Posted on November 2nd, 2010 in collaboration, project news and tagged activism, architecture, art, civil discourse, democracy, participation, theory
During the course of our work for Manifesta 8 (as Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum), Bassam El Baroni and I were invited by Markus Miessen to contribute a postscript to his latest book The Nightmare of Participation, which is the final installment of his trilogy of books on participation. (We commissioned nOffice, an architecture studio comprised of Markus and partners, Magnus Nilsson and Ralf Pflugfelder, to design both an architectural intervention and a display system for two projects in two separate exhibition spaces.) The book has just been released by Sternberg Press, and I’m happy to present our postscript below:
Postscript (from The Nightmare of Participation, Markus Miessen)
By Jeremy Beaudry and Bassam El Baroni
A nightmare is an iconic representation created by your mind. The idea of the icon is that it visualizes a situation that you cannot, in your conscious mind, imagine to be worse or more powerful. In sleep, the subconscious shows you something that your waking mind cannot elaborate on; it cannot construct a more difficult, horrific icon. The familiar and the plausible is often taken to such an extreme as to be terrifying, or problems that have no solution are presented. You become trapped in an endless cycle.
To wake up from a nightmare is to reach the threshold of realizing that you are in fact dreaming. You cannot escape the nightmare from within the logic of the dream itself; you must exit the dream world. Crossing the threshold of realization, you begin to understand that you are a character performing a role within a staged play—the dream—that you are watching. You observe this character, who is you, doing that which only a moment ago was natural and inevitable according to the logic of the nightmare. Escaping this logic, your conscious mind moves out of the dreamscape and into consciousness as the artificiality of the scene is revealed… the lights, the cameras, the props, the other actors, the monster who is not real, but rather, merely a huge animatronic puppet.
In the nightmare of participation, political subjects become caught in the logic of an iconic participation, a representative participation that has been exaggerated to the point of hollowness. The power of this participation is the power of the mesmerizing icon: It sustains the nightmare that we cannot wake up from, and it compels us to go on playing our assigned roles. Why has participation become a nightmare? The history is longer than we can tell here. Start looking a few decades back, to the 1980s, when the Western political model of participation as a legitimizing force emerged—a significant step in the evolution of late capitalism’s political theater. It is participation as instrumentalized political practice. Participation becomes a scripted scenario of liberal democracy, into which you insert the necessary actors, props, lighting, cameras, and mechanized monsters. Wake up!
A Worst-case Scripted Scenario of Participation! Imagine: the United Nations decides to build a new headquarters for the twenty-first century and beyond, a structure that truly can reflect the diversity of cultures and nations that comprise the global community. They invite architects, designers, and theorists from literally every corner of the world in order to participate in a design charrette to envision this pinnacle of world architecture. We might circumscribe the nightmare of participation in this scenario with the following: What is expected from the non-Western participants, such as the architect from Mozambique, or the interior designer from Oman? What are they supposed to contribute? Their heritage? Where does the premise for their participation come from?
Does the fact of their being from these places mean that they will actually think in terms related to where they are from? Is their otherness embodied so neatly, so simply? Or is difference not so evident as it used to be, and what if it were? What if they were so different that there was no common ground at all?
If these eager participants do represent a non- Western, non-modernist sphere, will they actually be acknowledged or seriously considered? Will anyone give a damn about their contributions if their alterity doesn’t meet the standards of acceptable difference?
Surely, many voices are represented—it is the UN afterall!—but what happens next? Representation is iconic and the icon can only deliver substance to a subconscious. What happens next? Nothing happens because no one wants anything to happen. We must want something to happen, and then state it in clear terms. We don’t want a representation; we want the thing itself. To wake up from the nightmare, a mechanism needs to be devised that does not function iconically, but practically. There is plenty of antagonism preloaded into the scenario above by reason of the nature of constructed difference. Difference was and is constructed by humans, but to get over difference we must construct a mechanism that exists in the world of consciousness, one that can reckon with the complexity of life. We need to leave antagonism behind for the sake of antagonism and move toward constructing solutions. Antagonism is a criticality applied from outside of the system, a criticality that is pessimistic and does not reciprocate. It only listens in order to consume and circulate that feedback within its own critical machine. Wake up!
