In what does the mystery of the ministry consist? The delegate becomes, through unconscious delegation (I have been speaking as if it were conscious, for reasons of clarity, by an artefact analogous to the idea of the social contract), capable of acting as a substitute for the group which gives him a mandate. In other words, the delegate is. so to speak, in a metonymic relation with the group; he is a part of the group and can function as a sign in place of the totality of the group. He can function as a passive, objective sign, who signifies or manifests the existence of his mandators, as a representative, as a group in effigy. (To say that the communist-affiliated CGT trade union was received at the Elysee is equivalent to saying that the sign was received in place of the thing signified.) But in addition, it is a sign which speaks, which, as a spokesperson, can say what he is, what he does, what he represents, what he imagines himself to be representing. And when someone says that 'the CGT was received at the Elysee’, they mean that the set of members of the organization were expressed in two ways: in the fact of demonstration, of the presence of the representative, and, possibly, in the discourse of the representative. By this token, it is easy to see how the possibility of a sort of embezzlement is part and parcel of the very act of delegation. To the extent to which, in most cases of delegation, the mandators write a blank cheque for their delegate, if only because they are frequently unaware of the questions to which their delegate will have to respond, they put themselves in his hands. In the medieval tradition, the faith shared by delegates who put themselves in the hands of the institution was called fides irnplicita - a magnificent expression which can easily be transferred to politics. The more people are dispossessed, especially culturally, the more constrained and inclined they are to rely on delegates in order to acquire a political voice. In fact, isolated, silent, voiceless individuals, without either the capacity or the power of making themselves heard and understood, are faced with the alternative of keeping quiet or of being spoken for by someone else.
In the limiting case of dominated groups, the act of symbolization by which the spokesperson is constituted, the constitution of the ‘movement*, happens at the same time as the constituting of the group; the sign creates the thing signified, the signifier is identified
with the thing signified, which would not exist without it, and which can be reduced to it. The signifier is not only that which expresses and represents the signified group: it is that which signifies to it that it exists, that which has the power to call into visible existence, by mobilizing it. the group that it signifies. The signifier is the only one which, under certain conditions, by using the power conferred on it by delegation, can mobilize the group: that is. in a demonstration or display of the group’s existence. When the signifier, the representative, says; ‘1 am going to show you that I am representative, by introducing you to the people that 1 represent’ (here we have the eternal debate over die exact number of demonstrators), the spokesperson demonstrates his legitimacy by demonstrating or displaying those who have delegated him. But he has this power to demonstrate the demonstrators because he is. in a certain sense, the very group whose existence he is demonstrating.
In other words, as can be shown in the case of managers (cadres). as Luc Boltanski has done, as well as that of the proletariat, or of teachers, in many cases, in order to escape from the type of existence Sartre called serial, in order to gain access to collective existence, there is no other route than by way of a spokesperson. It is objectification in a ‘movement’, an ‘organization’, which by a fictio juris typical of social magic allows a simple collectio personarum plurium to exist as a ‘moral person’, as a social agent.
