Making Democracy Spectacular more

This article was downloaded by: [Open University Library] On: 17 September 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 773147624] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Representation Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t741771152 MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR Nick Mahony Online publication date: 17 September 2010 To cite this Article Mahony, Nick(2010) 'MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR', Representation, 46: 3, 339 — 352 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00344893.2010.499702 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2010.499702 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR Nick Mahony n.mahony@open.ac.uk Mahony Dr September 0 300000 46 Nick Francis 2010 & Francis Original Article 0034-4890 (print)/1749-4001 (online) Representation 10.1080/00344893.2010.499702 RREP_A_499702.sgm Taylor and 2010 Spectacular forms of politics are proliferating and a reappraisal of political spectacle is underway. This article intervenes in debates about the constitution and value of contemporary spectacles by analysing how three, ostensibly very different, governmental, popular media and social movement participative experiments were set up and enacted. To explore the public value of making democracy spectacular, the article considers some of the fraught (but not always insidious) ways these participative events tested-out novel forms of democratic practice. Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 Spectacles are increasingly being used to enact democratic experiments. These forms of popular participative politics trade on the idea that established forms of democracy have become overly dominated by elite career politicians who are increasingly disconnected from, and out of touch with, public sentiments and ways of doing things. Relatively large numbers of people are being enrolled in these experiments to imagine, evaluate, demonstrate and prefigure new and ostensibly better ways of enacting democracy. These events are spectacles because they hold out the possibility of a large-scale, immersive and dramatic public display offering to invert various forms of pre-existing politics. In this article I am suggesting that these kinds of experiments may have a valuable—though certainly not a clear-cut—public role to play in contemporary processes of democratic renewal. There is of course a tradition of scholarship which asserts that democracy is subverted by spectacular events, which, they claim, trivialise, distract or deflect citizens from ‘real’, or more substantive, forms of politics (e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno 1983; Debord 1992; Postman 1985; Kellner 2010). However, the explanatory power of this scholarship has been recently questioned and new perspectives on the spectacle and spectatorship are beginning to emerge. Stephen Duncombe, for example, has developed the idea of the ‘ethical spectacle’ as part of his argument in favour of forms of progressive politics which are less puritanical and more attuned to contemporary popular cultural ‘dreams’ (2007: 158–75) and modes of practice. Kevin Hetherington’s (2008) and Jacques Rancière’s (2007, 2009) recent interventions in these debates are also significant. Each in his own way turns conventional understandings of the spectacle on its head by casting the spectator as a potentially active, rather than a necessarily passive, actor. Drawing on some of this literature and material from a recent research project investigating three rather different contemporary participative experiments, this article reconsiders the constitution and value of the political spectacle. Emerging Forms of Practice The starting point of the research on which this article draws was an interest in exploring the diversity and characteristics of the increasing array of contemporary participative practices being generated locally, nationally and transnationally. Many studies argue that the membership of political parties is declining; that there is a downward trend in electoral Representation, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2010 ISSN 0034-4893 print/1749-4001 online/10/030339-14 © 2010 McDougall Trust, London DOI: 10.1080/00344893.2010.499702 340 NICK MAHONY turnouts; and that trust is waning in mainstream politicians (Power to the People 2005; Norris 2002; Dalton 2004). The idea that there has been some kind of ‘hollowing out’ (Mair 2006) of pre-existing and established forms of democratic practice now seems to have attained the status of common sense. In this context I wanted to explore how—in practice—different kinds of participative experiments work to engage publics (Mahony 2010) and summon up and enact forms of democratic renewal. With some recent exceptions assembling and evaluating examples of different kinds ‘deliberative’ (e.g., Smith 2005, 2009) practices, public engagement mechanisms (e.g., Rowe and Frewer 2005) or instances of non-governmental experimentation (e.g., Feher 2007) the heterogeneity of contemporary participative experiments claiming to enact new and improved forms of democracy have not yet been subjected to any kind of systematic investigation. The diversity of these experiments can appear overwhelming. These include: citizens assemblies;1 ‘Policy Slam’ events;2 deliberative mapping;3 Climate Camp interventions;4 experiments in fine art practice;5 political competitions;6 ‘crowd-sourcing’ initiatives;7 democracy games;8 and, large-scale ‘21st-century town hall meetings’.9 It is important that these and other similar experimental practices are