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This is a preprint of
Venkov, Nikola A. 2020. "On the Retreat of Liberal Values and Access to Discourse:
Extending Post-Foundational Discourse Theory." In Discursive Approaches to
Populism Across Disciplines – The Return of Populists and the People, edited by
Michael Kranert, 199-223. Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Chapter 8 On the retreat of liberal values and access to discourse: extending post-
foundational discourse theory/ Nikola A. Venkov
Dramatic shifts in public perception
A recent poll in the US tested the perception of colleges and universities among supporters of the two
major political parties (Pew Research Centre 2017). Between 2010 and 2017, the share of Democrat
supporters who thought that institutions of higher education “have a negative effect on the way things
are going in the country” declined from 22% to 19%. More striking is the graph for Republican-
leaning respondents: it remained roughly stable at around 35% until 2015. After this a sharp rise
began, reaching as much as 58% by the last year of the survey. The period of change overlaps with the
presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Still, the image that colleges are hotbeds of leftist
indoctrination is a well-known and not at all new trope of the American Right. What I find intriguing
is that after being dormant for decades this view had such a sudden and dramatic effect on public
opinion. I will be asking in this chapter how it is possible that even an institution so integral to the
myth of modernity could lose its standing (and so quickly) for a significant portion of the population
just because of the ongoing political polarisation. How can we begin to understand this “ability” of
political discourse to shift such seemingly solid ground?
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In political studies this example and others like it are taken as a symptom of a fundamental political
transformation taking place. A number of authors today discuss a ubiquitous rise of populism in
liberal democracies and explore whether there are some overarching factors facilitating such a
seemingly global shift in politics (e.g. Inglehart and Norris 2016; Moffit 2016; Brubaker 2017;
Eatwell and Goodwin 2018). In this chapter I too will engage with this question. However, before I
suggest a novel answer to it, I will argue that it is not quite the right question to ask. I claim that what
we are observing is not simply more populist politics but rather a retreat of the taken-for-granted
values, knowledge and politics of the established liberal democratic order.
I advance the preposition that we are living in a genuine populist moment, engendered by an
unprecedented democratisation of access to political discourse which is shifting the balance in
national discourse circulation and thus facilitating a historical uncoupling between elite and popular
discourses. Thanks to this democratisation of access a much smaller investment is required today from
the common (non-elite) citizen in order to become politically active – not in the sense of joining a
political movement, but of a much earlier step: having an opinion.
To construct the analysis I will turn to the theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and the Essex School
in Discourse Theory (in Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Laclau 1990, 1996; and other works). It is variously
termed post-foundational, poststructuralist or post-Marxist discourse theory (PDT). PDT gives us a
powerful frame for analysing how political identities are constituted and how they enter into political
struggles.
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perspective on the While it offers a sophisticated ontology of the political, it is as yet less
well equipped to analyse politics as action (the ontic level). Namely, it is lacking the tools to look at a
world made up of multiple interacting subjects located in a landscape structured by the inertia of
history and power. While this is a larger project begun elsewhere (Venkov 2017, in Bulgarian), here I
will extend the conceptual apparatus of PDT by elaborating the notions of discursive social actor,
discourse circulation, and access to discourse.
With this extended PDT toolbox I will be able to theoretically ground the argument for an overarching
shift in the way the dynamics of discourses on matters of public concern (amongst others) play out in
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contemporary societies. This shift results in what analysts have been perceiving as a ubiquitous rise of
populist politics. I contend that we are experiencing something larger: a general retreat of liberal
values, and possibly even, a retreat of the fundamentals of modern knowledge. This claim is
illustrated in the next section through an empirical example.
Bulgaria: The “invasion” of gender
At roughly the same time as when Americans were changing their views on universities, on the
opposite side of the planet a mass outcry ensued as the Bulgarian government was preparing to ratify
the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and
Domestic Violence (Council of Europe 2011; the so called “Istanbul Convention”). The point of
contention with ratifying the Convention was neither about greater powers being granted to the state
to intrude on family matters, nor about a perceived threat to male power and privilege. The reason for
a mass moral panic was that the text of the document contained the unfamiliar term “gender”. It was
first reinterpreted in Bulgarian public space as “a third” biological sex, and then as “The Gender” – an
ultimate emblem of sexual deviance. Large parts of the general population became convinced that the
Convention was an attempt to surreptitiously introduce one of these in the socio-national body.
