Lisa Disch

THE IMPURITY OF REPRESENTATION AND

THE VITALITY OF DEMOCRACY

This article compares the conceptions of democratic representation found in the

work of Ernesto Laclau and Hanna Pitkin. Whereas Laclau takes Pitkin as his foil,
I contend that her treatment of representation has much more in common with
Laclau’s than he gives her credit for. Pitkin made a bold critique of
foundationalist notions of responsiveness and acknowledged representation’s
constitutive function. Yet, her antipathy to symbolic representation made Pitkin
recoil from the most radical implications of her argument: she would see as a
threat to democratic politics that which Laclau casts as its vitality. Laclau’s work,
then, does not merely refute Pitkin’s but advances a line of argument that she set
into motion.

Keywords Laclau; Pitkin; political representation; populism

The impurity of representation

It is a widely held intuition among both normative and empirical scholars of
politics, together with citizens, that constituent demand properly drives
democratic representation. Political representatives should typically carry out
constituent demand or, if they need to deviate from it, they must justify that
deviation such that the constituents themselves may be persuaded to redefine
their interests and wishes to accord with what their representative has done.
This intuition, typically summed up in a single word ‘responsiveness’, is
grounded on what I have termed the ‘bedrock norm’ (Disch 2011). This is the
idea that constituencies
their identities, preferences and demands
should
be the starting-place of democratic politics so as to ensure that citizens control
their representatives and not vice versa. The bedrock norm takes political
interests and political identities for granted, as such, it gets tripped up on the
‘theoretical stumbling-block’ that Laclau (2005, p. 4) shows to be posed by
populism but characteristic of democratic politics more generally.
As Marchart (2005, pp. 4
5) has argued, Laclau’s work establishes that
political identities ‘cannot be taken for granted as long as they are not
politically constructed’. Thus, the bedrock norm posits what must be analyzed,
because it has come into being as an effect of naming and other such acts of
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208 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

representation. Laclau (1996, p. 98; cf. 2005, pp. 155) terms this the
‘impurity’ of political representation: that it ‘does not simply reproduce, at a
secondary level, a fullness preceding it which could be grasped in a direct way,
but, on the contrary, representation is the absolutely primary level in the
constitution of objectivity’. For those who approach it from the traditional
perspective of the bedrock norm, the ‘impurity’ of representation becomes a
‘stumbling-block’ because it seems to destroy the ground on which the
autonomy of the people would rest. That is, norms of representation must
presuppose the autonomy of the people if democratic legitimacy is to have any
meaning, yet the ‘impurity’ of representation (and the logic of populism)
suggests that no people can speak, gather, appear, nor act as a whole
except
in so far as it is represented.
The beauty of Laclau’s work is to transform this stumbling-block into an
enabling paradox. He takes it not to indict democratic representation as a false
promise but rather to reveal the essentially representative character of
democracy. As Laclau argues, the constituencies of democratic politics do not
spontaneously emerge; they are mobilized into conceiving themselves as and
acting as a whole. The ‘impurity’ of representation, then, is this mobilizing or
constitutive function. In calling attention to this facet of democratic
representation, Laclau theorizes its vitality.
That it appears as a stumbling-block from the predominant normative
perspective, Laclau would blame largely on Hanna Pitkin. He contends that she
‘sidesteps the issue’ of representation’s constitutive function, and that her
entire discussion of political manipulation reduces representing to an
epistemological problem ‘of respect for or ignorance of the popular will,
without considering how that popular will is constituted in the first place’
(Laclau 2005, p. 161). I contend that Hanna Pitkin’s treatment of
representation has much more in common with Laclau’s than he gives her
credit for. As just a few of Pitkin’s readers have noted, her text posed radical
challenges to the study of political representation that have been largely
overlooked despite its being widely cited (Eulau and Karps 1977, Jewell
1983). Pitkin made a bold critique of the bedrock norm but ultimately recoiled
from the most radical implications of her argument: she would see as a threat
to democratic politics that which Laclau casts as its vitality. Laclau’s work,
then, does not merely refute Pitkin’s but advances a line of argument that she
set into motion.

