[...] one may throw the term out the window, but others will continue to use and disseminate it. The alternative is precisely to regard its vagueness and self-contradictoriness as its defining characteristic. This was the route taken by Pierre-André Taguieff, for whom populism is a political style which ‘can shape diverse symbolic materials and be fixed in a multiplicity of ideological positions, assuming the political colour of its place of reception’. The same line is taken by Yves Surel who, in an essay on Berlusconi, argues that populism does not represent a coherent trend, but corresponds to ‘a dimension of the discursive and normative register adopted by political actors’. Populism, writes Ernesto Laclau, ‘is not a fixed constellation but a series of discursive resources which can be put to very different uses’, ‘floating signifiers’ that convey different meanings in different historical-political conjunctures. The idea that populism works when regarded as a certain kind of rhetoric, applied in different ways in different situations, is appealing—but in truth, merely registers its polysemy and returns it to sender. However, there is a third possible line of attack. It is this: populism is not a self-definition. No one defines themselves as populist; it is an epithet pinned on you by your political enemies. In its most brutal form, ‘populist’ is simply an insult; in a more cultivated form, a term of disparagement. But if no one defines themselves as populist, then the term populism defines those who use it rather than those who are branded with it. As such, it is above all a useful hermeneutic tool for identifying and characterizing those political parties that accuse their opponents of populism.

There is a fine line between publicity and advertising. While anyone can see the difference between a full-page ad promoting a soft drink and a two-line classified offering part-time work, it is easy to slide from one mode into the other. This slippage between simple intermediation and a full-scale advertising campaign is what hampers thinking about the question. The classical theory underpinning the function of promotion is that of imperfect competition, or ‘non-price competition’, formulated in 1933 by the post-Keynesian economist Joan Robinson and, quite independently, by Edward Chamberlin of the Harvard School. Non-price competition occurs when, in conditions of oligopoly, the businesses concerned avoid a price war for the sake of their own profit margins, instead competing by promoting the products themselves, in particular by special offers. The increased promotional costs remain advantageous compared with the predictable alternative: loss of income through competitive price-cutting.

As to how effective advertising is in increasing sales, whether it is useful in the short or the long term, and how successful it may be in a contest with other promotional campaigns (‘voice share’ rather than ‘market share’): these questions have been under discussion for a century, with no conclusion in sight. The one thing certain, if we borrow a metaphor from physics, is that advertising is the channel through which money is transferred from industry and finance to the mass media: it is the ‘black box’ that takes in money and emits information. Advertising is the main instrument by which, especially in the twentieth century, the dominant economic interests have financed information. This link between money and information has appeared unbreakable, even in the most radical conception of press freedom: modernity has not succeeded in conceiving a means of creating pluralism in information that is not based on a plurality of economic powers. Hence the difficulty of conceiving pluralism of information in a regime of collective property.