Revisiting the concept of representation

Parliamentary Affairs

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 155-172

  Baker, Gideon ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 30344472423     PISSN: 00312290     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pa/gsj002     Document Type: Review

References (75)

1. An earlier version of this article was delivered at the ECPR workshop on representation held at the University of Edinburgh during March 2003.1 thank the participants of that workshop for their comments on this article and also for the quality of the wider discussion that informed subsequent reworking of it.
2. A. Phillips, 'Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas or a Politics of Presence?', Constellations, 1/1, 1994, p. 75.
3. E. Ermarth, 'Agency in the Discursive Condition', History and Theory, December 2001, p. 51.
4. F.W. Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 110.
5. F.W. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufman, Random House, 1974, p. 304.
6. D. Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, Routledge, 1994, p. 75.
7. M. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.), Penguin, 1984, p. 59.
8. M. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, Ibid., pp. 87-8.
9. Agency in the Discursive Condition', p. 51.
10. Agency in the Discursive Condition', p. 38. As it happens, Ermarth does not live up to her promise to consider these 'unavoidable' questions for democratic institutions. We shall see that she is not alone in this.
11. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing, C. Gordon (ed.), Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980, p. 88.
12. Maturity and Modernity, p. 204.
13. The Foucault Reader, pp. 378-9.
14. M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, Routledge, 1989, p. 440.
15. J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press, 1993, p. 230.
16. The Foucault Reader, p. 94.
17. More prosaically, but also more concretely, Calhoun concurs here: Two tacit guiding assumptions of much modern thinking on matters of identity are that individuals ideally ought to achieve maximally integrated identities, and that to do so they need to inhabit self-consistent, unitary cultures or lifeworlds. It is thought normal for people to live in one culture at a time, for example; to espouse one set of values; to adhere to one polity. But why? Not, I would suggest, on the basis of historical or comparative evidence. On the contrary, throughout history and still to a considerable extent around the world we find multilingualism common; we find people moved simultaneously by different visions of the world (not least, religion and science); we find people able to understand themselves as members of very differently organized collectivities at local and more inclusive levels, or at different times or stages of life [C. Calhoun, 'Nationalism, Political Community and the Representation of Society: Or, Why Feeling at Home is Not a Substitute for Public Space, European Journal of Social Theory, 2/2, 1999, p. 227]. Interestingly, Calhoun concludes from these observations (p. 228) that 'it is not an adequate response to human differences to allow each person to find the group within which they feel at home. It is crucial to create public space within which people may engage each other in discourse-not just to make decisions, but to make culture and even to make and remake their own identities'. This sense of the 'politics of difference' as unmediated, participatory practice makes it sound like something we have to do for ourselves rather than through representatives.
18. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Tavistock, 1970, p. 311.
19. Ibid., p. 311.
20. Ibid., p. 308.
21. Ibid., p. xxiii.
22. Ibid., p. 386.
23. Ibid., p. 370.
24. H. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, University of California Press, 1972, p. 97 (emphasis added).
25. Ibid., p. 100.
26. Ibid., p. 102.
27. Ibid., p. 102.
28. Ibid., p. 104.
29. Ibid., p. 111.
30. I.M. Young, 'Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy' in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 127.
31. Ibid., p. 127.
32. I.M. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 36.
33. J. Squires, 'Deliberation and Decision Making: Discontinuity in the Two-track Model' in M.P. d'Entrèves (ed.), Democracy as Public Deliberation: New Perspectives, Manchester University Press, 2002.
34. C. Gould, 'Diversity and Democracy: Representing Differences' in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 173.
35. Ibid., p. 185.
36. Burke's Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll, 3 November 1774 in R. Blaug and J. Schwarzmantel (eds), Democracy: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
37. I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 100, 105.
38. Ibid., p. 115.
39. Ibid., p. 113.
40. D. Stern, 'The Return of the Subject? Power Reflexivity and Agency, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26/5, 2000, p. 113.
41. M. Foucault, 'The Subject and Power' in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, University Press of Chicago, 1982, p. 208.
42. P. Rabinow, 'Introduction' in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Penguin, 1984, p. 7.
43. Ibid., p. 8.
44. See, for example, R. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 215-8.
45. D. Owen, 'Orientation and Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy' in S. Ashenden and D. Owen (eds), Foucault Contra Habermas, Sage, 1999, p. 33.
46. A humanist discourse itself closely associated by Foucault with an ascetic presentation of biopower as motivated by attention to the care of the species. Thus 'humanist forms of knowledge and biopolitical technologies tie our capacity to transform ourselves to the intensification of power relations' (Maturity and Modernity, p. 6).
