Symposium Paper
Jeffrey E. Green’s The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780195372649, Hardback, 296 pages, 449.95)
Winner of the 2010 First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section
of the American Political Science Association, Jeffrey Green’s The Eyes of the People (EOP)
outlines a basic distinction between two models of popular power in a democracy. On the one
hand, there is what Green calls the vocal model, which has dominated the way popular power has
been conceptualized since the rebirth of democracy at the end of the eighteenth century.
According to this model, the People is understood as a legislative voice—as a set of preferences
waiting to be translated into laws and policies. EOP demonstrates that despite the diversity of
approaches to democratic theory, the vocal model has informed virtually all philosophies of
democracy. For example, it informs not only democratic idealists of the nineteenth century, like
Mill and Tocqueville, but equally contemporary models (like aggregationists and deliberative
democrats) who, even if more skeptical about popular self-legislation in any simplistic sense,
continue to envision the People as a vocal, decisional force. The problem with the vocal model,
Green explains, is twofold: failing to account for the fact that most citizens most of the time are
not engaged in political decision-making, it is disconnected from reality; second, it is hegemonic
because, leading ordinary citizens to exaggerate their political capacity, it blinds them to the
distinction between an elite with special decision-making authority and the great many without
power. It is not surprising, then, as Green notes, that the very notion of the People has come
under pressure in recent years, as numerous scholars of democracy (e.g., pluralists), unwilling to
treat the People as a monolithic vocal being, have argued for jettisoning the concept altogether.
But rather than abandon the idea of the People, Green develops a competing model of
popular power, which he calls the ocular model—or also the plebiscitary model. Within the
ocular model, the People—the mass of everyday citizens in their collective capacity—is
conceived as a spectating rather than decisonmaking being: it watches leaders and other elites
who appear on the public stage. If the central ideal of the vocal model is autonomy (the People’s
self-authorship of the laws), the central ideal of the ocular model is candor. Green argues for a
model in which leaders do not fully control the conditions of their public appearances which are
thus shaped by unscripted, spontaneous, unpredictable, non-acclamatory events.
The Eyes of the People argues that citizens should treat the candor of their leaders as a
key criterion in evaluating how democratic their societies are and that, therefore, citizens should
find democratization realized not only in the content of political decisionmaking. but in the form
in which political communication is disseminated. For example, how unscripted and genuine
political events are. While Green does not deny that certain individuals and groups are in fact
able to influence policy, the book defends the ocular ideal of candor as an undertheorized, if not
overlooked, democratic value that is uniquely responsive to everyday political experiences.
1 I. Superhuman Vision: Beyond the Gaze
Melissa Schwartzberg, Columbia University
The Eyes of the People is a major accomplishment. Jeffrey Green elegantly characterizes
the nature of political citizenship in modern democracies, and provides theoretical guidance for
how to think about democratic commitments in a context in which voting is "the rarest and most
exceptional moment of democratic life" (Green 2010, 199). As Green rightly argues, the normal
mode of political life for the vast majority of citizens is “characterized by silence rather than
decision, spectatorship rather than activism, and hierarchy rather than equality” (Green, 199).
Green’s view is unromantic, even deflationary – and unmistakably correct. Further, his claim that
candor – "the institutional norm that a leader not be in control of the conditions of his or her
publicity" (Green, 130) – is a critical ideal within such democracies is important and persuasive.
Yet my fear is that Green’s ocular model of plebiscitary democracy gives the people
bionic vision while rendering them mute. This is, I think, because of some tensions in the way in
which Green characterizes political agency in plebiscitary democracy. As I shall argue, although
Green’s argument is – as he suggests – indebted to Schumpeter, the concept of the People –
capitalized throughout – is resoundingly not Schumpeterian. An uncharitable reading of the book
is that Green takes on the least attractive features of Schumpeterian democracy – its elitism –
while abandoning the most attractive element, the rejection of the so-called "classical doctrine."
Though this reading is unfair, I would like to suggest that there might be good reasons to reframe
the ocular model to avoid some of the vulnerabilities of the vocal model.
First, Green characterizes the public gaze in a Foucaultian sense as an "ocular force
whose chief function is to train and form individuals rather than to make decisions or levy taxes
or lead armies" (Green, 154, emphasis in original). Citing Foucault directly, he suggests that it
"coerces by means of observation" (Green, 154; citing (Foucault 1977, 170)). But how precisely
does Green intend the gaze to operate? The aim, I take it, is to create circumstances in which
candidates for office are obliged to appear in unscripted, spontaneous circumstances with each
other – circumstances they do not control and in which they are obliged to be "candid," in
Green’s technical sense of the term. Yet the only reason why a candidate should be concerned
about surveillance is because the information revealed therein will constitute the basis on which
she will be sanctioned – that is, she will win or lose political office based on citizens who vote on
the basis of what they see. To be sure, the fact that citizens vote in the final instance does not
mean that the People engage in self-legislating. Green is right that the vocal model cannot
adequately capture contemporary political life. But it does mean that the ultimate means by
which legislators are "disciplined" is not the gaze itself, but the ballot. The ocular model, then, is
an important corrective to the vocal model, but it cannot entirely supplant it, as Green sometimes
suggests that it should. In the final instance, voting is the means by which candidates are chosen
and rejected; it is indispensible.
How does this analysis differ from minimalist or Schumpeterian models of democracy?
On Green’s account, Schumpeter provided a reasonable critique of democracy – the "electoral
process is an insufficient organ for expressing views to the extent citizens do have them" (Green,
175) – but with the wrong implications. Schumpeter famously asserted that the "democratic
method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals
acquire the power to decide by means of the competitive struggle for the people’s vote."1 I take
Green to hold that competition might well be an attractive basis for democracy if it is understood
1
Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 269.
2 that leaders undergo and endue the risk, uncertainty, and unpredictability of having to face
challenge and contest. Elections are circumstances, in Green’s words, that "impose uncertainty
and destabilization upon leaders rather than securing their legitimation" (Green, 177). Adam
Przeworski’s Schumpeterian vision is similar; for democracy to endure, the outcome of elections
must be sufficiently unpredictable that parties or other major political forces will lose, but remain
willing to obey the outcome of elections because they believe that they stand a reasonable chance
of winning in the future – there will be alternation in government.2 In this sense, Green’s
conception of democracy is largely compatible with Schumpeter’s. Neither Green nor
Schumpeter (or Przeworski) wants to defend a version of democracy that aims to realize a
popular will, and both emphasize competition for the vote – the unpredictable struggle to capture
the public’s attention and ultimately their ballots.
On Green’s account, the plebiscitary model entails locating the object of popular power
in the leader, emphasizing the gaze rather than judgment or decision, and enacting popular
control over the means of publicity. Green’s loose discussion of "popular control" is in this sense
relatively unproblematic – one might think that it is simply "majority control" over the selection
of leaders or ensuring that leaders must appear in public without having the opportunity to give
prepared speeches, as enforced by public threats of ridicule or loss of office. But there is a
critical, and in my view worrisome, difference between Green’s conception and the
Schumpeterian model. Green cares about a People – indeed, the word is capitalized throughout.
The aim is to capture a collective concept of the People from an "ocular" rather than "vocal"
perspective. He defines them as the "mass of everyday, non-office-holding citizens in their
collective capacity" (Green, 4) He develops the concept more fully, holding that "Under the
plebiscitary model, the People designates a political entity that might be termed the organization
of the unorganized: political spectators linked together in their shared experience of nondecision,
nonpreference, and relative subordination to political elites" (Green, 63). Further, in his words,
"[T]he plebiscitarian conceives of popular sovereignty as the rule of a principle: specifically the
principle of candor. … A plebiscitarian claims that in the context of any political event the
People is sovereign – that is, the People will have its collective interest realized – to the extent
that candor governs the public presentation at hand." (Green, 207-208)
It is not clear, however, why Green wants to retrieve or to revive this language of popular
sovereignty, or what it lends to his argument. There is surely a sense in which Green is quite
right that people on his model have a strong and even foundational interest in candor. However,
the Habermasian move – to ascribe sovereignty to a procedure that ought to govern democratic
decision-making, i.e., that constitutes legitimate democratic rule – is not quite made here in the
development of the principle of candor as such. Moreover, even if it were, the claim that the
People’s interest in candor constitutes a basis for popular rule seems to undermine the central
thesis that he wants to develop: that the people simply do not rule and the principle of candor
cannot substitute for genuine political authority. In other words, Green should not wish to argue
that the people ought to locate themselves in any meaningful way in public actions by elites –
that would undermine their capacity to exert critical scrutiny.
Further, what is the work that collective agency more generally – the People –
accomplishes here? What would be lost if this were the "eyes of the people" – the eyes of the
aggregate or multitude of citizens? One might think, in fact, that the multiplicity of views, the
distinctive perspectives of each spectator, would be the critical feature of an ethic of candor.
2
Adam Przeworski, "Minimalist conception of democracy: A defense" in Democracy’s Value, ed. Ian Shapiro and
Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3 After all, the candidates would then need to accommodate an additional level of unpredictability-the notion that the public they are facing is heterogeneous, with responses that may be
conflictual. Green suggests that the fact that all citizens "see" constitutes them as a People. In my
view, a core critique of a version of the vocal model – one of the most important contributions of
the Schumpeterian account and of social-choice theory – is that it demonstrates that the people
qua unitary actor with singular will is purely fictive. Thus why Green would want to take onto
his brilliantly insightful reading of spectatorship this unitary model eludes me.
As such, I understand the contribution of The Eyes of the People to be slightly different
than Green might wish, I suspect. I take it to be a pivotally important account of the way in
which spectatorship can serve as the primary model of democratic agency, which generates an
ethics of candor as the accompanying critical ideal – but one that ought to improve the capacity
of individual citizens to choose among candidates on the basis of their public behavior.
II. Hearing with the Gaze: Jeffrey Green’s Eyes of the People
Richard Avramenko, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jeffrey Green’s Eye’s the People is a fine piece of scholarship. His central argument is
that the People, or as he calls them, citizen-spectators, are not powerless because they do not
make their political voices heard in their average everyday lives. The problem, however, is that
for 250 years, democratic theorists have "been incapable of conceiving of popular power other
than as a vocal force" (64). That is, if people are not making their voices heard, then they are
uninvolved—they are not participating in politics. For Green, this is an error. People need not
participate (vocally/legislatively) to be involved. In fact, involvement for the majority of
Americans is not active, but rather is best described as a "political experience" (Green, 50) based
on watching, spectating. It is the experience of this "ocular force" (Green, 133, 139, 148, 154)
that Green analyzes in The Eyes of the People.
One of the more illuminating aspects of this book is Green’s method. To analyze
experience is, of course, phenomenology, and analyzing human experience in its average
everydayness was exactly the task Heidegger proposed and pursued in his Being and Time.
Whether called phenomenological hermeneutics, the existential analytic, or ontology, Green is to
be congratulated for reminding (or even alerting) our discipline of the fruits this method can
yield, even when brought to bear on a topic as well-worn as democratic theory. The effort to put
forth an "ontology of popular power" (Green, 65) that actually comports with the
"phenomenology of the democratic experience" (Green, 7), or with the "phenomenology of
everyday political life" (Green, 31), is no easy task and can often fall on deaf ears. We might, as
Zarathustra says, have to "first batter their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes" (Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue).
