Facing Everybody: Political popularisation and populism in post-unive...

Political, public life needs presentation and exposition in order to live, to be able to engage in discussion and conflict and to initiate further political action. In today’s world, images and visual stagings often take on the role of creating presence, mediating, setting counter-positions and expressing political imagination in a variety of ways. In this context, showing faces and bodies is particularly important in addressing the widest possible audience. In tension with this role of visual creations, which always link the universal and the particular in a unique and new way, is the fact that the universal has not had an easy time of it since around the 1960s. It is deconstructed, accused of legitimising forms of power and domination of various kinds and of imposing views as it were by force. The particular, even the singular, is placed in the foreground or even celebrated.

The lecture presents a genealogy and iconology of visual presentations that attempt to address “everyone”, referring to image examples of contemporary populist movements (Lega Nord, Fratelli D' Italia) as well as popularisation strategies of NGOs and environmental activist groups. In the process, long lines of iconological tradition as well as ruptures and transformations will be presented. Special attention is paid to the role of visual representations in contemporary society characterised by the multiplication of political agents of image use and distribution (for example on new social networks and populist political parties), which always bring certain particular-universal constructs of ‘the people’ to bear against an elite. It is shown that in doing so, images and visual presentations trigger transition, but can also be overpowering and generally act as ambivalent agents: they mediate between the particular and the universal and the self and the other, but also between the private and the public. They convey or deepen desire as well as hatred, indignation and resentment and are thus agents of social and political processes of polarisation, re-politicization as well as reconciliation, communion and solidarity.

Schlüsselworte: universal, particular, public, iconology, evrybody, popularisation populism