The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories 9780226666938

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The Participant

THE PARTICIPANT

A Century of Participation in Four Stories C h r i s t op h e r M . K e lt y The Universit y of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­66662-­4 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­66676-­1 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­66693-­8 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226666938.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kelty, Christopher M., 1972– author. Title: The participant : a century of participation in four stories / Christopher M. Kelty. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017185 | ISBN 9780226666624 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226666761 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226666938 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Participation. | Social participation. | Political participation. Classification: LCC HM711 .K45 2019 | DDC 302/.14—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017185 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). Frontispiece: Teeter-Board for One Person. United States Patent 1,320,710. 1919.

Fo r m y pa r t i c i pa n t s

hll, ijkl, lolk

Contents

Participation, Exhibited

Participation, Introduced

Participation, Experienced

ix

1

45

Participation, Employed

87

Participation, Administered

13 6

Participation, Developed

183

Participation, Concluded Participation, Acknowledged Participation, Notated

Participation, Referenced

269

295

Participation, Indexed

319

249 265

Participation, Conjugated. May 1968. “Je participe, tu participes, il . . .” Source: Bibliothèque nationa le de Fr a nce, Notice no. FR BNF39841994. Used w ith per mission.

Participation, Exhibited Paradigmatic Bibliography We are open, they are crowdsourced, you are engaged, we are the media. I moderate, he likes, they dig, she tweets and retweets. @everybody Here we come! I no longer simply consume, I democratize innovation, she prosumes, and he produses. We are what democracy looks like. You are fans who write your own fiction, they are users who hack and mod their technologies, we are civic scientists who produce our own knowledge. She is a maker. He revolts, you critique, they revolutionize, we democratize the Middle East. We are filled to the brim with civic enthusiasm and collaborative power never before known. We are in the age of direct citizen participation, she is in the epoch of user-­generated content, we are convergence culture. You are the people formerly known as the audience, I am a peer producer, he is at the end of gatekeeping. We are the People. You are closed, we are proprietary, they are poorer, she is more idle, he is fatter, we are more disengaged and more disempowered, they are less equal and less happy. He lives in the time of bastard culture. She is net-­ deluded. I can’t focus, we live in the shallows, you are all amateurs, you are a gadget, he is inauthentic, they are evil, I click to save everything, she is unemployed, underemployed, and freelanced to death. We don’t vote. We live in filter bubbles. She moves fast and breaks things; I am the sucker of attention merchants; we bowl alone. Online. He is addicted, they are alone together, we are :( .

Zuccotti Park, 27 September, 2011 “Mic check!” “Mic check!” yells The Participant. Her back is to the speaker, facing a crowd of a thousand. “Mic check!” yell those who can hear her, then those who can hear them repeat it. Something like elation washes over The Participant—­the sense of being absorbed into something large and powerful, if temporary. She might describe it as a sense of belonging, or whatever emotion comes from “the sum being greater than the parts.” She might describe it as “the colossus Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x h i b i t e d

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who writes history with her feet and crumples governments with her bare hands.”1 Or maybe not. She looks around. The people around her don’t look colossal: there’s a predictable, dreadlocked youth sporting something Central-­American-­ish; that guy looks like a banker; next to him sit three wispy-­bearded, geeky boys, one set of knees balancing a laptop with a sticker that says “Come Back with a Warrant”; then there’re the cops along the edge of the crowd. But each time The Participant repeats a phrase and the entire crowd follows suit—­then they are suddenly colossal: something more, something also, something in addition to, something at the same time as. This experience of participation is what seems so valuable, so needed, and so difficult to sustain. But in the end, “people want to see, like, actual results.”2

Contents of The Participant’s Tool Kit A ladder

A policy instrument

Objects and plans for a

A Scanlon plan

cooperative

Open data

The Port Huron Statement

A Gesamtkunstwerk

Some industrial democracy

A DIY democracy

An agricultural extension

Several pieces of candy

employee from the Tennessee

A script

Valley

A crowdsourcing app

An essentially contested concept

A plebiscite One dictator

Voice

Two radicals

A budget

Twelve neoliberals

A public involvement

An ungovernable democracy in

manual

crisis

A focus group

Dissensus

A designer democracy

A machine-­learning algorithm

Two trade unions Astroturf

for sorting and matching participants

A scrivener

Another participation

Civic virtue

An experience

A social climate

Perplexity

A divi at 31 Toad Lane

A tool kit

x

Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x h i b i t e d

Participation, Introduced Introduction “Participation in what?” This is the first question everyone asks: “Participation in what?” Anything. Everything. Politics, community, the state, work, home, school, church, the village, the town meeting, the nation, the prefecture, art, the commune, the collective, the temple, science, budgeting, finance, decision-­making, the internet, unions, local governance, global governance, the movement . . . everything. And nothing. Participation is an evasive, wily concept, “always in the shelf next above the one [we are] looking at.” People come by the question honestly—­“participation in what?”—­because the word is dull and quotidian. But like other seemingly obvious words, such as “related” or “determined,” it is a word made to do some heavy lifting in philosophy and politics.1 Look closer, and it is also frankly mystical, hiding some seductive and threatening meanings with ancient roots that are rarely invoked in the commonplaces of contemporary participation. What at first seems obvious reveals itself to be challenging and difficult to grasp. In this book, I argue that over the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as the practice has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, around the world. The power of participation, at its best, is to reveal ethical intuitions, make sense of different collective forms of life, and produce an experience beyond that of individual opinion, interest, or responsibility. But in the twenty-­first century, participation is more often a formatted procedure by which autonomous individuals attempt to reach calculated consensus, or one in which they experience an attenuated, temporary feeling of personal contribution that ends almost as soon as it begins. Nowhere is this failure clearer than in the platforms, algoPa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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rithms, and network-­enabled participation of the internet and social media—­precisely the technologies that promised a liberation of participatory power heretofore impossible. Instead of offering the profound experience of meaningful, powerful participation, social media and the internet are now more likely to be denounced as a source of exploitation, cooptation, or enhanced neoliberal domination. But this book does not blame these contemporary platforms and technologies (or their designers or owners) for this change. Instead, it looks back further in time, before there were smartphones in every pocket and before the world became saturated in social media; it searches for the subtler transformations of participation visible in the experiments, theories, handbooks, sourcebooks, cases, and tool kits of participation past. Today’s technologies, seen from this perspective, are better understood as an apotheosis of past 2

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practices: they have followed a certain path out to its conclusion, in an effort to scale up and spread participation everywhere. But a different participation is possible, and many people intuit this and aspire to it—­and sometimes reject the formatted participation of today as a result. The shop seemed to be full of all This book explores participation as a concept, a pro- manner of curious things—­but the oddest part of it all was, that whenever cedure, and an experience, primarily in the twentieth she looked hard at any shelf, to make century, and primarily in North America and Europe. out exactly what it had on it, that Participation, like ideas such as “justice” or “freedom,” is particular shelf was always quite empthough the others round it were an important but comparatively imprecise concept in po- ty: crowded as full as they could hold. litical philosophy; it means both more and less than “de- ‘Things flow about so here!’ she said mocracy,” and it is related intimately to it, as a problem. at last in a plaintive tone, after she had Participation is also a practical procedure for solving spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked somethis problem: a set of rules, techniques, and tactics for times like a doll and sometimes like a organizing people, issues, and things in the service of work-­box, and was always in the shelf collective and equitable decision-­making, getting things next above the one she was looking at. ‘And this one is the most provoking done, and or changing the way things go. Participation of all—­but I’ll tell you what—­’ she can be proceduralized in different ways—­and I refer added, as a sudden thought struck her, here to these variations as different assemblages of par- ‘I’ll follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It’ll puzzle it to go through the ticipation. ceiling, I expect!’ But even this plan Finally, and most obscurely, participation is also an failed: the ‘thing’ went through the experience of a peculiar kind: it is the experience of be- ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it coming a collective. It is neither a strictly private, per- were quite used to it. ✴ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass: And What sonal experience nor a fully collective, anonymous one. Alice Found There (London: MacMilNeither the memoir nor the statistic can communicate lan, 1875), 103–­4 it. Experiences fade. The immediate, emotional, affective experience of participation is intense and meaningful in the moment, tattered and incomplete in retrospect. The experience of participation, I maintain, is not accidental but essential to the power of participation—­but it is also the aspect least likely to be preserved, strengthened, or taken seriously. Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, who plays a role in this book, had an ingenious name for such inevitably fading experiences: the soft parts of social fossils. While I have much to say about the concept and procedures of participation in the following chapters, it is this last aspect—­capturing the experience of participation—­that motivates the structure and layout of this book. I have organized my discussion around stories of participation—­ they are both the substance and the mechanism by which participation is communicated and analyzed here. Stories are an important, but underappreciated aspect of participation itself: to participate is to live stories, and stories are not fabrications but orienting ethical Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. Felix Gonzalez-­Torres, American, born Cuba, 1957–­1996. Candies individually wrapped in multicolor cellophane, endless supply. Dimensions vary with installation; ideal weight 175 lbs. Source: Photo by M a r k M au no (CC-­b y).

representations. Stories display, juxtapose, figure, guide, and enliven in ways that philosophical concepts or abstract procedures cannot. Stories are too often dismissed as “illustration” or “evocation,” as if they lacked the (masculine) rigor of the “concept” or the “procedure”; stories, and especially “myths,” are opposed to science or reality, as if representing only an imaginary, poorly explained world; they are the space of emotion and affect—­too often demoted in power as something incidental, soft, solipsistic, not academic, or inadequately precise for thinking. Stories, I will admit all too readily, are difficult to tell well, and they depend on the listener’s goodwill as much as the teller’s skill. But it is only by attending to the stories of the experience of participation that I can build an argument about the rational concept and the practical procedure of participation. In this book, there is one character and there are four stories. The character is The Participant, who traverses time and space (and gender and age and sometimes form) as the entity who experiences participation in its everyday stories. The stories include one about a colonial explorer experiencing—­and disrupting—­a village on the south coast of British New Guinea in the 1890s; another about the attempt to make workers participate in their own jobs in Virginia in the 1940s; a third about how blacks in Philadelphia in 1969 were required by law (but not defended by law) to participate in transforming the city; and a final story is about a method and a “participatory tool kit” designed to enroll people all over the world—­anywhere the international development beast roamed in the 1980s and 1990s—­in their own liberation and coming to consciousness. There are many other stories, but I’ve chosen these—­as an old-­school paleontologist might choose a sequence of fossils—­to make an argument that is bigger than any one of the stories. This book began in the context of collaborative research with colleagues and students on twenty-­first-­century internet-­based participatory platforms, software, apps, and algorithms—­things like crowdsourcing, citizen science, the precursors to the sharing economy like couch surfing or time banking, fan fiction, dating algorithms, direct-­to-­consumer genetic tests, recommendation algorithms and machine learning, or (my favorite) the collaborative hacking of freely available software.2 All these examples require participation, and my colleagues, students, and I study and contribute to such practices. But rarely, if ever, is participation defined in these cases. Rather, it is more often understood as a problem: How to get more (or less) participation? How to improve the quality of par4