Pitkin and Laclau

In researching her 1967 book, Pitkin read widely in the empirical literature of
the time. She proved to be particularly adept at using it to challenge its own
outmoded ideals. Like Laclau, she began by attacking the ‘legal’ model of
 T H E V I TA L I T Y O F D E M O C R A C Y 209

representation as a ‘one-to-one, person-to-person’ relationship in which the

representative serves as an intermediary for a principal (Pitkin 1967, p. 221).
She pointed to the obvious: a politician has a constituency not a principal. She
went on to conceive a constituency not as a group or ‘datum of the social
structure’ (Laclau 2005, p. 100) but as an ‘unorganized group’ (a
‘heterogeneity’ in Laclau’s (2005, p. 244) terms) whose several members
are mostly ‘incapable of forming an explicit will on political questions’, and
whose discrete preferences would not add up to a ‘single interest’ even if they
could assert them (Pitkin 1967, p. 221). Consequently, Pitkin (1967, p. 152)
emphasized, representing is an activity that must allow for ‘a certain minimum
of autonomy, of animation’ on the part of the representative. Lest such a claim
tend toward a Burkean conception of representative as ‘trustee’, Pitkin (1967,
p. 140) was equally insistent that representation also recognize ‘a relative
equivalence between the representative and the represented, so that the latter
could conceivably have acted for himself instead’. It is this ‘relative
equivalence’, that Pitkin made the defining characteristic of democratic
representation and that was the distinguishing feature of her own argument. As
Melissa Williams (1998, p. 24) has also recognized, the most unique aspect of
Pitkin’s conception of representation is its distinctive reciprocity: that
representation must ‘recognize the agency of the represented’ and that ‘of
the representative’.
It is not quite fair to say, as Laclau (2005, p. 160) does, that Pitkin
‘sidesteps’ the issue that political identities are ‘weakly constituted’ and
require ‘representation in the first place’. Although most of the time, Pitkin
speaks in terms of interests rather than identities, she recognizes these quite
explicitly to be ‘weakly constituted’. Pitkin emphasized repeatedly that
constituencies are not a literal presence in the democratic process. For
example, Pitkin (1967, p. 163) acknowledged that politicians frequently take
‘action on issues of which the people know nothing’. In the typical case, she
maintained that representatives do not act ‘in response to an express popular
wish’ but on what they believe the public would or could be made to define as
their interest (Pitkin 1967, p. 223). The representative process, by
institutionalizing punctual public oversight through the mechanism of
elections, gives representatives a kind of speculative approval: ‘we assume
that if the representative acts in the interest of his constituents, they will want
what is in their interest and consequently will approve what the representative
has done’ (Pitkin 1967, p. 163; emphasis added). Similarly, legitimacy is
secured by the ‘potential’ for persuasion rather than its actual occurrence. To
ensure this potential, there ‘must be institutional arrangements’ such as
competitive elections, universal franchise, and a right of opposition for all
citizens to provide ‘machinery for the expression of the wishes of the
represented’ (Pitkin 1967, p. 230, 232). Provided that ‘[the people] could
initiate action if they so desired’, it is fair to grant that a government is
representative
‘even if most of the time [its people] are unaware of what it is
210 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

doing’ (Pitkin 1967, p. 233). Certainly, Pitkin did not imagine that a
democracy could fail to represent public opinion or the public interest and still
be worthy of the term. But she wanted scholars to let go of the fantasy that
such things are ‘inputs’ that cause a policy ‘output’ (Wahlke 1971). She called
them to face up to the ‘fact’ that ‘in political representation, the represented
have no will on most issues’ (Pitkin 1967, p. 163).
Finally, Pitkin (1967, p. 218; emphases added) affirmed something quite
close to Laclau’s paradox of representation when she noted that ‘the national
unity that gives localities an interest in the whole is not merely presupposed by
representation; it is also continually re-created by the representatives’
activities’. For Pitkin, as for Laclau, to speak for ‘the people’ is to presuppose
something that no representative can take for granted (it cannot be ‘merely
presupposed’). The national unity is politically constructed. Yet, it cannot be
made up out of whole cloth; it is ‘re-created’ by the representatives, not
invented by them.
Laclau (2005, p. 161) glosses over these aspects of Pitkin’s argument when
he charges her with failing to consider how the ‘popular will is constituted in
the first place, [or] whether representation is not the very premise of that
constitution’. Pitkin clearly recognizes representation as constitutive; she does
not quite acknowledge its ‘essential impurity’, however (Laclau 1996, p. 98).
For Pitkin, the representative contributes an expertise to the process of
representation that the citizens lack. Hers model is a pedagogical model of
politics that defines good representation as educating a constituency about its
interest. Consequently, what the representative brings to the process should be
or have the potential to be ‘rationally justifiable’ (Pitkin 1967, p. 100). Good
representation in Pitkin’s (1967, p. 101) view is antipathetic to symbol
making, which she characterizes as ‘not a process of rational persuasion, but of
manipulating affective responses and forming habits’. Symbolic representation
seems ‘to rest on emotional, affective, irrational psychological response rather
than on rationally justifiable criteria’ (Pitkin 1967, p. 90, 100). For Laclau
(1996, p. 87; emphasis added), who maintains that ‘the representative has to
contribute to the identity of what is represented’, symbols are central to the
identification process.
Pitkin’s resistance to symbol making derives from the separations she
makes among descriptive representation, symbolic representation and repre-
sentation as acting for. Whereas these separations appear at first to be precise
and bounded, I will argue that they bleed into one another even in Pitkin’s
own argument. Pitkin fortifies the perception of their discreteness by
recruiting the German verbs vertreten and darstellen to secure them. By
‘contrasting’ these two verbs, ‘vertreten, to act for another, and darstellen, to
stand for another’, she hopes to clarify the distinction between conceiving
representation as a matter of being, what the representative ‘must be like in
order to represent’, and as a matter of doing, ‘what constitutes the activity of
representing’ (1967, p. 59). German helps the architecture of her argument
 T H E V I TA L I T Y O F D E M O C R A C Y 211

