Populism and the separation of power and knowledge

Claude Lefort: Power and knowledge fused; power and knowledge separated

The starting point for my analysis is not Foucault and the convergence of power and knowledge, but Claude Lefort, who claimed, on the contrary, that, under the symbolic regime instituted by the democratic revolution, power and knowledge became separated. ² It is true that Lefort speaks of democracy, not populism. When speaking of the latter, I will be turning to a critical reading of the relevant writings of Ernesto Laclau. My claim – which Laclau also makes (if for different reasons) – is that populism cannot be understood outside of democracy. Laclau, however, appears of little use when speaking of the separation of knowledge and power, and I must therefore refer to Lefort in order to argue that populism presents, or can present, a torsion of the separation of power from knowledge under democracy. Note that Lefort speaks of democracy in symbolic and not institutional terms, that is, he is concerned less with the institutions and institutional mechanisms of governance (parliaments, parties, voting, etc.) than with how the regime presents and represents itself, and in so doing, presents and represents a world of order, sense and value. ³ In effect, by speaking in terms of the symbolic, we are examining our problematic with a rather wider conceptual lens than usual. ⁴ With this in view, it will be necessary, before broaching the subject of populism, to examine what Lefort understands by the separation of power and knowledge under democracy, and such an understanding is best had by a brief look at his characterization of their fusion in the European monarchies prior to the rise of modern democratic regimes.

Power, knowledge (and the law) are said to be fused at their source in an all-knowing, all-powerful divinity. The monarch, by virtue of divine right, represented the divinity; the monarch did not represent his subjects, but represented God before these subjects. ⁵ As such, the monarch not only modeled his power on that of the divinity; he participated in God’s omnipotence and omniscience (if at a distance, as he lives within this world and is concerned primarily with worldly things). Through this participation, he serves as a conduit for the order, sense and value that God intends for his worldly kingdom. As all truth and all proper power proceed from God and God alone, there can, within this symbolic universe, be no order, sense or value outside God, as presented by his duly chosen representatives. In other words, by representing the divinity before his subjects, the monarch literally embodies his kingdom, its order, sense and value, even as he ensures that his subjects are faithful to the divine commands. Thus, to challenge the monarch is, symbolically speaking, to be on the side of disorder, ignorance and heresy. This is not to say that his power was never challenged, notably by dissident nobles, but such challenges, even as the monarchy presented them as contrary to God’s will, did not occur at the symbolic level that Lefort terms ‘the political’, which concerns the mise en forme, mise en sens and mise en scène of the regime, its order, coherence and significance. These challenges remained at the level of ‘politics’, and did not seriously affect the regime’s symbolic order.

This fusion of power and knowledge has many implications, two of which I will mention, before moving onto a more strictly theoretical point concerning representation. First, what we call censorship is here not an abuse of power but central to its purpose, for power is taxed with safeguarding the truth, and the true religion from which the truth proceeds. Second, just as God has only to speak for His Will to be done, so the word of the monarch, as representative of God’s Word, bears a power that goes beyond that of mere words, as his discourse moves in the direction of the intransitive, bridging the gap between saying and doing, and between subject and object. Like the divine word, if to a lesser degree, the monarchic discourse bears what might be termed an overt symbolic power, which gives form, and by giving form, gives reality to its object (even if it be only a partial or even virtual reality).

In short, monarchies, as a symbolic regime, suggest a very different notion of representation than the one more familiar to us. Representation here does not represent an already existing, already present, positive reality; it is not a ‘copy’ of some real object that exists prior to, and independent of, its representation. Rather representation here renders present what it represents – which is to say, that what is represented bears no visible, positive existence outside its representation. As such, representation can directly shape the world, giving the latter form and meaning, which it would otherwise lack. Such an understanding of representation supposes a very different understanding of what is meant by truth and reality, and consequently a very different relation to the facts. Where representation refers to what already positively exists, reality (and its order, sense and value, to the extent that reality possesses these properties) exists independent of representation. Here facts become the touchstone of truth; the closer to the facts, the more accurate the portrayal of the external reality, the truer the representation. But where representation renders present what it represents, the truth and, indeed, the real reality of this world lies not on the side of facts, but on the side of the representation, or what the representation seeks to convey. For here order, sense and value have their origins in transcendent principles that representation brings ‘down to earth’. The order, sense and value of the facts can never equal those of the transcendental principles. By their very materiality, the facts always remain at a distance from these principles, and thus, even when reproduced by representation, the facts bear, to one degree or another, a disorderly, senseless element. They thus prove less true (and so less real) than representation, and far less true (and real) than the principles to which the representation refers. Accordingly, the facts must at times be ignored, even actively combatted.

There is another point that needs to be made relative to the distinction that I wish to draw between the two forms of representation. Representation that refers to an already existing positive reality has no real power over what it represents, which remains what it is independent of the character of its representation. Where the truth of the representation lies on the side of its external object, the representation, even a true representation, is without (immediate) power over that object. ⁶ The other type of representation – representation that renders present what it represents – as it gives form and meaning to what it presents, bears both power (as it has ‘reality effects’ relative to its object) and truth (the sense and order it imparts establish the value and, thus, the validity of that object). In a sense, the former type of representation already supposes a separation of power from knowledge, which the latter does not. Within the monarchic symbolic regime the nexus between power and knowledge appears particularly tight because both refer to the same divine principle, the basis of all truth and all power, the guarantor of all order, sense and value. To the extent that monarchic representation renders this principle present, it shares in the latter’s truth and power – even if the order, sense and value that it is able to impose on the world remains, by reason of its terrestrial anchorage, a defective copy of the other-worldly reality to which it refers. Now, this second type of representation comes in different forms. Not all of them are restricted to the monarchic symbolic regime with its hierarchical order, and its reference to an all-knowing, all-powerful, infallible authority. Thus not all forms of representation that render present what they represent will bear the same symbolic efficacy. Bearing this in mind, we can now turn to some of the implications of the separation of power and knowledge supposed by a democratic symbolic regime.

