LEI_F_11 Spatial Semantics of Populist Discourses in International Comparison

Objectives/ Research Questions

This project is based on the preliminary observation that populism makes extensive use of spatial semantics to communicate certain modes of social cohesion. In doing so, it recurs to spatial imganiations/metaphors that originate from older phases of a new spatialization of the world under conditions of globalization (1950s, interwar period, and patterns of thought that have their roots in the nineteenth century). As first samples show, populism primarily transports spatial semantics that people have acquired in the context of school lessons (in the “world view subjects”: national languages, history, and, above all, geography) and that configure “space” as an unquestionably, permanently existing substance given in “reality”. Such spatial semantics are still implicitly effective today due to a lack of reflection and can thus be invoked comparatively easily as “truth”, easily instrumentalized politically and “sold” as tried-and-tested concepts for shaping present and future social coexistence. This not only is relevant for Germany, but also must be analysed systematically and comparatively, which poses particular challenges in terms of language mastery, historical contextual knowledge, and the amount of data to be processed, which will be met through cooperation with several projects and the use of digital humanities methods. In order to trace the contexts of origin, the project includes a historical long-term analysis of geographical communication media (journals, textbooks, and atlases).

The project makes a primarily comparative-contextualizing contribution to Cluster 3 by attempting to show how spatial semantics have been implicitly charged with questions of social cohesion since the nineteenth century, and thus how spaces have been made repeatedly re-readable for broad sections of the population as an expression of successful, fragile, failed, or optimizable social cohesion. Central questions are, Which structures of space-related semantic forms as modes of (self-)description of societies can be observed since the late nineteenth century? What changes are they subject to, especially in transformation phases of globalization? What role do central concepts of modern spatial semantics such as “nature”, “nation”, “state”, “empire”, “colony”, “region”, “landscape”, “civilisation”, or “homeland” play here? Which action-guided pragmatics can be observed in the production, communication/mediation, as well as (populist) instrumentalization of these spatial semantic forms?

Methodologically, the project is oriented towards an understanding of language that explicitly includes imaginations, visualizations, metaphors, and images. Especially important for the analysis of spatial semantics are transitions and translations between different media of meaning-making; central is the investigation “between image and text orders, the visible and the invisible, the available and the unavailable”.

Thematic relation to social cohesion

The project focuses on spatial semantics as a central instrument for producing ideas about social cohesion under the conditions of the new spatializations triggered by globalization processes. It is linked with several other projects in the concern of a European-wide and, tendentially, global mapping of populism by developing comparatively applicable tools of digital humanities to index large quantities of texts from very different historical epochs and different spatial configurations and to apply them together with the cooperating projects.