The reason Green’s effort might fall on deaf ears is the seemingly absurd idea that "the
People’s gaze represents an empowered form of vision" (Green, 128). The claim is redolent of a
passage in The Literal Meaning of Genesis where Augustine says that "the shaft of rays from our
4 eyes, to be sure, is a shaft of light. It can be pulled in when we focus on what is near our eyes and
sent forth when we fix on objects at a distance."3 There is, it seems, for both Augustine and
Green a kind of power that shoots out of the eye onto the object observed. In terms of science, of
course, this is absurd. The eye receives the light. The eye is dependent on light. One might even
say that the object observed rules the eye. Factually speaking, to claim that the eye, or the
People’s gaze, has a power of its own is absurd.
Green’s method, however, is not factual. Rather than pointing out the risibility of
Augustine’s claim, Green’s approach asks what more can be said about the power of the eye.
Take, for example, two statements describing a situation: i) "The mother is watching her child
play with her food," and ii) "The mother is glaring at her child her child playing with her food."
The statements are not merely describing different psychological states on the part of the mother.
From a strictly empirical standpoint, there is no difference between the two statements. For the
child, however, because of her relationship with her mother, the difference is glaring. The shaft
of rays from her mother’s eyes—though they are factually nothing—are meaningful. The power
of the mother’s glare is not nothing. One can speak meaningfully about an "ocular force."
What needs to be determined is whether one can talk meaningfully about this ocular
power in political life, for this is the central claim of Green’s book.4 For the sake of illustration,
let me return to the power of the mother’s eye, which, I suppose, we could also call the "stink
eye," the "dirty look." When a mother shoots a look at a child, the child need not reason through
the look. Between looker and lookee, there is a precognitive, practical understanding. Nothing is
said, and the child understands this nothing-said. Moreover, they are face to face. They are in an
I-and-thou situation—one on one. In the plebiscitary politics Green espouses, a political leader is
the lookee, the people the lookers. Yet the situation is quite different: first, it is not a one on one
situation; second, it is not clear that the lookee is in a position to be struck by the shaft of rays, so
to speak (and this is certainly so if the leader is on TV); and third, one wonders if its possible for
a leader and the people to have a precognitive, practical understanding of one another.
In terms of the lookee, The Eyes of the People is very helpful. Green’s evocation of
candor puts the lookee in a position to be struck by ocular power. Leadership debates (Green,
182), investigations and trials (Green, 187), and presidential press conferences (Green, 194) all
situate the lookee in the ocular firing range. Presumably these are publicly aired so that the
leader, perhaps through the blogosphere or opinion polls, can be attuned to what Heidegger calls
"the mood" (Stimmung) that envelopes the looker and lookee. If not publicly available, the leader
is only confronted by the gaze of other debaters, or the elite of the press corps—which hardly
constitute "The People." Candor, we might say, lets the "mood assail" (Heidegger, Being and
3
Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (New York, N.Y.: Newman Press, 1982), 37-38. Augustine continues:
"When [the ray] is pulled in, it does not altogether stop seeing distant objects, although, of course, it sees them more
obscurely than when it focuses its gaze upon them. Nevertheless, the light which is in the eye, according to
authoritative opinion, is so slight that without the help of light from outside we should be able to see nothing."
4
Green’s claim is that not only can we talk meaningfully about it, but that we ought to, lest the vocal model
continue to predominate, which creates "a danger of overly ambitious civic ideals unintentionally disrespecting the
ordinary citizen in real-world democracy" (Green, 48).
5 Time, 129). Forced to be candid, the leader must also have a precognitive, practical
understanding of her speech and deeds, lest she provoke the "second sight," of The People, as
Homer calls it.5
Less clear in The Eyes of the People, however, is how the ocular power of the People
manifests. While easy enough to imagine the gaze of a mother making a child shrink back, it is
more difficult to envision the ocular power of 300 million people. For the individual, Green hints
at the phenomenological power: individuals can discern whether a leader’s appearance is
meaningful; without candor, no meaning can be espied. Green, however, hints that there is
something more to collective ocular power. His ocular model, after all, aspires to elevate the
voiceless voice of The People to "a meaningful concept of a collective identity within
contemporary political life" (Green, 27). Yet the reader is left wondering how the collective
ocular power is enkindled? In other words, can we speak meaningfully about the power of the
collective gaze?
Let me put this analogous terms. A person has voice. She can speak, she can vote, she
can shout, she can sing. As a singer, she can sing a solo and make herself heard. But she can also
join a choir. The choir is not just 40 voices simultaneously singing. They come together to form
something more than 40 soloists. At mass, the choir fills the cathedral with more-than-ness. A
good choir does more than merely send vibrations through the air. Thus, in asking whether we
can speak meaningfully of the power of the collective gaze, I am asking if there might be such a
thing as a "gaze-choir"?6 Is there this kind of ocular more-than-ness in The Eyes of the People?
In other words, if Joshua and his people can shout down the walls of Jericho, how might The
People coalesce such that they can stare down walls with their ocular power?
A final related point. Even if there is such a thing as a gaze-choir, what might happen to
the ocular power of the people should one or two voices sing out of tune. The mother’s look, for
example, might well lose its power if the father, watching the same child play with her food,
looks on approvingly. In other words, if the eye of the people is not univocal, what then? If,
politically speaking, we turn to the gaze of the people to keep the powers that be in check, what
if our gaze, our opsis, is out of tune? My fear is that it will become a collective auto-opsis, an
autopsy.
III. “Seeing-being seen”: A Reply to Green
Lars Tønder, Northwestern University
The chiasm, reversibility, is the idea that every perception is doubled with a
counter-perception…, is an act with two faces, one no longer knows who speaks
5
"Stand up, try you your eyes, for mine hold with the second sight" (Iliad, 414).
One is reminded of the Greek roots of choir, choros and the power of the choros in Greek tragedy, especially as
envisioned by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.
6
6 and who listens. Speaking-listening, seeing-being seen, perceiving-being
perceived circularity…Activity = passivity. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty7
Jeffrey E. Green’s The Eyes of the People is a significant contribution, which implores
contemporary democratic theory to consider the increased importance of visual media in politics.
Sympathetic to such a project, I want here to examine what I take to be the central assumption
behind Green’s challenge to contemporary democratic theory—the assumption that the power of
vision, like the form of spectatorship it generates, is passive, and as such parallels, even enforces,
the plebiscitary model of “being-ruled” in which the People is empowered through unscripted
opportunities for “supervision” and “inspection” (Green, 134). Whether or not one is swayed by
the claim that democracy has shifted from a model based on “voice” to a model based on
“vision”—and whether or not one agrees that the answer to this shift is a plebiscitary democracy
based on the norm of “candor”—one might still want to ask whether this is the kind of
empowerment that follows from a politics based on vision rather than on voice. Is it right to say
that vision “does not realize itself in terms of active participation” (Green, 37), or does such an
account elide how the eye participates in what it sees, engendering a mode of empowerment that,
as suggested by Merleau-Ponty in the epigraph cited above, makes it difficult to distinguish
between who is “seeing” (and thus who is “ruling”) and who is “being-seen” (and thus who is
“being-ruled”)?8 My suspicion is that the answer is closer to the latter than the former, and that
the consequence is a different set of challenges and possibilities than the ones anticipated by
Green. If our goal is to embrace the role of vision in contemporary politics, then we may also
have to shift the analysis of visual empowerment to a different model than the one proposed.
Rather than privileging “supervision” and “inspection”—terms which imply a strict demarcation
of “seeing”/“ruling” and “being-seen”/“being-ruled”—what is needed is a supplement
foregrounding the chiasmic terms implied by Merleau-Ponty’s analysis: framing, mediation, and
circulation.
To illustrate the stakes of conceptualizing the power of vision in one way rather than
another, consider Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a play Green sees as “remarkable” because it links
the “central meaning of plebiscitary democracy” to the “empowerment of the People in its
capacity as spectator” (Green, 131). The play’s attention to plebiscitary power and spectatorship
is particularly evident in the second act where Coriolanus, elected by the Roman Senate to
become the next Consul, must appear publicly in the “gown of humility” (II.iii.41) so as to
please the People. If I understand Green right, this sequence of events is uniquely democratic
7
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The visible and the invisible; followed by working notes (Evanston
[Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 264, emphasis in original.
8
Green’s claim that the power of vision is passive rather than active follows from the argument that sight, together
with hearing, are “passive organs of sense…that typify the modern experience of being-ruled” (Green, 40).
Emphasizing its reactive nature, Green specifies the kind of empowerment embedded in the experience of “beingruled” in terms of the gaze: “It is the gaze—that hierarchical form of visualization that inspects, observes, and
achieves surveillance—that functions as the chief organ of popular empowerment under the ocular model” (Green,
9).
7 because it assumes the power of the People, which then is developed in the third act of the play
where the People benefits from “the spontaneous and unscripted appeal of a historical individual
under conditions of pressure and intensity” (Green, 137). Missing from Green’s reading,
however, is an analysis of the broader context which delimits Coriolanus’ initial appearance. In
the first scene of the second act, for example, we learn that Coriolanus must appear publicly
because he is expected to show, “as is manner, his wounds” to the people (II.i.261; my
emphasis). Later, in second scene, when Coriolanus expresses his reluctance to follow the script,
two of the tribunes state that he has no choice because the People desires a “jot of ceremony”,
and because all Consuls must adhere “to the custom” (II.ii.166, 168; my emphases). And finally,
right before Coriolanus solicits votes from a smaller group of plebeians, the play characterizes
the power of the People as a “no power to do,” which, as one citizen says, creates the expectation
that if Coriolanus indeed shows his wounds, “we are to put out tongues into those wounds and
speak for them” (II.iii.5–8). The expectation defines the plot of what follows: “Ingratitude is
monstrous, and for the multitude to be grateful were to make a monster of the multitude, of the
which, we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members” (II.iii.10–13).
At stake here is something more and indeed different than suggested by Green’s model of
visual empowerment. Rather than simply depicting a situation in which one entity (“the People”)
inspects another (“the leader”), the play can also be read as suggesting a mode of empowerment
that exceeds the unscripted candor Green associates with good plebiscitary democracy. As
Shakespeare’s play depicts it, the relationship between political leaders and the People is
concurrently framed as a matter of customs; mediated through context-specific ceremonial
processions; and circulated through a shared medium that is neither wholly unscripted nor
completely spontaneous—the flesh of Coriolanus’ wounds. Which of these processes comes first
may be impossible to say, and might even be irrelevant to the discussion of empowerment. If
empowerment is the ability to act in a given context, then this ability must always be understood
in relation to the most general of all force fields, even if this, in the context of our discussion,
means straddling the line between the visible and the invisible—between that which
simultaneously clarifies and obscures any given appearance. Green’s model of empowerment
does not ignore this concern, but, as suggested by the reading of Coriolanus, tends to leave it
untouched, redoubling the blindness that defines all perceptions of self, other, and world. What is
suggested by Green’s model of empowerment may thus be something less than an analysis of the
politicality embedded in the power of vision. Rather than training our eyes to look for the
liminal, however imperceptible it may seem, Green’s model appears so fixated on the seen that it
disavows its own blind spot, thereby limiting a critical examination of how all terms of
empowerment, including candor, are subject to framing, mediation, and circulation.
