In some situations, people who intend to carry a political action—that is, to affect collective outcomes, actively refuse to be seen as speaking for anyone but themselves. Not only do they not make any representative claim; they refute any possible characterization as representatives by making what might be called unrepresentative claims. While they may seem to constitute a minor and borderline case in politics, I contend that these claims shed an important light on the concept of representation by showing that speaking for a group may impede one’s ability to speak as an authentic member of the said group and thus to embody it. Indeed, these claims are rarely even considered in studies of political representation because they are at odds with both the history of representative governments and the most recent developments of the political theory of representation.
From a historical point of view, since the English, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, representative governments have progressively become hegemonic in the Global North and then in many countries of the Global South, to the point of constituting the only publicly defensible normative horizon after the fall of the Soviet Union (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1992). While representative governments leave room for the expression of public judgements and deliberation, political power is usually monopolized by elected representatives (Manin Reference Manin1997). The development of mass political parties in the twentieth century helped to reconcile the (democratic) direct participation of citizens with the (oligarchic) professionalization of representation, weakening the republican and democratic critique of representation (Urbinati Reference Urbinati, Alonso, Keane and Merkel2011). The framework of representative government has become so effective and pervasive that most organizations wanting to gain political momentum use the procedures and vocabulary of representation, from trade unions to NGOs, from the local to the transnational scale (Louis and Ruwet Reference Louis and Ruwet2017; Steffek and Hahn Reference Steffek and Hahn2010). Since the middle of the twentieth century, even authoritarian regimes have adopted at least the trappings of representative government, such as setting up mechanisms of systemic responsiveness (Duan Reference Duan2019; Truex Reference Truex2016). In a few centuries, the institutions of representative government, first and foremost the electoral mandate, went from having a minor role in some parts of Western Europe (Hayat, Péneau, and Sintomer Reference Hayat, Péneau and Sintomer2020) to being the common political language of humankind. In these conditions, refusing to represent may seem to go against one of the best established long-term political trends.
When one considers contemporary political theory, this hegemony of political representation may seem even greater, with the current widening of the number of political phenomena characterized as representation (Brito Vieira Reference Brito Vieira2017; Castiglione and Pollak Reference Castiglione and Pollak2019; Disch, Sande, and Urbinati Reference Disch, van de Sande and Urbinati2019; Urbinati and Warren Reference Urbinati and Warren2008). Indeed, much of the discussion on political representation has been focused lately on the “constructivist turn” initiated, at least in Anglo-American political theory, by Michael Saward’s famous conceptualization of “representative claims” (Saward Reference Saward2006; Reference Saward2010)—and by other endeavors going in the same direction (Rehfeld Reference Rehfeld2006). Saward makes an argument that is both simple and compelling: representation is fundamentally an activity of claim-making in which a maker presents an audience with a relation between a subject and an object—the latter being constructed by selecting elements from an existing referent (Saward Reference Saward2006, 302).
This grammar of representative claims unifies two meanings of representation that were historically distinct (Sintomer Reference Sintomer2013): on the one hand, mandate representation, in which the representative is authorized by the represented, often to defend their interest—an idea best captured by the German word Vertretung and, on the other hand, representation as embodiment, identified by the conceptual historian Hasso Hofmann as repraesentatio identitatis (Hofmann Reference Hofmann1973), a medieval term used to designate situations in which a representative (often an assembly) could stand for an entity (a universitas, or corporation) without any mandate, simply by speaking as pars pro toto, a part for the whole—better corresponding to the initial meaning of the German word Repräsentation (Hayat, Péneau, and Sintomer Reference Hayat, Péneau and Sintomer2018). While mandate representation in this sense has been hegemonic since the triumph of representative government, to the point of making some authors consider all forms of representation not based on authorization to be nonpolitical (Schweber Reference Schweber2016), the constructivist turn in the theory of political representation has expanded the world of representation to include claims that may sometimes be related to embodiment more than to mandate, such as those made by unauthorized or informal representatives (Montanaro Reference Montanaro2012; Salkin Reference Salkin2018; Saward Reference Saward2008). In Saward’s perspective, contrary to the classic assumptions of Hanna Pitkin’s masterwork (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1972), political representation does not require electoral authorization or any substantive or descriptive relation between a representative and its constituents. The performative activity of claim-making is in itself the medium of representation. For Saward, and for many of his commentators, it follows that representation can be found everywhere in the social world, not solely in the political field strictly understood.Footnote 1
Unrepresentative claims challenge the hegemony of representation as the major or even unique source of political power and the generality of the grammar of representative claims. My hypothesis is that these claims multiply and thrive in historical periods marked by the crisis of representative government and the expansion of popular protest. In these configurations, some social movements develop a rhetoric that rejects all forms of political representation and defends the power of the people. The problem is that in order to exist as social movements, they must speak as the people and therefore make claims to represent them. The popular upheavals of the 2010s were cases in point: protesters claimed that elected representatives did not represent the people—“¡Que no nos represantan!” shouted the Spanish crowds during the 2011 15M movement—and offered a “counter-representation” (Brito Vieira Reference Brito Vieira2015), such as the famous motto “We are the 99 percent.” Many works have discussed these movements’ combination of a radical critique of (constituted) mandate representation and strong claims to collectively embody the (constituent) people (Brito Vieira Reference Brito Vieira2015; Caraus Reference Caraus2017; de Barros Reference de Barros2020; Gerbaudo Reference Gerbaudo2017; Prentoulis and Thomassen Reference Prentoulis and Thomassen2013; Reference Prentoulis, Thomassen, Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis2014; Sande Reference Sande2020; Tormey Reference Tormey2015; Tufekci Reference Tufekci2017; Wessel Reference Wessel2013). In these movements, “self-authorized representatives” constitute the people in whose name they speak through representative claims; for example, in the motto “We are the 99 percent,” “We” stands for the “the imagined possibility of a democratic people empowered to name and confront a wrong that Occupy is already enacting” (Brito Vieira Reference Brito Vieira2015, 506). In this sense, there is a strong resemblance between these popular movements and the (paradoxical) logics of constituent moments, during which “the self-constitution of political community” is enabled by the “performative circularity” of a representative claim creating the very political community that authorizes the representative to speak in the name of that community (Lindahl Reference Lindahl2007).