The Convention became a hot topic overnight, discussed in TV studios and the Parliament. Although
many political actors jumped on the bandwagon, a lot of the action was happening beyond the
traditional public sphere and media. Flaming arguments between ordinary people would erupt with
hundreds of comments on Facebook, as both supporters and detractors of the Convention felt that
truth and justice had been offended. Detailed exegesis of the document‟s terminology and its roots in
sociology and psychology flew against images showing drag queens lecturing kids in Canadian
kindergartens on “changing” their straight sexual orientation and “becoming genders”. Both sides
searched for online information and bits of evidence to support their views; they laboured to have
their argument become coherent and compelling. The (mis)readings of the term “gender” were
peculiarly local and globalised at the same time. Locally, “The Gender” became the main hero of
creative ribald jokes, while a lot of the scarier information which started to circulate was drawn from
material published online a continent away by what researchers today call “anti-gender movements”
(Kovats 2017) becoming ever more transnationally connected (Hodjic and Bijelic 2014). Some of it
was recycled through Russian online media, where depraved sexual mores were explicitly articulated
as the reason for the political decline of the West (Riabov and Riabova 2014; Moss 2014). In a
population that had until recently been very much pro-EU, people were now scared that under the
pressure of foreign and local human-rights and “liberal” NGOs (non-governmental organisations) the
government was preparing the ground for future policies to “re-educate” their children into “deviant”
sexual orientations. The examples from Western contexts, e.g. images from the US child drag scene or
of picturesque revellers at the Cologne gay pride, were employed to illustrate what implementing the
Convention would mean for the Bulgarian national future.
A study on Facebook and Twitter activity showed that in January 2018 73.5% of posts about the
Convention by ordinary citizens were arguing against it (Media Metrics 2018). It is striking that in
this unprecedented truly popular political debate the supporters of women‟s rights, of the authority of
institutions and professions, of trust in Europe, of the integrity of scientific language, and of what one
might see simply as “reason” were heavily outnumbered. In March 2018, in a “populist” gesture, the
government withdrew from the ratification process.
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A year later a similar mass moral panic erupted about an update of the National Strategy for the Child
intended to improve the regulatory frame on social services and child protection. The document was
quickly rearticulated through a number conspiracy theories (see in National Network for Children
2019), most striking of which was that Norway is looking for ways to “kidnap” Bulgarian children on
a mass scale for improving its own weak and depleted DNA pool. In April 2019 the adoption of the
Strategy was likewise scrapped to keep the nation at peace.
What I would like to illustrate through these examples is that although we could try to think about the
Bulgarian events of 2018 and 2019 through the concept of populism (and even propaganda), there is
something deeper and grander at play. Along with the US example given earlier, they hint that today
large groups of people are prepared to dispute values, practices, norms and institutions that for many
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decades were seen as default elements of a good “modern society”. Thus, the question “why the rise
of populist politics?” seems to be closely related with another: why have many understandings, which
were taken for granted in liberal modernity, become so easy to dislodge on such a mass scale in both
the East and the West?
Following up on the “rise of populism” thesis
The research literature on populism is by now vast. Most accounts try to understand the rise of
populisms as a general disillusion of the masses with the liberal-democratic model due to some
concrete frustrations (so-called “demand-side arguments”). They maintain a range of arguments that
popular grievances arose due to changes taking place in the late 20th century: from dissatisfaction with
the existing parties becoming more technocratic and distanced from the citizens (Mair 2002:84-87;
Rummens 2017:567-68) to an anxiety caused by global neoliberal transformations threatening local
social relations (Kriesi et al. 2008; Holmes, 2010), e.g. through immigration or economic
restructuring. Treatments such as Eatwell and Goodwin (2018) or Mouffe (2019) synthesise all of
these arguments together.
This kind of account suffers from an overall epistemological flaw: the authors remain dangerously
close to economism when they foreground some “factually-existing” cause (if not the 2008 financial
crisis, then the crisis of democratic representation) to which populism is posited as the largely
automatic reaction. To avoid sliding into economism it is necessary to theorise how the reaction itself
is produced – how it takes shape in one direction or the opposite, or does not take shape at all (in
other words, when and why a given situation becomes a “social problem”, Iakimova 2016, in
Bulgarian; see also De Cleen, Glynos, and Mondon 2018:651-652). More sophisticated accounts
recognise that crises to which populist leaders promise to give the right response are most often the
discursive creation of populists themselves (Moffitt 2015).
Supply-side accounts, on the other hand, look at populism as a repertoire cultivated by political actors
in order to create an advantage over competitors (Mudde 2010). Populist leanings of the public are
also increasingly recast as the result of malicious propaganda (Vatsov 2018). Alternatively, Zankina
(2016) argues that populist policy-making could be seen by all involved as more efficacious than
traditional forms of politics, especially in the wake of a crisis.
Again, such approaches are not sufficient when trying to understand not a local political dynamic but
to support a global “rise of populism” thesis. If populist projects are a winning tactic for gaining
political influence by varied actors, it is not clear why it was not employed with a similar intensity
two or three decades earlier. If one is to argue for an unprecedented rise of populism taking place
today, it is necessary to differentiate it from earlier periods by something more substantial than
contingent tactics.
