1 Performative Imaginaries
Pitkin versus Hobbes on Political Representation
Mónica Brito Vieira
The democratic rediscovery of representation is commonly dated back to the late 1990s, with David Plotke’s 1997 article “Representation is Democracy” supplying a motto for much of the work that followed. There is some truth to this dating, especially if we take the rediscovery to involve two central claims: 1) the essentially representative character of democracy, and 2) the necessity for mainstream work on political representation to account for the constitutive, performative, aesthetic and cultural aspects of representation (Näsström 2011). However, there is a strong case for crediting Hanna Pitkin with this rediscovery more than a generation ago. Pitkin’s (1967) pioneering study of political representation, The Concept of Representation, set out to discover what makes representation democratic. But already in that work, Pitkin struggled with the paradoxical nature of representation, its unrealizable character and its conflicting demands. This uneasiness never abated. If anything, it grew stronger. In 2004, looking back on her work, Pitkin regretted having taken “for granted as unproblematic” (Pitkin 2004: 336) the relationship of representation to democracy. She openly questioned the traditional (and recently restated) equation of representation with democracy, and emphasized instead the inherent tension between both concepts and practices, a tension she believed had been aggravated by recent political developments. Genuinely democratic representation, Pitkin ruefully concluded, is possible, but its prospects fragile, if not evanescent (Pitkin 2004: 340).
This was Pitkin’s last word on representation. Its pessimistic undertones make it somewhat ironic that she should have become the inspirational figure behind many of those currently working on a renewed theory of democratic representation. In particular, Pitkin has come to be enlisted within the constructivist camp of representation theorists, who emphasize exactly what Pitkin denied: the essentially representative character of democracy. These constructivists present themselves as exploring and deepening original Pitkinian insights that have been lost to view in the serial appropriation of Pitkin’s views by the empirical political science literature (Disch 2011).1
This chapter has two main goals. First, I provide a reading of Pitkin’s views on representation that highlights the ways in which they diverge from the narrow “interests and responsiveness” view of representation that has come to be attributed to her. Second, I assess the limits of her current refashioning as a constructivist. While I agree that Pitkin acknowledged a constitutive dimension to representation, I argue that she remained committed to a “maieutic” understanding of representation as the activity of disclosing something that is already there, and knowable, but must be made present to the understanding. Moreover, she vehemently resisted the imaginative, fictional, and symbolic dimensions of representation as threatening to the proper “order of things” in representation. But in so doing, so I claim, Pitkin deprived herself of some of the tools she needed to articulate a theory of democratic representation capable of accounting for the processes of political subjectification she wished to indict.
Perhaps surprisingly, I seek to make good on this claim by going back to the first systematic theorist of political representation, Thomas Hobbes. Pitkin constructed her understanding of political (that is to say, democratic) representation partly against Hobbes. Her understanding of representation as a matter of “substantive acting for others” (Pitkin 1967: 209, my emphasis) is offered as a corrective to formalist views of representation, notably Hobbes’s “authorisation view,” with its alleged unilateral focus on “the giving and having of authority” (Pitkin 1967: 23). But as I have argued fully elsewhere (Brito Vieira 2009), Pitkin offers an unduly restrictive view of what Hobbes thought to be involved in representing politically. In particular, in defining Hobbes’s view of representation as an “authorisation view,” Pitkin is effectively defining away the symbolic, aesthetic, and performative dimensions Hobbes thought necessary to the core activity representation performs: the constitution of a political subject as such (Brito Vieira and Runciman 2008; Brito Vieira 2009; see also Mulieri 2013). In this chapter I bring these dimensions back into the discussion, thereby engaging in a process of both interpretation and reconstitution. Identifying what Pitkin found provoking and dangerous in Hobbes’s wider view of representation can yield fundamental clues as to her unstated assumptions and the limits of her constructivism.2 But this is not merely an exercise in testing Pitkin’s constructivist credentials. My analysis feeds into two larger questions, which may affect the direction the representative turn is taking today: would constructivists benefit from retrieving some of the lines of argument that Hobbes set in motion but Pitkin resisted? Equally, should they be more attentive to some of Pitkin’s warnings?
