Against Politics of Representation

“The call to 'listen to the most affected' or 'centre the most marginalized' is ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles. But it’s never sat well with me. In my experience, when people say they need to 'listen to the most affected', it isn’t because they intend to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Instead, it has more often meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to those who most snugly fit into the social categories associated with these ills – regardless of what they actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced.”

—“Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference” by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

“Today, identity politics have been very much co-opted by white liberals into the wishy-washy, superficial, and harmful politics of representation. The origin of the term 'identity politics' was actually a radical sentiment from Black lesbian feminists in the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977.

'We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression,' the Collective wrote. 'In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves.'

The revolutionary intent of the identity politics strategy was to build and organize with others for liberation and freedom, but instead, it has been co-opted into an electoralism-focused game of diversity and representation politics.”

—“Call it what it is: Representation politics” by Deborah Kwon

“Many well-intentioned activists are under the impression that increased media representation can change the world. And maybe it can. But this has led to media representation being the end all, be all for activism. People focus so much time on advocating for diversity in Hollywood that they overlook more pressing issues that exist in the world. The next James Bond potentially being a black woman may be cool, but it does nothing to diminish the struggles real Black women encounter in the workplace, their high infant mortality rates, the misogynoir they face at the hands of their own men. The Colombian migrant worker remains a victim of imperialist exploitation by the West, even as Encanto makes millions at the box office.

Additionally, praising Hollywood for 'getting diversity right' provides the already privileged and wealthy a shield from criticism, one that they don’t even have to raise a finger to build themselves. We think, how can something be bad if it features marginalized voices? People see a diverse cast and then don’t care to look at other problems that exist. It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed in particular with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)—thanks to the past year’s releases, the Marvel universe now contains more women, POC and queer characters than ever. As a result, leftists cannot point out poorly written storylines, the ever-present military propaganda, or Disney underpaying their employees without being accused of being racist, or homophobic, or some other form of bigotry by rabid fans, who ignore the fact that these critics are often marginalized people themselves.”

—“We Care Too Much About Media Representation” by Catherine Du

The goal of this collection of articles is to establish a pattern of how representation ultimately functions as a political tool that maintains rather than ends hierarchy. Táíwò points out how essentialist calls to defer to “the most marginalized” oversimplifies power dynamics and enables marginalized identity to be used obfuscate the role of class—and how this essentialism then facilitates a consolidation of class interests when marginalized elites represent their alleged community in positions of power. Kwon shows how this plays out in politics of the state while also arguing against putting the blame on identity politics, which has been co-opted from the radical Black lesbian and feminist Combahee River Collective. Then Du discusses how representation politics in media is a cultural way of reinforcing capitalist and imperialist hierarchies by using fictional marginalized representatives to placate and distract real-life marginalized people from materially real and ongoing oppression.

Though not specifically dealing with the type of liberal representation politics discussed here, theses 60-61 in The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord go into the role of star celebrities in maintaining the spectacle. Two definitions of spectacle I want to draw from:

Thesis 4: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Thesis 26: “In the spectacle, a part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.” A representation is an image of reality controlled by those who control the means of producing those images—in other words, those with material and social capital—these are the “elites” from Táíwò's concept of “elite capture.” This capital-owning class is the “part of the world” that “represents itself to the world and is superior to it.” To be represented is to be treated as a separate class that lacks capital, and to “feel represented” is to feel reunited through your separateness.

Excerpts from theses 60-61: “Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. [...] But the activities of these stars are not really free and they offer no real choices.” “The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the flow of things.”

To be a marginalized star—to be a spectacular representative of marginalized people—then, is to be forced by capitalism to embody your own separation, forced to play the role of reinforcing class. Once again, I reiterate via Vaneigem that “The proletariat’s problem is no longer how to seize power but how to abolish Power forever.” The goal is not to seize power as representatives of your respective marginalized groups within the capital-owning class, but to abolish class forever. The goal is not to put more marginalized people in charge of capitalism or make capitalism work better for marginalized people, but to end capitalism altogether. Or at least, that's what I think it should be.

(Sidenote, because I suspect somebody will ask: “Is there any way to do representation in way that is free from spectacle?” No—because the spectacle is just Debord's take on describing capitalism as a system. Representation as a concept is inherently tied to capitalist hierarchy was our point.)

“We contrast recognition with the destruction of worlds. Our destruction is both affective and collective – Hostis nurses a hatred for this world, and it works to annihilate everything it hates. Our purpose is to make apparent to all what is already self-evident to us: that our collective self-interest lies in the destruction of this world. Orthodox Marxists argue that revolutionary politics emerges from the working class when they realize the benefits of overturning capitalism. This is why the Communist Manifesto denounces 'philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.' The line we draw is not between bourgeois/proletariat (good/bad, left/right, oppressor/oppressed, etc.) but between those who preserve what is intolerable about this world and those of us dismantling it.”

—“Introduction: Recognition and its Discontents” by Hostis (CW: Rape)