Political Possibility in the Age of Managed Populations: 1 After Representation

Representation has often been treated as the natural scaffold of political life: the medium through which citizens express themselves, deliberate, and shape collective futures. Yet from a relational-ontological perspective, this assumption obscures more than it reveals. Representation is not an eternal necessity. It is a historically contingent construal of political potential—a configuration that once stabilised the field of possibility, but whose existence is not required for governance to function.

To think politically in the age of managed populations, one must distinguish between two fundamentally different systems: the semiotic system of meaning, and the value-coordinating system of governance. Semiotic participation relies on agents capable of construal, whose engagement shapes the space of potential futures. Value coordination relies on variables, metrics, and optimisation: the field may be navigated without invoking meaning. Representation belongs to the first system. Population management, regulation, and optimisation belong to the second.

This distinction is not merely terminological. It has structural consequences. A polity can operate entirely through value coordination while rendering semiotic participation optional. The field of political possibility persists, yet its form changes. What is no longer required may slowly, invisibly, contract. Possibilities once accessible only through semiotic construal may narrow. Actualisations proceed, but they may no longer realise the kinds of futures that meaning-bearing participants once could imagine.

Herein lies the faint chill of this analysis: the persistence of governance does not guarantee the persistence of political possibility. The system may function, the population may be managed, and yet the space of open, unconstrained potential may quietly shrink. Representation, once stabilised, is now optional; without it, political life continues—but not necessarily as we have known it.

This series will trace that evolution. It will explore how political possibility manifests, narrows, or mutates when governance no longer structurally depends on meaning. It will ask whether semiotic participation remains indispensable, or whether it is now a historical artifact: a transient configuration in the ongoing evolution of coordination systems.

To engage with these questions is not to moralise, to lament, or to prescribe. It is to excavate. To uncover the relational structure of political potential itself. And in this excavation, the faintest trace of existential chill persists: the recognition that what once seemed essential—citizens shaping their collective futures—may have been contingent all along.