“Populism”, “abstaining”, “loss of trust”, “mistrust of politicians”, “mediacracy”, “weakening of the State”, “shallow citizenship” – and the list goes on. Such phenomena are sometimes mistakenly defined by the useful term of “crisis” – crisis of representation, crisis of democracy, crisis of the political institution – but they are complex, many-sided phenomena which can be analyzed through a variety of geographical places and subjects. The starting-point of this research is a situation – that of present-day Argentina. The country, which had known a period of relative political stability since 1983 (reflecting the basic rules of a “democratic regime”) experienced a critical phase in 2001 on a political, social and economic level. This event showed a deep rejection of the political community as expressed through the motto “que se vayan todos” (may they all go away) chanted in demonstrations. Special attention was then paid to neighborhood gatherings, recovered factories”, barter networks, and organizations of unemployed workers, because they represented a rupture with the past and appeared as places reinventing politics – but it also soon became clear that the “old” political institutions would be the actual means to “get back to normal”. The researcher then picks one angle of approach – the Parliament. This institution will be viewed as a sort of negative exposed to the changes of society. On the snapshot, reality is perceived, but as the focusing, the amount of light or the frame vary, such snapshot is only one possible representation of reality. The focus will thus be less on the institution than on the practice of representation – i.e. on the activity of the ones representing and on the Parliament seen as a “public space”. What is mainly highlighted is the action of representation itself – what is being built between the “inside” of the institution and the “outside” of society, because representation is above all a rupture between those representing and those being represented. When the represented show their presence and get organized, the practice of representation is disrupted. The representative government faces a contradiction – between voting disinvestment and overexposure in the public sphere, between lack of interest and interruption, between the logic of the police and democracy. The research carried out in this dissertation is sociology-based, even though its topic traditionally belongs to the field of political science, and intends to understand political representation as a social practice.