Clearly some notion of secularization is supposed, as neither truth nor power need be referred to a principle of divine transcendence. It would be far too simplistic to claim that the one form of representation – the one that represents an existing reality – replaces the other. What is certainly the case is that the former becomes far more significant, and with it the corresponding notions of truth and reality, which highlight the importance of ‘objective facts’. Still, the other form of representation – that which renders present what it represents – certainly exists and in a variety of contexts, though its reference points need not be transcendent but can be ‘immanent’. Consider the representation of power within democratic regimes. The reference here, what must be represented, is the sovereign people (or nation). As sovereign, the people must be considered a principle, but one immanent to this world. Though the source of power, they are not, unlike God, all-powerful. ⁷ Still their power can be said to be absolute, if within the limits of a given nation-state, and relative to the latter, within the limits of its political sphere. ⁸

What kind of representation is the representation of the people? Does it render present what it represents, or do the people exist prior to their representation as a people? While a proper response to this question would require another essay, let us simply say that the representation of the people slides between the two forms, and potentially in different ways. I would argue, however, that the balance lies on the side of representation-as-rendering-present, as it is also a matter of representing the principle of sovereignty, which bears no ‘empirical’ existence outside its concept. Besides it is difficult to imagine the people recognizing their existence as a people without a representation of the people as a people. ⁹

Beyond the representation of the people as a people, there is also in a representative democracy the representation of the people by their representatives, what might be termed their political representation proper. ¹⁰ Do the political representatives have privileged access to power? Yes, in the sense that they represent the sovereign people, the true source of political power; but no, in that this privilege is always tentative, and easily withdrawn by those they represent – this being what Lefort means in part when he speaks of the place of power being empty. The latter supposes that representatives and represented can never entirely coincide, so that the former can never fully embody the power they represent. Such a coincidence would not only render either the represented or representatives redundant, ¹¹ it would restrict, even prohibit, the play of division, not simply between represented and representatives but within the people and amongst its representatives. One can add that as the power of the representatives is ‘empty’, their words lack the symbolic efficacy of the monarch’s discourse and only gain a degree of symbolic force to the extent that the representatives appear, if only momentarily, to surmount the division of representation and genuinely express the vox populi. ¹²

By contrast, political representatives do not have, unlike the monarch, privileged access to the truth. No-one can claim that the representatives are necessarily more intelligent or knowledgeable than those they represent, particularly when the latter are considered individually. Where power and knowledge are no longer fused almost by definition, it becomes possible to ‘speak truth to power’ – an expression that epitomizes their separation, and which would have appeared nonsensical in the previous symbolic regime. Indeed, intellectual progress now requires that knowledge be largely unfettered from power and its more immediate demands. Moreover, as all truth is no longer tied to a single divine source, knowledge separates into different, seemingly incommensurable domains, between which are different, often incompatible types of truth claims, and within which are often conflicting claims. Most of these domains do not concern the political sphere or concern it only indirectly. This only deepens the disjunction between knowledge and power, as the political sphere, however conflicted, appears by contrast comparatively coherent, even as the effective exercise of political power supposes a modicum of unity.

At this point, having established the separation of power and knowledge, I feel the need to walk back a bit. Such a separation cannot be absolute; it cannot preclude all relations between the two terms and all possible forms of complicity. ¹³ In this respect, I wish to consider three topics relative to the relations between power and ‘knowledge’ that will prove relevant to the discussion of populism. The first concerns the relation of the people, as the sovereign, to truth. As a democrat, one cannot suppose the people to be fundamentally ignorant, irrational and easily manipulated – though anti-democrats have always made such claims. There must be some relation between the democratic sovereign and truth, however modest.

The second topic concerns the knowledge of the people’s political representatives. They must have some knowledge, if only relative to how to successfully represent the people. Ernesto Laclau’s book On Populist Reason (2005) addresses this topic, and in a manner both compelling and troubling. The third topic concerns ideology. Ideology is generally seen as knowledge that has been shaped in relation to power, and that pays for its relation to power with the distortion of its relation to truth. Does populism form an ideology, or is it something sui generis?

The people and their truth

Let me begin with the question of populism as it concerns the relation of the people to truth. This supposes one first defines populism. Consider Cass Muddle’s ‘minimal’ definition: ‘a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale of the people’ (Muddle, 2015: 433). ¹⁴ Whether populism can be characterized as an ideology, even a thin one, is a question that will be taken up later. Here I want to point to the volonté générale (Cass Muddle explicitly refers to Rousseau), a term that places the people in a close relation to both power and truth, particularly when contrasted with the empirical ‘will of all’, a strictly empirical will according to Rousseau, without a relation to truth. ¹⁵

There are other figures that tie knowledge and power to the people, notably that of ‘common sense’ (here one can oppose Thomas Paine to Rousseau and the American to the French Revolution). Then there are figures that, if they do not posit the people as smart by definition, claim that they can be ‘educated’ via a properly functioning democracy: whether through the public sphere, whereby the people learn how to recognize and formulate the better argument (Habermas); through associations, whereby they learn about institutional procedures and how to cooperate and compromise with others (Tocqueville); or through conflict, whereby they become aware of the divisions in society, and the political stakes that oppose, but also unite them (Touraine). ¹⁶ Populism does not speak the language of these latter ‘pedagogical’ figures. Nor does it speak the language of Rousseau’s general will, if by the latter one understands an attempt to reconcile individual autonomy with collective rule. ¹⁷ Nor, despite its anti-elitism, does populism necessarily speak the language of common sense, with its claim that the people’s relation to truth is based on simple virtues, work experience and practical knowledge. ¹⁸