Rather, it is necessary that we uncover historical conditions of possibility that evolved in the late 20th
and early 21st century. We saw that such an evolution cannot be about an “objective” intensification of
crises in late modernity. Could it be, instead, about humanity being more easily prodded into a crisis
mode? The writings of thinkers such as Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Nicholas Rose and others
suggest ways to argue such a point.
I am concerned, however, with a simpler thesis: that a global technological shift – the widespread take
up of interactive new media – is having a profound impact on the ways political identity is
constituted.
A second wave of “cognitive mobilisation”?
My contribution to the debate is inspired by Ronald Inglehart‟s 1970s notion of “cognitive
mobilisation”. The latter relates to the possession of resources and skills that enable people to deal
with socio-political dependencies in an extended society, i.e. to care about the abstraction and
complexities of national politics. The term was applied to a marked increase in political awareness
among Western publics which was registered in the 1960s and the 70s (Inglehart 1977; Alaminos and
Penalva 2012:1-3). Inglehart‟s argument (1977:299-303) was that with modernisation and
industrialisation society was rendered too complex for the ordinary person to participate even in local
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political decision-making. The shaping of opinion was delegated to organisations of (typically) life-
long membership, such as political parties, trade unions, churches. Only since the late 1950s this
picture started to change in Western democracies, due to two chief factors: increasing levels of
education and the spread of television receivers. This exposure to political discourse facilitated
emancipation of opinion, which was seen in the decrease in traditional party identification and the rise
of new social movements (Dalton 1984).
In the next sections I will theoretically re-ground the somewhat problematic term “cognitive
mobilisation” in a post-foundational-discursive framework through the analytic concept access to
discourse, and then elaborate the significance of such a notion for our understanding of liberal-
democratic societies in the 21st century. Put briefly, what we are seeing is a second wave of cognitive
mobilisation due to a changing media infrastructure. If in the 1960s and 1970s the infrastructural
transformation of public communications consisted of the advent of broadcast television and the
“forced” regular exposure of the masses to the evening news (Prior 2007:255-258), in the 21st century
it is the interactive nature of the Internet (and other communication networks) and the opportunity for
“practicing” discourses. Thus, populism can be seen as a by-product of a more politicised citizenry,
becoming emancipated from the sway held by the elites on political discourses, values and projects
(Mudde 2004:554).
There is an important difference between the two waves of cognitive mobilisation, and between
Inglehart‟s argument and mine. I suggest that a political discourse is appropriated (or, in other words,
a politicised identity is shaped) not by passive exposure to it but by practicing articulations within it.
To demonstrate this preposition I need to dive in post-foundational discourse theory next, and then
upgrade its set of analytical concepts.
Introducing post-foundational discourse theory
In this section I give a brief introduction to the tenets of post-foundational discourse theory (PDT).
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Discourse theory accepts that the social world operates only through the discursive production of
meaning. Of course, physical reality exists independently of our perceptions, but its components can
be discerned and perceived only through the meanings we impart upon them. Individuals perceive the
world around them through systems of meaning which are shared, socially produced and historically
established. We call these discourses.
Discourses establish meaningful relations between objects in the world, actions, practices, social roles
and so on, by embedding them in a net of interrelations. That is, they supply things with identities. A
discourse is inescapably imbued with power: it orders the social in one way instead of another, draws
lines between acceptable and odd, visible and invisible, familiar and foreign. There are many ways to
ascribe meanings to the social and some of these might be competing. For Laclau and Mouffe any
political project is an attempt to fix identities in a particular way, that is, to impose a particular order
on the world. The (always temporary) success of such a totalising move is called hegemony. When
alternative discourses have been hidden from view and the contingent character of the established
order has been forgotten, the hegemonic discourse sediments into a self-evident and natural state of
affairs. What comes as natural can only be problematised when another discourse intrudes on the
local terrain and supplies the frame for a different perception of social reality.
Discourse is a relational complex of elements (signifiers) in which it is the relations that play the
constitutive role. The identity/meaning of every signifier is defined by its relations with the whole
complex and is therefore modified along with any change in the whole. Articulation is the practice
which establishes a new relation between discursive elements, modifying their identities as a result.
Articulation always contains a degree of contingency and undecidability – otherwise it would already
be a part of the relational complex. Radical contingency and undecidability – the rupturing of any
structure – are fundamental properties for the theory: the social can never be fully signified and
integrated in a completed discursive structure (totality). Every discourse has a limit and is always only
partially constructed. That which is outside threatens the inner structure of the discourse with the
potential to rearticulate the latter‟s elements through a different set of principles. It has to be either
incorporated into the relational complex, or wholly excluded through a “militarization” of the
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discursive limit into an antagonistic frontier. The construction of a frontier involves a “logic of
equivalence” – unifying everything beyond the discursive boundary under one name for “The Other”,
in order to block its structural threat to the inner order. At the same time it unifies the inside by
symbolising it as one in relation to the outside.
