“Any form of participation is already a form of conflict. In order to participate in a given environment or situation, one needs to understand the forces of conflict that act upon that environment. In this context, it seems urgent and necessary to promote an understanding of “conflictual participation”, one that acts as an uninvited irritant, a forced entry into fields of knowledge that could arguably benefit from spatial thinking.” (Markus Miessen 2010 p.91)
Designers performing designerly research show many similarities to what architect and theorist Markus Miessen has called the ‘uninvited outsider’ and a ‘post-consensus practice’. An outsider can be asked to enter or move into a situation, the domain of the insider. When an outsider moves in from the outside there is always a certain idea or framework of the inside, that which the outsider moves into. This circumscribed space in which the outsider is allowed to move dictates, to a certain degree, what he or she can and will do. We can describe this type of outsider-moving-in as a more or less invited outsider. The outsider is invited within a certain physical and mental space with accompanying boundaries and restrictions. The uninvited outsider transgresses these boundaries and moves about freely, delineating and crossing the borders of the acceptable and the known. By doing so, the uninvited outsider develops an understanding of the systems, practices and protocols governing a situation. This form of productive conflict, or post-consensus practice, is what makes collaboration so valuable in doing research.
Miessen, a spatial practitioner himself, describes participation as taking place in an environment or situation upon which forces of conflict act. The participation of any actor is such a force of conflict. These conflicting forces end up forming relative stable groupings and stable situations. A practice with its practitioners, accompanying protocols, things and ways of doing can form such a relative stable situation. Miessen observes that the designer (or any spatial thinker) can serve as an uninvited irritant with a larger degree of conflict as she makes a forced entry into these situations and the domains of the practitioners. This is characteristic of the critical spatial practitioner: the spatial thinker engages with other practices. The designer performing research in our case is practicing what Miessen summarizes as a ‘discipline without profession’. She has no prior part in the relatively stable, identifiable grouping or environment that she forces an entry in. The designer performs a ‘parasitic’ practice, latches on from the outside, and creates new meaning and knowledge.
Because the outsider is not part of the system or ‘space’ he/she moves into, there is no inherent motivation to keep the system, the status-quo, intact. New practices and knowledges arise in the meeting point, the friction, between the outsider and the insider. Through participating in the existing practice of the insider, by means of collaboration (as opposed to cooperation), possibilities for change arise. Through collaboration the uninvited outsider can help develop radically new things. The uninvited outsider forces newness by not conforming to, or cooperating within an existing framework or practice (towards an already specified goal). Cooperation follows rules of conduct, collaboration defines new ones, together.
At first it might have looked like an arbitrary difference, collaborate or cooperate, but they are most definitely based on different logics and dynamics. The insecurity and precarious modes of thought that arise in collaborations, the almost disastrous moment of “where is this damn thing a-going?” is aptly described by the FFS song ‘Collaborations Don’t Work”. In contrast, the dynamics of cooperation are aptly summarized through the classic Sesame Street songs (and Rolling Stones spoof) “I Can’t Get No Cooperation”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7h2n1h6kEM