WHY AESTHETICS? JUDGMENT AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

In this essay, I seek to build on Sartwell’s (Reference Sartwell2010) insight that the connections between politics and aesthetics “are too rarely appreciated, and can be exploited toward new forms of political understanding” (p. 49). For example, in both politics and the arts, representation can be understood as “a process of depiction” (Ankersmit Reference Ankersmit1996, p. 45). Yet as Ankersmit (Reference Ankersmit1996) rightly notes, “the interest of art lies in the fact that there are no fixed and generally accepted rules to link the represented and its artistic representation” (p. xiv). And while the realm of politics does not (at first glance) seem to involve quite so much variability, the familiar “mandate-independence” controversy regarding whether elected representatives should serve as the proxy of their constituents (doing what voters would do) or instead act based on their own best judgment of the common good lends credibility to Ankersmit’s larger point that “there are no algorithms that link the represented to its representation” (p. xiv).

Yet in highlighting the aesthetic underpinnings of our political desires and arrangements, I also take seriously Sartwell’s (Reference Sartwell2010) claim that while “there is no politics without aesthetics, there is also no politics that can thoroughly dominate or domesticate aesthetics” (p. 81). The aesthetic is “not exhausted by or thoroughly annexed by the political; they are orthogonal even as they are always correlated” (p. 81). So while there are obvious differences “between beauty and justice,” this essay is interested in how political and aesthetic values “cut across each other, infest each other, and exceed each other” (p. 11). Understood in the context of race and representation, our aesthetic responses to racial presence are related to the histories, political practices, and experiences that give them resonance.

Sartwell’s insights into the connections between politics and aesthetics bring me to a central reason why I find aesthetic theory useful in understanding the complex dynamics of racial presence: that aesthetics is one of the few spaces where theorists attend to the distinction between values and feelings. For it is through our aesthetic responses that we become most aware of the dissonance between our sensory pleasures and our ethical values. Questions of aesthetics and politics have a popular resonance because everyone can recall moments of political-aesthetic dissonance: being emotionally stirred by a film whose worldview you find reprehensible, feeling attracted to someone you dislike, or enjoying a song whose lyrics you find offensive. Or conversely, we might appreciate the political intentions of a song or film (or person) while finding them aesthetically unmoving and/or unappealing. In other words, because judgments of beauty are simultaneously sensory, emotional, and intellectual, it is in the realm of aesthetics where individuals most self-consciously encounter and debate the dissonance (and congruence) of our sensory preferences and our ethical values. Given this, it is my contention that aesthetic theory can help us make judgments regarding descriptive representatives, particularly since the growing diversity of our representatives is likely to increase our feelings of political-aesthetic dissonance.

Approaching racial presence through the lens of aesthetics reorients our gaze—rather than reflecting some self-evident truth, aesthetic considerations highlight the need for judgment when trying to assess the value and meaning of racial presence and visibility. As Ferguson (Reference Ferguson1999) notes, aesthetics pertains to “the process of collective and contested judgments established by cultures, sub-cultures, and specific groups” (p. xii). Echoing Immanuel Kant, Ferguson emphasizes the political and public nature of judgment:

Judgment is the mental facility “by which we situate ourselves in the political world without relying upon explicit rules and methods” (Beiner Reference Beiner1984, p. 3). Related to the world of appearance, judgments about both art and politics represent deeply collective practices. Moreover, because aesthetic judgments are made on the basis of taste as opposed to interest, they are contingent but not random. As such, our judgment is always subject to change and critique. In other words, rather than an inherent ability, good judgment is something we are capable of cultivating. Yet there is no guarantee that this capacity will be acquired and developed.

In stressing the political quality of aesthetic judgment, my argument builds on the claim that aesthetics is critically connected to “modern conceptions of knowledge” and central to “the constitution of modern identities” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1999, xiii). As Ferguson notes, “the racial, the performative, and the aesthetic complement one another: it is in the complex interplay of these that communal identities arise” (p. 44). And while Ferguson does not focus his attention on the growing ideological and partisan heterogeneity of raced subjects, his emphasis on judgment helps us rethink the dynamics of racial presence as we come to grips with the increasing visibility of Latino conservatives and other conservative representatives from historically marginalized populations.^{Footnote 5}

For example, in the 2010 midterm elections, for the first time ever, three Latino candidates—all of them Republicans and two of them Mexican Americans—won top statewide office. New Mexico voters elected the nation’s first Latina governor, Susana Martinez. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval became Nevada’s first Hispanic governor. And in Florida, Marco Rubio won the U.S. Senate race and serious consideration to be Mitt Romney’s running mate (Lopez 2010).^{Footnote 6} More recently in Texas, Ted Cruz—a Tea Party-backed Latino candidate—pulled a surprising electoral upset by winning the state’s Republican nomination in July 2012 and was then elected to the U.S. Senate (Fox News Latino 2012). All four were given prominent speaking slots at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

For advocates of descriptive representation, the growing presence of conservative Latino elected officials such as Rubio, Martinez, and Cruz complicates the accepted wisdom that increased racial presence correlates with more liberal (and therefore more racially just) policy outcomes. Yet there is an additional element at play here. For even as the meaning of presence becomes increasingly unsettled, the visible presence of racialized subjects on the public stage continues to stir our emotions. And this is true across the racial divide—whether enthralled or repelled, participants in the visual public sphere feel something when racial subjects appear on the public stage and claim political authority. The existence of such reactions is a reminder that the aesthetic dimensions of politics always demand a simultaneous engagement with questions of affect. For our affective responses are inevitably intertwined with our aesthetic reactions. And as Sartwell (Reference Sartwell2010) rightly notes, “a politics or political system that does not satisfy people emotionally or at least arouse or mobilize them in some way is unlikely to prosper or endure” (p. 50). In other words, the corporeal and aesthetic significance of how subjects appear—how they look, sound, and move—produces reactions and responses that theorists of democracy would do well to address.

