Empty Signifier Research Articles

Towards an intersectional approach to populism: comparative perspectives from Finland and India

ABSTRACT Building on a comparison between the Finns Party in Finland, and the BJP in India, we propose to understand populist mobilisation through its core discursive sequences, rather than by relying upon traditional left-right or radical-moderate axes of analysis. Developing an original methodology, we suggest to classify populist radical right (PRR) movements depending on whether they include or exclude individuals on the basis of their religious, ethnic, class, caste, age, or gender identity, or several of these axes at the same time. Our comparative analysis buttresses Laclau's idea that PRR discourses across different cultural contexts center around the concept of the people as the ‘empty signifier’, which can be filled with any specific content. However, our intersectional analysis also reveals PRR discourses to be complex constructs, building on rather similar intersections, but whose meaning and appeal vary across political and cultural settings.

On “progressive neoliberalism” from a discursive perspective: “Progress” as an empty signifier

On “progressive neoliberalism” from a discursive perspective: “Progress” as an empty signifier

Populism versus the people: How citizen's social representations of home destabilize national populism's territorial vision

Can understanding social representations of home unpack the central empty signifier of populism—the “true people”? Nationalist exclusionary forms of populism use home, birthplace, and born and bred narratives to frame sections of the population as Other. “Go Home” vans in the United Kingdom, Donald Trump's use of birther rhetoric during his previous presidential candidacy and the Sweden Democrats mobilization of folkhemmet (people's home) to question migrant welfare contributions together illustrate how nationalist populism works. Populism uses threat and insecurity, related to home, to make hegemonic a protectionist and reified worldview of home as stable, bounded and historically continuous. This article examines how populist rhetoric of home compares to people's actual social representations of home. Using cross-European interviews (N = 76) we find the dynamics of home relate to three social representations—home as a threatened space, home as birthplace, and home as a lifespan journey. These are articulated through a dialogical self engaged in transnational and intergenerational dialogue. The evidence of dynamic, dialogical, and relationally continuous representations of home points to the value of further examination of alternative social representations of home. This articulation could counter protectionist rhetoric associated with both vertical (ordinary/elite) and horizontal (people/migrant) dimensions of nationalist populism.

The subjective experience of recovery from psychosis in an acute mental health inpatient setting

ABSTRACT Background: Experiences of recovery from psychosis have been well explored but not with service users in the acute stages of psychosis. This study aimed to explore the subjective experiences of recovery from psychosis from the perspective of service users receiving acute mental health inpatient care. Methods: Ten participants undertook a semi-structured interview examining their experiences of recovery from psychosis during acute mental health inpatient care. Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Five superordinate themes emerged: “My future is just being ripped out in front of me”: Living with psychosis is a struggle; “Would you want to be in here?”: Traumatic experience of being in hospital; “I know roughly why I got ill anyway and what caused this”: A journey towards reaching an understanding; Recovery/Rehabilitation/Recuperation: A process of evolution; and “You need all the help you can get”: Facilitators of Recovery. Conclusions: This study highlighted that mental health inpatient settings are not settings where everyone can be in recovery or approaching recovery. For some participants, recovery appeared to be an empty signifier, and is a word used by services but does not necessarily correspond with their experiences of mental health inpatient settings.

The Dislocation of the Empty Signifier Freedom as a Tool in Global Political Struggles: A Case Study on RT’s Mini-Series How to Watch the News

Freedom is approached in this article as an empty signifier and as an object of discursive struggle, from a discourse-theoretical perspective. The hegemonic centrality of freedom in Western discourse and identity construction is acknowledged, but at the same time the article argues that hegemony is never total and all-encompassing. In other words, hegemonic constructions are seen as always particular, with their universal claims displaying cracks and gaps. Especially when different discursive communities (e.g. the West and Russia) engage in global discursive struggles, these cracks become visible through dislocatory strategies. The second part of the article then addresses a case study about how this discursive struggle is organised in practice, focussing on the RT mini-series How to Watch the News, which prominently features Slavoj Žižek. The discourse-theoretical analysis demonstrates how the mini-series deconstructs the Western articulation of freedom, in three ways, namely by showing the failures of Western liberal democracies, and the divided nature of Western societies, and by critiquing the individualistic articulation of freedom. The article concludes by pointing to the ambiguities related to the centrality of freedom, the role of RT and the role of Žižek as public intellectual.