Populism, following the minimal definition above, makes a much simpler, but potentially more forceful truth claim: it claims to know who the people are and what they want, and who are opposed to the people and their concerns. That this involves a truth claim is clearly evidenced by the supporters of Donald Trump. He alone, in their view, has the courage to speak the truth, a truth that the political class, mainstream media and a politically correct culture all want to suppress. This, of course, is less an objective, constative claim than an expressive one, as it concerns the expression of a (collective) identity. It is less a claim about what is evidently true, though it may present itself as such; for it is far more forceful when the claim is not yet true or, better, was but is no longer true. It is thus a performative truth: when effective, it becomes true, and the people become a people in accord with their definition. And it can be a powerful truth, so powerful that it can trump all other truths, even when articulated by a serial liar. It is important to understand what sort of truth claim this is and to ask why its expression can be so compelling.

Ernesto Laclau provides a response to this latter question. He argues that collective identity is formed from a ‘constitutive outside’, i.e. an opposing term that establishes the first term’s boundaries. The people know who they are as a people via the determination of a non-people or anti-people. As such, the people have no autonomous existence; they exist only through not just their representation but that of a contrast term. Though the people do not have an objective existence outside their ‘nomination’, the latter proves extremely robust because it establishes, mobilizes and galvanizes that identity through the positioning of an opposing term. One can ask: does this logic apply to all collective identities, and if it does, does this not deny the specificity of populism as a political logic? For Laclau, the answer is yes and yes, the specificity of populism appearing at most a matter of degree, the naming of the people being the key to understanding democratic politics. ¹⁹ Still, the implication is that the populist appeal is so effective because the opposing term is made so explicit. But this – and here Laclau becomes interesting – only underlines the arbitrariness of (the populist) representation of ‘the people’. This is not just because the ‘enemy’ can shift with changing circumstances, or can even be ‘invented’, but because the people are constructed from the disparate grievances of different groups, arranged into an ‘equivalential chain’. As these grievances, taken together, are incoherent, the chain is held together negatively by the claim, made by the populist movement, that the grievances are all somehow the fault of the opposing term. What holds the chain together is an ‘empty signifier’ – empty because the connecting links being negative, the signifier of the chain cannot be made too specific – formed from vacuous slogans and the leader’s charisma, which promise all things to all the aggrieved people.

The potency of the populist appeal lies then with its delusive quality; through the empty signifier the chain points beyond the grievances of its particular links to a general (if not universal) horizon that raises unrealistic, even utopian expectations. More conventional politics, by contrast, is based on a ‘differential chain’ where the parties in power are able to satisfy the different demands of their key supporters. Such political realism appears less appealing than the illusions borne of the equivalential chain, for the former cannot result in fundamental change.

The argument is not without cogency, but a series of objections can be raised. First, a politics that speaks of the enemies of the people will appear during periods of war or civil war, including when the establishment of democracy requires the overthrow of a non-democratic regime. But once a democracy is secured, there is more room for the expression of divisions within the people and with its representatives; as such, the definition of the people relative to a ‘constitutive outside’ no longer appears the central object of political dispute but is backgrounded and thereby rendered ‘pre-political’. What is specific to populist movements is that, in a sense, they seek to return to democracy’s inaugural movement, but within an established democracy, one that is, or appears, or is made to appear, to be undergoing a crisis of political representation, and must therefore be renewed.

Second, the definition of the people may be arbitrary from the perspective of an outside observer, but it hardly appears so to those who identify with that definition, particularly when, as with populist movements, that definition is foregrounded and becomes the political stake. In such cases, the signifier rarely proves empty but is ‘substantified’, accommodating very concrete images of the ‘real people’. ²⁰ That Laclau tends to confuse the representation of the people as people with the people’s representatives does not help – though, admittedly, populist movements often encourage such confusion, particularly when there is a dearth of autonomous forms of mobilization. One might also add that the distinction between differential and equivalential chains as corresponding to conventional and properly populist parties is hardly as clear-cut as Ernesto Laclau seems to suppose. ²¹

But the major objection to his argument for the purposes of this paper concerns his characterization of ‘the truth’ of populism. When discussing populism – and, by extension, democratic politics – Laclau does not speak of truth claims but of political rhetoric whose effectiveness, it seems, depends on its ability to raise unrealistic expectations. ²² But if people can be taken in by political rhetoric, it is because the latter makes truth claims, and truth claims of a certain type, which they deem both credible and of singular importance. It is not just a matter of the people’s identity, or that of their opposition; the claim is that the people, the real people, are not represented, but ignored, disdained, and mistreated, despite their being the basis of democratic rule and source of all legitimate power.

The reason why the populist call is so powerful is that it joins its claims concerning the people to an appeal to the latter’s latent power, this joining together being understood as both an exercise in truth-telling and a reassertion of the democratic sovereign. Earlier I spoke of the fusion of power and knowledge characteristic of a monarchic regime. Here too power and truth are conjoined, if within a very different symbolic regime and relative to only a single ‘idea’, but one with singular symbolic force. Again, one is faced, often despite appearances, with a representation that renders present what it represents; it is less a factual claim than an appeal for the people to truly become a people.

