Imagining 'Everybody': Political Popularisation as Triggers of Enthusiasm and Hate

Visual culture and art are often thought to enter the arena of politics and violence as a transforming or even as a “healing” tool. Nevertheless, visual figurations are part of political, public life in much more ambiguous ways: they are also active agents in ongoing conflicts. The present paper addresses popularisation practices in current, western democratic societies since the late 1960s, the visual figurations coined in this process and how they address and involve their public. It shows that for today’s political mobilisation “classical” popularisation figures such as “the worker” or “the (new) woman” are mostly a thing of the past. Contemporary audiences view their heroism and universalism sceptically. Nevertheless, contemporary agenda-setting subjects also have to coin versions of such particular-universal figures in order to address as large a public as possible. These figures are now, however, often borrowed from marginal worlds: they appear in the form of imaginative adoptions of the migrant and the clown, the outlaw and the villain or of particular historical personalities such as Guy Fawkes, who became the common face of the Occupy movement. In this paper I investigate such figures through which contemporary political movements and agenda setting entities compete for the attention of “all of us”, and in particular the emotional mediating role they play in the contemporary transnational public sphere. The focus is on the “ambivalence of imagination” (Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand), i.e. the ways in which these figures stir desire and enthusiastic adoptions, allowing people to build temporarily affective cross-border communities and solidarity, but at the same time how they can become catalysts of resentment, hate and violence too. In analysing this double-edged dynamic the paper refers to the work of such different political and social theorists such as René Girard and Pierre Rosanvallon.