What Is a People?

Popular politics is based on a set of fragile, changeable associations: forms of mobilization, collective action, public opinion, and symbolic protest. These are framed as different forms of collectivity—peoples, nations, publics, crowds, masses, mobs—which inhabit our collective imagination in different ways. They differ in their durability and rectitude: the composition of various groups, the ways they act, their forms of association, the normative nuances of our attitudes toward them. Among these, the people is one with a storied and privileged history.

I would like to raise an issue that haunts many discussions of this subject without making its presence fully felt. Others have managed to talk around what is in many ways the key issue: the meaning and significance of the people. The reason we ask “What is a people?,” the reason we attach significance and meaning to this particular abstraction, is precisely because of its normative character. We think of peoples as having powers, and we accord them a significance not shared by other collectivities. Collectivities like “the people” are surrounded by a complex aura of meaning. Clearly, if the answer to the question “What is a people?” comes back only in the form of a discussion about universality, incompleteness, the partitioning of society, class and group fractions, and various other questions about group composition, then the most important point is being missed. That is the answer registered in terms of the meaning and normative force of the people. To address that question we must attempt to capture something ineffable about our own thoughts and practices, something that is both persistent and fleeting. These are the political imaginaries that create “the people” and give it normative force.

A host of other categories stand in contrast. “The people’s people” are the excluded and invisible; more specifically, they are invisible from the perspective of the official people. There are also people who mobilize against colonization or empire, guided by a vision of a national people. This is a different deployment of “national adjective + people.”²

Universalism hovers on the edge of Badiou’s discussion. A fraction of the people mobilizes itself and overcomes the passivity of state cooptation by declaring itself “the people.” This is a people defined by “the future perfect of a nonexistent state,” in the case of an anticolonial struggle aiming at national liberation, or “abolishing the existing state,” in the case of a group excluded from the “official” people, one that Badiou claims would aim at communist politics.³

Badiou maintains an awareness of the way modes of distinction shape this concept. Here his work intersects with that of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu is also interested in language in use. He parses out the social dynamics underlying such usages, focusing on “popular” rather than “the people.” The shift from noun to adjective is important. The grammar of “the people” is a constitutive grammar: it constitutes groups by naming them. “Popular,” in contrast, is a weapon in the ongoing struggles of already-existing groups. It traces the social dynamics through which groups are valued and revalued in social space.⁴ Thus when we encounter difficulties in the use of “popular,” its politics are already apparent. Those politics concern the “proper” use of the adjective, where “proper” itself is a nexus of dispute and is patterned by the very mechanisms of power and distinction that create groups. “Popular,” then, is an object of struggle with constitutive significance.

The deployment of “popular” that most occupies Bourdieu’s attention is to classify forms of language use. Here popular is defined relationally as that which is excluded from “legitimate” language, which is to say, language formed according to the “accepted” or “proper” rules. It is also generated as an active strategy of defiance, a refusal to interpolate oneself into the social order structured by legitimate language. This is the choice to be a skilled speaker of a devalued idiom rather than a poor speaker of an officially sanctioned one. In these senses, language is both a marker of social difference and a principal stake in struggles over it.

The people never becomes a political subject for Bourdieu. It remains within the ambit of an ascribed category of social identity, chiefly a devalued one. In this, he revitalizes a much older view, one that had great currency in the France of the late ancien régime. Eighteenth-century ironists like Voltaire and Gabriel-François Coyer characterized the people as an abandoned, stigmatized class fraction. Coyer’s 1755 Dissertation sur la nature du peuple, for instance, shows a well-tuned sensitivity to the mechanisms of group distinction. Various occupational groups except themselves from “the people,” leaving farmers, domestics, and artisans. Even among the artisans, those who make luxury goods for the rich claim a refinement that excepts them from the people. Left behind is “the mass of the people.”⁵ These are the ones, as Voltaire put it a decade later, “who have only their arms for sustenance.”⁶

Coyer’s commentary is post-Marxist ahead of its time, tracing out social distinction as a matter of group formation rather than class. Like Bourdieu, Coyer understands these dynamics as moves in a game of better-than and worse-than. They are attempts to consolidate group identities while simultaneously revaluing them. Coyer’s greatest sensitivity is to the cultural politics of social classification. Such was society at the end of the Bourbon monarchy; such is society under global neoliberalism for Bourdieu. Plus ça change…