not only because it offers distinct terms for the various meanings of
representation that English speakers lump together under the umbrella term
‘representation’, but also because it clearly marks which meanings are
inapplicable to politics. Whereas darstellen in German carries an expressive and
aesthetic connotation (perhaps closest to English ‘performing’ or ‘perfor-
mance’), vertreten translates as substituting and is in one of its uses explicitly
linked to politics
the German word for parliament, Volksvertretung.
Pitkin’s own argument will illustrate that even the precision of the German
language cannot prevent the various meanings of representation from sliding
into one another. Specifically, it cannot prevent ‘descriptive’ and ‘symbolic’
representation from crossing the divide between being and doing that she
proposes to insulate political against non-political senses of the term. For
example, Pitkin criticizes political advocates of descriptive representation for
promoting a static conception of politics that reduces representation to
mapping or replicating the nation. As she elaborates this objection, however,
Pitkin acknowledges that description has active elements that go unrecognized
by proponents of proportional representation who misunderstand what maps,
portraits and other similar representations actually do. Pitkin astutely points
out that these are representations not only because they accurately depict
‘something visible’ but also because they ‘present a part of the world as being
or looking a certain way, make allegations about it’ (Pitkin 1967, p. 67, 70;
emphasis added). The ‘as’ is important for underscoring that description
actively interprets and makes claims. It does not merely present something but
presents it in a particular way. So, too, in politics selection is involved:
‘representation as ‘‘standing for’’ by resemblance, as being a copy of an
original, is always a question of which characteristics are politically relevant’
(1967, p. 87).
Although Pitkin groups descriptive and symbolic representation together as
‘two kinds of darstellen’, they turn out to be quite different (1967, p. 59).
Whereas descriptive representation is bound to reproduce some version of the
‘characteristics’ of the represented, in symbolic representation the connection
between ‘symbol and referent’ is arbitrary (Pitkin 1967, p. 82). In so far as
‘symbols are not likenesses of their referents . . . They make no allegations about
what they symbolize, but rather suggest or express it’, perfecting a symbol has
little to do with accuracy or judgment (1967, p. 94). Rather, it depends almost
exclusively on affecting ‘the beliefs, attitudes, [and] assumptions’ of those to
whom it is directed (1967, p. 100). When political representation is conceived
in these terms, it becomes ‘existential’ (1967, p. 102).
Whereas Pitkin (1967, p. 102,113; emphasis original) initially maintains that
this, too, is an ‘essentially static’ way of thinking about representation, she later
has to concede that symbolic representation ‘is a kind of activity’. This
concession poses a potential problem because it gives symbolic representation
two important affinities with her own conception of representation as ‘acting
for’. First, symbolic representation, such as political representation, involves
212 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

transforming an amorphous constituency into a people. Yet Pitkin (1967, p. 108;

