Markus Miessen: The Nightmare of Participation: Crossbench Praxis as A Mode of Criticality (2010)

“Welcome to Harmonistan! Over the last decade, the term ‘participation’ has become increasingly overused. When everyone has been turned into a participant, the often uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term has become frightening. Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility. Similar to the notion of an independent politician dissociated from a specific party, this third part of Miessen’s “Participation” trilogy encourages the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change.

Miessen argues for an urgent inversion of participation, a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, Miessen candidly reflects on the limits and traps of its real motivations. Rather than breading the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, he argues for conflict as an enabling, instead of disabling, force. The book calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.”

Includes an introduction by Eyal Weizman, a conversation with Chantal Mouffe, an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and post-scripts by Bassam El Baroni, Jeremy Beaudry, and Carson Chan.

Publisher Sternberg Press, 2010
ISBN 1934105074, 9781934105078
304 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-6)

Mik journal, Nr. 3: Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe (2007) [English/Lithuanian]

“The third volume of the Art History & Criticism journal includes articles based on the proceedings of the international conference Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe organised by the Art Institute, Vytautas Magnus University in 26-27 October 2006. Thirty scholars – from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA – presented papers focused upon one aspect of the European history and culture, namely the former Eastern bloc and its Soviet past as well as quotidian post-Soviet reality. Participants of the Kaunas conference discussed one of the most challenging issues of the field – art and politics.” (from Preface)

Meno istorija ir kritika / Art History & Criticism journal
Issue: Menas ir politika: Rytų Europos atvejai / Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe, 2007
Editor-in-chief: Vytautas Levandauskas
Publisher: Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas / Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania
ISSN 1822-4555
232 pages

conference programme (PDF)
publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-9-1)
Other issues

Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962/1973)

“A far more frightening work than any of the nightmare novels of George Orwell. With the logic which is the great instrument of French thought, [Ellul] explores and attempts to prove the thesis that propaganda, whether its ends are demonstrably good or bad, is not only destructive to democracy, it is perhaps the most serious threat to humanity operating in the modern world.” –Los Angeles Times

Originally published in French as Propagandes by A. Colin, Paris, 1962.
Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner
With an introduction by Konrad Kellen
Publisher Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1973 (reprint of the Alfred A. Knopf 1965 edition)
Vintage political science and social criticism
ISBN 0394718747, 9780394718743
332 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)