It is equally important to note what we do not get here, something that is more present for Badiou: attention to the ways collectivities function as political agents. There is no account of how “the people” becomes…a people. Or, more rigorously, the people for Bourdieu remains a self-marginalized, devalued social remainder, not a political agent. Bourdieu would likely argue that this is not a theoretical overstatement so much as a frank assessment of the ways material dispossession takes on social, cultural, psychic, and political form. Yet that answer is not good enough, because occasionally the people do form a people; occasionally the marginalized and scattered remainder becomes a unified, self-aware political force; and we leave too much on the table to ignore such occurrences and blind ourselves to this other important sense of the people.

Like Bourdieu and Badiou, Butler notes the constitutive effects of language in the formation of groups. “We, the people,” for instance, is an utterance with constitutive effects in the creation of a group. Butler shows that language is not primary in such instances, however. She notes that this kind of expression is not simply a speech act but one preceded by action: “the assembly of bodies, their gestures and movements, their vocalizations, and their ways of acting in concert.”⁹ It is a performative political enactment that is prior to the speech act itself. This is a politics of bodies assembled in groups, one that amounts to an act of collective self-constitution. It creates an “‘anarchist’ energy or a permanent principle of revolution within democratic orders,” a force that legitimates political representation but always exceeds it.¹⁰ The performance of collectivity also creates the basis for a more familiar and easily identifiable act of self-designation: “we, the people.” Collective political action thus precedes the speech act itself: a material performative goes hand in hand with a discursive one. In this sense, Butler’s notion of performativity is simultaneously discursive and material. It does not reduce one to the other but emphasizes their distinct and interlocking character.

The complex, discursive-material character of the people is an important insight on Butler’s part. She corrects our distorting tendency to see all politics through the lens of the linguistic turn, criticizing the focus on claims and speech acts at the expense of bodies and the politics of the street. The potent political force of people assembled in the square, before the parliament house, in silent vigil, in tent cities, in celebration, protest, or mourning—all of this goes to the core of contemporary politics, and Butler does us the great service of thematizing it as vital to our understanding of the people.

Yet Butler may overstate the importance of materiality in relation to discourse. The discursive constitution of a people—“we [are] the people”—is not necessarily preceded by its performative enactment. To claim otherwise overestimates the role of embodiment in relation to discourse, according one priority over the other. One phenomenon that is well captured by the linguistic turn, by thinkers as different from one another as Ernesto Laclau and Jürgen Habermas, is the virtualization of the people in contemporary politics.¹¹ There is a tendency for politics to be sublimated into discourse through forms of dispersed and abstract media. We might call this “the work of politics in the age of its technical mediation.” This is not to say that thinkers like Laclau and Habermas have the full picture. They overstate the case in the opposite direction, dissolving materiality and practice into abstract forms of discourse, and are much in need of Butler’s corrective. But neither should we follow Butler in thinking that physical, corporal enactment must precede discursive self-constitution. The people need not assemble before declaring themselves a people. Rather, we might think of performativity as including material and discursive elements of various kinds. The people is performed, but that performance can take many forms: the outdoor politics of the people in the square or the virtualized politics of public opinion formation in electronic media, for example. These forms are mixed and combined in complicated ways—always performed, but in a complex mélange of materiality and discourse.

As rich as Butler’s insights about performativity are, they do not go far enough to explain how a people becomes a people. Not present in this insightful analysis are our reasons for saying that an assembled group should have any particular significance. Why should a given group be interpreted as “the people” and accorded a special normative status? Why should we attribute particular force to the claims of such a group? How do we distinguish the performative enactment of the people from any other kind of assembly? Performativity is not enough to account for this in itself, nor is discursive self-assertion.

Earlier generations of political thinkers would have said, “We hold the people to be special and significant because they are sovereign.” They would agree with Butler about the anarchist energy and permanent revolution of the people, attributing it to a form of collective self-direction that was held to be natural or self-evident. This response is not satisfactory either, of course. It merely begs the question, pushing the burden back another step. It does not explain why we think that some particular group is the people, or why we think that this people is sovereign.