In addition to acknowledging the politicality of vision, a critical examination of these
terms is also needed to better see how the relationship between seer/ruler and seen/ruled flips
back and forth, and thus how the empowerment of both is more intimately linked than
acknowledged by Green’s model. In Shakespeare’s play, the term for this intimacy is, as I
already suggested, the wound inflected on Coriolanus during the campaign against the Volscian
8 army. Although a modern reader might think that the wound is too private to be shared, this is
not the case in Shakespeare’s play. Here the wound plays a spectral role that links the fate of
Coriolanus to the fate of the People (and vice-versa). The effect of Coriolanus sharing his wound
with the People is not simply one of exposure and vulnerability, but also, and perhaps more
importantly, one of creating the medium needed for each side to “see” and “be seen” by the
other. As Shakespeare’s play makes evident, the medium is neither fixed nor transparent: the
wound is seen, but only from a distance, and only through a cloud of expectations and rumors.
When one citizen says that “we are to put out tongues into those wounds and speak for them,”
Shakespeare might therefore mean to suggest something similar to a chiasmic relationship where
both sides “see” and “are seen,” and where each side is shot through with the spectral presence of
the other. Absent established customs and ceremonies (which are themselves open for
negotiation and change), the politics of empowerment is thus different from the one assumed by
Green’s model. Since neither “the People” nor “the leader” is ever at one with itself, the
operating assumption cannot be one of two predefined entities placed within a hierarchy that
affords more or less candid opportunities for supervision and inspection. Not only does such an
assumption obscure the politicality of vision, it neutralizes the reversibility of “seer” and “seen,”
“ruler” and “ruled,” diminishing the power of the spectator who is just as active (or passive) as
the one occupying the center of the spectacle.
Given these reservations, how might contemporary democratic theory then approach and
mobilize the power of vision? As already indicated, one option goes through the work of
Merleau-Ponty. Augmenting the participatory elements of Green’s model, foregrounding a
framework closer to Shakespeare’s account of the wound, Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to
the background conditions important for the power of vision as well as to the relationship
between the one occupying the center of the spectacle (“the leader”) and the one seeing the
spectacle (“the People”).9 Merleau-Ponty’s model of empowerment develops this relationship
along three insights: (1) the power of vision is defined through, and not prior to, the process of
spectating; (2) the power of vision is enabled by the visual frames and affective contexts that
constitute the backdrop of spectating; and (3) within this backdrop, the power of vision is a twoway process to which both sides contribute. The spectator, one might say, is complicit in what
s/he sees, even when s/he participates in so-called passive spectatorship. Merleau-Ponty
emphasizes the latter in a discussion of a painting by Cezanne: the spectator of the painting,
Merleau-Ponty says, is “reached” by it, and then “resumes in his own way the meaning of the
gesture through which it was made.”10
9
Among the many thinkers discussed in The Eyes of the People, Foucault and Sartre are closest to Merleau-Ponty.
Like Foucault and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty develops his argument through an engagement with the tradition of
phenomenology in which vision (or perception) is paramount to the conceptualization of lived experience. Unlike
Foucault and Sartre, however, Merleau-Ponty does not see the power of vision as one-directional or tied exclusively
to a form of surveillance, but seeks instead to disclose its incompleteness and complicity with the unseen. For
Merleau-Ponty, one might say, vision is always-already pluralistic as it discloses the world in this or that way.
10
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Evanston,: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 55.
9 Both the challenges and the possibilities embedded in the power of vision change once
we look at it through the lens of Merleau-Ponty. Most obvious is how Merleau-Ponty encourages
us to attend to the historical specificity of spectacle-formation, and thus to how the availability of
frames, media, and modes of circulation change over time in conjunction with the emergence of
new socio-cultural relations and discourses. The use of Shakespeare for the purposes of
conceptualizing the norms of contemporary democracy may here be limited, however way we
read his plays. Indeed, although Shakespeare’s regime of visibility resembles a chiasmatic mode
of subjectivity that historically has been associated with the camera obscura—an optical device
that allows the spectator to observe and participate simultaneously in the power of vision—the
difference between Shakespeare’s age and ours is that the production of images now is put into
motion through movies and digital media screened on personal devices such as computers and
smart phones.11 By chopping up the visible into discrete images, and then reassembling these
images in ways that do not always track chronological time, contemporary techniques of
framing, mediation, and circulation suggest that the power of vision has moved from an ideal
based on authentic representation towards an ideal based on creative discontinuity. If this is the
case, then the challenge for contemporary democratic politics may no longer be how to empower
candid, unscripted events such as the ones envisioned by Green, simply because the regime in
which they occur does not recognize them as either candid or unscripted. The challenge, we
might say, is less how to contain the power of vision, and more how to mobilize it in ways that
can augment as well as pluralize the freedom associated with techniques of creative
discontinuity.
It is in the context of this challenge that a chiasmic conceptualization of the relationship
between “seer”/“ruler” and “being-seen”/“being-ruled” can help unearth new, more participatory
possibilities for democratic empowerment. While Green is right to emphasize a decreased degree
of participation in terms of electoral voting and social activism, we need not conclude that new
forms of empowerment should envision themselves as exclusively, or even primarily, reactive
vis-à-vis the powers that be. As Davide Panagia recently has argued, the possibilities for
democratic empowerment rest precisely in the chopping up of images, which characterizes the
current regime that frames the power of vision—what Panagia calls “the stochastic serialization
of moving images.”12 Although the abrupt nature of the moving image does not guarantee more
democracy, as if one could ever reduce democracy to something measurable, it can be mobilized
in ways, which may not be strictly autonomous in the manner developed by neo-Kantian
democratic theory, but also do not limit themselves to inspection and supervision. Consider for
example the spectacles surrounding movements such as Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring.
Despite differences in local contexts, the spectacles associated with these movements could be
read as exploiting contemporary techniques of framing, mediation, and circulation to create
counter-images that invites the spectator into the frame as an active participant. Exposing the
11
On the camera obscura and its importance for visual culture, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on
Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), esp. Chapter 3),
12
Davide Panagia, "Why Film Matters to Political Theory," Contemporary Political Theory 11 (2012).
10 limits of government is part of this invitation, but so is the desire to exploit the gaps latent in the
existing series of images. A ballerina on Wall Street’s “Charging Bull,” or the carnivalesque
celebrations at Tariq Square in Cairo—these images do more than subjecting governments to
inspection and supervision: they mobilize the power of vision to actively displace the present in
favor of a different future.
I conclude by noting a fundamental agreement with Green: Given the increased
importance of visual media in contemporary politics, it is imperative that democratic theorists
take up the task of theorizing the power of vision. As I have suggested here, such theorization
may benefit from an engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s model of empowerment, one that
supplements Green’s concern for reactive forms of inspection and supervision with attention to
chiasmic terms such as framing, mediation, and circulation.
IV. Neither Blind, nor Mute: Why the People Shouldn't Give up on the Voice
Hélène Landemore, Yale University
While Jeffrey Green’s theory of “plebiscitary democracy” uniquely captures citizens’
experience of representative democracy in the modern age as a chronic lack of voice and genuine
sense of self-rule, it is not clear how this experience can be celebrated as normatively appealing,
even when sublimated as an empowered “gaze” or as the corresponding political ideal, in
leaders, of “candor” (i.e., the requirement that leaders not be in control of the conditions of their
public appearances). In other words, the descriptive and critical-diagnostic ambition of Green’s
plebiscitary democracy trumps its value as the normative ideal it aspires to be. In the following,
after elaborating on this main thesis, I offer some additional comments on where I think the book
oversells its undeniable achievement.13
Let me start by my external critique. Green is very much correct in pointing out that past
and contemporary democratic theorists’ exclusive focus on the “voice” of citizens—that is,
citizens’ ability to actively shape and even directly make collective decisions—masks the reality
of today’s mostly passive, apathetic, and powerless citizenship. In the age of mass and thus
necessarily representative democracy, it is no longer true that democracy is an experiment in
self-rule. It is, instead, an experiment in spectatorship. To the extent that it is descriptively
accurate, Green’s diagnosis is also a legitimate critique of much of contemporary democratic
theory as anachronistic, when it looks back to Athens, or too utopian, when it looks for example
to participation and deliberation on a mass scale.
Yet it is problematic to rationalize, if not romanticize altogether, the passive stance of
contemporary citizens as the nobler activity of “watching.” Similarly, it seems to me problematic
to suggest that citizens’ contemporary lack of autonomy can be dignified as a form of democratic
control, so long as they are given the opportunity of witnessing politicians’ occasional slip-ups
13
In this review, I rehearse some critical elements an earlier review of Green’s book Hélène Landemore, "The Eyes
of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship, by Jeffrey Edward Green," Political Communication 28
(2011).
11 on TV. While this is probably not Green’s intention, his rejection of the vocal model of
democracy and his defense, instead, of a new ocular model risks coming across as political
theory in a “sour grapes” mode. Since we can’t have a voice, let us pretend it is not all that
relevant or useful to begin with, and celebrate what we have instead, e.g., tickets to presidential
inaugurations where we can watch and gaze upon officials put in a position of “candor” (as per
the striking book cover, which features an anonymous crowd facing away from the viewer
towards the looming figure of Obama on large TV screens). If many participatory and
deliberative democratic theorists are guilty of excessive utopianism, Green’s own sin might be an
unusual mix of pessimism—we can’t hope to go much beyond representative institutions as we
know them—and naivety—we should trust that these same institutions can ensure sufficient
sincerity and spontaneity in our representatives.
To be fair, Green preempts many of these criticisms by embracing them as so many
badges of honor. Thus, he bravely reclaims pessimism and realism as the landmark features of
what he calls a new “Machiavellianism for the people.” As Green puts it, “I admit that these
charges are true: that a politics of candor is in fact imbued with a spirit of pessimism—or, as it is
often called, a spirit of realism and, in particular, a willingness to lower political purposes out of
respect for obstacles and difficulties that are deemed unnavigable” (p. 24). It is not the least
admirable aspect of Green’s book that it does not shy away from unpopular positions and is
willing to bite a number of bullets for the sake of consistency, resulting in a political theory that
is profoundly original and even, one is tempted to add, unfashionable or untimely in the
Nietzschean sense (this is meant as high praise).
Green also puts forward various reforms of representative institutions meant to increase
leaders’ candor. These reforms apply in areas that classical participatory and deliberative
democrats find of rather peripheral interest, such as presidential debates (which Green would
turn into cross-examination by candidates themselves in front of a mute audience), public
inquiries (which Green wants to routinize and divest of liability) and press conferences (which
should put the president himself on the spot, not his press secretary, a function that Green wants
to abolish entirely as one too many screens between the leader and the people). The goal of these
reforms, limited and admittedly more feasible than many deliberative and participatory schemes,
is to make sure that while citizens’ lack of voice within representative institutions as we know
them remains unchanged, the power of their gaze is increased. Green’s political theory is thus
pessimistic/realistic but not fatalist. Not much can be done to empower citizens’ voice but there
are some options when it comes to their ocular control.
