Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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138<br />
DEMOCRACY TODAY<br />
creditors; [24] or, it can arise out of the sharing of some form of basic<br />
identity, for example, those ascriptive identity groups into which we<br />
are born, such as country or family, where identity acts as an external<br />
indicator of the likelihood of the representative acting as the group<br />
members would in the face of similar circumstances – representation<br />
by someone who is ‘one of us’. In these forms of representation the<br />
important component is identification not authorisation, incorporation<br />
or accountability, though these may also be present. The group<br />
members see themselves as having a presence in the actions of the<br />
representative by dint of what they have in common with the group.<br />
These can be common interests, similar descriptive characteristics or<br />
social perspectives, values and insights. [25]<br />
But, is this the whole story? Some of the more subtle contemporary<br />
political theorists think not. This is especially true of those that<br />
have developed an ‘aesthetic’ theory of political representation, which<br />
overcomes the shortcomings of the other three accounts of representation<br />
because it <strong>do</strong>es not depend on one or both of two assumptions<br />
that they make: i) that the interests of group members cohere in such a<br />
way as to make them a plausible principal; and ii) that there exist a set<br />
of shared interests/identities prior to or as preconditions for political<br />
representation. Instead, these theorists borrow from the world of art<br />
and literature ‘the idea that any form of representation is never simply<br />
the copy of some pre-existing external reality’. [26] Rather representation<br />
always creates something new: Tolstoy’s account of the Napoleonic War<br />
<strong>do</strong>es not simply replicate the historical events, it creates a new version<br />
of it in the act of representing it. In other words, there is always a ‘gap’<br />
between an object and the representation of that object and this holds<br />
in politics too: as Ankersmit puts it, ‘political reality is not first given<br />
to us and subsequently represented; political reality comes into being<br />
after and due to representation’. [27] Political representatives can never<br />
therefore merely speak for the interests of the people as they existed<br />
24<br />
Hamilton and Viegi, ‘Debt, <strong>Democracy</strong> and Representation in South Africa’,<br />
Representation, 45.2, pp. 193-212.<br />
25<br />
Vieira and Runciman, Representation, pp. 111, 103.<br />
26<br />
Ibid., pp. 138-9.<br />
27<br />
Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford UP<br />
1997), p. 47.