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This preliminary chapter traces the development of the sustainability agenda at multiple decision-making scales, also incorporating recent and upcoming political changes. In doing so, it provides a critical discussion of the historical, non-linear development of sustainability, showing the malleability of the concept, its ethical underpinning and the influence of the political realm in shaping the legal and policy articulations of sustainability. The analysis is informed by critical theory and environmental law theory. More specifically, rejecting the modernist dichotomy between the Eco and the Anthropos, we move beyond a pillar approach to sustainability and consider the scope for dissensus, a more relational analysis and a transition towards the pluriverse.

This chapter presents an irresolution thesis: that constituent power cannot be absorbed into constituted authority and is to be treated as irreducible supplement which irritates and challenges rather than transcends the specific forms of constituted power. It argues that the radical openness of constituent power depends on its occupying a domain radically independent of constitutional form, and that it is possible to imagine and activate such a domain as something other than the ante-room of constitutional initiative and authority.

This introductory chapter outlines the book’s theoretical concerns: how the political is thought as a distinction between politics (le politique) and the political (la politique); the need to argue for hope as a possibility of the present, disentangled from teleological or theological forms, framed by Andrew Benjamin; and, the indivisibility of politics and aesthetics (the political aesthetic) conceptualised by Rancière. It covers the crucial difference between Schmitt’s ‘enemy/friend conflict’ and ‘dissensus’, which Rancière poses as a struggle for emancipation played out on the aesthetic plane. An important thrust of the book is to see artists’ relationships to others as a quality and methodology that inheres in the practice itself. This is a demand for an ethics of practice (Simon Critchley) that disavows the autonomy of art as an act or an object separated from its making or worldly context. [139]

This chapter turns to the concept of improvisation, a term that has become popular across several domains, from comedy improv, jazz, and even business practice. Games open up new ways of thinking about contingency, responsiveness, and performance, particularly within the digital environments. This chapter departs from exclusively screen-based games and considers the mixed reality form of alternate reality games. It focuses on a single case of a large-scale alternate reality game, the parasite (2017) that the author co-designed and executed at the University of Chicago. Drawing from methodologies of critical making and emergent frameworks, such as the experimental humanities, this chapter contends that both gameplay and experimental game design may encourage improvisational and unexpected responses to neoliberalism. More than any other part of the book, this final chapter offers the author's design alternative of experimental games that stand in distinction to gamification.

This chapter systematically analyses Warlpiri taboos showing how they can all be dispatched into four contexts (socialisation rituals, totemic relationships, mother-in-law/son-in-law relation, death) and four domains (space, language, sexuality and goods, especially food). Each combination of a context and a domain virtualises forms of obligations and ritual transgressions, which connect all taboos in a hypercubic way (see chapter 6). In that underlying entanglement of prohibitions and transgressions, any structural dualism seems to be conjured. Taboos become a way to create human and non human heterogeneous temporality, both as a vertical transmission – in the succession of generations re-enacted through socialisation and mourning rituals – and as a horizontal differentiation perpetually redefining these modalities of alliance and of ritual interdependance between the totemic groups. Everybody has an interest in reproducing a balance that respects the Law and pressing others to do the same, as well as giving what he/she has so that others will reciprocate. Such a social pressure partly explains the refusal to accumulate and the systematic circulation of all possessions, cars, clothes, etc., although it does not prevent conflicts. In fact, a certain dissensus is valued. First published in French in 1991.

This chapter shares some excerpts of Garnett's acting and production career. After revolutionary forces, left-wing teachers, union activists and television producers all found themselves branded, in a much-quoted phrase, as the ‘enemy within’. In this climate, conspiracy theories abounded; indeed, conspiracy, and its twin, betrayal, run through much discourse off both right and left in the decade. It is not surprising that they also surface in television drama, both on and off the screen. Kestrel Productions was the first independent drama production company in British television, and had its origins in the shake-up that followed the re-franchising of commercial television in 1967. The chapter also briefly discusses Kes—the development of a political aesthetic. However, radical television drama did not go uncontested, and there were high-profile cases of dramas being challenged across the media and other public discourses, and in some cases, withdrawn from the schedules before screening.

