The Vicissitudes of Representation
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The Vicissitudes of Representation Matteo Mandarini 1 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
This article turns to the issue of political representation that I argue is central to all forms of political thought and practice of the modern period. Taking political representation as its object, I argue that its crisis—that comes to a head in the travails of the Weimar Republic—provided the opportunity for forms of neoliberal representation to displace political representation with purportedly “neutral”, non-partisan and thus “fair” representational tools. In contrast, I seek to develop the idea of “self-representation” with a discussion of paths not chosen at Weimar and via Italian operaismo’s reflections on “class composition”, which combines collective self-representation with political organization. Representing each member of a collective to another as it develops epistemic and cartographic tools, it constructs group solidarity, organization and the capacity to act as it reclaims the collectivity alienated in modern political forms of representation and excluded from neoliberal ones. Keywords Political representation . Neoliberalism . Weimar . Class composition . Workerism/ operaismo
“In fact, one can achieve totality only by constructing it, by making it, by composing it, and it should be done in all frankness.” (Brecht 1970, p. 103) “There is the people prior to the class. And there is the people that encounters the class,
* Matteo Mandarini [email protected]
1
School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Jus Cogens
and along this path gains consciousness and power […] and becomes subjectivity organised”. (Tronti 2016, p. 62)
1 Precarious Order The context for this article is the current instability of (neo)liberal democracy alongside the totalising forms of neoliberal representation (NR) that have displaced the contestable ones of modern political representation (MPR). MPR alienated the collective as it posited an indeterminate people as condition of legitimacy of political order during the period of the formation of nation states in the modern period: it served to unify unrelated individuals into a single body, underpinning institutions with a popular foundation; to enable a stand-in-for to act-for the people, so that even in their physical absence the people could be said to be represented in the political institutions; and to ward off private conflict, reinstating it as a public prerogative of the state, while rendering it as competition between individuals within civil society. MPR thus underpinned political order and economic growth—Hobbes with Smith. However, this model of representation ceased to have much purchase as capitalist growth expanded and the people—from indeterminate—became increasingly differentiated into substantive material groupings of those who live by wages, profits, or rent—to take up Marx’s “trinity formula” (Marx 1981, p. 953–70). The impervious wall built between a conjured up indeterminate popular unity underpinning the political and the realm
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