Thinking more deeply about the aesthetic and affective effects of presence allows us to move beyond claims that descriptive representation is merely symbolic and therefore unimportant. Such arguments often dismiss the significance of presence, arguing that descriptive representation distracts voters from more important substantive issues of interest and ideology (Swain Reference Swain1993). In this paper, I argue that these criticisms echo earlier debates regarding the dangers of aestheticizing politics. Such denunciations characterize the aesthetic appeal of a subject’s appearance as a kind of concealing ornamentation for problematic political positions. Here, substantive representation is portrayed as a kind of rational anti-aesthetic, while descriptive representation is characterized as an aestheticized politics that deceives voters through its visually appealing surface.

Rather than try to prove which type of representation has the normative edge, I want to suggest that such arguments can be read as undertheorized responses to the aesthetic and affective experience of race. Put another way, while racial presence and diversity are clearly important elements of a just regime of representation, a more self-conscious consideration of affect and aesthetic judgment might allow us to challenge both aversive and essentialist arguments regarding descriptive representation.

To do this, I approach the affective and aesthetic significance of racial embodiment neither as proof of its true value nor as a kind of concealing disguise or diversion. Instead, I argue that racial presence and co-racial correspondence can be productively understood as a form of beauty and a type of aesthetic pleasure. As I show in the following pages, for many citizens, descriptive representation has a kind of beauty that feels and looks like a form of justice. Here, I consider the ways in which beauty can be understood as what Scarry (Reference Scarry1999) describes as “the experience of conviction” (p. 52). Yet while acknowledging beauty’s persuasive power, I want to distinguish between the affective force of aesthetics and claims to equality and social justice. In attending to this mix of rupture and relatedness, I take seriously a central claim of recent aesthetic theory: that aesthetic values (such as beauty) are in fact connected to questions of justice, goodness, and truth. Yet this claim is a limited one—the argument is not that aesthetic values are identical or interchangeable with our political values but that they have a complex relationship that we need to evaluate and make judgments about.

Rather than cultivating an anti-aesthetic that sees the “aesthetic embodiment of political power as a set of manipulative or affective tropes overlaying/expressing/falsifying a set of political ideas” (Sartwell 2010, p. 18), I seek to build on Sartwell’s (Reference Sartwell2010) claim that “the aesthetic is inherent in and necessary to the ethical, the political, and the epistemic, without exhausting those spheres of value” (p. 49). In a similar vein, I read racial presence as a necessary and inherent aspect of a just system of political representation. Yet the importance of presence does not overshadow or exhaust other spheres of value. Sensitive to the possibilities and political ambiguities of racial presence, thinking aesthetically about race and representation shifts our focus from evidence to judgment. Rather than try to legitimate the value of racial presence by anchoring it to a particular set of civic outcomes, my approach untethers presence from justice, inviting exploration of its multiple effects, ranging from its capacity to educate the public to its ability to legitimate injustice by seducing and misleading voters. Thinking aesthetically about racial presence’s affective and persuasive elements encourages public practices of judgment—that is, evaluative practices help citizens give an account of their interpretations of the various modes of racial embodiment occurring in the visible public sphere.

PORTRAITS, MAPS, AND MINIATURES: AESTHETIC CONSIDERATIONS AND THE LURE OF COMMON SENSE

Recognized as a seminal work in political science, The Concept of Representation (1967) is less well known for its use of aesthetics to analyze the varied logics of representation. Throughout the book, Hanna Pitkin draws on aesthetic theory to clarify and complicate the reader’s understanding of representation. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin (Reference Austin1961) and influenced by the work of Stanley Cavell (Reference Cavell1958), Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967) asserts that “we learn what representation is, not merely from the history of representative government, but also from knowing about representational art, knowing how to pick out a representative example, knowing how an actor represents a character on stage, knowing how contract law treats the making of representations” (p. 7).

According to Pitkin, the etymological origin of the word representation indicates a re-presentation, a concept that implies “a making present again . . . representation, taken generally, means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact . . . something not literally present is considered as present in a nonliteral sense” (pp. 8–9). Aesthetic theorist Frank Ankersmit (Reference Ankersmit1996) echoes Pitkin by noting that political representation is often understood as “making something present that is absent”:

Here, although the people themselves are not present, their political will is made visible through the medium of representation.

In her work, Pitkin identifies a wide variety of representative forms, including formalistic and accountability views of representation, descriptive representation, symbolic representation, and substantive representation. Among scholars of race, representation, and identity, the focus has traditionally centered on the distinction (and potential relationship) between substantive and descriptive representation.

For Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967), the difference between these two forms of representation can best be understood in term of the distinction between “acting for” versus “standing for” (p. 111). Substantive representation is defined as “acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them” (p. 232) while descriptive representation is the process by which a person or thing stands for others “by being sufficiently like them” (p. 80). According to Pitkin, the “major features of this view are most clearly developed among advocates of proportional representation” (p. 61). For proportionalists, “resemblance, reflection, accurate correspondence are vitally necessary in a legislature precisely because these things are what representation means. Without it, no true representation is possible” (p. 62).