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ticipation? What motivates people to participate (or not)? How to make participation more authentic, less exploitative? This “problem of participation” and its treatment extends from very local cases, like the question of how to make an archival practice more participatory using software tools like tagging, all the Throughout the research for this way to the grandest experiments in voting and delib- book, I discovered more and more eration at a national scale, using complicated software, places—­disciplinary and practical—­in which participation was a problem. such as the Pirate Party’s goals for “liquid democracy.”3 Although the book focuses on only a But the more closely our research group looked at handful of these stories, I try to emthe rapidly changing technologies of the present, the phasize how peripatetic participation is—­gallivanting through nearly every harder it was to see the deeper, fundamental questions. conceivable place that people gather. So I started investigating the wide range of approaches The best, and first, place to look for to participation in the past. I took a risk in stepping stories not told here of participation and its discontents is in art and art back, and fell off a cliff—­or perhaps into a rabbit hole. history. For a trenchant critique, see I began with a simple question: “what is the genealogy Claire Bishop’s excellent book Artificial of contemporary participation?” But quickly my investi- Hells, which analyzes everything gation turned into a fully fledged historical ethnography from the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner, to the mid-­century happenings of of the problem of participation. Rather than explaining Allan Kaprow, to the works of Félix contemporary participation through the empirical work Gonzaléz-­Torres, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia of looking at these new technologies and platforms, I Clark, or Tino Seghal, to the academic debates about “relational aesthetics” turned instead to how others in the past have defined and “socially engaged art.” ✴ Claire participation as a concept, arranged its parts, innovated Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory its procedures, and created examples, experiments, and Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012); also actions in the world, in attempts to prove the power of Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetparticipation, long before the era of platforms or algo- ics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002); Rudolf Frieling, The Art of Particirithms. This book is the result. It shows how participation pation: 1950 to Now (San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art in association has changed over time in the short term (the last fifty with Thames & Hudson, 2008); Claire years), as well as how it can be understood as a much Bishop, Participation (Cambridge, longer term problem related to representative democ- MA: MIT Press, 2006); Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community racy and the experience of politics. I am not much in- and Communication in Modern Art terested in any universal “theory of participation”—­but (Berkeley: University of California I also do not think participation can understood only Press, 2013); Nato Thompson, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from by looking at contemporary empirical cases. There is 1991–­2011 (New York; Cambridge, MA: a reason that so many diverse people value participa- Creative Time/MIT Press, 2012) tion, and it is related to the intuition and experience of ethical relations that occurs with other people, each leading their lives in particular ways, together. And it is surprising how rarely participation actually does the job it is intended to do; I think this is because we don’t look directly at it, but are always asking instead, “Participation in what?” Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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The Participant This book is organized around stories of the experience of participation. Stories bookend most of the chapters, and throughout I have added a range of decorations and adumbrated cases that dangle from the margins, or crowd the text like an overfull cabinet of curiosities. These paraphernalia are not random, but represent the itinerary of the central character in these stories: The Participant. I am not The Participant. I could not be: it is impossible to imagine a project in which I could experience participation in the diverse forms that I’ve explored in order to write this book. And so I admit a mischievous pleasure in an absurd experiment: I’ve tried to write an ethnography about participation, based on experiences of participation in which I did not participate. To accomplish this, a character named The Participant is my hero. Each story in the book places The Participant in a different site of participation, in all of its everyday troubles and sometimes meaningless details. The technique is intended—­somewhat in the manner of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, perhaps—­to track The Participant across time, place, identity, and consciousness. The Participant lives these stories about the experience of participation in an effort to sidestep the scholarly abstraction and representation of participation on which the stories are based. Although I tell stories here, I have tried to remain extremely close to the sources, words, and available portraits. I do not wish to invent that which I did not experience, but to unearth it from what remains. Experience leaves no explicit traces, but inference, empathy, and the diligent work of reading supply the next best account. The goal of this book is not, however, to represent yet another historical or ethnographic case in all its richness, specificity, and detail—­for that The Participant would be unnecessary, and I could present instead one or two cases in the normal, and increasingly arcane, detail familiar to historians and interpretive social scientists. Rather, The Participant meanders in impossible ways through a series of juxtaposed, reconstructed, lightly embellished stories of participation. The Participant’s goal is to lead the reader through the particularities of participation and to grasp the singularity of participation, not just its variation. Why? As a philosophically and historically minded anthropologist, I asked the seemingly simple question: can one participate in participation? The immediate answer is obvious. I could easily have 6

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chosen any normal, contemporary field site: a “public engagement meeting” about a local ordinance or state ballot initiative; the planning and building of roads in Peru with (or without) public input; a “technology of elicitation” being used in a debate about nanotechnology or genetically modified foods. I could have occupied Gezi park, or engaged in an Anonymous Op online.4 I could have followed the traveling instruments of participatory budgeting, or gone to Tanzania to watch development workers collect statistics, or observed the countless public meetings and debates around an environmental impact assessment.5 I could have spent time observing socially conscious artists involve viewers and residents in an art project, or joined designers as they work with clients to rethink the needs of a building or product.6 As that list shows, I’m not alone in studying participation. Each of these examples, and the scholars who study them, taught me something, whether vividly or schematically, about participation. Hundreds more cases and examples wait in the wings. As I researched participation—­looking for sites and sources to base my own analysis upon—­I discovered example after confounding example of collectives of people, academic or otherwise, confronting participation as a problem, across a surprising range of domains, places, and techniques. Each time I thought I had found the exemplary case to work with, another case and a whole set of literature would appear from offstage—­often totally unconnected to what I had just come from observing. From stories of participatory art to those of participatory budgeting, to those of Scandinavian participatory design to those of social movement mobilization, there is an alphabet’s worth of different cases that, on the surface, seem not to be connected in any way. They lack a central philosophical or practical focus. They often fail to communicate within the available literature; there is no cross-­ citation, little awareness of history, and a lot of repetition. But at the same time, these seemingly diverse forms of participation end up looking very similar to each other despite this varied, independent development. The affinities they have for one another are latent—­they are addressing a similar problem, but they don’t all name it. The similarity I observed was not schematic or structural. At first, I thought I would create a massive, comparative atlas, one in which all the similarities and differences could be mapped out and compared. A method such that, by comparing a dozen or a hundred Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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Three attempts to capture the dimensions of participation: Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” (upper left); John M. Cohen and Norman T. Uphoff, Rural Development Participation: Concepts and Measures for Project Design, Implementation and Evaluation (upper right); Dachler and Wilpert, “Conceptual Dimensions and Boundaries of Participation in Organizations” (bottom).

cases of participation, one could elicit the things that emerge in all of them, or are missing in all of them. Such an approach was mechanical, and unsatisfying: a student accused me of “butterfly collecting.” But even worse, I quickly discovered the existence of almost as many prior attempts to do exactly what I had planned. From organizational sociology to international development to media theory and communication to public administration, participation has been wickedly resistant to this kind of analysis. There are linear models of ladders,7 three-­dimensional models formed like cubes,8 and there are multidimensional models formed into complex systems.9 There are models based on power as a possession, and models that orga8

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nize participation by its telos; there is endless sophistication, and no consensus in the vast, multidisciplinary literature. Missing from these comparative analyses are the experiences of participation—­the stories that try to capture what it feels like when participation happens, whether it works for some purpose or not. The more widely I read, the more the literature on participation started to seem (at the risk of offending everyone) dull and boring. It is abstract, schematic, procedural, bloodless, and pale. For whatever reason, most work on participation does not describe, present, analyze, or study experience. One has to dig, dwell, linger far too long in order to get a sense of the urgency, the passion, and the experience of participating. Only after visiting dozens of sites of participation did the importance of the immediate, emotional experience of participation become obvious—­the unrecorded part of participation turns out to be the most important of all. If it could be preserved, the experience of participation would be the recording device, core sample, or signature one might use to see and study participation. But the experience of participating is precisely what is excluded from every definition of participation, every list of its dimensions, and every impassioned defense of whatever it is that makes it valuable. I could not myself experience participation in all the forms and modes that I sensed were indicated by this diverse literature. For every article I read, I asked myself: “but what did it feel like?” And each time I was forced to admit that the soft parts of the social fossil had decayed or disappeared. To achieve even a basic sense of how the experience of participation feels in different times and places, and to demonstrate how it might, or might not, be changing, it was necessary to invent The Participant.

The Plan and Argument of This Book The Participant’s meandering path through the stories in this book is accompanied by three main concepts: contributory autonomy, the experience of participation, and the grammar (or “forms of life”) of participation. Each of these concepts is discussed throughout the text, and I explain in this introduction my reasoning for using them to make sense of participation. At the heart of my argument is contributory autonomy—­the form of personhood that I claim is most often demanded by contemporary participation. It embraces both the individual autonomy sacred Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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to liberalism, and the idea that collectives form only through the contributions of those individuals. Participation, I claim, has been formatted both to demand and to reinforce this form of personhood—­a formatting that demands both more and less than individualism, but also more and less than collectivism or community. Alongside this formatting of participation, I also explore how participation as an experience differs from, and creates tensions or difficulties with, the instrumental and formatted expressions that are most familiar. When we format participation in particular ways, we contain, threaten, defuse, or transform this experience, causing participants to wonder: Am I part of this collective? Is that what I wanted? Did I just participate, or have I instead been taken advantage of? This sense of perplexity reveals how the experience of participation works, and why it is something more than simply the contributions of individuals contained in a collective. Participation did not always mean what it means today: ­the contributions of autonomous individuals in (political) collectives. Lastly, I rely on Wittgenstein’s analysis of forms of life—­his loose label for judgments made by different collectives about the things that exist in the world; forms of life are indicated by distinct grammars. Participation appears to be unproblematic and effective when participants all share the same form of life. When they do, they are capable of disagreeing about opinions or interests, and they are enthusiastically engaged by the process of doing so. This enthusiasm often yields an evangelical fervor to extend participation to yet more places and problems; it is the source of its normative power today. But when forms of life differ—­when different collectives experience participation as problematic or ineffective, it is often because disagreement has become impossible: the judgments that different groups make about the subjects or goals of participation do not align. The result is the sense of cooptation or exploitation, when one group’s judgment of participation dominates, contains, or eradicates another’s sense of how things should go. The confrontation of forms of life need not always end this way, but the power of contributory autonomy is such that even the most well-­meaning and committed participants sometimes assist in making true disagreement impossible. The opening chapter (“Participation, Experienced”) is different in kind from the others—­but it is connected by virtue of a focus on the personhood of participation. It is complicated in its story, involving some obscure debates about Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl familiar 10

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only to a handful of anthropologists. Some readers may wish to skip it and begin with the next chapter, “Participation, Employed,” instead. The point is not to engage these debates within the discipline of anthropology, but to explain the meaning of participation as something more than a political concept. That familiar political concept, I contend, emerged out of the ancient meaning of participation in the eighteenth century, primarily in the ideas of Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” but also in the context of the birth of modern representative democracy. It was Lévy-­Bruhl, however, who connected participation to ethical personhood most directly, and for whom a portal of possibility opened, one that few others have stepped through. The story that opens the chapter, of a thieving colonial administrator and amateur naturalist, is drawn from a single footnote in Lévy-­Bruhl’s work, and I expand the story here to try to capture the perplexity experienced by this participant and others like him, as they engaged directly in governing, reforming, and often destroying the collectives they visited around the world. Key to this perplexity is the immediate, intuitive capacity to experience values—­not as representations, but as participations. At first glance, this is a very different use of the word—­more metaphysical or, as Lévy-­Bruhl said, mystical. I review Lévy-­Bruhl’s work (and his reputation, and why the attempt failed, and why he is reviled by many for his explanation) to trace how he used the term to solve a problem concerning the intuitions we have about proper ethical behavior of different forms of life: how do I know immediately, and before even thinking rationally about it, when someone’s action is unethical or bad? This approach raises the question of the reality of ethical values and, for me, their necessary connection to participation in various collectives that sustain them as values. This chapter thus connects with work on affect and public life, recent work in the “anthropology of ethics” as well as that of the so-­called ontological turn, which has variants in anthropology, political theory, and science studies.10 The subsequent chapters explore how participation in the twentieth century underwent a progressive formatting to become an instrument, a procedure, a toolkit, even a “quasi-­algorithm” for producing participation. These chapters cover three domains—­work, city administration, and international development—­to demonstrate how participation has been organized in particular, concrete, mobile formats that vary in their components from case to case. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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“Participation, Employed” explores participation at work, where it has been a key problematic for far longer than the current concern over participation in digital labor or workplaces. The chapter opens in the 1940s in America, with some of the earliest experiments in worker participation and “social climates” conducted by students of Kurt Lewin and a generation of “participatory management” theorists and critics. At the heart of this story of participation is a single experiment in which women who worked in a pajama factory were given the chance to be directly involved in the design, execution, measurement, and pay rate of their jobs; they experienced, fleetingly and intensively, something that might today be referred to as “collaborative innovation,” and they responded well to it, according to the experimenters. The experiment became a canonical (and contested) example of how participation improves productivity. In this story, I find a tension between the participation of the group and the participation of the individual, which over the course of the 1960s and 1970s is worked over into a more familiar practice: the attempt to motivate individuals in various ways, conducted under a label now all too familiar: “human resource management.” In “Participation, Administered,” I track the enthusiasm for participation into the world of public administration, in the “Model Cities” program of Philadelphia in the 1960s, where “citizen participation” is first legally required in the United States, implemented as part of a federally funded urban renewal project, and critiqued for its failure to climb a famous “ladder of citizen participation.” In this story, a group of black citizens experienced direct, substantial participation (mandated by law and funded by the government) in the redesign of North Philadelphia—­and then had it taken away from them. This story also reveals aspects of a move away from associations and toward individual participation, and the sometimes paradoxical results of making participation a legal requirement in city administration. Here, too, the rise of “technical assistance” gives us a glimpse of how participation is first made mobile and asked to travel from city to city in an effort to standardize and format it—­ much like contemporary participatory budgeting projects around the globe. Lastly, in “Participation, Developed” I pursue participation into the world of international development. It leads out of the world of the preceding chapter’s social psychology experiments in “community development,” and into the radicalization of participation in the work of Paolo Freire and Participatory Action Research, the 12