Yet, even if one grants that the strength of the book is in its realism, I would still argue
that Green is not taking seriously enough new experiments in deliberative and participatory
democracy that have outgrown the utopian stage and have increased the theory’s credibility.
Green’s silence on that front may be due to his implicit focus on the U.S. context, where it is
hard to disagree that representative institutions have grown stale and too little institutional
imagination is at play, at least at the federal level (and notwithstanding a few efforts by the latest
administration mentioned below). Even so, a quick overview of the most obvious examples
12 shows this lacuna to be unwarranted: James Fishkin’s Deliberative Polls, conducted with
remarkable success across the globe, both at the local and national level, have given voice to
hundreds of citizens, randomly selected from the citizenry at large.14 Citizens’ Assemblies
similarly empower hundreds of quasi-randomly selected participants to come up with various
reform proposals that can be put to a national referendum and, in some cases, have been
conducive to important political changes bypassing regular elites.15 It might be objected that in
mass democracies such as the United States, the odds of being selected for such empowering
experiments are slim, as they involve at best a few hundred participants at a time. But consider
then Participatory Budgeting, which directly involves thousands of self-selected citizens in
budgetary decisions at the local and national level.16 Since its first implementation in Porto
Allegre in 1989, this form of direct democracy has become a normalized practice in Brazil,
where it has been developed over the last twenty years, and is now implemented in many
countries in the world (including, as of last Spring, several New York boroughs17). This form of
participation is not without its problems (one being representativeness) but, where offered,
genuinely allows citizens to go beyond spectatorship.
Green’s book also does not seem to measure fully the impact of (arguably) the greatest
technology break since print, namely the internet. Whereas TV and the radio, the technologies
seemingly shaping Green’s epistemological assumptions, allow only unidirectional
communication flows, the internet enables two-way exchanges, vertically between leaders and
their base, and horizontally between citizens themselves, who no longer need be united solely in
a silent gaze over their leaders but can commune in the interactive experience of deliberative
exchanges and the possibility of collective action and decision making of a new kind. At the
local level for example, small but significant forms of empowerment are now possible with
websites like seeclickfix.com, which allow anyone to register a problem observed in a given
neighborhood—whether a broken lamp post, an overflowing trash bin, or drug dealing on a street
corner—and notify relevant authorities, petition for their intervention, and even make
suggestions as to how to fix the problem. At the national level, initiatives like the Open
Government project launched by the Obama administration, including for example a program
called Peer-to-Patent, enabled self-selected citizens to volunteer their knowledge to increase the
efficiency of governmental agencies (e.g., the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office).18 No matter
how flawed their current implementation may currently be, such experiments seem like a step in
the right direction. On an even more ambitious level, Iceland has been engaged in the first
14
James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
15
See for example, Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse, Designing Deliberative Democracy: the British Columbia
Citizens' Assembly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
16
See for example this report by the World Bank for a review:
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/PSGLP/Resources/ParticipatoryBudgeting.pdf
17
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/nyregion/for-some-new-yorkers-a-grand-experiment-in-participatorybudgeting.html?pagewanted=all
18
Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger,
and Citizens more Powerful (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009).
13 attempt ever at crowd-sourcing the rewriting of its very constitution, by involving the entire
citizenry, via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, in the work of an elected commission
on a new draft soon to be put to a referendum. While Iceland is a small country, there is no
reason to believe that a similar experiment couldn’t be scaled up to empower the voice of
millions of citizens.
Today’s technologies, it should be pointed out, allow both for a stronger gaze and a
louder voice so that the choice need not be between either Green’s solution or deliberative and
participatory democrats’. For example, the omnipresence of cell phone cameras, combined with
the existence of YouTube as a universal video platform, puts officials under a constant
microscope, enforcing on them the norm of candor usefully theorized by Green. But these new
technologies also make it possible for more classical forms of vocal empowerment to be
reconquered and new ones to be invented. Contrary to what Green often seems to suggest, one
should thus be able to embrace the norm of candor without having to reject that of autonomy as
self-rule.
I would also suggest that the important distinction between participation and political
involvement recovered by Green can be used to support a more active model of citizenship.
Whereas political participation refers to active political engagement (voting, giving money to
candidates, campaigning, writing petitions, running for office, serving in government), political
involvement simply refers to an awareness of political issues and problems and a general interest
in them. Green points out that low participation is compatible with a high level of political
involvement, a subtle point that Green’s ocular model makes much more of than existing
political theory. Political involvement in the age of the internet, however, can be tapped in ways
it could not be in the age of the TV and radio and turned into, if not participation in the old sense,
collaborative problem solving and decision making of a new kind. Even classical political
activities—sit-ins, demonstrations, organizations of collectives, and so forth—can arguably
benefit from the availability of civic energies liberated by new technologies. In the end, even if
Green is right that deliberative and participatory democracy on a mass scale still remains hard to
envision and even if we are still far from anything as radical as the proponents of e-democracy
hope, my point is that the public need not, and indeed should absolutely not, content itself with
spectatorship alone.
Let me end on a more internal critique, if only to give an opportunity to the author to
clarify an important ambiguity. It remains unclear to me whether the ocular model of democracy
is meant to replace the vocal one entirely and if not, in what relationship to the vocal model it is
then supposed to stand, given the various displacements required by it (in terms of
conceptualization of the locus and expression of popular sovereignty in particular). As a
replacement for the vocal model, the ocular model is inadequate for an essential reason, which is
that the gaze, no matter how empowered, is still dependent on the voice. This concession is made
early in the book when Green admits that “the gaze is best understood as the reflection of a
power that has its base in some nonocular terrain ... (such as elections)” (p. 11). In other words,
the gaze has power only to the extent that it is accompanied by some form of actual physical or
14 vocal control—the existence of periodic elections, the rule of law, the coercion of the state, and
so forth. Despite this initial concession, though, the rest of the book sometimes proceeds as if it
did not matter and the gaze was sufficient to found a new conception of popular sovereignty.
This, of course, is implausible. Consider Tunisia and Egypt—countries where, prior to the
revolutions, there were none of the institutions of a real, functioning “vocal” democracy. No
amount of gaze would have been sufficient, there, to tame the leaders. In the end, it took the
actual physical gathering of people in public squares, the growling and furious sounds of the
crowd, their voice and not just their gaze, to push tyrants away and regain some control. If it is
the case that the gaze ultimately remains dependent on the voice, then I wonder if some of
Green’s concepts and reform proposals could not be helpfully enrolled to re-energize the vocal
model of democracy from within, rather than question and unsettle it from without, to give back
to the people both their voice and their sight.
V. Watching the Burkean Trustee and Internet Politics through the Lens of Jeffrey Green's
The Eyes of the People
Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame
In 1774, the Member of the British House of Commons, Edmund Burke, gave a speech to
his electors at Bristol, in which he defended his famous conception of the representative as a
trustee of the people, not a delegate or mouthpiece for their will, preferences, or interests. He
concluded his speech with a deliberately ironic bit of flattery to his electors, claiming: "Your
faithful friend, your devoted servant, I shall be to the end of my life: a flatterer you do not wish
for."19 In this concept of the representative as a "friend," not a "flatterer" of the people, and as an
expert judge of the people's interests, not a virtual or presumed mouthpiece for the people's
voice, Burke to some degree anticipated the philosophical and political debates that preoccupy
Jeffrey Green in his excellent new addition to contemporary scholarship on theories of popular
representation and plebiscitary democracy.
Just as Burke argued that he, as a Member of Parliament, was not bound to try to "flatter"
the people by attempting to replicate, channel, or otherwise reproduce their preferences in his
work as their representative, Green argues that representative democracy should not be
understood as a "telephone line" between electors and the elected, by which the "vaporous" voice
of the people is mysteriously carried through to their elected legislators and executives (Green,
115). Rather, Green argues that representative democracy is better understood according to a
fresh political metaphor: the eyes of the people.
He contends that we should think of
democracy in ocular terms—as a process by which we, the people, serve as spectators of our
representatives, keeping them accountable by making them feel watched. Similarly to Green and
other plebiscitary theorists of democracy, Burke's trustee model began with the premise of the
impossibility of realizing the popular voice or will through the representative legislative process.
19
Edmond Burke, "Speech on Being Elected to Bristol in 1774" in Speeches of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke,
ed. James Burke (Dublin: James Duffy, 1853a), 130.
15 With a profound irony that only a colonized Irishman in the British Parliament could
exhibit, Burke's 1774 speech to his electors in Bristol suggested that any attempt to serve as their
mouthpiece would be nothing but flattery, since it was not possible to capture and transmit their
preferences as a cohesive whole. Yet he could rationally discern—in concert with other expert
and moral parliamentarians—what was best for his nation and the people of his district, then
legitimately act on it: "Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that
of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good
resulting from the general reason of the whole."20 He flattered them, nonetheless, in asking them
permission to be their trustee—even after they had elected him.
This political performance on the part of Burke—the ironic spectacle of asking his people
permission to let him do what he thought right for the nation as their legislative representative,
because of their inability to relay the common good to him and his inability to aggregate their
diverse preferences into a conception of the rational good of the whole—illustrates some of the
fascinating moral and political problems that Green's book addresses. If representative
democracy is not about representing the voice of the people, then what is the function of
representatives and the represented in democracy? Under the Burkean view, and, as I read it, in
Green's view, the function of representatives is to act and perform in a spectacle of democratic
politics. The function of the people is to serve as spectators, whose peering and seemingly
omniscient eyes quietly threaten and disrupt the actors, making them ad-lib on the political stage.
Indeed, the eyes of the electors seemed to occasion Burke's candor, as well as his ultimate sense
of accountability to Bristol. His ironic yet cocky candor with his electors in 1774 led him to react
to their displeasure with his trustee model of representation by refraining from running for MP of
their city in 1780.21 Even then, his speech in declining the nomination reinforced his selfrepresentation as a trustee not needing to fully survey the will of the people: "I have not
canvassed the whole of this city in form. But I have taken such a view of it as satisfies my own
mind that your choice will not ultimately fall upon me."22
Burke's 1774 speech to his electors at Bristol had projected his legitimacy as a trustee:
"You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but
he is a member of parliament."23 Yet he also aware of the precarious character of this legitimacy
and the authority it gave him. Burke's sense of double-consciousness—as a colonized Irishman
and an assimilated British politician—made him all too aware of how this power could be
wrested from him at any moment.24 This insecurity may have driven his lofty rhetorical appeals
to divine providence as a justification of his trusteeship. He portrayed his "mature judgment" and
"enlightened conscience" as "a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply
answerable."25 The election of 1780, when Burke felt compelled to withdraw his candidacy for
the Bristol seat in favor of Malton, indicates the fragility of these appeals to his divinely
sanctioned authority and elite political wisdom. Burke's long-term failure to convincingly
20
Burke, "Speech on Being Elected to Bristol in 1774", 130.
G. E. Weare, Edmund Burke's Connection with Bristol (Bristol: W. Bennett, 1894), 153-63.
22
Edmond Burke, "Speech on Taking Leave of the Electors at Bristol" in Speeches of the Right Honorable Edmund
Burke, ed. James Burke (Dublin: James Duffy, 1853b), 168.
