Miessen, Markus (2010): The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality)

The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality) (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010)

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Prologue: The paradox of Collaboration

Eyal Weizman

At the horizon of the concept of participation—its very absolute extreme—is that of collaboration.

Collaboration might be thought of as the tendency for forcefully or willingly aligning one’s actions with

the aims of power, be it political, military, economic, or a combination thereof. The historical allusions are clear. This alignment is usually justified as a commonsensical, if tragic, solution to a problem of limits. The dilemma of participation/collaboration implies a closed system in which the options available for choice, and those who present them, cannot be challenged. Seeking to force the subject into compliance, a set of alternatives might thus be posed in such a way that “free-subjects,” choosing for their interests in moderating harm, would end up serving the aims of this power. Participation thus tends to raise a number of political and ethical dilemmas that demand a clearheaded study of the alignment of powers around the arena where it is called for.

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At the core of the paradoxes of participation is a tactical compromise that often deteriorates into a

structural impossibility—one that entangles the state and its opposition in a mutual embrace, making nonstate organizations de facto participants in a diffused system of povernment in which the state outsources its ethical self-consciousness to a non-governmental ethical agency, and this agency delegates its claim to effectiveness in the state.

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Introduction: What is at Stake?

At the moment, participation is at a point of transition within politics, within the Left, within spatial practices, and within architecture, which is its most visible and clearly defined product. Both historically and in terms of political agency, participation is often read through romantic notions of negotiation, inclusion, and democratic decision-making. However, it is precisely this often-unquestioned mode of inclusion (used by politicians as never-ending campaigns for retail politics) that does not produce significant results, as criticality is challenged by the concept of the majority. Instead, this work promotes a conflictual reading of participation as a mode of practice, one that opposes the brainwave of the democratic facilitator, one that, at times, has to assume non-physical violence and singular decision-making in order to produce frameworks for change.

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(...) Interestingly, the model of the “curator,” for example, is based on the practice of making decisions and therefore eliminating choice. Participation, especially in times of crisis, has been celebrated as the savior from all evil. Such a soft form of politics needs to be questioned.

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(...) will bastardize participation into a form of violent, non-democratic practice, an opportunistic model of interventionism, which allows for a post-consensual practice that is disassociated from integrated modes of decision-making, and that prepares the ground for productive internal struggle. I will eventually label this practical model the “crossbench practitioner.”

This is an ongoing project that concentrates on participation as the object of repair. It attempts to open up a new language and practice, a field of operation rather than confronting an existing one. While it comprises multiple modes of writing, it essentially presents a book on architectural thinking as method.

Within this framework, I am unleashing a series of experiments that have been conducted over the last three years, each of which was directed in one way or another toward the above-mentioned undoing of innocence. Some of these experiments are text-based; others are set within the art world; and again others are urban interventions, institutional models, or specific physical architectural projects—small-scale, local testing grounds for potential change.

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(...) What is/are the alternative(s) to conventional confrontation based on the nostalgic notion of the barricade? How can one propose an alternative practice engaging in spatial projects that deal with social and political realities? What could such a polyphonic practice potentially be? What is the relevance of such work, and does it always necessitate urgency?

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According to Hans Ulrich Obrist, there is an ever-increasing need to consider the “breaking of the consensus machine.”* Taking this notion seriously, one should attempt to understand and illustrate the importance of critical engagement in alien fields of knowledge—to use spatial conditions as means for a cultural investigation. As this ongoing work aims to investigate both the role of the architect and the role and remit of the contemporary institution, existing models of participation are reviewed, both in terms of the culture of consensus and the ethos of compromise; these examples illustrate how contemporary institutions could be structured.

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CHAPTER 1

Spatial Practice Beyond the Romantic

(...) 

