Meghan Sutherland

POPULISM AND SPECTACLE

In On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau proposes that the reputedly ‘empty’

rhetorical excess of populism constitutes the ontological and aesthetic ground on
which the existence of an entity called ‘the people’ depends. This essay considers
the tensions and affinities between the particular set of aesthetic relations that
Laclau attributes to populist rhetoric, on the one hand, and the set of apparently
techno-economic relations that Guy Debord describes as the logic of spectacle in
The Society of the Spectacle, on the other, arguing that Laclau’s conception of
populism compels us to recast the ontological problem of the relation that Debord
describes between the social and the spectacular in expressly aesthetic terms.
Beginning from this premise, the essay contends that the ‘empty’ aesthetic
conventions likewise associated with spectacular entertainment
and in
particular, the staging of the relation between audience and onstage spectacle
that defines the variety showcase aesthetic in this account
enact a set of tropic
relations that constitutes the audience as a generalized figure of ‘the people’ in
much the same terms as Laclau’s rhetoric. Tracing this aesthetic logic through an
especially charged performance from the history of blackface minstrelsy, the essay
concludes by considering how such a staging of the relation between populism and
spectacle might challenge the dominant models for understanding what constitutes
‘popular’ aesthetic form within Cultural Studies, and in the process, afford new
critical insights into the formal dimension of Laclau’s political logic.

Keywords populism; spectacle; popular aesthetics; variety; showcase;

audience
Ernesto Laclau begins On Populist Reason by recounting the many forms of
‘dangerous excess’ that political theorists have associated with both populism
and the social formations that historically claim its mantle (2005, p. x). Of
chief interest for Laclau is the charge that populism consists of ‘mere rhetoric’
(2005, p. 4). This charge serves as a rhetorical wellspring for all the others:
that populism has no political substance, no definable social referent, and
serves mostly as the shorthand for a base, irrational appeal to a base, irrational
element of society. However, it serves in this same capacity as an ironic
condensation of the book’s central claim. For as Laclau goes on to argue,
the rhetorical excess of populism constitutes nothing more or less than the
ontological condition of the foundational entity on which every other discourse
of society and the political depends for existence: the people. Because neither
‘society’ nor ‘the people’ exists as a coherent formation prior to its articulation
Cultural Studies Vol. 26, Nos. 2
3 March
May 2012, pp. 330
345
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.647646
 P O P U L I S M A N D S P E C TA C L E 331

in discourse
a premise that Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) have of course
elaborated throughout decades of worth of work done together and apart

their existence must be forged in the tropic relations of discourse itself.1
For perhaps obvious reasons, Laclau returns to the domain of political
rhetoric most literally defined to delineate the particular set of tropic figures
that produces a populist formation of the social. In the process, he transposes a
De Manian discussion of aesthetic terms and relations back onto more properly
defined social and political ones. For instance, he posits ‘the demand’ as the
minimal unit of a populist social formation; cites the ‘formation of an internal
frontier’ between ‘the people’ and the ‘institutional system’ as the metonymic
condition by which multiple demands associate multiple constituencies as a
people; and defines the charismatic figure of ‘the leader’ as the affective and
rhetorical condition by which this partial fragment of society becomes
metaphorically identified with ‘the people’ as such (2005, pp. 73
74; 94

99). Of course, at the heart of this distinctly literal discussion of political
relations lies the figurative claim most fundamental to Laclau’s renovation of
populism: without the affective charge that for other theorists and philosophers
only exhausts the conceptual content of populism, the hegemonic sublimation
by which a part of society becomes discursively identified with the whole of
society could not inhere. That is, without the radical investment of meaning
that the figurative dimension of this synecdoche sets in motion, the claim of
one particular group to represent society in general would read as a
misrepresentation at worst and a logical contradiction at best. Moreover,
the ‘rational’ practice of more revered political philosophies such as democracy
could not inhere either; the basic and yet impossible political imperative of
representing ‘society’
an entity whose claim to totality is necessarily founded
on this same incommensurability
would make no sense at all. Laclau thus
declares populism a ‘political logic’, which is to say, an ontological production
of the social itself, rather than the name for a particular social group or
ideology (2005, p. 117).
One of the many striking things about this scenario is the particular
combination of tensions and affinities that it holds with Guy Debord’s
description of social production in The Society of the Spectacle (1994). The
tensions are perhaps obvious. While Debord begins his treatise by declaring,
‘All that was once directly lived has become mere representation’ (1994,
p. 12), Laclau begins his by rejecting the very notion of any ‘merely’
epiphenomenal representation (2005, p. 67). While Debord emphasizes the
constitutive role that ‘trancelike behavior’ and ‘separation’ play in producing
the social unity of spectacle (1994, pp. 16
17), Laclau emphasizes emotional
investment and relation as the very ground of the populist formation. And
while Debord describes spectacle as the institution of an ‘enormous positivity’
in which ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear’
(1994, p. 15), Laclau expressly defines the aesthetic economy of populist
rhetoric against the aesthetic economy of this expressly institutionalist
332 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

