ABSTRACT
There is nothing, no ‘naked life’, no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this eld permeated by money, nothing escapes money.
(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 2000: 32)
The desire to channel the needs and demands voiced by citizens rather than ‘impose’ solutions is at the heart of participatory practices. Not all the committed architects, however, deploy participatory practices, and some are unequivocally opposed to participation. Many related practices, such as yarn-bombing or guerrilla gardening, are carried out without any public consent, whether ocial or unocial. And while yarn-bombing or seed-bombing are activities that raise only marginal opposition, if at all, other practices disrupt the consensus and confront public opinion. Jerey Hou opens the anthology Insurgent Public Space (2010) with a description of ‘an eight foot long metal pig that was anonymously planted on a sidewalk overnight’ in Fremont. Such individual, transgressive acts display a disregard for or rebellion against public opinion, ‘an attack on the ocial public sphere’ (Hou 2010: 1). The placing of the pig was an act that was not legitimized as citizens’ will. In the opposition by such actions to consensus, they form a counterpart to practices that are validated through consensus. Consensus-driven participation and anti-consensual engagement, hence, are intertwined, the former perceiving public opinion as the source of legitimacy, the latter perceiving it as illegitimate, a reection of dominant ideologies. Whereas the practitioners who exalt participatory practices tend to turn to Habermas’s theory and see their role as facilitators of citizens’ will, those who eschew consensus opinion often turn to theories that highlight contestation, such as the political theories of Moue or Rancière, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Hardt and Negri, in contrast, argue that transformation is achieved through contestation ‘from within’ current conditions, whereas ‘popular’ sovereignty and its consensual impetus is rejected.21 The celebration of the global condition that is at the centre of the political project of Hardt and Negri is driven by their animosity to the nation state. The social historian Michael Merrill suggested that ‘the central thrust of all their [Hardt
and Negri’s] work has been an attack on the state and its accompanying conceptions of sovereignty’ (Merrill 2010: 150).