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In such a rendering of an erstwhile practice, the architect is portrayed as the one who designs and supervises the construction of a building, the person in charge who propels an übervision, and who brings along a personal lifestyle that allows for the piece of “architecture” to emerge as a unique product. The great ideal Renaissance man was the polymath, a person of great and varied learning. In those days, architecture would go from an unwritten state, as it was “practical” practice (you do!), to a framework of knowledge and intellectual exercise (you think!). The nineteenth-century gentlemen would emerge as a derivation of such a rendering of the Renaissance man. In the context of spatial practices, one could argue that this understanding of architecture as a blend of practices-—-spanning building, pure theory, and a whole diverse universe of practices in between these two extremes—presented a key moment: It would allow, for the first time, for an understanding of a proto-conceptual architecture liberated from the impulse to build. This implied that it no longer mattered if something was built or not; the intellectual product was already understood as the product itself. 

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In the contemporary capitalist market system, the polymath has undoubtedly become highly  expendable. Today, results have to emerge quickly. Without elaborating on extensive interdisciplinary knowledge and complimentary vision (or even the possibility of questioning existing patterns of functionality and the way we do things), today’s architect is faced with an ever-increasing system of economic efficiency (...) This evolution is without doubt one of the main reasons why the so-called “developer” has become the “new architect.” Many contemporary architects have succumbed to a position in which they are limited to just delivering form—a perilous progress, since most developers can do it either cheaper or faster, and simply outsource architects to produce form.

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In order to be able to unmark these common formats of architectural conception, it might be helpful to think of architecture as a post-disciplinary force field of knowledge, a practice concerned with spatial realities and their becoming. It seems that today we are in vital need of a reevaluation of spatial production beyond traditional definitions, acknowledging the possibility of an “architecture of knowledge” that is being built up by actively participating in space. The understanding, production, and altering of spatial conditions presents us with a prerequisite of identifying the broader reaches of political reality. Today’s spatial practices not only utilize experimental research related to the transient conditions of urban society, but also apply physical and non-physical structures in order to change and alter specific settings. While the differences engendered may appear marginal, it has an undeniable asset: that of an operative optimism coupled with concrete impact.

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If one wants to understand the processes of spatial becoming, it is crucial to overcome existing discourses of loss, and transform practice into a mode of observation that incorporates both the transient nature of spatial constructs as well as the transformation of urban cultures generated by everyday phenomena and practices. The liberating aspects of recent cartographies of spatial practices seem to lie in the ability to look at given situations without assuming the worst right from the start. This is not to say that one needs to drop any kind of critical sight, but rather, to enjoy and celebrate the complexities of the physical world we live in: complexity as opportunity to engage.

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Throughout the history of twentieth-century architecture, one can witness numerous attempts to critically engage with traditional practice from a point of view of participation. Nevertheless, most of these did not manage to establish more than a formulation of resistance—marginally executed. In contrast to the randomness of the Surrealists and the ideological assembly of the Situationists, there have been other examples of formulations of resistance. In the 1960s, when Team 10 advocated the use of concepts such as mobility, patterns of everyday life, and incremental urban growth as the basis for city planning, social change (previously imposed from the top down by an avant-garde that assumed an agency of architecture a priori) was then seen as emerging from the bottom up, from society's own internal processes, which architecture and planning were to manage. In this context, the task of the designer was understood as the facilitator of hardware: the amplifiers, attenuators, and gates that regulated the rate and intensity of flow within those systems.

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In France, Yona Friedman—whose work is based on principles of unpredictability—investigated issues of reconstruction such as the acute housing shortage and urban rebuilding, which he turned into the subject of public exposure. He proposed gigantic structures in which residents could build their own dwellings, and developed simple manuals in the form of comic books, which enabled people to make decisions about the design of their own living environment. In England, Cedric Price was  simultaneously propagating the architecture of “calculated uncertainty.” His lateral approach to architecture and time-based urban interventions has ensured that his work has an enduring influence on contemporary alternative practice. Similar to the work of Swissborn sociologist and economist Lucius Burckhardt  -who was particularly interested in planning methodologies and alternatives models of participatory urbanism, with a focus on new lessons for all roles involved in planning processes’-—Price’s approach was used as a parallel investigation during the IKAS conferences in the 1980s.’ More than two hundred participants from forty countries discussed the social task of architecture, rather than its formal or constructive aspects, which were the subject of parallel postmodern discourses. These conferences investigated themes such as democratization, user participation, construction in continuity, and the use of architecture over time. These models are often based on an understanding of participation that presupposes consensus and social engagement as the driving force of practice.