However, there is an important difference, which has been overlooked and is integral to the distinctiveness of these popular movements: unlike in constituent moments, the rejection of representation also affects the potential leaders of these movements, who are in constant danger of being rejected by the protesters if they claim to speak for them.Footnote 2 These movements bring together ordinary citizens, the governed, the represented—by the nature of their construction, they cannot include representatives. And yet, like any collective entity, these movements need spokespersons to exist, especially in the media. My contention is that this contradiction forces aspiring leaders to show that they too are mere citizens by staging their refusal to represent anyone but themselves. Only by making unrepresentative claims can these “self-denying” (de Barros Reference de Barros2020) leaders paradoxically be recognized as spokespersons both by participants in these movements and by outside audiences.
This strategy was particularly visible in the protest that opened the last wave of the 2010s popular uprisings: the French Yellow Vest movement, the Gilets Jaunes. This movement was initiated at a time when the French political system was facing a major crisis, with the election of Emmanuel Macron against established political parties and traditional divisions, including the left–right dichotomy (Cautrès and Muxel Reference Cautrès and Muxel2019; Dolez, Frétel, and Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2019; Perrineau Reference Perrineau2017). This election both revealed and accelerated the profound defiance shared by French citizens against professional political representatives, who were trusted by only a small percentage of the population.Footnote 3 Yet a year after Macron’s election, he faced a large, multifaceted popular protest, the Yellow Vest movement, unified by a call for social and fiscal justice and a critique of the oligarchic tendencies of the French representative government (Confavreux Reference Confavreux2019; Jeanpierre Reference Jeanpierre2019). This movement rapidly gathered strong momentum across the country, with thousands of occupied roundabouts and weekly demonstrations. The Yellow Vests mounted a radical critique of all institutions (political parties, but also trade unions and the press). But more importantly, they also refused to designate representatives of the movement itself: as the political scientist Christian Le Bart phrases it, “the refusal of verticality challenged all forms of leadership, representation or even simply delegation to a spokesperson” (Le Bart Reference Le Bart2020, 99). The anthropologist Serena Boncompagni observed a similar “principle of horizontality” on the roundabouts she studied: “Yellow Vests were busy questioning—almost systematically—the propensity of some to organize and represent others,” making it “extremely dangerous for all who risked taking on responsibilities, particularly that of spokespersonship” (Boncompagni Reference Boncompagni2021). Indeed, during this movement, not only local leaders but also prominent Yellow Vest figures articulated a radical critique of representation and a claim that the Yellow Vests were the people with multiple unrepresentative claims in which they claimed to speak only for themselves.
In this paper, I will try to make sense of these unrepresentative claims, by showing how Yellow Vest leaders make these claims to assert freedom from any mandate, and thence authentic belonging to the people—constructed as those who represent no one but themselves. But these claims are also the occasion for their makers to give public portrayals of themselves, putting forward selected aspects of their identity. This example then informs us more generally about the reason unrepresentative claims may empower their maker: they give credit to their claims to speak as something (a citizen, the member of a social group, a singular individual) by staging their refusal to speak for anyone, a form of embodiment that is particularly empowering in situations in which authenticity matters more than authorization.
First, this paper will start with a presentation of some unrepresentative claims made by Yellow Vest leaders. I will then discuss how these unrepresentative claims fit into the broader category of negative claims or claims of misrepresentation, allowing their makers to appear as unattached members of the people speaking only for themselves. In a third section, I will show that these negative unrepresentative claims go with an implicit positive representative claim through which unrepresentative claim-makers offer portrayals of themselves to the audiences of their claim, opening the possibility for them to embody these identities. Finally, I will delineate three ideal-types of unattached identities embodied through unrepresentative claims.
