The spatiotemporality of nationalist populism and the production of political subjectivities
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The spatiotemporality of nationalist populism and the production of political subjectivities Michaelangelo Anastasiou1 Accepted: 30 September 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract While recent research has made progress in analytically disentangling “nationalism” from “populism”, the question that is left unanswered is why, from an empirical standpoint, populist movements typically impinge on national(ist) modalities. I argue that this impasse is encountered because research has not yet comprehensively examined the manner, and the extent to which, nationalism comes to be imbricated in the spatiotemporal organization of power relations, through which political subjectivities emerge. I argue that nationalism should be understood as a “hegemonic milieu” that comes to be consolidated through the broad but uneven symbolic dispersion of national(ist) modalities in “spatial” configurations, where heterogeneous affective referents come to be consolidated in reference to “the nation”. Thus, the temporal unfolding of political subjectivities in the “populist moment”—which beholds subversive potential—will inevitably dovetail into already-structurated experiences that are diversely marked by nationalist modalities. Nationalist populism is therefore deemed to inhere in the structure-freedom nexus. Keywords Populism · Nationalism · Hegemony · Subjectivity · Space · Time
Introduction There is to this day considerable theoretical disagreement concerning the relationship between nationalism and populism. The question of whether, and to what extent, they constitute distinct or closely associated phenomena is increasingly gaining academic attention. Conventional wisdom, which has hitherto informed both theoretical and journalistic accounts of populism, tends to regard “nationalism” and “populism” as homological or even identical phenomena. Consequently, the specificity of each respective phenomenon is effaced. Such theoretico-political positions * Michaelangelo Anastasiou [email protected] 1
Department of Social & Political Sciences, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus Vol.:(0123456789)
M. Anastasiou
have been scrutinized by recent scholarship that is principally associated with the “Essex School” and that has, as an outcome, analytically disaggregated the phenomena (e.g. De Cleen 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2017). This theoretical breakthrough endows novel analytic possibilities. It makes it possible to identify and analyze forms of populism that are not predominantly nationalistic, in the absence of any aprioristic ethico-theoretical prejudices. What is by extension acknowledged is that populism can also assume an inclusive character and that nationalism is not necessarily populist. However, from an empirical standpoint, it proves impossible to completely disentangle populism from nationalism. And while this is acknowledged by various Essex-oriented theorists, there have been only limited attempts in theoretically substantiating why this is so. To acknowledge what something is, is not the
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