23
Burke, "Speech on Being Elected to Bristol in 1774", 130.
24
Terry Eagleton conceptualizes this kind of colonial political predicament as a "Joycean irony," or "establishing
one's Irish identity by reference to a European capital." (Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism: Irony and Commitment" in
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 24).
25
Burke, "Speech on Being Elected to Bristol in 1774", 130.
21
16 perform as a trustee for the people of Bristol begs us to ask: what do his political mistakes teach
us about the enduring applicability of the concept of democracy as an ironic spectacle?
In the context of the modern media, where we, the people, tend to receive our political
information through viewing of carefully staged and scripted news programs on television or
YouTube videos shared in our online social networks, perhaps ocular democracy is better
conceived as a kind of watching rather than a kind of spectatorship. In Shakespeare's Globe
theatre, where the audience was famously interactive with the actors, or even in Burke's meeting
hall in Bristol, where the candidate felt compelled to flatter the electors despite his pretense to
the opposite, the relationship between spectator and spectated was dialectical: each was
responsive to the actions, or expected actions, of the other. In modern media, especially since the
internet has come to dominate it, we, the people, do not spectate in this interactive or dialectical
sense so much as we watch in a more passive, distant, yet eerily all-knowing sense.
No longer does the elite Burkean trustee have the God's-eye view in democratic politics,
but rather we, the people, have usurped the God's eye view through the diffusion of our "eyes"
via the modern media. Whereas the panopticon of Bentham's prison was directed toward the
inward, all-seeing, all-knowing surveillance of the inmates within its walls, the panopticon of our
time has inverted itself, turning outward, marshaling the power of the internet to empower us to
watch our politicians, or at least make them always "feel like" someone is watching them. As
Weber, Key, and Schumpeter theorized, we may not be able to convey our will via our
representatives, but we can retrospectively judge their political performances, and periodically
"vote the bums out" in the market economy of electoral competition (Green, 112-177).
This brings me to a friendly question for Green, which is, does it matter that we actually
watch our politicians? Or is the threat of watching them enough to keep them on their
metaphorical toes? In practical terms, the spread of internet-based media seems to have made us
potential or hypothetical watchers, rather than actual watchers. We, the people, appear to be one
step further removed from ideal models of robust democratic participation.
Recent Internet trends such as the controversial yet incredibly popular short film "Kony
2012" illustrate how the modern media can encourage a kind of passive watching and simplistic
reception of complex political problems. "Kony 2012" was produced by the organization
Invisible Children, which seeks to raise awareness and visibility of the problem of the Lord's
Resistance Army's forcible impressment of children as soldiers in its past two decades of armed
conflict in eastern and central Africa.26 Although the film is fairly sophisticated in its deliberate
manipulation of ideas and images of internet social networking, popular awareness, and political
theatricality to raise consciousness of these crimes against children, the 30-minute internet video
has been trenchantly critiqued by non-Western and Western commentators alike for failing to
communicate the complexity of the political issues on the ground in eastern and central Africa.27
As the Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu recently wrote,
In the world of Kony 2012, Joseph Kony has evaded arrest for one dominant
reason: Those of us living in the western world haven’t known about him, and
because we haven’t known about him, no one has been able to stop him. The film
is more than just an explanation of the problem; it’s the answer as well. It’s a
26
For the original film released on 5 March 2012 and other materials related to the work of the organization
Invisible Children, see http://www.kony2012.com/.
27
See, for example, T.M.S. Ruge, "'Kony 2012' is not a Revolution," The New York Times, the Opinion Pages, 14
March 2012.
17 beautiful equation that can only work so long as we believe that nothing in the
world happens unless we know about it, and that once we do know about it,
however poorly informed and ignorant we may be, every action we take is good,
and more importantly, ‘makes a difference.’28
Mengestu's commentary on "Kony 2012" raises important questions for media-savvy democratic
theorists. In the spirit of Robert Dahl's questioning of who governs, we ought to ask: who is
watching? To whom have the oppressed been invisible, and why?29 Does the Internet make their
plight more visible, or more opaque, to the people who "watch" them or their political leaders?
In light of these questions, the new democratic culture of "watching" politics could be less a
vehicle for a cosmopolitan ethic of care, and more for an Orwellian dystopia in which our
cultural biases are reinforced by the scripts of the media. Perhaps the panopticon has inverted
itself again, turning us into the Foucaultian inhabitants of Plato's cave (Green, 246n44). We may
be watching shadows on the walls of our laptop screens, with the pleasing illusion of control that
only a click of a mouse can give.
Tying these problems together, I wonder if the political mistakes of Burke might provide
insight into how to escape this current democratic predicament of ocular passivity. Burke's
decision to publicly adopt the trustee model of representation was politically unwise. His ironic
posture provides no protection, or sympathetic regard, from the eyes of the people. They "see
through" his placating intentions and ultimately judge him as an inattentive, self-serving, and
lame duck representative of the Bristol district.
The relationship of "Kony 2012" to its Internet audience poses a set of comparable
political problems on a dramatically different stage. The opening scenes of "Kony 2012" display
an ironic self-awareness of the ways that Internet media pervades our lives, relationships, and
identities. We are shown the abstract revolving globe of the earth, from the apparently God's-eye
perspective of outer space, and asked to reflect on how social media nonetheless ties us together
across the continents. The film proceeds to argue, through the filmmaker's interviews with his
very young son and a former LRA child-soldier, that watching "Kony 2012" is in itself the
obvious starting point for solving the problem of social justice faced by the "invisible children"
of eastern and central Africa. The interviews are often poignant, but are also explicitly
sentimental and even emotionally exploitative of the audience's sense of obligation toward these
children and future generations of children. The film adopts a deliberately ironic posture toward
its own emotive appeals to global social networking and the moral insights of children.
Ultimately, the film is saying: you are being visually manipulated into caring about these
children, whom you would have already known were victims of a decades long war if you were
half as smart as the average child.
The additional, and most damaging, irony has not been lost on many a viewer: the film
neither succeeds in adopting an intercultural perspective on social justice nor in pushing forward
an authentic sense of connection between peoples across the global North and South. In April
2012, a riot at a screening of the film in Gulu—which left one person dead and many injured—
sadly captures the dangerous social consequences of the ironies of "Kony 2012." The rioters
28
Dinaw Mengestu, "Not a Click Away: Joseph Kony in the Real World," Warscapes, March 2012. See
http://www.warscapes.com/reportage/not-click-away-joseph-kony-real-world.
29
Robert Alan Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1961).
18 were angry at the film's lack of concern for the perspectives of northern Ugandan people,
especially those who had been conscripted to fight for the LRA.30
There are three main political lessons that theorists of ocular democracy may draw from
audience responses to Burke in Bristol and to "Kony 2012" around the world. First,
plebiscitarians are better off resisting the urge to acknowledge the ironies of their advocacy and
practice of representative democracy, especially when playing a leadership role. Second,
democratic audiences might take advantage of the critical opportunities presented by such
blunders (or miscalculated candor) in their leaders' performances, as Green argues. Third, an
actively watching people might be developed over time by encouraging youth around the globe
to use civics education, intercultural dialogue, and social media (especially independent and
inexpensive web-based videos or podcasts) to shape critical public opinion and engagement on
questions of social justice at the national, international, and perhaps even authentically
transnational levels.
VI. Lots’a Gotcha Moments for the Deciders: Jeffrey Green’s Eyes of the People
Ruth Abbey, University of Notre Dame
My questions about The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship are
posed in the spirit of support and admiration for Jeffrey Green’s accomplishment. This is as an
excellent work of political theory: intelligent, thoughtful, and thorough, while also being
original. It is realistic and grounded, clearly written and argued, and exhibits intellectual maturity
by being honest about the limitations and lacunae of the thinkers and approaches Green admires.
As intimated in my praise for the book as realistic and grounded, I read Green as
advancing a non-ideal approach to the question of popular sovereignty. Importing terminology
from the work of John Rawls seems like an apposite way of characterizing Green’s approach. A
non-ideal theory faces squarely issues of inequality, injustice, and oppression in the political
relations of societies that espouse the goods of equality, respect, fairness, and freedom for all.
This non-ideal approach is manifested in Green’s insistence that the modern conditions of mass
democracy threaten the idea of equality and self-rule in contemporary democratic societies:
"Exclusion and the spectatorship it engenders are fundamental to the contemporary experience of
democracy" (Green, 68, cf. 29-30, 47). He further insists that democratic theory has a duty to
take this condition seriously and not remain in the clouds of ideal theory by simply articulating
ideals and models that can never be realized. "Political philosophy of a democratic stamp has a
special obligation to develop political principles in a manner that respects the everyday structure
of political experience" (Green, 6, cf. 3-4, 16, 36-7, 47, 202).31
While facing these problems squarely, Green tries to navigate a middle course between
the Scylla of unattainable ideals and the Charybdis of disappointment and despair (7).32 He does
30
David Livingstone Okumu, Akema Moses, and Sam Lawino, "Kony 2012 Screening in Gulu Leaves One Dead
and Many Injured," Acholi Times, 16 April 2012. See http://www.acholitimes.com/index.php/8-acholi-news/154kony-2012-screening-in-gulu-leaves-one-dead-and-many-injured.
31
32
Margaret Kohn, by contrast, finds his arguments about candor utopian and unrealistic (2010: 1211).
Kohn, by contrast, reads Green as celebrating spectatorship (2010: 1211).
19 this by advancing his principle of candor, which will make the spectatorship to which most
citizens are confined more powerful. Pellucid without being pessimistic, Green’s outlook
inspires his selective reclamation of the plebiscitarian tradition of democratic thinking and his
formation of a spectatorial model of democracy (Green, 32, 129, 159).
How the two models of democracy relate
My first question comes from the suspicion that Green sometimes exaggerates the
distance and the difference between the two models of democracy he delineates. I see them as
more complementary and perhaps even symbiotic than he seems to permit. The vocal model of
democracy, which focuses on voting in elections, seems to be what gets the spectatorial model in
general, and the principle of candor in particular, going. After all, leaders care about being seen
by those who might vote for them. They have no interest in how they are seen by non-citizens,
nor even really by the large swathe of Americans who never vote.33
So the vocal model, with its emphasis on elections, seems to be prior and preconditional to the
spectatorial model, even if the spectatorial model accurately captures the way most non-leaders
participate in democratic politics most of the time. I think of the two models by analogy with a
clock face: we start at midnight (or noon) with the vocal model, which explains why elections
matter. One hand then moves slowly down and around to the number 6, and during its passage
from 12 to 6, we have the spectatorial model, which is the condition of most citizens, most of the
time (Green, 4-5, 32). But at 6:30 the vocal model reappears, because the telos of spectatorship is
the election, or some other means by which people pass judgment on leaders – such as a
referendum or recall vote. Between 6:30 and midnight (or noon) we are back to the spectatorial
model, and so on, in a revolving cycle.
Green does occasionally acknowledge this sort of interaction between the two models,
conceding that "the ocular model is not absolutely hostile to the vocal model in every case … it
may be … that ocular power is underwritten by the vocal one: that without elections, leaders
would have little obligation to make public appearances, let alone candid ones" (Green, 15, cf.
