Introduction
As a nomadic communication practice, the Dialogical Structures explore alternative forms of linguistic-spatial negotiations by means of dialogically designed objects and structures. The aim is to investigate spatialised hierarchies through experimental settings in order to develop new typologies and negotiation formats.
The Dialogical Structures are method, utopian approach and concrete formulation at the same time and develop iteratively from session to session out of this trialectic (Lefebvre). They are a toolbox for potentially testing other forms of negotiation, a potential setting for utopian thinking. We refer to the conversations, meetings and workshops in and with the Dialogical Structures as micropolitical exercises because the Dialogical Structures constitute artificial sites, ephemeral sites or, in full awareness of the danger that this kind of designation may provoke academic embarrassment: Pop-up Parliaments.
The Dialogical Structures describe a spiral process of concrete exercises and settings, their practical testing, the reflection of these exercises, the engagement with absurd, seemingly unrelated inspirations and the imaginations that follow, as well as the re-transfer of the insights to the real place, the next real meeting.
The political perspective is subsumed – also for reasons of comprehensibility – in the term „Neighbourhood Parliament“, which we mean at the same time very seriously and is a placeholder for other possible translations. If we imagine that there would be neighbourhood parliaments in the future – whatever they might look like – then we do not want to negotiate in them according to the same logic as is the case in the current parliamentary buildings. So we can understand the exercises as preparation. But we can also understand them as exercises in utopian thinking.
Between method, utopian approach and concrete formulation, the Dialogical Structures follow a conception of utopia that we call dynamic utopias (plural). These have little to do with the static utopia of the 19th century, which tended towards totalitarianism. The concept of utopia has undergone a transformation in recent years. It would perhaps be too much to speak of a utopian turn, but nevertheless a development worth looking at: from the great fear of totalitarian utopias, the degradation of utopian thinkers to what in german is called „Utopist“, the reproach of the naïve, which we were also allowed to feel in the academic environment – all of this is breaking up. Above all, feminist, intersectional and anti-colonial positions and discourses are opening up a way of thinking that formulates critique through positive visions of the future. Here, utopia is no longer a rigid construct, a finished idea spun by a "genius" mind. Utopia is collectivised, the artists of Intelligent Mischief speak of "multiplicity of utopias", we discover dynamic utopias in anarchism and in general the plural becomes more important than the singular.
The Dialogical Structures are part of these micropolitical exercises in which the aim is to open up to utopian thinking and to find and try out negotiation strategies together that follow a different logic than that of parliamentary politics. How does a network of different utopias hold together? What do structures of relationships look like that last beyond geographical points? How can self-determined local decisions be made possible without ignoring or excluding macro-political dependencies and connections?
Setup
The material basis of the modular settings is composed of blue metal joints, wooden poles and a yellow mat made of oilcloth. From these, depending on the context and location, more or less familiar elements are created, such as entrances, benches or roofs, which are expanded by site-specific additions. Together with the yellow point, they form an "other", a separate space that lies between the abstract and the concrete, between conceptual and lived space. The Dialogical Structures are to be understood as an artistic tool with which we work and research. If at all, they represent symbolic approaches, but by no means a fully developed space for negotiation.
In addition, there are the invisible aspects of the design on various levels: 1. The entrance through the pink curtain reinforces the exit from everyday life. 2. The material and colour of the curtain play with affects and invite productive friction. 3. The benches reinforce a sense of collectivity that the heavy, upholstered chairs in most parliaments prevent. 4. The benches are hard and uncomfortable and force constant re-positioning of the body (and mind?). A point Jonas Staal elaborates in his text "Assemblism": "We have learned that using chairs maintains the liberal order that emphasizes the sovereign individual above the collective, whereas benches maintain the principle of negotiating and sharing collective space." (Staal 2017) 5. The non-material flow of the conversations is structured by methods from anarchy and theatre. For example: the introduction is read by everyone together, the yellow mat can be written on, the participants negotiate both in the large group and in smaller groups.