By engaging with democratic-minded objections and rule-of-law based critiques of constitutionalism, this book has suggested that, counterintuitively, a retreat from judicial supremacy becomes the most promising route towards redeeming fundamental social and personal rights under modern conditions of deep moral dissensus and complexity. But this step would indeed amount to an abdication of judicial role and responsibility—as both these critiques fear—unless it goes hand in hand with a moral-practical emphasis on the proceduralizing—that is, forum-creative and agenda-setting—role of courts in the process of a progressive clarification of the meaning of a right. But ongoing deliberation does not mean indefinite postponement of substantive resolution because the underlying proceduralist consensus is robust enough to express a commitment to mutual recognition of participants as stakeholders with legitimate interests. This proceduralist move addresses uncertainty in encouraging joint learning about unforeseen possibilities and limits. It helps legitimize decisionmaking in pluralism by authorizing the participation in the undertakings that concern them and by making a best-practice consensus routinely corrigible. Outcomes are legitimate as long as procedures are sufficiently inclusive to allow citizens whose interpretive views do not prevail to (re-) initiate scrutiny and revision of shared constitutional understandings in the light of new experience. Courts require attentions to relevant reasons. Over time, when interpretive answers have crystallized in the light of experience and mutual reason giving, courts can then shift towards stronger forms of judicial intervention that consolidate best practice. It is this proceduralizing move that Euroconstitutionalism epitomizes.

This chapter addresses the limitations of contemporary debates on ethics and democracy. It discusses the notion of heteronomous freedom and its relation to ethical obligation, political antagonism and sexual difference. It proposes a feminist democratic praxis and an ethics of dissensus, which opposes the conservative political work performed by privatized moral discourse and is inseparable from transformative praxis which aims to change unjust power relations and to acknowledge infinite responsibility for violence and the oppression of others. This chapter argues that the effectiveness of democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression depend on an ethical-political understanding of freedom that side-steps the seemingly intractable debate between the two positions available today: the liberal position that seeks normative criteria for the determination of political justice beyond difference and the communitarian position that advocates the continued contestation or negotiation of heterogeneous forces based on an ethical obligation to the other.

Chapter three rethinks the notions of political community and democracy through Alex de la Iglesia’s La Comunidad (2000), and places them in the context of the anxieties attending Spain’s integration in the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. Taking as starting points Jean Baudrillard’s vision of the “consumer society” and Jacques Rancière’s account of the “politics of consensus,” this chapter suggests that La Comunidad launches a powerful critique of the ideological presuppositions and “regimes of visibility” of Western liberal democracies. However, departing from previous analyses, it is argued that the real strength of the film lies not in its ability to render visible this order of domination, but rather in its ability to create an aesthetics of dissensus within the sensory world of the viewer. In this way, the film demonstrates not just the aesthetic dimension of politics, but the political character of aesthetics.

This chapter explores speeches and essays by Frederick Douglass to show the peculiarities of democratic claims making from an understanding of the people not as a unified subject but as a form of political subjectification. It focuses on Douglass’s most celebrated address, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” The chapter describes and analyzes how Douglass exemplifies a form of political subjectification called a “constituent moment,” in which someone gladly speaks in the name of a certain group but does not have the authority to do so. It illuminates the connections between the formal and constitutional dimensions of Douglass’s speeches and explores his consideration of the power of claims enacted through practice as well as speech. Moreover, the chapter examines the art of rhetoric and how Douglass’s delivery of the famous speech in 1852 demonstrates an example of “staging dissensus.”

This chapter demonstrates how Moroccan-Belgian filmmaker Nabil Ben Yadir’s La Marche presents the 1983 March for Equality and against Racism as a political praxis and a metaphor for homecoming. As a group, the march connotes desired community and emotional togetherness. It promotes anchoring visions of solidarity and connectedness across gender, class, racial and sexual divides. As a metaphor, the marching group becomes a political mode of existence. In La Marche, Ben Yadir thus offers an oppositional gaze to dominant politics and a substantial project, in the shape of a narrative of mobility that moves away from allocated places and the suppressed speech of the ‘unaccounted for’ to formulated politics and discourse.