discourse, which, unlike the incommensurable synecdoche of a populist

formation, ‘attempts to make the limits of the discursive formation coincide
with the limits of the community’ by emphasizing its ability to unite every
existing difference in the name of ‘separation’ (2005, p. 81). In all of these
ways, Laclau’s affective revaluation of populist rhetoric would seem
diametrically opposed to Debord’s harrowing denunciation of The Society of
the Spectacle. Or at the very least, it would seem to imply a rejection of this
denunciation of spectacle.
As Laclau himself has taught us, though, the relation of opposition is never
simply diametric; no relational entanglement is. It is from this point of view
that the affinities between Laclau and Debord’s respective accounts take on an
expressed charge. For instance, when Debord writes, ‘The spectacle appears at
once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification’ (1994,
p. 12), it is difficult not to think of the tropic role that synecdoche, and the
affective sublimation of a people with ‘the people’ that it sets in motion, play
in Laclau’s discussion of populist rhetoric. Even more precisely, it is difficult
not to think of the way that the spectacle itself here seems to displace or
obviate the role that Laclau assigns the leader plays in securing the
metaphorical identity between the two terms of this synecdoche. In its very
capacity as spectacle
as that which exercises an irresistible visual appeal to
the spectator rendered as a generality
it both constitutes a point at which ‘all
attention, all consciousness, converges’, and in doing so, becomes a ‘means of
unification’ between, on the one hand, whatever ‘part’ of society it then
retroactively manifests as the spectacle of ‘society itself’, and on the other, a
separate entity that is also implicitly known as ‘society itself’ (1995, p. 12).
Along similar lines, when Debord contends, ‘The spectacle divides the world
into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation to the world,
and is superior to the world’ (1995, p. 22), he introduces into social existence
exactly the sort of ‘radical internal frontier’ that Laclau sees as a minimal
aesthetic condition for the establishment of this same synecdochal affect (2005,
pp. 83
93). Somewhere along the way, Debord’s cryptic statements about the
ontological status of spectacle
like his proposal that spectacle is ‘not a
decorative element’, but rather, ‘the very heart of society’s real unreality’
(1995, p. 13)
also begin to evoke Laclau’s characterization of populist
rhetorical excess more than the metaphysical denunciation of representation
that serves as their chronological, if not philosophical, premise.
And yet, if anything, these evocations only make it harder to define the
nature of the relation between the respective accounts. While the two
analogical comparisons above make it tempting to think of Debord’s spectacle
as the uncanny techno-economic double of the rhetorical affect that Laclau
recuperates in On Populist Reason
we might call it the return of repression

the ontological conceit of the last one undercuts such an easy distinction. On
the one hand, it reminds us that many aspects of Debord’s willfully
inconsistent argument already suggest a more complicated relationship
 P O P U L I S M A N D S P E C TA C L E 333

between the existence of society and its representation as ‘mere’ spectacle. On

the other hand, it reminds us that Debord’s description of spectacle does not
simply consist of the techno-economic relations of production with which it is
conceptually identified in theory. Debord’s spectacle also consists, and perhaps
most fundamentally, of a particular set of aesthetic relations defined around the
distinctly visual and spectatorial conditions of excess that qualify a representa-
tion as spectacular in the first place. Moreover, it is the contours of these
relations themselves
rather than anything specifically technical or economic
about them
that grounds the analogical affinities between Debord and
Laclau’s respective accounts.
Of course, this reminder almost immediately summons another: namely,
that Laclau’s account of the dangerous excesses associated with populism and
‘the people’ would hardly be complete without any mention of a tendency
towards spectacle
a tendency shared in reciprocity by the figure of the
populist demagogue, who gains power precisely by making a spectacle of
himself, and by the figure of the ‘suggestible’ crowd that is drawn to such
vacuous spectacles precisely on account of the broadly affective visual appeal
that defines them. It would be impossible and perhaps unnecessary to rehearse
the Platonic origins of this association in full here. But at least as early as
Politics, Aristotle could permit a judicious use of ‘spectacle’ in tragedy
a
stylistic excess to be avoided otherwise
on the expressly political premise
that the audience for tragedy is ‘partly vulgar too, composed of laborers and
farmers and other such, and these people too must be granted their spectacles
as relaxation’ (1977, pp. 8.7.4
6). As we know from the work of British and
American Cultural Studies scholars
not to mention the theories of the mass
audience that they sought to challenge
the association between spectacle and
the figure of the ‘people’ as plebs that Aristotle summons in his Politics only
grows more entrenched with the development of modern mass-entertainment
forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 What is more, it remains
entrenched today, when the very notion of ‘making a spectacle’ of oneself on
YouTube conveys at once an aesthetic and intellectual devaluation, a
denigration of the overly affected audience that both fuels and feeds on such
excessive visual displays, and a grim diagnosis of the apathetic isolation that
defines twenty-first century political practice in ‘real’ space
not to mention
the role that reputedly ‘populist’ media platforms such as YouTube play in
eroding the properly rational and linguistic basis imputed to an idealized
democratic political practice of the past.3
Generally speaking, the theoretical foundations of Cultural Studies
scholarship provide three basic models for explaining the persistence of this
association: Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) conception of a class-defined aesthetic
habitus, Stuart Hall’s (1981) understanding of the popular audience as a
discursive construction fashioned against the ‘power-bloc’, and various
adaptations of Michel de Certeau’s (1984) theory of popular tactics.4 While
Bourdieu’s scenario would suggest that spectacular entertainment represents
334 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

