‘POPULAR CULTURE’ IN A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW POLITICAL REASON

ISSN： 1466-4348

Source： Cultural Studies , Vol.25, Iss.4-5, 2011-09, pp. : 659-684

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Abstract

Since the US presidential campaign of 2004, references to a new political ‘populism’ abound. Sometimes the politics of populism has been waged over the claim, by the Left and the Right, to populism. Although there is a long history of political movements representing themselves as populist, the struggle over the claim to populism has certain recent inflections, and matters differently than in the past, and in the USA differently than in other parts of the world. One thing that distinguishes the recent political populism in the USA is its articulation to and through a ‘media revolution’. My intervention in a collection of essays interested in rethinking ‘media convergence’ involves rethinking certain assumptions about the relation between the ‘media revolution’ associated with ‘new media’ and a new ‘convergence culture’ and the emergence of (the claims to) a new political populism in the USA. In so doing, the project also engages the writings of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Paolo Virno and Michel Foucault in order to rethink the relation between ‘the popular’, ‘populism’ and ‘population’.