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work of development expert Robert Chambers, and the embrace of these techniques and tools by the largest international agencies, the United Nations and the World Bank. In this chapter, the story of participation is about the experience of being trapped in a tool box—­the line between the purported “authenticity” of conscientização (consciousness-­raising) and the inauthenticity of a script or tool kit designed to produce the same experience. This case demonstrates the rapid spread, global uptake, and subsequent critique of participation as a proposed solution to the failures of international development. In this part the emergence of a tool kit becomes most obvious—­literal, in fact—­taking the form of a leather briefcase filled with scripts, techniques, and procedures designed to make participation an experience in villages, farms, urban neighborhoods, and development conferences around the world. In the conclusion, I return to the present, with these stories of participation past as precursors to the technologically enabled and institutionally mobile forms of participation of the twenty-­first century. The rise of the apps, instruments, devices, platforms, and especially algorithms is said to enable new possibilities for human development and progress today. Over the last ten years, the enthusiasm for such devices and tools has only seemed to intensify as people have taken the fire of participation and transformed it into algorithms, platforms, apps, and websites meant to facilitate and scale it up, so that it might move quickly around the world to wherever it might be needed. So, too, has the skepticism of participation and even outright rejection of it grown. But such devices and procedures do not always end in extractive platform capitalism, even if that appears to be their routine fate: sometimes they also end up in our administrative institutions, our educational practices, and our well-­meaning social movements. The stories I tell in this book are heavily weighted toward America and Europe as the key sites of this development, but it entails a certain awareness of how participation has been deployed and understood in other parts of the world. No doubt a different story could be told from the perspective of other places and experiences, from Denmark’s folk high schools, with their intensive civic education, to the Indian notion of sarvajanik,11 or to participation under communist or fascist regimes. I would like to be able to tell such stories, but it is not my expertise; I am not tracking a particular national or cultural story, but something more like a “technological zone” or a “global assemblage” Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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within which participation has routinely appeared.12 Participation, as I analyze it, might be better understood along the model of Didier Fassin’s analysis of “humanitarian reason”; though it contains elements of a moral and political universalism, it emerges from minor disciplines and practical projects to be taken up in administrative regimes and spread through handbooks, tool kits, and other technological arrangements. Participation is not itself a mode of government, though it certainly is a component of it. Contr ibu tory Au tonomy

“Contributory autonomy” is the concept I use to refer to the theory and practice of making participation happen, particularly as it has developed in the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, across primarily (but not exclusively) European and North American liberal representative democratic countries. It is meant to signal the centrality of one of the sacred features of modern individualism—­ autonomy. But at the same time, it demands that this autonomy be put to work in the service of a collective, by contributing something to that collective: voice, vote, decision, action, aid, data, money, life. Only by virtue of becoming an individual, possessing liberty and an autonomous moral and political conscience, do we become capable of freely contributing to the creation or maintenance of a collective.13 Contributory autonomy is a creature of late liberalism: where it exists, the opinions or interests of individuals are channeled or calculated into a collective conceived of as the effect of these individuals and their opinions or interests. It privileges individuals, to be sure, but it is also a corrective to overly individualistic, libertarian, or neoliberal attempts to fracture collectives and isolate individuals. Contributory autonomy holds more in common with the language of communitarianism, deliberative democracy, or the hopeful politics of care, relatedness, or co-­constitution. Whether it be voting in an election or making a collaborative contribution to a citizen science project or marching in a protest, it follows a logic of putting individual autonomy into the service of a greater collective: your vote counts, your voice is important, you are not (bowling) alone. Contributory autonomy, therefore, picks out a relationship between two things: participation and personhood. I treat the former (participation) in the manner of Ian Hacking, as something that is real because it produces effects in the latter (personhood). Hacking 14

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famously argued that things (such as electrons) are “real if you can spray them.”14 Participation cannot be “sprayed,” but something similar happens when participation takes place. Participation most often takes the form of a practical procedure, arranged in concrete places, with specific rules and scripts, and it asks people to act and think in particular ways in the service of various goals or projects related especially to political and ethical issues of living with others. Participation must be formatted. Doing participation usually involves two aspects: deciding to participate, and participating in decisions. Usually, any practical, normative definition of participation implies that it is voluntary—­an individual has to decide to participate in something. To be able to do so, he or she is presumed to be autonomous and free, and to understand, to some extent, what he or she is getting into. This emphasis on autonomy necessarily depends on a clear sense that each individual does so on his or her own, and not as a representative or in some entangled or proxy sense of being dragged in by others. To be sure, involuntary participation also happens: To For m at people find themselves participating without ever hav- What does it mean to format someing given consent or becoming involved in something thing? Consider this: “Formatting as a result of a prior decision (or the decision of an- a disk, an exercise that many will performed with floppies, is the other, such as a parent, a manager, a spouse). It is also have process by which the track and sector possible for people to find themselves participating in divisions—­which are themselves something—­indeed, to willingly decide to participate in simply flux reversals—­are first written something—­that in the end is harmful to them or their onto the media. There is thus no such thing as writing to the disk anterior interests. The cases I look at in this book demonstrate to the overtly rationalized gesture of this aspect differently: sometimes the decision to partici- formatting” (Matthew Kirschenbaum, pate is explicit, sometimes hidden or implicit, and some- Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination [Cambridge, MA: MIT times assumed to have already been made in the past. Press, 2008], xx). In addition to a decision to participate, most practiTo format, as the most basic of cal cases imply participation in deciding. Preferably, one material operations, is to prepare for abstraction. Formatting a disk participates in an important decision that will guide further used to be a very physical process, some future course of action, establish a rule, or legiti- though in the age of virtual servers and mize a state of affairs. But deciding in this sense is never arrays of disks and processors, it need something a participating individual does alone (that not be. But its function is to prepare for further changes, and to allow one to get would be the absence of participation), so it is more on with things without having to worry accurate to say that one contributes to a decision some- about what lies behind or below. But how: by voicing an opinion, countering an argument, “unformatted” objects are unusable. crafting or revising rules or legislation, adding an idea or an improvement, proposing an alternative, casting a vote. Contribution, in this sense, can be an ad hoc, entangled, improvisational, Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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unmeasured form of contribution, or it can be a highly structured and calculated form, strictly measured or controlled. Either way, it depends on the recognition of others to become a contribution rather than simply a belief, opinion, or interest. However, there are also many forms of participating that have nothing to do with deciding: performing a task, lending a hand, helping execute a plan, following an agenda, voting without deliberating. These, too, are contributions, but they do not aim at resolving into a decision; rather, they imply that a decision has already been made, at some other time or place, to accomplish some project or task. A town council can decide to build a bridge, but the bridge yet needs construction; a social movement can decide on a message and a date for the occupation, but its organization has yet to be accomplished and the people mobilized. A normative definition may prefer participation in decision-­making, but it does not always exclude participation in the carrying out of that decision, unless the participants in the one are strictly different Carole Pateman, who has written one of the few excellent books about from the participants in the other. participation and democratic theory, These procedures of participation, therefore, are also makes a virtue and a goal out of ways of making up people. The more participation is forthis looping: to gain a participatory matted as a procedure involving contributory autonsociety, we must become participatory at every level—­home, church, school, omy, the more precise are the forms of personhood it rework. She analyzed in particular the quires; and the more precise they are, the easier it is for way in which participatory workplaces people to reflect on these demands. For some people, in socialist Yugoslavia could be used to understand this fractal meaning of it is liberating to be asked to become a certain kind of participation. See Carole Pateman, responsible, participating person; for others the request Participation and Democratic Theory is tantamount to an attempt at control or exploitation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). By participating, people conform to the project of participation; but they also acquire experiences that provide material for reflection upon what participation is and can be. Hacking called this approach to personhood “dynamic nominalism”—­a kind of pragmatic working out of alternatives that changes what it means to be a person. Persons (“human kinds”) are neither simply real, preexisting entities, nor are they merely socially constructed.15 Daniel Navon and Gil Eyal give a clever example of the existence of “looping kinds.”16 Persons are made up by practices (classifications of autism, in their case), and by virtue of this, they engage (participate, even) in changing the practices of classification that made them up in the first place (expanding the genetic meaning of autism, in their case). In the case of contributory autonomy and participation, I argue 16

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that something similar has happened. Participation has been formatted in ways that treat persons primarily as autonomous individuals who contribute to a collective kind of some sort—­neighborhood, workplace, society, state, movement. As a result, people experience participation as preserving and enhancing this distance between the individual and the collective—­and only sometimes reflect on this as a failure of participation. In the stories I tell in this book, there are multiple examples of the transition from a world made up of groups whose collective identity preceded individuals to a world of individuals called upon to create those groups by contributing to them. The person of contributory autonomy is neither the isolated, responsibilized, neoliberal individual forsaken by the state nor the oversocialized individual demanding the recognition of a state that would complete him or her. Rather, he or she is an individual whose autonomy and freedom exist for the purpose of contributing to a polity, a society, a community, a collective, a market. The moment of participation becomes the moment of becoming both a full, autonomous, and free individual and, at the very same time (by virtue of that freedom), a member of a collective whose power is expected to be greater than that of its members. I use the term “personhood” here primarily in the sense of ethical persons—­and to distinguish persons from individuals. It includes both the ways in which people act and the reasons given for those actions. Crucially, persons can be not only individual humans but also some forms of groups or collectives—­corporations, most famously. The concept can also include an increasing number of nonhuman animals and even some imagined intelligences emerging from the cobbling together of software, media, networks, and platforms. This is not an ontological claim about the existence or identity of beings, but an ethical claim about the kinds of action and responsibility expected of entities referred to as persons—­persons capable of participating. However, the personhood of contributory autonomy is also highly individualistic today. A person experiencing contributory autonomy is not submerged within a collective or dissolved by virtue of his or her participation, but remains a coherent part of the whole—­always available for contribution to another collective elsewhere. The collective is not identified with the individual or sustained as such, but is more like a container or medium within which individuals are encompassed temporarily. This feature of contempoPa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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rary participation is perhaps most clearly evident in the platforms of social media engagement: it is in these contexts that an individual is asked to be an individual who participates in an infinite series of collectives, mediated by algorithms that display the outlines of these collectives according to opaque procedures and interests—­ outlines that shift faster than human perception or consciousness can apprehend. What on the surface appears to be an overflowing surplus of sociality or collectivity might be just the opposite: not alienation or isolation, but an unsupportable demand to contribute to a constantly shifting, unending collectivity. The E xper ience of Pa rticipation