brought into relation with one another and analysed comparatively. Why? In an atmosphere in which preexisting democratic forms are increasingly subjected to critique, these and many other experiments now compete for popular attention, public credibility and political authority— whether we like it or not. Against this backdrop of proliferating democratic innovation across multiple sites and domains I attempt to bring into relation and compare how democracy was enacted by three ostensibly quite different political experiments organised in 2005–06. These were, first, ‘Harrow Open Budget’, a local government participatory budgeting event that took place in London in October 2005 and involved some 250 people. This initiative offered local residents the chance to play a role in policy-making and budgetary decision-taking. Second, ‘Vote for Me’, a national reality-television broadcast in January 2005. This was commissioned by the commercial television company ITV to allow the UK public to select one of their own to stand as an MP in the 2005 General Election and, at its peak, was watched by 1.2 million viewers. Third, a 2006 social movement gathering called the ‘4th European Social Forum’, comprised of approximately 17,000 activists for four days and nights of political meetings, protests and cultural events geared to resisting ‘neo-liberalism’ and generating alternatives. While investigating the often messy complexities of these events, I set out to trace and explore differences and potential areas of similarity between them. I conducted this research by means of a practice-oriented approach. I collected documents generated in each setting and undertook participant observation prior to and during the three experiments. My study focused in on three sets of practices which I used for detailed comparative analysis: publicity practices; facilitation practices; and practices of interaction performed by those who participated in these experiments. This practiceoriented approach enabled me to trace and explore how the many forms of politics and democracy were enacted in each of these settings. In order to proceed in a practice-centred way, I used a concept of democracy that was non-foundational. I attempted to set aside normative concerns about what democracy is or should be and questions about the intentions and motivations of the organisers of these events. As it became evident that these experiments produced a wide variety of outcomes and effects I also took the decision to bracket out the issue of how the ‘final’ results of these experiments might be identified, understood and evaluated. Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR 341 To help me develop this approach and reflect on the findings of this study I turned to a range of scholars and literatures. Of particular interest and relevance were the recent work in political anthropology (e.g., Paley 2002) and cultural geography (e.g., Barnett and Low 2004) that has illuminated the constructed, mutable and culturally variable qualities of democratic practices; the democratic theorist Michael Saward’s (2003) article ‘Enacting Democracy’ which calls on political theorists to engage creatively and reflexively with different models, ideas and procedures of democracy in order to develop practices that meet the demands of particular contexts; and the work of political theorist Michael Freeden (2005), particularly the way his work has drawn attention to the inherently indeterminate qualities of key political concepts (such as democracy) and how it has highlighted the importance of investigating how the meanings of such concepts are temporarily ‘decontested’ or stabilised in particular contexts of practice (2005: 117–24). Despite my focus on processes of conceptual constitution and political enactment and my interest in the generative potential of practices, normative undertones may still be discernable in what follows. This may be inevitable since this research was designed to inform a much broader and longer-term political project, the central concern of which is to better understand what enacting democracy in non-foundational ways might mean in practice. As well as the other scholars mentioned above, the political philosopher Jacques Rancière (2006) has been a source of inspiration in my research. Democracy, for Rancière, is taken to be the ‘government of anybody and everybody’ (2006: 94). It is not ‘based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form’, neither is it ‘borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any’ (2006: 97). Politics, for Rancière, is therefore much more than institutional politics: it is ‘the foundation of a power to govern in the absence of a foundation’ (2006: 49) where every legitimisation is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy. Democracy, rather than being reduced to any one particular constitutional or institutional form, is made up of public practices that are indeterminate in nature. It is a politics ‘only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts’ (2006: 97). This article demonstrates, in different but overlapping ways, how three contemporary participative experiments opened out to public challenge various pre-existing ideas and practices of democracy. It also points to how each of these experiments generated openings for public acts of political participation. Before presenting the findings of this research, I need to explain the three experiments I researched in more detail. I will also need to make clear why I was prompted to investigate them as spectacles. Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 Publicity In my research I found that publicity practices were used in all three settings to promote the idea that different pre-existing forms of politics had reached crisis point. Promotional materials stressed, in each case, that action was needed to interrupt these preexisting forms and to stress the urgency of publicly testing-out, demonstrating and prefiguring alternatives. In the case of Harrow Open Budget, its publicity emphasised that a crisis of accountability and representation existed between local Harrow residents and their council. Promotional materials called for residents to get more directly involved in discussions about local policy issues and priorities, with text on the homepage of this event’s website imploring Harrow’s public to ‘have your say’ accompanied by an icon of a small child which was used to provoke local residents to ‘Tell the Council where to stick its money’.10 342 NICK MAHONY Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 Vote for Me’s press release questioned the legitimacy of the UK’s system of parliamentary and party political democracy and invoked the idea that this form of democracy was not working because it was outmoded and in urgent need of updating. It highlighted downward trends in UK electoral turnout and emphasised the idea that young people in the UK had an appetite for new interactive media technologies and formats. This event’s publicity called on the British public to enrol themselves in an experiment that would use a reality television talent contest to select a prospective Parliamentary candidate to stand in the 2005 General Election.11 Publicity practices used to promote the 4th European Social Forum implicated a different set of political institutions in the crisis of contemporary democracy; these were transnational organisations such as the WTO and the IMF.12 These and other transnational organisations were associated in this event’s publicity with the intensification of ‘neo-liberalism’ at local and global levels. As a counterpoint (and in common with other Social Forum events), this Forum’s publicity invoked the idea that ‘another world is possible’ (beyond neoliberalism) and that this event would help facilitate resistance and the generation of more socially equitable alternatives.13 Publicity practices were therefore used in each setting to disassociate these experiments from various pre-existing, supposedly crisis-ridden, political practices. These materials were also used to associate such experiments with a range of pre-existing organisations; to align them with different ongoing political projects; and to link them with various pre-existing and familiar ways of doing things. For example, Harrow Open Budget’s publicity worked to align this experiment with Harrow Council’s already established budgetary decisionmaking process and with a New Labour public-policy agenda. Vote for Me’s publicity connected this experiment to ITV; the project of renewing UK parliamentary democracy; and with familiar reality television formats used by programmes such as ‘Pop Idol’ or ‘X Factor’. The 4th European Social Forum’s publicity was different again. It connected this event to the multitude of social movement organisations already involved with the Forum process worldwide; to forms of conduct pioneered through other Forum activities; and to the ongoing political aspirations of this loosely knit, diverse and regularly changing coalition of political activists. Facilitation Investigating these experiments’ facilitation practices allowed this research to explore how the forms of ‘new’ politics summoned up in these events promotional materials were constructed and enacted in practice. For the Harrow Open Budget event, an open and informal atmosphere was fostered during the series of discussion sessions, organised as part of this event, by arranging participants in small groups around banqueting tables. Lunch and other possibilities for convivial interactions were integrated into this experiment and variations of tempo and a sense of drama were engendered by regular lighting changes and loud bursts of pop music played during voting sessions. Even an interactive trivia quiz testing participants’ local knowledge was staged at the conclusion of this experiment. Vote for Me went further. This TV show was organised to be as much a piece of entertainment as it was a political experiment. In common with other reality TV talent contests, this show offered contestants the possibility of a transition from public obscurity to fame and celebrity (Mehl 2005). Jonathan Maitland (better known as the consumer champion who MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR 343 presented the long-standing ITV series ‘Rogue Traders’) was Vote for Me’s presenter with tabloid journalist and former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie, daytime TV host Lorraine Kelly and former political journalist John Sergeant enrolled as the programme’ s judges. Viewers were told that ‘hundreds’ of members of the UK public had applied to take part in this television event and that 60 had been selected for its auditions.14 To evaluate the talent of these would-be politicians, Vote for Me staged a sequence of reality television style ‘challenges’. These tested contestants’ political skills, for example, as lobbyists, media handlers, public speakers and policy makers. Jokes and other kinds of informal banter were given great prominence in the coverage of these challenges and those viewing this contest from home were offered a key role in the judging process. A special premium rate telephone line was set up and viewers were repeatedly invited to register their preferences for their