emphasis original) contends that whereas a political representative achieves this
by articulating a common interest, the symbolic representative holds his position
as a leader by virtue of what he does to stimulate ‘identification or acceptance’ of
his leadership: ‘what matters is always the alignment of wills between ruler and
ruled; [symbolic] representation is that alignment, no matter how it is brought
out’. Second, there is a reciprocity to symbolic representation
she calls it a
‘two-way correspondence’
just as in Pitkin’s ideal (1967, p. 108). Yet here,
Pitkin attempts to draw a stark line. She contends that the symbolic
representative is indifferent to whether the alignment of wills is ‘achieved by
adjustments at the ruler’s [or] at the subject’s end’ (1967, p. 106). Symbolic
representation is pure fantasy; having no relation to the referent except in so far
as ‘it is believed in’, it is entirely free-floating (Pitkin 1967, p. 100). At its
extreme, symbolic representation becomes the ‘fascist theory of representation’
which Pitkin (1967, p. 109, 108; emphasis added), following Barker, calls
‘inverse representation’ because the ‘following represents or reflects the leader’.
Subtly, Pitkin appears to have introduced a ‘direction’ into political
representation (Eulau and Karps 1977, p. 237). For representation to be
properly political
and this means for Pitkin that it is democratic
it must go
in just one direction. Pitkin asserts that ‘the ‘‘re’’ in ‘‘representation’’ seems
to suggest . . . as I have argued in rejecting the fascist model of representation,
[that] the represented must be somehow logically prior; the representative
must be responsive to him rather than the other way around’ (1967, p. 8,
140). All is clear: the ‘fascist theory’ becomes ‘inverse’ representation because
it turns responsiveness ‘the other way around’.
Laclau (2005, p. 101) is right to argue that Pitkin ‘can see only irrationality
in any kind of symbolic representation’. Insightfully, he observes that to
protect the boundary between political and symbolic representation, Pitkin
endorses a ‘distinction between causes and reasons’ (Laclau 2005, p. 100).
Although Laclau (2005, p. 161) does not dispute the possibility or even
importance of making such a distinction, he objects to the notion that reasons
are benign, uncontaminated by symbols, and, ‘entirely outside representation’.
On the contrary, Laclau (2005, p. 161) contends that reasons ‘require as their
starting point an identity’ that is formed symbolically by means of an
imaginative identification with a position in a particular struggle. Put simply,
the activity of representation as Laclau theorizes it necessarily goes both ways.
There must be an articulation of identity ‘from representative to represented’
to constitute a constituency before that constituency can judge whether it has
‘good reason’ to believe it is being represented (Laclau 2005, p. 161).
By contrast, Pitkin cannot acknowledge that identification is indispensable
in the creation of any political group; consequently, she leaves no room for the
imagination to play a role in representation that is not pathological. For an
immanent critique of this point, it is useful to return to the German language.
The German constellation for speaking about representation contains three
 T H E V I TA L I T Y O F D E M O C R A C Y 213

terms: vertreten, darstellen and vorstellen. A technical term in philosophy,

Vorstellung (the noun) is used to speak of mental representations, such as
thoughts and images. Perhaps Pitkin’s omission of this term is simply
understandable. After all, it seems irrelevant to the public, political acts of
representation with which she is principally concerned. Yet, as she certainly
knew, just as vertreten and darstellen can be paired to bring out the contrast
between activity and passivity, so too can Vorstellung and Darstellung be paired.
Their pairing brings out an affinity between representation as activity that takes
place in the mind (thoughts or images) and representation as an activity that
takes material form in the world (maps, portraits, paintings, sculpture and
performances). This affinity is significant because it destabilizes the activity/
passivity divide that Pitkin initially aimed to set up by juxtaposing vertreten
against darstellen. Recognizing the place of Vorstellung in the family of German
terms for speaking about representation brings the active elements of darstellen
to the fore, thereby making it clear that all three modes of representation have
activity in common. In addition, vorstellen (the verb) has a secondary meaning

imagining
that poses an even bigger challenge to Pitkin’s conceptual scheme
by naming its blind spot.
Pitkin cannot see or will not see the role that imagination has and must
have in representation. She can see that in the case of material representations
(darstellen) the act of materialization participates in producing what it claims to
represent. She can also see that in the case of representation as acting for
(vertreten) representing has a constitutive role in producing the unity that gives
the parties an interest in the whole. She resists the idea that there would be an
imaginary or symbolic aspect to what the people takes itself to be. A map says:
‘this is what you are for the purposes of . . . (e.g. biking in the city of Paris;
assessing voter turnout by electoral district)’. A portrait, painting or statistical
sample alleges: ‘this is what unites you such that your interest is . . .
(e.g., opposing the waste incinerator that is to be sited in your neighborhood;
supporting an increased appropriation of tax dollars for public transportation)’.
An advocate says: ‘I voted this way (e.g., against the waste incinerator; for the
appropriations bill) in order to protect your interests’. Representation in any
of these senses can be seen as rational because the proposed ‘we’ can resist on
the basis of its interests. It can argue with the purpose that has been attributed
to it, refute the allegation that is made, or vote its advocate out of office. What
Pitkin seeks to forestall is a ‘we’ that becomes imaginatively invested in an
identity so that it no longer argues with the claim or assesses its interest. She
can accept that there is a constitutive role of representation as long as there is
not an arbitrary connection between how a group is represented and what it
wants. The act of representation (even if it sparks opposition) is supposed to
help the group clarify its interests, not to mystify the process of figuring them
out by provoking an investment that serves nothing but the interest of the
powerful in enlarging their power.
214 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Laclau champions the imaginary dimension of representation. If politics is