Butler would not try to salvage this way of approaching the problem. She has strong objections to the idea of sovereignty, even though her ideas about anarchist energy and permanent revolution invoke similar associations. In the company of thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Carl Schmitt, she characterizes sovereignty as a form of absolute mastery and control.¹² Writing about performativity in language, for instance, she takes pains to undermine what she has called “sovereign performatives.” They are forms of “absolute and efficacious agency” in language, in her view. To invoke them, Butler says, is to draw on a fantasy about a return of sovereign power, a power that in language has always been a fantasy.¹³ This fantasy invokes a conceptual frame that was rightly rejected by Michel Foucault, she says, because it is built on a notion of subjectivity that emphasizes the centrality of subjective agency at the expense of diffuse relations of domination and control. Thus she draws a sharp line between an absolutist conception of sovereignty and the more ineffable and diffuse power of the people that she describes.

Butler’s objections to this notion of subjectivity lie in an insightful analysis of the sense in which speech acts are insufficient to assert peoplehood. A speech act is not a self-contained act. The conditions for their assertion and acceptance are not given in the moment; “the temporal conditions for making the speech act precede and exceed the momentary occasion of its enunciation.”¹⁴ In other discussions of performativity and language, she emphasizes the role of convention as that which stands outside of and beyond sovereign subjectivity. The performative force of an utterance is generated from the conventions that it draws on. No one (singly, individually) exercises sovereignty through speech. Because of the role of convention in creating, stabilizing, and reproducing language, it is not possible purely to exercise one’s own will in saying something. That utterance depends upon a reservoir of convention for its meaning and force.

What then about performatives involving “the people”? Are those also modeled on sovereign performativity? Here, Butler deemphasizes language to bring materiality more fully to the fore. In this account, the performativity of the people is not linguistic and conventional but performed through assembly. This does not seem quite right, however. We should not be so quick to reject sovereignty as an analytic concept, nor should we lose sight of convention as a vital part of sovereign performatives. Political sovereignty is built on a long history of convention that has great currency in our culture. To object to the intertwinement between subjectivity and sovereignty is to be distracted by intellectual constructs. The actually-existing commitments of our culture contain many elements that, on closer scrutiny, fit together poorly or do not make sense. A strong conception of subjectivity associated with notions of absolute sovereign control is surely one of those problematic ideas. However it is important to remember that there is much more in operation in our shared imagination of politics than these (purified, rationally reconstructed) ideals.

Absolutist conceptions of sovereignty have always been counterfactual assertions, more attempts to save some waning system of authority than descriptions of reality. Thus, Hobbes and Filmer, for instance, articulated powerful defenses of absolute monarchy as a rearguard action against a seventeenth-century democratic revolution. To dismiss sovereignty based on such narrow and counter-factual conceptions is unfortunate. It singles out a small group of (historically embattled) conceptions among many, only to dismiss them, leaving aside the scattered plethora of other forms that proliferated after the age of kings. Today, sovereignty is one of the principal ways we understand ideas like “the people,” which is not to say in any absolute or unitary form. Rather it gives us a historically situated vocabulary for examining the genealogy of such ideas. It is precisely this history that traces the conventions around the people. If we are serious about bringing forward Butler’s admirable insights about the people and performativity, we must view sovereignty (in piecemeal, malleable, nonabsolutist form) as a principal locus of such convention. We must take a broader view of the noise and fiber of actually-existing cultural contents, including the ways that sovereignties permeate our understanding of what it means to act as and declare ourselves to be the people.

For help in this endeavor, let us turn to a second moment of the people. Georges Didi-Huberman thematizes the ways the people can be “rendered sensible,” which is to say brought to the focus of our attention. For him, this is not necessarily a matter of making present, in the sense of bringing into visibility something that is fully there but obscure. Rather it is a critical and problematizing sensibility. This can be a matter of what he refers to, following Walter Benjamin, as a dialectic of images, one that loosens our grasp on received opinion by problematizing the sensible.¹⁵ It can also consist in opening up alternative perceptions of history, critically interrogating the representation of the people. Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Arlette Farge are put forward by Didi-Huberman as exemplary of this problematizing practice. Rendering something sensible can involve bringing to attention things lacked and desired. In the case of the people, for instance, he follows Maurice Blanchot in noting that the powerlessness of the people itself can be rendered sensible. Similarly, for Didi-Huberman rendering sensible can involve bringing to our senses something that does not make sense. In these cases, Didi-Huberman characterizes rendering sensible as a twofold movement: being moved emotionally and moved to thought.¹⁶ There is, in other words, a motivational-critical force to rendering sensible, one that challenges existing truths and images while rendering these problematizations vivid to us.

