In this Fellows Colloquium, Vito Laterza will build on the emerging concept of diagonalist political communication to show its relevance to the mainstreaming of rightwing populism. William Callison and Quinn Slobodian describe diagonalism as a political strategy that goes beyond conventional left/right distinctions, while veering towards the legitimation of far-right ideas and policies.
Laterza works at the intersection of political theory, media and communication, and linguistic anthropology. He will focus on how left-sounding vocabularies, imaginaries, and moral claims are mobilized into communicative forms that normalize anti-democratic politics. He will develop anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s classic insights on “schizophrenic communication” to illuminate some of the key sociolinguistic features of diagonalist politics. This exploration is empirically situated within the recent wave of populism in Italy, from the earlier Five Star Movement’s post-ideological vision of “digital democracy” through to the current consolidation of authoritarian rightwing populism under Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. In this period, diagonalist communication has become increasingly visible, as evidenced by several factors: harsh anti-immigration policies reframed as humanitarian care (“closing borders to save migrants from suffering and death”); anti-capitalist language used to justify exclusion and the scapegoating of diversity; and an insistence on a post-ideological “common sense” that advances concrete rightwing positions and promotes an anti-progressive agenda. Specific attention will be paid to discursive and ethnographic illustrations from Italian “red-brown” movements consolidated around anti-lockdown and no-vax protests, which make extensive use of diagonalist tactics.
Vito Laterza is an anthropologist, media scholar, and political analyst. He is an associate professor in the Department of Global Development and Planning at the University of Agder in Norway, and an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Center for Organizational Research. Laterza was a work package leader on the recently completed Horizon Europe project Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age. He is the editor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications thematic collection “Mediated Populism” and a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies. Laterza’s approach involves the systemic integration of ethnography, macro-level structural analysis, and epistemological and reflexive inquiry, in the tradition of “big ideas”-based social science and social and political theory. The main empirical focus of his current research is political communication, digital platforms, and rightwing and post-ideological populism in Italy and the US.
IWM Permanent Fellow Ayşe Çağlar will moderate the discussion.