The larger point here is that there is more than one sort of truth claim, and historically speaking, factual truths often appeared less truthful than ‘symbolic’ truths. If the latter do not begin in the facts, the symbolic force of such truths can enable them to acquire considerable purchase on factual reality, even as they impose meaning and value on that reality. Thus, once the people have been effectively rendered present through their representation, they can be credibly represented as having a factual existence prior to their representation rooted, for example, in terms of blood or soil. ²³ Note we are speaking of an immanent and not a transcendent truth. Neither the existence nor truth of the people can be guaranteed; as a performative truth, much depends on the success of the performance. ²⁴ Performances work at the level of appearances; if the appearances can be made to appear real, they will be treated as real, and so will become real for most purposes. ²⁵ In the case of populism, the truth of its representation of the people depends on its success as a movement and, later, as a government – though as a government it can seek to reinforce its definition of the people with state measures. Again, it must be underlined that, while we can speak here of the conjoining of knowledge and power, the reference is hardly to an all-knowing, all-powerful authority. The conjunction concerns but a single, if decisive, claim: the people know who they are, and with such knowledge can assert their power. The claim is decisive because it concerns not the power-holders, whose hold on power is always provisional, but the sovereign basis of their power, the power they are supposed to represent. Populism claims to restore democracy to the truth of its definition as rule by the people. It claims to revive a debased, ‘corrupt’ democracy, thereby presenting a fundamental, even revolutionary change without an actual change of regime. This is the source of its promise.

On the other hand, democracy, particularly modern democracy, is not just the rule of the demos. Modern democracy entails a notion of rights and an institutional architecture which populism, in the name of the people, may trample on. Moreover, modern democracy is representative, and so evokes all the divisions of representation, those between representatives and represented, those within the representatives, and amongst the represented – divisions that populism, again in the name of the people, their unity, the need for them to remain united, may seek to repress. This is the basis of its threat.

The representatives of the people and their knowledge

Let us return to Ernesto Laclau. He a man of the left and is tired of losing; he presents populism as a winning strategy, which must be taken up by the left, lest, as now seems all too clear, it be successfully taken up by the right. To repeat, for Laclau populist reason (and indeed, all politics and even society itself) is established rhetorically, via the formation of a convincing definition of the people, itself composed of an equivalential chain held together by an empty signifier. And for him, political rhetoric is fundamentally arbitrary, though what lies behind such rhetoric is not; for what lies behind the rhetoric are grievances (or the desires that fuel them), and these must be considered ‘real’. Between the largely pre-symbolic grievances and their symbolic articulation as political rhetoric there lies a gap that renders the latter fundamentally indeterminate, thus arbitrary and even delusory. ²⁶

The resonance of this rhetoric, its success with the electorate, though engineered in large part symbolically, is itself extra-symbolic, as it implies ‘real effects’. Thus, although the definition of the people is necessarily arbitrary, a successful hegemonic definition, one that effectively articulates the pre- and post-symbolic levels, and thereby joins the two ‘reals’, can be said to surmount that arbitrariness. If the definition of the people cannot, for Laclau, be true, the rhetoric that constructs this definition, when successful, does bear a relation to truth, if not at the level of its content, than at the level of its efficacy. And once one realizes that politics is constituted rhetorically, one can study political rhetoric with a view to the establishment of a hegemonic relation to those it addresses. ²⁷

Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason proposes just such a study, and thus, despite its abstract, theoretical tone, the work therefore bears an essentially strategic character. Laclau would be the advisor to the would-be modern prince – the latter being not, as with Gramsci, the leadership of the Communist Party but that of insurgent populist parties. And yet, given its abstract, theoretical character, the work appears, particularly today, rather naïve. Today’s advisors to the prince, i.e. political consultants, have a much more ‘concrete’, instrumental attitude towards winning elections. One thinks of all the techniques to apprehend the desires of different groups of voters, to test their receptivity to certain messages, to craft political communication accordingly, and to ensure that that communication is received by the relevant populations. At this point, the use of surveys and focus groups, the employment of media consultants, telephone banks, not to mention campaign workers knocking on doors, look almost quaint. The recent exploitation of new digital media suggests not simply an intensification of the previous techniques, but the emergence of a whole new set of political dark arts. Political manipulation, the Cambridge Analytica affair has taught us, can now occur outside the relative transparency of the public sphere, as the mining of big data is able to uncover hidden trends and establish correlations at the macro-level, from which multiple psycho-political portraits at the micro-level can be constructed, which then allow the targeting of individual susceptibilities through purportedly private channels without the awareness of those being thus targeted. And the latter appears but one egregious example of the use of ‘psyche ops’ and, more generally, the weaponization of information, pseudo-information and outright misinformation.

We are speaking here of a form of knowledge, a specialized, technical form of knowledge, which is narrowly focussed on the acquisition and, potentially, maintenance of power. Still, it is knowledge, and as such bears a relation to truth. Of course, such knowledge and its use is hardly limited to populist parties, but is employed, to one degree or another, by all political parties. What, arguably, distinguishes populism is that the employment of such techniques, particularly the darker techniques, appears more brazen and manipulative. Such is implied by the argument that populism is a modern form of demagogy, as those opposed to populist movements almost inevitably claim. Rhetoric has historically often been associated with demagogues ²⁸  – even as the panoply of manipulative techniques now extends far beyond the use of rhetoric.

But behind the accusation of demagogy lies another claim relative to populism, one that claims a sort of performative contradiction between the knowledge required by the crafting of an effective political rhetoric and that other form of knowledge claimed by populism, which concerns the identification of the people and its enemies. The latter involves a truth-claim that must be accessible to, and held by, all those who identify with ‘the people’, while the former is, and can only be, known by a few, not least because it is technical and deployed behind the scenes. There would thus appear a form of ‘instrumental’ knowledge held by the would-be representatives of the people (or their advisors), which would be very different from the ‘substantive’ knowledge held by the people themselves if they are to be a people. Populism should appear particularly vulnerable to the exposure of this difference; for the populist leader or party claims that it alone listens to the people, gives voice to their concerns and asserts their interests. Populism’s proclaimed raison d’être is to heal the division between the people and their political representation; but this difference in knowledge would seem to reintroduce the division of representation. Those who support the populist leader must not, or must refuse to see this division; to admit the difference in knowledge is to admit that those opposed to the populist movement are right, that one has been ‘conned’.