Pitkin uses a number of metaphors and analogies to help illustrate the logic of descriptive representation. The most familiar of these include analogies regarding portraits, mirrors, maps, and miniatures. Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967) quotes John Adams’ description of one characterization of the ideal representative legislature:

For Adams (1787), the representative assembly is like the portrait, and “as in art, ‘the perfection of the portrait consists in its likeness’” (p. 61). Here, use of the term “miniature” implies a “condensation of the original, or a part of the original that can be used to stand for the rest” (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967, p. 73). For proportionalists, “a legislature should be a miniature in the sense that it should have members to correspond to each feature of the national landscape” (p. 73). In a similar vein, the Anti-Federalist Melancton Smith argued that representatives “should be a true picture of the people; possess the knowledge of their circumstances and their wants; sympathize in all their distresses, and be disposed to seek their true interests” (Storing Reference Storing1981, p. 17). According to Herbert Storing, the Anti-Federalists believed that “[e]ffective and thoroughgoing responsibility is to found only in likeness between the representative body and the citizens at large” (p. 17). Full and equal representation requires representatives who “possesses the same interests, feelings, opinions, and views the people themselves would were they all assembled” (p. 17). As Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967) notes, such arguments for descriptive representation almost always implicitly assume that descriptiveness is related to substantive representation: “Of course even the proportionalists are interested in what the legislature does; they care about its composition precisely because they expect the composition to determine the activities” (p. 63).

In all of these analogies and examples, advocates of proportionalism presume that the sharing of particular descriptive characteristics will allow representatives to not only “reason and act” like the people, but to “think” and “feel” like them as well. Such practices of identification are assumed to shape voters as well. Describing this process, Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967) quotes Harold Foote Gosnell as he describes the affective pull of citizens who see in their representatives a likeness of themselves:

For Adams and Gosnell, descriptive representation is characterized as creating a multidirectional affective relationship capable of moving both voter and representative. In seeing the similar physiognomy of the representative, the citizen is portrayed as feeling as if he himself occupies a seat of power.

Yet alongside this rhetoric of likeness and identification, Pitkin notes that, “a replication is never a replica . . . artistic representation has always been a matter of style and convention, as well as skill” (p. 66). Because there is “always a question of which characteristics are politically relevant for reproduction,” Pitkin’s insight helps us to understand how the Founders could simultaneously defend the idea of “likeness” (p. 87) and accurate party-by-part correspondence, while also creating an exclusionary design scheme that included the three-fifths compromise and the denial of voting rights to Blacks and women. Social and political conventions based on patriarchy and White supremacy led the Founders to cultivate a style of representation that reflected certain assumptions regarding which subjects were seen as politically relevant and worthy of full and equal representation and reproduction—after all, “a replication is never a replica.”

According to Pitkin, in addition to portraits and miniatures, many proportional theories of representation draw on analogies of maps and mirrors. In the mirror analogy, representative government should be an “accurate reflection” of the community—in terms of accurately reflecting either the demographics of a community, “the general opinion of the nation,” or the “variety of interests in society” (p. 61). Yet although mirrors reflect an ideal of “perfect accuracy” that unerringly displays “the changing scene before it at each moment,” the mirror nevertheless “can reproduce only visual features; it cannot show structure as a blueprint can, or abstract relationships as on a map” (p. 72). In a 1798 speech before the Estates of Provence, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti Mirabeau stated that a representative body “is for the nation what a map drawn to scale is for the physical configuration of its land; in part or in whole the copy must always have the same proportions as the original” (Mirabeau quoted in Pitkin, p. 62). Like the portrait or the miniature, the map is understood here as a condensation of the original—one that shares a likeness with the original based on its corresponding proportions. Yet unlike mirrors, miniatures, and portraits, maps have a different relationship to appearance. As Pitkin notes, maps are not evaluated based on whether they resemble what they depict. Instead, a map “is judged by its accuracy” (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967, p. 71). In this way, a map is something that needs to be read and deciphered. A map “conveys information only to someone who knows the ‘style’” (p. 72).

By emphasizing familiar metaphors such as portraits, miniatures, and maps, Pitkin’s analysis reveals how a commonsense understanding of representational art helps to sustain a belief in the rightness of descriptive representation. Here, Pitkin’s analysis lends support to Ankersmit’s (Reference Ankersmit1996) claim that great political ideas (like great art) have a kind of accessibility that makes them appealing and widely understood:

According to Ankersmit, because political ideas “can only be effective on condition that most people can understand them, assess them, and pronounce on the way they have been put into practice,” the most difficult challenge is to find “that narrow optimum between concreteness, abstraction, and efficacy that will show them the way to the citizen’s mind and heart” (p. 17).

For Pitkin, one of the problems of descriptive representation is that it’s a political concept whose aesthetic implications render it excessively appealing. For example, Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967) notes that even those who challenge the proportionalist view often leave unchallenged the presumption that “to represent means to resemble or reflect accurately” (p. 64). According to Pitkin, “once it has been articulated . . . [t]here is something so compelling about the view that representation means accurate reflection . . . that critics have accepted it unchallenged” (p. 65). Even when insisting that we ought to privilege other aspects of representation, critics of proportionalism nevertheless refer to “sacrificing ‘accurate representative’ for the sake of effective government” (p. 64). For Pitkin, characterizing the loss of accurate reflection as a “sacrifice” represents the power of this definition of representation. Described as loss, this admission of remorse concedes that under certain circumstances “representation must be sacrificed—for something more important . . . but sacrificed nonetheless” (pp. 64–65). According to Pitkin, the proportionalist definition is “so compelling” precisely because its logics affirm the epistemic power of the visible. As Linda Schlossberg (Reference Schlossberg, Sanchez and Schlossberg2001) notes, “[t]heories and practices of identity and subject formation in Western culture are largely structured around a logic of visibility . . . At the most basic level, we are subjects constituted by our visions of ourselves and others, and we trust that our ability to see and read carries with it a certain degree of epistemic certainty” (p. 1). Like Pitkin and Ankersmit, Schlossberg acknowledges that the “seemingly intimate relationship between the visual and the known” (p. 1) surrounds particular practices of visibility.

As Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967) argues, “critics accept the proportionalists’ definition because it strikes them as correct and convincing, as it may strike us unless we have thought of other definitions or counterexamples” (p. 65). Rather than accepting this commonsense understanding of representation as resemblance and accurate reflection, Pitkin warns her readers that “perhaps we should not assume too readily that we know . . . what the word means in such a context” (p. 66). Offering her own counterexample, Pitkin notes that “accuracy of depiction has not always been seen as the goal or measure of art” and that “[e]ven in paintings of the most painstaking accuracy . . . the artist does not reproduce reality, but combines paint in complex ways on canvas. This is something an artist has to learn to do, and a viewer has to learn to read” (p. 66). Because the self-evident power of the visible obscures the necessity of interpretation and judgment, Pitkin calls for challenging what initially appears “correct and convincing.”

While granting that descriptive representation is “obviously relevant to political life” (p. 89), the overall thrust of Pitkin’s critique is that advocates of proportionalism too quickly presume the existence of a transparent relationship between one’s identity and one’s actions. Pitkin writes:

While Pitkin is correct in asserting that there is “no simple correlation” between “people’s characteristics” and “the actions they will take,” Pitkin’s analysis underestimates the affective power that drives the desire for proportional representation. More specifically, the historic absence of representatives from particular populations has intensified the political meaning we ascribe to descriptive representation in general and racial presence in particular. Seen from this perspective, the classic definition of political representation in which “something absent is made present” (p. 81) takes on new affective dimensions when absence itself is saturated with significance. Rather than serving as an innocuous concept, absence is understood to be the result of exclusionary policies and the unjust denial of political rights.

In the field of American politics, scholarship in the field of race and representation is fairly unanimous in its belief that racial presence is a key element of justice and that the absence of particular racial groups is clearly unjust. However, the recognition that racial absence is a form of injustice has sometimes resulted in the problematic corollary that the presence of such subjects will put right our dysfunctional representative system. By this logic, representatives from marginalized populations bring unique cultural attributes to their positions that make them better representatives. By bringing their distinctive experiences and approaches into our representative institutions, their presence promises an improved politics.

I turn now to two recent works in Latino politics that illustrate this tendency to collapse the distinction between racial presence and racial justice. In Políticas: Latina Public Officials in Texas (2008), the authors conflate descriptive representation with substantive representation, arguing that Latinas govern better than other political representatives. By contrast, Barreto’s Ethnic Cues: The Role of Shared Ethnicity in Latino Political Participation (2010) shifts the focus away from the actual content or quality of representation and instead focuses on the affective experience of descriptive representation. In both works, practices of judgment and contestation are overlooked and undervalued while the power of aesthetics is overstated yet undertheorized.

Presence as Justice: Latinas Governing Differently

In Políticas, Sonia García and her colleagues (2008) seek to “examine the complexity and contributions of Latina leadership in the American political context” (p. 1). Their research does this by presenting case studies of the first elected and appointed Latina public officials in various levels of offices in the state of Texas. In approaching this research, the authors ask: “As elected leaders, do [Latinas] have unique political perspectives and/or skills gleaned from their cultural background or life experiences?” (p. 1):

Like Adams and his claim that a representative body should be “an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large,” the authors of Políticas share the view that “true” representation means to resemble or reflect accurately. Understood as a form of racial and gender correspondence between voter and representative, the authors’ assumption is that Latinas in public office will “advocate for the issues that most affect Latinas” because their shared likeness allows them to “think, feel, reason and act like them” (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967, p. 61).

In her foreword to Políticas, former New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid echoes the authors’ proportionalist logic, writing:

In both passages, descriptive representation is made synonymous with substantive representation. Madrid’s foreword conflates a political problem (the need to “close this economic divide”) with a design proposal (electing more leaders who “look like America”). Here, the solution to the problem of being a nation “beholden to the interests of the few” is shifted from institutional structures of government to the visual composition of bodies. And while Madrid and the authors are certainly right to argue that democratic institutions’ racial and gender composition is a key component of those institutions’ legitimacy, conflating presence and policy works to displace analysis of larger structural problems in our electoral/representative process (the role of money in politics, political corruption, civic alienation, etc.). Instead, the assumption is that the enhanced presence of new racial subjects will produce political change.

