Many, Other, Place, Frame
Focusing on the scenic dimension of the visual register of constituent imagination, Chapter 3 focuses on how select early modern, modern, and contemporary theorists stage the scenes in which a sovereign (people) appears either as the author or as the outcome of the act of constitution. Building on Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism, the chapter shows how choreographed interplay among four abstract stage ‘props’ allows constitutional thinkers to stage one of the most important attributes of sovereignty—its capacity for creatio ex nihilo. Through a series of engagements with Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, Sieyès, Lefort, and others, Chapter 3 reveals how they conformed to the unwritten laws of constituent dramatism, as well as the tricks they resorted to in order to bring a sovereign people into imaginative existence.