The Unrepresentative Claims of the Yellow Vests
The French Yellow Vest movement started in November 2018 to protest against taxes on gas, but it soon expanded into a more general protest, quite unprecedented in its scope, longevity, diversity, popular support—and in the violence of the repression protestors had to face. Among the movement, the refusal of representation was prominent, both against Yellow Vests attempting to speak for the movement and against institutionalized representatives, be they professional politicians, journalists or trade-union leaders (Dardot and Laval Reference Dardot and Laval2018; Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2019). This attitude toward representation was put to the test several times. As it happened, there was an election to the European Parliament in May 2020, and during the campaign not only did party candidates court the Yellow Vests but several figures of the Yellow Vests themselves stood in the election. There even were two lists that claimed to represent the movement: Alliance Jaune, led by the singer Francis Lalanne, and Évolution Citoyenne. They both utterly failed to take advantage of the popularity of the movement, obtaining respectively 0.54% and 0.01% of the votes. Other attempts were met with strong resistance from Yellow Vests, such as the short-lived candidacy of Ingrid Levavasseur, a nursing assistant and one of the movement’s early prominent figures. After Levavasseur created a party, the Ralliement d’Initiative Citoyenne—a direct reference to the “Référendum d’initiative citoyenne,” meaning citizens’ initiative, which from December 2018 became the main demand of the movement—and declared her intention to run for European deputy, she became the target of a large and violent campaign from Yellow Vests, leading her to give up and withdraw from the movement. The most radical speech against representation was given by a group of Yellow Vests from a small town in the east of France, Commercy. On November 30, 2018, they launched a call to popular assemblies on YouTube, through a formal declaration read in turn by several Yellow Vests, directed against the government that had recently expressed the wish to discuss with representatives of the movementFootnote 4 and, more importantly, against the possible Yellow Vest leaders who would accept. They stated that
We do not want “representatives” who would end up talking for us! (…) If we appoint “representatives” and “spokespersons”, it will eventually make us passive. Worse: we will quickly reproduce the system and act from top down like the scoundrels who rule us. These so-called “representatives of the people” who are filling their pockets, who make laws that rot our lives and serve the interests of the ultra-rich! Let’s not get ensnared in representation and political maneuvering. This is not the time to hand over our voice to a handful of people, even if they seem honest. They must listen to all of us or to no one! (…) We will not let ourselves be ruled. We will not let ourselves be divided and bought off. No to self-proclaimed representatives and spokespersons! Let’s take back the power over our lives! Long live the yellow vests in their diversity! LONG LIVE THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE!Footnote 5
This kind of declaration was not commonplace at this stage of the movement, but it resonated with a much more widespread critique of representation among Yellow Vests.
Yet, despite all this refusal of representation, leaders emerged. But those who did and managed to stay seemed to be the ones who were the more likely to make unrepresentative claims. One particular Yellow Vest leader, the commercial executive Benjamin Cauchy, who decided to run for European deputy on a right-wing souverainiste list, thus declared “Je ne représente que moi-même” (“I do not represent anyone but myself”). Far from being an isolated case, the phrase “I do not represent” or other similar ones were repeatedly pronounced by many Yellow Vest leaders in different situations. Another early Yellow Vest leader, the hypnotherapist Jacline Mouraud, created her own political party in April 2019, but as a guest on a radio show, she claimed: “I represent only myself.”Footnote 6 A group of Yellow Vests started a meeting in December 2018 saying, “We are apolitical. We do not represent the Gilets Jaunes.”Footnote 7 In February, the truck-driver Eric Drouet, one of the two individuals who started the movement, claimed to have “no organizing or leading role in this movement” but to be a mere “mediator” (relais).Footnote 8 The other initiator, Priscillia Ludosky, recognized that “some people have the need for representation” but insisted that “among the ‘figures’, as they say, there is not this need (…). I do not have the responsibility to speak in the name of someone in particular.”Footnote 9 In the early days of the movement, a list of eight spokespersons emerged, selected mostly by cooptation. They called themselves “official communicators” (communicants officiels), a term that had never been used in a French social movement until then, and insisted they were “not leaders or decision-makers, but messengers.”Footnote 10 After two of them, Drouet and Ludosky, met the Minister of Ecology, they refused any further negotiation, insisting that all future encounters with officials should be broadcasted live, and the group was dissolved.Footnote 11 As Eric Drouet then explained, “there can be no representative for the movement, it is the whole of the Gilets Jaunes that must speak.”Footnote 12 Other occurrences may be found in the discourse of all prominent figures of the movement. They did not even try to use the legitimization provided by charisma, as they often pretended to be figures just by chance, easily replaceable by any other activist. These strange unrepresentative claims were much better accepted by Yellow Vests than the more usual representative claims made by Levavasseur and others. The rhetoric of unrepresentative claims was paradoxically common among Yellow Vest leaders who managed to remain in charge—as if it was a necessity to make an unrepresentative claim to remain a representative of the Yellow Vests.Footnote 13
Unrepresentative Claims as Negative Claims
In order to make sense of these unrepresentative claims, we can reformulate them using Saward’s grammar of representative claims. When someone claims to speak only for herself, she makes a negative representative claim, stating that she, as a subject, does not stand for anyone else. This negative claim functions as a “claim of misrepresentation” (Guasti and Rezende de Almeida Reference Guasti and de Almeida2019) in which a maker puts forward a subject which is said not to stand for an object that is related to a referent and is offered to an audience, with two differences. First, claims of misrepresentation generally imply that there is mis-representation where there should be representation, and the point of the claim—even if it is purely rhetoric—is to repair this flawed relation of representation or to replace it with a better one. On the contrary, when a Yellow Vest leader claims to speak only for herself, she is not “challenging the legitimacy and authority” (Guasti and Rezende de Almeida Reference Guasti and de Almeida2019, 154) of a representative but acting as though speaking for anyone but herself would undermine her position. Second, while claims of misrepresentation are usually “counterclaims” (Saward Reference Saward2010, 36–7) that target specific representative claims, the negative claim implied by the sentence “I speak only for myself” is general: it targets any possible relation of representation—that is, any possible representative claim that could have the maker of the unrepresentative claim as its subject. These unrepresentative claims thus attempt to present their maker as fundamentally unattached.