Throughout Políticas, the logic expressed is that more Latinas in public office means more people advocating for Latina issues and interests. Yet the question of what constitutes Latino issues and interests remains vague. Part of this might have to do with the fact that the authors simultaneously speak of “Latina interests” while also acknowledging the diversity of Latinos and their representatives. Describing their research methodology, the authors write: “We fully recognize the limitations of our research design . . . our conclusions are thus limited to these individual women” (p. 15). Delving into some of the more significant distinctions among Latinas, the authors write:

In describing the many differences that exist between Latina candidates and public officials, the authors admit that they are “unable to generalize to all Latina public officials, or even Latina public officials in Texas” (p. 15). Yet following this acknowledgement, the book goes on to make a number of sweeping claims regarding the gender and cultural practices of Latinas and how they shape the political behavior of this group of elected officials. A few examples:

Citing the 2006 immigrant rights marches, the book concludes with this claim:

Políticas provides readers with an immensely useful account of how Latina representatives in Texas have been socialized into politics and the factors that have thus far influenced their decision to run for office. Such state-centered research is tremendously valuable. However, in trying to develop “an encompassing theoretical framework for the study of Latina politics” (p. 132), Políticas overreaches the limits of its methodology, exaggerating the implications of presence by claiming that the value of Latina representatives lies in their capacity to govern better and differently than other representatives. Such an assertion reflects an anxiety that without such claims, arguments for descriptive representation and racial presence will have no value. Anxious that arguments for substantive representation will be used to deny the importance of racial presence, advocates of proportionalism feel compelled to justify presence with the claim that representatives from particular populations are not just good but superior. Yet as Latina political representatives grow in number and display increased ideological diversity, such claims regarding racial/gender presence will become increasingly untenable.

Presence as Justice: Latinos Feeling Differently

In contrast to the direct assertion that Latina/os govern better or differently than other representatives, Matt Barreto in Ethnic Cues: The Role of Shared Ethnicity in Latino Political Participation (Reference Barreto2010) shifts his focus to the impact that descriptive representation has on those being represented. Interviewing political elites and analyzing exit surveys, voting records, and demographic data, Barreto builds on “broader studies of identity politics and in-group identification” to show how ethnic minorities “are often persuaded by ethnic appeals and vote as a bloc for ethnic candidates” (p. 3). According to Barreto, over the past fifty years, several factors have led to shared ethnicity emerging as an important element of voter preference. These include:

In contrast to Políticas’ all-inclusive claims regarding Latina elected officials, Barreto distinguishes between Latinos who possess a strong sense of group affiliation and a collectivist orientation toward group empowerment, and those Latinos who display less ethnic-group consciousness. According to Barreto (2010), “Latinos with a higher degree of ethnic attachment are more likely to prefer Latino candidates, absent party labels” (p. 87). For Latinos with “higher levels of ethnic identification, co-ethnic candidates increase the level of political awareness and interest in the election, increase the opportunity to be contacted and asked to vote, generate a sense of psychological engagement with the political system and strengthen feelings of shared group consciousness” (p. 7). Put somewhat differently, Latinos who strongly identify racially display an affective orientation that makes them more likely to be politically mobilized. Similarly, ethnic identification also impacts the behavior of Latino representatives: Latino candidates with an ethnic-specific strategy are the most likely to have a mobilizing effect among Latino voters. According to Barreto, “the presence of a viable Latino candidate uniformly results in increased voter turnout among Latinos” (p. 158). Moreover, when Latino candidates run for office, “they are much more likely to view Latino voters as part of their base and to conduct voter mobilization in Latino communities” (p. 29).

Here, Barreto’s analysis echoes Katherine Tate’s (Reference Tate2003) analysis of race and representation in Black Faces in the Mirror: African Americans and Their Representatives in Congress. Tate, like Barreto, shifts the question away from trying to prove whether or not descriptive representation is synonymous with substantive representation. Instead, Tate expands the question to examine the effects of descriptive representation on Black public opinion. Beyond this, Tate (Reference Tate2003) argues that political representation “consists of three forms: substantive, descriptive, and symbolic” (p. 4). By adding the symbolic into her measure of African American interests, Tate is able to explore how symbolic practices matter.

According to Tate, one reason descriptive representation is important is because African American voters perceive they are “better” (p. 122) represented by African American members of Congress:

For both Barreto and Tate, racial presence is related to justice less in terms of the quality of representation than in terms of how racial presence produces attentiveness and trust. When representatives of color are present, Black and Latino-identified voters feel they are better represented and are more likely to take an interest and pay attention. Looking at the impact of Latino mayoral candidates, Barreto’s (Reference Barreto2010) study shows that “the presence of a viable Latino candidate uniformly results in increased voter turnout” (p. 117). Here we are reminded of Pitkin’s quote of Harold Foote Gosnell and his claim that descriptive representation can make a certain type of individual feel “as though he himself were present in the seat of power” (Gosnell in Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967, p. 78).

In thinking about the relationship between political views and Latino identity, Ethnic Cues opens with two conflicting claims. Like the authors of Políticas, Barreto states that: (1) Latinos are deeply heterogeneous, and (2) that shared cultural characteristics make them fundamentally the same. Noting that when it comes to Latinos “no single historical event, institution, or migration creates a shared group experience” (p. 24), Barreto (Reference Barreto2010) makes a very different claim at the start of his book. Writing in his introductory chapter, he states the following:

I quote Barreto’s introduction at length here because the construction of this passage is telling. He begins by asking whether or not Latinos “act congruently on political issues” then immediately shifts the discussion to the “four characteristics” that “describe the roots of all Hispanic Americans regardless of their background” (p. 9). It’s interesting that the structure of this passage moves from questions regarding political congruence to an assertion of shared characteristics, while admitting that such “roots” may in fact be “altogether dormant” in many Latinos. The paragraph then slides from a discussion about the growing discrimination against Latinos (when one’s ethnic identity is “under cultural attack”) to claims regarding the current state of Latino underrepresentation. Finally, although the paragraph concludes by noting “distinct differences” of various Latino subgroups, it concludes with the assertion that “they share a common Latin American heritage that brings them together.” Overall, a strong principal unity undergirds Barreto’s analysis. Despite acknowledging Latino diversity, Barreto’s narrative conveys the impression that Latinos share a distinct political perspective based on a shared sense of civic Latinidad. As I have argued elsewhere, this approach takes as its starting point the presumption that shared cultural characteristics have an intrinsic connection to a shared political perspective.^{Footnote 7} Yet like Políticas, Ethnic Cues is often vague about which political issues Latinos will act congruently on. Nevertheless, because strong ethnic identification is synonymous with higher levels of political interest and engagement, Ethnic Cues tends to extol those political subjects whose strong racial identification exceeds party affiliation. Understood as a sign of political literacy, Latino pan-ethnic identification is conflated with proper political socialization: “subjects who identify with their fellow Latinos are often characterized as displaying civic agency and voice, while those who lack such a perspective are depicted as disempowered and politically ineffectual” (Beltrán Reference Beltrán2010, p. 101).

