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Political communication, social transformation and democratic alternatives: critique of the Podemos experiment

PSOE leader Pedro Sanchez, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera and Vice President of the Spanish government and Partido Popular Soraya Saenz de Santamaria at a live television debate. Demotix/Oscar Fuentes. All rights reserved.Admittedly, the Podemos phenomenon
is a unique case in political science and highly deserves the attention and
recognition it has generated.

At the very least, the
Podemos project has achieved the opening up of a mediated framework situated in
deliberative democracy and the general interest, the common, alongside the
widely circulated renewal of 15-M discourses.

All of these aspects are,
I believe, undeniable. The
question posed here is whether this political
experiment will come to be limited by a theory and political practice that is
by any standard debatable, as concerns its concept of communication as well as
the struggles that relate to capital and class identity. That said, we begin by
recognizing two fundamental contributions that Podemos has made.

Firstly, Podemos has
given a central role to political communication, historically a weakness in
left-wing political movements. Podemos’ electoral programme included important
measures concerning the transformation (and not a commodified, market-oriented
transformation) of the symbolic sphere. What the party promises is a political
culture for the citizenry that features active participation of the population
and an institutionally renewed democracy, marked by transparency; at its best,
the Podemos project articulates communication and culture from what may be
called a ‘transversal’ (or cross-hatched) conception.

Secondly, Podemos has,
moreover, innovated from the point of view of what may be called ‘technopolitics’;
that is, it has employed forms of dialogue with the citizenry mediated by a creative
and intelligent use of social networks in a manner suitable to a conception of
democracy 4.0, or what Cava has called ‘Populism 2.0’.

This approach broaches
not only a different reading of class composition but is further virtuous for
its new strategies and vernaculars that connect with the rising generation of
internet-istas and the contemporary
cyber culture.

That is, Podemos’
implicit form of institutional action relates a conception of proactive
endeavour and the Internet citizen in a manner that fully recognizes the
necessity of defending this cooperative space. Podemos promises politics that
are not ‘mercantile’– that is, distinctly not commodified and market-driven–in
order to appropriate the use of virtual spaces in pursuit of the project of
institutionally-oriented communication on behalf of stakeholders.

On materiality and the mediation of political work

While recognizing both
of these contributions from the party’s emergence, nevertheless limitations
follow from the Podemos experiment.

Political communication is not only a question of employing
mediums but also of mediations.
That is, despite the upsides of its project noted
above, the mediacentricism of Podemos is the Achilles heel of
a strategy designed with apparent initial success. The mediacentric approach
has relegated the Podemos movement to a lesser role at the moment, surpassed by a
force of the political right; namely, the party that goes by the name Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’) that enjoys the
support of the information sector corporations that dominate the public sphere.

To mortgage all
political communication to media is a mistaken
deal from a perspective informed by the political economy of communication. The possibilities
of political communication on television depend precisely on undermining the hegemony
of capital, which imposes limits that are very difficult to exceed, given the
power of vested interests.

The power of mediation
demands a strategy that is both inside and outside the mediums–a very tall
order, given the interpolated subjects of discourses who have been mediatized
by the flow of information that is, in turn, dominated by the conjoined power
of mainstream media organs.

In this view, Podemos’ reading
of Laclau’s populist theory of communication politics results in an error. The
evolution of these events in Spanish politics demonstrates that to think the
constitution of a new political subject can arise from within the hegemonic
situation of media is to end up with a mediacentric reductionism; a
reductionism with too little in the way of politics and still less that is
transformational. If capitalism depends on its political-affective
constructions, it does not follow that indetermination of the socio-discursive
field would be absolute or liberating; still less if we analyse the hyper-concentrated
structure of power in the journalism industry in countries like Spain.

The floating signifiers presuppose and demand political
subjects who would know how to swim.
We know
that the idea of the political centre, on this view, is so diffuse as to assume
all space as fluid and mutable; and for the same reason, a fluid, mutable
“centre” presents the propensity to shipwreck subjects who move themselves into
this space (as in for example, the displacement of Podemos voters to Ciudadanos). The discourse and the notion of a public or a people (el pueblo) are by definition opaque and both defer the theory of
why events (do, do not) happen, as these come to bear on Podemos.

Allow me to clarify. To
think that political identities are not determined by economic relations and
concrete social facts–that is, to think that these are basically discursively
modelled–disables the transformation possibilities of new subjectivities as
well as for historic change.

By contrast, in being
mindful of material constraints, critical theory demonstrates that subjectivity
and change are all about a process of production and something more than
cultural democracy via the market place or the free exchange of signifiers.

