Agonistic Assemblies

‘Let’s begin, in nearness!’ Thus sounds the starting shot with which Markus Miessen introduces his latest work, on the need for a critical, politicised and above all decentralised architecture. Agonistic Assemblies: On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality is a voluminous anthology – a toolbox, as Miessen himself calls it – with the aim of rethinking democracy from the bottom up, on the fringes of its institutional framework, and above all at the local or even intimate level in terms of space, design and architecture. Because this much is clear: architecture is not just an expression of a political culture – it also shapes that culture. Those who change architecture, we learn from the book, thereby inevitably change power structures. The key, therefore, is to use architecture and design critically in our thinking about and shaping of our current democracy.

The concept of a socio-politically inspired architecture is nothing new to Markus Miessen. Besides being an architect, Miessen is a professor of Urban Regeneration at the University of Luxembourg and was a fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This anthology is not his first book. The Bonn-born, Luxembourg-based architect previously published The Nightmare of Participation (2010) and Crossbenching: Towards Participation as Critical Spatial Practice (2016), works that touch on the critical question of spatial politics. He has also edited several anthologies, including The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict (2016) and Para-Platforms: On the Spatial Politics of Right-Wing Populism (2018).

For his latest think tank on paper, Miessen collected essays and interviews by more than 20 theorists, designers and artists (most of the contributors to the anthology operate at the intersection of these three fields) who reflect on the meaning, possibilities, and practice of a political space for a horizontal and thus agonistic democracy. This interdisciplinarity not only allows for a welcome broad view of spatiality as a political instrument, but also and especially an awareness that the crucial possibilities of critical architecture cannot be captured in one discipline: ‘architecture is too important to leave to the architects’, as one of the book’s contributors aptly puts it. Among others, Berlin-based artist and theorist Patricia Reed, Amsterdam-based architect David Mulder van der Vegt, and the Parisian founder of DemocracyNext, Claudia Chwalisz provide contributions. Finally, we also get a piece on agonistic pluralism from Chantal Mouffe, one of the giants of contemporary political thought. Her widely known idea of agonistic democracy, as the title also reveals, is the crucial thread that ties together the 20 texts collected here.

Unlike deliberative democracy, the agonistic formula does not allow itself to be driven by consensus. On the contrary, in Mouffe’s vision, it is precisely conflictual friction that drives the democratic system. It is an interesting vision, in which the democratic process is not diluted into a rational, abstract and therefore rigid uniformity in which no one recognises themselves in the end, but one in which, on the contrary, battles are fought with words, passion and emotion – not only for concrete, collective identities but also for the meaning of democratic foundations such as freedom and equality. The agonistic model thus reopens the gaze to new, alternative visions of the future – visions that are, however, in no way reconcilable with each other, thus also perpetuating the friction or agon. What remains is an unending, productive confrontation, an unfinished project, always in the making. A functioning democracy, it turns out, is above all one that is not yet. Political thinker Rahel Süß hits the nail on the head when she quotes activist documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor in the book: ‘Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.’

Particularly tantalising is the way in which Miessen considers the agon, or democratic confrontation, from a choreographic point of view. Every political system is characterised by its own choreography (the way in which that political system is expressed) and therefore also has its own scenography (the space in which that choreography takes shape). A new kind of democratic choreography thus requires a new kind of space. Throughout the anthology, various ideas emerge, some more interesting than others, about architectural forms that may or may not adhere to the model of a decentralised, agonistic democracy. Inspiration is drawn from unconventional architectural and theoretical frameworks, more often than not linked to non-Western traditions, past architectural practices, or political visions of the future. An entire section is devoted to the Diwaniya, the traditional Kuwaiti reception room, and the book also delves deeper into the West African Togu Na or ‘palaver hut’ – an open construction intended as a place for discussion, whose roof is so low that the participants in the conversation are forced to sit down together and thus cannot simply escape confrontation. Ultimately, agonistic friction requires a space that fosters proximity – both in the sense of ‘local’ and in the sense of ‘intimate’. ‘This is where space starts to hurt,’ Miessen writes, ‘where we feel the pain of visibility, the embarrassment of social but intimate transparency, where friction becomes a productive asset’. Perhaps most of all, such agonistic spaces mean the possibility of facing each other not only in terms of ideas but also physically, in equality, with all the discomfort and friction that implies. This is the important but equally beautiful idea of intimacy in rivalry.

The fact that this compilation, like its democratic subject, remains a work in progress, without definitive conclusions, does not detract from the strength of its content. On the contrary, the interdisciplinary, not to say rhizomatic form of this book, in which visions both resonate and clash, breaks norms and conventions, resulting in a stimulating, open perspective on new ways of thinking about the future. What remains is a renewed political consciousness and a resurrected imagination, perhaps the most important tools in this intellectual toolbox.