another instance of ‘popular aesthetic form’, and thus marks and produces the
habitus of its audience as a disenfranchised class formation in aesthetic
discourse, the other two would focus on how audience discourses surrounding
the reception of spectacular entertainment articulate the constituents of this
audience as a populist formation defined against the dominant institutions of
culture. In both cases, the discursive production of ‘the people’ takes place
entirely outside the aesthetic relations of spectacular entertainment itself; the
aesthetic relations of visual discourse somehow do not carry the ontological
force allowed to ‘discourse’ here. There is something of value in each of these
arguments, to be sure. And yet, in my estimation, Debord and Laclau’s
respective accounts require that we take the radical conceit of rhetoricity that
lies at the heart of On Populist Reason far more seriously than any of these
models allows. Indeed, they compel us to consider the extent to which the
vaguely defined aesthetic conventions associated with ‘spectacular entertain-
ment’ enact a set of tropic relations that automatically stage their audience as a
generalized figure of ‘the people’, and in the process, enact a kind of
enfoldment of the movement between affection and disaffection, production
and reproduction, that they respectively describe.
In the pages that follow, then, I want to explore this possibility by
indulging in a rhetorical sublimation of my own: I want to look at how the
staging of the audience in a particularly charged form of popular spectacle

the blackface minstrelsy show
showcases an aesthetic automation of the very
same tropic relations that Laclau traces out on the terrain of political discourse.
In the process, I want to consider how the populist political formation that
congeals around the figure of this audience might provide some critical
leverage on the details of Laclau’s aesthetic figuration of populism
especially
where it overlaps most suggestively with the institutionalist figure of spectacle
in Debord’s account. I also want to consider how the rudimentary set of
aesthetic conventions that define this particular instance of American popular
entertainment, as well as a good deal of what is still considered definitively
‘popular entertainment’ worldwide, might allow us to recognize the
infamously ‘broad’ spectacular form of the variety showcase
a form that
carries the basic visual conceit of monstration, or showing, across a wide array of
mediums, genres and constituencies
as an ontological aesthetic of ‘the
people’ in its own right.5 As I have already begun to suggest, this expressly
aesthetic vantage on the ontological nature of the relation between spectacle, on
the one hand, and the discursive production of the ‘the people’, on the other,
proposes some significant changes in the way that we understand the relation
between political ontology and the visual dimension of popular aesthetics.
Perhaps even more fundamentally, though, it attempts to draw out at least
some of the profound implications that Laclau’s most recent work holds for us
today
when the discursive terrain of ‘proper’ political discourse is more
overwhelmingly expansive, if not more spectacular, than ever.
 P O P U L I S M A N D S P E C TA C L E 335