Interests and Responsiveness View
For many years now, empirical political scientists seeking normative grounds for the use of responsiveness as the key indicator of the quality of representative government have cited Pitkin in their support. Arguably, Pitkin has no-one to blame but herself for this, having defined representation as “acting in the interest of the represented in a manner responsive to them” (Pitkin 1967: 2009, my emphasis). At first sight, this definition possesses all the ingredients of the “interest and responsiveness” view of representation that constructivists have come to reject: representation is a unidirectional principal-agent relationship, which takes citizens’ interests as given, to which representatives must remain closely responsive. But this definition summarizes her position and, like many summaries, itself requires comment on at least two counts.
Pitkin speaks of the representational relationship in directional terms, running from represented to representative and conceived as principal and agent respectively. She emphasizes the priority of the represented over their representatives, and the former’s capacity to pass judgment and eventually resist the latter on the basis of their interests, as fundamental conditions of political representation. But it remains to add that “first” means in this case a logical – and I would say normative – priority rather than temporal precedence.
It must likewise be remarked that although she speaks of the capacity for resistance on the basis of interests as a condition of representation, she recognizes that interests are not entirely pre-given: rather they are, typically, weakly defined, and in need of being partly constituted. “Partly” is an important qualification, because even though Pitkin recognizes that representation calls forth interests, she allows interests a partially independent, objective reality, and remains at a distance from the more radical constructivist claim that the very materiality of interests is “discursively constituted” (Disch 2012). Pitkin believes that political issues, and the kind of interests involved in them, are configured and operate within a broad intermediate range between subjectivity and objectivity – this being the range within which representation itself needs to operate.
Responsiveness to interests, then, remains central to Pitkin’s account. But her account is nuanced according to the particular nature of the interests involved. While in the case of attached interests, consultation, and some degree of responsiveness, are critical, in the case of unattached interests, where there is no person or group whose interest it is and who can claim the right to define it, responsiveness can no longer be the criterion of political representation. The implication here is twofold, and, at once, at odds with responsiveness and constructivist views of representation: for Pitkin, representation is never a matter of strict responsiveness, and there is always some relatively independent standard of interest against which representatives can be held accountable. Pitkin insists, accordingly, that democracy is not about getting people what they want. In other words, representatives are not obliged to follow the interests their constituents have, but interests their constituents would have good reasons to affirm – interests which, in most cases, representatives must work out for them.3 This means that the measure of interests one is legitimized in pursuing is counterfactual, not empirical congruence. As such, it is accountability and answerability – potential rather than strict responsiveness – that makes representation possible for Pitkin (Pitkin 1967: 213). Hence when representatives deviate from what the represented believe to be their interests they must seek to give reasons to the represented to broker their interests in what is proposed. In sum, while Pitkin’s view of representation remains an “interest and responsiveness” view of sorts, it is at once subtler and more complex than it is usually made out to be.
This combination of subtlety and complexity helps to explain why contrasting readings of Pitkin could have emerged. Pitkin’s views on representation are chameleonic and never achieve full resolution without the intervention of interpretation. But there are certain fixed elements in the conception of representation that distinguish it from alternative accounts. Let me say something about these in turn. The first is her claim that we can properly speak of representation only where there is a reciprocitarian relationship between represented and representatives (see also Williams 1998: 24). This implies relative independence, by which is meant the capacity in both parties for independent agency, judgment and action, or, in a word, autonomy. That is to say, if, for Pitkin, the representative must in representing act substantively on behalf of the interests of the represented, it must also be possible for the represented to pass judgment on these actions for themselves.
Further to this Pitkin makes a second key claim: that representation can be properly conceptualized only as a systemic property: “Political representation is primarily a public, institutionalized arrangement involving many people and groups, and operating in the complex ways of large-scale social arrangements” (Pitkin 1967: 221). Despite its emphasis on institutional representation, this second claim has been defended and elaborated upon by constructivists (Disch 2011), since it functions as a critique of attempts to model political representation on private “one-to-one, person-to-person,” principal-agent relationships (Pitkin 1967: 221). As Pitkin rightly stresses, “a political representative … has a constituency rather than a single principal,” and does not represent “by himself in isolation,” but “with other representatives in an institutionalized context” (Pitkin 1967: 225). All of this presupposes a complex web of mediations.
