Representation

The Meanings of Representation

The English words “representation” and “to represent,” and their equivalents in many other modern languages, derive from the Latin: repraesentatio and repraesentare. The original meanings of these words were not political. Indeed, representation has maintained a rich variety of meanings that do not directly apply to things political. Although independent, the deployment of representation in our political vocabulary maintains, nonetheless, some important conceptual and semantic connections with uses in other vocabularies and areas, so that paying attention to them is not irrelevant.

The original Latin meanings referred to three different acts: (1) payment in ready money, (2) bringing something before the mind, and (3) an image in art. Each of these particular meanings involved ideas of “substitution,” “presenting something again,” and “presenting something in a different form.” How these uses and their more general connotations developed into a constellation of differentiated meanings in unrelated fields is an exceedingly complex story. The crucial period is probably the time between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, when more abstract ideas of representation acquired currency and the Latin meanings of the term were variously conjugated with (or used to translate) more philosophically established Greek ideas such as phantasia (as the faculty of representation) and mimesis, or the process of abstraction through which particular things are related to their “representation” in [Page 824]the mind. The philosophical refinement of the word is important to understand some later uses in political discourse. But equally if not more important is the way in which theological and religious ideas of representation established some of the conceptual paradigms influencing the development of ideas of political representation. In particular, ideas of the vicarious presence of God and Christ through the corpus mysticum of the Church, the Pope, and the Cardinals proved decisive to inform political ideas of representation.

Since then, separate uses have developed, informing discourses about “artistic representation” in both figurative and symbolic contexts; practices and theories of “acting” and “impersonating” in theater; and, at some remove from political ideas, conceptions of “mental representation.” Representation has also become a central concept in the overlapping discourses of politics, law, and, more recently, social research. As already noted, the connections between political and other uses are not just diachronic but also synchronic, continuously enriching and revitalizing the political understanding of representation. It is less obvious whether a metatheory of representation, encompassing all such disciplinary fields and discourses, is possible. One distinction that originated in the philosophy of “mental representation,” that is, between the problem of representations (plural) and that of representation (singular), may have useful applications in politics. Robert Cummings distinguishes between problems concerning the means of cognitive representation (in the plural) and problems concerning the relationship of representation (in the singular): that is, what representations represent. A philosophical approach to political representation may have to do with a similar analytic distinction between an investigation of the institutions of representation and one of the nature of the representative relationship in politics.

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