Posted on August 7th, 2011 in musings and tagged democracy, leadership, politics
Wandering through the archives of this blog, I found a post I wrote just a few days after Obama was elected in November of 2008. I recognized in it the feeling of momentousness with respect to the election of Obama, but what I had forgotten was the sharpness of my skepticism and frustration around American politics. Not surprising, of course, given how spectacularly bitter that 2008 campaign season was—and here we are again at the beginning of the next one. At that time I wrote:
Apparently, I sober up pretty quick, because, while Obama’s achievement is impressive, it must be understood within the context of a demonstrably corrupt and increasingly militarized and corporatized neoliberal political system. Yes, Obama won — and I may take pleasure at that because I support the winning side this time — but he won in no small part because of his superior gamesmanship, by playing the game better than his opponents. The rules of this political and electoral game have absolutely not changed. A more productive “hope” we might have now is that under this new leadership there might arise the possibility to change the nature of the American political system. Will Obama work to change the rules of the game now that he has been elected? Will the Clintonites with whom he is apparently surrounding himself change the rules? Will they change the rules (as Bush did) to consolidate and secure power, or to distribute power? Emerging from the hazy warmth of the election, I ask: With this incredibly significant democratic event, how do we leverage this slight shift towards the Center-Left to do the work that needs to be done in order to (re)build a civil society where economic and social justice extend to all of our fellow citizens? How can we work to open up authentic spaces for participation, discourse, and difference?
2 plus years on, in the putrid wake of the recent debt-ceiling debacle, there’s not much to feel optimistic about when it comes to government and its so-called leadership around the really pressing, urgent problems we face. The dysfunction is structural, embedded in the fabric of our political culture and possibly in the very strain of “representative” democracy that is our system of governance. The current political paradigm is one of extreme polemics and banal partisanship, a context that prohibits politicians (with few exceptions) from creatively addressing any of these systematic problems. Understanding our current political situation in terms of paradigms is useful because, as Thomas Kuhn has so aptly pointed out in the history of science, the dominant paradigm constitutes the frame through which we view (and subsequently make) the world. It is only through a profound shift in the dominant paradigm that truly new approaches and methods can be developed—that is, entirely new worldviews which might completely recalibrate our relationship to the world and each other.
We heard much in last few weeks about the “leadership” of the respective parties within congress, and Obama and his administration count among that “leadership” cadre as well. Sometimes the term was used descriptively to refer to the senior members of the Senate or the House; sometimes it was used pejoratively as jibe to force the other side live up to what is implied by the designation. Regardless, the more I heard about—and from—the “leadership,” the more hollow it sounded. Not only are these political actors constrained by the current, death-embracing political paradigm, but they are also lacking so many qualities that might lead to innovative approaches to our most urgent problems: empathy, humility, an understanding of genuine collaboration, ecosystem awareness, critical consciousness, a willingness to fail productively (and on and on perhaps). In a recent interview, Otto Scharmer of Theory U fame (I borrow “ecosystem awareness” from him) has this to say about leadership:
Today, if you talk with leadership practitioners, everyone gives you the same thing—which is change and institutional transformation. Everyone. What is that? If you unpack that, what is the nature of change? Well, it is transforming consciousness. Because change essentially is helping people to see the bigger picture, to see that they are part of a bigger picture. You level people up from a more narrow, egocentric perspective to a perspective where you take into account the views of other stakeholders, and maybe even of the larger ecosystem that you are a part of. So, real change practitioners, institutional leaders today all deal with consciousness. You deal with the transformation of who man is in consciousness. That’s what change work is about.
It’s possible that government may yet have a role to play in such transformation—but it’s so hard to see on the macro level, within the monolith that is the American national political system where brute force and gamesmanship (theatrical or not) make up the modus operandi. The change work that Scharmer describes, if it is to be meaningful, will have a profound practical impact on people’s lives, but it will also dwell in the realm of consciousness where the first steps toward a paradigm shift must occur.
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 February 7th, 2009 in activism, collaboration, project news and tagged action mill, activism, civil discourse, democracy, public sphere, research, social media, uarts, web
I’ve just begun working on a design research project with my colleagues and great friends, Jethro and Nick, of the Action Mill and three undergraduate students at the University of the Arts. The project, Social Media for Social Change, investigates how networked technologies and social media may be used to create hybrid public spaces where civic discourse and meaningful participation are facilitated, organized, and nurtured at a grass-roots level. We see this work as vital if we are to harness the potential of networked communications in creating spaces for discussion, disagreement, and community, especially when so many of our everyday interactions with others are circumscribed by social media. I invite you, readers, to follow along at the project blog and join the conversation.
