The Body Speaks Before It Even Talks: Deliberation, Populism and Bodily Representation

Abstract

Deliberation is a complex interpersonal process that involves different forms of communication. While earlier versions of deliberative theory had overly rationalistic and proceduralist views of linguistic exchange, it is now understood that deliberation involves a full range of speech cultures, which include humour, storytelling, metaphors, testimonies and others, as well as the full range of emotions including fear, anger, compassion and sympathy. This article extends these developments in deliberative scholarship by placing the role of the body as central to the practice of public deliberation. The agents of real-world deliberations are not pure consciousness but embodied beings whose corporeality carries the palimpsest of marks of their class, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation, amongst others. Bodily self-presentation informs how affect, identification and political representation are established even before words are spoken. The goal of this article is to reflect on the effect of bodily identification and representation on the process of deliberation. Drawing on populism literature, particularly the socio-cultural approach, I explore four types of bodily representation: popular, technocratic, authoritarian and populist, and the affects they might provoke in other participants in deliberations, both negative and positive. Through this article, I hope to demonstrate how the vocabulary of populism research can equip deliberative democrats to identify, confront and negotiate the politics of bodily representation.