Representation

Jaleh Mansoor

Since the twin bourgeois revolutions of the ­eighteenth century—first the American and then the French—“representation” has been viewed as a path to social justice. In this formulation, the body politic renders itself knowable through communication with a sovereign whose consciousness it purportedly forms in turn (Habermas 1991). The cry of the Boston Tea Party, “No Taxation without Representation,” crystallized a presumed symmetry between government and governed.

Outside of the electoral system, “representation” is frequently associated with “visibility.” According to Jacques Rancière (1999), it is in this arena that popular movements have struggled to attain recognition in order to direct or supplement electoral campaigns. The tacit hope underlying these efforts is that visibility might help to influence electoral results or compel systemic changes. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both the Civil Rights and Feminist movements made the case that traditional representational politics both excluded and misrepresented the people by devising and projecting a false image of universal interests. Within these movements, political survival often seemed to depend upon achieving visibility or, in some cases, audibility. As the French anarchist Auguste Vaillant proclaimed after throwing a bomb in the French National Assembly in 1893, “the more they are deaf, the more your voice must thunder out so that they will understand you” (quoted in Thompson 2010, 159). In the context of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP summarized the problem as follows: “Silence = Death.”

By the end of the twentieth century, however, “representation” had begun to lose its emancipatory purchase. The term’s ubiquity in 1990s rap and hip-hop elegantly conveyed the problem. On the one hand, calls to “represent” stood as assertions of individual and collective self-determination. On the other, they amounted to little more than a meaningless slogan. In Nas’s “Represent” (1994), the term seems both to be a watchword for survival in a police state and a symptom of struggle’s futility:

Somehow the rap game reminds me of the crack game

Used to sport Bally’s and Gazelle’s with black frames

Now I’m into fat chains, sex and Tecs

Fly new chicks and new kicks, Heine’s and Beck’s

Represent, represent!

Despite the word’s association with autonomy, Nas made clear that the best one could hope for was to take a few steps forward on the logos-and-brands game board. Around the same time, various social movement currents began to turn away from representation, seeking instead to elaborate tactics of interruption and withdrawal. From anticapitalist protests at global summits to the struggles of indigenous people to reassert sovereign control over territory and from the Zapatistas to the recent American riots against racist policing, these movements show signs of edging beyond representation’s political horizon.

Asserting that “to be heard, we march in silence,” twenty thousand masked Zapatistas descended upon San Cristóbal, Mexico, on December 21, 2012. The gesture evoked Nanni Balestrini’s Vogliamo Tutto (1971) and Gli Invisibili (1986), semi-fictional accounts of civil unrest set in workerist Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. Anonymity, horizontal organization, assemblies, and the refusal to advance demands for fear of legitimating the state gave these movements their specific character. Like the Zapatistas, such movements refuse not only the vote but visual identification as well. This rejection is symptomatic of capitalism’s failure to ensure a future for broad sectors of the population—a global underclass that cannot be made to fit into the representational universe that came into being at the end of the eighteenth century. As one commentator observed:

In order for capitalist society to continue its course, the growing mass of surplus humanity must somehow be “integrated” into class society even despite being socially “unnecessary” to its reproduction. In the absence of any wider social resolution to growing immiseration, the predicament is for now resolved ideologically through criminalisation and practically through punishment. Increasing immiseration, and subsequently exclusion, must therefore be justified and normalised. Rising social inequality becomes framed as a problem of containment and the solution one of increasing control. (R. L. 2014)

The historical elaboration of the word “representation” over the long term affords not only a sense of its contingency, but also clues to the conditions of its dissolution. Notable here is the way in which the Oxford English Dictionary entry on “representation” frames the historical period wherein the term’s meaning in aesthetics (as likeness, imitation, substitution) converges with its political connotations of standing in for another—as an elected official stands for a body politic in whose interest she or he acts—to provide an anticipatory sketch of the regime we currently inhabit. While in late Middle English it indicated the act of drawing something to consciousness through a range of strategies (e.g., description, persuasion, argumentation, various forms of symbolization), by the mid-seventeenth century it had crystallized into its association with parliamentary government, as “a substitute for a number of people in a legislative assembly.” During the nineteenth century, “equivalent” and “counterpart” had come to act as synonyms. The transition in meaning from disparate forms of designation to equivalence and substitution coincides with the rise of mimetic illusionism and the Renaissance era’s single-point perspective. Here “representation” comes to assume the burden once reserved for mimesis.

