From Brexit to Bolsonaro, from Duterte to Donald Trump, and from Orban’s illiberal democracy to LePen’s rassemblement national, the rise of (alt)right populism has come to define our political landscape. Liberal democracy hangs in the balance - its deliberative procedures, its institutions, the ostensible self-evidence of the post-war order seem up for grabs.
The spread of right-wing populism is a political development of the first order, but it is more than that: it also involves tectonic cultural shifts that become evident in escalating conflicts over norms, values, and identities, in renewed culture wars, and "metapolitical" struggles for cultural hegemony. Indeed, the culturalization of politics appears to be among the key symptoms, if not the driving forces, of the current shift. Increasing diversity and polarization are met with identitarian appeals, while a perceived state of exception ostensibly warrants decisionist stances. As globalization gives rise to new uncertainties and social disintegration, it becomes all too easy to give in to authoritarian temptations (Heitmeyer 2018). Political, social, and economic polarization has profoundly unsettled postwar narratives and the self-confident success story of an ostensibly global liberal democratic order, and we are witnessing a spike in the ongoing culture wars.
In this situation, it becomes urgent to inquire again into the cultural conditions for deliberative democracy: where can we locate shared spaces for dialog and critique, for negotiating participation and difference without resorting to anti-democratic, authoritarian or identitarian positions? What role does culture play in framing a “resonant, alert, and informed” public sphere (Habermas)? How can we ensure the continued relevance of expertise and intellectual engagement without fostering anti-elitist resentment and anti-intellectual reaction? What resources do we have to engage broad epistemic and discursive shifts under the aegis of “alternative facts,” “post-truth,” and calls for new forms of “post-critique?”
We propose to undertake this task guided by three concepts that to us seem central to understanding the current conjunction, in which they have been mobilized in various, often contradictory ways: critique, resentment, and common sense. Though each of these terms has received extensive treatment in various disciplines, we consider precisely their intersection to constitute a crucial epistemological site for grasping the cultural politics of the populist era. Taking an interdisciplinary, humanities-based approach that complements the political science of populism, we propose to interrogate contemporary aesthetic forms, changing media landscapes, and discursive formations to gain insight into the role of thought, knowledge, expertise, of (public) intellectuals and the academy for contemporary democracy. While our focus is on the present and while we hope to ground our analyses in the specificity of concrete cultural configurations, we will benefit from historical and transnational perspectives.
In the age of “post-truth” and “alternative facts,” critique would appear indispensable: a tool for countering patent lies as much as for unraveling the ideological assumptions and political implications of texts, speech acts, and cultural trends. And yet, the notion of critique has come under suspicion itself – whether from a populist, anti-intellectual stance that sees critique as inherently destructive, obfuscatory, and a violation of common sense; or from within the academy, where misgivings about the protocols and legacies of critical theory have led to calls for a shift into “post-critique.” In these and other debates, the very notion of critique oscillates between enlightenment and conspiracy, both of which work by questioning appearances, treating texts and actions with a hermeneutics of suspicion. In an age when politicians and media have successfully completed the deconstructive project by severing the relation between truth and a seemingly unlimited array of (alternative) facts, when climate change deniers can draw liberally on constructivist notions of truth and appeal to critically to the contingent nature of scientific consensus, Bruno Latour asked as early as 2003 whether critique had “run out of steam.”
Like critique, common sense is presently an embattled concept, and like populism itself, it oscillates between democratic appeals and authoritarian reflexes. As even a brief glance at its various translations reveals, common sense can be difficult to pin down: it means something different in the American tradition than the French sens commun, which must be distinguished in turn from the Latin sensus communis to which Kant still appealed in his Critique of Judgment. Other translations, whether as bon sens in French, gesunder Menschenverstand or Gemeinsinn in German, only further illustrate the semantic complexity of the concept. For our present purposes, however, we might distinguish broadly between two aspects of common sense, its democratic and its authoritarian valences. From Thomas Paine onwards, common sense has been understood as a prereflexive, shared understanding of the world, a discursive commons without which there can be no deliberation and debate. it is the “lifeblood of democracy” (Rosenfeld 2011). Hannah Arendt stressed this dimension of the term by drawing on the role Kant ascribed to the sensus communis in aesthetic judgement - a “special sense,” as Arendt called it, that grounds all judgments as their origin and their telos. In this sense, common sense would constitute an indispensable basis for any deliberative polity that weighs different judgments and engages in (self)critique.
On the other hand, a populist appeal to common sense can all too easily short-circuit critical reflection, replacing it with an anti-elitist reflex against deliberation and thinking itself. Here, common sense becomes the ground and telos of an anti-critical, anti-intellectual stance. Reviling complexity, diversity, expertise, and agonistic debate as ostensibly disintegrative forces, the populist invocation of common sense lays claim to the vox populi as authoritative, natural, uncorrupted source of ostensibly self-evident knowledge. Here, the corresponding image of politics and society is not deliberative but authoritarian, not agonistic or pluralistic but populist and homogeneous.
Resentment, which tends to align with this authoritarian common sense, is anti-intellectualism’s affective charge. At once vehemently critical and opposed to the reflexive protocols of critique, resentment is “insulated against arguments and experience,” as Martin Seel points out. Instead, it articulates a grievance and the memory of an earlier injury, whether real or perceived. Where resentment and the aggressive appeal to common sense join forces, the latter is cut in half, as the political scientist Emmanuel Richter puts it: common sense is stripped of its commonality and becomes exclusive of all those who would not heed its call.
Our conference is designed as a forum to investigate the intersections of common sense, resentment, and critique at different levels of culture and society. How do media configure common sense and resentment as affect? What resources might literature, film, or the arts provide for re-imagining the configuration of critique and common sense? What role does (public) scholarship and the dissemination of knowledge play in shaping that configuration? How can historical perspectives on critique, resentment, and common sense and on earlier culture wars help to understand their resurgence?