Audience Power and the Configuration of Political Representation

• In Event: Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference III: Beyond the Principal-Agent Binary: New Approaches to Democratic Representation

Abstract

Recent work on political representation has effectively extended our understanding of representation practices – to include also non-elected representatives – and has introduced a grammar of representation that provides new levels of analytical purchase (e.g. Saward 2006; 2020; Shirin & Reinelt 2014). Audiences are an elementary part of this new grammar but their contributions to representation processes remain under-theorized. The unilinear underpinning of the grammar of representation (i.e. maker of claims – subject – object – referent – audience) continues to center-stage and privilege political claim-makers and the (vocal) activity of claim-making (cf. Severs 2024).
This paper analyzes the work which audiences perform in representation processes and argues that democratic representation requires the audience’s assistance as empowered spect-actors (Boal 1993). I draw on literature on audience/spectator democracy (Manin 1997, Rosanvallon 2006; Green 2009), and theatre and performance studies (Féral 2002; Fitzgerald 2015; Debord 1967) to theorize audience power as comprising both a revelatory and articulatory capacity. The configuration of political representation in contemporary democracies is skewed towards revelation. The evolutions that characterize audience democracy have reduced the expressive function of elections. Citizens increasingly react to the terms that have been presented on the political stage (Manin 1997, 223) and primarily use voting as a mechanism for de-selecting political representatives (Rosanvallon 2006, 173). Meanwhile, the spectacularization of politics (Debord 1967) undercuts, in important ways, the articulatory capacity of democratic audiences. Growing competition for citizens’ gaze has resulted in a politics whereby form increasingly takes precedence over content. The Spectacle casts spectators in a one-way relationship to the center of representation that maintains and even strengthens their isolation from one another. Vested in consumption, not dialogue, it fails to undo the fragmentation of society and rebuild a meaningful sense of togetherness (Kohn 2008, 477).
Building on this analysis, the paper investigates alternative configurations of political representation that could strengthen the articulatory capacity of audience power (understood as its capacity to contribute to discourses that produce it as an object). It draws inspiration from street theatre (as an alternative to the proscenium/confrontational style of theatre) and non-Western styles of theatre, to advocate for the creation of a ludic space that allows audiences to join in and participate (also in horizontal ways) in the performance of their political representation.

Author

• Eline M. Severs, Vrije Universiteit Brussel