The discursive field is criss-crossed with antagonistic frontiers: between discursive formations
(interlinked complexes of discourses that share meanings and operate well together) and also within
them. Hegemonic struggles re-inscribe different meanings to signifiers, ultimately redefining
(rearticulating) what is “good”, “true”, “scary”, “worthwhile”, “unimportant”, and predetermining
anxieties, ambitions, social and political actions.
Discourse theory in a world of polycentric discourse production
Acts of hegemonic articulation are, for discourse theory, the elementary acts of politics. How does
hegemony look like in practical terms? If we go back to the classical formulations put forward by Hall
and Gramsci, hegemony is a tool of domination by consent (Hall 1996:426). It is achieved by
redefining the vocabulary of terms and identities used by the dominated group in such a way that its
views are made compatible with the interests of the ruling group. In discourse theory, which dispenses
with any pre-discursive elements in the understanding of power (such as the notions of “dominated”
or “dominant” social group), any series of articulations that inscribes a region of the social terrain into
a given discursive formation is totalising and hegemonic (Laclau and Mouffe 2001:139). Hegemony
can be seen as placing a specific discursive repertoire at the subject‟s disposal, through which it will
subsequently perceive, think and act.
In the analysis of empirical case studies PDT has one major shortcoming. We know empirically that a
hegemonic discourse is not successful over all subjects in a population. In January 2018 Bulgarian
society quickly split into people suspicious of the gender innovation and others suspicious of the anti-
gender discourses. Some people exposed to the hegemonic discourse would muster a resistance but
not others. How can we study that interplay? PDT recognises that societies are criss-crossed by
multiple political divisions and frontiers-in-the-making. We should keep in mind that any subject is
submerged in a dynamic terrain where a number of not (yet) directly antagonistic political projects
may be competing to define identities in the subject‟s locality. We therefore need theoretical tools that
can understand how in practical terms a subject relates and reacts to a complex landscape of
polycentric discourse production.
Presently, discourse theory collapses these dynamics into the highly conceptual “black box” notions
of contingency, heterogeneity (Laclau 2005:150-153), and “the split subject” (Torfing 2009:119-121;
see next section). Within the theory they serve the function to capture the fundamental gap of the
unknowable present in the social. In my opinion this gap might currently be stretched wider than is
necessary: a large part of the so-called contingent dynamics can be re-admitted in the analysis by
complicating the conceptual tools available to PDT. While PDT and Laclau‟s analysis of populism
operate on the level of political ontology, that is, on the level of the categories through which we
should think the political, we need a new, second level of tools for the analysis of politics as action.
One way to go about this is to re-construct a world of transactions between social actors (agents)
while staying firmly grounded in a post-foundationalist understanding. I have begun such a theoretical
endeavour elsewhere (Venkov 2017, in Bulgarian). Here I add to it by developing the concept of the
discursive social actor before I proceed to the new terrain in the analysis of populism that this opens
up for PDT.
Enter the discursive social actor
What is the difference between the subject in post-founational discourse theory and the classic
sociological concept of a social actor? PDT avoids seeing agents as self-defined totalities with clear-
cut interests or as endowed with autonomous wills that go on to produce the social through their
interactions. The subject is not necessarily a person – it could be “the working class”, for example, or
“the state” – but even if, on occasion, it is used to conceptualise an individual, it does not overlap with
our common-sense perception of a person. That person would be construed not as a basic unity, but
rather as a series of dispersed subject positions. This is because PDT accepts that the language we
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speak and the actions we undertake are always borrowed from the discursive formations in which we
are embedded in, in order to be made subjects (there cannot be a subject outside of the social). A
subject would operate through identifications, such as “a woman”, “a truck driver”, “a daughter”, “a
Bulgarian”, “a European”, “a stamp-collector”, and so on. Each of them endows one with a specific
“sense of self”, value orientations, language, body language, significant others against which to define
one‟s being. Moreover, PDT states that those different subject positions will not be able to suture a
coherent, fulfilled identity – at every moment the mutual articulation between them is contingently
determined (hence a “split subject” for Torfing 2009).
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If identity is produced through the discursive order, any putting into question of that order must
necessarily constitute an identity crisis (Laclau and Mouffe 2001:126). This is why hegemonic
political projects are resorted to as the mythical surfaces of fullness, into which a subject hopes to
inscribe itself in order to achieve complete identity (Laclau 1990:60-63). It is the sedimentation of
hegemonic discourses, through the forgetting of their contingent and insecure grounds, that covers
over the fundamental gaps in reality, and, likewise, in one‟s self.