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Similar to the recent over saturation and use of the word participation in the world of architecture and planning, there have previously been similar developments in the art world, suchas Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1990s term “relational aesthetics,” in which an artwork is judged on the basis of “human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” In contrast to the majority of production in the 1980s and early gos, the relational aspect focused less on the object, and more on site-specificity and performative events that explicitly relied upon audience interaction and participation. Claire Bishop’s recent publication, titled Participation, investigates this practice of moving viewers out of the role of observers and into the role of producers, as a means to produce new social relationships.

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CHAPTER 2 

Undoing the Innocence of Participation

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Participation is often stipulated and promoted as a false nostalgic desire. Modes of participation can also be populist, and be used in this manner. Referenda, for example, can not only strengthen  democracy, it can also erode it.

(...) 

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Frankly speaking, not everyone should always be asked or invited to be included in the decision-making process. There seems to be a false and perverted sense of urgency regarding inclusion, which is most often fuelled by the fear of losing power, sustaining constituencies, and shaping and controlling stakeholders in order to be able to use them strategically.

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Participation has become a radical chic, one that is en vogue with politicians who want to make sure that, rather than producing critical content, the tool itself becomes what is supposed to be read as criticality.

In such a context, participation becomes a mode of buoyancy-production, a societal sedative, not in terms of the potential decisions that the populus can make, but in withdrawing the ground from which they can actively critique the actions of the decision-maker and representative. This leaves us with the presentiment that the notion and concept of horizontal organization can today be presented as something worthwhile, but is mostly used as political currency for those who offer it.

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A lot of recent talk on participation assumes that the closer you get to something or someone, the moreempathy you develop. This is a scary assumption. Today, once we start to think about the issue, topic, and/or problematic of participation, the first thing that comes to mind is a growing, irritating romanticism that has by now infiltrated the entire political spectrum from the critical Left to the far Right (...) The more we are superficially and publicly engaged, the less we give a damn.

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It seems that in the context of such romantic nostalgia of the good-doing, open-source practitioner, institution, or party, we are in urgent need of an outspoken political candor.

(...)

The crisis of the (over)use of the notion of participatory practice in architecture is only part of a larger crisis that the profession has been in for the last twenty years. The rapid emergence of practices all of a sudden becoming “social” throughout the 1990s is only an indicator for the economic instability of the profession. What is hardly ever being discussed in the context of participatory practice is that, in architecture, many offices have turned toward a more inclusive model of process-oriented research projects, because they could simply no longer get commissions for larger construction work. Interestingly, this economic aspect is often excluded from the debate (...)

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This is not to say that there hasn’t been a serious interest by some practitioners to develop inclusive and engaged models of practice. The crisis in many telated professions, such as architecture, urbanism, and spatial practice per se, has also led toa situation in which many interesting and relevant models of praxis have been developed and tested. As every crisis has its severe downfalls, it also, of course, has its productive and digestive potentials.

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(...) Democracy is always and foremost a process of democratization. This process is never-ending and needs to be learned and nurtured. Politics is always now and multifarious.

In order to develop strategies for a post-nostalgic practice, one needs to get beyond the truism that in order to act fully democratic, everyone needs to be involved. In fact—as I said in the introduction— sometimes democracy has to be avoided at all cost. The “notion of the curatorial” by default presents us with the opposite of what one might call “the romantic participatory,” as it embodies decision-making from the outside—some might say top-down: it is about exclusion and the act of “ruling out”; rather than thinking about what to show, it is about what not to show.