Springtime For The Populists?

The readings for this class bombard you with ideas, hence a proper reflection is required for clear significance and understanding because meaning according to Baudrillard is self-referential. We need to understand ideas within our own contexts just as I will attempt to display relating Kipnis’ ‘Refunctioning’ reconsidered: towards a left popular culture and Hitler.

Major political changes in history haven’t really happened without a “crisis”. I really mean major ones such as Germany (the masses/people) feeling all self-defeated after WWI looked upon someone who would create a new ideal; Hitler. Hitler illustrates Kipnis’ assertion that hegemony is always a process, and a class (in this case an individual) becomes hegemonic not through sheer domination, “but through its ability to interpellate both the members of its own class and members of the classes it seeks to dominate” (32). Hitler rearticulated German nationalism (admittedly with the help of some force) by “provoking a crisis of the dominant ideological discourse and a crisis in the ability of the system to neutralize its dominated sectors” (33). Hitler recognized the German people needed to reunite and called upon them to become the ideology with German nationalism (something that related all of them) because the previous dominant ideology and the loss of WWI caused moments of antagonism (as Tapley says: moments of ‘pissed-off’-ness). According to Kipnis these people are considered 'unassimilatable", however Hitler just moved the people from being assimilated from one ideology to the next despite this 'unassimilability'. Hitler recognized the antagonisms and articulated them with popular interpellation in a rough sense, “Hey you à we the people of Germany, we are the #1”. Thereby winning the ideological class struggle because he reappropriated “the same interpellations in antagonistic discourses” (33). Hitler rearticulated values, however he reinstituted the same hierarchy the previous ideology had before him. It goes in a cycle because there will always be an antognistic discourse to rearticulate, and once rearticulation happens for the next group of opressed a new hegemony has taken over.

At the end, Kipnis poses the question of how we should go about challenging ‘the system’ versus, “fostering critical strategies” (34). However, I find that she is in conflict with her own discourse on populism by expressing the need for action in academia. The academic population is an elite and definitely not the masses, nor does her article reach the masses. Albiet Kipnis argues for action, I think hegemony and new ideals are so privisional we just keep reproducing hegemony which marginalizes a new and different group each time; othering.