Welcome to the Nineteenth Century: Venezuelan Elections
by Fernando Calzadilla

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Chavez, like Joselo, is fond of breaking the rules for the sake of raising a populist element within his constituency. “Con Chavez Manda el Pueblo,” read big billboards across the nation. In the photograph [Fig. 3] we can see a reversal of the presidential character, an important one played in humble garb, Chavez playing a modern Juan Bimba. The pueblo, a reclaiming of the word he changes from meaning "poor" to meaning "sovereign," identify in him their aspirations. He is one of us, we can do it.

Chavez's embodiment produces what Pierre Bourdieu calls misrecognition, a paradoxical construal whereby power relations are perceived not for what they are and instead are rendered legitimate in the eyes of the beholder (8). Up to the December 1998 elections, the discursive formations sustaining Venezuela—the constitution, the judiciary, and so on—claimed the country to be a representative democracy. Nonetheless, elected presidents, legislative authorities, and basic democratic processes—such as candidate lists—reflected not the interests of the “people” but the interests of the ruling elite. Yet the system was called democratic and ‘rendered legitimate.’ Since July 2000, after the so-called re-legitimizing elections, Venezuela has a federalist participatory democracy with legislative authorities elected through ‘open lists.’ Yet abstention on one side and Chavez’s handpicked candidates on the other leave little room for an accountable democracy. Nonetheless, social imaginaries reflect the workings of the entire population, not just the few in power. Social imaginaries make evident the contradictions and tensions that political pronouncements and promises attempt to hide. In Venezuela, the tensions are numerous—mostly perceived along class, gender, and racial differences. The performance of the popular social imaginary in electing president and representatives reenacts colonial monarchic values and 19th-century personalist politics (caudillism). That is why in Venezuela it is so difficult to trace ideological affiliations along party lines in the traditional spectrum of left and right, or for that matter between federalist and centralist forms of government. People tend to vote for the candidate that they perceive will protect their interests, whether there is any basis for this perception or not. Theatricality and style therefore become fundamental to the electoral process.

Some commentators assert that few traces remain from the colonial period and 19th-century politics (see Kornblith, 1993:5-6). I disagree. I contend that while constitutions are decreed and approved, laws drawn, organizational principles designed, and agreements signed, embodied practices responding to well established social imaginaries are resilient. Personalist politics dominate democracy’s political landscape through the embodiment of verbal and non-verbal pacts and alliances. Social imaginaries are slow to change in spite of the apparent discursive formations’ rapid implementation. Neither one is stable and in their interaction they affect each other. However, performatic formations based on the enactment of social imaginaries are seldom observed for what they are.

By observing embodied behavior concerning candidates’ performance, voter participation and abstention, and social imaginaries at play, I want to problematize the democratic system’s legitimacy, when 76 percent of the electoral active population decides not to vote (9). This observation will highlight pressing questions, such as: which are the social imaginaries at play in electing a candidate? What is at stake in an election? What is the meaning of abstention from voting? Does Venezuela suffer a crisis of representation? Do social imaginaries influence the outcome of an election?

Of course, there is no simple answer to any of these questions and they apply not only to Venezuela but also to democracy in general. By focusing on the Venezuelan case from a performance studies perspective, I hope we can learn something about how embodied behavior tells a different history than the one we find in discursive formations.