What is more, representatives represent not only different constituents, but also different constituencies, having therefore to reconcile distinct, and often conflicting, claims, in their attempts to arrive at a representable will. Hence, Pitkin concludes, any “harmony of final-objective-interests” will never be given, but “created” (Pitkin 1967: 218). The public interest is therefore something ultimately constituted in the act of representing it (deliberating, negotiating, accommodating, and so on). However, constituting is (here) an activity that presupposes the counterfactual possibility of rational persuasion, which Pitkin continues to describe as akin to the unveiling of a hidden, objective, enlightened interest, which we (ideally) are brought to see – or, at least, follow. The lingering objectivism is palpable: it is this objective interest that a constituency is right in recognizing as representing it.
As it is at the level of individuals, so also at the level of political collectivities “responsiveness” is the crucial criterion by which to assess whether representation is happening. Yet, Pitkin once more makes it clear that this does not imply the “constant activity of responding” to public opinion, but rather the “constant condition of responsiveness, of potential readiness to respond” (Pitkin 1967: 133). Where this “potential responsiveness,” understood as “access to power rather than its actual exercise,” is present, and constituents “could initiate action if they desired,” they can be conceived as “acting through” their representatives, even if they are broadly unaware of what is being done throughout the system in their name, on their behalf (Pitkin 1967: 233). In other words, non-objection, where systemic conditions for influence and objection – some form of reflexivity, let us say, but not necessarily mobilization (Disch 2011) – are in existence, provides sufficient evidence that representation is taking place.
As Pitkin shifts her attention to the systemic level, however, something changes. There is a visible relaxation of conditions of autonomy she originally ascribed to both representatives and represented. When speaking of representation as a reciprocitarian relationship, she theorizes it in terms that presuppose a self-present intentionality and consciousness on the part of individual agents who are being viewed, as it were, severally and from an external standpoint. Representation then appears as the result of the “conscious, rational, creative effort by some individuals” to pursue other persons’ or groups’ interests and of these persons or groups coming to the understanding that they effectively hold the interests being pursued (Pitkin 1967: 225). But Pitkin now emphasizes instead representation as the product of a system, “operating in the complex ways of large-scale social arrangements” (Pitkin 1967, 221). This system is the custodian of “invisible hand” processes, whereby unintended social benefits emerge from individual interactions, which are lacking on their own. The representative system can therefore sustain much “apathy, ignorance, and self-seeking” (Pitkin 1967: 255), and even metamorphose the latter into virtuous, substantive representation. It can generate rational outcomes – “a ‘rationality’,” in Pitkin’s favoured word (1967: 255) – even if many of its members lack in rationality, and pursue other interests or are even oblivious to the interests that are being pursued. The move here is from the conception of representation as a reciprocitarian relationship, with its emphasis on autonomous agency, to the cunning of institutions and the rules structuring them, which partly dispenses with that agency in looking after the public interest. To the representative system is now reserved the role of the “epistemic maieutic:” to elicit knowledge acquisition about, and enable the pursuit of, those interests members of society want, but may not know (or perhaps even ever get to know) they want. As the system is entrusted to look for the place where “reason” resides, whether, and to what extent, it is necessary that it mobilizes its members to find their common interests with one another becomes an open question.4
Constructive Elements of Personhood
This brief presentation of Pitkin’s views on political representation, especially in its constitutive and systemic dimensions, does enough, I hope, to suggest how the refashioning of Pitkin as a constructivist could have won increasing numbers of adherents and enthusiasts. But it is also already suggestive of some of the limits of this refashioning, as representation remains essentially a process of interest clarification, whose standards for evaluation seem to lie outside the representative process itself. However, these limits come more sharply into focus through an analysis of Pitkin on Hobbes, and especially her resistance to the roles of imagination, fiction, and performativity in Hobbes’s views on representation (see also Douglass 2014).
In the beginning, there was Hobbes’s theory of personhood. “The self-conscious theatricality of Hobbesian representation” (Kahn 2003, my emphasis) first manifests itself there and Pitkin’s discomfort is visible. Hobbes famously constructs personhood on an analogy with fictional or theatrical representation. Personhood, Hobbes claims, is founded upon impersonation, and every act of the person is an act of representation, so that the person is, at its heart, a theatrical fiction. The very etymology of the word, Hobbes insists, tells us about the theatrical root of the “person,” as the mask used by actors on stage. The word was subsequently extended metaphorically, so that “to Personate” was made a synonym of “to Act, or Represent himself, or an other” (Hobbes 1996: 112). This established a continuum between the actor bearing a character (or its mask) on stage, the self-impersonator representing himself in everyday life, and the political representative, namely the sovereign impersonating the stat...
