Who has the right to represent student?

As much as we talk about who we want to represent us, we rarely talk about the nature of representation. Instead, we become become fixated on the personalities involved in the contest to represent us. 

This is not to say that the personalities are irrelevant considerations. They, of course, should be considered, but the fixation on the individual has distracted us from the failure of representation as an idea itself.

American representative democracy provides the winner of elections with the mandate to represent, but it fails to cultivate the necessary processes to ensure that the individual actually acts to represent the people. Instead, vote-getters justify their actions after the fact by claiming that they have the mandate to represent in whatever way they see fit.

At an abstract level, the horizon of issues on which our opinions can be represented is established by those seeking power. While salient individual issues may bubble to the surface, the structure of the debate among those seeking votes is established by the participants in the debate itself, as opposed to by the people. 

In effect, the complexity of the populace is collapsed into issues as determined by the overlapping media, political, economic, cultural and social discourses. For the average voter, this means that there is a consistent failure of representation deriving from the way in which voters are able to express their preferences.

The fundamental complexity of the population is the exact attribute that undermines our current representation schemes. Given different identities, interests, collectives and ways of thinking, the notion of an embodied representative who can synthesize and vote following the preferences of these complicated groups seems functionally impossible.

However, to accept the other understanding of representation as the election of someone based on their previous experiences to vote how they think, then the notion of democracy as a society governed by the people collapses. Thus, we seem stuck between a functionally impossible system of representation and an inadequately democratic form of representation.

If we are to cling to the tenets of representative democracy, this board believes the resolution to this bind lies in conceiving of representation as a process as opposed to a stagnant position. The noun representative must be replaced with the idea of representing. In this capacity, the obligation of elected officials is to continuously determine the interests of the people through being involved in the community. 

Representing thus involves a restructuring of the relationship between the people and the elected official such that it is more horizontal and dialogic. This, in turn, means a shift away from seeking the correct, discursively constructed issues to harp on to a focus on determining the issues that people care about.

This theoretical debate has ramifications for the way we as students attempt to change our campus community. The notion of a process of representation leads us to question who is making the effort to learn how best to represent us. 

While the Student Congress claims to be the representative of the student body, recent debates on "Two for Two" and "Better Together" indicate this claim to representation is not inclusive of all.

Further, many students feel the Student Congress fails as an actual representative organization insofar as the body seems uninterested in engaging with the issues that students care about. 

Given the history of student body presidents and representatives organizing students into a collective entity to oppose the abuse of power both in the University and at higher levels of society, our current situation is a sad state of affairs as representation seems to mean nothing more than distributing club funding.

The frustration of many students with Student Congress stems from this exact failure to represent. If the body would like to claim to represent us, then it ought use its privileged position to organize students for collective action. As of now, the only way many students are represented by the Congress is on members' resumes.