Moreover, by emphasizing attention and participation, Barreto’s analysis shifts the focus away from an explicit analysis of the quality of Latino political representatives and instead highlights the affective impact generated by particular candidates. This finding of increased interest and attention speaks to the complexities of racial presence and its relationship to racial justice. On the one hand, Tate’s and Barreto’s emphasis on the symbolic helps us see the possible relationship between affect and action. Yet as Pitkin rightly notes, the realm of the symbolic is indeterminate. Describing the power of the symbol to evoke “feelings or attitudes” (p. 97), Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967) writes:

A version of such representational practices is apparent in the use of symbols by Latino candidates in a technique Barreto (Reference Barreto2010) refers to as “nuestra comunidad (our community)” (p. 63). According to Barreto, nuestra comunidad represents a unique campaign approach whereby Latino candidates “cultivated a strong sense of shared community and linked fate with Latino voters” (p. 57). Some of the ways in which Latino candidates seek to connect with Latino voters include “highlighting their shared ethnicity . . . moving back and forth between English and Spanish” and demonstrating that “they are either from la comunidad . . . or part of la comunidad” (p. 62). According to Barreto, the idea of nuestra comunidad “implies a sense of shared issue agenda” (p. 63). Use of these practices in stump speeches “creates an underlying sense of solidarity on the issues. Latino candidates have the opportunity of make a stronger personal and ethnic connection with Latino audiences through nuestra politics” (p. 63). Here, the symbolism of moving between Spanish and English or invoking Latino cultural practices is a way for Latino candidates to highlight the importance of their own racial presence in order to provide voters with a satisfying aesthetic and affective experience.

According to Pitkin (Reference Pitkin1967), it would be tempting to use the logic of symbolic representation to see representation as “co-extensive with satisfying, being-accepted-by the constituent,” to believe that “representation exists only where someone believes that it exists” (p. 109). It is the “vagueness, looseness, and partial quality of the reference” that renders the symbolic a kind of representation, but of a limited type (p. 97). Here, the crucial test of political representation “is an existential one: Is the representative believed in?” (p. 102). And indeed, this is the criteria that both Tate and Barreto emphasize. But for Pitkin, this way of thinking about representation “would be a mistake” (p. 109). In part, this “mistake” is related to the fact that symbolic representation “seems to rest on emotional, affective, irrational psychological responses rather than on rationally justifiable criteria” (p. 100). For Pitkin, this affective response to racial presence is characterized as irrational and lacking in legitimate criteria.

According to Barreto (Reference Barreto2010), Latino politics “requires a new perspective in the twenty-first century,” one that acknowledges a new political reality in which “Latinos continue to face discrimination and underrepresentation” alongside the commonplace occurrence of “prominent Latino candidates” running for public office (p. 6). I agree. But to my mind, this paradoxical condition of increased presence and widespread racial and economic injustice requires practices of judgment lacking in Barreto’s analysis. The affective response to presence that he wants Latino voters to have relies on voters sharing the fallacious assumption of Políticas: that Latino representatives do indeed provide better representation and that descriptive representation is synonymous with substantive representation. Put another way, in focusing exclusively on mobilizing potential of shared ethnicity, Barreto’s logic of representation and political empowerment relies on Latino voters’ continuing tendency to take the aesthetic and affective power of race at face value (so to speak). Rather than stress the need for Latino voters to use their judgment to interpret how these uncertain aesthetic and affective encounters relate to political representation, Barreto celebrates practices of identification that lead voters to conflate symbolic, descriptive, and substantive representation. For example, while Latino candidates often seem to prioritize targeting and mobilizing Latino voters by invoking the logic of nuestra comunidad, this approach tells us nothing about the quality of representation being offered. For while claims to nuestra comunidad may imply a shared agenda, it may not actually be a shared agenda. And here lies the fundamental problem with Ethnic Cues: it celebrates racial responsiveness while underemphasizing political judgment. And while racial presence can encourage interest and attention, political values must nevertheless be anchored to practices of judgment and assessment.

Scholars studying race and representation in the field of American government often seem to regard the aesthetic and affective power of racial presence in two distinct ways: either positively as proof of its close relationship to justice (as in Políticas or Ethnic Cues), or negatively as a kind of concealing ornamentation for destructive political practices (as Pitkin does in her discussion of symbolic representation). In the realm of race politics, another important example of this more negative critique is Carol Swain’s Reference Swain1993 book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. Because this view is also significant to this analysis, I want to briefly turn to Swain’s work.

