Figure 5.5.1 Ballot for Constitución referendum
Manuel Tironi
July 2010. Five months had passed since the 8.8 magnitude earthquake and the consequent tsunami that ravaged Constitución, a coastal city in southern Chile. In mid-April an interdisciplinary team of architects and social scientists – myself among them – was put together to conduct a participative design process for the reconstruction of Constitución. After three months of public hearings, community forums and charrette exercises, the process culminated with a city-wide referendum to decide on the construction of the plan’s most ambitious project: the 20-hectare anti-tsunami park on Constitución’s riverfront.
The project had been contentious. To begin with, it entailed the forced relocation of several families and the capacities of the park to mitigate a giant wave were quite unclear (Tironi and Farías 2015). And importantly, the architects from the reconstruction team were against the very idea of a referendum. It was not responsible, they claimed. A form of protection had to be built if lives were to be saved from future tsunamis, hence the park was not an alternative but a policy and moral obligation. Sociologists and anthropologists did not concur. We were not against the park but against its imposition in the name of an uncontested principle. Democracy comes with its own risks, we argued; too many technoscientific atrocities have been carried out in the name of security, progress or the common good, especially in states of exception. After days of intense conversations and negotiations, an agreement was achieved. Architects and social scientists worked through a hybrid arrangement. The referendum would be conducted, but instead of a blank ballot with simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’ options, each alternative would be accompanied with a pedagogical description of its pros and cons. The people would be in charge of deciding the fate of the park, but after being responsibly informed about what comes along with each choice. The referendum was carried out in July 2010. The ‘yes’ option won almost unanimously.
This story can be narrated in different ways. First, it can be a tale about how responsibility, deliberation and ‘life’ were signified and ordered differently by architects and sociologists in Constitución. A story, in other words, about how interdisciplinary ventures provoke multiple – and sometimes clashing – modes of valuing. In Constitución, however, an agreement was reached. Despite their differences, architects and sociologists worked around an accord. And this is the second possible account: one about the practices deployed in interdisciplinary projects to carefully tinker a solution, a temporary settlement in which different commitments are attentively knitted together.
Figure 5.5.1 Ballot for Constitución referendum
Tale #1 and tale #2 are good examples of how conflicts over values in interdisciplinary research are often invoked in science and technology studies. When it comes to reflecting the complexities of interdisciplinary valuation, we usually turn either to conflicting epistemologies, i.e. the encounter of valuing realities that do not link up (tale #1) or, conversely, to the choreography of practices and materials unfolded to reach a tentative solution (tale #2). The first tale is about multiplicity and difference (Mol 2002; Law and Singleton 2005); the second about diplomacy and cosmograms (Latour 2004, 2007).
But there is also a tale #3. This account emerges when the script changes and the protagonist shifts from the researcher, either troubled by conflicting value systems or engaged in cosmogramming a common world, to the actual people of Constitución and the political potentialities of tales #1 and #2. Sociologists and architects disagreed, but to what extent did their disagreement facilitate the possibility of political explorations, problematizations, and emancipation? Further, did the interdisciplinary accord reached by sociologists and architects create the conditions for invoking or at least imagining a technopolitical otherwise by those that suffered and endured the tsunami? Attuned in the speculative register of the ‘what if?’ (Pignarre and Stengers 2011), tale #3 is not about the epistemic conundrums of experts but about what the situation could have offered to the people of Constitución as they strove to persevere as etho-political subjects in late liberal Chile.
In what follows I want to play around tale #3. I want to imagine a situation in which architects and sociologists, instead of achieving an accord, dissent. Dissent comes from the Latin dissentire, or to feel (sentire) differently. Interestingly, then, dissenting implies not just a discursive or cognitive quarrel, but a conflict that unfolds through and upon affective, sensuous and pre-reflexive doings. Dissenting is not a dispute over opinions and perspectives, but a clash over modes of sensing, engaging and inhabiting the world (Tironi and Sannazzaro 2017). I am particularly interested in the political affordances of these affective disagreements and in their capacity to crack open new forms of collective life. Interdisciplinary projects, I argue, render workable dissenting situations that need to be carefully accounted for in political explorations. Not the modelling of dissent into a formal method, but dissenting – or the moment of feeling differently – as a situation that may be methodologically empowered for the creation of a political otherwise. With the help of Jacques Rancière and Isabelle Stengers I want to think about the political capacities that might be unleashed when value mismatches in interdisciplinary projects are not worked through but enhanced as moments of democratic expansion.
The referendum was celebrated as an historic success for both Constitución and post-disaster planning in Chile at large. A total of 800 neighbours voted and the ‘yes’ option won with an impressive 84%. The political technology devised by architects and sociologists performed as expected: it offered citizens the last word on the park while rendering the project irreversible and incontestable. Architects and sociologists cheered the result as a methodological accomplishment of their interdisciplinary compromise.
But the referendum was also a way of closing down a debate whose threads were multiple and entangled. The planning team had the mandate to design the final plan in 90 days. So while participation was placed centre-stage the process could not afford too much deliberation. Constrained by time and results, the participation apparatus deployed in Constitución enacted citizens and participation in very particular and often conflicting modes (Tironi 2015). In June, an open meeting was conducted to discuss the social and technical plausibility of the park. The format of the meeting, however, ended up congregating the project’s concerned groups and ‘stakeholders’, namely those whose properties faced potential expropriation, and who, by virtue of their economic loss, assumed a political superiority over the park’s fate. So, despite the democratic objectives imprinted on the participatory machinery put forward to deliberate about the park, the discussion did not open a space for a minority politics as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would have it, in which other ways of seeing and feeling could be invoked. The referendum, with its large scale, anonymity, legal age constraints and the power invested in it by the force of Western liberal democracy, not only sealed the fate of the park but also validated a way of defining what the public sphere is, who can participate in it, and how.