Language and work, hand
and brain are historically connected. It is not possible to disentangle the
universe of discourse from the necessary conditions of lives lived in common. In other words, a
process of change is not possible without ourselves facing up to the
materiality that mediates all theory and all social action. To avoid being
reductively deterministic in deploying a conception of the popular reliant on
inconclusiveness, there must be anchors in the real. This is the ill-considered
difference in the thinking of Gramsci that arises via Laclau’s interpretation.
As I understand it, Laclau lacks a diagnostic within a structural vision; more
Bourdieu, please, and less semiotic-centricism. As it stands, Laclau promotes a
new idealism about autonomy and the indeterminancy of the symbolic—and he does
so largely as if there are no structures of class and rules of the game of
access to symbolic capital.

This lack of reflexivity
leaves the mediated operation of floating signifiers blowing in the wind without
consistency, vulgar, not held in common, enveloped in the banality of the new kitsch. The reliance on floating
signifiers ushers in a game of thrones proper to the world of spectacle, where
creativity and the invention of other imagined worlds is only possible in discourse;
that is, in a performative sense, without changes to reality, without
intervening in the literal bases and materials of the life world.

The calculated ambiguity
of language, the indetermination of the empty floating signifier, tends toward accommodations
to the current moment and does so through mere tactics. As in the 1980s,
the political communication of Podemos shares the fetishism of commercial
communication that
appealed to brands and public relations to resolve the structural crisis of capitalism.

What is surprising is
that many intellectuals of the left share such a vision of pan-communicationism. This is a vision that has denied an idea fundamental
to the whole emancipatory project: to wit, submission to the belief that the
pure signifier and the logic of symbolic interchange alone open the way to
universal equivalence. For
this reason, we say that Podemos participates in
an impoverished understanding of the relation between theory and reality, between
communication strategy and practical politics.

Looking towards the future

It is a moment to stop
to think and at the same time, to mobilize hearts and minds. Critical theory is
the thing that illuminates the clues, connects and modifies perspectives, monitors
new cognitive horizons, captures in its essential complexity the marvel of the
life held in common. And critical theory demands that we remember that all
connection, all relational systems are by definition contradictory. Moreover,
relations are not only imaginary, not simply ideals, but are also the products
of experiences mediated by power interests within situations in which the
position of the observer is unequal and not equivalent. As Gramsci teaches, it
is not possible to think “outside”, since the myth of exteriority is not
possible.

The study of long-term
historical dynamics permits analysis of contemporary problems with specified
criteria and in terms of relationships. As Mandel warned, we should not
disconnect the history of above (i.e., by, for, and of the ruling elites) from
the structures of the history of the same as seen from below. Near the start of the
Gramscian image of articulation of doubly articulated power, the challenge
arises to systematize and to develop Marxism as a scientific theory, as
practices of social dynamics, as objective and subjective conscience in
addition to the ‘pressing ideological unconscious’.

If articulated
beyond the common sense of Laclau, a liberating mediation could offer another
form of urgently needed theoretical practice, including as outlined above, a
bid to overcome the following longstanding defects in left-wing movements: 

a.    –  The technocratic tradition
of Marxism that has privileged the economic factor alongside the development of
productive factors as the crux of collective transformation; and

b.    –  The superstructural reading
that, conversely, exiles and forgets economic conditions and the relations of
production, a tendency that has triumphed in North America and England in their
pursuit of cultural studies.

What
do we have? The return of history to politicize the interpolation of the figure
of the intellectual and historical commitment bursts through the sociology of rhetorical
deconstruction, the linguistic turn and the hypersymbolization of
micropragmatism, developments implicit in cultural studies. What
does it all mean? In this place, it is vital to transcend the
absence of essential theory, beginning with the critique of the capitalist
unconscious that today dominates thinking by positing the false dichotomy of
individualism/collectivism. Beginning with the basic, driving idea in Marx that
social facts of thought, such as a society’s scriptures, are of and within
exploitation and not something else, presents a start to a new project. Only
beginning with the radical materiality of this originally Marxist logic is it
possible to comprehend unconscious ideology–the fear of having fear–a common
feeling for all subjects who have asked themselves ‘what is to be done’ in
times of epochal change.

In
the towns and cities of Spain, the people do not await a communication-oriented
response to their problems, but rather alternative transformations. Mediated
products have a rapid obsolescence. The problem is that they do not enable the
landscape of hope for some. Now the media products are fast-fading and the
floating signifiers do not serve any more. There is a need for setting up the
return of the real and the concrete, with all its thickness and complexities.
Perhaps after the readjustment of the media and a reduction to innocuous
flickering onscreen, some will rediscover a fundamental principle. That at least we hope, for the good of
all, for the common good.

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