Affective Representation: Social Media's Implications for Political Representation

Abstract

Citizens who do not want to be represented are a challenge for conventional representative claim-makers, but this does not mean the end of representation as such. Post-representative movements such as the Gilets Jaunes rejected any notions of representation, yet they produced medially and politically recognized spokespersons. The Gilets Jaunes movement organized and mobilized their physical protests digitally, and what fueled the digital messages of new representative entrepreneurs were not interests or identities, but affective experiences (Rosanvallon 2022, 88–104; Le Bart 2020, 40–56). The case of the Gilets Jaunes draws attention to a particular form of representative claims: affective representative claims. They shift the key dynamic of representation from claim-making to represent a political cause or a socio-political identity to claims that are centered around speaking for collectively shared affective states. These claims allow one to only speak for oneself while simultaneously being able to speak for others due to the indeterminacy and universality of affect and emotion. In the context of widespread distrust in parties and institutionalized representation, affective representative claims give insight into new forms of organizing politically disaffected citizens.

Despite the intense affectivity of contesting institutionalized representation (Magni 2017; Granjon 2021; Flinders and Hinterleitner 2022; Sullivan 2021, Celis et al. 2021) and notions of affective polarization in Western democracies (Reiljan 2020; Hobolt et al. 2021), constructivist theories overly focus on how elite actors employ affective cues in their representative claims to mobilize constituencies (Mouffe 2022; Disch 2021, Saward 2010, 2020; Brito Viera 2015; Knops and de Cleen 2019, 172), and thus overlook how affective representative claims can empower non-elite actors to challenge and contest conventional forms of representation.

Understanding affective forms of representation is important not only because of the high affectivity of the current political constellation but also due to the structural change of the public sphere induced through social media. The dissemination of authorship widens the scope of representative claim-makers and potential audiences (Habermas 2022), and the affective affinity of social media (Sunstein 2017; Papacharissi 2015; Staab and Thiel 2022; Hindman 2018) has the potential to bring “affective publics” together (Papacharissi 2015), who produce their own representatives in turn. Investigating the representative dynamics that emerge from the affective architecture of social media gives insights into new forms of collectivization and mobilization of societies in a context of eroding and changing social and political identities (Jäger 2023; Reckwitz 2022; Rosanvallon 2022, 80–83; Cole et al. 2023, 399–403; Dassonneville and Hooghe 2018; Asenbaum 2023) and ways to form new categories of collective representation that are constituted through the articulation of affective states and are exercised by non-elite actors. This article is divided into three sections: The first section discusses the shortcomings of constructivist theories with respect to affect and emotion. In the second section, the idea of affective representative claims is conceptualized, incorporating Jacline Mouraud's viral selfie-video in the beginning of the Gilets Jaunes movement to illustrate the logic and the political anatomy of affective representative claims. The third section discusses the impact of social media on affective representative claim-making in highlighting how affective representative claims are afforded on social media and how digital audiences shape and authorize their own representatives.

Constructivist theories of representation highlight the procedural character of representation. The pioneering works of Michael Saward (2006, 2010) understand representative claims as a way to invoke constituencies through reading certain attributes into an audience and presenting themselves as ideal representatives because of shared qualities and attributes. Representation is central to the constitution, political subjectivation, and mobilization of new collectives (Saward 2010; Disch 2011, 2014, 2021).

However, affect and emotion are mostly understood as strategic elements in elite representative claims to mobilize constituencies. Understanding representation as discursive construction of identities (Mouffe 2013, 125f.), Chantal Mouffe (2013) has highlighted the importance of “passionate attachments in the constitution of political identities” (p. 96). Accordingly, mobilizing “affects of political and ecological nature whose articulation can result in the construction of a ‘people’” (Mouffe 2022, 76) has been recently proposed as an important strategy for the left to mobilize for a green revolution (see also, Latour and Schultz 2022, 37–43).

Similarly, Lisa Disch contends that evoking attachments toward cultural symbols, not necessarily good arguments (Disch 2021, 101–102), can result in successful mobilization. She has recognized affective means, for example, resentment as a distinct way of making representations “that codes political messaging in the language that ordinary people use to differentiate social groups” (Disch 2021, 63). This relates to Saward's (2020) discussion of shape-shifting representation in which politicians continuously make use of different roles and resources in different contexts to bring about successful representative claims (pp. 75–76). Thus, politicians can play into affective registers when they want to present themselves more authentically or mobilize latent grievances through emotional means. But in all these accounts, affective representative claim-making is imagined as an elite cue to (strategically) achieve representation by the elite politician “that takes care who she speaks to” (Saward 2020, 85) in “a differentiated and densely mediatized political world” (Saward 2020, 85).

Recent analyses have focused on how political elites employ affective cues in representative claim-making (Knops and De Cleen 2019) and overlooked how non-elite affective representative claims played an important role in the emergence of social movements, for example, in the Occupy movement (van de Sande 2020) or the Gilets Jaunes (Hayat 2022). In the case of the Gilets Jaunes, the critique of the movement aimed at representative institutions that were not able to understand or incorporate seemingly idiosyncratic affective life experiences (Le Bart 2020, 40–48) in their decision-making processes.

The focus on mobilization through affective means oversights leads constructivist theories of representation to underestimate the role of emerging non-elite representatives through affective representative claims, which are concerned less with mobilization but rather, making present specific emotions. Affective representative claims can be empowering for non-elite actors, since they have fewer entry barriers: They can be made in the spur of the moment and require not much deliberation beforehand. Also, these claims do not necessarily need to be explicitly representative or even carry representative intent. Presenting the self as emotional carries with it a sense of authenticity and intimacy that can fill the gap toward institutionalized politics that are perceived as technocratically distant and cold (Coleman and Moss 2022, 6; Noordzij, De Koster, and Van Der Waal 2021). Further, affective representative claims can enable a political presence without granting “an encompassing intersectional metanarrative” (Cammaerts 2021, 349), because they allow everybody to not position themselves politically while fostering interpersonal and latent political connections through emphasizing personal experience. The Gilets Jaunes did not want to have the collectivity of shared experience neutralized by political positionings (Lianos 2019), thus affective representative claims can be empowering in times of distrust in political institutions. The presence enabled by affective representative claims goes beyond fixed social or collective identities (as developed in Phillips 1995), thus allowing more relational and fluid expressions and performances of collective identities (Asenbaum 2023, 57–85). For example, the expression of disaffection and precariousness by the Gilets Jaunes brought together different strands of professions that went beyond classed identities, experiences, and interests (Rosanvallon 2022, 55–58).

Thus, it is important to address another oversight that is due to the mobilization focus of constructivist theories of representation. Here, emotions are portrayed as elements that are lying on the street, just waiting to be picked up by an entrepreneur of representation. Louise Knops (2022) argued that processes of affective imitation of indignation were central to the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes movement. But her equation of affect and emotion (Knops 2022, 3) leads her to miss one key dynamic of affective mobilizations—the “tipping point” (Knops 2022, 11) that transforms collectively shared affects into action. In her example, indignation is something that somewhat naturally arises from a consistent confrontation with injustices and precarity (Knops 2022, 9–11), thus overlooking one of the central foundations of constructivist theory, namely, “that the identity, interests, or preferences of the represented are not given prior to representation but shaped through being represented” (Fossen 2019, 824).

This logic needs to be extended toward emotions, something that Knops overlooks in her approach. Constructivist theories of representation need to look at how representative claims enable self-perceptions of audiences that are invoked through claiming to feel a specific emotion in a given context. Following Pitkin's statist view of symbols as “object of feelings, and actions, not an actor” (Pitkin 1967, 103), the unofficial spokespersons of new social movements are often seen as symbols for a collective (van de Sande 2020; Brito, Vieira 2015; Hayat 2022; Zicman de Barros 2021). But symbols can act: This is the case of Jacline Mouraud's viral selfie-video that was an important driver of the Gilets Jaunes movement (Allain and Mallet 2019; Royall 2020, 100; Boyer et al. 2020, 114). In this video, she talks about the emotional impact of the decisions made by Macron's government and her everyday experiences, not about specific political demands. Jacline Mouraud became a symbol of the Gilets Jaunes, that not only stood for but also acted for an affective collective. As a part of a delegation, she met the French prime minister. Her story makes an interesting case of how affective representative claims enable someone to be representative without initially wanting to represent, and contest institutionalized representation from below, which will be explored throughout this article.

This paper aims to address the oversights of constructivist theories of representation toward affective representative claims by (1) conceptualizing the inner logic of affective representative claims that move affect and emotion toward the object of representation, (2) reflecting on the rise of new non-elite representatives through the content and the channels of communication of these claims, that is enabled through social media.

The decline of social and political identities, coupled with an increasing politicization of the private sphere, and an individualized mode of managing the own life give way to more intense, wide, and suggestibly idiosyncratic political demands that cannot be contained within clearly delineable social or political identities or current forms of political representation (Jäger 2023; Reckwitz 2022; Rosanvallon 2022, 80–83; Cole et al. 2023, 399–403; Dassonneville and Hooghe 2018).

Contesting representative institutions is an affective praxis (Sullivan 2021), triggered by the sentiments of citizens who feel that their lived experiences, feelings, and personal struggles are neither heard nor understood by political elites (Hayat 2022, 1047f.; Coleman and Moss 2022; Noordzij et al. 2021). This suggests an increased importance of representing affective idiosyncrasy, which gains increasing political relevance in “a world in which the idea of progress has faded and uncertainty reigns, a world in which personal factors and situational variables are primordial in characterizations of individual lives” (Rosanvallon 2021, 38).

This makes it necessary to investigate the qualitative shift toward affective representative claim-making. If politics is indeed increasingly experienced as a matter of personal biographies, “self-exploratory” (Reddy 2001, 103) emotion claims, which engage in a personal reflection and presentation of emotional states, should be considered as a starting point for new representative relationships. This qualitative shift entails that emotional experiences of personal biographical trajectories now form the starting point of representative claims—what is claimed here is an emotional experience that can serve as a node of identification for others who see their personal experience validated in the story of somebody else. Representing an emotional self serves as a node of identification and, possibly, a form of representation that does not necessarily explicitly state the intent to represent.

As such, this theory aims to advance the understanding of new forms of representative relationships that are centered around shared affective experiences and not interests or identities. This helps take into focus non-elite actors that can become politically significant through affective representative claim-making, such as Jacline Mouraud, an important figurehead of the Gilets Jaunes movement in France. Drawing on her example, I sketch out the logic of these affective representative claims and the possibility for affective claim-makers to not only stand for communities of feeling but also act upon them.

Social media changes the art of representative claim-making (1) through the democratization of authorship (Habermas 2022), which makes virtually everybody a claim-maker. Social media makes visible “private, infra-individual representative claims” (Saward 2006, 309) and enables them to be heard through (2) the connectivity of social media. This widens the scope and access to audiences who can produce counter-representatives through influencing algorithms based on network effects that drive algorithmic proliferation and popularization of content. Digital popularity, that is, virality, thus can be understood as a new form of authorizing non-elected representatives. Additionally, (3) social media incentivizes a fast, spontaneous, and affective form of communication (Habermas 2022; Staab and Thiel 2022; Reckwitz 2020, 234f.; Wahl-Jorgensen 2019, 147) that fosters affective approaches to politics, “that rethink the personal as political, and the political as that which is personally felt” (Papacharissi 2015, 117). The affective structure of social media coupled with its affective authorship lays the groundwork for new forms of political representation. Affective representative claim-makers can become the incarnation for the affective and emotional experiences of their audience: their statement stands for something that is felt by other individuals. Depending on public reception and resonance, these symbolic representatives can also come into positions of acting for affective collectives.

In times of institutional distrust, social media allows disaffected citizens to express themselves and to become representatives themselves. This is due to a qualitative shift in representative claim-making toward speaking for and through emotions, instead of interests or identities. Constructivist theories of representation have overlooked the possibility of non-elites to become representatives by speaking for affective experiences due to focusing overly on an elite-centric understanding of representation. Contributing to an emerging affective turn in constructivist theories of representation, this paper aimed to conceptualize non-elite affective representative claims by building upon the case of Jacline Mouraud's viral selfie-video in the wake of the Gilets Jaunes movement.

Affective representative claims can start as self-representative emotion claims that translate diffuse affective experiences into discrete emotions. These affective testimonies allow others to see their experiences symbolized and embodied in someone else. As such, they prescribe an emotional corset through translating diffuse affect into discrete emotions, legitimize emotional expressions in specific contexts, and thus contribute to specific forms of political subjectivization and invoke collectives that understand themselves as being tied together through similar feelings and experiences.

Social media catalyze these claims in their capacity to tie communities of feeling together. They incentivize authentic self-representations and tie communities of feeling together. The central affordances of social media—authorship and connectivity—work as a playground for new affective representative relationships since they put everybody in the role of a claim-maker and offer an omnipresent audience. Audience and media-generated popularity can enable representative claim-makers to act on collectively shared emotions and move beyond mere symbolic representation. An interesting point for further research would be a more empirical outlook on political networks surrounding, driving, or contesting affective representative claims.

There is a democratically empowering factor in affective representative claims, because they not only democratize the position of the representative but also enable audiences to shape their counter-representation against distant ruling elites using the affordances of social media. The affective affinity of social media should be less regarded as the demise of the rational public sphere but as the manifestation of a new field of political conflict around emotional experiences on which different actors contest the affective capacities and expressions of others. Further, affective representative claims suggest a change in the political anatomy of representation by reframing legitimacy as authenticity and the validation of subjective experiences and troubles of disaffected citizens. As the case of Jacline Mouraud has shown, becoming representative without explicitly claiming the intent to represent becomes an important form of contesting institutionalized representation in the wake of several post-representative movements, which is enabled through affective representative claims. They enable one to only speak for oneself, yet this simultaneously enables others to identify with such an affective self-representative claim. The distrust in representative institutions coupled with the intense affectivity of a current crisis-ridden suggests that affective representation is here to stay. Researching affective representative claims helps to understand how social media contributes to shifting representation further away from institutions toward ordinary citizens, which gives insight into how political collectives can organize and express themselves in times of institutional distrust.

I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.