This section introduces the empirical case. It recounts the arrest of the populist president Joseph Estrada, which instigated the largest single protest in Philippine history. Edsa 3, as it came to be known, lasted a full week and mobilized nearly two million people. The demonstrators gathered around a landmark shrine along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (Edsa) in Manila. They consisted largely of the urban poor, a population generally seen as risk-averse and fragmented and thus unlikely to mobilize as a group. Why did they turn out in such unprecedented numbers for a president roundly portrayed as corrupt and feckless? The chapter highlights the state of dissensus between Manila’s poor and middle class over Estrada’s fate. It suggests that this dissensus is connected to the segregation of the two groups throughout the metro. The project of the book is to show how. The chapter concludes by outlining this project.

Chapter 1 describes the intellectual stakes and analytical approach of the project. With respect to the stakes, it relates the story at hand to three broader topics in urban and political sociology, namely: (1) The restructuring of cities in an era of globalization. Urban restructuring involves more than just the transformation of social and spatial structures. It involves the formation of distinct subjectivities and a particular economy of practices. The book aims to integrate structure and experience into an account of social change. (2) The experience of democracy in the Global South. The urban middle class and poor experience democracy differently. The middle class see it distorted by the participation of the masses, while the poor feel the disjunction between their formal political equality and their everyday social inequality. These different experiences shape their politics. (3) Dissensus. Dissensus, following Ranciére, is a conflict over who counts politically. The notion helps us make better sense of Edsa 3. The second half of the chapter unpacks the various elements comprising the book’s analytical approach. These elements include social class, categorical inequality, class identity, slums and enclaves, and spatial mechanisms. Data and methods are also discussed, and several blind spots identified.

Chapter 8 shows there to be two Edsa 3s, one in the minds of Manila’s middle class and one in the minds of the urban poor, the one a product of political manipulation and the other an expression of people power. The two sides mobilized different facts in support of their respective interpretations. While the two sets of facts are not mutually exclusive, each party attends to only one set in their depiction of Edsa 3, and thus we end up with incommensurable objects. The chapter proceeds by juxtaposing the two Edsa 3s. It narrates the dominant account based primarily on coverage of the event in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It narrates the subaltern account based on the testimony of organizers and urban poor participants. Juxtaposition highlights a situation of dissensus. It also keeps the urban poor’s claims from being swallowed up by various efforts to reinstate consensus, whether spatial, political, or historiographic.

This section concludes the book by revisiting the three topics taken up in the Introduction. (1) Urban restructuring. At issue is not the extent of inequality but its spatial organization in the form of interspersion. Interspersion has worsened class relations, which may be characterized in terms of categorical inequality. (2) Democracy. Why do the middle class support the controversial Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte? The section suggests that frustration with democracy is partly behind their support. Their frustration is not only with elite depredation but with electoral siege. (3) Dissensus. The section proposes that we reframe the “problem” of democracy in terms of difference rather than backwardness. A difference framework represents a shift in focus from trying to change the poor to trying to understand them.

The conclusion traces the book’s argument backward from topics laid out in chapter three to the beginning. Following these arguments, the conclusion sets forth what is at stake when critical thinking and thought are threatened as they are today. The conclusion argues that ultimately, at stake is the possibility of replacing the (conformist) consensus with the (problematizing, questioning) dissensus. Furthermore, the fundamental question of democracy consists of identifying or creating the conditions under which sociability as the faculty of the multitude can flourish. The multitude will always be governed by the unconscious mechanisms of the imagination and affectivity. Society will never think or act as a philosopher. However, the conclusion asserts, that does not mean we should not seek to increase our sovereignty and autonomy as a political body. We must cultivate virtues such as self-examination, generosity of spirit, and an eye for the construction of problems, as these not only lead to knowledge but also shape social and political attitudes, and prepare the ground for the exercise of thought and action as dissensus.