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Bruno
Latour, Domus September 2004
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As you drive along the roads in France you notice them. Black silhouettes
branded with a red streak of blood. You might drive ten kilometres
without seeing one, and then suddenly you see four in a row with
their sad drooping posture. Sometimes there is just one, sometimes
two or three. No name, no gender, no age —although some look
smaller as if they are kids — but always bearing the weight
of an indefinite sadness. Who are they? They are the ghosts of the
dead killed in road accidents. They have been accumulating over
the years thanks to the work of agents of the Transportation Ministry,
and they crowd the most dangerous “black spots” along
the highways.
It seems some civil officials took the initiative a few years ago
to bring the dead back in this ghostly shape so that they could
meet the living. To warn drivers? To tell them to slow down? To
frighten them so much that they panic and join the dead in the valley
of the shadows? Hard to say. But what is sure is that they alter
your idea of driving. Before, you were carefree, forgetting everything,
“externalising” the heavy toll society pays for your
speeding, and then, suddenly you find yourself among thicker and
thicker lines of dead. Creepy really. You begin to slowly “internalise”
what it costs to drive in France.
I slow down, for sure, but my mind speeds up: Why do the dead need
to be brought back from the grave by the Ministry of Transportation
through the mediation of artists and designers?
Because they have to be represented, that is, presented again and
again to our forgetful minds. Of course, we know very well that
politics is about representation. This is why we talk so much about
electing our “representatives”. But what we tend to
ignore is that representation is impossible if by this term we mean
that the people are “faithfully” transported into their
deputies. No such transportation can occur since the people are
many and the deputies few. So, some huge, some abysmal transformation
has to take place that metamorphoses what the people think into
the thought of their representatives. To be faithful —that
is, to transform the many into one— transubstantiation has
to occur that looks like a sleight of hand, or even a sheer betrayal.
This is why political scientists like to complain of a “democratic
deficit” or of a “crisis of representation”. They
argue there is a huge scandalous gap between the people and their
representatives. But of course there is and fortunately so. How
could millions of voices be heard without this betrayal —what
the English, in a magnificent expression, call “spin”?
Instead of complaining against such a “democratic deficit”
they should rather inquire on the odd reasons that make them request
from politics a type of fidelity that would render it forever impotent.
It’s because of this gap, of this massive transformation,
of this extended “spin” that politics can be faithful
in its own sense of the adjective: it accomplishes the feat of transforming
the many voices into a few.
If you really believe in democracy, don’t ask something that
you know can’t be delivered. Representation in politics is
not some sort of direct mimesis. It has to transform, to betray,
to reinvent, to subvert everything to give it a new and ever changing
shape. Yes, it is a shadowy business.
No one was more aware of this rarely expressed truth than Walter
Lippmann, the great American columnist who managed to comment on
public affairs, with unparallel lucidity, from the Versailles treaty
to the Vietnam War. In a small but stunning book, he defines democracy
as the “emergence of the public” but this public, much
like the black silhouettes along the roads of France, is a ghost
or rather a phantom. Lippmann is in many ways the Machiavelli of
the 20th century. It’s because both were fervently interested
in fostering democratic ideals that they searched so opinionatedly
for a realist version of what is humanly possible. A utopian definition
of democracy can only lead, after too many disappointments, to tyranny.
For Lippmann, saying the public is a phantom is not derogatory.
It simply means that those who have imagined that there is such
a thing as a body politic made of many members and a huge head have
turned the business of representation into a sham. “The democratic
ideal has never defined the function of the public. It has treated
the public as an immature, shadowy executive of all things. The
confusion is deep-seated in a mystical notion of society. ‘The
people’ were regarded as a person; their wills as a will;
their ideas as a mind; their mass as an organism with an organic
unity of which the individual was a cell. Thus the voter identified
himself with the officials. He tried to think that their thoughts
were his thoughts, that their deeds were his deeds, and even that
in some mysterious way they were a part of him. All this confusion
of identities led naturally to the theory that everybody was doing
everything. It prevented democracy from arriving at a clear idea
of its own limits and attainable ends.” (p.137-138).
The public is not the people but the “bystanders” who
have been made aware of some invisible and unwanted consequences
of their actions that public officials don’t seem to be able
to deal with efficaciously. When the public comes in, they are by
definition ignorant, blind and uninformed, but it’s they nonetheless
who have to detect who is lying most in the parties vying for its
judgment. “Where the facts are most obscure, where precedents
are lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade everything, the
public in all its unfitness is compelled to make its most important
decisions. The hardest problems are those which institutions cannot
handle. They are the public’s problems.” (p. 121)
Are the victims of road accidents my problem? There were not before
the silhouettes appeared along the road I have to confess, or else
in such a shadowy fashion that I had forgotten them entirely. Now
they are my problem. A shadow plus a shadow makes for a strong presence:
I have become aware of my connection with the dead. I am becoming
part of a public. I am aligning myself with those who find that
the price to pay for the freedom of driving in France is much too
high. A new public is being produced. It is a mix of drivers who
are now more cautious, some public officials, some militants against
road violence and the dead represented by those ghostly figures.
There is indeed a deficit of representation, but it’s filled
in with just those humble actions that bring back those that have
been excluded. It’s precisely because the public is a phantom
that it has to be constantly represented. How else would we see
its writings on the wall?
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Notes:
See the remarkable work on the notion
of deficit by Noortje Marres (2004). "Tracing the Trajectories
of Issues and their Democratic Deficit on the Web." Information
Technology and People 17(2): 124-149. I thank her for having led
me to Lippmann’s book.
Lippmann, W. (1927 [1993]). The Phantom Public. New Brunswick, Transactions
Publishers. He is better known for another work (1922). Public Opinion.
New York, Simon & Schuster.
Hence the title of John Dewey’s much better known book (1927,
1954). The Public and Its Problems. Athens, Ohio University Press
which is in many ways a reply to Lippmann. Lippmann woke Dewey "out
of his dogmatic slumber" much like Hume did for Kant.
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