The argument, at least implicitly, is that the populist leader does not himself believe in what he says, that the latter bears only a tactical value as an instrument of his will to power. This argument becomes all the more insistent when what the populist leader says contradicts other, factually demonstrable truth claims. Lies have their use: they comfort one’s friends and confound one’s enemies, even as they present the world as one would like to see it. Big lies in particular can be used to cement loyalty, as they demand one burn one’s normative bridges and surrender one’s independent judgement. But is the leader’s speech simply tactical, subordinated to his will to power? Does he always consciously lie or, on the contrary, is he narcissistically deluded, believing everything he says or, alternatively, does he believe in the more general truth of what he sees as his historical mission, even as, at times, he knowingly acts opportunistically when he thinks that it serves his cause?

Is populism an ideology?

Consider the third problematic, ideology. Our attention now turns to knowledge that does not directly concern the political field narrowly considered, as is the case with the identification of the people or the establishment of a ‘hegemonic’ iteration of this identity. Here the separation of knowledge from power is far more evident, not just because knowledge in this context does not directly concern power, but because knowledge is no longer hierarchized or totalized but is distributed across different domains and disciplines with conflicting intellectual currents. Nonetheless, to speak of a separation does not exclude a relation between the separated terms, and ideology suggests such a relation, for it mediates knowledge from the perspective of power. Claude Lefort (1986) wrote an important essay on ideology, which, in certain regards, continues Marx’s discussion of ‘bourgeois ideology’, beginning with the claim that the latter bears a relation to truth (a ‘rational kernel’) though one distorted by the attempt to legitimate an existing system of domination. Lefort adds several other points.

First, he claims that bourgeois ideology does not exist where power and knowledge are fused. Ideology does not seek, in our terms, to make present what it represents, as though it could translate the invisible into visible terms, and thereby give shape and meaning to the world. Ideology is turned instead towards an immanent reality, understood as having a factual existence beneath its discursive claims. As such, the credibility of ideology does not depend on its overt symbolic force but on the adequacy of its claims relative to an ‘external’ object. Ideology can thus be found within, and is often modelled on, academic disciplines (though its incantatory repetition of key words like order or democracy suggests one is dealing with more than simply empirical knowledge).

Second, bourgeois ideology is relatively supple, capable of shifting between perspectives and adapting its claims to changing circumstances. Bourgeois ideology is thus able to accommodate itself to the fragmentation of knowledge, drawing on different domains, while glossing over barely disguised inconsistencies and contradictions. Similarly – and this is a third point – even as it welcomes an open future, it seeks to blunt the effects of what Lefort terms the dissolution of the markers of certitude that such openness threatens. In effect, it would cover over the tears in the fabric of meaning with a patina of ad hoc rationalization, justification and resignation. In sum, ideology supposes the separation of knowledge and power but seeks to neutralize and absorb the potentially corrosive effects of this separation. This supposes a tacit admission of the limits of an existing set of power relations and its hold on the world, while simultaneously asserting their factual immutability and normative excellence in an attempt to staunch questioning and criticism. ²⁹

In the earlier quote from Cass Muddle, populism was described as having a ‘thin ideology’. In truth, populism often thickens itself by borrowing from other ideologies, whether from the left or right. However, let us suppose that a form of populism can exist without such borrowing, a truly thin, pure populism, one whose truth claims remain largely restricted to those discussed so far. The question then is: if it is truly ‘thin’ in Cass Muddle’s sense, does it remain an ‘ideology’ in Lefort’s sense? My argument will be that it does not. Trumpism, I will further argue, though not entirely thin, can be said to exemplify a movement that in certain decisive respects negates Lefort’s characterization of ideology.

Consider first the claim that bourgeois ideology makes truth claims modeled, however problematically, on positive knowledge, knowledge that seeks to represent an already existing external reality. A thin populism requires little reference to such knowledge; its truth claims are performative, visceral, and welded to the idea of the people; they thus rely less on their correspondence to an independent reality than on their symbolic appeal to those it seeks to address. Its truth, the truth concerning the people and their enemies, as noted, can trump all other truths, when the latter interfere with its claims. ³⁰ Trumpism is in this regard both exemplary and egregious. Formerly, the tendency was to either ignore, downplay or spin unfavourable factual claims made by journalists; here, however, they are simply denied and called ‘fake’.

There is a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in the United States, leading to a distrust of the claims of the humanities and social sciences as inherently obscure, elitist and removed from the ‘facts on the ground’ (Hofstadter, 1966). Still, even governments that drew on this tradition (one thinks of Reagan) had their intellectuals and drew on those with disciplinary expertise who were considered ideologically sympathetic. Trumpism, by contrast, does not seek intellectual credibility, and rejects all expertise, even the kind that is not really visible to the public. Thus, to give one minor but striking example, there are almost no professional economists in the Trump government, the economic portfolios being filled by oligarchs and media pundits.

Much has been said about the rejection of climate science, and the apparent disdain of the natural sciences more generally. ³¹ The latter have, arguably since the 17th century, provided the gold standard of reality-based truth claims, authorizing the natural sciences’ relatively autonomous development. ³² This contempt for the facts has given rise to the claim that we live in a post-truth era. This essay is suspicious, for reasons noted in the introduction, of the term ‘post-truth’; it speaks instead of competing truth claims or, better, competing forms of the representation of truth. Truth (and falsehood) are symbolic terms; as such there are different kinds of truth claims, depending on different forms of representations, which often belong to very different symbolic regimes.