Equivalence and Antagonism in Marx’s Theory of Value

The centrality of abstract labor in the Marxian theory of value seems to imply an essentialist position incompatible with Ernesto Laclau’s poststructuralist theory of hegemony. However, this essay argues that the Marxian value theory—in the interpretation offered by Moishe Postone—is in fact very much compatible with Laclau’s focus on social contingency insofar as it understands abstract labor as a framework of social relations. This raises the question: if abstract-labor equivalence does not derive from a metaphysical essence, then how does it emerge as a socially constructed universality? The theory of value already anticipated Laclau’s logics of difference, equivalence, and the empty signifier, and Laclau’s work on antagonism can strengthen the argument that abstract-labor equivalence does not involve essentialism. The central point of this essay is thus to interpret abstract labor as a contingent hegemonic formation, constituted upon the antagonistic exclusion of directly useful work.

'Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste': The Impact of COVID-19 on Legal Education

The COVID-19 pandemic represents the most significant rupture to universities since the advent of neoliberalism. In Australia, the economic shock was brought about primarily by a drop in international student fees, border closures, plus efforts from the Federal government to keep public universities from accessing financial support. In this paper I discuss the impacts of COVID-19 on legal education. What concerns me in particular is the rhetoric under which massive structural changes have been justified in response to the pandemic. Most commonly, university leaders have sought to externalise the problem and adopt the language of unforeseeability, emergency and necessity. Changes to learning and teaching have also been described as an ‘opportunity’ to re-examine outdated pedagogical practices and forms of assessment. While not denying the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, this paper argues that current changes in higher education are not a break from the past but a continuation of the neoliberal project. To support this argument my paper proceeds in three parts. In part one I develop the argument that the idea of a university is an empty signifier that changes over time. Attention is given to the role of neoliberalism in shaping the contemporary university and learning and teaching. In part two I develop a theory of crisis capitalism in conversation with scholars of political science and political economy. Crisis, from this perspective, represents an opportunity through which unpopular reforms could be promoted under the language of necessity. With this theoretical framework in place, part three critically examines five recent changes that are relevant to learning and teaching: job losses and casualization; cuts to programs; finding new markets for international students; online teaching; and changes to assessment. While not denying the scale of the challenge that confronts higher education, I argue that university leaders are using the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis to push through unpopular reforms. I substantiate this argument by comparing statements prior and during the pandemic and through a reading of how leaders have used the language of necessity. Ultimately, I concluded that Rahm Emanuel’s dictum that one should ‘never let a crisis go to waste’ is the governing mantra in universities today and will have a profound impact on learning and teaching for decades to come.

Contesting Welfare Discourses in Post-New Order Indonesia

This article analyses the contestation of 'welfare' discourses in Indonesia since the fall of the New Order, employing the discourse theory offered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001 [1985]). Its main argument is that welfare is an “empty signifier”, the meaning of which may shift or change as a consequence of the unfinished discursive contestations of various subject positions. This article identifies four central discourses, or master signifiers, between 1998 and 2015 that serve as “nodal points” in the hegemonisation of welfare: "Social Safety Net", "Creative Innovation" versus "Electoral Strategy", "Sustainable Development", and "Right of the People and Constitutional Obligation of the State". The dominant and hegemonic meaning of welfare, understood here as a “nodal point”, is only temporary; it is partially fixed, while at the same time experiencing ongoing discursive contestation. It is, is being, and will be subjected to unending dislocation.

