Performance and populism. Choreographing popular forms of collectivity

Seeking return of democracy into the realm of politics and popular sovereignty into state institutions, populist movements and political parties arose across the world in the early years of the twenty-first century on both sides of the political spectrum. Whether conceived as a way of doing politics, ideology, style, figure, discourse, political logic, or strategy, populism in all these views implies a moment of division between the people and the elite. This is why the debate about populism is a political debate about constructing the people, that is, new forms of subjectivity, community, or collectivity. To envisage alternative ways of living together, some political philosophers from the left found inspiration in the horizontal, leaderless civic movements, such as Occupy, and the notion of the self-organized multitude. Others found inspiration in the vertical civic movements with leadership, such as Podemos, and the notion of constructed people. The segmentation of civic and political structures that emanates from such a dualism prevents the left from displacing neoliberalism, arresting the increasing institutionalization of right-wing populism and invigorating democracy. To find a way out of this deadlock and empower the left, this chapter envisages the relationship between these disparate views in co-constitutive terms. What I will be calling the choreography of articulation is the performative practice that transforms horizontality into verticality, embodying the multitude of democratic identities in a popular form of collectivity. The performance 100% City by the German-based ‘collective’ Rimini Protokoll offers a view on articulation as a choreographing practice of embodying imagined forms of collectivity