It is not unusual, depending on the symbolic regime, to claim that the facts do not live up to the truth and are therefore without real significance. The scandal conveyed by the term ‘post-truth’ is that, with the formation of the democratic symbolic regime, we have tended to see, if always rather inconsistently, the truth as having to live up to the facts – a claim that supposes representation represents what, within this world, lies out there, beyond its representation. The shift to, and increasing importance of this form of representation in its many different iterations helped ensure the separation of knowledge and power. That we are now confronted with truth claims based on a representation of power that would render present what it represents is itself hardly new; what, within a democratic context, is new is the brazen manner with which it advances its truth claims, indifferent to, and often dismissive of, objectively based, factual truth claims. ³³ In this regard, it is important to note that, although there is talk of ‘alternative facts’, there is no attempt to fuse power and knowledge and posit an ‘alternative science’ (such as race science or scientific materialism), as was the case with the properly totalitarian regimes. ³⁴

However forceful and visceral the truth claims made in the name of the people, there is no attempt to reconstruct certain branches of knowledge in the name of the people. Rather than appealing to a ‘people’s science’, it is a matter of throwing doubt on inconvenient truths. This is not ideology in Lefort’s sense. The latter seeks to bridge the separation of knowledge from the side of power, even as it would render knowledge compatible with power. As such ideology presents a sort of compromise, whereby the relative autonomy of knowledge-based claims can be affirmed while being twisted into the service of the dominant forms of rule and their accompanying forms of inequality. But here, with a ‘thin’ populism, power appears unconcerned with mediation or compromise, let alone fusion. Instead it is as if the separation of knowledge (that is, knowledge external to the affirmation, acquisition or maintenance of power) from power was to be extended, even to the breaking point.

The other two characteristics of ‘ideology’ described by Lefort can be treated together. The one bears on its relative malleability, which enables it to admit, adapt and, to a degree, even welcome the relentless, often unexpected transformations borne on the wings of time. Yet despite its relative openness, ideology cannot say just anything: its claims have to appear objectively true, even as it seeks to re-affirm certain capital letter, supposedly eternal, normative truths. With Trumpism, however, neither the verisimilitude nor moral respectability characteristic of ideological truth claims appear to be required. As such, its assertions appear less elastic than capricious and peremptory. Transgressive claims are welcomed, not only because they mock elite pretensions ³⁵ but because, with their carnivalesque reversals, they produce both fascination and disorientation, a sense of release and revulsion. Sometimes the rejection of the facts, when particularly outrageous, appears a test of one’s commitment to more ‘symbolic’ truths, and ensures that there will be no turning back in the face of ever more compelling, contrary evidence.

The other, related trait of ideology concerns its attempt to blunt the insecurity borne of the dissolution of the markers of certitude. Integral to ideology’s labour of legitimation is its ability to act as psychic shock absorber that cushions the uncertainty borne of unpredictable events, rendering them acceptable, or at least intelligible and, therefore, potentially manageable. But a thin populism can move in the opposite direction and make the most outlandish claims as if to undermine the parameters of what can be said, whether in constative, normative or expressive terms. At least as concerns matters beyond its core identitarian claims, ³⁶ rather than attempting to soften the effects of the dissolution of the markers of certitude, it can seek to sharpen the sense of insecurity that often accompanies such dissolution. The reference here is not just to physical or economic insecurity but to an epistemological insecurity, all of which are both admitted and exaggerated. ³⁷

It has been argued that this amplification of insecurity is to be understood in strictly instrumental terms. Many speak of being absorbed into the spectacle of Trump’s 24-hour news cycle, as though he purposely sought to leave one open-mouthed, dazed and hypnotized. Naomi Klein (2017) speaks of ‘the shock doctrine’, the creation of a crisis that disorients and confuses in order to do things that would otherwise be deemed too objectionable. Others talk of ‘gaslighting’, the attempt to make one question one’s memory, perception, and, ultimately, sanity (Carpenter, 2018). But sometimes the embrace of chaos appears an end in itself, a replacement for, rather than a stimulus to, action. At other times, the chaos appears less as a means or end than simply a description of the inner state of the commander-in-chief who, even as he barely seems able to keep it together, thrives on the confusion and fear he generates, not least among his closest associates.

With regard then to all three of the characteristics discussed by Claude Lefort, we cannot speak here of ‘bourgeois ideology’. Rather than a thin ideology, we are faced with an ‘anti-ideology’, though the term here hardly suggests the removal of the blinkers from our eyes and an unobstructed view of the truth. Without ideology, there can be no ideology critique. Ideology critique’s notion of truth overlaps with that of ideology, as they both share the underlying form of representation. Where the latter is lacking, it makes little sense to try to extract the rational kernel from the ideological dross.

Concluding remarks: The symbolic and the real

There is a tendency to blame post-truth politics on post-modernism. This is not a debate that I have the space to engage in here. In my view, the very premise of the debate, the claim that post-modernism bears a responsibility for post-truth, entails an element of bad faith – as if one could ever expect that an author’s claims could be prevented from being interpreted and used in ways that the author never intended, particularly when those doing the interpreting approach the ideas with very different and potentially malicious intent. ³⁸ Moreover, the authors that I am using, Claude Lefort and Ernesto Laclau, can be considered post-modern (or post-structuralist) as they question our understanding of reality, particularly when our truth claims are blind to their symbolic character. I must therefore claim that populism cannot be properly understood outside some version of post-modernism (recognizing that other versions may be far less helpful). ³⁹ In this concluding section I want to return to the discussion of ‘representation’ with reference to these two authors and consider how they understand ‘reality’ in relation to the symbolic. Let me begin by providing a short, rather potted history of the ‘human sciences’ with a view to situating post-structuralism and, relative to post-structuralism, these authors.

