Representation as Critique

Political representation is permanently and necessarily in crisis. A representing institutional framework is not capable of being an "authentic" voice to the people who are supposed to be represented. The reason for this is its paradoxical structure: Representation includes two sides - one represented and one representing - which need to be connected and separated at once. This means, both sides need to be equally similar and different. This claim, since paradoxical, cannot be fully realized. Thus, when there is representation, there is also someone who is not represented; someone who is not represented the way he or she would have expected to; someone who finds him or herself divided between different competing representing instances. Thus, representation is always and necessarily confronted with struggles for/against/between representation(s). In my perspective, this is not an argument against representation at all. Rather, I would like to shift perspectives and to interpret these struggles as the genuine core of representation: I want to argue for a politics of representation as a struggle with and about political representation. They create multiple (also illegitimate) forms of representation as a critique of institutionalized representation. This critique can be described in two directions: (1st) towards the representing form or procedures (e.g. the state, party politics, forms of organizations) and (2nd) towards the meaning and structure of the represented collective (e.g. questions about membership, about the meaning of the nation or about the understanding of identity). In my paper, I would like to show that those conflictual politics of representation necessarily contain both dimensions, although they may focus more on the one or on the other. Movements which can be described as politics of representation are critiques of specific political forms as well as critiques of political identities. Nevertheless - and this is equally important - they also affirm the fundamental structure of representation, i.e. the paradoxical connection and separation of subject and form of politics. Thus, they are also distinguished from (a) "authenticity-based" identity politics, according to which there is no legitimation to speaking for others without sharing the same identity, and (b) from a sort of populism which presupposes the immediate and affective unity of the collective. This will be shown (1st) theoretically, focusing on a new interpretation of the police/politics-differentiation by Jacques Rancière (and against it). (2nd) The idea will be exemplified by current discussions on feminist identity politics on the one side, and the Catalan Referendum of October 1st 2017 on the other side. (Panel 4)