The experience of participation, when it is described at all, is often spoken of as something more than individual. Sometimes it is an experience of immersion. Sometimes it is an experience of being at one with a collective of some kind; an experience of being so thoroughly and so completely identified with a collective that it becomes transparent, a background, a milieu, in which inside and outside are inverted or mixed. This has most often been identified in the experience of joining a crowd or mob, where one’s identity becomes mingled with and submerged beneath that of the crowd. Elias Canetti says of crowds: “A head is a head, an arm is an arm, and differences between individual heads and arms are irrelevant . . . all demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.”17 The experience of participation is immediate, affective, emotional and more than (or other than) individual. For the experience of participation to be meaningful (one might dare say authentic), however, it must be more than mere procedure. To participate automatically, procedurally, or according to a script or a recipe violates this desire: it cannot be satisfied by simply following rules or playing a role. The experience of participation must include the sense not only of having spoken, but of having been heard. It must include the feeling not only of having voted, but of seeing the collective of those who voted with you emerge as an entity; it must include not only the moment of deciding, but the deep, affective sense that the decision is recognized by everyone involved as having been made, and legitimately so; it must emerge from a moment of radical equality, not from the dictates and commands of another. These are all 18

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features of participation that are neither simply individual, nor simply collective They are both individual and collective at the same time. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to reduce them to procedures or recipes. In the model of contributory autonomy, a strong form of procedural rationality governs the success or failure of participation, in the name of monitoring, measuring, and establishing its success. Feeling, emotion, affect, or subrational intuition is accidental; it cannot be recorded or preserved, nor does it play a functional or instrumental role. What does it feel like to be autonomous, and what does it feel like to contribute to a collective? Autonomy is, in some versions, the conquering of emotions; contribution is the expression of (individual) power. The experience of participation, under conditions of contributory autonomy, is more likely to be a private, personal one, with no real consequence for the success of participation as a formatted procedure. By contrast, the ideal of the crowd, or the march, or even the small-­scale experience of soberly participating in local decision-­ making makes experience into something essential to the success of participation. There is a feeling of collective joy; in particular, there is a feeling of something like ownership or belonging—­not merely to be part of a collective, but actually to be that collective, or more precisely, to be an instance of a collective. At the heart of the experience of participation, therefore, is the question of what it means to experience becoming one with some collective or another—­ whether that collective consists of similar persons, other collectives, or some mess of individuals, collectives, and lively things. There are endless names for different collective kinds that can provide such experiences: society, assembly, community, network, culture, association, team, neighborhood, platform.18 The distinctions between them are important, and not every experience of one must be the same as that of another. But participation is the name for when a person experiences something that is neither simply personal, nor simply collective, but a blurring of both. The case of a team sport might be the most obvious to think with. Contributory autonomy would model the team as the sum of the skills of each individual player. The experience of participation would be something like an educational experience through which an individual develops capacities, enhances strengths, and learns to be a better player—­the sum of which results in the victory of one team over another. But the experience of playing a team sport Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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often produces a much different feeling of responsibility—­not so much a question of individual skills but of coordinated, collaborative melding of those skills. The team wins, not the individual; and the players experience being a team as qualitatively different than being a skilled player. The team is, at least, more like an organism that cannot be dismantled, rather than a collection of independently operating parts. The experience of participation is not always so felicitous, however. Opposite to the sense of immersion and collective joy—­and sometimes by virtue of it—­the experience of participation can be one of perplexity: the sudden awareness that a background or milieu of sense and agreement is not there or that one is not part of a collective that had seemed mere background before. For instance, the feeling that many Americans experienced on the night of November 8, 2016. Or when it becomes clear that another collective immersed in its own sense of belonging (white people of privilege, say) cannot experience the world as you do, and cannot even hear your ideas and demands as sensible or achievable, so that your words may literally make no sense. Instead of the immediate affective sense of organic agreement, perplexity signals instead the absence of disagreement. Sometimes this perplexity precedes any formal moment of participation; sometimes it happens as a result of moving between collectives, whether that means simply moving from one neighborhood to another, or around the world to a radically different place. If participation produces effects on personhood by virtue of the ways it is formatted and performed, then the experience of perplexity creates the grounds for a reflection and a critique of participation. Personhood is not something one chooses in total freedom. Indeed, one useful definition of personhood that is appropriate here is Harry Frankfurt’s: to be a person is not only to be able to do or not do something (a question of “first order will”) but also to be able to desire to do or not do something in the future (a question of “second order will”).19 Personhood is not just a subjective experience of will, but also a way of speaking about who one wants to be, what one should or should not do, and about what kinds of things exist in the world, or should exist. Contributory autonomy assumes the presence of first-­order will in all who participate; to act in this sense is to respond to incentives and to choose to contribute out of the freedom to act. However, not everyone is granted autonomy to the same degree. And not everyone is free to engage in contributory autonomy; some people 20

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are condemned only to experience participation without either the autonomy or the right to contribute. In the cases I look at, this includes the workers in the factory who are enrolled without their knowledge in experiments in participation, but it also includes the “wretched of the earth” who are the subject of participatory development and participatory action research. In both cases, the experience of participation—­and the second-­order will of coming to want to (or not want to) participate—­precedes the first-­order decision to contribute as autonomous subjects. In the first case, gender and class trap the workers within the experience of participation; in the latter, being nonwhite or nonmodern does so. In a strange way, the second-­order will is used to produce the first-­order will: the experience of participation is presumed both to be positive and to produce the capacity and the further desire to participate more in the future. Of course, it does not always work out this way. Ironically, as contributory autonomy has been sharpened and extended in the past decades, the nostalgia for a pure experience of an unmediated participation has become more common, especially among those most committed to the power of participation. Thus, there are those who participate (according to the model of contributory autonomy) and yet are filled with regret that the experience of participation seems to be procedural and empty, and long for it to become full and real again. The cases that Caroline Lee documents in her study of “public engagement experts” offer one good example.20 Alongside these nostalgic persons, there are those who are not free not to be the bearers of experience (those accused of being emotional, nonrational, not fully autonomous), for whom participation is not yet a choice, not yet a contribution, even though they form the nostalgic core of a longed-­for collective experience. That experience is the longed-­for core of participation and yet plays no relevant function in the outcome of participation is a conundrum of contemporary participation. The literature on participation—­with few exceptions—­is largely silent on this conundrum. For this reason, Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl’s lifelong struggle with “the scandal of participation” is a useful, if arcane, place to look for an alternative explanation. Lévy-­Bruhl’s use of the term “participation” seems to be totally distinct from the everyday meaning of participation as being with others in a group. At first, it is only a nominalist accident: isn’t it curious that the word we rely on to describe the central feature of modern democracy is also the word that Plato used to explain the Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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relation between the real and the ideal, or Aquinas the relation between ens and esse, or Malebranche the reasons why a mechanistic Cartesian universe was one still saturated by the will of God? But the word is not just a heteronym. The historical link between the ancient and the modern meaning of the word becomes clear with Rousseau. The concept of the “general will” (as various intellectual historians have helped me understand) is a transformation of a theological debate about nature and grace (the “general will” of God) into a political structure (the general will common to the people).21 This connection provided me with a way to signal—­if not resolve—­why participation remains a problem and, in particular, how it relates to the affective experience of being part of a collective (or not). Lévy-­ Bruhl and Rousseau are important to thinking about this relation in the context of twentieth-­century participatory experiments, because they help us understand why some people embrace participation with downright religious enthusiasm, and others experience perplexity, disconnection, alienation, or surprise that the collective they are in is not the collective they are of. Lévy-­Bruhl turned to the notion of participation to explain the experiences of perplexity that confronted travelers, ethnologists, missionaries, and colonial administrators as they extended their reach among foreign cultures around the world. The manifestly different explanations, reactions, and tolerances of the so-­called primitives that colonists encountered focused Lévy-­Bruhl’s attention on the general problem of how it is that one feels oneself a participant in one’s own culture—­and what happens when one does not. His lifelong friend Maurice Leenhardt shared his interest, but he preferred to call the experience “lived myth” and to ask how living the myths of others (New Caledonian islanders, in his case) could transform personhood. The ways in which we resolve perplexity can lead participation to different ends. In some cases, perplexity is resolved through violence, subjugation, colonialism, or versions of liberal universalism; in some cases, it is allowed to stand firm, as a testament to tolerance, to pluralism perhaps, to politics maybe—­to the understanding of another, different form of life. Lévy-­Bruhl’s analysis of participation also reveals an important feature of how this perplexity works. What Lévy-­Bruhl went looking for in his lifelong work was the ethical person. The feeling of perplexity that he identified, and the way he used the concept of participation to make sense of it, is related to his own philosophical grounding in a certain naturalistic theory of ethics: that ethics is not a set 22

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of rules or procedures drawn from logic and reason, but rather a set of embodied affects that represent a collective sense-­making capacity of some kind. Lévy-­Bruhl never succeeded in thinking such an approach to its conclusion, and in some ways he was too immersed in a colonial moment out of which it might have been impossible to think such a theory. But I suggest here that if we want to make sense of why participation remains a problem for contemporary liberal democracy, his ideas offer us an unusual, if partial, alternative. Forms of Life a nd the Gr a m m a r of Pa rticipation

Participation necessarily entails a relationship between individual persons and collectives of persons. The nature of either of these entities ought not be prejudged. As in the case of persons, collectives—­ whether society or publics or platforms—­are not just preexisting entities that allow or demand participation, but are also entities afDuckRabbit, first crefected (if not produced) by participation. Indeed, what makes par- ated by Joseph Jastrow, ticipation distinctive is that it names this relation—­which is both 1899. Made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein. personal and collective at the same time. Different arrangements Source: W ik im edi a of people, procedures, goals, and institutions will produce or trans- Com mons. form different collective kinds, and different relations can yield different forms of personhood (tending toward alienated individuality, for instance, or identification with a particular collective). Nonetheless, it remains necessary to have some kind of footing from which to observe this roiling mess of emergent, changing relations. As a philosophically minded anthropologist I am primarily interested in how people speak about the experience of participation, how they make sense of it, and what forms of action they engage in or promote. And I am as interested in the cases where participation seems to make perfect sense to people as I am in those where it seems to be confusing—­where the experience 371. Essence is expressed in grammar. is one of perplexity. Throughout the stories in this book, 373. Grammar tells what kind of object people tend to speak about participation in one of two anything is. (Theology as grammar). general modes. On the one hand, they make sense of ✴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim participation in an enthusiastic and hopeful way, and Schulte, Philosophische Untersuchungen demand that it be implemented or expanded as a solu- / Philosophical Investigations (Malden, tion to a very wide range of collective problems. On MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009) the other hand, they make sense of participation with a grammar of suspicion—­that what is called participation is actually something else, usually a form of cooptation. Although I did not start out with Wittgenstein in mind, he offers Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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a helpful way of tracking these different ways of making sense of participation: they express “grammars” by which it is possible for people in one “form of life” to make sense of an experience and to share that experience with others in a meaningful way. By contrast, when something fails to make sense, it signals that people are employing different grammars—­and that something that makes sense to one person or group fails to make sense to the other. This is, in Wittgenstein’s sense, a problem not just of sharing the same definition (or opinions or interests), but of sharing the same judgments about the world, expressed as grammars. “It is not only agreement in definitions but also (odd as it may sound) in judgments that is required,” and this is “agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.”22 When judgments fail to align, disagreement becomes impossible. The function of a grammar—­in Wittgenstein’s sense—­is to tell us what things exist in the world, and in order for things to exist, they need to be accessible to a “form of life” that comprises rules and languages (language games) without which something cannot make sense. “Forms of life” are notoriously underspecified in Wittgenstein’s work—­mentioned explicitly only five times. Are forms of life collectives, cultures, society, forms of personhood, race? There is a debate about whether forms of life are (in Stanley Cavell’s terms) “horizontal,” meaning a kind of variation in culture and identity across times and places, or “vertical,” meaning that they concern universal judgments of what it means to be human.23 For my purposes, it is important that Wittgenstein himself seems to have recognized that being able to speak a language and communicate with others does not necessarily entail that we understand others: 325. We also say of a person that he is transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards our considerations that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. One learns this when one comes into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even though one has mastered the country’s language. One does not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We can’t find our feet with them.24