12-13). But despite the occasional nod to their connection, the overall thrust of his presentation is
to distinguish the two models. Consider, for example, his assertion that "a plebiscitary politics
grounded on the ocular ideal of candor … suggest[s] an alternative moral universe …" (Green,
19, cf. 119, 188, 210).34
33
William Scheuerman likewise observes that "at many … junctures in his analysis, ocular democracy remains
parasitic on vocal democracy" (2011: 55).
34
Kohn reads Green as urging us to embrace the "ocular" model (Margaret Kohn, "Review of The Eyes of the
People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship," Perspectives on Politics 8 (2010), 2111) which also suggests that
they are alternatives rather than complements to one another (cf. 1212). Scheuerman likewise describes Green as
arguing that the vocal model should "be supplanted by a novel ocular model of democracy" (William Scheuerman,
"Democracy as Spectator Sport: Review of The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship,"
Radical Philosophy 154 (2011), 54).
20 At times Green presents the spectatorial model as silent watching, even though the
watchers are also listeners and interpreters. He acknowledges that the watchers are also listeners
in a note appended to the first chapter (Green, 213n.2) and in his claim that "sight and hearing,
the passive organs of sense … typify the modern experience of being-ruled" (Green, 40,
emphasis in original), but the fact that audiences are listening as well as watching needs more
acknowledgement than this. The audience is also interpreting what they see and hear, which
leads me to a concern that what Green’s differentiation of the vocal from the ocular model
occludes is that both are verbal. Not only do voters ‘speak’ during elections, even if they are
listeners for most of the time between them, but even when spectating, voters are actively
making sense of the words and deeds of leaders, and this they do through language. Pace his
reference above to the passive organs of sense, spectators and auditors are not as passive as
Green makes them out to be when referring to "the passive, nonparticipatory, spectatorial nature
of everyday political life" (Green, 17, emphasis in original), and "the all-too-common passive
experience of being silent and deferring to the decision making of a select cadre of political
elites" (Green, 28, emphasis in original). He later refers to "the nonsovereign majority, silent
and passive, for whom political experience primarily consists of spectatorship" (Green, 58) and
says that "the everyday experience of politics is the passive spectatorship of the select few who
are engaged in public decision making" (Green, 61). Instead of being passive viewers and
listeners, people are actively interpreting the information they see and hear.
To the adverb actively I would add variously. Attention to the fact that viewers are not
just interpreting what they see and hear as and after they see it, but will do this differently from
one another, corrodes some of the unity Green imputes to the viewing audience in a democracy.
Different viewers and hearers will come away from performances of leaders with very different
‘take aways’ from what they just saw and heard, and these diverging impressions will influence
their next opportunity to voice their interpretations in an election. Once again, Green
acknowledges this to some extent (Green, 210), but does not drive home its full implications.
This point about diverse interpretations of the same event has repercussions for the principle of
candor, because it signals that not all viewers are going to interpret the same happening,
admission or reaction as candid. Some will see it as a gotcha moment, while others will interpret
the leader’s statement or reactions more sympathetically, depending in large part of course on
their existing political orientation and predilections.
As this indicates, partisanship and the associated cognitive biases that most people bring
to their interpretations of political events dilute the critical impact of the principle of candor.
Perhaps this principle is most apposite for that sector of the electorate that identifies itself as
independent and which might genuinely be swayed by a politician’s moment of candor. Perhaps
it is also relevant when we can control to some extent for partisanship – in a primary contest for
example – and the viewers might plump for Romney over Santorum or Clinton over Obama
because of a moment of candor on the part of one or the other. But my general point here is that
the witnessing of candor is unlikely to be a uniform experience: candor will be interpreted
differently by different parts of the electorate. And note again how easily the discussion lapses
into a concern with elections, suggesting again that the two models are not quite as separable as
Green often suggests.
21 Between Governor and Outsider
There is another way in which Green tends to overstate the unity of the spectating
audience. However his two models of popular sovereignty – the dominant vocal one and the
ocular - interact, these two models co-exist in the book with what is actually a tri-partite
distinction within the people. The first component of Green’s depiction of the democratic
citizenry comprises the leaders, deciders, or governors, who hold power temporarily but who
emerge from, and will be reabsorbed into, the electorate (Green, 32). The second is "an
intermediate position of citizenship in which there is meaningful psychological involvement with
politics, but which nevertheless does not lead to active participation in political life" (Green, 33,
cf. 35, 48, 53). The third stratum consists of the apolitical citizen who "takes little interest in
public affairs, lacks knowledge about government, has no sense of being an efficacious actor,
and either does not vote or votes without a clear sense of what is being selected" (Green, 33).
These latter two strata occupy the space "between governor and outsider" and comprise the
category of "citizen-being-ruled" (Green, 35).
Green’s political ethic is, therefore, binary but his population has three constituencies.
With two models of popular sovereignty, and three distinct sub-groups within the people, there is
a slippage internal to Green’s theory. As far as I can tell, the spectatorial model only applies to
the intermediate group. The third group of apolitical citizens are not even spectators: they come
to politics with eyes wide shut. To use another of Green’s metaphors, this group never visits the
political zoo (Green, 33). The statistics on pages 49-50 suggest that 5-10 % of the population
actively participate; 60-70 are at least minimally involved – the viewers as Green would portray
them. But that leaves between 20 and 35% of the population as not involved at all. Yet Green’s
theory has nothing to say to or about this group. They are largely invisible in his spectatorial
model. They too are citizens-being-ruled but they do not watch the rulers and so cannot,
presumably, be empowered by the increase in candor.
Yet the incompleteness of Green’s conception of the people is eclipsed by his claim that
the spectators are synonymous with the people:
a key effect of a plebiscitary account of democracy is to provide the citizen-beingruled with a larger group to which he or she can belong; namely, the People –
defined as the mass of everyday citizens understood in their collective capacity …
the People designates a political entity that might be termed the organization of
the unorganized: political spectators linked together in their shared experience of
nondecision, nonpreference, and relative subordination to political elites (Green,
62-3, emphasis in original, cf. 6).
Having nothing to say to or about this third group of apolitical citizens makes Green’s ocular
model a more partial, in the sense of incomplete, account of popular sovereignty than he ever
acknowledges. The people are all citizens-being-ruled but are not, by Green’s own admission, all
spectators. The category of ‘the people’ is broader than that of spectators. Spectatorship cannot,
22 therefore, provide the unifying thread of the people that Green repeatedly declares it can (Green,
28, 118, 178, 206). The third apolitical stratum constitutes a significant portion of the people and
should, by his own logic, be of concern to democratic theorists.
The Paradox of the People
Green’s incomplete account of the people leads me to conclude that he should separate
the phenomenon of spectatorship from his attempt to redeem in a meaningful way the category
of the people (Green, 27-28, 68, 206, 209, 68). Only some of the people are spectators, yet the
category of ‘the people’ should cover all citizens. We need either to find a more inclusive way of
portraying the people’s experience than spectatorship or admit that it is too hard to give a
phenomenology of the category of the people. This latter option leads to the bigger question of
whether non-ideal democratic theory even needs a conception of the people. I think the answer is
yes, persuaded by Charles Taylor’s argument that in order to function and prosper, democracy
needs to generate and sustain a strong sense of ‘we the people’; a robust sense of the collective
democratic decision-making body. Participants need to believe themselves to be listened to, and
heard, by their fellow citizens in order to consider their democracy legitimate.35 But the category
of ‘the people’ is and probably must remain a paradox: on the one hand, it can never be realized,
but on the other hand, it is indispensable to any critical and progressive democratic theory.36
VI. Reply to Critics
Jeffrey Edward Green, University of Pennsylvania
I am deeply grateful to the six contributors for the generosity of their critical attention. Their
comments provide an occasion for me not only to defend and clarify certain elements of The
Eyes of the People (EOP), but also to learn how many of the ideas pursued in the book might be
developed further in the future. I organize my response to their contributions around six issues:
(1) the relationship of EOP to Burke and the trustee model of representation; (2) the relationship
between the vocal and ocular models of popular empowerment; (3) the question of whether
spectatorship is as collective a phenomenon as EOP alleges; (4) the question of whether EOP
fails to account for the active, participatory potential of spectatorship and ordinary citizenship;
(5) the question of whether the People is better jettisoned than reformulated in ocular terms; and
(6) the question of how a collective gaze of numerous citizen-spectators might differ in its
function from the gaze of an isolated spectating citizen.
1. Situating EOP vis-à-vis Burke and the Trustee Model of Representation
35 See Charles Taylor, "The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion," Journal of Democracy 9 (1998), Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 36
In this sense it parallels what Judith Butler says about the universal (Judith Butler, "Restaging the Universal:
Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism" in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the
Left, ed. J.Butler, E. Laclau and S. Zizek (London: Verso, 2000)).
23 Eileen Hunt Botting appeals to Burke’s 1774 speech to the electors at Bristol to illustrate the
“moral and political problems” that EOP seeks to address. The relevance of Burke, Botting
suggests, is twofold. On the one hand, Botting’s trusteeship model of representation—in which
parliamentarians are supposed to rely on their own deliberative reflection in determining public
matters, rather than act as mere mouthpieces, or delegates, for their constituents’ preexisting
preferences—conceptualizes representation in a manner seemingly in harmony with EOP’s
strong doubts about how well ordinary citizens in contemporary mass democracies have their
collective preferences reflected in the legislative output of the state. On the other hand, Botting
appeals to the choreography of Burke’s speech—his actual appearance before an assembled
group of onlookers in a manner that, because Burke did not fully control the event, carried with it
a certain amount of political risk, uncertainty, and unpredictability—as an instance of candor as I
define the term and, also, as a form of public appearance potentially threatened in our own era
where leaders appear to us, not directly, but mediated through television and other technologies.
I share Botting’s sense of the aptness of the Burke example to the claims and concerns of EOP
and would add, only, that the example’s usefulness stems as much from how it departs from the
spirit of the book as precurses it. With regard to the first of the two points of linkage—
representation—if Burke’s trustee model is grounded, as Botting emphasizes, on the
impossibility of a legislature being able “to capture and transmit [the electorate’s] preferences as
a cohesive whole,” then Burke’s defense of trusteeship does seem to follow upon a concern very
similar to my own: the profound difficulty of even cognizing a genuine popular will for most
issues. If, however, Burke’s objection to delegation is not so much the absence of a popular will
but its inferiority to the reasoned deliberation of elite parliamentarians (a reading which seems to
follow from Burke’s objection to leaders flattering the People), then I would understand Burke’s
theory as a version of the usual conceptualization of popular power as a vocal, expressive,
legislative force waiting to be channeled into laws and policies. That Burke rejects the propriety
of such channeling does not mean that he rejects the ontological conception of the People’s
power in terms of voice—and, if he does not reject this conception, then I depart from Burke
precisely in my critical account of this prevalent ontology. Further, if Burke finds in the trustee
model a mode by which leaders might attain full legitimacy—because he thinks elected
parliamentary leaders do tend to realize policies consonant with “the general good”—this too
departs from the argument of EOP which finds in the impossibility of the delegate model of
representation one key source for why leaders in contemporary mass democracy lack full
legitimacy (another, related key source being that it never seems possible to say with full
confidence that elected representatives are in fact realizing the common good).