Material, form and process are part of the design of the space. For many reasons, the objective of this design – a space in which discussions take place with less hierarchy and in which people fabulate together – can never be achieved. In this respect, the Dialogical Structures are never completed and are constantly dependent on their reinvention.
Archive
Based on the open-purpose salons of the last 400 years and parliamentary as well as extra-parliamentary architectures, the Dialogical Structures are inspired by various negotiation spaces that we have collected over the past years. The collection forms a growing archive that we return to again and again. It is an integral part of our artistic work. We understand negotiation spaces metaphorically here, as the images of the archive in this article show: They can be stellar constellations, descriptions of biological processes or the etymology of a word. Each negotiation space illustrates – quite subjectively – certain principles, dependencies, relationships, movements, forms and can become the starting point for speculative designs, completely detached from the political architectures of our present.
Propositions
In the following, we formulate a relationship between artistic practice and utopian thinking on the basis of three propositions, starting from the Dialogical Structures. We try to make clear to what extent an expanded concept of space and speculative artistic research, methodically brought together, form practices of imagination.
It is possible to recognise and produce new worlds through iterative action/practice. But: not everyone has the possibility to do this.
We all reproduce the existing world through our (everyday) actions. Doing something over and over again creates reality. In Germany, this kind of reality production is verified by the courts in the form of unwritten "Gewohnheitsrecht", which is on a par with written laws. The Federal Supreme Court aptly formulates it as follows: "Customary law arises through prolonged actual excercise (Übung)." (https://www.bundesgerichtshof.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020012.html, retrieved 24.02.2021). This practice must be carried out permanently, constantly and uniformly, and must usually go beyond the individual case. We can read this as an allegory. But we can also understand the link between action and social reality on a legal level.
In Mülheim, a small German town in the Ruhr area, there was an alternative meeting place where concerts took place every weekend. Each time the bands started to play a little later than announced, so that the visitors also showed up a little later, so that the bands in turn started to play a little later. At some point, the concerts started at 2:00 in the morning.
According to sociologist Martina Löw, space is created through two interrelated processes. Firstly, the placing or positioning of social goods and people, e.g. the placement of goods in the supermarket, the positioning of people in relation to other people, the construction of houses, etc. Löw calls this "spacing". (cf. Löw 2001: 158) "Social goods" here means above all symbolic markings that identify or subsume ensembles of people and goods, as e.g. entrance and exit signs of villages do. These symbolic markings can be played with. Secondly, these positionings are combined into spaces through "processes of perception, imagination or memory [...]" (Löw 2001: 159), which Löw calls "synthesis".
Space is thus to be understood as a relational "(An)Ordnung" (Löw is playing with the german words for arrangement and order), which means there is an action dimension and a structuring dimension. (cf. Löw 2001: 166) According to Löw, "spatial structures are recursively reproduced through repetitive actions" (Löw 2001: 263). So on the one hand, there is an action dimension and a structuring dimension. However on the other hand, space is also produced between actions and structures in this extended sociological sense (cf. Löw 2001: chapter 5.2).
