ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 provides a distillate of the empirical and conceptual reflections of the book. With the goal to generalize insights from the case study of the Koalition der Freien Szene, four analytical vectors outline a post-foundational theory of political representation and articulation. Regarding the interrelatedness between articulation and legitimations, the chapter reveals that agonistic collective actors engage in passages between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ to intervene in existing hegemonic settings of meaning and power. To understand the emergence of new political actors and movements, the chapter summarizes how agonistic self-organized collective actors acknowledge the insurmountable dimension of antagonism and the productivity of conflict to create new ways to conceptualize political mobilization, organization, representation and legitimacy. These spaces of ‘conflictual collaboration’ move beyond the normative fixation on consensus, and instead urge us to re-politicize urban (cultural) politics by bringing ‘the political’ back into the heart of critical urban and political theory. The outlook reiterates the importance of attending to the endlessly diverse manifestations of ‘the political’ in urban (cultural) life, igniting unconventional, temporary and informal yet legitimacy-building relations in multi-stakeholder collaborative governance settings.