Before we can consider the nature of the aesthetic relation between

populist rhetoric and spectacle, we must first address a more rudimentary
question: What is the aesthetic of spectacle? Or rather, what is spectacular
about spectacle? Although The Society of the Spectacle is seldom regarded as a
work of aesthetic theory
let alone descriptivism
it offers some useful cues.
For instance, the iterative and sometimes reiterative pages of theses that make
up the book as a whole repeatedly conceptualize spectacle as a ‘accumulation’
of partitive spectacles, each one united only in its ‘separateness’ (1995, p. 12).
However, they also rhetorically enact this scene of figurative accumulation at
the level of form, highlighting the graphic hiatus between a series of partial
conceptual presentations of spectacle that, altogether, constitute the seemingly
non-teleological series of ideas collected into one simultaneously textual and
conceptual whole. In this much alone, Debord’s text already summons the way
that we speak of spectacles in everyday life, whether we are making them or
regarding them
never as the spectacle, but rather, as a spectacle, and
implicitly, one of many more to come in succession. Indeed, the hollowed-out
conceit of monstration or showing that defines spectacle most minimally as a
presentation of anything already precludes the possibility of any absolute
definition of spectacle, let alone the possibility that any one spectacle could
define spectacle as such; it is essentially inessential. In other words, spectacle is
what Laclau would describe as an empty signifier
a fundamentally hegemonic
term that can only point to an unrepresentable plenitude by effacing its ability
to signify any one differential meaning within the order of language.6
The term spectacle necessarily implies more than just the promise of more
and different spectacles, though. As the Latin root of the word makes clear, to
qualify as a spectacle something must attract spectators, and thus, it must also
manifestly distinguish itself from the visible continuity of the phenomenal
world that would otherwise subsume it. Put otherwise, a spectacle is the
presentation of something that is generally replaceable in the larger scheme of
potential spectacles, but is also so manifestly different in what it shows that it
nevertheless demands spectatorship. In fact, at the most rudimentary level of
all, the term spectacle would seem to define nothing so much as this highly
affected relation of looking
that is, the mutually constitutive relation of
attraction between spectatorship and the expressly ‘empty’ aesthetic appeal of
visual display itself. And in this respect, it makes sense that so many popular
genres associated with the seemingly undefined aesthetic imprimatur of
spectacular entertainment generally meet two basic formal criteria that,
together, define what I will call the variety showcase aesthetic: like so many
historical iterations of variety entertainment
including circus, freak shows,
vaudeville, television variety shows and talent competitions, pageants, and
even websites such as Facebook and YouTube, among others
these genres
present a variety of different visual attractions on one platform (whether
theatrical or technological), and as if to confirm the affective dimension of
336 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

these attractions, showcase as well the breadth of the audience that responds to
these attractions with expressions of their own variety.7
Interestingly enough, this double presentation of an articulated spectacle,
on the one hand, and the spectacle of the reciprocally articulated audience for
this spectacle, on the other, also resonates strongly with Debord’s most
Laclauean description of spectacle as a set of relations, where he writes, ‘The
spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of
unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all
consciousness, converges . . . the unity it imposes is merely the official
language of generalized separation’ (1994, p. 12). Indeed, with the tropic
relations of the showcase aesthetic in mind, it is a great deal easier to visualize
the mise-en-scene of this otherwise illogical set-up. As a ‘part’ of society,
spectacle evokes the focal point of a visual display whose ‘broad’ appeal
coordinates the sightlines of ‘all’. As ‘all’ of society, it evokes both the surfeit
of representivity imputed to this variegated display on account of its ‘broad’
appeal and the variegated spectacle of the audience whose apparent articulation
of different responses simultaneously confirms it. Finally, as a ‘means of
unification’, it evokes the relational aesthetic condensed under the heading of
the variety showcase itself. Thus, to read Debord’s description of spectacle as a
relational production of social unity that is predicated on separation
much
like the unity of a rhetorical relation
is to recognize spectacle as something
more than just an empty signifier. A fortiori, it is to recognize spectacle as a
signifier of the empty signifier, a monstrative display case of sorts for the set of
tropic movements that the empty signifier enacts, and at bottom, a veritable
mechanism of hegemonic social productions. But what would it look like to see
the institutionalist aesthetic of spectacle coincide with the aesthetic reading of
On Populist Reason
not to mention the understanding of a ‘society of
spectacle’ that it makes thinkable?
Material institutions of spectacular entertainment seldom cast quite the
menacing shadow of oppression that spectacle does in theory; blackface
minstrelsy is an exception. And in this same capacity, it provides a
concentrated example of how the political logic of populism can overlap
with the distinctly institutionalist logic of spectacle in a single aesthetic
production of ‘the people’. What is more, it provides this example in a
medium of spectacular entertainment that precludes any simple reduction of
the latter’s logic to merely technological or economic registers of mediation

namely, the spatio-temporal unity of a pre-industrialized theatre. Indeed, when
minstrelsy stabilized as a discrete institution of American popular theatre in the
1840s, critics often hailed it as the first great art form to originate with
the American people
a distinction that perhaps already speaks to its
significance for the formation of an expressly working-class cultural sensibility,
but one that simultaneously overlapped with an institutionalist construction of
white American civic identity more generally (1974, p. 25). Performances
generally featured white ethnic performers in blackface, most of them recent
 P O P U L I S M A N D S P E C TA C L E 337