Discourse, concepts, ideologies

AbstractTwo branches of discourse studies, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse theory (DT), could benefit through extending their critical focus and incorporating findings and methodologies of neighbouring disciplines. While indebted to the attentiveness of CDA to ordinary language, ideology studies have by contrast developed interpretative, non-judgmental analytical frameworks that explore the many-faceted features of ideology, power, and the political. In turn, the macro-focus of DT on binary distinctions, articulatory equivalences, and the construction of hegemony through empty signifiers, overlooks the complex internal conceptual morphology that produces multiple ideological vocabularies. Through a layered filtering of texts, utterances, and linguistic intensities, ideological micro-morphology reveals processes of semantic decontestation in order to defend, alter or criticize political thought-practices. It illuminates the complex interrelationship between word and concept and accepts fantasies as ineluctable and decodable features of communal life. By reaching out beyond their disciplinary confines, the interplay of these parallel approaches could enrich the scholarly understanding of the political.

“Symbolic photographs” as floating and empty signifiers

Abstract The article discusses the use of “symbolic photographs” – images in news reporting which have no direct connection to reported events – in news reporting. Such images deviate not only from the self-professed journalistic norm of factual reporting but also fundamentally challenge the act of civic eyewitnessing constitutive for visual journalism. Concepts of floating and empty signifiers from Discourse Theory are applied to “symbolic photographs” to analyse their ambivalent act of signification, their particular mode of iconicity and, by extension, the journalistic and political implications of their repetitive use.

The Coronavirus and the Future of Liberalism

The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly reshaped debates on the globalorder, democratic politics and the liberal mode of governing societies. Somehave compared the virus to the “ultimate empty signifier”, which alloweddifficult ideological groups to fill it with their own securitizations, creating inan instant a plethora of political otherings. For IR realists, the suddencollapse of cross-border movement and other privileges of the globalizedliberal elite came as a vindication of their long-cherished argument: thenation state remains the key actor in international politics, and the post-national world had largely been a utopian liberal illusion. Right-wingnationalist populists have been saying the same thing but in a differentlanguage and were apt to make COVID-19 instrumental to their purposes.Thus, Viktor Orbán quickly linked it to the agenda of migration and used thestate of exception as a pretext to further limit the democratic process inHungary. However, as students of populism have also stressed, the populistresponse to the pandemic has been far from uniform. In a yet broaderperspective, while some democratic governments enacted draconianmeasures in response to the pandemic, suspending basic individualfreedoms, some dictatorships like Belarus experienced a sudden “flow ofliberalism“, refusing to cut down on both economic activity and cross-border movement. This special issue focuses on comparing the liberal andilliberal reactions (both domestic and international) to the pandemic,looking into how it has affected the democratic and non-democratic formsof governance; examining where the responses have been similar oroverlapping, i.e. where COVID-19 has practically blurred or erased theborder between liberal and illiberal politics; looking into how different typesof regimes and political groupings have borrowed new elements and stylesof politics, e.g. in which circumstances populist or autocratic politicianssuddenly seemed more liberal than their liberal and democraticcounterparts; and investigating the ramifications of these changes for theliberal components of the globalized international order.

‘There's something about sustainability’: The discursive dynamics of policy reform

AbstractSustainability is now among the hegemonic discourses used by government to construct problems and policy beyond the environmental domain. Detached from its origins, it functions as an ‘empty signifier’ whose flexibility and ambiguity can be harnessed in policy‐making and political debate. This article uses an Australian case study to show how sustainability discourse was mobilized to justify reversing a previous decision and raise the age at which the publicly funded aged pension could be accessed. Overall, it contributes to understanding how hegemonic intervention is accomplished by tracing discursive processes over time and amongst different texts, helping to identify shifts and turning points in trajectories of policy reform and political debate. I conclude by arguing that the use of sustainability discourse warrants particular critical attention because it signals broader difficulties in imagining alternative collective futures and considering the costs and consequences arising from current arrangements.

