Foundational Moments, Representative Claims and the Ecology of Social Ignorance
| Author | Mihaela Mihai |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721995639 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721995639
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(4) 962 –982
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321721995639
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Foundational Moments,
Representative Claims and
the Ecology of Social Ignorance
Mihaela Mihai
Abstract
This article identifies a blind spot in constructivist theories of representation and their account of
legitimacy in terms of the challenge posed by ecologies of social ignorance, generally and especially
during foundational moments. Social ignorance is conceptualised here not merely as the absence of
knowledge or true belief but as a social practice of legitimising epistemically problematic political
imaginaries and the institutional systems they underpin. In dialogue with social epistemologists and
phenomenologists, the article shows how representation can nurture social ignorance, despite the
availability of ample opportunities for political contestation and alternative opinion formation. A
permanent feature of democratic politics, this problem becomes most salient during moments of
constitutional re-founding, such as regime change, post-conflict reconstruction or constitutional
referenda, when representative claims can reconfigure a community’s political imaginary, rendering
it more or less ignorant. The representative claims made by the Vote Leave’s key figures during
the Brexit referendum campaign serve as illustration.
Keywords
Keywords: constructivist theories of representation, social ignorance, Brexit, political emotions,
founding moments
Accepted: 23 January 2021
Introduction
This article aims to trace how democratic political representation can nurture practices of
social ignorance, despite the existence of ample opportunities for contestation and alter-
native opinion formation. Contrary to colloquial usage, social ignorance does not merely
involve a lack of knowledge or of true belief. Historically informed social epistemologists
define it as a ‘substantive epistemic practice’ (Alcoff, 2007: 39) encompassing both indi-
vidual and structural belief-forming practices. It is an ongoing process of producing and
Politics and International Relations, School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, UK
Corresponding author:
Mihaela Mihai, Politics and International Relations, School of Social and Political Science, The University of
Edinburgh, 18 Buccleuch Place, 3F1, Room 3.21, Edinburgh EH8 8LN, UK.
Email: mihaela.mihai@ed.ac.uk
995639PSX0010.1177/0032321721995639Political StudiesMihai
research-article2021
Article
Mihai 963
legitimising certain skewed, self-serving narratives about a community’s identity and its
history, occluding unsavoury episodes, historical injustices as well as their reverberations
in the present. Such narratives are constituted within power constellations in the sense
that the members of the community do not participate on an equal footing in forging them
– certain groups’ voices are overrepresented in articulating the political common sense,
that is, the unquestioned ‘truths’ a community takes to be self-evident. When institution-
alised – via the education system, official holidays and memorialisation practices, public
museums and the media but also more broadly within the public culture – such ‘truths’
configurate individuals’ perceptual schemas, habits of political remembering, the scope
and intensity of their affective investments as well as the contours of their political imagi-
nation in ways that affect the quality of democracy. Exclusionary, inegalitarian and
romantic ideas of the ‘nation’ and its sanitised history will thus inform the configuration
of political life in the present, often along racialised, classed and gendered lines. Because
it permeates institutions, public culture, but also cognitive and affective structures, social
ignorance has an ecological character: what is politically memorable, perceivable, think-
able, imaginable is informed – though not fully determined – by these ‘truths’, with their
non-accidental erasures and blind spots, the result of a tacit ‘agreement to misinterpret the
world’ (Mills, 1997: 18). Social ignorance is therefore ‘an active accomplishment requir-
ing an ever-vigilant understanding of what not to know’ (Gross et al., 2015: 5).
This article highlights the limits of constructivist theories of representation and their
account of legitimacy when confronted with entrenched social ignorance, generally and
especially during foundational moments. I focus on the constructivist turn (Brito Vieira,
2017; Disch, 2011; Disch et al., 2019; Saward, 2010) for its capacity to reveal how inter-
ests are articulated and constituencies interpellated into political existence by successful
representative claims. According to constructivist theorists, ‘[D]emocratic political repre-
sentation neither simply reflects nor transmits demands; it creates them as it actively
recruits constituencies’ (Disch, 2011: 102). Demands are not, however, created from
scratch: for their claims to be effectively taken up by the public summoned as political
subject (‘the people’, ‘the nation’, ‘the 99%’, ‘the silent majority’), representatives must
tap into the hermeneutical sources of a community’s common sense and articulate visions
that resonate – cognitively and affectively – within their addressees’ horizon of experi-
ence. On the constructivist account, the represented are not therefore passive. Provided
institutional avenues for contestation and alternative opinion formation are available –
that is, provided what theorists of representation call ‘system reflexivity’ (Disch, 2011)
obtains – the interpellated can retroactively accept or reject the claim, thereby injecting
accountability into the process. I suggest problems arise for democracy even under condi-
tions of system reflexivity, if the taken-for-granted, dominant ‘truths’ that representative
claims translate and particularise politically reflect an entrenched, exclusionary and ine-
galitarian social imaginary that sits uneasily with democracy’s key normative commit-
ments. In other words, I will argue that the formal prerequisites of system reflexivity
cannot prevent representation from serving as a key dynamo of social ignorance, with
repercussions on the type of political relationships that can be nurtured in its penumbra.
Such effects emerge regularly in the life of a polity – in ordinary public and parliamen-
tary debates as well as during electoral campaigns. Social ignorance can be cultivated
whether the representative claim addresses a specific group (defined via socio-economic,
ethnic, religious, gendered or racialised markers of identity)1 or the community as a
whole. However, the impact of socially ignorant representative claims is potentially most
important during (re)founding moments, that is, moments of fundamental political
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