>> Television screens were mounted on a wall that functioned as both the focus of attention during the screenings and an informational backdrop during the conversational sessions. The forum was also framed by the “barnacle wall”, which filtered the afternoon light, producing a simultaneously grand yet incredibly modest environment for a set of sessions that showed no trace of paradoxical deficiencies: between Detroit as its subject, its object, and its site, the forum reified the very space of Derridean différance, existing both as signifier and signified, occurring after the films yet before the cameras, producing synthesis as data. As architects, our attempt was to activate to the best of our abilities, a space of democracy—a space that, in the words of Chantal Mouffe, cannot
consist of pure consensus but must include dissent and disagreement: an agonistic public space. “In a pluralist democracy, such disagreements should be considered legitimate and indeed welcome,” she writes. “They provide different forms of citizenship identification and are the stuff of democratic politics.”1 For Jacques Rancière, the space of dissensus is more precisely located between two types of pedagogies, ethical immediacy and representational mediation. It’s positioned in the conflict, as he writes, between sense and sense, “between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or ‘bodies’.”2 The intentions behind the design of the forum as an event-space, were precisely to enhance the possibilities of this dissensus, through the conjunction
of the three processes that, according to Rancière, define the paradigm of a critical art when enacted concurently: “first, the production of a sensory form of ‘strangeness’; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness.”3 The strangeness was certainly by design, was inevitably experienced, awkwardly acknowledged and intensively discussed. As for the outcome of its mobilization, it’s too early to tell, but the seeds were planted. ____
Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Public Sphere” in Okwui Enwezor ed., Democracy Unrealized (OstifildernRuit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002): 89.
1
Jacques Rancière, “The Paradoxes of Political Art,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum, 2010): 137.
2