With respect to the second point of linkage, I agree that Burke’s speech is an excellent concrete
example of a leader’s appearance on a public stage—and I also accept Botting’s concerns that
this interactive form of appearance (where audience members could interject in real time) risks
having its critical potential neutralized by the rise of unidirectional, mediated political
communication. Botting’s distinction between the interactive spectatorship of the onlookers in
1774 and the mere watching of television viewers today underlines these worries. And, in
somewhat different terms, Botting expresses a similar apprehensiveness when she speculates
about a threefold transformation: namely, that the panoptical model whereby the few can achieve
surveillance over the many (as in Foucault’s analysis of the modern prison) has also ushered in
promising synoptical possibilities whereby the many can survey the few (e.g., the new degree to
24 which leaders are under heightened surveillance, in large part because as Hélène Landemore
points out an increasing number of ordinary citizens carry cameras with them at all times and can
easily share their recordings on a common site), there is nonetheless the real threat that what this
will lead to is citizens watching meaningless, or, worse, manipulative, spectacles of their leaders
(what Botting nicely describes as an inverted panopticon in which citizens are turned into
“Foucauldian inhabitants of Plato’s cave”). If I depart from Botting here at all, and I am not sure
that I do, it is not that I am without such concerns but that I think candor, the principle that
leaders appear under conditions they do not control, has as vital a role to play in regulating
mediated public appearances as in direct, interactive ones. While it is true that citizens in
contemporary mass democracy watching politics on television (often long after the events being
watched actually transpired) cannot interact with their leaders, if the content of what they watch
is candid—such that leaders are precluded from orchestrating their messages in a controlled,
uncontested fashion, but must appear under conditions of risk and uncertainty—then the
Orwellian potential of our mediated politics, I think, will be reduced not augmented. What
matters from the perspective of generating authentic as opposed to manipulated spectatorship, I
believe, is not that the spectators themselves interact with leaders (especially given the highly
limited, reactive expressivity that has always shaped such audience interjections), but that
someone or something interact with leaders so that they do not control the conditions of their
publicity.
2. The Relationship of the Vocal and Ocular Models
Another concern raised by contributors involves the relationship between the two models of
popular empowerment. Ruth Abbey questions whether I exaggerate the difference between the
vocal and ocular models, since it would seem that the vocal model is “prior and preconditional
to” the ocular model and that, relatedly, my analysis of the ocular model continually “lapses into
a concern with [the necessarily vocal institution] of elections.” Melissa Schwartzberg also
expresses this worry when she writes of EOP that “the ultimate means by which legislators are
‘disciplined’ is not the gaze itself, but the ballot”—so that the ocular model “cannot entirely
supplant [the vocal model] as Green sometimes suggests that it should.” Likewise, Landemore
takes issue with how parts of EOP proceed “as if it did not matter…that the gaze, no matter how
empowered, is still dependent on the voice.”
The relationship between the two models is complex, since while distinct they are not altogether
opposed. Abbey, Schwartzberg, and Landemore recognize this complexity—they acknowledge
that EOP does make the point that the two models need not conflict and can work in tandem—
but they think my overall emphasis nonetheless is to distinguish the models as separate
alternatives and that this move remains in some respects unpersuasive. In response to this point, I
think it is helpful to differentiate the origins of popular power from the field in which popular
empowerment manifests itself. EOP holds that while both models may ultimately share the same
origins (insofar as the threat of losing elections motivates leaders both to try to make decisions
that will seem consonant with the people’s alleged voice and to withstand critical publicity
before the people’s eyes), they are more likely to diverge in their conceptualization of how
popular empowerment should be manifested.37 Even with regard to this latter dimension there is
37 Because
EOP recognizes that the origins of the ocular model may reside in vocal processes (leaders’ desire to win
the People’s vote in elections), I do not think it is true, as Avramenko suggests, that the book understands the public
25 a possibility for overlap, but if EOP emphasizes the potential for divergence it is because the
question of the field of popular empowerment makes a palpable difference to how reformist
energies, always scarce, are to be expended. With regard to debates, for example, the vocal
model might suggest that the key thing is to find ways to include representatives of the People’s
voice (e.g., audience questions), whereas the ocular model recognizes that it is precisely by
eliminating such outside interventions that the candor of the debates would be maximized (i.e.,
without third parties, the candidates would have no choice but to engage in cross-examination
with each other, the format that arguably carries with it the highest potential for risk and
spontaneity). Likewise, an “ocular democrat,” inspired by the ancient Athenian practice of
euthunoi (or public audits) would support having leaders, following their term in office,
compelled to provide public testimony about their conduct (perhaps with immunity)—a practice
which might seem unhelpful (because retrospective, non-legislative, and disruptive) from the
perspective of the vocal model, but deeply satisfying (because providing an institutional source
of candor) when considered in ocular terms. More generally, it can be said that whereas the
tendency of the vocal model is to focus on the content of political communication (what is said
and done) in evaluating popular empowerment, the ocular perspective attends to the form of
political communication (e.g., how candid it is)—and if it is true that these two perspectives need
not conflict, I believe they are sufficiently different from each other in the reforms they suggest
to support the rhetoric of “alternatives” upon which, as Abbey, Schwartzberg, and Landemore
rightly note, I often rely.
3. Is Spectatorship As Collective an Experience as EOP Alleges?
Abbey also questions whether spectatorship can “provide the unifying thread of the people that
Green repeatedly declares it can.” She points out that while I initially acknowledge the
“apolitical citizen”—who is neither an active governor nor a spectator—I go on to treat
spectatorship as a phenomenon applying to the collective, non-elite citizenry. This is a great
observation, but I believe its significance is less that it challenges the phenomenon of a widely
shared spectatorship than it indicates how within certain polities—notably the United States—
democratization has not led to a widely shared prosperity, but unfortunately has been consistent
with a deeply underprivileged economic minority whose insufficient access to basic resources
like healthcare, safety, and education exposes the inadequacy of merely formal democratic rights
like universal suffrage. I take it as a legitimate objection to my book that it says nothing about
this underprivileged group—and hardly anything about the broader issue of the impact of
economic inequality on politics—and I hope that future work can do better in these regards. But
with respect to the specific issue of spectatorship, I think that it is in fact defensible to appeal to
spectatorship as something virtually all ordinary citizens, underprivileged or otherwise, share in
their bearing toward politics. Milbrath’s influential 1965 study on political participation, which
estimated 30% of the population as being apolitical, reveals its datedness in precisely this
respect: the proliferation of television and internet, along with pre-existing print journalism,
means that, perhaps more so than ever before, it is difficult to escape political spectatorship
gaze as itself exerting its own autonomous power, at least not in the sense of affirming “a kind of power that shoots
out of the eye onto the object observed.” EOP confronts this form of ocular power, associating it in particular with
Sartre’s notion of le regard as well as the folkloric tradition surrounding the “evil eye,” but ultimately dissociates its
conception of People’s gaze from this approach because it is too speculative (see EOP, 12). 26 entirely.38 EOP invokes the apolitical citizen more as a figure that recurs in democratic theory (a
merely economic agent who, it is important to note, still votes and so is not completely outside of
politics) than as a credible account of the bearing of ordinary citizens toward political life.
4. Does EOP Underestimate the Active, Participatory Potential of Spectatorship and
Ordinary Citizenship?
One of the chief ambitions of EOP is to show how spectatorship is not without critical purchase:
that there are moral criteria for differentiating an empowered from a disempowered form of
looking and that candor (the norm that leaders appear in public under conditions they do not
control) helps to define this difference. Lars Tønder, however, argues that this account of
spectatorship is still too passive: it is based on a suspect division between seeing and being-seen
that fails to recognize chiasmic processes of “framing, mediation, and circulation” whereby those
who see might be said to participate actively in constituting what they see. It strikes me that
Tønder’s challenge is especially forceful, substantively speaking, if it is taken to mean that some
of the critical norms I employ in my conception of candor (e.g., unscriptedness) cannot be
defined apart from how specific regimes understand such terms, so that there will be historical
variety and the potential for evolution in this regard—and, methodologically speaking, if it is
taken to mean that the kind of phenomenological analysis I pursue, as a general matter, could be
further developed and enriched, especially in light of Merleau-Ponty’s influential contributions
which I unfortunately did not address in EOP.
However, if such points become the basis for denying the basic division between the great many
who tend merely to watch politics and the select few who ultimately decide matters of great
political importance, I would express concern that this otherwise welcome sophistication
regarding the subtleties of visual processes runs the risk of blinding us to the reality of power as
a scarce commodity that some possess and others lack. Even Foucault’s effort to move beyond a
familiar, commodified conception of power (with his notions of disciplinary power and
governmentality) did not lead him to reject the more traditional understanding of power as
irrelevant. But when Tønder quotes with seeming approval Merleau-Ponty’s lines—“One no
longer knows who speaks and who listens….Activity=Passivity”—and when he himself refers to
the ways in which “both sides [audience and leader] ‘see’ and ‘are seen,’” such that there is a
“reversibility of ‘seer’ and ‘seen,’ ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled,’” I worry that, however relevant such
reflections on interactive processes might be at the individual level where subjects encounter
objects in their field of vision, they threaten to obscure what to me is the most basic feature of
ordinary political experience: the experience that others beside oneself possess primary decisionmaking power. Here it is relevant to point out that, as Landemore rightly observes, equally
important as the aspirational ambition of EOP to delineate a progressive norm for democratic
spectatorship (i.e., candor) is its critical-diagnostic ambition to demonstrate a pervasive tendency
within democratic theory, both past and present, to overstate ordinary citizens’ opportunities to
actively shape the norms and conditions of public life. I take Tønder’s point that I have
overlooked aspects of spectators’ potential control over what they see—along with similar claims
from Botting regarding the allegedly interactive forms of political spectatorship common prior to
the rise of modern technologies and from Abbey regarding my inattention to the degree to which
38
See Lester W. Milbrath, Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), 16-17.
27 “people are actively interpreting the information they see and hear”—as arguments which, even
if true in some specific sense, are objectionable if they suggest ordinary citizens possess a level
of empowerment equal to that of leaders or, in any case, sufficiently approximate to what the
historic ideal of free and equal citizenship requires so as to merit our complacency. This
tendency to exaggerate the power of ordinary people—and thus to resist confrontation with the
heteronomic core of actual political life as it is experienced by everyday citizens in its raw
immediacy—is something that EOP tries to expose and criticize as a long-standing, stillenduring trope within the study of democracy, a trope which reveals how otherwise
commendable democratic sensibilities (i.e., the commitment to free and equal citizenship) can
promote unrealistic diagnoses about the present (e.g., the belief that the conditions of such
citizenship are already being realized to a satisfactory degree).