to have a genuinely political dimension, one not reducible to economics, then
it must be more than a domain for fighting out competitive interests.
Imagination must play a role if identification, necessary to group identity
formation, is to go beyond the simple assertion of a particularistic demand.
This is to say that democratic political representation, at its best, mobilizes
new popular constituencies. This mobilization involves a double movement:
the articulation of identity from ‘representative to represented’ and the
assertion of demands the other way around. With her antipathy to symbolic
representation, Pitkin denies herself the resources she needs to promote the
kind of politics that her commitment to democracy demands. Her anxieties
about fascism leave her unable to ‘properly distinguish between manipulation
and sheer contempt for the popular will, and constitution of that will through
symbolic identification’ (Laclau 2005, p. 161). She lacks the ‘theoretical tools’
to conceive an activity that acts on the imaginations and identities of the
represented not manipulating but mobilizing them, as democratic politics
requires (Laclau 2005, p. 161).
Pitkin’s framing of the problem of democratic representation
as ensuring
that symbols do not turn it the ‘other way around’ into fascism
cuts short
what Laclau suggests should be its project. I mean that if we (and I include Pitkin
in this we) take the political to be something more than ‘pure administration
within a stable institutional framework’, then Laclau (2005, p. 154) urges us to
recognize that the ‘construction of the ‘people’ is the political act par excellence’.
This act cannot adhere to Pitkin’s etymological protocol because it will involve
the ‘constitution of antagonistic frontiers within the social and the appeal to new
subjects of social change’ (Laclau 2005, p. 154; emphasis added). As Laclau sees
it, imagining is common to representation in all of its variations

philosophical, artistic and political. The question is, Does his recognition of
the activity of imagining give him the ‘theoretical tools’ he takes Pitkin to lack,
those which would enable the subtle distinctions between manipulation and
constitution of the popular will? I believe that it does, specifically by the way
that Laclau conceives of the rhetorical devices of metaphor and metonymy
working to produce political unities.

The agency of representation

Ernesto Laclau and Hanna Pitkin share a common concern to emphasize the
agency of representation. Laclau plumbs this agency more deeply than Pitkin
could do by refusing to appeal to interest as its ultimate ground. As Laclau
(2005, p. 162) wryly observes, there is no ‘‘manifest destiny’ by which
[demands] should tend to coalesce into any kind of unity’. What holds a
‘people’ together cannot be reduced to ‘abstract common feature underlying
 T H E V I TA L I T Y O F D E M O C R A C Y 215

all social grievances’ (Laclau 2005, p. 97). Laclau (2005, p. 108; emphasis
added) emphasizes that movements ‘do not tend spontaneously’ to come
together. They must be brought into an ‘equivalential relation’ in which they
will share ‘nothing positive’ as demands beyond ‘the fact that they all remain
unfulfilled’ (Laclau 2005, p. 96). Equivalence links popular demands not in
commonality, ‘because their concrete objectives are intrinsically related’, but in
opposition, because they can be rendered ‘equivalent in confrontation with the
repressive regime’ (Laclau 1996, p. 40).
The first task of a popular movement is to work up that confrontation by
producing what Laclau (2005, p. 105) calls ‘emptiness’
an urgent sense of
dissatisfaction that points unmet needs in the direction of regime change. It is
important to underscore that emptiness is a political achievement. It is a sense
of urgency that makes it possible to reinterpret democratic demands as
symptoms of a crisis, thereby dislocating them from the bounded domain of
interest politics and relocating them on the expansive terrain of populism.
Laclau (2005, p. 105) terms emptiness ‘constitutively irrepresentable’. It is
not a simple void but a palpable, signifiable sense of urgency. The construction
of a ‘people’ that Laclau (2005, p. 112; italics original) calls the ‘political act
par excellence’ is perverse: it involves deriving the ‘fullness of communitarian
being’ not from the latent presence of a common identity but from a sense of
urgency that he terms the ‘presence of an absence’.
Laclau’s account of the agency of representation deepens Pitkin’s by
foregrounding the drama of popular struggle. It is one thing for the
representative to contribute to the education of the represented, as in Pitkin’s
model, and quite another for it to play this ‘constitutive role’ of recruiting
democratic demands into a popular struggle (Laclau 1996, p. 99). For a
popular movement to be successful, it must re-imagine the social terrain. It
recruits members by transforming ordinary demands, such as equal pay for
equal work, into claims that pose a fundamental challenge to capitalism. It is
not that particular demands are subsumed into a larger cause. The idea is to
refuse to participate in the numbers game of interest group pluralism by
breaking with alliances and functions that have come to seem natural, and
forming new ‘divisions conceived in terms of ideal aspirations, sentiments,
theoretical ideas’ (Laclau 2005, p. 46).
To link demands in the absence of a common denominator means mobilizing
them in the name of possibilities they can only imagine. To voice a universalist
aspiration in the name of ‘the people’ is to picture that people to itself as an
actor in a historical process that ennobles their particular grievances. This is
where vorstellen comes into play, not as philosophers have typically invoked it
(as the noun Vorstellung or private thought or image), but in its secondary sense
as imagining. Laclau insists on holding open a conceptual space for the
imagination in populist politics. This is not the pathological fantasizing to which
the manipulations of a fascist leader give rise but the mobilization of new
political subjects that is the vitality of democracy.
216 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Marchart (2005, p. 7) captures the role of the imagination in political