Noble Polish Sexuality and the Corrupted European Body

This article attends to the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish political campaigns. Locating current political debates in a cultural-historical context of long-established hierarchical divides, it conceives of gender and sexuality as ‘empty signifiers’ deployed in political struggles (for hegemony) over notions of civic responsibility, good citizenship and articulations of Europeanness. Similarly, it takes ‘Europeanness’ as an empty signifier, without any essential meaning, arguing that these signifiers are key to understanding recent mobilizations around moral frontiers in Polish politics. Illustrative examples serve to elaborate how LGBT rights and sex education are instrumentalized among self-proclaimed liberals as well as rightwing nationalists, seeking to guarantee the moral integrity of the nation according to an antagonistic logic. On both sides of the political divide, we witness a self-orientalizing positioning towards the European ‘core’, whether phrased in terms of sexual modernity or Christian civilization.

Writing Philosophy from the Periphery: Lixing as Foundational Empty Signifier in Tang Junyi\u2019s Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason

This article adopts Ernesto Laclau’s notion of empty signifier to discuss Tang Junyi’s uses of the concept of lixing (‘reason’ or ‘rationality’) in his seminal work Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason (文化意識與道德理性; 1958). My dual goal, in doing so, is to bring to light the relations of power constitutive of the text’s discourse on lixing and relate them to the problematic of writing philosophy from the periphery. I argue that in this work, lixing’s dual referents—as a translation of ‘reason’ and as denoting a Neo-Confucian faculty to intuit moral truths—allow Tang to inscribe himself in a philosophical field designed to exclude non-Western philosophies, while at the same time enabling him to symbolically relegate Euro-American philosophy to a peripheral position by filling in the notion of lixing with a content that legitimizes his own agenda. Tang could thus authorize his Confucian metaphysics by presenting it as the true content of lixing, understood not only as a universal faculty enabling humanity’s access to all that is universal, but also as a condition sine qua non of for one’s inclusion in the philosophical game. By attempting to co-opt the empty signifier (lixing/reason) for his own purposes, I argue Tang employs one of two possible strategies that can be adopted by those situated at the periphery in order to oppose the hegemon; one that leaves the structure of power relations intact but working in favor of the periphery.

Empathy, More or Less: Scaling Intermediary Experiences of Emotion and Affect in Innovation

AbstractQuestions of scale permeate current approaches to empathy in applied human‐centered work—and especially design thinking—but they have remained largely unquestioned. What is more, empathy has become an empty signifier, and empathizing is often a near‐formulaic and pro‐forma endeavor. To catalyze a reworking of the concept, in this paper I synthesize what has been said so far of empathy and its role in design and innovation, and I take stock of what these contributions point to. I ask: “How can we think of empathy as a scalar phenomenon and thus re‐scale it in innovation?” I offer some illustrative, if unresolved, tensions with empathy I have had in my own ethnographic work with a robotics start‐up, and I conclude the article with a series of provocations with the hope they will be taken up further.