Didi-Huberman’s ethos of problematization holds particularly for representative abstractions like “the people.” He is careful to specify that the people does not exist “as a unity, identity, totality, or generality”; it is a nonidentity that is always incomplete.¹⁷ Otherwise put, the people should not be subsumed into the unity of one concept. He sides with thinkers like Bataille, Blanchot, and Nancy, who problematize notions of collectivity that are conceptualized as simple communion or substantial unity.¹⁸

Didi-Huberman’s focus thus falls on peoples in the plural, by which he means specific and unique peoples. His attention is directed to marginalized and invisible peoples, those without name, without papers, without lodging, without rights, and without images. He often refers to this in Jacques Rancière’s idiom of “the part with no part.” His project of rendering the people sensible, he says, is to return such peoples to the rank of full status as political subjects. In this sense, his concerns intersect with those of Badiou, Bourdieu, Coyer, and Rancière. Interestingly he does not characterize this project as focusing on equality but on what he calls the upwelling of heterogeneity (surgissement de l’hétérogène).¹⁹ The point is not to render equal but to bring to the fore the wide variety of what is marginalized and hidden from sensibility.

Didi-Huberman is careful not to hypostatize representation. His reference to rendering sensible should be read as a careful choice: not simply visibility but a broader form of sensibility that includes aspects of attention, classification, and prioritization. It includes practices that might otherwise be classified as cognition or perception, and it frames sensibility as an inherently intersubjective practice. It is no mistake, in this light, that Didi-Huberman refers at various points to the imaginary character of peoples. He references the differentiated, social character of this idea in Cornelius Castoriadis’s work.²⁰ Castoriadis talks about the imaginary without reducing it to a logic of identities or a positivist myth of representational transparence. He renders the imaginary social, a space of community in which community itself is always under negotiation. By associating his project with the imaginary, on one hand, and community, on the other, Didi-Huberman makes clear how rendering sensible relates to peoples. First, he is interested in the broadest register of the sensible world we share in common. Second, he frames a notion of community in which imaginary classifications are always in play, both potentially hypostatizing and always open to critique. And third, he is keenly aware of the way these two things come together to render certain groups (“peoples”) marginal, of lesser value, or invisible. Thus the political logic of rendering sensible has a strong, critical focus on forms of social exclusion, picking up themes shared with others but revealing their deployment and reproduction in the imaginary domain.

In this sense, Didi-Huberman’s critical focus on representations in the broadest sense provides a corrective to a narrower emphasis on language in the constitution of peoples. The world-constituting power of language carries over to political collectivities, particularly in the form of naming. This is reflected in the perspectives of Butler and Badiou. Bourdieu displays it in a different way: social identity is quietly duplexed onto language use, not in the form of naming but in the minute variations of usage that code social identity. This is a very incomplete picture, however. Without rejecting language, Didi-Huberman pushes outside its bounds to reveal the symbolic elements at work in the formation of political collectivities.

Didi-Huberman’s emphasis on forms of representation does impose certain limits on his views, however. One of those is a tendency to view peoples as objects of representation rather than as subjects of politics. They are variously represented, hypostatized, rendered sensible, and/or occluded from sensibility: objects of representations. What Didi-Huberman thematizes much less (with some exceptions)²¹ is the active, self-constituting dimensions of peoples—the dimensions that capture Butler’s attention. This is likely a matter of his framing of the task rather than any deeper narrowness of his views: the idea of rendering sensible is implicitly structured around the accessibility of objects of representation. It is an objectifying perspective, one that comes to seem limited when the objects are peoples.

