Look Who’s Watching. How Audiences Co-Perform Representative Claims.

Increasingly, political scientists studying representation rely on Michael Saward’s understanding of representation as the formulation of representative claims. Their analyses center-stage the would-be representative and foreground the active role of the “maker” of representation, and the subject represented. Although the claim-making paradigm provides new analytical purchase on the constitutive aspects of representation, the subject-centered approach it promotes sits uneasily with the insight, from linguistics, that meaning is not in the text but is established in the minds of interlocutors. Audiences typically rely on speech conventions and habitual understandings of doing representation when reading representative claims into (sometimes banal) political performances. This paper seeks to decenter representation research from the study of text and redirect it to the broader range of practices through which representation comes about. To that end, I elaborate on the work performed by audiences, and present a typology of audiences: the audience as addressee, participant, and counter-public.