If architects and sociologists had disagreed on the value, content and role of the referendum, the park would not have been built. Or it would, but differently. Or maybe the disagreement could have precipitated new discussions about the politics and ecologies of the ocean in Constitución, new affective encounters between the people of Constitución and their material surroundings. Or perhaps it could have congealed new procedures for thinking about and deciding on the future of the city. Perhaps an interdisciplinary disagreement could have created the conditions for what French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1999) calls political emancipation.
Indeed, for Rancière politics is – needs to be – always emancipative (Rancière 1999). It only emerges when those who have not been taken into account, or have had their right to define what it means to (ac)count usurped, emancipate themselves from the arrangements that others have prepared for their proper democratic inclusion. Politics does not appear when a place is assigned to those that have been excluded but when the assignment itself is questioned and destabilized. So, politics is not the recognition of ‘the community’ as an excluded part in post-disaster decision-making, or the consequent integration of laypersons into planning via the referendum or other political technologies. Such a gesture assumes that society’s parts – their characteristics, needs, and capacities – are already known and that hence those traditionally marginalized can be properly included by participation apparatuses. Politics, for Rancière, is when the counting of the parts, the knowledge about their nature, and the procedures for inclusion are contested in the name of a radical definition of equality: a debate not about the inclusion of the excluded but regarding what ‘debate’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ actually mean. For Rancière, the political moment par excellence is when two people speak but do not understand each other because they have not agreed on what it means to speak. Politics, the possibility of radical equality, resides in the incommensurable and frictional moment of profound disagreement – something that the referendum and the participatory machinery put forward by sociologists and architects diluted.
Could an interdisciplinary venture be thought differently? What procedures, what material practices could architects and sociologists have assembled to invoke their ‘feeling different’ as a means for emancipation in Constitución? To translate interdisciplinary dissent into a method might be tricky. Methods are complex apparatuses that provoke into being the entities being observed, elicited or intervened (Law 2004). But the question remains: what would an interdisciplinary commitment to take dissenting as a political potentiality look like? It could very well look like sorcery, if we follow Isabelle Stengers. Stengers is interested in the political dislocation forced by witches. Defining their art as magic, asserts Stengers, is already a ‘magical’ act ‘that creates an unsettling experience for all those who live in a world in which . .. the art of magic has been disqualified, scorned and destroyed’ (2005: 1002). The touchstone of this art is the capacity to convoke a force – the Goddess for neopagan witchcraft. But this force is not convoked in the search for a solution but to catalyse a regime of thought and feeling ‘that bestows the power on that around which there is gathering to become a cause for thinking’ (2005: 1002). Ultimately, the efficacy of this force relies on its capacity to ‘transform each protagonist’s relations with his or her own knowledge, hopes, fears and memories’ (2005: 1002).
Stengers is hence interested in those concrete experiments and modes of empowering a situation; practices and rituals to confer the problem at hand, with all its complexities, the power to redistribute roles, shift questions and instantiate new affections. Empowerment is an activation. And as such it can be extended, at least speculatively, to the interdisciplinary challenge undertaken in Constitución. By attending to the valuing of differences and facilitating their full antagonistic deployment, sociologists and architects, as sorcerers, could have empowered a situation with the capacity to provoke new relations. They could have crafted a space for being ‘in the presence of’ their values and their consequences.
So, for example, as a political experiment ‘in the wild’ sociologists and architects could have debated the referendum in Constitución’s main plaza, allowing everyone to pitch in. An open-air assembly without restrictions on who should talk and what should be said; an ad-hoc palaver1 devoid of any teleological expectation: an interdisciplinary quarrel over the referendum as an object of public debate and starting point for imagining collectively not just what is needed to protect Constitución against oceanic forces, but also how collective decisions about the city will be made.
Alternatively, sociologists and architects could have used probes (Michael 2012), testing devices to speculate about possible futures and through which a zone of political indeterminacy could be opened. The inventory of possible futures to be tested would have needed to go beyond typical scenario planning – epitomized by the restricted Constitución with/without an anti-tsunami park figuration. For what is at stake here is how the dissent between sociologists and architects over democracy might have congealed different political futures. What type of world is enacted if human ‘life’ is valued over all other principles and secured univocally as a moral mandate? What does it entail for the political future of Constitución if consensus, even over material immunization against life threats, is prioritized? Sociologists and architects could have designed a game in which a decision opens a new set of options (and closes others) to articulate indeterminate political trajectories. A sort of strategy game or sandbox (Guggenheim, Kraeftner and Kroell 2013), played collectively, in different neighbourhoods, or installed in Constitución’s main square for anyone to play. Such a probe, based on the interdisciplinary clash between sociologists and architects, could have ignited a discussion about the political future of Constitución that the participation machinery set up by planning experts did not address.
Palavers, probes, sandboxes. The main point is that interdisciplinary dissent over the referendum, offered and extended to those that will have to cope with future tsunamis, might have engendered a moment of idiocy (Michael 2012) or precarity (Tsing 2015) with significant political effects. If experts had slowed down their attempt at reaching an agreement, if they had let their interdisciplinary disagreement flourish untamed, they might have allowed the people of Constitución to decide not just about the feasibility of the park, but also about the political ecology of things, affects and representations at stake.
1 Palaver [from palavra, ‘word’ in Portuguese] is a negotiation system utilized in pre-colonial Africa in which no principle for participating is imposed and all forms of knowledge are accepted. The term is often cited by Stengers as an alternative to liberal decision-making.
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