To understand why someone may want to appear unattached, one has to understand why people might presume that someone is attached and what it means, which in turn assumes taking into account what institutions are. In the constructivist perspective developed by John Searle, “institutional facts” are created through the attribution of “status functions” to persons or objects that acquire “deontic powers” through “declarations” (speech acts) that are collectively accepted (Searle Reference Searle2011). Expanding on Searle’s framework, the pragmatist sociologist Luc Boltanski states that “an institution is a bodiless being to which is delegated the task of stating the whatness of what is” (Boltanski Reference Boltanski2011, 74)—that is, to maintain the integrity of social reality. The problem is that in order to exist, as bodiless beings, institutions have to be embodied by spokespersons authorized to make declarations on their behalf. This ontological need for institutions to be embodied thus leads to a constant suspicion that their spokespersons do not adequately fulfill this task (Latour Reference Latour2003). Our social world is constructed as such as every institution needs spokespersons, and behind every spokesperson there is a human being, with her own passions, interests, and needs, which she can sometimes put before the interests of the institution she represents.
For Boltanski, this “hermeneutic contradiction” caused by the necessary delegation of the institutions’ deontic power to spokespersons is at the core of the possibility of social critique (Blokker Reference Blokker2014). Indeed, to rephrase this in our framework, it allows for claims of misrepresentation to be made in which citizens (makers) refute that instituted spokespersons (subjects) stand for the institution (object) they are claimed to represent but instead represent only themselves. These claims of misrepresentation were ubiquitous in the Yellow Vest movement, and more generally in the 2010s popular upheavals that rejected representatives as defending only their own interests, or the interest of the rich, using a rhetoric that may be linked with Rousseau’s defense of popular sovereignty (Brito Vieira Reference Brito Vieira2015). However, this radical critique of instituted representation does not entirely explain the presence of unrepresentative claims; on the contrary, it is often combined with a claim made by the movement to be self-authorized representatives of the sovereign people. In order to assess for the presence of unrepresentative claims, and not just claims of misrepresentation, we have to take into account the opposite suspicion, overlooked by Boltanski, that is born from the hermeneutic contradiction: that behind every living person that speaks in the social world, there may be an institution acting. In Searle’s account, there are good reasons to dismiss these cases as impossible, as institutions precisely rely on collective recognition. But once you introduce the suspicion that persons speaking for institutions actually speak for themselves, you may consider the reverse possibility, that some institutions act through people who speak for them without claiming that they do. This suspicion is at the core of every conspiracy theory, according to which some persons, especially those entrusted with public positions, have a secret agenda, which is not to defend their own personal interest (the basic critique related to the hermeneutic contradiction) but to actually speak for an (often hidden) institution (Fenster Reference Fenster1999). This suspicion proceeds from the same uneasiness described by Boltanski facing social reality: we do not know what lies behind the speech of other humans and we often have to make inquiries about them to stabilize our conception of social reality—a situation linked by Boltanski with the general destabilization of societies by capitalism since the end of the nineteenth century, which led to the emergence of detective novels, sociology, conspiracy theories, and clinical paranoia (Boltanski Reference Boltanski2014).Footnote 14
In that sense, unrepresentative claims may be made to assert that when someone speaks, there is no institution speaking through her voice, and thus her speech is authentically hers. What she says may be directly attributed to her, not to any “bodiless being” that would speak through her voice. This is why unrepresentative claims were so important in the Yellow Vests movement: the popularity of the movement, its nonpartisan aspect, and its apparent initial disorganization led to a real eagerness to appropriate it from political parties, trade unions, associations, and so on. Members of the movement were faced with a double bind: for the movement to grow, they had to accept any person of good will, but they also had to resist partisan appropriation, especially from their spokespersons, and thus they had to make sure those who spoke as Yellow Vests did not actually represent something else. As a Yellow Vest interviewed during a demonstration explained when asked who was welcome in the movement,
We said no party, no trade union, no official media (…), no association with political connotation, no Left, no Right, OK? You only have a right to come with the French flag or regional flags. (…) There is no reason to have foreign flags, or political flags like NPA [a Trotskyist party] or trade unions, they have no place here—the flags, beware, because as individuals, on the contrary (…). Everyone has the right to come, but with no flag.Footnote 15
Protesters of all kinds were welcome—but only if they accepted to appear and to speak only for themselves, not for organizations.Footnote 16 On the part of the movement’s spokespersons, these negative claims also allowed them to distance themselves from the world of representatives, often seen as a small elite out of touch with reality, defending its own interest and ultimately corrupt—antiestablishment imagery often used by populist leaders and defenders of conspiracy theories (Barr Reference Barr2009) but also present in social movements such as the Yellow Vests. In these situations, making unrepresentative claims is a way to prove one does not belong to the establishment but to the much larger group of people who have no mandate, no institution behind them—that is, mere citizens.
This had an important consequence on the relations between leaders and other Yellow Vests: because they did not claim to represent anyone but themselves, they were not accountable to the rest of the movement. For example, when asked why he intended to participate in the summer camp of La France insoumise, a left-wing populist party, the Yellow Vest leader Jérôme Rodrigues answered,
Today the Yellow Vest movement does not wish to have leaders, representatives or even heads, something I agree with, so I am not at all this person, I am part of the movement like anyone, and present since the beginning. As a result, I have no nominative legitimacy that could prevent me from speaking and debating with anyone I want.Footnote 17
In this Facebook post, Rodrigues explicitly made an unrepresentative claim, which allowed him to claim at the same time that he belonged to the movement and that he was free from any mandate and accountable to no one. In a political world where being a representative means being accountable to the represented, making unrepresentative claims is a way to declare oneself free from any checks or controls. Aspiring leaders had to prove they were authentic Yellow Vests (wearing the vest, participating in roundabout occupations, going to demonstrations, speaking in a very plain language, etc.), but once they were recognized as such by their audiences, they could and should act as mere individuals speaking only for themselves.