The nightmare of participation can only end when we wake up to a strange world where we have accepted an order that is not predicated on the same measurement of things. Perhaps this is exactly why we don’t want to wake up from this nightmare. Perhaps to wake up to this strange world where we are truly disoriented is the nightmare we dread the most, and that is why we prefer to live in this recurring nightmare of participation, which we at least know and are familiar with.
In the present volume, the author—as well as his collaborators—has earnestly elaborated on the nightmare of participation in order to propose a series of countermeasures to a “politically motivated model of pseudo-participation.” The tactics suggested are drawn from diverse disciplines and knowledge bases, and they appear in several guises: the uninvited outsider, the crossbench practitioner, the management consultant / systems designer, to recall a few. And while our language here may veer more into the domain of the imaginative for metaphorical effect than Miessen’s, we understand the objective of this project to be a mechanism that moves us closer to the threshold of realization, the line at which we see the nightmare of participation for what it is and find agency to escape the grasp of its iconic power. The call to arms is clear: wake up!
Posted on January 8th, 2010 in musings and tagged activism, art, philadelphia, taz, thinktank
Dilemmas—bona fide dilemmas—are tough. They present difficult decisions with less than ideal alternative choices to be made. Thinking about a potential dilemma in the making earlier today, I went back to a text I had written a few years ago for a Think Tank project that addressed another perceived dilemma. “The Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice” was written and then read as part of a performance that I did with four other Directors at Artivistic in Montreal in October 2007. I have not previously made the text available, so I’ve decided to publish it here now. Past writings serve as a marker of a specific frame of mind—spatial, temporal, political, intellectual—and that is evident to me in this example. In some ways my thinking has evolved, but in large part the assertions and questions are still relevant for me.
The Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice
1.
In early July of 2006, at the invitation of the Director of the Department for the Investigation of the Unmentionable, four individuals gathered at the corner of Coral and Hagert Streets in the Kensington section of Philadelphia—on the sidewalk, with lawn chairs, looking professional. I was there because I was one of them. I am one of them. They, or we—really, I and you—are the Think Tank that has yet to be named. I am the Director of the Department for the Investigation of Meaning. On the sidewalk in lawn chairs looking professional, we held the first Publicly Held Private Meeting.
As a matter of origins and motivations and ontological inquiries—as a provisional history of things that probably are not, nor never will be, historical—we might ask ourselves a few fundamental questions: Where were we? Why were we there? What did we see? What did we do? Or, rather, as a dialectical tactic, we might ask ourselves: Where were we not, and why were we not somewhere else? What did we not see, and what did we not do? We might ask ourselves. Just as likely, though, I might ask you, or you might ask me. (And, to be prudent, let’s not get caught up in the past tense—although we might get caught up in the past, in the memory, and in the remembering.)
Thomas burst out of the Puerto Rican bar across the street sipping on a large bottle of beer that he was carrying in a brown paper bag. We were on the sidewalk in lawn chairs looking professional and he approached us without reservation, curious, amicable. He asked us what we were doing and wanted to know what kind of meeting we were having. We told him about the Think Tank that has yet to be named. We told him about how each of us was the Director of our own departments, and how that allowed us to reveal each of our own biases and positions. We told him about the Publicly Held Private Meeting, how we wanted to be out in the world and talk about the places we occupy and talk with others about these places too. We told him we were artists and that we were concerned about how our presence in the neighborhood might be doing harm to that place. Thomas immediately sat down and stretched out on the sidewalk. Animated, he listened intently and then told us about himself. I don’t remember many details about what he told us, but the exchange was profound, nonetheless. I remember the overwhelming sense of being in the right place at the right time and for the right reason. Thomas had sat down and stretched out on the sidewalk with us (albeit looking somewhat less professional and less peculiar) and he listened to us and looked us in the eye and we looked him back in the eye and listened to him.
Thomas got it. We were close to getting it ourselves.
2.
“You had to be there.” None of this is new or particularly interesting. “You had to be there.” Lest my account devolve into mystification: “You had to be there.” You weren’t there, so you don’t know. She [point to Meredith] and he [point to Jethro] were there—they know. As for you, you just weren’t there. None of you are from there. Where are you from? How do you decide where “from” is?