immigrants to the States, as they played out various stereotypes of black affect
in a variety showcase comprised of comedic musical numbers, dances, dialect
performances, skits and oratorical satires. As Robert Toll notes, the versatility
of this format played a key role establishing the form’s popular status, for it
gave the minstrel show ‘a flexibility that . . . could immediately respond to its
audiences’ preferences in both form and content’ (1974, pp. 52
56). Of
course, insofar as the versatility of the format made it possible to adapt the
show itself to the demands of the people in the audience, the affective response
of this audience quickly became recognized as a conventional part of the
spectacle promised by it.8
In Love and Theft, Eric Lott (1995) offers an account of the political
discourse that emerged around the phenomenon of the minstrel show that
should interest us a great deal. In the course of this argument, he draws a
subtle link between the performance and consumption of ‘blackness’ that took
place in this particular arena of popular entertainment and the consolidation of
modern populist labour coalitions. Positioning the practice of cross-racial (and
often cross-gender) drag in the volatile political context of the mid-nineteenth
century
just as pre-Civil War debates about slavery began to threaten the
federal union and ‘labor struggles’ and class-driven riots erupted in urban
centres
Lott characterizes minstrel performance as a site of contradictory
investments for the white working class. He writes:

Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as

well as fear, the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even
as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class.
There was a good fit, for example, between the conflicted nature of the
shows and the racial tendencies of their audiences, such that the artisan
abolitionist constituency could rather benignly enjoy the same form of
leisure that supported racist, antiabolitionist ridicule.
(Lott 1995, pp. 8
9)

In this scenario, the performance of racial difference on the minstrel stage

raised two divergent possibilities for its audience. On the one hand, it allowed
members of the audience with a variety of different class interests and ideas
about race to entertain the coincidence between the struggles of the black slave
and the ‘black’ Irish wage-slave, and to articulate their own various
experiences of difference and disenfranchisement through identification with
the ‘black’ performer as a ‘low Other’.9 On the other hand, though, it
provided this audience with an exoticized spectacle of objectified racial
difference, through and against which it could construct the collective identity
of the working class as white over and above its ethnic-immigrant and artisanal
variety. It is the minstrel show’s staging of this double-movement between
‘love and theft’ that interests Lott most, to be sure. But it should interest us,
too. For as we will see, it is above all this staging of a double-movement
338 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

between the racial figuration of working-class expropriation, on the one hand,

and the consolidation of American citizenship as the province of whiteness, on
the other, that so strongly suggests the minstrel show’s staging of an aesthetic
overlap between two staggered figurations of ‘the people’: the institutionalist
logic of Debord’s spectacle and Laclau’s political logic of populism.
Lott himself treats the minstrel show as a ‘deep-rooted’ aesthetic tradition
of the working class that simply helps the latter’s various pre-existing
constituents work through a hegemonic battle over the status of race in
populist political discourse. Nevertheless, in the course of this argument,
Lott’s vivid description of a 1933 engraving of the audience for a performance
by the minstrel show icon T.D. Rice opens the way for a more radical
understanding of the relation between the showcase aesthetic of minstrelsy, the
populist political discourse that emerged from its domain, and the institution
of white citizenship that emerged simultaneously for so many American
immigrants. Lott writes:

With only a fiddler by his side, Rice performs center stage. He is the only
‘black’ person in the theater. A crowd has thronged to the foot of the
stage and overflowed onto the boards. It is a crowd of some variety,
except for the almost total absence of women: workers in smocks and
straw hats rub elbows with militiamen; clerks ape the betters they hope
one day to become; a few respectable men intervene in scuffles that have
broken out in two places on the stage. The picture frame is tightly packed
with spectators; the frame extends beyond the boxes on the left to include
four more tiers of people. The crowd has become both background and
foreground
it is not too much to say that it has become the spectacle
itself, so much is Rice dwarfed by the crowd’s interest in its own
activities.
(Lott 1995, pp. 124
125)

In this passage, Lott finds the two linked performances I have deemed typical
of the variety showcase aesthetic: Rice’s performance of ‘blackness’ and the
audience’s performance of its response to Rice, the latter of which marks out a
whole spectrum of different social positions within and just beyond the borders
of the white, often immigrant working class. The significance of this audience
showcase is of course not lost on Lott, who proposes that the ‘function’ of
minstrelsy was ‘to bring various class fragments into contact with one another’
by accommodating an array of ‘emerging splits’ within populist discourses of
race equality and citizenship
not least on account of the ironic mode of
address that often attends the presentational aesthetic of the variety showcase
(1995, pp. 66
67). But what if we took Lott’s reading of the minstrel show’s
‘populist’ audience more literally? What if this popular art form’s tendency
towards audience participation, presentation and emotional investment has less
to do with a ‘deep-rooted’ habitus, and more to do with the aesthetic
 P O P U L I S M A N D S P E C TA C L E 339

