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“We have arrived to a phase in which we, ourselves, are always our own representation.”
— Ettore Sottsass28
“Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.” — Fredrick Jameson29
“What a time this is for learning about people, politics and oneself!”
— Michael Taussig30
When political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe posited the concept of radical democracy,31 they underscored the importance of artistic production as the key domain where a society critically renews its modes of representation. For Mouffe and Laclau, public participation unfolds agonistically through the confrontation of disparate positions admitting only punctual, ephemeral, ever- negotiable agreements. According to this approach, social formations are not to be constituted as closed, stable communities but rather as effective support structures aimed at common goals depending on various needs: Communities thus shed their condition as useful fictions where every form of participation is a form of violence, and become instead the end result of a series of processes establishing the commonwealth. The series of support structures allowing for these communal bonds to be made and unmade and remade constitute a chain of specific agreements responding to shared needs and multiple pressing circumstances. A good example32 would be an ancient façade precariously standing even after the building it belonged to has collapsed. Preserving the façade involves setting up a scaffolding, a propping system, as a temporary, transitional shoring measure, before a definitive solution can be found. Once the scaffolding is in place, the façade and its structural support are linked in form and function: Neither makes sense without the other, each is defined through its connection to the other. The propping structures are defined by their agonistic precariousness and the usefulness of their interstitial spaces. Therein lies the significance of fiction: like a piece of corrugated cardboard with sufficient support, a structure develops the solidity and strength it did not possess before, fold against fold.
28 In Design Quaterly, 1973.
29 Fredric Jameson, op. cit., p. XII.
30 Michael Taussig: Trump Studies. [https://culanth. org/fieldsights/1046-trump- studies] [Accessed 10 March 2017].
31 See Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 2001.
32 See Céline Condorelli, Support Structures, Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press, 2009.