mobilization when he emphasizes that ‘the name of the people seems to
point at the more radical instance of political subjectivity (rather than specific
forms of political agency or identity)’ (cf. Laclau 2005, p. 105). The
problem is not to attach a name to something that already exists. To exist as
a political subject in the first place, the movement in its ‘totality’ (i.e. as a
‘people’) must ‘have access to the field of representation’ (Laclau 2005,
p. 162). Yet, it is precisely as a totality that it is not literally representable.
Its totalization can come about only by the intervention of ‘something
qualitatively new’, an undeniably symbolic force that
by ‘privileging’ itself
as the possibility of satisfaction
becomes ‘the rallying point of passionate
attachments’ (Laclau 2005, p. 110, 81, 116). This attachment cannot be ‘led
back to any deeper positivity’, but ‘is provided from outside those demands,
by a discourse on which they can be inscribed’ (Laclau 2005, p. 94, 98).
This rallying point that comes from outside is the name. It comes to stand
for the totality of demands hegemonically, by virtue of their ‘radical
investment’ in a ‘particular difference’; that investment, in turn, enables the
difference to for a collective with which it is ‘incommensurable’ (Laclau
2005, p. 71). Whereas Pitkin would ultimately want this investment to be
backed by good reasons, Laclau (2005, p. 163) insists that, as representation
is ‘ontologically primary’, the investment affects what counts as a good
reason.
This idea of representation as ‘radical investment’ is beautifully
exemplified by the story that Jacques Rancière (1999) tells of revolutionary
August Blanqui at trial in 1832. Asked to state his profession, Blanqui
declared himself a ‘proletarian’. Rancière narrates, ‘the magistrate immedi-
ately objects to this response: ‘‘That is not a profession’’’ (1999, p. 37).
Rancière explains that because the magistrate takes ‘profession’ to mean a
job or trade, ‘proletarian does not designate any occupation whatever, at
most the vaguely defined state of the poverty-stricken manual laborer,
which, in any case, is not appropriate to the accused’ (1999, pp. 37
38).
The magistrate expects a twofold relation of accuracy between a ‘profession’
and an actual occupation on the one hand, and between what Blanqui
professes to be and what he actually does on the other. He holds a strictly
literal understanding of representation as correspondence to an empirical
referent.
Rancière tells the story of Blanqui in a way that exemplifies what Laclau
calls the ‘social productivity of a name’ (Laclau 2005, p. 108).1 He insists that
the ‘class in which Blanqui professes to line himself up is in no way identifiable
with a social group’ (Rancière 1999, p. 38). He continues:

‘Proletarian’ is a ‘name’ that ‘defines neither a set of properties (manual

labor, industrial labor, destitution, etc.) that would be shared equally by
a multitude of individuals nor a collective body, embodying a principle,
 T H E V I TA L I T Y O F D E M O C R A C Y 217

of which those individuals would be members. It is part of a process of

subjectification identical to the process of expounding a wrong.
(Rancière 1999, p. 38)

By identifying himself as a ‘proletarian’, Blanqui engages in an act of naming

that inaugurates the group on whose part he speaks. He repartitions a social
terrain that had been fragmented into jobs and trades into a popular struggle
between labour and capital. Thus, for Laclau and Rancière, Blanqui’s
declaration is performative. It is a ‘profession of faith’ that forges what Laclau
would call an equivalential link among the ‘thirty million Frenchmen who live
off their labor and who are deprived of political rights’ (Rancière 1999, p. 37).
This ‘social productivity’ of naming accounts for the agency of
representation at the most fundamental level. First, as I have already noted,
the name is pure agency. It has no referent in ‘an ultimate positive feature
shared by all the links in the chain’ (Laclau 2005, p. 96). Second, the name
effects a transformation of that which it names. Up to the moment of naming,
the representative serves only as an intermediary, which produces ‘a vague
feeling of solidarity’ but not more. The question is: how to ‘crystallize’
demands in a ‘certain discursive identity which no longer represents
democratic demands as equivalent’, mediating among them as ‘ancillary’ to
them, but constitutes ‘the equivalential link as such’ (2005, p. 93; italics in
original). Naming precipitates the move from ‘vague’ solidarity to popular
identity by what Laclau (2005, p. 93, 99) provocatively calls an ‘operation of
inversion’: the name ‘does not simply express a unity of demands constituted
outside and before itself, but is the decisive moment in establishing that unity’.
Naming has, then, a ‘double function’. It first constitutes a ‘heterogeneity’ as a
‘unity’, and then represents it (Laclau 2005, pp. 162
163).
This is where the impurity of representation emerges full blown. Not only
does responsiveness go both ways but Laclau puts representing prior to the
‘represented’. It seems that he proposes make what Hanna Pitkin would call
‘inverse’ representation
the definitive characteristic of fascism
the heart of
democratic practice. Does this not prove Pitkin’s point? Could it possibly be
more clear that breaking the condition of unidirectionality courts fascism?
Only for someone who lacked the ‘theoretical tools’ to distinguish between a
‘metaphorical totalization’ of popular identity and the metonymic constitution
of a hegemonic alliance (Laclau 2001, p. 239).
Laclau’s response to Pitkin turns on this rhetorical distinction between
metaphor and metonymy. Whereas metaphor posits a mythic unity among
elements that are necessarily related, analogous to one another and, so, perfectly
substitutable for one another, metonymy preserves the heterogeneity of the
elements of a unity. These elements come together not by subsuming differences
under a central organizing term but by the displacement of properties from one
to the next. Laclau uses this distinction to thematize the work of the imagination
in politics and to open it up to critical analysis. He also emphasizes its material
218 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