What is arguably missing from Didi-Huberman’s reflections is a particular sense of the people that takes it as a political collectivity with a special normative status. This problem manifests itself in a second limitation of this perspective. Didi-Huberman asserts that there is no “people,” only peoples. This is, in certain ways, an important insight about the logic of collective identity and the dangers of fixity and closure. Yet in seeking to prevent us from hypostatizing the people, Didi-Huberman goes too far in the other direction. “The people” has a vital reality in contemporary cultures and constitutes an important part of our modern political imaginaries. To rule that out-of-bounds is to fail to interrogate it as a rich source of meaning in contemporary democratic societies. It is to impose a kind of conceptual correctness where it may not be warranted. Better would be to let the archive speak for itself, noting occasions when “the people” is an organizing concept and others in which “peoples” is more appropriate.

The importance of using both of these concepts in an interpretively astute way is elegantly illustrated by the title of this book. The question posed is not “What are peoples?” but “What is a people?” The choice is an important one, since questions about “peoples” tend to sound like episodes from the philosophical anthropology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the peoples of the earth, the natural characteristics that separate one people from another, and so forth. The guiding impulse of that project was to catalog different human types. In contrast, investigating the meaning of “a people” is at once vital for interpreting our received common sense and an opportunity to problematize it. Implicit in this undertaking is the idea that there is often some particular people, “the people,” that is taken as having singular importance within a given context. This is the idea that guides Jacques Rancière, for instance, when he distinguishes between “the very idea of a democratic people” and political attempts to subvert that idea by merging it with “the image of the dangerous masses.”²² Rancière agrees with Didi-Huberman that there is no “people” as such, yet he is also keenly aware that images of the people circulate in our collective imagination, and some of them exert a powerful normative force in politics. He has traced some of these images in his own work, particularly the diverse essays published in Les Révoltes Logiques between 1975 and 1985.²³ Following the consequences of this line of thought, we can say that the people is an imaginary entity; it has a tangible reality for us because we imagine it as such. Investigating the sources of its special, normative character is to inquire into the intersubjective, shared, imaginary construction of the people.

When we ask “What is a people?” we are not asking a purely socio-ontological question: about its formation in the social space of our collective imagination. The social ontology of the people pivots around a crucial, constitutive semantic element. What the people is depends upon what the people means. Put otherwise, the most crucial element is the way the people takes on shades of meaning in the ongoing process of construction. To ask questions about the place of the people in our shared imaginaries is thus to ask about the way we construct visions of the people and endow them with meaning. In this sense, the people goes beyond being a simple collective identity that assembles individuals into groups. It is a meaningful collectivity that we endow with normative value. The people is important in politics because it has these normative valences, ones that change with time and context, and are thus all the more interesting.

Following Didi-Huberman’s inspiration, we should ask about the diffuse and ineffable image of the people that we do share: one that is part of our shared imaginary, our very conception of what politics is and how it functions. That is the question we could see being posed, for instance, by Judith Butler’s evocation of the force of the people assembled. We think of such assemblies in some way as “the people.” The question is how and why?

At the center of this heterogeneous ensemble we find “the people,” with all of the subtleties and instabilities of composition that we have already examined. Also revealed here are the constructions that surround the people and invest it with normative powers: “the power of the people,” the sanctity of foundings and new beginnings, as well as other forms of rectitude and authorization. These powers accrete through slow processes of formation that lead us to think of the people as a distinctive collectivity and an important political actor.

To see how sovereign imaginaries develop over time, we must examine them in their historical specificity. The notion of the people takes on a politically significant role in modern Europe in the late middle ages, when it functions to acclaim the king. With the gradual disintegration of monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the people first constitutes a euphemized criticism of royal rule, then its competitor, and finally its replacement. These themes transform in new ways in the early nineteenth century. In some cases they furnish a basis for the progressive breakup of colonialism and the host of new sovereignties that it spawned. In other ways, nineteenth-century nationalism pushes the people aside in favor of the nation as a collectivity of choice. At the same time, subnational collectivities like crowds and masses become increasingly prominent, largely as objects of fear in the barricade politics of revolutionary Europe and the anxious imaginations of early social scientists.²⁴

These imagined normativities enter a broad field of action as they arrive in the twentieth century. There is the mobilization of the people in the Russian Revolution and the subsequent formation of Soviets that was celebrated by Hannah Arendt.²⁵ More perversely, there is the popular basis of National Socialism in Germany and the widespread popular acclaim of fascism in Italy. There are popular insurgencies in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, then again across the whole Soviet empire in 1989. The unworking of colonialism across the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries furnishes a whole different set of paradigms for imagining the people and its powers. More recently, we have Tahrir Square and the rest of the Arab Spring, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and anti-austerity demonstrations in Europe. The Internet and other communication technologies have created wikis, blogs, and other postindustrial knowledge projects of all kinds, in which the people stands for new forms of decentralized, democratized epistemology. In all of these instances, the people and its powers are imagined in new and different ways.

