] distinct embodied, performative political styles” (Moffitt 2015: 47). Ostiguy and Moffitt, among others building on the same approach, offer valuable insights for understanding the relation between public behavior 2 and the socio-cultural contexts from which they it takes its meaning. Two elements are central to the sociocultural definition of populism. First, Moffitt’s concept of populism as a performative political style, whose opposite is a technocratic style.3 According to Ostiguy, the political weight of the “performance” is anchored in the antagonistic way in which displays and uses cultural elements associated with the social “low”, the vulgar, the “incorrect” ways of behaving, speaking, acting, dressing. Ostiguy defines this way of acting as the “antagonist flaunting of the low in politics.” (2009) Both Moffitt and Ostiguy underscore the fact that the attractive of such performances comes from the transgressive promise embodied in the leader: that he or she will use his courage (or “balls) in Ostiguy’s terms) (2009) to advance the sociocultural perspective of the “low” against the “well-behaved”. This transgression brings about something like the “powerful experience of self-transcendence” that John Chasteen situated at the root of the enduring personal loyalty that the Caudillos’ men felt towards their leaders (Chasteen 1995: 5). That self-transcendence continues to be an often overlooked yet very powerful political experience.4 1 Even if one conceptualizes ideology in a “thin” way, as Mudde and Kaltwasser do. (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017) 2 With these tensions in mind, there are a number of important reasons for choosing to focus on the leader as the key actor or ‘performer’ of contemporary populism. First, individual leaders are undoubtedly the most visible and prominent symbols of populism today, with much academic and popular discussion of populism hinging on their personalities and performances. The devotion of followers—and indeed, the hatred of detractors—similarly hangs on the leader in many cases rather than the party. (Moffitt 2015: 56) 3 “In the context of Western societies, the codes for body staging in politics suggest professionalization and a certain distance between the office holder and the voter.” “Diehl 2017: 367) 4 For Chasteen, the caudillos embodied for their followers the ability to transcend their small, tightly-knit peasant communities and be part of a larger collective identity by joining a community of “people who recognized each other through symbols of a common heritage and destiny” (1995: 5) through the common endowment of loyalty to one caudillo. Chasteen advises to “pay careful 2 As mentioned before, the “other” of populist representation is the technocratic ideal. 5 While in the technocratic ideal the follower is supposed to trust and believe in their representatives on the grounds of both their superior expertise and their orientation to the common good, it is my hypothesis (which is also informed by the reading of Laclau)6 that populist representation is based on the body of the leader becoming the signifier of a powerful act of political transgression and inversion of the social order. (2005) The body of the leader, through his or her performance, becomes able to ‘carry with it’, as it were, the bodies of his or her followers into spaces of power from which other those bodies were previously excluded, but in which other bodies (the ‘high’ bodies of the elites and “respectable” people) were allowed. It is by this act of personal, concreted, embodied “irruption” that the leader fulfills his or her promise of shaking the status quo and dislodging the élite.7 While it is true that “...talk of the body politic has largely disappeared from our political vocabulary following the rise of liberal democratic politics (Neoclaus 2003) ... under democracy, the body politic is ostensibly ‘disembodied’, as democracy is conceptualised as an ‘empty place’ of power.” (Lefort 1988, Moffitt 2015: 64), it is also true that the impact of the body in politics is now, thanks to the power of mediatization (as attention to narrative representations of the leader and try (by zigzagging back and forth between text and context) to identify the qualities that most resonated most strongly with their followers.” (1995: 5). That methodological perspective is loosely employed in this chapter. 5 Moffitt: “the difference between populism and technocracy