consequences, persistently using the term to differentiate among strategies of

democratic struggle.2 Whereas metaphoric unity is an alignment of wills
incarnated by a leader, hegemony, the metonymic alliance, is a ‘multifarious
democratic identity’ that preserves the ‘specificity and particular objectives’ of
the various struggles of which it is composed (2001, p. 248, 343).3 It comes into
being by a displacement, such as when ‘a trade union or a peasant organization
. . . take[s] up political tasks that are not related by necessary links’ to its position
in the relations of production (2001, p. 237). In practice, the two are
intertwined. A ‘hegemonic operation’ will always try to represent itself as
incarnating a necessary alliance, while a mythical unity will always be
‘contaminated by metonymic contingency’ (2001, p. 244).
This undecidability means that any attempt at metaphorical totalization is
bound to fail. All claims to represent a ‘people’ are structurally unstable and
open to challenge. Even under an authoritarian regime, perfect ‘alignment’
between a people and a leader would be difficult to sustain; in a competitive
political system with a vibrant civil society, it would be nearly impossible. It
seems that Pitkin’s impulse to protect representative democracy against fascism
by imposing unidirectionality on responsiveness is fueled by a false fear.

Conclusion
Laclau demonstrates that naming goes two ways. Yet, this movement is not the
‘two-way correspondence’ that Pitkin (1967, p. 106) feared would effect an
‘alignment of wills’ between the represented and representative. First of all, a
name must be taken up if it is to have any purchase politically. A group has to
form in response to a name and to formulate demands in its terms. Once this
occurs, the name becomes what Laclau (2005, p. 105, emphasis added; 120)
calls ‘the ground of the thing’, meaning that the name becomes the ‘‘‘destiny’’
from which [the movement] cannot escape’. Laclau (2005, p. 81) writes: ‘the
‘‘people’’, in that case [populism], is something less than the totality of the
members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless
aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality’.
This double movement between partiality and the aspiration to incarnate
the whole opens up the possibility of a radically political notion of
accountability, one that would not be assessed by the correspondence between
a representative and something outside and prior to the act of representation.
It would derive instead from the ‘essentially representative’ structure of
popular identity (Laclau 2005, p. 163). The hegemon that names what it
claims to represent can be held accountable to what it has called itself.
Marchart (2005, p. 17) has put this with exceptional clarity: a name is ‘both
provisional and politically binding’.
 T H E V I TA L I T Y O F D E M O C R A C Y 219

This is not accountability in a juridical sense; it does not become a

problem because of what a particular leader does in violation of what she
promised to do or should have done to secure the public interest. The test of
accountability becomes internal to the logic of popular identities which, Laclau
(2005, pp. 108
109) explains, are ‘always loci of the tension between . . .
opposite movements’. The first of these movements, ‘identification’, is
provoked by recognition (Laclau 2005, p. 162). The represented must
recognize something of itself in the representative for a linkage to occur. But
there would be no representation, properly speaking, if good representation
were judged exclusively by the accuracy of its recreation of the represented.
As Laclau (2005, p. 158) observes, ‘the function of the representative is not
simply to transmit the will of those he represents, but to give credibility to
that will in a milieu different from the one in which it was originally
constituted’. This relocation to a different milieu brings up the second
movement, estrangement.
Estrangement has three aspects. The first, which precedes identification
with the revolutionary cause, involves an estrangement from the existing
regime by virtue of the conviction that one’s demands can be satisfied by
nothing short of revolutionary transformation. The commitment to transfor-
mation brings about a second estrangement, this from one’s own particular
demand which is reframed by petitioning for its satisfaction in the name of the
revolutionary cause. Finally, there is the estrangement of the representative
from any demand in particular, which is necessary if the popular identity is to
name radically heterogeneous demands, but risky. The more extended the
chain of equivalence, the more open it is to re-articulation under a new name.
This tension is unavoidable because popular movements are inherently
expansive. Once the popular identity ‘has become the signifier’ of opposition
to the existing regime, it ‘will have an irresistible attraction over any demand
which is lived as unfulfilled’ (Laclau 2005, p. 108). The more far-reaching an
alliance, the more open it is to fragmentation and challenge.
The name affords a thoroughly political check on the activities of a
representative. the hegemon acts on the represented but they act back in their
turn. Laclau (2005, p. 108) puts it this way: If the ‘names of the ‘‘people’’
constitute their own object . . . the reverse movement also operates: they can
never fully control which demands they embody and represent’. This dynamic
opens up a mode of accountability that works not by making reference to a
pre-political ‘bedrock’, (you did not do what I/we wanted) but by a
disidentification or signing off: ‘Not in our name!’ The concept here is difficult
to express because, in English, the expression ‘to sign off’ means virtually the
same thing as to ‘sign on’. Both signify authorization. To sign off is to grant
approval; to sign on is to join. The protest ‘Not in our name!’ is a signing off
from. It is a withdrawal from an enterprise that purports to be collective.
I propose this as another important aspect of the act of secession that
Marchart picks up from Rancière to exemplify Laclau’s conception of the
220 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

