Through the Looking Glass: Televised Politics in Contemporary Populist Italy

Abstract

This article evaluates the role of political mediation played by national and local television networks within the social peripheries of Naples, Southern Italy. In the context of contemporary Italian populism, the management of this medium by simultaneously public and private —as well as formal and informal— power‐holders, such as the neoliberal state and the Camorra (a powerful criminal organization) have increasingly replaced civil society's historical role of mediation between centers and peripheries. The direct participation of the subaltern in the production and circulation of explicitly populist televised content is now strongly promoted and yet informally monitored by the Italian state authorities. The regimes of media production and social representation emerging from these mediatic processes have not triggered crises of cultural hegemony—exercised by the Italian neoliberal “establishment” over the lower classes—but instead furthered the sovereignty of the state and amplified its ability to arouse the political imaginary of both its most marginalized citizens and “middle‐class” cultural operators. Simultaneously, however, these regimes have also spawned new modes of socioeconomic mobility and forms of “political society,” which reproduce the mediacratic features of Italian state power among a plethora of local informal agencies, including ostensible “public enemies” such as the Camorra.