With mimesis, an image was charged with resembling a thing while affirming that the pictorial resemblance was nothing more than a visual copy of its referent. The passage from the late-­medieval to early-modern period witnessed the extension of this new logic of representation to include text. By the early seventeenth century, “representation” had come to mean “the fact of standing for, or in place of, another, especially with authority to act on that other’s account” (OED), as in the legal function of the signature. Concurrently, “representation” entered the juridical realm, where it became associated with property assignation and guarantee. Here a document was said to “represent” the interests of its signatory. During this period, representation also came to denote a presentation of facts aimed at conveying a particular view in order “to influence opinion and action.” This new meaning became entwined with modern democratic politics during the mid-eighteenth century, when “representation” became “the fact of representing or being represented in a legislative or deliberative assembly.”

By the mid-to-late-eighteenth century, sovereignty had ceased emanating from an external agent (e.g., God or a king thought to possess divine right) and came to be located in the body politic itself. Conceived as sharing homogenous “universal” interests, despite being dispersed across the nation, a sovereign people thus came into being by reflecting itself to itself. Through representation, this “people” arrived to prove the identity of model and copy. The question of who or what constituted the “people,” however, would haunt democratic politics over the coming centuries (Habermas 1991). Meanwhile, the putative identity between political representation and social order was interrupted by the dynamics of capitalism.

According to Georg Lukács (1971), an early theorist of the relation between the capitalist mode of production and the phenomenon of consciousness to which representation is oriented, the forms of cognition that enabled bourgeois ascent had become inoperative by the advent of the twentieth century. At the level of consciousness, transparency was no longer possible since the new relations of production obscured the human labor upon which they relied. In this view, capitalism introduces a rift between object and process and—with that—a tendency toward abstraction. The resulting disarticulation of fragment and whole yielded what Lukács called “reification.”

As a mode of value extraction founded on what Karl Marx in Capital called “the hidden abode of production,” capitalism undermines representation by undoing its nominal transparency. Meanwhile, because capitalism yields a contradictory situation in which value production simultaneously impoverishes the workforce, the presumption of self-interest underlying the concept of representation becomes increasingly untenable under capitalism. Additionally, because “the people” to be represented encapsulates both worker and capitalist, an antagonistic relationship arises within (and becomes simultaneously concealed by) the representational category itself. Not only does this antagonism find expression between class enemies, however, it also leaves each of them internally riven. The worker works against herself and in opposition to the principles of equality, liberty, and property. Meanwhile, the capitalist presumes to exercise choice while remaining a cipher in a machine that may well render him obsolete.

Between reification and the social reproduction necessary for capitalism’s perpetuation, there no longer appears to be any correlation between an image and the thing it was said to represent—and still less between an elected individual and people’s actual interests. The mythic transparency upon which democracy is founded is further undermined by capitalist globalization, where the national framework upon which representation depended during the Enlightenment becomes undermined by unfettered capital accumulation.

Art historians have noted that the rise, elaboration, and decline of aesthetic abstraction roughly coincided with capitalism’s entry into and saturation of social consciousness between the 1860s and 1940s. This period is marked by the failures of the nineteenth-­century revolutionary left (including the fall of the Paris Commune) and the intensification of proletarianization. In high culture, the period is bookmarked by the works of Manet and Mondrian. The temporal coincidence of aesthetic abstraction and the systematization of what Marx called “real abstraction” (e.g., money) signals the difficulty of forging representational correlations.

What does the representation of real abstraction look like today? According to Rosalind Krauss, full-blown aesthetic abstraction dialectically signaled the loss of the object it wished to represent. “This grounding of the terms of representation on absence—the making of absence the very condition of the representability of the sign—alerts us to the way the sign-as-label is a perversion of the law of the sign” (1994). Today, the passage from sign as authority (law) to sign as a gesture toward presence that serves ultimately to highlight the absence it conceals is fully accomplished. Nevertheless, the fight over representation continues. What will these signs mean? In The Coming Insurrection, the anonymous authors remind us that “certain words are like battlegrounds: their meaning, revolutionary or reactionary, is a victory to be torn from the jaws of struggle” (Invisible Committee 2009).

Within political and theoretical discourse, a range of positions now question the “politics of recognition” upon which democratic representation depends—not to mention the representational logic that holds transparency and justice to somehow be synonymous. Similarly, social movements operating on a variety of terrains have ceased calling for “representation” as though it were a self-evident good. It’s as though a politics founded on a refusal to be represented has become the only way to demonstrate, once and for all, the structural impossibility of representation itself.

See also: Agency; Community; Democracy; History; Ideology; Leadership; Misogyny; Nation; Nature; Politics; Populism; Race; Sovereignty; Vanguard