Long before post-structuralism, there was a ‘Methodenstreit’ (a struggle over methods): should one study society in strictly objective terms, as suggested by ‘positivism’, which claimed to be based on the methodology of the natural sciences, or should one examine the (inter)subjective dimension of social action, and how the social actors made sense of the world, orienting their actions accordingly? The latter position was termed the ‘interpretive’ approach, with its more demanding versions drawing on phenomenology and hermeneutics. ⁴⁰ With the introduction of linguistic structuralism, an objective moment (which had been anticipated by Emile Durkheim) was introduced into the study of the inter-subjective realm, as attention shifted from the meeting of minds in their interiority to sign systems and their more formal, exterior elements. ⁴¹ With this shift, the concern was less with what was understood than with the symbolic structures that underlay discursive formations, ensured their internal discursive coherence, and conditioned what they could or could not communicate. In this manner the structuralist turn not only introduced an ‘objective’ moment into the inter-subjective world, but in a sense introduced a ‘subjective’ moment into our understanding of the objective world. For what is seen as real now appears, and can only appear, as dependent on the symbolic order that apprehends it and gives it meaning. And once one claims that our understanding of reality depends on how it is represented, one can raise the question of what, for whatever reason, is not represented, or not represented directly, and which thereby escapes our ability to make sense of it. By raising this question, the symbolic need no longer appear all-encompassing. Structuralism tended to ignore this question, as it considered only the sign system, and enclosed the latter within the immanence of its own internal relations. The question was less easily avoided by post-structuralism, as it contested this closure, and the excessively coherent, rigid and static character of the structural ‘codes’ that resulted. It thereby opened itself, at least potentially, to a consideration of the impact on sign systems of their ‘outside’. At the same time post-structuralism could hardly revert to a naive description of the sign in terms of its correspondence to, and adequation with that outside; for such tends to occlude both the ‘autonomy’ of the symbolic and the ‘externality’ of what escapes it. In this respect both Claude Lefort and Ernesto Laclau can be said to speak of ‘the real’, which is to be distinguished from ‘reality’.

‘Reality’ is always already represented; it is how reality appears, and appears as meaningful within a given symbolic regime. ‘The real’, on the other hand, is not, cannot, or cannot yet be represented, at least not directly. ‘The real’ is a term drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis and can be detected in the trauma repressed in the unconscious, but whose presence is only visible in the torsion of the symbolic evidenced in slips of the tongue, dreams and neurotic symptoms. Lefort and Laclau are not psychoanalysts and use the term ‘the real’ in a broader sense. Laclau, as already suggested, references the term when he speaks of both the ‘grievances’ (and thus the desires) behind the political rhetoric that seeks their symbolic capture, and the ‘real effects’ of that rhetoric, as it succeeds or fails to resonate with its intended audience, or disappoints when raised expectations are deflated. Claude Lefort’s sense of ‘the real’ is more general. It refers to all that escapes a given symbolic regime, including all the unpredictable ‘contingencies’ that time brings; however, as symbolic regimes (with their sense of reality) differ, so does their relation to ‘the real’, as does, as a result, the significance of ‘the real’. As a symbolic regime democracy proves relatively open to the real – an openness that allows for a degree of uncertainty, a willingness to question, and a capacity to absorb the unexpected and encourage the new, which is foreign to other symbolic regimes. ⁴² Such openness would be unthinkable without the separation of power and knowledge. Where the two are fused, such that knowledge proceeds from power and power from knowledge, ‘the real’ cannot but appear as an immediate threat to (the sense of) reality, and must be ignored, downplayed, denied or vilified. But where power and knowledge are separated, knowledge is able to constitute ‘the real’ as a possible horizon of investigation. Note that this separation, which must be considered part of the structure of the democratic symbolic regime, is not itself represented within that regime (for Lefort, democracy remains largely ignorant of its own character). In this sense, one might speak of a fold within the symbolic, whereby the latter escapes its own immanence. Both power and knowledge, if in different ways, also present such a fold, as each seeks to distance itself from ‘the social’, and thereby transcend their origins. To the degree that they stand ‘outside’ or ‘above’ their social object (without, however, being able to fully break from the latter, and occupy a ‘position de survol’), they can never be entirely encompassed within their own positivity. ⁴³

Since both Laclau and Lefort hold to a notion of ‘the real’, neither can be said to hold to a post-truth position, if by the latter one understands the claim that ‘what is’ can be understood solely in terms of what is said or done, and that what is said or done remains fundamentally arbitrary because unrelated to an ‘outside’ (whether immanent or transcendent). ⁴⁴ But Laclau, unlike Lefort, appears unconcerned with knowledge as located and configured within a given symbolic order. For Laclau, power (and, in the last analysis, society) are founded in rhetoric, and thus power bears little or no relation to knowledge. In this regard Laclau can be said to be, relative to the separation of power from knowledge, close to the torsion of the democratic symbolic order presented by populism discussed here. Lefort, in this regard, is more interesting, as he raises the question of truth.