Speaking for Oneself, Embodying an Identity
The unrepresentative claims of Yellow Vest leaders were negative claims that allowed their makers to deny all possible representative claims that might have related them to an authorizing body, thus asserting their freedom from any mandate and their belonging to the vast majority of people who speak only for themselves. It is solely because they were only unattached individuals that Yellow Vests could together make a “claim of constituency” (Schweber Reference Schweber2016) in the strongest sense—that is, to present themselves as constituents, in both meanings: the represented of instituted representatives denounced as a small elite that defends its own interest and the bearers of constituent power. Yet unrepresentative claims, as representative claims, are not mere assessments of a predefined reality: there are performances, made in front of audiences, that partly produce the reality they perform—here, the self-representation of a subject that represents no object (Hall Reference Hall and Hall1997; Rai and Reinelt Reference Rai and Reinelt2016; Saward Reference Saward and Vieira2017; Reference Saward2020). Yellow Vest leaders’ unrepresentative claims were made in different situations to convince different audiences (Yellow Vests, the media, political authorities, police officers, judges, and so on) that they were actually speaking only for themselves. The question of whether to consider claims made by protesters who affirm that they speak only for themselves as representative claims is debated (de Barros Reference de Barros2020; Thomassen Reference Thomassen2021). But there is a consensus about the fact that such claims imply representation in the sense that as performative claims, they necessarily participate in the construction, in the mind of audiences, of representations of the object of their claim—here, the very self of the claim-maker. As Mónica Brito Vieira puts it, despite “Occupy’s self-depiction as a post-representational movement,” protesters had to “remain inscribed in a representative paradigm”—showing the “inescapability of representation” (Brito Vieira Reference Brito Vieira2015, 504–6). If we use the distinction between “acting-for-others” and “portraying-something-as-something” (Fossen Reference Fossen2019, 824), unrepresentative claims may well refute any “acting for others,” they still necessarily imply a portrayal of the self.
In this sense, an unrepresentative claim is not solely negative; it always goes together with an implicit, positive representative claim: that I (the maker and subject) speak only for myself (the referent and object)—and thus it participates in constructing this self by performing it. As Linda Alcoff explained in her seminal article about speaking for others, “in speaking for myself, I am also representing myself in a certain way, as occupying a specific subject-position, having certain characteristics and not others, and so on. In speaking for myself, I (momentarily) create my self—just as much as when I speak for others I create their selves—in the sense that I create a public, discursive self” (Alcoff Reference Alcoff1991, 10). Two meanings of representation are at play here: even when I deny that I am speaking for someone else, I speak as someone, thus making a portrayal (my self, the object) of the referent of my claim—that is, myself, the person that makes the claim.Footnote 18 We see here the importance of the distinction between object and referent:Footnote 19 as Thomas Fossen has noted following Nelson Goodman, “when x represents y as z, y signifies the referent, and z signifies the kind of representation it is” (Fossen Reference Fossen2019, 828)—that is, the object of the representative claim. This distinction is particularly crucial when we are dealing with unrepresentative claims, where the maker, the subject, and the object all have the same referent: the speaking person that makes the claim to speak only for herself. When I make an unrepresentative claim, I picture myself (the referent, the person that speaks) as my self (the object, the portrayal my claim makes): neither the referent nor the object is absent. We can now see why unrepresentative claims do not fit well in the standard model based on Pitkin’s core meaning of representation as “making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact” (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1972, 8–9). Constructivist authors have focused their critique on Pitkin’s idea that this absent entity should preexist representation—what Iris Marion Young, following Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, called the “metaphysics of presence” (Young Reference Young2000, 126). According to constructivists, on the contrary, representative claims are performances that construct both the represented and the representative (Disch Reference Disch2012; Reference Disch, van de Sande and Urbinati2021; Disch, Sande, and Urbinati Reference Disch, van de Sande and Urbinati2019; Fossen Reference Fossen2019; Rezende de Almeida Reference Rezende de Almeida2018). However, unrepresentative claims present a specific challenge to this definition by showing that it is possible to have a representation in the sense of portrayal without any absent entity, whether it is considered preexisting or not. When I claim to speak only for myself, to paraphrase Pitkin and underline the inadequacy of her definition for assessing for unrepresentative claims, I make present in some sense the self which is present literally.
This meaning of representation, in which there is no absent entity, is not entirely new. Quite the contrary: as historians of premodern representation have repeatedly stated, when it entered the political vocabulary toward the end of the Middle Ages, the word representation could mean making present something absent but also just performing presence (Chartier Reference Chartier2013; Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg, Ryle and Soper2001; Marin Reference Marin2005; Sintomer Reference Sintomer2013). In French, to be “en représentation” may mean to be on stage, thus making an absent character present, but also to adopt a behavior that would underline (often favorably) certain characteristics of oneself—someone can thus have “une belle représentation”—that is, a fine appearance. In that sense, representing only oneself is indeed representation in the sense of underlining certain characteristics of the self—in other words, certain aspects of one’s identity. This is much aligned with Erving Goffman’s notion of the presentation of self (Goffman Reference Goffman1956): social interactions may be conceived as theatrical performances in which participants try to influence the mental representations (Vorstellungen) others have of them by making representations of themselves (Darstellungen). So when someone claims to represent no one but herself, she not only denies the existence of a mandate relation between her and potential constituents; she also means that she speaks as someone defined by a given identity, the one she is performing in front of an audience.