So far I outlined PDT's insights into the ontology of the subject. The issue with PDT‟s analytical
toolbox is that both inter-subject interactions and power are deconstructed into articulations between
discourses. To be able to study politics as involving multiple subjects in a social space which is pre-
structured by power and inequality, we need to upgrade that toolbox. We need to complement
discourse theory‟s drive to reveal the contingency and indeterminacy of any social structure with tools
that keep in view what sustains it, after all, as a structure. Here I respond to the call for building up a
theoretical framework suited for empirical research (Marttila 2015a). Marttila directs our attention to
the argument that it is the sedimentation of hegemonic discourses that turns them into a “mere”
“objective presence” (Laclau 1990:34). The self-evidentiality of sedimented forms of discursive
meaning tends to settle institutions, practices and the perception of objects (objects as perceived) into
stable “material” existence – this Marttila names “discursive materiality” (2015:6-7).
In light of this reasoning, I take a social actor to be a discursive subject together with its history of
hegemonic articulations and with its embeddedness in structured relations and relations of power
(which are, of course, discursively constituted). As a history of articulations accrues, its discursive
materiality somewhat limits the actor‟s choices for future articulations. I would like to evoke here
Bourdieu‟s concept of habitus: the accumulated heritage of a person‟s life trajectory through social
structures. It is “deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action
[and tends] to guarantee the „“correctness‟” of practices and their constancy over time” (Bourdieu
1990:54-55). This is part of a much larger project of combining Bourdieu and post-foundational
discourse theory (Venkov 2017:123-146). Here I will not go into how a discursive habitus may
function; I will outline only some properties that will be useful for us.
My central observation is that a social actor starts to value certain positions in the discursive field
when he or she lays claim to them. One gets “sentimentally attached” to discourse as one articulates
through it. Why? There is a certain pressure to be consistent. One reason is that this preserves the
identifications already laid down: it avoids the crisis of discovering that one‟s identity is contingent.
Another is to avert challenges by opponents. When asked a question one is forced to deploy a
discourse, sometimes without much prior thought, but then has to stick with the enunciated position
even if not very satisfied with it. The discourse employed once also becomes easier to employ again,
in a less reflexive and more habitual mode. Over time, a certain “regularity in dispersion” (Laclau and
Mouffe 2001:105-106) between articulations / identifications accrues as well, which guides what
future articulations feel “correct”.
For all the above reasons, sets of solidifying subject positions are laid down and the response to the
next question / challenge or / necessity to define oneself is somewhat constrained. Still, as the
principle of undecidability reminds us, it never becomes fully constrained. In each subsequent
moment the social actor must make a new contingent choice, one which tells him or her, “Aha! I think
this on that question.”
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New media and political identity-making beyond the elites
Here I will dwell upon an important corollary from the idea for a discursive social actor. In the
preceding section I basically suggested that an actor‟s discourse-social identity takes shape through an
ongoing process of practicing articulations. It follows that it is not so much the passive exposure to
information, e.g. by broadcast television or the morning reading of the newspaper, that fosters the
cultivation of opinion, political or otherwise, but the re-telling at the dinner table of what was read and
heard. Choosing the point to make makes it stick. Of course, articulations can also take place in one‟s
mind – but taking part in a heated argument is always better. Conversation can be stimulating even
when one is not an active participant in it: in terms of mental articulations, more are induced when
listening to a third-party dispute or to incongruent versions on a topic than to a coherent, serially
reproduced discourse.
The luxury of individual political opinion is traditionally related by sociologists to the elites and
middle classes (e.g. Bourdieu 1984:453-465; see quantitative data for the US in Dalton 1984:274-
283). In the larger part of the 20th century the common man, and even more so woman, had no
experience and confidence in being political – beyond what was expected and established for them by
the system (e.g. by the national electoral ritual or by the traditional partisan belonging, see in
Alaminos and Penalva 2012:2; Dalton 1984:264). In a less strong image, even if he or she did sport an
individual political opinion, they could perform and reaffirm it before a small constituency of peers
whose views were already familiar and, very likely, similar: close friends, family and relatives, fellow
workers and the pub regulars (for the men). Political views, therefore, brought with them less sense of
importance to the person than skills in other ways of performing social identity and demonstrating
wit. Non-elite political passion rarely had an audience and was for this reason suppressed – unless
special channels were painstakingly organised for it, such as by trade-unions and communist parties.
These observations hint that one factor for the great rise of populist politics since the late 1980s – and
even more intensively in recent years – may have been the transition of media to more interactive
forms: not only social media and the internet (blogs, forums, news comments sections) but also the
earlier spread of cable TV and political talk radio.
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Benefiting from the new access to communication, former passive audiences could start to rehearse
“knowing” politics and to practice having an opinion. I suggest that a socio-technical shift has
fostered a new wave of “cognitive mobilisation”, expanding on the one identified in the 1960-70s
(Inglehart 1977). Thanks to it new constituencies are being politically emancipated and can enter the
scope of electoral interests as independent subjects. Since they are likely to be impartial to the elite
sensibilities attaching earlier empowered groups to the liberal political order, these newcomers also
happen to be more open for illiberal political projects.
