“There’s a new context for democracy. It has very little to do with participation or digital democracy. Enter imagination”
Democratic innovation is one of our long-standing taxonomies/categories on the Daily Alternative. Here’s something we participated in earlier… as part of Demos Helsinki’s Untitled community, dedicated to a revitalised democratic culture.
After participation: Imagining democracy in the age of conflict is a paper which summarises discussion within Untitled, which our founder and co-initiator Indra Adnan participated in. Below is an excerpt which contains their seven insights about what might comprise a “new democracy”:
Recognise that adding participation to the mix is not the solution
Our group discussed that participation rarely significantly impacts on how elected officials or governments work. Participation as an idea is a thought born from “the Californian Ideology” articulated by writers such as Marshall McLuhan and James W Carey. It has then penetrated nearly all forms of human organisation – the business, public sector, art, media and science alike.
Currently, participation is unfortunately often about having the cake and eating it. It is considered to be sufficient not to change or create anything new or permanent but to increase participation and access to what there already is.
This arrogance is manifested in the mainstream debate primarily dominated by different “solutions” of renewing electoral systems, increasing citizen participation at all governmental levels or harnessing new technologies. These are all for sure worthy tasks, but they do not go to the heart of the problems of many contemporary democracies.
Imagine new artefacts of democracy
Our conversations highlighted that perhaps imagination is not in deficit but in abundance. Right now, for example, most people’s imagination is tied to reproducing the current system and finding solutions within its limits, bounding the scope of imaginative and creative alternatives. Very few work with imagining new structural alternatives but imagine hard how to stay within the budget, reduce emissions or employ new technologies.
Brazilian philosopher and statesman Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that many experience our present times as a “dictatorship of no alternatives”. Whilst the issues with our current social and political systems are widely recognised, there is a perceived inability to imagine alternative directions we could collectively move toward. This “dictatorship” exists only within our heads, as all structures are imagined, including the ones we live in.
”The worlds in which we operate are not just an expression of our imaginations; they also shape and instruct our imaginations for interacting back with them.”
Make good use of conflict
We also discovered in our conversation that the role of conflict in politics has changed. Conflict is a central part of the current democratic parliamentarism, where conflict is managed but, we argue, rarely resolved. Conflict in parliamentarism is addressed by bargaining and taking turns on which side or sides of the conflict can decide.
It happens through intricate processes of how different parts of the governing system interact. Not much is done to go to the heart of the conflict and its potential long-term resolution. On the contrary, parliamentarism in the current context seems to “freeze” tensions to ideological battle lines, thus enforcing them.
Consequently, an allergy to conflict has emerged in our democratic societies. This does not mean that there is no conflict or polarity, but rather that we do not know what else to do when they arise but revert to those ideological battlelines.
We now tend to see friction as a failure of the democratic system to produce answers and policies instead of as the first step to generating solutions together. However, the capacity to “hold space” for conflicts and understand the sources of social tensions, frictions and polarities are central to political imagination. It enables us to generate new alternatives collectively.
This kind of generative view of conflict requires a genuine interest in understanding others. As a result, democratic processes turn into processes of caring. Instead of debate, there should be dialogue, where groups “take part in each others’ thinking”, as psychologist David Kantor said. This reframing of conflict engages the imagination rather than suppressing it in favour of quick and seemingly painless solutions.
Create liminal spaces
Our group shared a belief in the growing importance of liminal spaces. Social transformations create instability as they break down existing or archaic structures whilst new structures, institutions, and human values are still emerging. Furthermore, disagreements about future pathways will arise, dissolving social cohesion. This is both alarming and necessary.
In the era of social transformation, the role of this kind of “generative conflict” is accentuated. In more stable times, the conflict revolves around minor adjustments to the widely accepted vision of a good society. In transformation, the entire course of society itself is at stake. Similar eras in the past have led to democratic backsliding or revolution. They have also produced transformative societal change and leaps forward in human civilisation, well-being, and development, precisely due to the higher degree of conflict.
New liminal spaces have emerged in the previous transformations to host this confusion. For example, civic organisations, universities, political parties and the labour movement have all played a significant role in bringing liminality to conflicts.
Liminal spaces have allowed the formation, exchange and testing of new ideas, practices, behaviours and even institutions. In the disagreements that arise in such liminal spaces, there lies an opportunity to resolve conflicts between new and old narratives and structures.
Crucial to these spaces has been that they have been, at least in principle, open to anyone whilst still providing enough psychological safety. This helps enable both the questioning of fundamentals and changing one's mind in a reasonably diverse group of people.
Liminality – the threshold between the old and the new – is, however, not just about collective learning and imagination but also has a strong emotional and perhaps even spiritual function. It implies mourning – the inevitable departure from familiar ways of being and entrenched power structures.
It also means losing the psychological certainty these systems brought. Additionally, it is hard to think of a transformation with only winners – real social transformations always produce new losers.
Without liminal spaces, conflicts are not managed but end up upholding the old. With them, conflict can be used as leverage for generating and testing new ideas.
