The intellectual outside: Anti-intellectualism and the subject of populist discourses in Australian newspapers

Abstract

A discourse analysis of anti-intellectualism in Australian newspapers, this study proceeds from the philosophical and theoretical assumptions of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory, integrating into that framework several methodological tools for close textual analysis. Focusing on four interrelated anti-intellectual themes drawn from a corpus of 60 newspaper articles, it examines the discursive struggles that have hegemonized some anti-intellectualist meanings and excluded others. Placing these struggles into the historical and political context of the 1990s and 2000s, newspaper anti-intellectualist discourse can be understood as one articulation of an emergent populism that aimed to reconstruct a traditional Australian social space. However, it is shown to be the overdetermination of intellectualism as difference or differing – by virtue of its very formal structure – that makes it stand over and above other articulations, such as anti-refugee, anti-gay and anti-Aboriginal articulations. Thus, rather than being a contingent articulation, intellectualism is shown to be highly prone to disarticulation, and thus presents as a signifier peculiarly suited to strategic deployment as ‘other’ in the constitution of a populist Australian subject.