performativity of naming. Marchart follows Rancière in emphasizing how the

plebeians, who as nameless beings in the patrician order of Rome must
consequently be speechless, secede from that order. They make themselves
count by giving themselves names, performatively seizing the capacity to
speak. I pick up on a different kind of secession, one appropriate to a
universalist political order that presumes a consensus for its policies. My
secessionists demand not to be counted but to be counted out. They act
together to discredit one who presumes to act in their name. This is a
profession in reverse: a demonstrated lack of faith put forward as a manifesto
or call to others to join in the act of signing off from a counterfeit leader.
This is the possibility that Pitkin was not equipped to see. The two-way
movement of representation opens up the possibility of a dis-alignment between
the represented and representative. Such movements are manifest, as Bernard
Manin (1997, p. 174; emphasis added) has put it, ‘when a crowd gathers on the
street, when petitions are delivered, or when polls point to a clear trend, [so
that] the people reveal themselves as a political entity capable of speaking apart
from those who govern’. He might also have mentioned ‘minor’ political party
movements, local community assessments of environmental risk and impact,
voter realignments. The concept of dis-alignment suggests that the questions to
pose of a representative democratic system concern, at a minimum, the forms
of action that are protected by civil rights and civil liberties. They also concern
the forms of organizing that are promoted by its electoral, ballot and campaign
finance laws, by the design of its public spaces, by the demographics of its
communities and by the density of its communications networks (to name just a
few of the factors that affect mobilization).
On Populist Reason is masterful for its account of naming as generating the
possibility of accountability from within the movement of representation
between incarnation and estrangement. By his elaboration of this movement,
Ernesto Laclau extends Hanna Pitkin’s thesis regarding the distinctive reciprocity
of representation. He also breaks through the dead end to which her fear of
symbolic representation led empirical researchers. The difference between
manipulation and leadership does not turn on the ‘direction’ of influence and
responsiveness in a representative system but on the kinds of unity the system
and its leaders try to create. There will be leaders who exploit metaphor,
presenting themselves as the incarnation of a people on a mythical quest. There
will also be those who build context-specific alliances among heterogeneous
causes. Laclau’s work makes it possible to tell the difference between the former
and the latter by analyzing the rhetorical and political dynamics of mobilization.

Notes

1 Pogge’s (2002) provocative proposal for ‘self-constituting constituencies’

implicitly relies on this same principal. Pogge (2002, p. 40) describes
 T H E V I TA L I T Y O F D E M O C R A C Y 221

constituencies coming into being initially as a label on a public election

website, and succeeding to the extent that the label recruits members and
solicits attention. He writes: ‘any successful constituency . . . will take on a
life of its own, beyond its label, through associated news media, through
prominent voters publicly associating themselves with it, through the
programs and personalities of legislators elected and candidates running in
it, and so on’.
2 Laclau (2001, p. 250) goes so far as to cast the ‘history of democracy’ as
being divided by the ‘fundamental cleavage’ between the ‘Jacobin conception
of democracy’ that aims to incarnate the people as a mythic, metaphoric unity
and the ‘multiculturalism or . . . new pluralism associated with contemporary
social movements’ that aims for an alliance of particular struggles.
3 Pogge’s (2002, pp. 40
41) discussion of the various ‘dimensions’ on which
‘self-constituting constituencies’ might organize
identity vs. self-defining;
ideological vs. topical; narrow vs. broad
elaborates (albeit in a different
language) further aspects of the distinction between metaphorical and
metonymic unities.

Notes on contributor

Lisa Disch is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the

University of Michigan. The author of The Tyranny of the Two-Party System
(Columbia, 2002) Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Cornell, 1994),
she specializes in contemporary political theory.

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