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