On Demagogic Reason: Representation, Spectatorship, and Populist Rhetoric

• In Event: Staging the Political: Theater, Politics, and Representation

Abstract

The recent “constructivist turn” in political representation has challenged common assumptions that the latter practice is best characterized by the “dyadic” and “unidirectional” activities of agents taken to voice the pregiven preferences of their constituents (Disch 2021; Mansbridge 2003). Instead, constructivists argue that the qualities ascribed to constituents cannot preexist the circulation of representative claims that must first address and be taken up by specific audiences (Saward 2010; Laclau 2005). In turn, this insight has yielded a celebration of representation for its proliferation of voices and sites of contestation in democratic life. Yet this development has also encountered basic challenges in theorizing legitimacy given its focus on social construction. If the identities or preferences of “the represented” are not taken as a fixed reference point prior to the claims made by representatives, how are we to evaluate better or worse representation?

This paper revisits the constructivist literature to argue that this problem arises from an incomplete theorization of “the audience.” While constructivists tend to conceptualize a necessary place for audiences as those who encounter and respond to representative claims, these accounts remain opaque regarding what amounts to (or indicates an absence of) audience agency. Interrogating this gap, my paper identifies two practices that fly under the radar as a result. The first involves cases of non-vocal representation wherein representative content appears in such a way that audiences do not encounter discrete claim-making agents in the process. Such cases require tracking how audiences are positioned to engage the process of representation in communicative contexts that are not amenable to vocal “responses.” Secondly, my paper interrogates contexts wherein representative claim-makers actively identify as members of the audiences to whom they speak. While some constructivists attend to this interaction, I argue that they neglect how it can serve to co-opt audiences insofar as their capacity to respond is made superfluous by the speaker’s performance of shared group membership with them.

In sum, both practices reveal that political representation can involve particular constructions of the very audiences whose judgment is solicited to legitimate subsequent representative claims—indeed, a process that can leave audiences deprived of the very agency imagined on constructivist accounts. My paper then suggests that a paradoxical conflation of the above two practices occurs in demagogic manifestations of populist representation. That is, demagogic leaders advance representative claims by presenting themselves as members of silenced audiences and staking the legitimacy of their claims on the promise that their performance will be “eventful” enough to turn their spectators into actors—provided they keep watching. Building on Moffitt’s (2016) work on populist style and Urbinati’s (2014; 2019) accounts of populism as a disfiguration representative democracy, I argue that constructivists must attend to the construction of audiences tethered to populist claim-making practices lest they fail to interrogate the phenomenon of demagogic misrepresentation at the heart of democratic retrenchment.

Author

• Boris Litvin, Trinity College