favourite contestant by phoning in. These viewer polls determined which contestants were eliminated and who was eventually ‘elected’ as Vote for Me’s winner. Informality, excitement, opportunities for participant interaction and openings for forms of public self-organisation were also built into the 4th European Social Forum. A wide variety of cultural activities was scheduled as part of this experiment, giving live music, dance, film and art exhibitions a high profile. Ad hoc informal gatherings were also encouraged by setting up cafes, bars and restaurants and integrating them into the overall site design. A large number of the pre-scheduled activities that appeared in this event’s programme clashed with one another. To take part, participants were therefore required to negotiate their own pathways through this event, allowing them to move between cultural activities and political meetings in a self-directed and even spontaneous way. These facilitation practices held out the possibility of informality, drama, excitement and public self-organisation. However, at the same time these practices also orchestrated and managed these experiments in a variety of ways. Facilitation practices structured the discussions that took place during the Harrow Open Budget and being so tightly structured, shaped this event’s agenda, timings and objectives as well as the policy options on which participants were invited to vote during the experiment. A team of facilitators also helped run the event, working together in a tightly knit way they used technology to help ensure that participants had opportunities to speak, act and keep up with the proceedings while also working to the programme’s schedule. Electronic wireless keypads were used to allow each participant a vote on policy issues. Laptops were used to record excerpts of table discussions, and large screens and microphones used to communicate and discuss voting results. Great care and attention to detail was also lavished on the production of Vote for Me. Drawing on pre-recorded and live footage, studio and outside broadcasts, this series of five programmes was edited in a polished and professional way, with the end product referencing countless other contemporary reality television entertainment shows. The way the television studio was designed also contributed to a sense of déjà vu. In front of an imposing backdrop, contestants were arrayed and displayed—‘X Factor’ style—facing the panel of judges, behind whom a studio audience were assembled. Judging practices did bring a degree of rigour and fairness to proceedings. For example, following each test judges were given turns to evaluate a contestant’s performances and this was followed by a brief period of discussion between the three members of the panel. The political workshops, seminars and spaces of informal assembly enacted as part the th European Social Forum also had a managed, pre-planned and often rather hierarchical 4 Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 344 NICK MAHONY feel. Political meetings, for example, were typically organised in ways that offered a privileged position to a panel of pre-arranged speakers. Speakers were placed together facing other attendees who were configured, in these meetings, as an audience. Well-established Social Forum protocols were used to convene and facilitate these meetings with pre-arranged speakers given at least half the time available to present their thoughts or proposals. This was followed by a more open period for questions and answers and further discussion. Before concluding this brief sketch of the experiments, it is useful to say something about the participants’ interaction practices. This allows me to illustrate a few of the ways in which people negotiated the subject positions, ideas and practices offered to them in each of these settings. Participant Interaction Analysing the interactions that were enacted during the Harrow Open Budget it was possible to discern participants translating the ideas they were presented with via the publicity materials used to promote this event. Facilitators and facilitation materials invited participants to express their views honestly, listen to and respect the views of others and deliberate together in an open-minded way during discussion sessions (Harrow Open Budget Discussion Guide). The stated objective of these discussion sessions was to allow participants to decide which of the various pre-constituted policy positions they preferred (Harrow Open Budget Discussion Guide 2005). Participants interacted during these sessions in a range of ways. Some elaborated and critiqued the pre-constituted policy options; others brought to the fore and challenged the political assumptions that underpinned them. For example, during a discussion centred on waste management and recycling issues, several participants challenged the idea that it might be either possible or desirable to detach a debate about ‘local’ waste management from the national and transnational politics of waste management. In this and many other ways, Harrow Open Budget participants problematised the pre-constituted options around which these discussions were facilitated. This resulted in many new policy proposals being generated by participants. These proposals, and there were a great number of these, were often radically different from and rather more radical than the policy options with which participants had originally been presented. Participants also actively intervened in the Vote for Me experiment. On several occasions, for example, contestants questioned the authority of the Vote for Me process, either by attacking