47. Democracy and Its Critics, pp. 217-8.
48. M. Dean, 'Normalising Democracy: Foucault and Habermas on Democracy, Liberalism and Law' in Foucault Contra Habermas, pp. 174-5.
49. Ibid., p. 183.
50. M. Foucault, cited in 'Normalising Democracy', p. 173.
51. 'Normalising Democracy', p. 175.
52. The Foucault Reader, p. 61.
53. D. Conway, 'Pas de Deux: Habermas and Foucault in Genealogical Communication' in Foucault Contra Habermas, p. 65.
54. Pas de Deux, p. 66.
55. M. Foucault, 'Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault, Telos, Summer 1977, p. 160.
56. M. Foucault in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault, MIT Press, 1988, p. 12.
57. Social representation theory may be seen as fleshing out something like this general account of the subject. For example, Howarth, who has studied the role of representations in children's identity construction, claims that: Social representations provide the 'scaffolding' for the child's efforts to construct a social identity world. 'Yet, the circulation of representations around the child does not lead to them being either simply impressed upon the child, or simply appropriated by the child, rather, their acquisition is an out-come of development'. As the child familiarises himself with the dominant representations around him, and comes to re-interpret, to re-construct, and to re-present, the 'scaffolding' is dismantled. When the child has established a position for herself within the networks of meaning that comprise her culture, through processes of reciprocal relatedness and decentring, she can be said to have negotiated an identity, though this identity is always inherently unstable (C. Howarth, 'Identity in Whose Eyes? The Role of Representations in Identity Construction, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 32/2, 2002, p. 156).
58. As Habermas characterises it, resistance cannot be meaningful for 'socialized individuals [who] can only be perceived as exemplars, as standardized products of some discourse formation-as individual copies that are mechanically punched out' (J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, MIT Press, 1987, p. 293).
59. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, Allen Lane, 1977, p. 222.
60. Maturity and Modernity, pp. 69-74.
61. Discipline and Punish, p. 60.
62. Reconciling the subject as an effect of power with non-determination or agency is usually attempted along the following lines: 'What is enacted by the subject is enabled but not finally constrained by the prior working of power. Agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled ... [since], if conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration ... that is never merely mechanical' (J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex', Routledge, pp. 15-6).
63. The Final Foucault, p. 3.
64. The significance of reciprocity is brought out particularly in Foucault's later work on ethics. Extrapolating from a discussion on ancient Greek sexuality, for example, he states that 'What I want to ask is: Are we able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other... The Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to a virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of the other... All that is quite disgusting!' (The Foucault Reader, p. 346).
65. S. Thompson, 'The Agony and the Ecstasy: Foucault, Habermas and the Problem of Recognition', in Foucault Contra Habermas, p. 208.
66. I.M. Young, 'Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought, Constellations, 3/3, 1997, p. 343.
67. The Foucault Reader, p. 50.
68. In this connection, it is interesting to note the many Foucauldian definitions of agency that read like Rousseauvian refutations of representative government in the name of self-government: 'we experience ourselves as free subjects, as subjects of power, to the extent that we experience ourselves as agents, that is, as beings who can conduct our own conduct, while we experience ourselves as dominated subjects, as powerless, to the extent that we experience the exercise of our capacities for reflection and action as not being self-directed: that is, as being directed by others' ('Orientation and Enlightenment', p. 35).
69. The Final Foucault, p. 18 (emphasis added).
70. We are reminded here of Nietzsche: 'There is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything' (cited in 'The Return of the Subject?', p. 118).
71. M. Foucault, cited in Pas de Deux, p. 73.
72. Foucault's thought here anticipates new forms of political practice, visible since the 1980s, which involve an idea of a self-limiting revolution in which action in civil society comes first. For detail on the emergence of these ideas in context, see G. Baker, 'The Changing Idea of Civil Society: Models from the Polish Democratic Opposition', Journal of Political Ideologies, June 1998.
73. For a theoretical discussion of the politics of 'civil society first', see G. Baker, 'Civil Society Theory and Republican Democracy', Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 4/2, 2001.
74. Owen, for example, writes of Foucault's work that the 'space of the political is presented as a space of struggle in which the question 'who are we?' remains perpetually open to negotiation and re-negotiation, rather than being located as the site of a transcendental determination of our being' (Maturity and Modernity, p. 207).
75. Laclau too has suggested that undecidability is crucial for imagining the political (E. Laclau, 'Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony' in C. Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Routledge, 1996).