Constructivist Representation and Democracy: A Rhetorical Perspective

In revealing the key role of representation in the formation of political subjectivities the constructivist turn has provided valuable insights to understand the mechanisms of participation. But paradoxically it has also led to a normative deadlock insofar as it has come to confirm the main argument of the elitist school: that we cannot understand the political preferences of the constituencies independently from the strategic manoeuvres of the elites. The responses given so far to this impasse can be divided into two groups: those that argue that the democratic status of a representative system should be assessed in terms of its capacity to create opportunities for civil society to challenge and influence those in power; and those that develop fine-grained conceptual analyses of the multiple dimensions of representation to be used to make more accurate judgments on it. What these two groups share is that they do not directly assess the central element of representationthe representative claimspreferring instead to shift the focus on its systemic dimensions. This approach is coherent with the idea of representation as a performative, symbolic and context-dependent activity, highly dependent on judgment. Nonetheless, it also ends up somehow circumventing the normative conundrum. In this paper instead I argue that normative theories of representation cannot refrain from directly engaging with representative claims. This is one of the key conclusions we can draw from Lefort’s view of democracy as a regime characterized by an indeterminacy about its own foundations. For Lefort the task of representation is to establish the link between the ‘symbolic’the abstract political principlesand the ‘real’social reality in its ever-changing concrete manifestationsbut without never completely eliminating the gap between them. In this perspective what becomes essential for democracy is the way in which those principles are articulated: i.e., how they are interpreted and materialized through representations that apply them to society. And here we have to understand the how not only in terms of ideological ‘contents’, but also and crucially in terms of rhetorical ‘forms’. A normative theory of representation therefore needs to include a rhetorical analysis able to assess the kind of communicative interactions those articulations produce, so as their political outcomes, even if it recognizes the impossibility to develop absolute standards. This sort of rhetorical analysis however is rarely undertaken due to a general tendency among theorists to endorse (if often implicitly) either the rationalist opposition between rhetoric and rational discourse or, inversely, the post-structuralist position that considers all kinds of discourse as equally rhetorical. Both approaches are incompatible with the Aristotelian understanding of rhetoric as an argumentative practice in which logos-pathos-ethos operate interdependently. Employing such Aristotelian framework allows us to assess representation in its symbolic and embodied dimensions asking, for instance, to what extent representative claims are able to combine a general normative orientation, without foreclosing the symbolic space (i.e., how they combine the principles of unity and representation); or whether charismatic leaderships and personal identification are employed to create new forms of democratic mobilization or more plebiscitarian ones.