Populismin väkevöityminen

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan populismin ideologista väkevöitymistä populistisen radikaalioikeiston herättämänä kysymyksenä. Ernesto Laclaun käsittein kuvataan aluksi argumentaatioltaan heikoksi mainitun populistisen retoriikan liikettä muodostavaa voimaa. Laclaun kuvaamat ”tyhjät” ja ”kelluvat” merkitsijät voivat panostua myös ideologisesti liikkeen luonnetta muuttavalla tavalla. Populismin ytimeltään heikko ideologisuus altistaa uusiin ideologisiin linkityksiin ja panosten väkevöitymiseen sen omassa retoriikassa. Siten ideologiaa ei ymmärretä vain populismia jälkikäteen vahvistavaksi aatteeksi, vaan sen merkitsijöitä muuttavaksi dynaamiseksi mahdollisuudeksi. ”Tyhjän merkitsijän” käsitteen kautta Laclaun kuvaama populismin retoriikka kytkeytyy artikkelissa Slavoj Žižekin analyysiin ideologisesta fantasiasta suurten kertomusten jälkeen – ideologioihin ei enää entiseen tapaan uskota, mutta niiden virittäminä toimitaan ”kyynisesti" arjen käytännöissä. Ristiriitojen ylittämiseen tarvittava fantasialisä liittyy myös Laclaun ajatukseen yhteiskunnallisesta täyteyskuvitelmasta, jonka mahdottomuus antaa lisää voimaa populistiselle kahtiajaolle. Poliittisten vaatimusten ja täyteyskuvitelmien estyminen tuottaa helposti negatiivisten tyhjien merkitsijöiden paikkoja, sijaisuhreja eli syntipukkeja. Tätä ilmiötä kuvataan lähinnä René Girardin käsittein. Edellä kuvatulla käsitteistöllä tarkastellaan yhtä Jussi Halla-ahon varhaista blogikirjoitusta populistista me–muut jakoa hyödyntävänä kulttuuri-ideologisena tekstinä, jossa nativistinen fantasia antaa ideologisen ponnen muodoltaan rationaaliselle diskurssille. Tästä päädytään lyhyeen loppupohdintaan ”kansan” käsitteen ideologisoitumisesta ja tasa-arvon käyttötavoista oikeistopopulismissa.

Digital labour: an empty signifier?

Since the early 2000s, the expression ‘digital labour’ has identified an influential theoretical proposition in the Marxist critique of the political economy of digital media, which sees the leisure-driven, unpaid activities of social media users as unremunerated forms of work contributing to Internet companies’ profits. Over the years, however, this expression has evolved into an umbrella term, used to describe a variety of practices and instances concerning the broader relationship between labour and digital technology – including paid work – often with little or no relation to the original theory. Reflecting on this evolution, this article argues that ‘digital labour’ has become a kind of empty signifier, unable to serve a clearly distinguishable critical or analytical purpose. Focusing on the emergence of platform labour, it shows how ‘digital’ and ‘labour’ have come to be largely inseparable dimensions and discusses the related implications.

Memory production, vandalism, violence: Civil society and lessons from a short life of a monument to Stalin

Memory production, vandalism, violence: Civil society and lessons from a short life of a monument to Stalin

The Cultural and Commercial Production of Leadership

Scholars have long criticized the commercialization of leadership, leadership education, and leadership development—some to distinguish what they consider legitimate research and practice from mass-market “bullshit,” others to characterize the whole notion of leadership as an ideological ruse or empty signifier. But neither critique rests on an adequate foundation of theory or empirical research regarding the actors, institutions, and industries that drive and profit from the commercialization of leadership. We therefore draw from the production of culture literature, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural fields, Roger Friedland’s critique of Bourdieu, and our own work on leadership fashions to develop a theoretical framework fit to explore the cultural and commercial production of concepts, discourses, products and services via the leadership industries. A deeper understanding of the competitive and industrial dynamics behind these industries promises to contribute fresh perspectives on the proliferation of so many approaches to leadership; on the industrialized production rather than just the social construction of those approaches; on the continued predominance of romanticized and individualized prescriptions over against more sociologically nuanced theories of relational and collective leadership; and on the central role that scholars themselves play in the leadership industries, and in the production and reproduction of leadership.

PLANLAR, SINIRLAR VE ÜTOPYALAR ARASINDA BIR BOŞ ALAN: TEMPELHOFER FELD

This article is about the huge emptiness of the Tempelhof Field, which was an airport before. In the heart of Berlin, free from its historical past, it remains a dysfunctional, passive but an enormous area. In this article, the potential future of the Tempelhof Field, which is debated by both formal and informal actors, will be discussed in relation to Lefebvre's spatial triad regarding perceived, lived and conceived spaces in capitalist societies. The dialectic relations among these three make the field a product produced from above and below. In this study, the Tempelhof Field will be examined and read as an “empty signifier” through the concepts of use and exchange value of space and as well as the right to the city.