The advent of interactive media does not in itself bring about politicisation of its users. Politics is just
one domain of articulative identity-making, and it may remain excluded for a long time from a
communicative community‟s interest or decency norms. Rather, the new communication
infrastructure creates the conditions for the possibility of political identity-making and for emergent
dynamics independent of identities prescribed by the system.
The claim here is one of a degree. I argue that until recently the hegemonic weight of political
discourses promoted by elites and the system was much greater than it is today. By “the system” here
I have in view something quite heterogeneous: state institutions, media, parties from the established
political spectrum, trade unions, even, after a certain point in time, new social movements. It depends
on the national political context how diverse the discourses circulated by this heterogeneous complex
are – in a liberal democratic society they would include both right and left politics, a civil rights
movement, etc. In the post-1989 Bulgaria they were dominated by the intellectual anti-communist
reaction in all of its variety. What leads me to unite a range of positions under one term (“the system”)
for this analysis is that the politically opinionated strata that fill in the positions of the system typically
share some core set of values and convictions, stemming from their common privileged position. An
important part of this shared core is the post-WWII consensus on political liberalism, trust in the
working of democratic principles, deference to scientific knowledge and to institutional authority –
the tenets that today seem under attack.
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Stirring up popular political engagement from non-elite positions was not impossible in the past but
had to overcome much higher obstacles.
viii
If a common person‟s views happened to go against the
discourses fed and reinforced by the system, their otherwise slow, short-distance, family-to-family
and pub-table propagation would be dampened even sooner as they confronted one politically shy
audience after another. In this way dissent from the dominant discourses would typically remain
fragmented and on the level of everyday dissatisfaction. In such a setup of society, if certain
discursive formation holds a monopoly over the systemic discourse, this is enough to maintain it as a
hegemonic regime for the entire society. Importantly, even if a political entrepreneur came along and
tried to mobilise counter-hegemonic sentiments, they would find that their potential supporters had no
practice of expressing such sentiments and would have difficulties identifying with them (cf. Mudde
2004:553-554).
Circulation of discourse and access to discourse
There is an important nuance to my argument here. New media are significant not so much for
democratising the production of discourse – i.e., giving an opportunity for marginalised perspectives
to be heard – but for democratising the circulation of discourse. Both are achieved by enabling new
groups to express their thoughts before an audience – by calling into a TV or radio program,
maintainging a blog, posting on Facebook or commenting on Twitter. Yet, discourse circulation is the
process crucial for shaping discourse-social identities. I define it as the iterative practice of
articulating and rearticulating a discourse within a population of social actors communicating with
each other. From the perspective of a single actor the circulation of discursive statements is the cycle
of their consumption (i.e. articulating them with/in one‟s discursive habitus), re-production (which
now differs from the initial input) and re-consumption (of a variety of modified, possibly mutually
incongruous, successors that had been re-produced by others in the community). Each of these steps
forces one to make identity-asserting choices.
The opportunity to intensify circulation of a particular type of discursive content in a social group or
communicative community is what I call access to discourse for that group. Access to discourse is
about the multivalent process of its appropriation, which includes the growth in confidence and in the
ability of using it. As discursive social actors “exercise” the discourse, they work out creative and
diverse ways to employ it for varied aims and needs. Beyond beginning to be “comfortable” with it
(e.g. with taking a public stand on political matters – in the case of what I referred to as “political
discourse”), they gradually incorporate it in their identity (e.g. being an “engaged citizen”) and may
become invested in it.
The argument advanced in the preceding section can now be formulated in the following way: the
majority population of established liberal-democratic societies previously had access to those
discourses that are propagated by “the system” (in all its variety and complexity). New interactive
media have democratised access to political discourse and opened space for independent dynamics in
identity-making.
Let us go back to the preposition that a rise of populisms is the by-product of an ongoing second wave
of what quantitative sociologists of modernisation have called “cognitive mobilisation”. By
reconceptualising Inglehart‟s notion, the first wave of cognitive mobilisation can be understood in a
theoretically more complex way as the mass attainment of access to the discourses of modern national
society (which in the West was also espousing a liberal consensus). Broadcast media began
emancipating individuals from organisations of primary political identity-making (parties, churches,
local communities...) by making its audiences more intimately aware of alternatives, on a national
scale. While widening horizons this new knowledge was itself centrally filtered, and thus, likely more
elite-dominated rather than less. In effect, what happened thanks to education and television in the
post-war period is that larger share of the population joined the discourse-producing elites and “the
system‟s” national hegemony.