Whether or not a form of life is reducible to some other collective kind (culture, society, rationality) is less important here than the fact that speaking the same language does not necessarily allow one to understand or to make sense of another form of life. This per24

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plexity is also what Lévy-­Bruhl picked up on, in the huge archive of materials he collected in his attempt to make sense of participation. Perplexity is a sign of the presence of diverse forms of life—­differing judgments about the world and what exists in it, not just different opinions or definitions. I track this capacity throughout these stories by attending to the grammar of participation that different actors use when they try to make participation happen. Mutual misunderstanding is not the end of the story, however. Often one “grammar” of participation makes sense at the beginning of a story, while at the end another dominates—­sometimes in the very same person. One can learn to understand another form of life, to be sure. In the case of “participatory de- 355. Is there such a thing as “expert velopment,” for instance, many involved in that moment judgement” about the genuineness were both instigators and scholarly observers, and some of expressions of feeling? Here too, there are those with “better” and those started out in a form of life that enthusiastically em- with “worse” judgement. In general, braced participation, only to end up using a grammar predictions arising from judgements of of suspicion that denounced their own work as part of those with better knowledge of people will be more correct. Can one learn a “tyranny” that had gotten out of control. this knowledge? Yes; some can learn Depending, then, on the form of life at stake, par- it. Not, however, by taking a course of ticipation is figured as a different kind of problem, and study in it, but through “experience”. the solution to this problem looks different. So when Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time participation is experienced as effective and powerful he gives him the right tip.—­­This is by people who engage autonomously by contribut- what “learning” and “teaching” are ing to some project, it becomes a problem to produce like here.—­W hat one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct more of that experience, more reliably, more widely; judgements. There are also rules, but it becomes a challenge to make it into a procedure, they do not form a system, and only a script to be followed, a tool kit that can reproduce experienced people can apply them Unlike calculating rules. ✴ that experience widely. Yet, when participation is ex- rightly. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuperienced as a trap—­as something one did not choose chungen / Philosophical Investigations, (autonomously)—­then it becomes a problem of cri- 239 tique, of suspicion about its form and effects, that it might actually be a containment strategy and not any liberation at all. Participation based on contributory autonomy tends to reduce, confine, or obliterate perplexity in the name of successful participation. On the surface this may sound like a good thing—­as if the absence of perplexity was the same as agreement. But in the process it destroys the capacity for disagreement—­and something is thereby lost. In the name of a consensus of contributing, autonomous individuals, it washes out the ability of different collectives to judge the world differently, and to participate in the clash of these Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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judgments. Contributory autonomy prefers an exclusivity of enumerated choices, rather than a confrontation of experienced forms of life; despite its commendable liberal heritage, pluralism is not its goal. The limitation of Wittgenstein’s focus on language and grammars seems to be that it reduces all participation to an issue of communication, deliberation, or speech—­and excludes problems of action, procedure, technique, or things. Recent work in science and technology studies and political theory has fought hard to reintroduce things or forms of matter into the political realm.25 Given my own interest in the central role of things like software, algorithms, platforms, or networks, I too would question such an approach. On the one hand, the world is populated today by lively machines and interactive nonhumans that are just as difficult—­if not more so—­to understand as another form of life in Wittgenstein’s sense. They are opaque, deliberately in some cases, by virtue of complexity in others. On the other hand, language remains the paradigm of action for all these lively things: software, algorithms, platforms are all “little languages” that intervene in, format, and channel people and their desires. To the extent that we can also speak of procedures as being “grammatical” in Wittgenstein’s sense, then I think the approach helps make sense of why people address participation differently as a problem—­they don’t only talk about it one way or another, they also make it happen practically in one way or another. Grammatically so. The grammar of participation is evident in the actions, techniques, and procedures (from games and scripts on paper up to and including algorithms and apps on smartphones or laptops) of people involved in making participation happen (managers, scientists, organizers, designers), as well as in the work of those who are analyzing its forms and outcomes (scholars, critics, activists, and others). Participation shares this grammatical character with other concepts, such as justice. Hanna Pitkin, in her Wittgensteinian discussion of the dispute between Socrates and Thrasymachus over the concept of justice in Plato’s Republic, pinpoints this problem of grammar.26 Thrasymachus argues that justice is whatever the ruling elite says it is—­a realist, if cynical, view; Socrates counters with a normative claim about justice that neither contradicts nor extends Thrasymachus’ claim, but poses the problem of justice differently—­ grammatically differently—­as “everyone having and doing what is appropriate to him.”27 In one case, the grammar articulates justice as 26

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what people have done in the name of justice; in the other, the grammar articulates justice as an ideal we should be trying to achieve. These are not incompatible, but there is something like a grammatical difference between them—­a difference that, according to Wittgenstein, requires different “forms of life” to make sense. According to Pitkin’s reading, the difference concerns a “tension between purpose and institutionalization” that points to the way certain terms can function both as normative guides to practice and as indices of certain regular forms of action and reaction in social life. “Justice,” therefore, might be both a normative guide and a set of expectations or experiences of what is called justice—­very much depending on the forms of life of the speakers. The tension between purpose and institutionalization that Pitkin points to is also at work in the differing approaches to participation I review in this book. One form of life sees participation with respect to purpose, as something good and necessary, which ought to be enthusiastically embraced and extended everywhere—­it accounts for much of the spread of participation in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries. But alongside it is a sense that participation—­as institutionalized—­is also a problem in need of critique, because it is, in some cases, similarly seen as “whatever the ruling elite says it is,” and therefore both inauthentic and variously a threat. In nearly all the stories in this book, this tension is visible. As an example of the enthusiastic form of life, one might take the work of Erik Olin Wright and Archon Fung in their various writings about “empowered participation” and “deepening democracy.” This work revitalizes a faith in democratic potential in the face of “the political triumph of anti-­statist neoliberalism.”28 They focus on cases like neighborhood governing councils or participatory budgeting or habitat conservation: empirical sites where local, participatory governance has seen substantial, demonstrable success, and from which they are able to draw an enthusiasm for its extension. For Fung and Wright (and also for a scholar like Charles Sabel), the experience of participation is not just instrumentally better for democracy, but also enables political wisdom, new skills and competencies that spill over into other domains of life, and in the best of cases establish “schools of democracy” (Mill’s famous phrase) in various domains of political life.29 A similar, more recent case of enthusiasm is that of “open government data,” which envisions the opening up of different kinds of government data to public access, so that the creative, entreprePa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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Original presentation drawings, RPS 23. “Tupelo, Mississippi—­Alterations to Montgomery Ward Building—­Drawing No. 7.” Source: R ecor ds of the Tennessee Va lley Author it y, R ecor d Group 142, Nationa l A rchi v es at Atl a nta, Mor row, GA .

Philip Selznick’s TVA and the Grass Roots is the classic ethnography of the decentralized administrative strategies of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s “grass roots democracy” and a founding book in organizational sociology. “Democracy on the March” (David Lilienthal’s enthusiastic phrase) was also the strategy of incorporating participants into the administrative agenda of the federal government—­ cooptation. Selznick memorably defined it as “the realistic core of avowedly democratic procedures. To risk a definition: coöptation is the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy-­determining structure of an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence” (Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study of Politics and Organization [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949], 13).

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neurial zeal of participating citizens can be brought to bear on improving government administration. As Beth Noveck’s book title Smarter Citizens, Smarter State suggests, such a process seeks both to enhance individual virtue and to improve government functioning. Here the enthusiasm rests on opening up data to harness the entrepreneurial spirit and yokes it to civic virtue. Advocates argue such openness should be institutionalized permanently as a requirement of good governance.30 In this book, such enthusiasm is on display in each of the chapters in different ways: in the enthusiastic promotion of “participative management” in the 1950s and 1960s; in the “maximum feasible participation” of the 1960s Economic Opportunity Programs; and in the promotion of participatory development in the 1980s and 1990s. Opposite this enthusiasm are cases of critique of participation as cooptation. These appear coevally with participation, and not in some temporal succession. So Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

much is clear because one of the very first works to take participation seriously on its own terms is Philip Selznick’s 1949 classic TVA and the Grassrooots, in which he analyzed the systematic cooptation of extension workers, farmers, and residents into the federal government’s mission. More recently, the example of the so-­called sharing economy is apposite. What started as an enthusiasm for participation—­in the form, for instance, of “couch surfing,” whereby the internet enabled traveling strangers to meet each other and share accommodations—­ developed into a cooptation of that participation by AirBnB. Another example is the shift from local community-­run “time-­banks” to the dominance of firms like TaskRabbit.31 From one perspective, an enthusiasm of the power of participation to solve market-­based problems of particular sorts and create new communities and new relations in the process; from another, the universal solvent of capitalism dissolving exactly those relations in the name of monetizing what was hitherto personal and private. In the cases I look at here, the same suspicions are evident: with regard to participative management, labor leaders tried to alert workers about experiments in participation by asking: “did you know that you are being used as guinea pigs?” Observers of the Model Cities Program worried about how participation was becoming so routine that it was now mere “participation in participation.” And in international development, scholars would call out participation as having become “The New Tyranny.”32 Although this grammar could allow us to see a particular story of the encroachment of new forms of domination (especially that bogeyman “neoliberalism”), this would be The term “participle” captures someto embrace only one of the active forms of life that can thing central about participation: a participle is both adjective (or noun) make sense of participation. I do not wish to offer a sin- and verb: e.g. “participating citizens gle genealogical story that culminates in the apotheosis find that participating is difficult.” To of neoliberalism or exploitation, even if it is clear that participate is to be an instance of one thing and something else at the same that is indeed one way to make sense of new forms of time. “Its name comes from the Latin participation. participium, a calque of Greek metoché The wiles of (neo-­)liberalism do not succeed in se- ‘partaking’ or ‘sharing’; it is so named the Ancient Greek and Latin ducing participation completely, any more than they because participles ‘share’ some of the categosucceed in rejecting it. That participation becomes a ries of the adjective or noun (gender, problem is very often the result of particular liberal number, case) and some of those of values (a fervent desire for equality or inclusion, for in- the verb (tense and voice).” ✴ “Participle,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia stance), and just as often participation is critiqued as .org/wiki/Participle a problem that violates other liberal values (a concern Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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for dignity, rights, or autonomy, for instance). Thinking of these as forms of life, or as a grammar, helps make sense of how they coexist and become entangled in the processes of renewing participation. Sometimes these forms of life are legible to each other; sometimes they result in a form of perplexity. This tension, or clash of grammars, of judgments, is the motor of exploration, critique, and renewal. In the vacillation between these two grammars—­an optative and a critical mood, as it were—­there is a remainder. What often remains is the aspiration: not just a naive optimism in the power of participation, but an aspirational certainty that a better participation lies elsewhere, further in the future, or in the past, under different conditions. We watch participation cascade up the shelves, as in the shop Alice visits, through the ceiling and out of our view: what was a problem that could not be solved transforms into an aspiration to be pursued.