Yet there is a gap between the everyday presentations of the self and unrepresentative claims made publicly during a social movement: while both represent the self without reference to an absent object, the former are often implicit, repetitive, and mundane. On the contrary, unrepresentative claims are “set-piece performances: specific, designed and contrived acts or events targeted at particular audiences or constituencies, (…) visible, public, and distinctive” (Saward Reference Saward and Vieira2017, 78). Unrepresentative claims do not prevent their makers from making portrayals of themselves, quite the contrary: not only are they able to select which identity is put forward and thus constitutes the object of the claim because they go together with a negative claim; they also may help construct an image of authenticity and genuineness. Unrepresentative claims reinforce (selected) identities, which opens up the possibility for claim makers to stand for the community of those who share this identity, without even having to claim it. In this sense, they are at the same time negative claims that deny any mandate relation with any object apart from themselves, positive representative claims that portray them by underlining part of their identity and “claims of constituency” (Schweber Reference Schweber2016) that give visibility to groups defined by the said identity—these three claims leading implicitly to a last one: that as simple members of the performed constituency, they may stand for it, using the mechanisms of descriptive representation and the politics of presence (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1999; Phillips Reference Phillips1995; Young Reference Young2000).
We recognize here the logics of embodiment, or repraesentatio identitatis (Hofmann Reference Hofmann1973), in which representatives stand for the group simply because they claim to be part of it. Frank Ankersmit calls this “synecdochical political representation”in which a may be said to represent b simply because “a is part of b, as in a pars pro toto” (Ankersmit Reference Ankersmit, Castiglione and Pollak2019, 236). Representation as embodiment was dominant during the Middle Ages, be it in the Church, in monarchies, in corporations, or in republican city states (Ankersmit Reference Ankersmit, Castiglione and Pollak2019; Barat Reference Barat2017; Faggioli and Melloni Reference Faggioli and Melloni2007; Hayat, Péneau, and Sintomer Reference Hayat, Péneau and Sintomer2018). Political modernity, with the arrival of representative governments, supposedly rendered this form of representation obsolete. But multiple forms of embodiment have persisted over time, often embroiled with elements of mandate representation. In particular, embodiment has become of paramount importance in giving a presence to social groups, despite the legal triumph of individualism, realized in the political sphere by the principle of “one person, one vote.” Parties, trade unions, and associations could embody groups such as the working class without any formal authorization but according to a logic of “social embodiment” (Rosanvallon Reference Rosanvallon2002, 249)—and thus they would participate in the making of the said group (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Thompson1991a).
But whereas embodiment was then carried out by stable, collective, and institutionalized entities, unrepresentative claims involve a very different form of embodiment. Those who claim to speak only for themselves may well offer portrayals of their self, thus constituting the social identities they embody, but they do it as individuals. In this respect, unrepresentative claims are one symptom among others of a wider movement of personalization of politics, characteristic of what Bernard Manin called “audience democracies”—that is, democracies marked by the establishment, through the media, of a direct relation between individualized representatives and their audience (Manin Reference Manin1997). The personalization of politics, resulting from a complex process involving the media, the institutions, professional politicians, party members, and the voters themselves, challenges the hegemony of political parties, not necessarily by weakening them but at least by forcing them to adapt, sometimes to innovate, to give more room to individuals at different levels (Cross, Katz, and Pruysers Reference Cross, Katz and Pruysers2018; Gauja Reference Gauja2020; Martigny Reference Martigny2019; Rahat and Kenig Reference Rahat and Kenig2018). In the French case, Macron pushed personalization to the extreme, by refusing the left–right dichotomy, by creating a movement (not a party) using his initials, by presenting himself (and not the Prime Minister) as the real head of government, and by constantly adopting an informal, noninstitutional attitude.Footnote 20 However, this personalization of politics concerns not only political parties but also citizens, who may participate in social movements or associations but are less and less willing to become members of stable collective entities such as parties (Biezen and Poguntke Reference Biezen and Poguntke2014). The logic of contentious politics in the digital age mixes collective action with “connective action” in which individuals engage in movements as singular entities whose participation is part of personal narratives shown in digital networks (Bennett and Segerberg Reference Bennett and Segerberg2013). Similarly, unrepresentative claim-makers such as Yellow Vest leaders offer portrayals of themselves to different audiences, and in this sense they embody social identities, but they intend to remain unattached individuals while doing so.
Three Objects of Unrepresentative Claims
Unrepresentative claims allow their maker to appear at the same time as unattached and as able to exhibit an identity that may form the basis of a relation of embodiment. Which identity may profitably be put forward by a claim-maker is entirely contextual, especially as she can make use of the “shape-shifting” property of representative claims—that is, to shape “strategically his persona and policy positions for certain constituencies and audiences” (Saward Reference Saward2014, 723). Yet, starting with examples from the Yellow Vest movement, we can establish three ideal-types of objects constructed by unrepresentative claims by distinguishing between three broad categories of identities that may be underlined by a subject making them, without implying a mandate: generality, particularity, and individuality.