On the contrary, the impact of interactive media today is to shift the balance over the volume of
circulation of discourse, decreasing in relative terms the weight of the elite component. By purely
dynamic means spaces of non-systemic potential are sustained, where politicised identities may begin
to be appropriated. This is a point of opportunity for the sort of political repertoires typically analysed
9
as “populist”. I call this a genuine populist moment, in the sense that a deeper dynamic made this type
of repertoires effective and advantageous.
This argument is a different one from the now commonly made claims that social media lets populist
leaders bypass the filter of mainstream media (Brubaker 2017:23); that a populist style of politics is
better suited to the exigencies of the contemporary mediascape (Moffitt 2016); or, more generally,
that a changing relationship between public, media and politics leads to a “mediatisation of politics”
(Manucci 2017). It is also different from the “echo chamber” metaphor claiming polarisation of
politics due to a fragmentation of the public sphere (Sunstein 2017). My claim is that politicised
identities which are less closely attached to discourses of the elites and the system are able to emerge
today thanks to the articulatory practices afforded by interactive media.
It is worth noting that the reclaimed spaces of “independent” discursive dynamics are not necessarily
populist or anti-liberal. Theoretically, we should expect diverse formations to emerge if there were no
other factors involved. It is true that those that did not go against hegemonic elite sensibilities would
likely not be recognised at all, while those that did – have a good chance of being marked as
“populist” (Stavrakakis 2017:1-4).
ix
Still, the ubiquitous presence of far right, conservative or anti-
liberal mobilisations around the world is a sign that additional structured dynamics and dependencies
are at play. Certainly, the impact of the elites (systemic or new “populist” ones) over the masses has
not vanished, rather the relationship is transforming. These topics will be explored in future research,
taking advantage of the extended PDT framework developed here.
The significance of elite actors and strategic production of discourses is easily demonstrated for the
examples, described earlier on, of Bulgarian popular mobilisations. The local debate took up tropes
from the world-wide “anti-gender movement” (Kovats 2017), while many political actors jumped on
the bandwagon in a typically populist manner, with the hope to regain some political relevance. Yet,
just a decade earlier the ratification of similar documents did not galvanise public resistance or, for
that matter, draw much interest. There are many factors for that change, but a significant one is that
recently large swathes of Bulgarians who do not belong to the customary “protester” crowd (anti-
corruption, pro-European, mostly liberal and/or Green, highly educated) have been taking up the
discursive/behavioural components of being “an active citizen” concerned with the nation‟s future.
They were trying these new articulations, first of all, in online communities.
Conclusions
The dramatic transformations of the 21st century in national political dynamics require that we
develop new analytical approaches to understand them. The paradigm of post-foundational discourse
theory (PDT) is a powerful tool to conceptualise political change at a deeper level. While its native
domain is that of political ontology, it is useful to extend its apparatus with concepts that reach across
to the ontic domain of politics as action. To this end, I introduced here the concepts of the discursive
social actor, discourse circulation and access to discourse.
With the concept of the discursive social actor we can begin to look into a post-foundational
discursive world where the subject reacts variably and heterogeneously to a complex landscape of
polycentric discourse production. In PDT such dynamics have been relegated until now to the
theoretical black boxes of heterogeneity and contingency. While there will always be a remainder to
any description of the social, and these concepts are designed to capture it, their necessary scalability
makes them at the same time just too easy to stretch wider than strictly needed, enabling, in this way,
unambitious sociology. The concept of the discursive social actor was constructed here to assist in
limiting the scope of their use. It was formulated as PDT‟s discursive subject together with its
particular history of hegemonic articulations and its embeddedness in relations of structure and power.
It introduces an emphasis on consistency and inertia to PDT with regards to the subject‟s search for
sutured identity. Such a push towards consistency was stipulated on the basis of the regularity in
dispersion that we expect from any discursive system and therefore also from the subject‟s
articulatory practice.
Of interest in this chapter was the corollary that what is significant for a social actors‟ identity-making
is articulatory practice, i.e. the ongoing process of attempting, succeeding and failing in making links
10
with and between discursive elements. Practicing articulation of political discourses gradually makes
actors comfortable with a politicised identity.
Zooming out from the single actor led me to the notion of discourse circulation, the iterative practice
of articulating and rearticulating a discourse within a population of communicating social actors. A
discursive formation, as well as the identifications related to it, is produced, made relevant, and,
ultimately, made hegemonic through discourse circulation.
For a variety of contingent historical reasons the circulation of some types of discourse in certain
populations is more intensive than in others. To be able to pinpoint these dynamics analytically I
introduced the notion of access to discourse. Access to a discourse by a given population is about the
multivalent process of appropriation of the discourse through articulatory practice i.e. about the
intensification of its circulation. This process leads to more ease, confidence and skill in evoking the
discourse; to its inner diversification and, thus, to more possibilities for its tactical use and more
reasons for subjects to become invested in it. Access to a discursive formation makes a discursive
social actor able to “think” on new issues and perspectives.