the impartiality of the judges or by questioning the show’s transparency or editorial integrity. These interventions illustrate how participants used openings for participation to question the ideas and practices they were invited to enact. Those watching at home also took up their role as participants in this process. This is most strikingly demonstrated by recounting how viewers used this experiment to contest the will of Vote for Me’s official judges and rebel against the entire ethos of the show as it was constituted in its publicity. The one contestant the three judges unanimously agreed did not deserve to win, Rodney Hylton-Potts, eventually won this contest on the basis of the viewer poll. This result proved to be highly controversial. Hylton-Potts pledged that if elected as an MP he would endeavor to stop all UK immigration and campaign for the castration of those convicted of child abuse offences. Vote for Me was promoted as a benign, progressive and technologically and culturally attuned alternative to elitist forms of party politics. The election of Hylton-Potts demonstrated that the public who took part in this experiment was different to the public that had originally been summoned to take part. Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR 345 Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 Participants were also active during the 4th European Social Forum, albeit in different ways. For example, during the tussle I observed in several meetings regarding the issue of what participative equality should mean in practice, participants engaged in fierce debate about the political effectiveness of bouts of open-ended dialogue in the face of conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the threat of global warming. During these exchanges I witnessed several participants calling for a stronger and more institutionally unified form of Social Forum leadership and for a system of collective representation. Defending what, in their view, was at the heart of the Social Forum ethos, others argued passionately for the value of working with and through participants’ differences in as participative and inclusive way as possible. The tension highlighted here between vanguardist and rather more pluralist tendencies was played out in many of the meetings I attended. On some occasions these tensions were negotiated in ways that resulted in agreements about forms of collective action, on others these tensions remained unresolved perpetuating, and sometimes even intensifying, differences between participants. Engaging with the Spectacle The forms of spectacularisation I want to highlight here are somewhere between mediatisation and the carnivalesque. The former being almost purely stage managed, premeditated, directed and non-spontaneous while as Bakhtin emphasised the latter is rather more delirious, expressive, folkish and anti-establishment (Bakhtin 1984: 7). But what exactly is meant by spectacle here and why view these participative experiments in this way? At least in terms of social and political theory, probably the most influential account of the spectacle is provided by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle (1992). According to this account, the spectacle engages only to mesmerise, contain, manipulate and pacify its subjects, thereby giving rise to what Debord calls ‘autonomous movement of the nonliving’ (1992: 7). Society of the Spectacle is a polemic designed to alert its readers to discrepancies between the spectacle’s seductive appearance and its reality. There are overlaps between how Debord conceptualises spectacle and the definition the Oxford English Dictionary provides: Spectacle […] a specially prepared or arranged display of a more or less public nature (esp. one on a large scale), forming an impressive or interesting show or entertainment for those viewing it […] a piece of stage-display or pageantry, as contrasted with real drama.15 The OED definition contrasts ‘a piece of stage-display or pageantry’ with ‘real drama’ in a way that echoes how Debord, in his account, insists on opposing the spectacle’s appearance with its reality. Debord mobilises this binary in order to assert that spectacles always mask forms of power. And on this basis he argues that spectacles will always necessarily be an insidious obstacle to the realisation of other less exploitative (more authentic and autonomous) forms of life. There are ways that the three participative political experiments outlined in the previous section align with this way of understanding spectacle and ways they do not. Evidence has been presented here shows that the three experiments were all, in their own ways, specially prepared and arranged large-scale public displays. Again in line with the meaning of the spectacle outlined here, each of these experiments was also constructed so as to offer participants an experience that would be highly engaging, dramatic, immersive 346 NICK MAHONY and exciting. Here it is worth noting again how music, lighting, site design, food, drinks and entertainment were integral parts of these participative events. The three events were therefore public spectacles because the practices enacted in each setting worked to generate an inversion of precisely those pre-existing forms and experiences of democratic politics that each had condemned. In different ways, all three invited prospective participants to engage imaginatively, test out, demonstrate and prefigure what the event’s publicity materials claimed would be innovative and better ways of enacting democracy. The analysis presented in the previous section identified tensions between the ideas