conditions of producing a collective social identity on cultural turf? Moreover,

what if the social identity produced is not strictly populist? In short, what if the
popular aesthetic form of the variety showcase itself contributes to a more
ambivalent formation of ‘the people’ in general?
Laclau’s intervention in On Populist Reading provides us with many
resources to work through these difficult questions. Perhaps most fundamen-
tally, it allows us to see the role that the spectacular mise-en-scene of the
minstrel show plays in the scene above to actually constitute ‘the people’ of
the populist formation that Lott treats more incidentally. For instance, if we
return to the scene of Rice’s performance with the rhetorical relations of
populism in mind, a whole different discursive architecture comes into view.
As Lott suggests, the audience that invades the spectacle of Rice’s performance
is a ‘crowd of some variety’, composed of ‘class fragments’ that make different
political demands on the spectacle of race they have come to see (1995, pp.
124
125). As a result, they watch this spectacle, but only as they watch the
reactions of other audience members for signs of their differing responses to
the political charge of the racial performance onstage. Packed elbow to elbow
and even fist to fist, we find a simultaneously physical and affective relation of
metonymy between the spectators, their ‘demands’, and their sightlines; there
is a sense of association between them, but one that bears the traces of their
contingent relationship as individual workers of different economic positions,
trades and political orientations
especially with respect to race. Much as
Debord would have it, then, in the absence of a leader
the charismatic figure
that, for Laclau, affectively condenses the metonymic association of group
demands into a metaphorical figuration of ‘the people’
it is the spectacle of
the cross-racial minstrel body that serves as the hegemonic ‘quilting point’ for
uniting the fragmented audience as a popular whole. More specifically, it is the
non-naturalistic presentational conceit of the variety showcase aesthetic that
allows Rice’s performance of racial identity as a ‘partial object’ to become such
an overdetermined signifier of the miscegenated American social body as a
whole, and in turn, to consolidate the larger white identity of the popular
audience itself as a whole without entirely effacing the differences between
them.
Of course, the spectacularization of race under way here animates yet
another spectacle as well, and with it, another ‘partial object’: the popular
audience whose very relationship it renders as such. By extension, then, it
serves another crucial function in the rhetorical order of populism that Laclau
describes, establishing a radical frontier around the figure of the audience
before it. For indeed, as Laclau makes clear in On Populist Reason and
throughout his work, the hegemonic synecdoche whereby a part of society
becomes ontologically invested with the significance of the social whole cannot
be sustained by a simple dialectical relay between two opposed actors, or ‘us’
versus ‘them’. Instead, it must draw two frontiers of exclusion around itself to
function as such. On the one hand, it must mark out a liminal contact with ‘the
340 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

opaqueness of an irretrievable ‘‘outside’’’
for instance, the radical

heterogeneity of the lumpenproletariat
to secure both its appearance of
homogeneity and its ‘underdog’ status (2005, p. 152). On the other hand, it
must cordon itself off from the figure of dominant society and the distinctly
institutional representation that society itself already provides. The funda-
mental theatricality of the minstrel show spectacle provides an economical
solution to this challenge. While the blackface spectacle occurring onstage
‘marks’ a liminal point of contact between the spectators and the figure of the
‘low Other’ that coordinates their sight-lines in relation to the stage and each
other at once, the socially and spatially bounded architectural space of the
theatre
which is showcased in the process
provides a figurative ‘frontier’
by literally cordoning the audience off from the institutional world of politics
and social representation that lies outside the boundaries of the space for
‘entertainment’. That is, in so far as the space of a spectacular representation is
taken to be removed from the ‘proper’ space of sociopolitical representation, it
can always already be defined as the space of ‘popular’ representation; whether
or not it rejects ‘dominant’ values per se, it displaces their immediate
expression as satisfied.
As this scenario suggests, the minstrel show’s staging of a racial and
institutional frontier of exclusion around the figure of the popular audience
plays a necessary role in constituting this audience as a holistic formation of
‘the people’. In the process, however, it would seem to present a scene of
aesthetic undecidability between the political logic of populism and the
institutionalist logic against which Laclau defines it. Laclau opposes these logics
to one another precisely because of a distinction that he makes with Ranciere
between ‘politics’ and ‘police’: in the economy of these terms, the
incommensurable synecdoche that defines the aesthetic of populism opens
up a space of demand for the production of new political identities
and
presents itself as expressly incomplete despite its claim to represent ‘the
people’
‘while police’ entails ‘the attempt to reduce all differences to
partialities within the communitarian whole’ (2005, p. 245). Laclau and
Ranciere are persuasive on this matter, to be sure. But it is difficult to imagine
which side of this opposition would be appropriate for the constitutive act of
racial exclusion by which the minstrel show spectacle helped to forge the
populist social formation that, for Lott and others, effectively made the
movement viable at such an unstable moment. Not only does this exclusion
quite literally serve to ‘police’ the emergence of a black political identity
within the discursive space of populism; the spectacle of this exclusion
simultaneously provides the very liminal point of contact that articulates a
horizon of recuperable differences around the white audience members it binds
together, endowing them with a quality of holistic representivity that is crucial
to the hegemonic operation.
In this respect, the racial exclusion of the minstrel show points to another
element of the showcase aesthetic that would seem to blur the distinction that
 P O P U L I S M A N D S P E C TA C L E 341

