Representation: An Exhausted Paradigm?

Abstract

Hannah Pitkin opens her exemplary text on representation with the declaration that “In modern times, almost everyone wants to be governed by representatives …; every political group or cause wants representation; every government claims to represent”. In doing she reflects mainstream opinion that see representation as paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense of setting the parameters for the debate and analysis of legitimacy, governance, participation and sovereignty. Where once the world was rued by despots, now it is governed by representatives. On the other hand, since Pitkin wrote these words in the 1960s, much has occurred to undermine that sense of certainty that underpins the paradigm. We vote less (when we are given a choice); we trust our politicians less, we increasingly ignore parties, politicians, news about “politics”, the political – “Politics” in the sense of mainstream representation is in crisis. Can it recover? What I explore in this paper is the possibility that politics as representation is losing its paradigmatic status both as a descriptor of ‘how politics works’ and as the limit-horizon for thinking about how politics might and could work. As regards the first point, the expansion of “reflexive modernity” in the manner described by Bauman, Heller, Beck and Bang progressively eroding the fundaments upon which representative governance and representation itself works. These include the “imagined” homogenous political community (nation-state, proletariat etc), the representable subject (‘the people’) and the agentic representor (competent, insightful, trustworthy elites). The representative ‘bargain’ or ‘claim’ as Saward puts it, is becoming less tenable to fewer people. This is not, to move to the second point, to imagine that the outside of ‘representation’ is as easily to hand, as commentators such as Barber and Pateman seem to think. ‘Participation’ and ‘strong democracy’ are themselves products of the enlightenment imaginary and just as susceptible to critique as the followers of Pitkin. More productive is to think of the problematic in terms of ‘post-representation’ which like ‘post-’ suffixes generally does not supplant or erase the original object. Rather it embraces the ‘inevitability’ of the object, at the same time as it seeks to contain or distance itself from it. Many contemporary political phenomena and forms of discourse have this aspect to them such as the Zapatistas, the World Social Forum, social struggles in Europe, the Indignados and so forth. What unites these initiatives is a hostility to the legacy of representative politics, and the desire for a rethinking of the meaning of ‘community’, ‘subject’ and political process.