Following Löw's repetitive actions, we speak of iterative actions and thus want to direct the focus primarily to those actions that do not reproduce "world" recursively but produce it speculatively – actively! Iteration does not describe a circle of exact repetition but a spiral that circles away from its starting point. Whether we reproduce what exists or produce something new also depends on what we do and how we do it. The Dialogical Structures are an attempt to provoke this shift spatially, that is, to create a space in which reproductive actions are reflected and questioned and the production of a "new world" is made possible. "New worlds" emerge when we build knowledge and experiences that underpin the engagement with transformative interactions and processes from which potentially heterogeneous lifeworlds emerge. (cf. Janssens 2017: 153)
The artist and writer Patricia Reed emphasises that something "gains value through the imitation or repetition of use". (Reed 2016: 82) In her essay "Constructing Assemblies for Alienation", she writes: "To target what could be is both to define the goals of the assembly and to articulate a new spatial condition for a logic that is not tied to the real imperatives of the present landscape. What could be is not something that can be revealed, but the project of a vast collaborative construction that develops an alternative future liberated from certain impasses [...]." (Reed 2016: 81)
The Dialogical Structures are ultimately an attempt to build a space in which new relations are temporarily revealed and negotiated through common actions until they become reality. These collective actions require assembled bodies and, as we know from Judith Butler, are in this respect inherently political: "Even if it does not take place in the parliamentary form of written and oral contributions, the provisional assembly is a call for justice. [...] The assembled bodies 'say' that they are not freely available, even if they only stand there silently. This expressiveness is part of plural and embodied performativity, which we must understand as marked by dependence and resistance." (Butler 2016: 29)
In her essay "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be", Ursula K. LeGuin describes the entanglements between societal power relations and utopian designs: "Utopia has been euclidean, it has been European, and it has been masculine". (LeGuin 2016: 177) Therein lay, and still lies, a problem with the idea that one can produce new worlds through iterative actions: not everyone has the possibility to do so. Firstly, because they are so caught up in everyday actions, in life-support measures, that there is neither time nor strength for anything else. And secondly, because as marginalised people they are kept oppressed and invisible, deprived of their history, without which it is difficult to imagine a future (cf. Ytasha Womack as quotet in Hilton 2018: 17). The two points are not exclusive. These marginalised and oppressed groups are forced into reproduction and prevented from producing "new worlds" in the active way described above, or from participating in this production at all.
The Dialogical Structures are not a utopian design but a space that emerges between action and structure. It is an attempt to make utopian thinking possible through friction, which means difference, and not to impose it. Utopia is inextricably linked to social power relations. If we ask ourselves how different spaces, technologies and embodiments shape the practices of imagination we need to consider this. It is essential to keep Audre Lorde's words in mind when she emphasises the importance of difference in her recently published essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" and brings it together with the possibility of being an active – one could also say "world-producing" – being. She writes: "Interdependence between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive being and the active being." And further: "Only within that interdependence of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being." (Lorde 2019: 104)
Space is a socio-material positing. It constitutes the basis for negotiations.
The dialogical structures are first of all a toolbox for us. One question is whether the toolbox, which consists of material and interpersonal components, can be used to build a setting that creates conditions for various negotiations: this includes the acoustics, visibility of participants, architecture, timeframes, and so on. All this is interrelated with the basic needs of coming together. Bodies have different requirements. The space must also deal with this.
What Watzlawick claims for interpersonal communication, namely that one cannot not communicate, also applies to space and the Things (in the Christian Nordic and Germanic sense of the word that Pelle Ehn e.g. has referred to in his paper "Participation in Design Things") of which it consists. Space cannot not communicate and is thus always a socio-material positing. This positing implies an intention. Space can be designed as a question, an argument, a statement, a position, an assertion, a suggestion... We compare it to language, which, when spoken, also becomes a spatial positing, enabling the conversation partners to react, to interpret, in its multi-dimensional concreteness. Just as a good conversation requires arguments and thoughts that remain displaceable, a good negotiation space requires what we call ephemeral settings.
The space develops between elements of irritation and the familiar. Everything happens in between. Irritating elements can be: enduring silence, hard benches, a latex curtain. Thus it forms the stage for political imaginations and utopian thinking. The socio-material settings must remain open for appropriation and interaction, but at the same time allow for the friction already indicated above. We are talking about spatial settings that guide without prescribing, that stimulate confrontations but also enable a focused exchange. In her text "Collective Sense-making for Change: About conversations and instructs in the anthology Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice", architect Nel Janssens describes this approach as "curating a conversation" (Janssens 2017: 154). This also includes curating the space, the design of which includes not only the "spatial setting" but also the immaterial setting in the form of "rules of conduct, guidelines, methods..." (Janssens 2017: 155).
