Look who’s watching. Audiences’ assistance in performances of political representation.

Recent work on political representation has effectively transformed our understanding of political representation. The conception of representation as a relationship between actors formulating representative claims and audiences engaging with such claims highlights the constitutive and dialectical qualities of political representation. However, discussions on representation need to focus more on the ways in which audiences assist in processes of political representation. In support of this argument, the paper analyses a concrete political performance that was delivered before two different audiences: (1) the live audience of a press conference organized by the Flemish liberal party following its electoral defeat in May 2019 and (2) the online audience that manifested itself after the video recording of the original performance was uploaded on the party’s Facebook platform. The comparison of both events reveals how the assistance of the audience shapes the actual performance and determines its felicitous outcome (cf. Austin 1962). Facebook’s architecture allows the audience to formulate comments and express (dis)like. This capacity for critically reading back (cf. Saward 2020) the representative claims articulated in the live performance turns the online audience into co-producers, whose contributions radically alter the original meaning of the performance and degrade it to a self-congratulatory performance by ‘out-of-touch’ political elites. Focusing on the audience helps us to: link spectatorship (e.g., Green 2010; Fitzgerald 2015) with political representation, grasp the ways in which practices of watching, listening and commenting may shape and/or improve democratic politics (Rosanvallon 2011; Coleman 2005), take seriously the role of audiences in systemic representation, and underline the co-constituted character of political representation.