Definitions and Debates If need be, participation is quickly defined: to take part, to share in or with, to enjoy in common with others, to share the qualities or characteristics of something. But this colloquial and everyday usage masks a semantic domain that is richer than one might suspect. The root of the English word is the Latin partem habere (to have part) or partem capere (to take part). Its foreign cognates (such as Teilnehmen/Teilhaben in German) often share the same basic sense of “to take part.” Its earliest appearance in English is in the nominative form—­but is much more common as a verb. According to the OED Online: “to take part; to have a part or share with a person, in (formerly also of) a thing; to share.” It clearly overlaps with the language of sharing, although more often as an action than as a thing. We share food, but we participate in dinner, or eating.33 The OED Online also suggests that the definition of participation has more than just the immediate connotation of taking part in: [Participation] is not a technical term of philosophy and [Thomas Aquinas] is no more concerned to define it than a modern philosopher would be, to define some such common tool of his thought as, say, the word compare. ✴ Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 89.

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3. The process or fact of sharing in an action, sentiment, etc.; (now esp.) active involvement in a matter or event, esp. one in which the outcome directly affects those taking part. Freq. with in. Cf. audience participation at AUDIENCE n. 7d.34

To participate is to share action or sentiment, both of which are important; the word has evolved to signal Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

especially sharing in an event or a matter. But most significantly, in this definition, there is a loop: one participates because the outcome directly affects (implicitly, benefits) the one participating. For example, one receives an “educative dividend” of learning how government works by participating in it. But participation can also benefit the entity enabling it, as when a corporation makes “worker participation” a key platform in measuring productivity or efficiency, or when scientists can claim advances and discoveries that depend on the contributions of countless observers, as in astronomy or ornithology. Or in the “audience,” as the OED definition suggests, to participate in laughter is to enjoy the joke, and reward the comic. Participation’s cognates (see table 1) illuminate some of the ways the term stretches semantically. Collaborate/collaboration and cooperate/cooperation are clearly narrower, but they form an etymological pair, both focused on types of action: labor in one, work (the Latin plural, opera) in the other. The reliance on the particle co-­already signals a basic individualism that must be overcome, a sense of bringing together what is separate, or of placing side by side. Cooperation, according to the OED, derives directly from Robert Owen and his early experiments, which are only ambivalently acknowledged as the origin of cooperativism. Collaboration, by contrast, has had a less felicitous history, as is evidenced in the more nefarious use of the term to indicate working with the enemy, but it too is frequently referenced in contemporary terms.35 Ta ble 1. Pa rticipation ’s Co gnate Ter m s V erbs

Co g nate

De finitions

Participate

1. intr. To take part; to have a part or share with a person, in (formerly also of) a thing; to share. Cf. partake v.

Democratize

1. trans. To make (a state, institution, etc.) more democratic; to introduce a democratic system or democratic principles to. 2. trans. To make (something) accessible to a wide range of people; to make (something) less elitist, pretentious, etc.

Engage

1. To deposit or make over as a pledge. 2. To bind or secure by a pledge. 3. To cause to be held fast; to involve, entangle. 4. With reference to combat.

Collaborate

1. intr. To work in conjunction with another or others, to co-­operate; esp. in a literary or artistic production, or the like. 2. spec. To co-­operate traitorously with the enemy.

Cooperate

1. intr. To work together, act in conjunction (with another person or thing, to an end or purpose, or in a work). 2. intr. To practise economic co-­operation.

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Involve

1. To enfold, envelop, entangle, include: predicated either of an agent or of a surrounding or enveloping substance or material.

Include

1. To enclose. confine. 2. To have, put in, or incorporate as part of a whole. b. To contain as part of a group, category etc.; to comprise.

Co gnate

Definitions

Participation

1. The action or fact of having or forming part of something; the sharing of something. 2. The fact or condition of holding or sharing something in common; partnership, fellowship. Now rare. 3. The process or fact of sharing in an action, sentiment, etc.; (now esp.) active involvement in a matter or event, esp. one in which the outcome directly affects those taking part.

Engagement

1. The action of engaging; the state, condition, or fact of being engaged. 2(a). A formal promise, agreement, undertaking, covenant. (b). An “appointment” made with another person for any purpose of business, festivity, etc. (c). Comm. in pl. Promises to pay; pecuniary liabilities. (d). The fact of being engaged to be married; betrothal. 4. Moral or legal obligation; a tie of duty or gratitude.

Cooperation

1. The action of co-­operating, i.e. of working together towards the same end, purpose, or effect; joint operation. 2. Polit. Econ. The combination of a number of persons, or of a community, for purposes of economic production or distribution, so as to save, for the benefit of the whole body of producers or customers, that which otherwise becomes the profit of the individual capitalist.

Collaboration

1. United labour, co-­operation; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work. 2. spec. Traitorous cooperation with the enemy.

Involvement

1(a). The action or process of involving; the fact of being involved; the condition of being implicated, entangled, or engaged; engagement, embarrassment; financial or pecuniary embarrassment. (b). An involved or entangled condition, manner, or style; complicated state of affairs, imbroglio.

Inclusion

1(a). The action or an act of including something or someone (in various senses of include v.); the fact or condition of being included, an instance of this.

N o minat ives

Source: Arranged and abridged definitions of cognate terms from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, consulted August 2015.

Engagement signals a quite different semantic domain of obligation and promise; the root -­gage connects to terms like “wager” or “pledge,” and it signals a sense of duty and responsibility. To be engaged, most colloquially, is to promise to marry; or to hire someone, or to sign a contract. When we do “public engagement,” we are asking individuals to pledge themselves to a collective somehow. 32

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The term involvement shares with participation a richer, more complex meaning—­entangling and enveloping in imbroglios and embarrassments—­a mix of the practical and the affective; to be involved, just as with participation, can happen voluntarily or involuntarily. Volvere: “to be rolled up in.” For example, you were involved in the War on Terror, despite your opposition, through the timely payment of your taxes. You involved yourself, however, in the movement for global justice by joining the marches, coordinating the actions, donating your money and time. What involvement signals more clearly than the others is that involvement is a condition and not just an action, a state of affairs and not just a moment in time when a decision is made. Lastly, one of the most fraught cognates of participation is inclusion. To include, etymologically, is to enclose, incorporate, comprise, confine; this seems at odds with the notions of autonomy and freedom in participation. To participate is to be active, to speak, to vote, to debate, while inclusion sounds vaguely like imprisonment. Inclusion is not participation. An individual can be included in a group but never participate in that group: even if there is no restriction on or barrier to active participation, one can fail to participate by never voting, speaking, writing, doing, or acting. One can also be hired but not work (Bartleby); one can be present at the meeting but neither speak nor vote; one can be invited to the exhibit but refuse to take a piece of candy from the pile, and so on. Sometimes, it is true, silence is a form of participation—­it is assent, giving voice by not speaking up, or it is refusal, giving voice by not answering (perhaps protesting the form of the question). But not always; sometimes nonparticipation is simple apathy; sometimes it is malingering; sometimes it is “legitimate peripheral” participation.36 The term is important because inclusion and exclusion can create powerful subjective and affective consequences: to feel that one belongs to, or that one has been excluded from, a collective, irrespective of one’s contributions, can produce intense emotions, and can have practical consequences for the ability to participate. To be actively and warmly included in a group is to be called to participate; to be grudgingly included, or excluded by signs and symptoms of difference and perplexity, can stifle participation even where it is structurally or formally possible. Thus, to participate can sometimes mean to be included and sometimes to be involved. And in both cases, this can be good or bad. To be included can mean to be given the means to participate, Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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but that participation can nonetheless also fail. To be involved can mean “to contribute to” but it can also mean “to be usurped by,” in the sense that some group is relying on your participation—­your vote, your assent, your contribution of money, time, data—­to do something you would not actively choose to contribute to if asked again.37 Involvement-­as-­usurpation is The term “participatory democracy” was coined in the Port Huron Decladifferent from domination-­by-­exclusion, but neither is ration of the Students for a Democratic a particularly felicitous state of affairs for most people. Society (Michigan, 1962), written Perhaps all that can be said, then, is that the question mostly by Tom Hayden, with encourof whether participation is good or bad for someone agement and advice from the political theorist Arnold Kaufman and others. cannot be answered by referring it to the question of See Tom Hayden, The Port Huron whether they have been included or involved. ParticipaStatement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder’s tion remains, if not terra incognita, then at least a poorly Mouth Press, 2005); Arnold Kaufman, mapped territory, with faded paths and deceptive dis“Human Nature and Participatory tances, and one that is possibly inhospitable for all but Democracy,” in The Bias of Pluralcastaways or fugitives. ism, edited by William E. Connolly (New York: Atherton Press, 1969). In what is written about participation in political Participatory democracy, as a slogan, theory, it is most often opposed to representation. Ofascended rapidly and has since been ten this is shorthand for two idealized institutions of used to modify just about every form direct and representative democracy; participation is of human endeavor. Subsequently, one can find participatory art, budgeting, not defined positively, but only by way of a mechanism culture, design, democracy, economof decision-­making. For many theorists, starting at least ics, learning, management, medicine, with James Madison and Abbé Sièyes, direct democracy planning, research, and urbanism, just to name the most obvious. is impossible: it is impossible for everyone to be present in the agora, or in the Swiss canton, or even in the town meeting when towns grow large enough, and so there must be a principle of substitution. Nowhere is this more bluntly stated than in Federalist 14: The true distinction . . . is that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, must be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.38

Representative democracy shifts the meaning of participation from a pure model of citizen participation to one that combines the regular participation of representatives with the periodic participation of citizens (in elections, in referenda, or in general deliberation and debate). Representative democracy’s most famous advocate, John Stuart Mill, viewed direct participation as a problem because, as he put 34

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it, people generally hate government, are unwilling to participate, and encounter “mechanical” difficulties of scale.39 However, even in representative democracy, Mill makes it clear that participation remains essential. It is a “school of democracy,” the source of civic virtue; participation is the ground without which no duly elected representative could legitimately claim the authority to speak for another person. Representative democracy may be founded on a suspicion of participation, but it also introduced new demands for more of it—­ most obviously in the expansion of the franchise, which becomes the de facto locus of participation in most versions of nineteenth-­ century democracy. From the 1830s, with the emergence of the various socialist and cooperative movements, and especially in the antebellum Lincolnian democracy of late nineteenth-­ century America, participation becomes something The opinion of the respected British “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It is political theorist Anthony Birch is that expanded in every dimension: to the incorporation of “the concept of political participation more and different kinds of people as citizens and as is not nearly as complex as the concept representation, is not currently convoters, the incorporation of citizens into more and dif- of testable, and can be easily illustrated ferent forms of governing, and the struggles to expand by example, in the form of a list of the franchise, and also the technologies of democracy, the main forms of participation open such as recall, propositions and referenda, secret ballots, to citizens in the modern democratic state” (Anthony Harold Birch, The and compulsory voting. Concepts and Theories of Modern DeThe demand for the expansion of participation did mocracy [London: Routledge, 2007], not stop there. It was extended to the workplace (in the 144). Industrial Democracy movement); it was extended to schools and universities, to trade unions, and to corporations. A threshold of sorts appeared in 1962: the Catholic Church, in Vatican II, changed the liturgy to encourage lay participation in vernacular languages, and at nearly the same moment the Students for a Democratic Society (the new name, incidentally, for the League for Industrial Democracy) issued the Port Huron Statement, ushering in a decade of dramatic change, and announcing the arrival (or perhaps return) of decentralization and direct participation. It was at this moment that the word was rendered adjectival: participatory democracy first appeared in the Port Huron Statement. It signaled a renewed demand for the experience of collectivity, a return to the small-­scale governance of direct democracy, and a utopian rejection of elite democracy, corruption, and unaccountable expertise. It was in this context that one of the few books that directly address participation in political theory first appeared: Carole Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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Pateman’s Participation and Democratic Theory (1976). Pateman’s work proposed an expanded meaning for participation; it attacked the “elite democratic” theorists of the twentieth century (Schumpeter, Dahl, Michels), who proposed an extreme version of the suspicions voiced by Mill, in which citizens are deemed both incapable and too apathetic to participate properly. But she also radicalized the idea of participation she found in Rousseau, Mill, and G. D. H. Cole to suggest that for a participatory democracy to emerge, it must emerge as much in the home, the school, and the workplace as in the design of the state.40 The problem of scale is resolved by rendering it in fractal terms, by embedding forms of participation in ever widening circles, without necessarily requiring everyone to be present at once, in one place and time. This theory is at once sympathetic with and more encompassing than those of deliberative democracy that came later: it offers a way to think about a process of democratization in terms of participation. The renewed demand for participation in the 1960s—­the decade of consciousness-­raising and -­altering—­brings these instrumental and institutional features of participation together with the experience of participation. Activists, theorists, and politicians of the 1960s wanted a decentralized democracy of immediate, convivial, affective participation as a solution to the “organization man” and the anatomizing and alienating hugeness of midcentury corporate capitalism.41 Many observers in this period identified a problem in the technological systems and structures populated by an unelected technical elite, whose expertise, it was claimed, had come to substitute for the actual political debate central to a democracy. In the 1960s, such bureaucrats and technical experts represented a broken form of democracy—­one that relied on expert judgment, couched in an inaccessible jargon authorized by the prestige of engineering, mathematics, and scientific management. Politics had been captured by these men, and the movements of the 1960s saw it as a necessary countermovement to liberate government from elites and experts, and return it to a decentralized, face-­to-­face politics of the local. This image of expertise has haunted the notion of participation ever since—­and the stories I tell about the “formatting” of participation in the twentieth century track how the desire to return governance to the people through participation has often ended up creating new versions of the monsters it sought to defeat: proceduralized and (ironically) expert-­led forms of “engagement” and direct 36

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citizen involvement. The forms of life imagined as a response to the elite, expert forms of governance have morphed and recombined into new forms that govern populations by demanding this formatted and structured participation—­one audited and monitored to ensure that it is meeting expectations. These formatted versions of participation are the subject of the three chapters that focus on work, public administration, and international development, respectively. But across these three domains they are not identical with one another, nor do they necessarily stand in a genealogical relationship. I think of them as something more than infrastructures or institutions, but as having a somewhat more complicated temporal relation to both the micropractices of participation in any given case, and the more general problems and principles of liberal democracy.

Participation as Experiment, Institution, and Assemblage Participation never just happens to people; rather, people make participation happen, and they do so in myriad ways, with greater and lesser awareness of their own craft, or of the history of other similar attempts. Participation is most often a problem—­either there is not enough of it, or it is not effective enough, or it is made to happen badly, or has undesirable effects. Participation is not, in my argument, a universal idea that represents specific material practices, or one that animates them in some structural way. It is a problem. Something is a problem when people start to think about it as uncertain, difficult, unfamiliar, or broken. This is the sense of “problematization” that I learned from Michel Foucault and from Paul Rabinow: “thinking is the freedom one has in relation to what one does, the movement through which one detaches oneself, constitutes oneself as an object and reflects on all of this motion as a problem.”42 I have attempted to find a place—­to constitute myself and my own participation in participation as an object—­from which to study how thinking about participation is problematized. Although I do not rely heavily on this approach, it is in the background of my thinking, and it bears distinguishing from other recent attempts to make sense of participation. Although I occasionally use the language of problems, apparatuses, and assemblages, I do not claim to be original in treating participation as a practical, material Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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arrangement of people and things. I share this approach especially with recent work in science studies, such as Noortje Marres’s Material Participation and Chilvers and Kearnes’s edited volume Remaking Participation. Science and technology studies remains my basic methodological and theoretical starting point, even if the domain of study here is only distantly that of science and technology. To shift the gaze of “science studies” away from science has become established practice (leaving many in that field with a somewhat awkward label—­some talk about “expertise” instead, others about “infrastructure,” and so on).43 Among the many scholars in science studies who guide my thinking, Donna Haraway’s method of attending to the figures and stories that animate the world—­those of democracy no less than those of science and technology—­has influenced my approach. Similarly, Bruno Latour’s guidance—­to focus on method first, not domain—­is in part a warrant for turning my attention away from the nitty-­gritty technical aspects of software to the more general, but still technical aspects of participation as a procedure. The more recent work of Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun, individually, collectively, and with sundry collaborators, has created a vibrant space within which it is now exciting to ask how people think and act democratically, in practical, material ways.44 Lezaun’s detailed studies of the various attempts to elicit public participation in science and engineering (and not only there) have established a unique methodological and theoretical angle on these phenomena. Soneryd and Lezaun, in particular, show both the stabilization of “technologies of elicitation” in participatory settings, and their capacity to travel from site to site by virtue of institutional mimicry. This “formatting” and travel of participation is core to what I mean here by the rise of contributory autonomy and the transformation of participation into a “tool-­kit” in the cases I present. Marres’s work on “material participation” clearly demonstrates how contemporary participation requires things to be brought back into the center of the debate.45 To participate—­we have long been told—­is human and largely understood as something deliberative and cognitive. But we participate now in all kinds of ways through the medium of things; we participate materially in our economies and politics by voting with our wallets, buying this technology or that, engaging in practices of energy saving at home, or bike sharing in our cities, or recycling at work and school, and so on. Not only are things ever present in our political landscape, but also political pro38

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cedures and practices increasingly possess thinglike characteristics. Even given these allegiances, I think it is important to further distinguish the terminology of experiment, emergence, co-­production, or institutional analysis from the particular use of terms like assemblage and problems that guide my thinking. To speak of participation as an experiment or experimental system is to highlight the local, temporary character of most cases of participation. Some have recently characterized participation in just these terms.46 There is a large literature on experiment, especially in science studies and philosophy of science, but an influential work is Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger’s notion of experimental systems as “generators of surprise.”47 Experimental systems in this sense (and also in the sense elaborated by Michael Fischer) allow us to look at how elements of participation are arranged in particular ways to generate surprise, and to explore possible outcomes—­to explore “ethical plateaus” that emerge from the experimental arrangement of elements.48 In the cases I look at here, participation is explicitly experimental (in a classic sense) in the case of the Harwood experiments I describe in the first of my case studies (see “Participation, Employed”). In other cases, such as the Model Cities program described in “Participation, Administered,” it is less a designed scientific experiment, and more an “experiment in democracy.” In both cases, the temporary creation of sites of work and observation stands out: participation is neither expected to be quite permanent, nor is it understood as a single moment in time (like a vote or decision). The drawback in thinking of participation in these experimental terms is that it implies a more intentional organization and a more obvious outcome than is often the case. Indeed, to describe the “participatory development” (in “Participation, Developed”) as an experiment misses the mark of what was created and made semipermanent in that case. And in many cases, it’s not really clear, in an experimental sense, what participation is meant to achieve. The term is useful for identifying cases that occur as “discrete and ephemeral events” and for highlighting how measurement and comparison have become central to participation’s functions.49 I argue, however, that it rarely produces the “surprise” that Rheinberger’s concept identifies in the case of biological experiment. Participation might also be described as an institution. This approach has plenty of partisans (and no shortage of definitions). Institutionalist thinking, especially in sociology and political science, Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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has the virtue of allowing us to locate repeated routines and stable practices in ways that allow for comparison and careful analysis.50 To think of participation as an institution is to focus on the repeated routines of participatory practice, the formalization of those routines (the specific “formatting” of participation), and also on the ability of those practices and routines to be picked up and moved from one setting to another—­to travel. In the case of worker participation in “Participation, Employed,” certain kinds of “participatory management” institutionalized themselves in this sense: role-­playing games, “sensitivity training,” and forms of “participative decision-­making” are arguably institutionally embedded in the workplace today. Similarly, the success of participatory development in establishing itself in the halls of the World Bank or United Nations had to do with the creation of the very practices, toolkits, and methods that I detail in “Participation, Developed.” One institutionalized form—­participatory budgeting—­has become something of the go-­to object of analysis for sociologists, economists, and political theorists. Recent work by Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza, for instance, mounts a spirited defense of participatory budgeting in Porto Allegre, Córdoba, and Chicago, drawing on the “policy instrument” approach of Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Gales.51 The story I tell here of the Model Cities Program in Philadelphia in the 1960s is a clear antecedent to many of these cases, emphasizing similar themes, such as the replacement of groups and associations by individuals, the innovation of “technical assistance” in place of expert control, and the frustration over whether a particular participatory role (“budgeting,” in this case) can or cannot be extended to more general self-­governance. What emerged in 1969 as a concern about mere “participation in participation” is mirrored in anxieties about contemporary participatory budgeting as it travels the globe. Institutional analysis allows one to see how a proceduralized participation is spreading around the world in ways that are institutionally thin, carry great normative weight, and can often be implemented without any challenge to existing power relations. These forms consolidate power through contributory autonomy, not through the extension or constitution of new collectives with power or rights. Although many of these theorists maintain an enthusiastic optimism for these techniques, they recognize that they are not fundamentally transformative of contemporary democratic institutions. Institutional approaches tend to have a significant drawback: 40

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they focus on institutions as solid and more or less permanent; which is arguably part of the problem. Institutions tend to preserve the problems that they were designed to solve. Institutional analysis has many ways of focusing on the change over time of an institution, but it rarely allows one to ask how a particular problem and its responses are situated in history or in the experience of individuals who participate and critique participation. Participation is no doubt institutionalizing itself in some troubling ways today—­but the tools of institutional analysis do not easily allow us to explore why that is happening, or what resistances and recombinations of participatory practices are occurring, and what new forms of life or practice are being created. One could focus on the deinstitutionalization of participation or the production of new institutions alongside old ones, but more is at work in this process than just institutions. This is why I sometimes prefer to describe participation in terms of assemblage, apparatus, and problem: it can be helpful, as Rabinow has suggested, to think of these three terms as operating within distinct temporal scales.52 Practically speaking, participation never appears fully formed to serve the purposes to which it is put (democracy, worker productivity, artistic expression, the urban environment, individual happiness), but must be made, remade, or tuned to a setting or cause in a particular time and place. In the three case studies of this book, participation is understood by people as a practical, small-­scale problem in the context of twentieth-­century democratic societies. Each chapter documents a specific “assemblage” that sets up various elements in relation to the problem of participation. In each case, the assemblage is what draws together, and holds temporarily steady, heterogeneous components ranging from legal requirements to scripts and procedures to ideologies of various sorts. In these cases, the most striking feature of participation is the way it is related to other twentieth-­century problems, like the need for increasing levels of expertise, American racial politics, the rise of managerialism, the spread of new information and communication technologies, and the centralized bureaucracies and international organizations of global governance. Participation is a problem because it is made or remade out of these complex components of late modern life, and it poses a challenge for those who want it to have particular effects and outcomes. As an assemblage, participation can be seen as a local, historically specific problem to be solved within the context of contemporary Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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democratic states. In these cases, it is easier to see when participation works and when it doesn’t—­or, more precisely, which elements are essential to participation, and which are inessential. However, I raise the question in this book of whether participation can also be seen as a general problem: as an event of much longer duration, during which a variety of apparatuses or assemblages come into being in response to it. One very significant such apparatus related to participation is that of liberal representative democratic government—­a relatively stable, but nonetheless mobile configuration of heterogeneous concepts, institutions, techniques, and technologies that can be seen as responding to and channeling the general problem of participation. To treat participation as general—­and democracy as a more specific apparatus to which it responds—­amounts to asserting that participation is prior to democracy. Participation is n ­ ot a simple component of democracy, but something problematic enough that things like representative parliamentary democracy, federal constitutions, secret ballots, and regimes of audit and regulation are oriented toward dealing with too much, too little, or the wrong kind of participation. This is not a conventional way of looking at democracy, and it will not fit well with a political theory tradition in which participation plays only a bit part in the great historical drama of democracy. I think, however, there is something to be gained by reversing this relation. Instead, one can view participation as a longstanding problem of the relation between persons and collectives, and see liberal democracy as existing in an intermediate temporality where institutions, theories, constitutions, legal systems are in a process of steady transformation. The apparatus we call “liberal representative democracy” is one concrete response to the problem of participation. It is an apparatus that changes more slowly and with greater inertia than do the local, contemporary assemblages of participation within it, such as the three cases I review here. The assemblages that I observe in this book, therefore, are both bigger and smaller (more general and more specific) than democratic institutions. On the one hand, participation is a problem that confronts every form of democracy and all its innovations. On the other hand, participation is an arrangement of practices, experiments, ideas, procedures, and toolkits that are dependent, contingent, specific events within the history of democracy whereby participation has been organized and stabilized temporarily: at work, in cities, and around the world. 42