In this sense, space is particularly interesting as an artistic means because it is not only a stage on which forms of life are performed, but at the same time this stage itself produces interactions, experiences and affects (cf. Lehnert/Wehinger 2014: 13-33), formulates arguments to which others can relate and react. On the one hand, the Dialogical Structures outline a possible utopia as a starting point and, on the other hand, emerge as a new possible utopia through the negotiation that takes place within them and that shapes them. They must be understood as iterations that embody a dynamic concept of utopia.
Micropolitical units are flexible, specific and capable of action. As nuclei, docking points and decentralised, diverse networks, they are politically relevant.
The principle of subsidiarity was established by the Treaty on European Union. Whenever possible tasks and decisions should be carried out by the smaller unit, which means that communes should only delegate tasks and decisions „upwards“, e.g. to the regions, if the political objective can be better achieved there. The principle of subsidiarity can be read as an idea to take sovereignty away from the nation states in order to confer sovereignty on the regions (or – as we push for – the neighborhoods). The ideal of a European constitution that ensures fundamental human rights across the board, while an association of autonomous entities regulates most of the tasks itself, resonates in this formulation. A horizontally intertwined network; a broad, flat hierarchy for decision-making (see e.g. Menasse 2014).
These autonomous entities can be seen as micropolitical units. In concrete terms, these could be compared to communites, affinity groups, interest groups, associations or a housing block. The members of a micropolitical unit can be connected through their common geographical location, but also through friendships, contracts, common preferences, kinships, etc. (A wonderful utopia of autonomous units is described by p.m. in his 1983 book "bolo'bolo", to which we owe much.) Micropolitical units stabilise as a network because each person is not only part of one micropolitical unit, but different ones with different interests and identities: "Working on a political level as a citizen to radicalise democracy does not mean throwing other forms of identification overboard and is easily compatible with engaging in democratic struggles of a more selective nature." (Mouffe 2018: 80), as the political scientist Chantal Mouffe puts it.
It is important to interpret the concept of unity in a way, which is always only temporarily valid, because a return to nationalisms that can be observed for some years now is also the result of consensus-oriented politics. Based on these considerations, Chantal Mouffe pleads for a multipolar conception of politics in which enemies become adversaries. (cf. Mouffe 2014 and Miessen 2012: 91) There is a need for differently scaled negotiation spaces that do not try to proclaim some kind of universalism, but accept social conflicts as part of the never-ending process of becoming a society. This is also part of the Dialogical Structures: they emerge in confrontation with a counterpart, forming a temporary political arena.
In Simone Weil's political writings, published in German under the title "Unterdrückung und Freiheit" ("Oppression and Freedom"), she writes in the "Meditation on Obedience and Freedom" that cohesion could only be established "in a small group" (Weil 1975: 260). A plural society can only potentiate itself from the small and can thus only be found in the large (the mass) through the many small. This small must not close itself off to the outside, as is the case with the bourgeois nuclear family for example. The micropolitical unit must be potentially open and celebrate variety and "la différance". Networks of different micropolitical units stand in solidary relations with each other and form a horizontal structure.
How do micropolitical units connect in the future when geographical location marks only one form of connection? What does de-localised mutuality and mutual aid look like? How do they negotiate differences without banishing them, without post-local warfare? The Dialogical Structures are micropolitical exercises in which we approach these imaginaries. But is it ok to try out this approchement analogically, physically and locally, even if many micropolitical entities will not share a common locality?
In archaeology, substructure (Substruktion) refers to building supports that can be found under Roman tribunes and terraces, for example. Niches must be occupied to prevent them from collapsing. (cf. p.m.'s very poetic approach to substruction in "bolo'bolo".) In micropolitical exercises we prepare ourselves for the possible utopia that is built in the places that are empty of power. Substruction in this figurative sense means the establishment of new practices and relations in the systemic gaps exposed by climate emergency, growing social inequalities, pandemics, transformation of work and crisis of democracy.
References
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Images used for sampling:
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