Laclau sets up between the constitutive lack of populism, on the one hand, and
the promise of plenitude or representational sufficiency that defines the
institutional logic of spectacle in Debord’s account. For if the obviously limited
audience for this popular spectacle can be invested with the incommensurable
significance of embodying a synecdoche for ‘the people’ more broadly, it is
partly because the differential articulation of the audience that the showcase
aesthetic carries out amidst its entire sceneographic operation also foregrounds
the broad array of audience ‘demands’ to which it must answer to gather a
‘popular’ audience worthy of the name. That is, by showcasing the variety of
the particular audience constituencies fighting for ground in the unseemly
confines of a minstrel show galley, the spectacle of the audience points like a
rhetorical vector to its own claim for broader representivity, and thus, to the
variety of ‘the people’ it can accommodate in general
whether or not it
succeeds in accommodating any actual demands in the political sphere. The
spectacle of racial difference presented onstage can open onto the contentious
spectacle of sociopolitical demands it articulates because it showcases the figure
of the audience according to the same tropic totality that Laclau describes

essentially a limited set of metonymic differences that takes on a metaphorical
sense of identity with an impossible social whole. To paraphrase the vision of
the working class that Laclau and Mouffe borrow from Rosa Luxembourg, the
audience is constituted as a ‘people’ because ‘a frontier of exclusion’
here
racial and institutional at once
allows their ethnic, political and economic
differences to be effaced without disappearing (2005, p. 81). At the same time,
though, the affective coherence of this spectacle of ‘the people’ depends on the
traces of these differences precisely to point to the total sufficiency of the social
fragment it represents as an audience and nothing more; consumer plenitude
and political partiality overlap here. It is perhaps for this reason, above all, that
the institution of minstrelsy is generally associated with the production of two
very different constructions of political identity: on the one hand, the
consolidation of full white citizenship for the ethnic immigrants that could now
begin to embody the very plenitude of American multiculturalist and economic
inclusivity, and on the other, the consolidation of the distinctly class-bound
populist coalition that Lott discusses.10 And yet, the aesthetic overlap between
these two hegemonic constructions of the social is hardly unique to the
minstrel show format either.11 The production of any coherent political
identity would seem to require the policing of the limits of difference it can
contain, and in turn, the policing of a rhetoric for heterogeneity through which
to articulate itself in its drive for liberation. Blackface minstrelsy is simply one
brutal vestige of this process.
In treating the spectacular mise-en-scene of the minstrel show as an
ambivalent ontological ground on which a figure of ‘the people’ was forged in
this period, I would not like to suggest that we can simply equate the
‘populism’ of consumer culture with the political discourse of populism that
demands something other than a spectacle to its liking. Rather, I would like to
342 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

suggest, on the auspices of On Populist Reason, that the aesthetic relations

associated with the formal conditions of what is known as ‘popular aesthetics’
in virtually every account are not simply the vestigial traces of some ‘primitive’
and now ‘deeply-rooted’ working-class art form; they derive from an
enactment of the same basic tropic economy that Laclau attributes to the
construction of ‘the people’.12 As such, the ontological production of ‘the
people’ that takes place in the realm of popular entertainment cannot
constitute a populist political movement on its own. But if it can be said to
either compete with, contribute to, or foreclose the productions of social
objectivity on which such movements depend for their own representational
success, it is only because it competes for visibility on the same ontological ground
that more properly political rhetorical productions of ‘the people’ do. Simply
put, the rhetoric of populism is not the only populist rhetoric, nor is it ever
only a populist rhetoric; the aesthetic relations of popular spectacle itself
reproduce this rhetoric on their own terms all the time, and in the context of
new media culture, we must necessarily imagine the ontological production of
populist rhetoric that Laclau draws out in detail as a figuration of the social that
must harmonize with a million other such figurations, or else, successfully
compete with them on yet another register of hegemonic status.
It is perhaps only with this secondary register of hegemonic representation
in mind
a register where hegemonic representations of the social must
themselves compete amongst each other for hegemony
that the complicated
affinity between On Populist Reason and The Society of the Spectacle comes fully
into focus. After all, to read the aesthetic relation between the spectacular
conceit of the variety showcase through Laclau’s account of populist rhetoric in
the former is to arrive at much the same problem that most worries Debord in
the latter
the ‘autonomous’ production and reproduction of representations
of the social.13 It is simply to recognize the nature of this problem in far more
complex ontological terms
terms that directly problematize the postmodern
scenario of ‘implosion’, or an elimination of relationality as such. To begin
with, by teaching us to recognize the economy of representation as the
ontological ground on which every other figure of the economy operates,
Laclau’s work helps us to recognize that the problem of representational
‘autonomization’ refers not simply to the automatism of a network economy, a
capitalist economy, or an automatic reproduction of subjectivity, but also to
the automatism of the aesthetic economy of relations that defines spectacle as
an ontological terrain in the first place. In other words, the reproductive
‘accumulation’ of spectacles only represents such a threat to Debord because it
coincides with the originary production of social existence that likewise depends
on the aesthetic relations of spectacle
‘the very heart of society’s real
unreality’
for its material existence. Our relation to the image, then, is
potentially both material and affective, figurative and removed, a scene of
plenitude and partiality at once, but it is most assuredly a relation. Indeed, the
performativity of populist naming also entails a more conventional scene of
 P O P U L I S M A N D S P E C TA C L E 343