of democratic practice summoned up in the three experiments’ publicity and their facilitation practices. On the one hand, these practices gave participants the chance to self-organise and steer politics for themselves with this offering up the possibility of processes that would be spontaneous and unpredictable. On the other hand, these practices also summoned up the idea that such experiments as these would more efficiently realise specific sets of political aspirations that were in each case announced in the events’ promotional materials in advance of any participation. Viewed through Debordian lenses these differences could be viewed as evidence of discrepancies between the appearance and the reality of these events. That is, discrepancies between the possibly ‘unrealistic’ promises constructed through these events’ publicity materials and the ‘realities’ of the events as they were enacted in practice. To develop this point a Debordian analysis might also draw attention to the pre-constituted nature of each event’s political agendas and facilitation schemes. And in particular the ways these practices worked to shape participants’ experiences and the outcomes of these events prior to their enactment. I cannot deny that this way of analysing these spectacles may have value; this approach is especially useful, for example, for drawing attention to issues of power. I believe, however, that a different approach is called for here because the three spectacles I studied did not pacify participants in the way Debordian theory anticipates. The three experiments publicity and facilitation practices certainly seem to have shaped how participants interacted. But, as illustrated in the previous section, participants in these events accepted the invitations to participate and used the openings provided within these settings for interaction. More importantly, they engaged with these experiments in inventive and unpredictable ways. Across the three cases participants probed, questioned, elaborated on, diverged from and contested a significant number of the ideas, agendas and modes of practice privileged via these events’ promotional materials and facilitation schemes. Participants’ practices were certainly not wholly determined by them. These findings do not negate the idea that spectacularisation can lead to insidious political results. The example of Vote for Me demonstrates how spectacularisation can open out possibilities for reactionary and even dangerous forms of politics—the victory of the contestant Rodney Hilton-Potts is the case in point here. However, no evidence was apparent that these kinds of reactionary politics were being enacted via Harrow Open Budget or the 4th European Social Forum. To re-iterate, these results point to the need for a different way of accounting for these spectacles than is provided by Debord’s theory. Searching for other ways of studying the spectacle I discovered the work of cultural geographer Kevin Hetherington (2008). Hetherington has developed a less totalising and reductive perspective on the spectacle than that elaborated by Debord (Debray 1995: 137). Based on his analysis of consumer spectacles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hetherington claims that spectacles can open up active as well as less active states Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR 347 of being. Spectacles, he argues, are spaces that have a relational quality, spaces with a ‘both/ and rather than either/or composition; spaces of bewilderment, fantasy, manipulation, fragmented experience, mythical displaced meaning and social membership’ (2008: 184, italics in original). On encountering the spectacle, subjects encounter what Hetherington calls, ‘the paradoxical space of possession’ (2008: 184). Spectacles can take possession of people, he asserts, but they can also invite people to take possession of them. Debord’s account emphasises discrepancies between the spectacle’s appearance and its reality; Hetherington, in contrast, suggests that it is the hybrid, in-between and indeterminate qualities of spectacles that deserve more attention. Looked at through the lens of Hetherington’s theory of the spectacle, the ambitious sets of claims summoned up through the three experiments’ publicity could be seen as more than simply superficial distractions designed to seduce and excite people about the prospect of immersing themselves in these events. The ways in which these practices invited people to identify and engage with these democratic experiments in often contradictory-feeling ways should perhaps, instead, be conceptualised differently; as political spectacles that opened out possibilities for forms of active and imaginiative negotiation and participation. The tensions between the different ideas of public action that ran through these events publicity and facilitation schemes should therefore also be viewed as an integral feature of the spectacular character and appeal of these experiments. Constituted as spectacles, each experiment addressed and invited participants to act as a particular kind of subject, a subject whose role was to engage with, translate, articulate and inventively negotiate the mix of ideas and practices they were invited to enact via acts of participation. One further recent contribution by Jacques Rancière is also useful to call on here. In versions of his (2007, 2009) essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Rancière reflects on spectatorship. Like Hetherington, Rancière illuminates the possibility of active forms of spectatorship. However, Rancière goes so far as to suggest that all forms of mediation necessarily entail forms of spectatorships. He asserts that forms of mediation and spectatorship are a precondition of, rather than a barrier to, interaction and communication and thereby challenges the binary running through Debord’s work between direct and unmediated forms of practice. Following this framework, forms of communitarian immediacy, direct communication and self-presence become not just unachievable but also undesirable political goals. Rancière’s political call is instead for greater individual and collective (public) engagement with the objects that mediate all interactions (2007: 277–9). Inverting Debord, Rancière emphasises the inventive and potentially transformative possibilities of spectatorship. Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 Conclusions By comparing and bringing into relation three contemporary democratic experiments, this article has focused on exploring one particular, and perhaps surprising, similarity in the way in which these events were enacted. The differences between the three spectacular political experiments examined here are, however, as significant as similarities amongst them. In the case of the Harrow Open Budget, the ideas and practices that were privileged in these events’ publicity materials and facilitation schemes do not initially appear to be particularly radical. However, many participants engaged in this event in reflexive ways, elaborating on, questioning or contesting the pre-constituted policy options and generating 348 NICK MAHONY new and sometimes more radical ones. In the setting of Vote for Me, it was the contestants who generated policy agendas, and it was the panel of judges and the audience watching and voting from home who were ultimately given the task of assessing contestants’ performances. As I have shown, the assumption that allowing ‘ordinary’ people to take centre stage might automatically lead to the performance of a more progressive form of democratic practice was thrown into doubt by the results of this reality television experiment. This result also threw into question the efficacy of this experiments democratic design. The 4th European Social Forum was the experiment that, of the three, was the one most led by its participants. However, process controversies were also omnipresent in this setting with this indicating that more space, more time and a more open agenda do not necessarily lead to more effective or, at least a less fraught, form of democratic enactment. As experimental spectacles, these events enacted unconventional divisions of political labour, novel forms of political conduct and generated non-mainstream political agendas and forms of public action. They tested out, demonstrated and worked as public forums for the evaluation and critique of these experimental and spectacular forms of democratic practice. Each therefore enacted a form of democratic politics by publicly challenging various aspects of different pre-existing democratic forms. Each also opened out to public challenge the efficacy of the ‘new’ and supposedly better forms of mediation that participants were invited to evaluate and demonstrate. These experiments did not operationalise any one pre-existing normative model of democracy nor did they clearly point the way to any new and more effective model. The three events were experimental and the forms and meanings of democracy they enacted were highly ambiguous. However, as Michael Freeden has pointed out ‘ambiguous and vague expressions of political thinking cannot just be dismissed as inferior thought-products’ (2005: 122). In fact, the ambiguity and indeterminacy of these spectacular experiments worked to mobilise relatively large numbers of people and created the conditions of possibility for forms of participatory politics; forms of participative politics that were enacted around issues of democratic mediation and around the role that publics should have in ‘old’ as well as ‘new’ forms of practice. If the renewal of democracy—in whatever form—is to engage and involve diverse publics, then the meaning of democratic renewal may need to be held open to allow for different forms of experimentation. The research outlined here has illuminated some of the ways that participative spectacles may allow publics in different contexts to get involved with envisioning, interacting with and evaluating ‘new’ ways of enacting forms of democratic politics—albeit perhaps temporarily. For these reasons participative spectacles may well have a role of value, albeit a problematical one, to play in contemporary processes of democratic experimentation and renewal. Participative spectacles do not inevitably result in insidious or reactionary outcomes. Neither do they necessarily pacify their participants; in fact I have highlighted examples of how they can generate the conditions for forms of inventive public participation and surprising political intervention. The results of this study prompt the need for further research. Not least because since undertaking this work I have collected further examples of practices that also trade on their spectacular and participative appeal such as the 2008 UK Department of Justice-sponsored competition ‘Building Democracy’.16 This initiative gave rise to ‘Policy Slam’ (‘poetry slam’ style events at which different public policy ideas are discussed and scored by audiences Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 MAKING DEMOCRACY SPECTACULAR 349 Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 made up of members of the public); and ‘Tagwagon’ (which ‘uses a converted campervan to take technology direct to local communities to record and map their