1. Title of the PhD project Populism, Affect and Ethics in the Technological Age 2. Summary of the theme and aim of the project The questions of populism, new media technologies and the role of affect in social and political life have been widely discussed over the last two decades. Although affect theory is sometimes used to explain the functioning of digital technologies, the three aforementioned topics are almost never addressed in conjunction. However, the recent rise of populist politics in Western countries, together with the rapid spread of digital technologies through which the populist messages are being constantly transmitted, makes it necessary to account for the interlacing of these three complex issues. Ernesto Laclau views populism …show more content…
This fact led several researches to proclaim the birth of digital populism (Davoli et. al. 2013; Bartlett et. al. 2011). Although populism has been analyzed with regard to the media dimension (Mazzoleni 2008), the term digital populism designates the coupling of populist discourses with contemporary digital technologies, which provide a capacity to transmit and reinforce the marginal political worldviews on a scale larger than that of traditional media like the TV and newspapers. However, the notion of digital populism is itself problematic, since it rests on a dogmatic presupposition that there is the digital as a distinctive and more or less independent realm. Rather, the linkage between populism and new media technologies should be considered as a complex relationship between the political and the technological. In this respect, digital populism is a manifestation of such a …show more content…
This methodological stance is an inevitable consequence of adopting Spinoza's framework which does not radically discriminate between ethics and ontology and rejects mind/body