How do we decide where “from” is? As travelers, we ask and are asked: “where are you from”? I answer: I’m from the United States. I’m from Philadelphia. I’m from Fishtown. I’m from Palmer Street. I name a place. But it’s also about identity. Before we travel, we pack our bags: socks, shirts, pants, toothbrush, nail clippers… and identity. Our identity is in part localized in a place (places), in being “from” somewhere. This is turf, the ‘hood, the ‘burbs, the streets, ownership and agency, boundaries, roots, nomadism, isolationism, colonialism, cosmopolitanism, provincialism, us versus them, outsider/insider, trespassers and interlopers, homeboys and homegirls, hicks and city-slickers.
As an aside: Does my arrival in Montreal herald a sort of homecoming? My ancestors came through French Canada—one in particular, a minister name Beaudry, perhaps passed through this city in the early 19th century. Did you notice the Rue Beaudry, or the Beaudry metro stop?
Regardless of where we’re from, we’re all here now.
3.
“Ich bin ein Berliner!” I am a pancake! I am a jelly donut! Well, not exactly. On June 23, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivers a speech in West Berlin to an anxious yet enthusiastic crowd of West Berliners. Two years after the Wall was completed, they are still reeling from the fact that the waters of Soviet-style communism have risen up around them. Expressing solidarity with the West Berliners, Kennedy descends on the island, stakes the ideological flag of western democracy, and proudly declares himself a citizen of West Berlin: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Funny thing, though: in other parts of West Germany, a Berliner is a kind of fruit-filled pancake, a jelly doughnut. No big deal—Berlin, the world, knew what he meant. Still, it might not ever be enough to simply say for oneself: “I am from this or that place”—even if it’s only meant as a rhetorical gesture. There’s a whole host of other people who have a stake in where you’re from as well. So often, being from somewhere depends upon the consensual acceptance of a larger group of people who also claim to be from there.
The place where I now live: the neighborhood of Fishtown, in Philadelphia, on Palmer Street. I’m not really from there. I mean, I’m from there in that I was there before I was here and I’ll go back to there when I leave here—but I am not from there. You know what I mean? It’s not that I misspoke earlier when I said I was from Fishtown, but it’s complicated. Many of the families in my neighborhood have lived there for generations; homes are passed down from grandparents to parents to children; kids grow up on one block and buy houses on the next one over. I am not from there. I’m a newbie, the ones who are from there say. I am a jelly doughnut.
How do we decide where “from” is? Take a longer view, and maybe my neighbors are not really from there either. Previous waves of Europeans settled long before them—English, Scots, German, Polish. Plenty of streets are still named after those forgotten colonials. And, of course, before them were the native peoples, the Lenape, the Delaware, the Shawnee. Down where Shackamaxon Street dead-ends at the Delaware River, you might wonder in vain about how these indigenous tribes answered the question of where “from” is when they signed the treaty with the renegade Quaker, Billy Penn, Pennsylvania’s namesake and Philadelphia’s founder. It is a truism that the native American world view did not share in the European preoccupation with dominion over the land, with a totalizing ow nership per se. Who exactly is from Fishtown anyway?
Being both from and not from my neighborhood is difficult: Although I’ve only lived there a short while, I and many others have expended much energy and time organizing the community in advance of sustainable planning and development. We’ve advocated for open and transparent public processes and responsible and accountable governance. This activism has specifically focused on organizing community opposition to two Las Vegas-sized casinos that are planned to be built across the street from residential homes along the waterfront. It has been highlighted that many of us organizers are new to the neighborhood, new to Philadelphia in general—that is, not from Philadelphia—which is noted as a source of our irreverence for political authority and our “naive” belief in citizens’ rights to self-determination. Our allies are quick to embrace us, to laud our efforts. Our opponents, on the other hand, are quick to point out that we newbies are not from the neighborhood and have little stake in its future. From-ness is measured in longevity, and I’m holding on to the shortest straw.
How do you decide where “from” is? Furthermore, who, besides you, decides where your “from” is?
4.
