The politics of copresence: an ecological approach to resistance in top-down participation

Abstract

The globally unfavourable assessment of state-generated forms of participation often extends to the citizens’ talk in itself. Today, it is the very idea that ordinary citizens are able to express themselves in a relevant and fruitful way during technical and tightly framed public discussions that seems to be called into question. How do citizens respond to the difficulty to express their ideas or concerns about their neighbourhood, in a forum where they have been invited to do so? What are their reactions to repeated failure to impact the discussions and the projects? ‘Exit’, ‘voice’ and ‘loyalty’ are three typical reactions to dissatisfaction. This paper will describe a fourth option, ‘internal resistance’. Following this option, citizens, while conserving appearances of loyalty, resituate themselves in the interaction through tactical moves that are found to each illustrate one of the main principles of Goffman's conception of the ‘interaction order’: focusing, mutuality, equality.

Keywords:

• participation
• copresence
• interaction order
• resistance
• attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Developed in the Brussels-Capital Region since 1994, Contrats de quartier (here, Neighbourhood contracts or NCs) are urban renewal programmes that involve a participatory dimension. Each programme receives a budget of EUR 15 million (the major part coming from the Brussels-Capital Region) to develop, within a limited urban perimeter, about thirty operations related to housing renovation, requalification of public spaces, creation of neighbourhood-scale public facilities, and actions of social and economic regeneration. Each NC opens with a first year of collaborative planning, during which a ‘general programme’ is drawn up. During this NC start-up year, a Commission Locale de Développement Intégré (Local Commission for Integrated Development – LCID) meets each month, first to discuss the priorities for the urban regeneration to achieve, and later to follow the evolution of each operation. The LCID is composed of local elected officials, experts from the city planning office hired by the public authorities, some specialized civil servants, representatives of local non-profit associations and (at least) a dozen local residents. The analysis proposed in these pages is based on the observation and audio recording of 60 public events organized in the context of five Brussels NC. The observation focused on the utterances of the citizen participants towards the representatives of political authority (elected officials) and technical authority (city planning experts). We have rendered the conversation excerpts anonymous by using pseudonyms for the participants, the bodies in which they occurred (ex: Callas NC), the people involved and the places they mention.

2. In particular, I showed how it is extremely difficult for the lay participant (i) to bring new objects or new references into the discussion, (ii) to present a role the other partners in the interaction are willing to acknowledge, and (iii) to deploy the objects of his or her statements in an expressive formula that is adjusted, constructed and uninterrupted. It is at the intersection of these three main difficulties that I call topical relevance, role appropriateness, and formal correctness, that most citizen participants stumble, fail in their attempts to represent and are revealed – or confirmed – in their condition of underdogs (Berger, 2009b).

3. The notion of attentional and ecological competence in social interactions was introduced by Erving Goffman in Behavior in public places (1963a). See also Conein (2005).

4. For an historic perspective on the growing importance of meetings and ‘meeting manners’ in modern organizations: Van Vree (1999).

5. Focusing is dealt with in an ecological perspective in Goffman (1963a), and in a more sociolinguistic perspective, as ‘topicality’, in Goffman (1976) and (1983a). For further developments on attentional competences in situations of joint action: Conein (2005). The principle of ‘mutual involvement’ is at the heart of Goffman (1963a). One will also read Daniel Cefaï’s excellent postface of the French edition of the book (Cefaï, 2013). In his last text (1983), Goffman evokes the ‘equality rule’ underlying the interaction order. Implicit ideals of equality appear quite clearly in the descriptions and analyses of Asylums (1961a) and Stigma (1963b). An important part of Anne W. Rawls’ early work has been to highlight this moral and political dimension of Goffman's work, regarding ‘the limitations to the institutional inequalities brought by the interaction order’ (Rawls, 2012, p. 190). Taking as an example the habits of bodily contacts, the ‘touch system’ developed among staff members and inmates of the psychiatric facilities that Goffman studied, Anne W. Rawls insists on this potentiality of the interaction order to create a ‘small oasis of equality within an environment which is otherwise overwhelmingly hostile to the very existence of the self’ (Rawls, 1987, p. 140).

6. For studies on the fundamental figure/ground relation considered through the ethnography of communication, see Goodwin and Duranti (1992).

7. The symbolic and indexical uses of language are understood in the sense Peirce gives to these categories of signs:

An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object. ( … ) it is not the mere resemblance of its Object ( … ) which makes it a sign, but it is the actual modification of it by the Object. ( … ) A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object. ( … ) Not only is it general itself, but the Object to which it refers is of a general nature. (Peirce, 1998 [1903], pp. 291–292)

8. ‘Since one does not usually know in advance what aspect of an object or action is important, it follows that most of the time, a given object will give rise to several different coarse internal descriptions’ (Marr, 1977).

9. In the trichotomy of signs proposed by Peirce (symbol, index, icon),

An Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, ( … ). Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it. (Peirce, 1998 [1903], pp. 291–292)

10. Let us insist on the fact that ‘iconic’ is here used not in its vernacular use, but strictly as defined by C.S. Peirce, that is, as the quality for any sign to resemble to its object, to look alike (‘likeness’ is sometimes used as a synonym by Peirce). Actually, the vernacular use of ‘iconic’ for ‘emblematic’ directly refers to Peirce's definition of ‘symbolic’ signs.

11. In reaction to the citizens’ criticism, Frusquet stated later, more explicitly, and still ironically that he ‘personally, “had no horse” in the project’.

12. Figure 1 is inspired by Conein (2005, p. 149).

13. Adam Kendon as in this case speaks of the F-formation, in other words a positioning and orienting of bodies which enable the participants to share a ‘joint transactional segment’.

14. Here, the proximity between Goffman's words and Niklas Luhmann's developments on the relations between the ‘interaction systems’ and the ‘societal systems’ is striking (Luhmann, 1995, pp. 405–436).

15. ‘I personnally hold society to be first in every way and individual's current involvements to be second; this report deals only with matters that are second’ (Goffman, 1974, p. 13).