opinions’ and has been employed to facilitate youth engagement in local authority consultation initiatives.17 Further research that explores these or other participative spectacles will need to look more extensively and in greater depth at how power is exercised in and through these kinds of practices. Recent work by John Allen (2004, 2006), for example, analyses how power can work through seduction and inclusion. It may be productive for additional research in this area to engage with Allen’s work on power in concert with more classic contributions by scholars such as Lukes (1974) and Bachrach and Baratz (1962). The aesthetic qualities of spectacularisation practices also require more attention than it has been possible to give them here. The staged and theatrical qualities of performances of contemporary politics have been recently been the subject of renewed philosophical (see for example Bayly 2009) and sociological attention (see for example Hajer 2005, 2009, or Harvey 2009). With the status of different norms of democratic conduct and civility being questioned and contested across this field, future research needs to address how specific sets of contextual norms are allied with different practices of popular control and accountability. Further research will certainly also need to address the issue of what skills and resources are needed for participants to make the most of different kinds of spectacular democratic practice. Levels of political participation in actually existing forms of democracy have been shown to correlate to levels of income, wealth and education (Pattie et al. 2005). More rather than less virtuosity or mastery of politics may be required to take part effectively in democracy as it is imagined by philosophers such as Rancière (Hallward 2006: 126). There is a paradox here. Making democracy spectacular may lead to forms of politics that are more popular and engaging while leading also to forms of politics that are more demanding. This observation resonates with a point that has been made by the political scientist David Plotke: when populist criticism of legislatures and representation is angry and insistent, we should recognise that urgent calls for direct and simple political relations have often been made by democratic movements. Yet successful democratic movements often make politics more complex and less direct. […] If democratic movements tend to increase political complexity, we should not identify democracy with simplicity or directness per se—even if those same movements rightly say that democratic reform will make democratic politics more accessible for them. (Plotke 1997: 24) Work that has equated the staging and enactment of political spectacles with either fascistic or strongly consumerist agendas provides the cautionary backdrop against which this article has sought to work. The process of theorising political spectacle in less stark terms is certainly not without its risks. However, democracy imagined as a radically egalitarian and ongoing process of public imagination, experimentation, invention, reflection, contestation and renewal needs to be a form of practice that is necessarily indeterminate. Risks and possible openings for progressive democratic change and renewal will go together. The indeterminacy of this vision of democracy is part of its danger and its spectacular political appeal. NOTES 1. E.g., Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (Ontario), available at www.citizensassembly. gov.on.ca, accessed November 2009. 350 NICK MAHONY 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. E.g., www.buildingdemocracy.co.uk, accessed November 2009. E.g., www.deliberative-mapping.org, accessed November 2009. E.g., www.climatecamp.org.uk, accessed November 2009 E.g., see Antony Gormley’s 2009 experiment, ‘Clay and the Collective Body’ at www.antonygormley.com, last accessed November 2009. E.g,. see ‘How to Live in the 21st Century’, organised by the UK political campaigning group Compass, available at www.howtoliveinthe21stcentury.org.uk, last accessed November 2009. E.g., a Conservative Party (UK) proposal for a ‘crowdsourcing experiment’; see Parker (n.d.) E.g., ‘Democracy 2’, available at www.positech.co.uk/democracy, accessed January 2010; or ‘Budget Simulator’, available at www.budgetsimulator.com, accessed January 2010. See www.americaspeaks.org, accessed January 2010. Harrow Open Budget website, October 2005 ‘Vote for Me’ press release, 14 April 2004. 4th European Social Forum website and official programme, February 2006. Ibid. ‘Vote for Me’, episode 1, I TV, 10 January 2005. 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Political Studies 51(1): 161–79. SMITH , GRAHAM. 2005. Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from around the World. London: Power Inquiry. Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010 352 NICK MAHONY SMITH , GRAHAM. 2009. Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nick Mahony is a research associate with the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, a centre of interdisciplinary research excellence based in the Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University, Milton Keynes. His research comparatively analyses the public’s enactments of democracy and cultures of politics emerging from forms of contemporary participative experimentation. Visit Nick’s website The Experimental Democracy Console (http://www.open.ac.uk/ socialsciences/experimental-democracy/) to access and interact with many more examples of recent democratic experiments. Email: n.mahony@open.ac.uk Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:28 17 September 2010