Truth and falsehood are symbolic terms; they do not exist in nature. As symbolic terms, truth-claims cannot pass over the question of representation. There are different kinds of truth claims, based on different forms of representation, themselves belonging to different discourses, embedded in different symbolic regimes. ⁴⁵ As a first, rather crude schema, we distinguished between representation that represents what is already present from representation that renders present what it represents. The claim, associated with the first definition, that truth demands one represent what, within this world, exists independent of its representation (and of the symbolic) lies behind the appeal to ‘objective facts’. Without entering into the question of whether facts can ever be fully ‘objective’, ⁴⁶ there is no need to deny the validity of truth claims based on ‘the facts’. What should be pointed out, however, is that when representing ‘the facts’, the symbolic and its effects hardly disappear (which would be the case if ‘the real’ and ‘reality’ could be made to coincide). Once ‘the real’ passes through the symbolic to become constitutive of ‘reality’, a fact is no longer simply a fact, but enters a world of sense that responds to its own symbolic imperatives, even as certain aspects of the fact’s ‘objectivity’ will be neglected as a result of these imperatives. Still, the appeal to objective facts (which always played, if not always explicitly, a role in the construction of everyday, common-sense forms of practical knowledge) has become the basis on which truth claims came to be made in a number of fields. ⁴⁷ But historically speaking, the appeal to ‘the facts’ belongs to a relatively recent truth-claim (Poovey, 1998), one that, it is being suggested here, depends on the separation of knowledge from power, as facts can now appear as indices of a truth-value independent of the imperatives of power’s self-(re)presentation. But this does not – and indeed cannot – eliminate other types of truth claims, based on other forms of representation, which represent the truth differently in response to different imperatives. The problem is that the facts, by their existence as facts, bear an ontological primacy relative to whatever order, coherence, sense or value one seeks to ascribe to them – which is to say that their truth value is, to a degree, independent of their order, sense and value. In other words, the world according to the facts does not immediately appear orderly, coherent or meaningful, and the discourses that privilege facts cannot guarantee the world’s ultimate orderliness, coherence and meaning. While this ‘absence’ may be necessary for the revolutions in knowledge, it often proves barely tolerable at a more general level. It undermines the capacity of the symbolic to repair the tears in the world’s fabric, for it is as if these tears had now become part of the symbolic. But where representation renders present what it represents, the truth lies with the order, coherence, sense and value that representation represents, while facts that are disorderly, incoherent and senseless appear without real truth value. Representation thus appears in principle as the guarantor of order, coherence, sense, value and truth – and of the facts, but only to the extent that they coincide with the discourse that claims to articulate them. In this sense, representation appears the bearer of its own superior facts – superior because they bear, by definition, coherence, sense and value. What I have called the symbolic force of this form of representation is based on its capacity to create superior facts. This symbolic force will be all the greater where these facts are joined with the representation of power, thereby enabling the power of truth to be joined to the truth of power. Such symbolic force can be said to have been maximized, at least symbolically, when knowledge and power were fused, pledged to a figure of transcendence both omnipotent and omniscient, where the power of truth and truth of power were indistinguishable. With the democratic symbolic order, it is difficult to recapture this force; power is represented as immanent, and however ‘absolute’ its claim to sovereignty within its national parameters, it remains far from omnipotent, let alone all-knowing. As a consequence the truth of power and the power of truth are liable to contradict each other.

With populism one confronts a particularly volatile form of the representation of the democratic sovereign. Populism seeks to render the people, as the democratic sovereign, present to itself in its most forceful terms, while claiming to minimize the division of the people relative to its representatives. Rather than remaining an inchoate background supposition, the people are to (re)discover their identity, underlying unity, and the boundaries that enable this identity and unity to be clearly circumscribed and resolutely affirmed. Only in this manner, it is supposed, can the people recover their ‘originary’ power as the democratic sovereign. The result is a particularly forceful version of the truth of power. Yet however forceful this truth, and however adamantly affirmed, it remains narrow in scope, being limited to the identification of the popular sovereign and its enemies. Still, this truth, as it concerns the sovereign threatens to become a sovereign truth; for it can lay claim to the constituting power at the basis of all the duly constituted authorities, and as such can, if it so decides, suspend these authorities on the grounds that they are no longer representative. The ‘narrowness’ of its truth proves the basis of its potential ‘absolutism’. In the name of the people, it can present a power that refuses to be limited by the institutional mechanisms that would limit power, including those that would tie power to ‘wider’ truths. Power’s truth claims can thus be delivered from the usual epistemological as well as institutional constraints. Confronted with counterclaims that malign either the people or the people’s representatives, the truths of power can be made to oppose the power of truth. In this manner, not only is the separation of power and knowledge extended, but this extension threatens what the separation had managed to avoid: the politicization of knowledge. Still, the truths of power here prove quite fragile.

When compared with the nexus of knowledge and power in other regimes, particularly those that appeal to the power of an omniscient divinity, the claims of a democratic power cannot but appear weak. The very separation of knowledge and power ensures that the relation between the truth and the vox populi remains tenuous; and the division between the vox populi and its representatives ensures that the truth claims of the latter remain particularly questionable. With populism, the problem is exacerbated. Populism questions the reality of reality in order to reshape it, and does so without external supports, whether in transcendent truths based on some higher imperative, immanent truths rooted in some supposedly scientifically demonstrable natural or historical necessity, or simply in the long-standing conventions borne by institutional inertia. To a degree not found in other democratic regimes, it must depend on the circularity of its own performativity. The truths of power depend here on power, on its ability to make real – or to appear to make real – its definition of the people and their predicament, and to (appear to) make real its ability and success in advancing their cause. And this in turn depends on its ability to (appear to) overcome the many divisions that haunt political representation – and this at a time of heightened political conflict – lest the populist movement or government appear to fall apart. The fictive moment in such a performance can never be fully disguised, and if it is to continue to enthrall, it must maintain the intensity of its dramatic element. Any slippage in its performance and the clamour of the ‘reality community’ becomes louder, while the movement’s momentum points to a flight forward into fantasy. However visceral the force of its appeal, its truth at a symbolic level remains, at bottom, quite frail. Such frailty may suggest that a populist movement or government cannot last for any length of time. Alternatively, a populist government, when threatened, may seek to compensate for the increasing evidence of its weakness with an increasing turn to authoritarianism.