Unrepresentative Claims to Embody Generality
First, unrepresentative claims can help the claim-maker assert she has no interest to defend, individual or collective, and is thus entirely impartial, embodying generality. Among Yellow Vest leaders, Priscillia Ludosky was particularly keen on using this strategy. From her initial petition that launched the movement to her launching of the “Citizen Vests” and of the “Real Debate” against Macron’s “Great Debate,” she claimed to embody a position of “citizen-expert,” contrasting her impartiality with the alleged partiality of institutional representatives.Footnote 21 Using unrepresentative claims to establish a position of expertise is not a specificity of the Yellow Vests. Other examples could be found in institutions of international governance, such as multistakeholder processes. A case in point is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the most important international standard-setting body in the world, based in Geneva. To draft the norm ISO 26000 for social responsibility, issued in 2010, ISO then experimented with an unprecedentedly open process (Hahn and Weidtmann Reference Hahn and Weidtmann2016). Different categories of stakeholders were selected, and for each category representative organizations had to nominate experts. But these experts themselves had no mandate, because once selected, they had to express their own perspective, in a deliberative manner, on the discussed matter: “the experts act in a personal capacity and not as the official representative of (…) the organization by which they have been appointed.”Footnote 22
In the position of expertise claimed by Ludosky or the experts participating in the ISO 26000 committees, the only legitimacy of their word is that they are experts: they have to claim that they themselves have no stake to hold, no interest to defend, in short that they are not representatives of anything but themselves—in their capacity as experts, be they citizens or scientists. A related situation emerges every time a professional is defined by the generality of the interest or principle she defends, which prevents her from making any other representative claim but gives her a “legitimacy of impartiality” (Rosanvallon Reference Rosanvallon2011).Footnote 23 Although the dominant form of generality in politics today is expertise, it is not necessarily the only form of generality politically acceptable. The ability to give oneself to a cause, to the point of being ready to be hurt or even to die for it, is another aspect of this kind of embodiment, especially when the sacrifice involves the body. In the Yellow Vest movement, some persons acquired a position of leadership through their experience of repression, such as Jérôme Rodrigues who became a prominent figure after he lost an eye to a rubber bullet. With his large beard and his eyepatch, he became a symbol of the Yellow Vests, represented in numerous drawings shared in Facebook groups or sometimes drawn on Vests. The mutilation of his body, combined with the fact that he continued to demonstrate and appear in the media, allowed him to embody the selflessness of the movement. So at the most abstract level, unrepresentative claims may reinforce someone’s claim to speak as someone guided purely by the principle she may embody: science (experts), the cause (martyrs), a discourse (Dryzek and Niemeyer’s discursive representatives; Dryzek and Niemeyer Reference Dryzek and Niemeyer2008), or the general interest (Rousseau’s Legislator).
Unrepresentative Claims to Embody a Particular Group
At a lower level of generality, making unrepresentative claims may allow someone to embody a collective entity, be it an institution, a group, or a movement. Yellow Vests performed their common belonging to the movement just by wearing the vest; they did not have standardized stickers or posters: they wrote individual slogans directly on their vests, making each individualized and yet made common by the fact they all wore the same vest.Footnote 24 The vocabulary used by Yellow Vest leaders to be sole messengers for the movement, as was seen above, falls into this category. They claim to be just simple Yellow Vests with no other characteristic, as though they had been selected at random, which enables them to embody the whole movement without any mandate.Footnote 25 Such unrepresentative claims are quite common among activists, not only Yellow Vests. Sometimes not speaking for others is a powerful constraint in a social movement. The second-wave feminist movement in the USA was a case in point: no one wanted to speak for others, as there was the attempt to forge a participative and inclusive environment (Alcoff Reference Alcoff1991; Trebilcot Reference Trebilcot1988). In the same vein, Black feminist movements, maybe because they were born from a reflection on representation and the silencing of the voices of Black women both in feminist and in Black movements, developed distinctive unrepresentative claims, insisting on the importance for people suffering from oppression of speaking for themselves. In the preface of Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins asked herself, “How can I as one person speak for such a large and complex group as African-American women?” and the answer was a clear unrepresentative claim: “I cannot and should not because each of us must learn to speak for herself,” her book being “on voice in a dialogue among people who have been silenced” (Collins Reference Collins2002, ix).
This insistence on not speaking for oppressed groups could also be found, although quite differently, in the Occupy movement. As an article from The Occupied Times explained in 2011, “We do not ‘speak for’ the poor and oppressed around the world, but we are in solidarity with them.”Footnote 26 Most certainly, there is a representative claim at work when constituting the “We” of the Occupy movement, and the “We are the 99%” should be understood as a proper representative claim. But inside the movement, unrepresentative claims were constantly made, supporting a strategy of “synecdochal representation” (Sande Reference Sande2020). As Mathijs van de Sande explains, Occupy activists set up a website on which “thousands of people, mostly from the US, posted pictures of themselves, accompanied by a brief statement that described their individual situation, (…) all undersigned by the slogan “I am the 99%. (…) It seemed that, in a way, every single personal story could embody or encompass all the others—they all represented the entire 99%” (Sande Reference Sande2020, 407). It is precisely because they offered a solely personal testimony that they could embody “the 99%,” using the logic of pars pro toto. Similarly, in the Notre-Dame-des-Landes “Zone to Defend”—a movement against the construction of an airport in the west of France that started in 2009 and soon became a junction point for the French and European radical Left—every person that was interviewed by the media or spoke publicly presented him- or herself as “Camille.” In all these cases, subjects of unrepresentative claims put forward a specific part of their social identity by underlining the particular institution or group to which they belong while refusing to speak for others.