This historical kaleidoscope reveals important aspects of the ways that political collectivities are imagined. It includes not only notions of collectivity itself—say, “peoples”—but also the normative statuses with which they are endowed—their “powers.” Most prominently, we see that the power of the people is an unstable set of historically contingent, changing cultural and material constructions that are continually problematized even while they are being elaborated. They are formed out of a complex web of symbolic contents, acts, and practices of imagination. Such efforts of imagination are always partial, incomplete, more a form of symbolic and material politics than a fully worked out, coherent doctrine.

Consider, for instance, a pivotal moment in this history: the formation of modern ideas of the people in eighteenth-century France. Under the ancien régime, “the people” is a term of art in a genre of political criticism. It used by public intellectuals like Voltaire and Coyer to attack the monarchy in a backhanded way, euphemizing politics as a form of social critique and removing its sting with humor and irony. These writings are very much a part of the intellectual scene of salons and sociétés de pensée. As conditions change, however, the monarchy weakens and the people is pressed into a different function. It now becomes a conceptual means to retheorize sovereignty. Gone is the unified agency and will of the king; in its place steps a rather problematic, fraught attempt to universalize the people and endow it with the kind of normative status that the king used to bear. Conceptual pieces and remainders of royal sovereignty are repurposed to create new notions of the people, with somewhat mixed and unstable results.²⁶

In this era, the people and its powers are articulated within a set of unresolved problematics. These ideas are created to take the place of royal sovereignty; they try to respond to the problematic situation at the same time that they are inscribed within it. As a result, there is continued unsettlement and controversy over the composition of the collective identities. Throughout this time period, there is substantial disagreement about what the people actually means—who it signifies, who is included, on what basis, by what right. This includes often paradoxical attempts to claim its universal character simultaneously with forms of differentiation. In this sense there is a complex web of associations between sovereignty and collective identity. Universalism and particularity compete with one another. There is confusion whether sovereignty and power proceed from “all the people” or various partisan movements, factions, or insurgencies. There are questions whether parts of the people might be disqualified from sovereignty, or by extension, certain material conditions might disqualify specific groups. Such attempts to settle the meaning and composition of the people are also attempts to settle the question of sovereignty.

The doctrines descended from those revolutionary events in eighteenth-century France imagine the people in an implicitly exclusionist way conditioned by a history of colonialism that reaches back before the Revolution. Thus we see the kinds of tensions that Sadri Khiari identifies: constructions of the people that default to an unmarked white European imaginary, requiring marked exceptions for anyone of a different identity. Khiari notes the implicit exclusion of black, Arab, and Muslim French citizens from “the French people” because they do not fit the imagined identity category. This, he says, happens in an almost subliminal way: someone descended from “French stock” can easily identify with the French people by claiming a privileged relation with the nation-state, whereas a Malian-French or Senegalese-French citizen cannot make the same claim without considerable cultural dissonance. To subvert these imaginaries, Khiari insightfully notes the need for a “redistribution of cultural and symbolic powers” to bring nationality under interrogation from a “decolonial” perspective.²⁷ His work brings an important historical element, the colonial history of Europe, to contemporary constructions of the people. It thus draws attention to race as a principal way of not having a part in contemporary societies. It is also implicitly focuses attention on the ways that the people is imagined: in this case, as durable, national-racial imaginaries that are warped by internal tensions even though they are lived by millions of Europeans.

The value of tracing such transformations is to observe how the power of the people is imagined as a normative construction—as having an inherent value, natural rectitude, or obligatory force. The people are imagined as having power, and that power can vary considerably in its forms, sources, and concentrations. Attempts to settle the meaning and composition of the people are also attempts to attach normative connotations to them. Power is created with the people.

