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: LaclauPitkinpolitical representationpopulism Notes 1. Pogge's (Citation2002) provocative proposal for ‘self-constituting constituencies’ implicitly relies on this same principal. Pogge (Citation2002, p. 40) describes 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 (Citation2001, 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 (Citation2002, 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.