Benefiting from the “extended PDT” toolbox laid out above I explored the implications for the
analysis of populism. I contend that what we are observing today is not simply more populist politics
but rather a retreat of the taken-for-granted values, knowledge and politics of the established liberal
democratic order. A PDT-based perspective allows me to see Western electoral democracy not as the
best, if imperfect, organisation of society (as many analysts do) which will naturally be supported by a
population of free citizens – but as a hegemonic order sustained by an elite consensus. I claimed here
that what kept liberal hegemony stable in the post-war era in Western societies was an enforced
monopoly over the political discourse. In the last decades the monopoly was lost and we are now
observing liberal hegemony being ruptured as alternative popular identities have the opportunity to
emerge. In post-1989 Eastern Europe the discursive monopoly had a shorter duration, less
comprehensive elite support, and a much shallower hegemonic penetration (cf. Dawson and Hanley
2016). Still, I believe there is a structural analogy from which we can benefit in order to gain insight
into the political shifts both in the East and the West.
I argued that the rise of populist politics and the retreat of liberal values hinge on the democratisation
of access to political discourse, or, in other words, on the spread of politicised identity. Gaining such
an access is not tied anymore to exposure and participation in the political discourses hegemonic
among the elites. Therefore, we are at a genuine populist moment where alternative politics not
supported by “the system” can easily gain traction. I suggested that this change is rooted in an
ongoing socio-technological transformation engendered by the nature of new interactive media and
their recent mass spread.
Author Biography
Nikola A. Venkov holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Sofia (2017) and a PhD in
Mathematics from the University of Nottingham (2009). He has been a Fellow at the Centre for
Advanced Study Sofia and at the Leibnitz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig. His work
ranges from theoretical sociology to engaged anthropology and even socially engaged art (co-founder
of Duvar Kolektiv). His principle interests are in advancing Laclau's Discourse Theory, applying it to
understand power and marginalisation, the mechanics of politics and coexistence in the city, and
lately, new political forms and propaganda.
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i
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, the editor of this volume, Michael
Kranert, and my colleague Georgi Medarov for very engaged readings of an earlier draft of this
chapter. It also benefited enormously from feedback received at the conference “New Discourses of
Populsim and Nationalism”, June 2018, Edinburgh and at a workshop “How to Get your Paper
Published in an International Journal”, June 2019, Zagreb, organised by the Journal of East European
Politics and Societies. Special thanks to Hannah Oswald-Rose for making sure my endeavours in
English are at least partially readable.
ii
Note that I am not interested here in Laclau‟s (2005) own analysis of populist logic.
iii
The presentation of these developments is here necessarily condensed. There are a
number of reports available in English (Gotev 2018; Stanoeva 2018; Smilova 2018) and two research
publications (Squire 2018; Darakchi 2019). The mobilisation in Bulgaria falls in the scope of the so-
called “anti-gender movements” (Kovats 2017).
iv
Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000) and Laclau (2009) are further good sources for the
beginner; for a detailed recent treatment see Marttila (2015b).
v
A good illustration of this is the tension between the identifications as a Bulgarian
and a European. These aspects are sometimes felt to be complementary (Bulgarians are today
recognised citizens of the European Union), and sometimes in a strong opposition. The guilt of “not
being truly European” or “not European enough” is integral to the very constitution of the modern
Bulgarian national identity since the 18-19th century. Until this day it remains penetrated by a
subversive “Oriental heritage” in mentality and values.
vi
These acts are nicely apportioned during a chain of exchanges in a Facebook
discussion. On the other hand, a philosopher writing a research chapter goes through the entire
process by themselves, consciously playing it over and over again in their mind, and adjusting it until
they are confident it is a coherent ensemble of articulations.
vii
In the Bulgarian context a prime feature of cable TV channels are the talk
programmes with open phone lines where the audience would call in to share with the host their views
and, often, to vent their rage. The Romanian film “12:08 East of Bucharest” by Corneliu Porumboiu
beautifully depicts such a call-in programme. They are possibly homologous to the political talk
radios in the US that emerged after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, however, without the
editorial screening of callers. It might be that the well-established censorship on call-ins in the
14
Western equivalents of programmes with audience interaction has effected a temporal drag on the
formation of system-independent popular subjects.
viii
Bringing an anti-system discourse to the stage of smooth propagation often depended
on the allegiance of an elite group (revolutionary intellectuals, students, local teachers, etc) that
wielded the cultural capital and social technology to achieve that. Sometimes it also required the
systematic organisation of spaces of discussion (clubs, clandestine committees, reading seminars,
sports societies, etc).
ix
“Very often the movements, parties, leaders and discourses under examination seem
to have nothing or very little in common [other than that] they seem to cause surprise. [...]Populism is
seen as violating or transgressing an established order of how politics is properly, rationally and
professionally done.” (Stavrakakis 2017:2)