Unrepresentative Claims to Be Seen as an Unattached Individual
Finally, making an unrepresentative claim may attempt to deny not only any relation of representation but also any form of social belonging in order to be seen simply as an individual. This stance is sometimes taken by “citizen representatives,” a term coined by Mark Warren to emphasize the representative role of citizens in participative and deliberative forums (Warren Reference Warren, Warren and Pearse2008). In many cases, participants in these are reluctant actively to claim any form of representativeness, social belonging, or expertise: they are just individuals that agree to give their subjective point of view on a topic—the organizers are those who claim that a given minipublic is representative (Gül Reference Gül2019). Paradoxically, claiming one’s individuality may help to be considered representative by other claim makers, such as those who set up forums or journalists looking for the take of “real people” on a specific matter. The role of the media should not be downplayed here. Indeed, many Yellow Vests figures emerged because they were available and competent enough to play the role of a Yellow Vest in TV shows, without having any interest to represent, thus being seen as having authenticity. In his work on the way the media represented the Yellow Vests, Christian Le Bart showed how journalists and Yellow Vests converged in selecting figures who had no history of activism but could be presented as “mere individuals snatched away from their everyday life by their legitimate anger, [thus] having the grandeur of authenticity” (Le Bart Reference Le Bart2020, 39). To demonstrate this authenticity, journalists multiplied individual portraits, “gaining in consistency and substance what they lost in representativeness” (Le Bart Reference Le Bart2020, 55). Although they refused to represent the Yellow Vests in the usual sense of political representation, these figures represented them from an aesthetic point of view, as past characters do in historical narratives (Ankersmit Reference Ankersmit2001; Reference Ankersmit2002).Footnote 27 The rise of digital social media platforms deprived magazines, radio, and TV of their monopoly in the construction of narratives in which individuals were select to represent either themselves or a given group. Now “microcelebrity networked activists” can launch a podcast or a YouTube or Twitch channel, or even a mere Twitter account, and defend their point of view, sometimes influencing many people without having to resort to being a character in someone else’s narrative (Tufekci Reference Tufekci2013). Yet often this assumes that such figures speak just for themselves, and not for a party or any organization, because authenticity is of paramount importance to establishing oneself as having a singular—and thus worthy—point of view (Gaden and Dumitrica Reference Gaden and Dumitrica2015).
Conclusion
Unrepresentative claims are political performances of a specific kind. As negative claims, their makers deny speaking for anyone but themselves. But by doing so, they offer portrayals of themselves to their audience, selecting the aspect of their identity they want to put forward, which allows them to embody the persons who share this identity. The ubiquity of unrepresentative claims shows that far from being relics of medieval times, occurrences of representation as embodiment are still part of the rhetoric of multiple agents and institutions. Asserting that one does not hold a mandate may in some cases be mandatory to successfully claim to be seen as impartial, to embody a group, or to see one’s subjective experience recognized. More importantly, it shows that not all contemporary forms of embodiment are individualized and linked with authoritarian or populist endeavors—some are collective, actively opposing tendencies to appropriation by leaders. But it also shows that unrepresentative claims, even made in the context of social movements, do not necessarily seek to defend a form of direct democracy. Yellow Vest leaders used the general defiance toward instituted representative democracy, but they did not try to set alternate mechanisms of decision making that would empower protesters. On the contrary, their leadership largely depended on the absence of such mechanisms, which may explain why the most radically democratic attempts born from the movement, such as the four “Assemblies of Assemblies” that took place in 2019 at the initiative of the Commercy roundabout, did not include any of the most prominent Yellow Vest figures. Ultimately, the leaders’ unrepresentative claims served their (implicit) representative claims that they were able to embody the movement, without being accountable to its members. Whether these claims have inclusive effects or not depends on how the members of the constituency they create can themselves participate in politics—which sometimes mean contesting the very claims that gave them a voice (Brito Vieira Reference Brito Vieira2020; Disch Reference Disch2011; Hayat Reference Hayat, Castiglione and Pollak2018). Still, unrepresentative claims, which are bound to flourish in a political world marked by a crisis of representative democracy, contribute to reshaping the representative system as a whole. Taking them seriously, as parts of this system, may help us understand what kinds of representation exist beyond representative government and what challenges they may raise for the future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article was language edited by Gabi Maas. Previous versions of this paper were presented in different conferences and seminars, and the author wishes to thank the organizers, discussants, and participants, in particular Camille Bedock, Frédéric Brahami, Gérard Bras, Mark B. Brown, Dario Castiglione, Bruno Cautrès, Suzanne Dovi, Alexandre Escudier, Lise Herman, Edouard Jourdain, Christian Le Bart, Felipe Linden, Jane Mansbridge, Marion Paoletti, Michael Saward, Eline Severs, Mark Warren, Marta Wojciechowska, and Thomás Zicman de Barros for their remarks. A special thanks to Lisa Disch, Virginie Dutoya, Vincent Martigny, Alessandro Mulieri, and Yves Sintomer for our regular conversations on political representation. The author also wishes to sincerely thank the three anonymous reviewers for their kind and careful reading and invaluable suggestions.
FUNDING STATEMENT
This article has benefited from resources from the ANF-DFG Project “(New) Political Representative Claims: A Global View (France, Germany, Brazil, China, India)—CLAIM” (ANR-15-FRAL-0010) and the I-Site ULNE ERC Generator and ANR JCJC Project “Workplace Political Theory. Reconceptualising Exploitation, Democracy and Justice through Workers’ Reflexive Writings—WORKORY” (ANR-19-CE26-0011).
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declares no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
ETHICAL STANDARDS
The author affirms this research did not involve human subjects.
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