performance that articulates the politics of the popular audience through its
own variety showcase of group spectatorship
whether in relation to the
monstration of an entertainment spectacle or the demonstration of a political
rally. The term spectacle would thus seem to refer to nothing so much as the
aesthetic relation of undecidability between these terms that manifests itself as
the unstable substrate of visual presentation undergirding the ‘empty’ imagery
of rhetoric and spectacle alike.
Of course, to think of spectacle this way is to recognize the latter as
something that constitutes an opening for the political just as unstably as it does
a closure for, or codification of it. For insofar as the variety-based aesthetic of
spectacle can raise a people in the name of this same codification
simply by
staging them according to the spectacular formal relations of the showcase
it
shows well how the potential to police enfolds a key moment of politics. In
this sense, reading spectacle through Laclau’s intervention does not make us
better readers of Debord’s text or his intentions; it allows us to recognize a
much larger and more complex problem of political ontology that manifests
itself in the pages of The Society of the Spectacle, whether Debord intends it or
not; it compels us to think this problem anew, and perhaps indefinitely.

Notes

1 To cite just a few of these works, see Laclau (1990, 1996); Laclau and
Mouffe (1985).
2 For just a couple of the field-founding discussions of popular art forms and
the audience with which they are associated in Cultural Studies, see Hall and
Whannel (1965) and Williams (1978). For a couple of the most archetypal
Frankfurt School treatments of the audience for ‘mass’ entertainment, see
Kracauer (2005) and Adorno (2001).
3 Several recent studies critique the ‘populist’ claims of reality-TV and new
media from an implicitly or explicitly Debordian perspective. See, for
instance, Andrejevic (2003) and Dean (2010).
4 For a small sample of some of the canonical texts associated with these three
theoretical traditions and their adaptation within the field of Cultural
Studies, see Fiske (1989a, 1989b) and Jenkins (1992, 2006).
5 I explore this idea at significantly greater length in my dissertation and book
manuscript on how the trope of variety moves across the registers of
political and aesthetic discourse as a figure of spectacle. See Sutherland
(2007).
6 Laclau offers his fullest discussion of the logic of the empty signifier in ‘Why
Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’ (1996, pp. 36
46).
7 For a much full development of this claim, see Sutherland (2007, 2008).
8 For instance, by the time the minstrel show fell out of favour in the wake of
the Civil War, the spectacular convention of spotlighting the response of the
344 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

audience had already been established as a quintessential trait of the

vaudeville variety show.
9 Lott of course borrows the concept of the low Other from Stallybrass and
White (1986).
10 For an example of this first narrative, see Rogin (1996).
11 See, for example, Michael Kazin’s description of the process through which
a populist political formation took shape under Gompers (1995, pp. 53

54).
12 It is important to note that this ‘popular’ figuration of the audience
necessarily depends on other modes of popular media to assume this same
representative function in the ‘popular imagination’ of the world beyond
the theatre. It is perhaps for this reason that detailed representations and
descriptions of the audiences for these shows
like the one of Rice from
which Lott draws
circulated so widely in the popular press at the time.
13 Debord first describes spectacle as ‘the autonomous image’ in thesis 2 of The
Society of the Spectacle, in which he links the separation of spectacle from
society to the former’s ability to produce ‘the autonomous movement of
non-life’ (1994, p. 12).

Notes on contributor

Meghan Sutherland is Associate Professor of Cinema and Visual Studies at

the University of Toronto and a founding coeditor of the online journal World
Picture http://www.worldpicturejournal.com. She is the author of The Flip
Wilson Show (Wayne State University Press, 2008), and her essays on media,
politics and philosophy have appeared in Framework, Senses of Cinema, and
various edited anthologies.

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