Landemore challenges EOP’s pessimism regarding the structure of ordinary citizenship less by
insisting upon a more participatory form of spectatorship than by holding on to the enduring
relevance of the vocal model. On the one hand, Landemore draws attention to recent events—
like the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011—in which, according to her, the “voice and not
just [the] gaze [of]…the actual physical gathering of people in public squares….push[ed] tyrants
away and regain[ed] some control.” On the other hand, she appeals to recent and future
technologies that might “make it possible for more classical forms of vocal empowerment to be
reconquered.” In response, I should restate that I do not deny that certain individual citizens or
well-organized groups might influence public policy. What I reject is the belief that the People
(the collection of ordinary citizens taken as a whole) regularly performs this function or that such
successful instances of representation are typical of ordinary (as opposed to exceptional) political
experience. It strikes me that the Arab Spring is as much a caution about the applicability of the
vocal model as it is evidence for it, insofar as the protests involved the exceedingly rare instance
of liberation (the binary delegitimation of regimes) rather than the ordinary and ongoing practice
of self-legislation (the more subtle and expressive determination of concrete laws and policies).
With regard to new and future technologies, I certainly do not want to discount the abstract
possibility that these will drastically improve the participatory potential of democratic politics in
mass democracy, but I believe it is a disservice to the reality of our situation to think that
examples Landemore cites are doing this. In fact, Landemore does not disagree as she herself
acknowledges that in spite of the numerous developments she outlines (deliberative polling,
citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, the Open Government Initiative, seeclickfix.com,
and Iceland’s use of crowd-sourcing to rewrite its constitution), “deliberative and participatory
democracy on a mass scale still remains hard to envision and…we are still far from anything as
radical as the proponents of e-democracy hope.” I believe our disagreement, if we have one, is
less about excitement over the potential for future progress than about the importance of having
any concrete, existing democracy attend to its fundamental shortcomings vis-à-vis historical
ideals of equal participation and self-legislation.39 If I strongly emphasize such shortcomings, it
39
Given the unideal aspects of mass spectatorship—and, in particular, that the unviability of the vocal model carries
with it the problem of lack of full legitimacy for leaders and their projects—I share with Abbey the view that EOP
ought not be conceived as celebrating spectatorship, something Landemore suggests when she writes that “lack of
voice and genuine self-rule” are “celebrated [in the book] as normatively appealing” and when she claims that EOP
aims to “celebrate what we have” in the mode of “sour grapes.” Like Landemore, Margaret Kohn also thinks that, in
its approach to the spectatorship characteristic of ordinary political experience in mass politics, EOP “celebrates
28 is not merely because of any mood of pessimism, but because of the of the new normative (as
opposed to only technological) possibilities opened up by facing them—and candor (with its
focus on regulating never-fully-legitimate leaders rather than laws) would be a key example of
such pessimistically-infused normative innovation.
5. Should the Collective, Macrosubject of the People be Abandoned?
A key challenge emerging from the critics is to question why I continue to rely on the idea of
popular sovereignty at all. This point is made especially forcefully by Schwartzberg who argues
that by trying to replace the idea of sovereignty on an ocular rather than vocal register—instead
of jettisoning the notion—I, first, run the risk of contradicting my overall point in exposing
heteronomic features of ordinary political life and, second, I employ a hard-to-verify, speculative
macrosubject of the People (the mass of ordinary citizens in their collective capacity) about
which one might be rightly skeptical. Why not, she suggests, follow the sobriety which seems to
inform other aspects of my critique of democratic theory and simply dispense with the
metaphysics of popular sovereignty? What, after all, would be lost, Schwartzberg asks, if I spoke
only of the eyes of “the aggregate or multitude of citizens” rather than invoke the People? In
other words, rather than note the unreality of the People conceived as sovereign self-legislator
and then go on to find another conception of popular sovereignty, why not simply abandon the
notion of sovereignty altogether—and, in particular, the problematic notion of the People on
which it rests?
While I appreciate the desire for accuracy and clear-headedness underlying such a criticism, one
of the central premises of EOP is that the unreality of the People in a democratic society is a
problem in need of solution. It is not just that the etymology of democracy would seem to require
democratic citizens to have some lively notion of the demos. More concretely, the loss of a
meaningful notion of democratic peoplehood is the loss of non-atomistic avenues of
empowerment. This represents an unwelcome deflation of the meaning of democracy—since,
historically, a central promise of democracy was that an ordinary citizen would be connected to a
larger, collective entity—the People—and that, in addition to considering the individual’s private
interest, the People’s interest would be formed and empowered. Rousseau captures this double
aspect of democratic empowerment—its individual and collective components—when he
hypothesizes a democratic citizen who after contributing his own preference in a political
decision has to then confront the majority view as that of the People and, thus, as something to
which his own preference ought to conform: “When, therefore, the opinion contrary to my own
prevails, this proves only that I have made a mistake, and that what I believed the general will
was not so.”40 Without a meaningful sense of democratic peoplehood, few think in such terms
today. One need not accept Rousseau’s democratic theory in its specifics—certainly not his
account of the general will—to express some nostalgia and legitimate longing for a democratic
society in which an everyday citizen had two chances for empowerment: one through the
opportunity to voice one’s preference as an individual, the other through finding satisfaction that
the special collective to which one belonged by virtue of living in a democracy—the demos—
would be made to rule. Because I think part of the promise of democracy is the double
what other theorists lament.” Margaret Kohn, “Review of The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of
Spectatorship,” Perspectives on Politics 8.4 (2010): 1211-12, 1211.
40
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968), IV.2, 153
29 empowerment of the ordinary citizen—both as an individual and also as a member of the
People—I think problems with the leading paradigm of popular sovereignty as a vocal process
ought to lead to a revision, but not abandonment, of our understanding of the People:
specifically, to the reformulation of popular sovereignty in ocular terms.
To a certain extent, Abbey shares Schwartzberg’s concerns about my (or any) invocation of the
People. She raises the possibility that we today might “admit that it is too hard to give a
phenomenology of the category of the [P]eople,” which leads her to ask “whether non-ideal
democratic theory even needs a conception of the people.” Abbey, however, ultimately resists
the suggestion that the People be jettisoned, since she thinks that “in order to function and
prosper, democracy needs to generate a strong sense of ‘we the people’: a robust sense of the
collective democratic decision-making body” (emphasis added). Yet she also argues that any
recovered conception of the category of the People “probably must remain in paradox: on the
one hand, it can never be realized, but on the other hand it is indispensable to any critical and
progressive democratic theory.” While I clearly share Abbey’s concern for holding on to a notion
of the People—and while I also share her view that any conception of the People as a collective
decisionmaker will be caught up in paradox—I depart from her in being skeptical about the
ultimate value and emancipatory potential of a paradoxical conception of peoplehood. As I see it,
one of the central attributes of any vital and democratically useful notion of the People should be
that it allows us to know whether and to what degree the power of the People is in fact being
exercised. The problem with the paradoxical conception—a conception that has received a great
deal of attention and support in recent years not just from Abbey, but from numerous other
thinkers including Lefort, Rosanvallon, Honig, Frank, and in a sense Rancière—is that it is too
easily circumvented in practice. If the people’s empowerment is accepted as paradoxical, we risk
not only normalizing situations when it is legitimate that the People not rule, but losing clarity
about when it is and is not ruling—something which exposes popular empowerment in the direst
fashion to manipulation and effective neutralization by politicians.41 And so, while I agree that
customary conceptualizations of the People as a vocal, legislative being will lead to paradox—
for me this is a chief reason to move beyond such traditional formulations and explore an
alternate ontology of popular power.
6. What does the Collective Gaze do than an Individual Gaze Cannot?
Richard Avramenko asks “how the ocular power of the People manifests” according to the
theory of EOP. In a felicitious analogy, he notes how if the voice of a person resounds
differently when joined to a multiplicity of voices in a choir, it is not clear to him what difference
there is between the gaze of a single individual surveying political leaders and the gaze of a
multiplicity of eyes (e.g., the millions who might tune in to watch a political debate):
specifically, he says “in asking whether we can speak meaningfully of the power of a collective
gaze, I am asking if there might be such a thing as a ‘gaze-choir’? Is there this kind of ocular
41
Tønder rejects the idea that “one could ever reduce democracy to something measurable”—a point I take to be
true if it means that democracy’s ultimate meaning ought not cease to evolve in light of ongoing philosophical
development and practical experience, but questionable if it means to reject the notion that any conceptualization of
popular empowerment ought to contain criteria that enables a society to determine when the demos is or is not
ruling.
30 more-than-ness in The Eyes of the People?” In response, it strikes me that what a multiplicity of
gazes achieves, more than the surveillance of a single individual, is the production of moments—
special events which reveal leaders to the public in new, unpredicted, and spontaneous ways and,
in so doing, potentially enliven and accelerate the pace of ongoing political happenings—since a
multiplicity of gazes generates both the motivation of leaders to perform (i.e., it constructs a
public stage) and the capacity to effectively record, transmit, share, and interpret such
performances when something important happens (i.e., it transforms the merely remarkable into
the eventful). EOP argues that candor, in addition to putting critical pressure on political elites,
also has this function of promoting eventfulness—and it cites with approval Arendt’s hope that
the promise of democracy would be to “make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of
everyday life.”42 Avramenko’s comments persuade me, however, that EOP might have profited
from more closely allying itself with the existentialist tradition with which his reflections bring
the book into conversation. In different yet related ways, existentialists like Kierekegaard,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers associate the Augenblick (the moment, conceived literally in
ocular terms as the “blink of the eye”) with the Einblick (the in-sight that arises from such
special moments).43 If for them the Augenblick is the occasion for profound insight into eternity
and the nature of our being, for EOP candid moments produce the much more modest, though
still real, insight into truths about leaders—e.g., their characters, their strengths and weaknesses,
their genuine beliefs about issues of the day—otherwise concealed by politics in its stagemanaged, propagandistic form. EOP perhaps deemphasizes too much this revelatory aspect of
candor, since it repeatedly stresses defining candor first and foremost in terms of the more
measurable, less speculative institutional criterion that leaders not be in control of the conditions
of their publicity. But the revelatory promise is still a vital aspect of my account of candor, both
because EOP shares the Arendtian view that eventfulness is a democratic value and because one
should expect candor, even when defined institutionally, to generate rather the hinder the
production of revelatory moments where leaders and their speeches and deeds are brought to a
brighter, more penetrating light.44
42
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 197. This focus on
eventfulness means that even if Schwartzberg is potentially correct when she writes that “the only reason why a
candidate should be concerned about surveillance is because the information revealed therein will constitute the
basis on which she will be sanctioned” (emphasis added), there are democratic values beyond such sanctioning why
democratic citizens should prefer candor: not just exposing political elites to potential humbling on egalitarian
grounds, but the injection of eventfulness into political communications too often hampered by propaganda and
fakeness.
43
See Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in 19th- and 20th-century Western
Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) and Richard Avramenko, "The Road to Perplexity: The TemporalOntological Presence of Nowness in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time," International Political Anthropology 2
(2009), esp. 213-16.
44
See, e.g., EOP, 137: “[E]ven though plebiscitary democracy grounds itself on institutional candor (putting leaders
in public situations that theuy do not control) rather than psychological candor (the genuineness of the leader), this
privileging ought not be conceived as an indifference to generating genuine moments of self-disclosure from
leaders. That is to say, even if psychological candor needs to be subordinated to the much more reliable and
discernible standard of institutional candor, it is still legitimate to hope that the provision of the latter will yield the
former.”
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