The Parallel Polis, an idea co-developed by Vaclav Havel in 1970s Czechoslovakia, thinks of spaces that enable the bypassing of the state in creating communities and fostering inclusive political discussions and collective action.
As adapted by The Alternative UK, this idea may enable the redistribution of political power and allow the emergence of grassroots discussions, agreements, and collective action in response to critical 21st-century challenges.
”All of us — especially those with privilege — must learn to recognise when the ways of seeing, relating, and working we've held dear obstruct true transformation. And we must be courageous in letting them go, so that new visions can thrive.”
Don’t confuse immediacy with intensity
Our group noted that the tyranny of immediacy has stifled our democracies. The impulse to act on urgent issues quickly has led to limited patience for holding space for conflict and trying to understand each others’ viewpoints in politics. And ultimately to a situation where immediacy takes the role of intensity.
It seems as if contemporary democracies are incapable of changing established structures except in response to crises, that only then can the structural ambition of political activity be increased. It often happens without the complete democratic process, as was the case in the pandemic and undoubtedly is in terms of security politics.
In times outside crises, we tend to give people more power in the least structurally ambitious issues, such as details of public service delivery: how a part of a park should be designed, what routes buses should take, etc.
The tyranny of immediacy tends to promote compromising with the existing and making small, uncontroversial technical solutions. Rather than immediacy, we should be looking at the intensity of democracy: instead of more speed, we should be going for more ambition in social renewal during non-crisis periods also.
Ask whose imagination counts
Our group was very vocal about the conditions through which one gets legitimacy to imagine. In times of transformation – as the surrounding structures and institutions are imagined and remade – the question of equity changes. In steady times it is more about accessibility to existing institutions.
Now the question is, whose imagination counts in creating new structures and institutions? Many believe that the ongoing reimagination of our democracies needs to include marginalised voices to succeed – perhaps even starting the reimagination work from a marginalised perspective.
John Dunn has argued that previous social transformations and democratic renewals have followed a certain pattern. New social classes have emerged, and the old elites have reacted by creating a new institution to hold the new groups’ interests at arm’s length – the parliament, the voting rights and so forth have emerged like this.
In other words, new social structures have been designed as a reaction to new powers, but at the same time, not designed from the perspective of the excluded. On the contrary, our group suggests imagining new democratic structures from precisely the point of view of the excluded.
Start from the physical
Our group proposes to pay attention to the overlooked physical conditions of democracy and imagination. Ultimately, transformation can stem from changes in everyday routines, as these routines are what uphold existing structures. Similarly, structures are felt and lived in as physical embodied beings that populate a space with other physical beings. By changing the point of view to the embodied experience of coming together, new ways to develop democracy open.
We can think of infrastructures of imagination. These infrastructures facilitate interactions that allow imagination to bloom. Civic Spaces, as worked on by Gabriella Gómez-Mont, are public spaces that enable people to interact together and organically allow for political agendas, social movements, and other collaborations to emerge. Civic spaces are not to be confused with participation in the design of public spaces but represent entirely new criteria for them.
Situating ideas in specific human contexts allows the local intimate space to interact with ideas of global relevance and tailor new imaginations to particular needs. The distinction between local and national or international is now fading away, creating the cosmolocal – a state that does not distinguish between what is known locally or globally.
Information is interconnected, and diffusion across communities easier, providing the potential to combine the benefits of large-scale ideas and global interactions with the human, inclusive nature of local imagination and implementation.
How our public and private spaces are designed constructs how we think and behave similarly to institutions. They set the agenda for our interactions. By looking at physical spaces carefully, we can understand how the creator of an environment, its designer, manipulates what can emerge from it.
An awareness of the power that agenda-setting or facilitation has on the outcomes of an imagination process is crucial when creating infrastructures for imagination. It goes for physical infrastructures, but the same logic applies to broader structures and institutions.
Lead by combining local initiative with the central authority
Our group recognised a growing tension between different notions of political leadership. Traditionally, leaders have been expected to provide direction and vision for society, with the people following them.
The other notions of leadership emphasise energising and empowering people to engage with issues directly. Rather than generating solutions top-down, leadership should create conditions in which people can imagine and create their own solutions. It is no wonder that many democracy activists and initiatives have stressed locality and grassroots action – rather than negotiating the tension between central authority and local initiatives.
Direct grassroots action is ideal in a stable system and is a principle that many democratic countries' constitutions enshrine. However, in a state of a large-scale social transformation, large-scale – even universal – policies are needed.
So, the real issue of democratic political leadership today boils down to the ability to combine bottom-up initiatives with the ability to resource, spread, execute or at least oversee chosen things centrally. Many transformative initiatives are universalist. Take universal basic income, for example, which can only be fully realised through a central authority that makes it universal.
So it is never a question of bottom-up or top-down or, but a question of leadership's ability to provide the tools for social imagination without boxing imagination itself within current structures, and conversely, grassroots’ ability to interact with the leadership.