Regardless of where we’re from, we’re all here now. Gathered together in this place we are a kind of occupying force, an assembly of emissaries—although, perhaps positioned at the more benign end of the spectrum of all possible connotations of the idea of occupation. It’s occupying nonetheless. It’s temporary, provisional, flexible, with purpose. At this moment, most of us are occupying the space between “from” and “not from”, between this collective “here” and our respective “there’s”. You and I—we—the Think Tank that has yet to be named—draw upon the places where we are from in order to interrogate, understand, engage, and activate the places where we are not from: this space right here, for example.
In the space between “from” and “not from”, we have these questions: What does it mean to export the local and site-specific? How can a practice rooted in a rich, nuanced interrogation of an intimately known place be relocated effectively to another, unfamiliar place? To what extent does such a localized art / activist practice rely on internalized assumptions about the valorization of indigenousness and the privileging of “authentic” spatial occupation? And what is “authentic” spatial occupation anyway? How can we even precisely locate indigenous? We worry over these problems, these difficulties. We have described this nagging feeling of failure in our work as the Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice.
We go on anyway. Or not. Maybe we stop and start over somewhere else, or just stop altogether, leaving the traces of a question, a thought, a practice, for others to take up. If there is an intellectual—hell, even spiritual—model of praxis that we Directors embrace and perhaps ultimately corrupt, then it might the TAZ, the Temporary Autonomous Zone. The mystical theorist Hakim Bey cobbled together an account of the TAZ from stolen fragments: pirate utopias, Nietzche’s last mad musings, pagan carnivales, cybernetics, repurposed sufism, Situationism, etc etc etc. The TAZ is both singular and multifarious. It exists as a particular instance, but also describes a network of relations, an “occupation”, a rift, the tearing of space and its mending. The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Throw a party. Come together provisionally. Eke out a space of your own. Appear and then disappear. Embody radical, perpetual becoming. Terrorize the world with poetry. Transgress everything. Know that it will not last. Negate. Destroy to create. Escape to Croatan. Go away and never come back.
Hakim Bey tells us that the TAZ is like an uprising. It is a festival, a revelry that has been unloosed or forced to vanish from its traditional moment in time and space. The TAZ may appear freely and then dissolve itself to reform elsewhere and elsewhen. It possesses “a nose for the ripeness of events, and an affinity for the genius loci.” Attuned to the psychotopology of a place—the “flows of forces” and “spots of power”—the TAZ is rooted spatio-temporally, if only for a moment.
So let’s call this a minor uprising, stop for now, and see you again in the next place.
Philadelphia, 2007
Posted on August 23rd, 2009 in collaboration, project news and tagged action mill, activism, design, game theory, presentation, social media, uarts
I will be traveling to Belfast on Tuesday to attend ISEA2009, the International Symposium on Electronic Art. I will also be giving a short presentation on the Social Media for Social Change project. As a refresher, SMSC is a design research collaboration between me, three undergraduate students, and members of the Action Mill that is funded by the Philadelphia Applied Research Lab at the University of the Arts. The fundamental question we are asking is: how can we reimagine civil discourse in the context of social media and networked communication? Our objectives are: 1) to learn more about human interaction (online and offline); 2) to create structural changes (as opposed to merely tweaking existing tools); and 3) to build environments that accommodate divergent perspectives, mediate disagreement, and encourage civil debate.
Quite unexpectedly, the deliverable we have produced at the close of this first phase is a haptic board game called The NIMBY Game. Using real-world land use and zoning dilemmas often faced in cities, players must negotiate these in order to collectively plan their city while balancing the pressures of self-inerest and common good. We think it’s quite useful for understanding better structures for civil discourse — and it’s also pretty fun to play. We’d like to release the game as a limited edition multiple once the final glitches are worked out. (As Rob from the Action Mill says, “Board games are the new indy film.” Works for us!)
Anyway, if you’re going to be in Belfast for ISEA and trying to determine which of the myriad presentations and panels to attend, please do come. I present on Saturday, August 29 at 14:30 in a location called “Waterfront Hall Bar I and II” at the University of Ulster. See you then.
UPDATE: Here are the slides of the presentation I gave:
