Is This What Democracy Looks Like? The Politics of Representation and the Representation of Politics

Abstract

Taking its inspiration from the twenty-first-century protest chant, ‘This is what democracy looks like!’, this chapter explores the interrelation between theories of representation and modes of radical democracy. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and others, Schmidt analyses recent political actions that refuse to adhere to what he calls ‘the politics of the count’, including demonstrations against tuition fee increases in the UK, the 2011 London riots, the actions of UK Uncut, and Occupy, all of which emerged within the same twelve months. Such actions produce a representational crisis in two interrelated meanings of the idea of representation: they challenge representational democracy, and also challenge our understandings of what counts as the political—that is to say, what politics looks like.