We can call the processes of constructing the normative background of sovereignties “normatization.”²⁸ It creates value in the political imaginary by forging connections between collectivities of various kinds and other ideas and practices. These associations and projections can be made with a space or territory; they can be counterfactual or actual; they can be projected into the future or the past, articulated across space, time, and collective identity in characteristic, distinct, and variable ways. Such associations can include different arrangements of national and territorial space, different appeals to temporality, both in a past-oriented nostalgic mode and a future-oriented, prospective one, or association with other normative values. What lies in common to all of these variations is the creation of a collectivity as having a normative character. The form it takes is a variable and characteristic feature of the particular case under consideration.

In this sense, postulating a political identity can itself be a strategy of normatization. It can project that identity into the past to naturalize it and give it value, or project it into the future as a goal worthy of completion, one that has value now, counterfactually, by virtue of the expectation that it will be completed in the future. A whole set of fantasies and imaginations can be called into play in complicated ways: heroic pasts, sanctified founding moments, future ideal states. All of these play on identity within a politics of meaning. In such cases political identity is less the point than are the processes of normatization that invoke it. Demands for identity are a proxy for the discursive and practical negotiation of sovereign imaginaries. These are practices of imagination that articulate new visions of politics. They are a self-referential, self-reinforcing practice that creates the imaginary bases of popular power.

Consider, for example, the creative ways that normatization endows a collectivity with force by invoking time. Locating one’s people or nation in an ancient past, for instance, gives it a kind of naturalized value.²⁹ More radically, such a community can be located in an eternal past, as Emmanuel Sieyès does in his famous essay on the Third Estate.³⁰ Past-looking temporalities can also reference a more specific point in time, drawing on the special character of a privileged historical starting point, as in stories of revolutionary founding. Employed in a more abstract sense, this is also the central normative device of social contract theory.

Temporality can be used in a future-oriented sense as well. Here the people defines a goal to be completed or a potential to be realized. In this construction, the people is endowed with normativity by virtue of its future promise.³¹ Something like this strategy operates implicitly in many criticisms of the fragmented and exclusionary character of present peoples. It highlights forms of distinction and exclusion as a way of pointing toward a world in which they will be overcome.

The people can also be imagined as having a normative status by associating it with concepts of space. This is particularly true when a people alleges itself always to have existed on some territory. It puts into play a double strategy of normatization, in which time is combined with space to naturalize the particular group in a double sense. It taps into some notion, never well articulated, that ancient territorial claims confer a material durability on that people, which in turn creates a presumption of rectitude for its present and future actions. Without trying very hard, one can think of many current political conflicts that play on such ideas. Another way to give the people power is to associate them with a bounded, sovereign territory. This “Westphalian” strategy unifies populace, territory, and jurisdiction in a way that taps into some of our most deeply held normative ideals. It forms the idea of a democratically self-regulating people, one in which the subjects of the law are also its authors. Even though such ideas are deeply entrenched in our current political tradition, there is nothing natural or necessary about them. Like other sovereign imaginaries, they have accreted over a long period of time through processes of normatization.

Performativity plays a large role in these processes of collective imagination. Political acts and collectivities take their meaning from such imaginaries, which define who, collectively, counts as a politically significant actor. At the same time, such acts and collectivities contribute to creating our sovereign imaginaries. The people takes its power from performativity in a double sense: by drawing on normative imaginaries and by contributing to their creation. The power of the people has a performative dimension, but it also contributes to the background of shared meanings against which other performances are understood. Put otherwise, it helps to construct the matrix of significations within which practice is perceived. When it comes to collectivity, action can help to constitute the intersubjective, normative basis of reality. It does something in the (intangible, intersubjective) world. Actions of certain sorts exercise a constitutive influence on our political imaginaries.

This happens in both a compositional and normative sense. It affects what we think “a people” is and what significance we attach to it. Acting like a people can precede and create the imaginary preconditions for being a people. This is similar to the forms of self-authorization described by Jacques Derrida, Jason Frank, and Bonnie Honig.³² It is not self-authorization in a specific, narrow, legal-political sense, however: not “we hereby create the legal bases for our existence as a people” but rather the long, slow accretion of normative expectations about collectivity and normativity. It is a form of imaginary politics in the broadest, most cultural, and most deeply shared sense.