Test2

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.