Presence as Distraction or Deception: Faces versus Interests

In Black Faces, Black Interests, Swain argues that advancing Black interests in Congress does not primarily hinge on increasing the number of Black representatives in the House. In fact, Swain argues that efforts to maximize descriptive representation can actually have a negative impact on the substantive representation of Black interests in Congress. Examining the political careers of thirteen members of Congress (nine Black, four White) who represent substantial Black populations, Swain analyzed the representational styles of these individuals using the participant-observation approach congressional scholar Richard Fenno used in his 1978 book Home Style: House Members in Their Districts.

Dividing Black representatives into four types of congressional districts (historically Black, newly Black, heterogeneous, and majority White) and looking at White representatives of minority-Black and majority-Black districts, Swain highlights the diversity of African American members of Congress, showing how their representational styles vary by region, interests, and priorities. In addition to participant observation, she uses multivariate regression analyses to analyze the voting behavior of the House of Representatives in the 100th Congress, concluding that party and region are the best determinants of voting behavior. Swain (Reference Swain1993) writes: “On every indicator, Republicans are less responsive to Black interests than are Democrats” (p. 19).

Swain’s most controversial claim is that the substantive representation of African Americans might be improved through having fewer “majority-minority” Black districts (p. 189). Arguing against racial gerrymandering to increase the number of Black faces in Congress, Swain argues that such districts have a number of normative and material drawbacks. To create districts in which African Americans were the majority, Blacks were taken out of surrounding districts, creating heavily White districts that increased the likelihood of electing Republicans (who provide far less substantive representation to Black interests). For Swain, such practices risk “isolating Black voters in overwhelmingly Black districts places them in a situation where their policy preferences can be more easily ignored” (p. 198). According to Swain, “Republicans give African Americans the opportunity to increase their descriptive representation, but, quite possibly, at the expense of their substantive representation” (p. 205).

While Swain insists that “White representatives . . . are a further source of Black representation,” she also observes that “White representatives of Blacks will never replace Black representation…. The presence of Black representatives in Congress, regardless of their political party, fulfills a host of psychological needs that are no less important for being intangible” (p. 217). Yet despite this acknowledgement, the overall tone of Swain’s argument implies that the desire for racial presence serves a kind of dangerous distraction. The longing for presence is understood as a psychological state that often hurts the subjects who seek it. Here, racial presence represents a mode of politics that deceives voters through its visually appealing surface. For Swain, what is needed is a de-aestheticized politics in which racial symmetry is disregarded in favor of a more rational and ideological approach to representation. And while I agree with Swain that we should avoid equating racial presence and justice, I approach racial presence not as inherently deceptive or distracting but, rather, as a form of beauty whose relationship to justice is as deep as it is uncertain.

A FEELING OF TRUTH: THE BEAUTY OF JUSTICE AND THE AESTHETIC PLEASURE OF PRESENCE

Swain, García et al., Tate, and Barreto all believe that every American should have equal opportunity and access to our representative system and that such access is critical to any definition of justice. This is why scholars of race and representation rightly emphasize the historical and political context that has led to the absence (or presence) of people of color as political representatives. What is less understood, however, is how racial presence (and its absence) is experienced as a visual event. Yet attending to the aesthetic elements of racial presence provides us with a deeper appreciation of how visibility helps satisfy our political and affective desires. With this in mind, I want to explore how racial diversity and co-racial correspondence in the public sphere are often experienced as a kind of beauty and a form of aesthetic pleasure. For many race-conscious citizens, descriptive representation has a kind of beauty that feels and looks like a form of justice. Such feelings have an uncertain relationship to justice—they can serve as affective resources that can be used in the service of justice, but such feelings can also be used to manipulate and seduce citizens in ways that undercut justice. So while racial presence can be understood as a kind of beauty that gives us pleasure, its relationship to a more politically just society is uncertain. As with other types of aesthetic value, racial presence invites interpretation, and is subject to collective and public judgment.

Drawing on Sartwell’s (Reference Sartwell2010) insight that “[b]eauty has rhetorical or persuasive affects” (p. 30), I want to consider racial presence as exhibiting a kind of persuasive power. More specifically, I want to explore the relationship between beauty and justice and the affective experience of beauty as a form of conviction. In emphasizing the aesthetic components of justice, I am not saying that the aesthetic dimensions of race trump ethics, history, or legal claims for justice. Rather, as Sartwell argues, “it only insists that we acknowledge the aesthetic dimensions of ethics and politics, and take them seriously as, among other things, pertinent to moral description and evaluation” (p. 62).

In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry (Reference Scarry1999) argues that “beauty really is allied with truth” (p. 52) and that “beauty assists us in getting to justice” (p. 94). Yet in making this claim, she is not arguing that “what is beautiful is also true” (p. 52). Instead, Scarry argues that beauty and justice are “analogous to one another in that they both share the feature of balance and symmetry—the weighing of both sides” (p. 94). Citing John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, Scarry notes that Rawls characterizes the condition of fairness in the original position as “the symmetry of everyone’s relations to each another” (Rawls Reference Rawls1971, p. 12). That a Rawlsian notion of fairness can be understood as a form of design is indicative of how epistemic standards are often articulated as aesthetic standards. In a similar vein, Sartwell (Reference Sartwell2010) argues that “the question of political form is also a question of the aesthetic” (p. 67). Given that classical conceptions of beauty often speak of qualities such as order, coherence, and simplicity in variety, we can see how justice itself comes to be experienced as a kind of beauty. Because politics “traffics in transformation” (p. 67), human beings are forever trying to create a political system that satisfies our desires and aspirations. In this way, both beauty and political utopianism represent “the object of longing” (Sartwell Reference Sartwell2006, p. 3). Often conceived in terms of ideas such as balance, harmony, simplicity, and symmetry, justice regularly operates as an aesthetic concept:

Thinking about injustice as a type of extreme imbalance or a failure of symmetry helps us understand why the absence of certain bodies in the public realm can be experienced as injustice, regardless of the content and actions of those present. Moreover, as Scarry argues, aesthetic attributes exert a kind of pressure on us—our reactions to what moves us visibly are experienced as a kind of visceral certitude. Describing this aesthetic/affective encounter, Scarry (Reference Scarry1999) writes:

Scarry’s characterization of beauty as an “uninvited, freely arriving perceptual event” highlights the ways in which beauty is experienced not just as a form of pleasure, but as an affective encounter with truth. Moreover, encounters with what we find aesthetically unappealing can also be experienced as “wrong,” a kind of error. For Scarry, one of the ways that beauty “assists us in getting to justice” (p. 94) is that it “creates, without fulfilling, the aspiration for enduring certitude. It comes to us, with no work of our own; then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor” (pp. 52–53). For Scarry, the affective encounter with beauty is capable as serving as a kind preparatory event—it “intensifies the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries” (p. 57).

Thinking about the affective power of aesthetics in the context of racial presence helps us explain why the presence of certain types of bodies is experienced not only as a form of aesthetic pleasure, but as a visible encounter with fairness and justice. As Scarry notes, beauty draws our attention. In a similar vein, Alexander Nehamas (2007) characterizes the experience of attraction as the sense that “my life would be better” if the object of beauty “were to become a part of it” (p. 54). Here we can see parallels to Barreto’s and Tate’s arguments that Latino and African American representatives help encourage higher levels of attentiveness among voters from those same communities. For both Nehamas and Scarry, the affective encounter with beauty is capable of serving as a kind preparatory event—it “intensifies the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries” (Scarry Reference Scarry1999, p. 57).

Citing eighteenth-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson and his definition “a compound ratio of Uniformity and Variety,” Sartwell (Reference Sartwell2010) notes that “[o]ne of the most traditional definitions of ‘beauty’…is that beauty is unity in variety” (p. 65). Just as in art, political systems also require the “coordination of disparate elements into some sort of unified whole” (p. 65). For many citizens, racial presence reflects a desired form of “unity in variety”—a vision of a multicultural America. Moreover, the aesthetic simplicity of co-racial correspondence is a perceptual event whose beauty feels and looks like a pleasing symmetry, a form of justice. An example is Barack Obama: his presence on the public stage (and the pleasure that many citizens take in his racial appearance) helps normalize the presence of people of color in highest positions of political power. Intriguingly, the presence of Black Republicans such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell operates in the same manner. In all of these cases, a multiracial government made present by a diverse body of representatives is experienced as a form of aesthetic pleasure that becomes both desired and imaginable. Moreover, just as the absence of racialized and female bodies served to naturalize a representative system composed exclusively of White men, the presence of more heterogeneity helps de-naturalize all-male, White-only rule, normalizing racial presence and gender diversity on the public stage, regardless of its ideological content.

On the other hand, for those averse to racial bodies in the public sphere, racial presence and gender diversity create an affective conviction that something is amiss, a reflexive experience of imbalance, injustice, and error. The attacks by Tea Party activists on President Obama often seem to reflect this conviction that Obama’s very presence on the public stage signifies that something has gone “wrong”—that America is no longer America. In each case, the aesthetic experience of race leaves citizens more prepared “to undergo a giant labor” (Scarry Reference Scarry1999, p. 53) either in the service of White supremacy or in the desire to create a multiracial democracy.

THE NEED FOR JUDGMENT: BEAUTY’S SEDUCTIVE POWER

While I agree with Scarry that, at times, beauty “assists us in getting to justice,” her reading of beauty fails to adequately acknowledge how the experience of beauty can also lead us toward injustice. For although Scarry is correct in noting that aesthetic values such as beauty are connected to questions of justice, goodness, and truth, other aesthetic theorists argue vehemently against conflating our aesthetic values with our political values. These theorists remind us that that which delights us at sensory level may well have a complicated (and even contradictory) relationship to our political beliefs.

As Nehamas (Reference Nehamas2007) observes, no matter how alluring the promise of beauty, “it reveals neither what it is that it promises nor what will become of me if I obtain it. Beauty and certainty pull in opposed directions” (p. 131). There is always a politically contingent quality to that which we find aesthetically pleasing. As Sartwell (Reference Sartwell2010) notes, aesthetics “attracts us to a set of political figures and policies that might otherwise repulse us or arouse our indignation or even resistance” (p. 60). Beauty “is always, among other things, seduction, and in deploying its aesthetic, a vision of beauty can be seductive epistemically, ethically, politically” (p. 67). In this way, beauty “works on us through our pleasures to transform us. This is what makes it potentially evil. But of course it’s also what makes us potentially good. Beauty…always has a seductive power, or carries with it the potential of a loss or intensification of the self” (p. 76).^{Footnote 8} And it is here where we are again reminded that aesthetic judgment represents a capacity to be cultivated. Rather than simply treating our aversive and pleasurable feelings as a simple form of proof, we need to remember that our judgments are not only particular and contingent, they are also subject to correction and amendment. As Leslie Paul Thiele (Reference Thiele2000) reminds us, judgment is the ability “to make decisions in the absence of rules that dictate right answers” (p. 566). Moreover, because judgment “cannot be reduced to a deductive exercise” or “rigid procedures” (p. 566), judgments regarding racial presence require citizens to develop criteria they feel is both considered and justifiable.