Populism: Adopting popular iconic practices and engaging meaning and ...

Populism is often characterised by putting things in a different context. Populist politicians, for example, present themselves as “one of the people” and thus try to blur the difference between the represented and the representative. At the same time, they claim a strong leadership role. These appropriations of popular practices, iconological motifs and forms of staging have something in common: they all play with different versions of “everybodies”, specific figurations addressed to the audience or that members of that audience address to us or each other.

I ask the following questions in this paper:

- Which iconological traditions are taken up in them?

- How were the ways audiences are addressed transformet with the upheavals that led to democratic forms of government?

- What functions do these figures and stagings assume for political disputes in democracies?

- How do they appear in populisms or how do symbolic practices of populism differ from other (non-populist) political practices in democratic societies?

- To what extent can they be associated with “culture” or in which way do they function as agents of “culturalisation”, for instance related to “the nation”?