Regimi di visibilità e partecipazione politica giovanile. Per un’integrazione della teoria partecipativa nella prospettiva della cultura visuale

Abstract

Political sociology has traditionally classified participatory acts according to their intrinsic properties — subjective cost, institutional function, morphology — assuming organisational affiliation as the general condition of political efficacy. Building on the constructivist turn in democratic theory, this essay integrates the established taxonomies with a meta-categorical criterion derived from visual culture: configurative efficacy within the regime of visibility, understood as the capacity of a participatory act to alter the thresholds of intelligibility through which a political field recognises its relevant subjects. The criterion responds to a structural transformation of the representative field here termed dis-cursus honorum: in algorithmic ecologies, the construction of political careers detaches from the vertical progression of party militancy (cursus honorum) and unfolds in the horizontal network of public appearance, where the figurative dimension of representation (Darstellen) tends to precede and to enable representative delegation (Vertreten) — inverting on the field of democratic representation the sequence that Spivak's analysis had kept distinct on the discursive register. The conceptual framework draws on Mitchell's account of image agency, Mirzoeff's theory of visuality and counter-visuality, and Rancière's partage du sensible. The 2025 New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani is used to illustrate the analytical device. The proposed criterion offers interpretive purchase on the repertoire of visual and creative practices that taxonomies calibrated on organisational mediation tend to misread, and renders the generational configuration of the mobilised yet unaffiliated theoretically legible.