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Analyzing these cases as assemblages means thinking about the combination and recombination of specific elements they share, without necessarily being connected in time and space, or in some strictly genealogical sense. Some elements are in a genealogical relation, but many cases of participation exhibit the same elements without necessarily drawing them directly from precursors or exemplars. As different forms of life make sense of participation, they offer different critiques, which are taken up and worked over in the attempt to solve the problem of participation. The various assemblages of participation in the twentieth century that I describe in the chapters of this book are not entirely distinct from one another. They emerge as practices and events in a strikingly heterogeneous set of domains, but they then converge in form and content, and become something like an incipient apparatus. That incipient apparatus is not simply representative liberal democracy as we have long known it, nor is it simply a failure to achieve some more primordial or pure form of democracy. If this approach offers a novel way of viewing things, it is so that one might observe the transformation—­even the end—­of liberal democracy by attending more carefully to the concrete, practical ways in which the elements of participation are being formatted and reformatted today. In the conclusion, I return to this issue of the transformation of liberal democracy. Much of the writing concerning democracy—­ especially on the left and in the academic humanities and social sciences—­takes a much more pessimistic view of the formatting of participation than I am willing to take. It has even become possible to oppose democracy to participation (or participation to “politics,” which might not be the same thing), and the popular figure for this is Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, who famously declared “I would prefer not to.”53 While I recognize this gesture as a powerful, necessary, radical refusal of the stagnant and ossified institutions of what is most often labeled “neoliberalism,” I do not think that democracy is what stands above it all, promising a better future yet to come. I would rather ask: what is emerging from the democracy that has been in place since sometime in the eighteenth century? What new apparatus of participation is being organized by which we will be governed in the future, and can we understand better why we are all involved in it? Can we stand apart from it long enough to see it as a problem? I am critical of the literature that suggests that participation is only a contingent—­and corrupted—­tool threatening Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n t r o d u c e d

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democracy’s universal problematic. If this book offers an alternative to that assessment, then it does so by trying to insert more precision, at the risk of more complexity. Whatever democracy awaits us, it cannot escape the problem of participation. What at first appears as mere technique within the vast armature of democracy now appears to me instead as the enduring problem that has given rise to a desire for democracy—­and always on the shelf above the one we are looking at.

A Note on the Text I have frequently heard my historian friends say, while discussing the difference between history and anthropology, that they prefer history because their subjects “don’t speak back to them.” While this is certainly literally true, I have always found it a disheartening kind of thing to say—­of course they speak back; they argue with you, they contradict you, they have a life of their own; and despite your power as author, you often do not get the last word. This book contains several vignettes that have been reconstructed from historical source material. In many cases they are more quotation than reconstruction, and it may not be immediately obvious that they are painstaking reconstructions in dialogue with a large volume of books, articles, images, and other materials—­most, but not all, of which are clearly footnoted and referenced. Although the form of this book (and the preference of this press) facilitates reading without being constantly distracted by footnotes and references, I nonetheless want to confront the reader with sources as such. My intention has been to render historical documents and texts ethnographically, rather than as evidence or documentation. The choices of which texts to rely on often leaned toward the aesthetic, rather than the merely scholarly. The use of pictures of written texts—­ rather than citations—­is similarly intended throughout: these texts are persons, dead in some cases, and not in others, sacred to some, and not to others, never only a source, but also a sink. The diverse material of these stories is not just evidence used to represent history, but an honest attempt to participate in it.

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Participation, Experienced June 1889 The Participant is at latitude 8°12′ south and longitude 146°10′ east. It is the south coast of Papua New Guinea, on the Torres Strait. He has been there for eighteen months in a village of roughly two thousand people, and the people have welcomed him and his wife Isabelle—­though they are nonetheless nearly alone as white people. Among other things, he is an agent of the Burns & Philp company, which has recently begun—­around 1884—­ to offer tours of the region to curious white Australians and Europeans. But he is also being paid by the British government to represent the crown in this little village, despite being a Swede (name of Edelfelt), or maybe because of it—­in any case as a necessary convenience, since the recently declared protectorate of British Papua New Guinea is in apparently dire need of representatives. The governor, William MacGregor, begrudgingly pays The Participant to keep the mail moving, teach the natives about individual responsibility, and otherwise receive guests and government employees as they continue the work of colonial administration. Governor MacGregor, it is true, does not think very highly of The Participant: “he first judged Edelfelt as being ‘not of remarkable talent, but very zealous’ but later found him unreliable. When MacGregor sent one of the Ansell Murderers to him for custody, ‘this outlaw was allowed . . . to walk about . . . without irons, without guards, and could have swum easily to the next island.’ Edelfelt also bungled the mails and MacGregor reported that he had suffered great inconvenience and the service much loss.’”1 The Participant is also here as a collector and naturalist, and it is not his first trip. Several times before, The Participant has visited parts of this land, primarily in hopes of scaling Mount Yule and there collecting an abundance of unknown plants, flowers, fossils, or other rarities. For “a plucky young naturalist explorer . . . Mount Yule is a peculiarly rich hunting-­ground for the naturalist, botanist, and geologist.”2 Until this trip “his botanical researches in New Guinea were entirely a private enterprise on [his] own small means, and a Mr. T. A Gulliver, from Townsville, who spent a considerable sum of money for botanical and other scientific researches in New Guinea.”3 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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Those who first saw these people from within, even if they lived among them for some time, were too much engaged otherwise to be able to give accurate and detailed accounts, as complete as possible, of the institutions and customs which came to their notice. They observed what seemed to them most noteworthy and singular, the things that piqued their curiosity; they described these more or less happily. But the observations thus collected were always merely side-­issues to them, never the main reason for their sojourn among the peoples. Moreover, they did not hesitate to interpret phenomena at the time they described them: the very idea of hesitation would have seemed quite unnecessary. How could they suspect that most of their interpretations were simply misapprehensions, and that ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’ nearly always conceal with jealous care all that is most important and most sacred in their institutions and beliefs? ✴ Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives Think (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 20–­21

The Participant did not come solely to colonize, or to proselytize, or to capitalize: but he feels an obligation, or opportunity, to do all this and more. He has “every reason to believe that the whole of this district is healthy, and will eventually be one of the localities for European settlement.” Before leaving for New Guinea, when asked by the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland, he insists that, despite some reports, the climate can be endured and also states that “he did not think there would be any difficulty in the way of Europeans acquiring land in the districts visited by him. There were millions of acres unutilised except for the purpose of hunting; and the land was so fertile that the natives only required small areas for planting purposes.”4 But having spent eighteen months here in Motumotu and seen evidence of smallpox and the deaths of hundreds of people from other diseases, he has since changed his mind: “the district is an immense extent of sago country, very humid, and beyond doubt the fever-­bed of New Guinea.”5 An amateur, a gentleman, an administrator, a missionary, a curious adventurer. He has met many ethnologists, geographers, and naturalists in his time, and is constantly on the hunt for funding and support to carry out essential geographical, cultural, and biological exploration. So far, Papua New Guinea has been his only exotic destination. And he thinks he has

already come to understand the customs and ways of the people. The Participant has much to say about the people of Motumotu; he hopes to produce many articles about them, though it is far from his main activity. He is both repelled by them and in awe of them. To him, they are at once noble and savage, trustworthy and duplicitous, kind and ruthless. Much like the British. He tells his audience at a meeting of the Geographical Society: “are we not as much idol worshippers as the uncivilised savages of Africa or New Guinea? In my humble opinion, most emphatically yes! Do we not worship ourselves individually? Do we not bow down and worship money and other worldly possessions, to a far greater extent than anything else in our beautifully created universe? This is certainly the highest form of selfish and egotistic worship, and is looked upon by the All Seeing Eye as the greatest crime committed by us made in the image of our Master.”6 To him it seems necessary to write something of his experience “so as to preserve for the benefit of coming generations the habits of the lawful and original owners and occupiers of the land which we now call ours . . . for, before long, the traditions and customs of the aboriginal population 46

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of New Guinea will be things of the past as in the case of the Australian aboriginals.”7 So, playing the scientist, he notes down everything, starting with descriptions of his hosts: “many of them are exceedingly good-­looking, if not handsome. They have mostly large soft-­speaking eyes, full of expression and frankness, which is strongly indicated towards anyone known to them; but they can also show the reverse to those of whose friendship they are not certain; they are jolly and mirthful, and display much native witticism. They are very impulsive, and will create a disturbance without a moment’s notice, and perhaps, in fact, frequently without the slightest cause; but the next moment they might bring all the pigs in the village as a peace offering; and they can strike a bargain with anybody.”8 “The Aroma and Motu-­motu people are certainly the most noisy folks I have met in New Guinea as yet, and my wife has named them the Irish of New Guinea.”9 His wife is far from threatened by them, but rather “an enterprizing and courageous lady.” “Armed with her own revolver, Isabelle sometimes accompanied him on his frequent journeys.”10 They stay in a house in the village, first constructed by the missionary Chalmers during his time here, and which is comfortable and well appointed. The residents are frequently around the house, some coming from far away to view the portrait of Queen Victoria that hangs in the dining room or maybe to “sit on [the] verandah a whole day arguing the price of two cocoanuts, and rather than give in their point . . . hide the nuts in some corner on [the]

An image from Chalmers’s biography depicting his house, where The Participant also lived. From Richard Lovett and James Chalmers, James Chalmers: His Autobiography and Letters (Oxford: Religious Tract Society, 1902), 326. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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grounds, and perhaps appear the next day again trying to sell them at their price.”11 But what strikes The Participant most frequently—­here in Motumotu as well as in other villages he visits—­is the inveterate larceny of the natives, and their apparent lack of shame about it. “They were, at the time I lived amongst them, expert thieves. They would steal all the bed-­clothes off your bed while you sat in the next room, and even while talking to them; they might see a knife or some other article on the floor, they will then move cautiously towards it and cover it with their foot, or throw their bag on it, and sit down to watch their chance to appropriate it.” Indeed, they appear to him not only shameless, but positively joyous in their machinations: “Sometimes they very cleverly move the article along with their toes, and in the twinkling of an eye—­when one’s attention may be attracted to something else, or they might purposely draw one’s attention to some object or other—­and standing on the one leg perfectly motionless, lift the article with the toe, bend the knee to such an acute angle that the foot at the back of the body will meet the hand and relieve the toes of the stolen article. If they at any time are discovered red-­handed, they will pass it off good humouredly as a jest, and ask for a smoke in the bargain.”12 Earlier, during an expedition with Reverends Couppè and Verjus, The Participant noted a similar cunning in the village at Inawabui. “The people are very kind; they possess a keen commercial ability, and are, to my idea, rather Israelitish in their dealings with Europeans; but, be this as it may, they appear to be very industrious, and grow more bananas and vegetables than I have seen in any other part of New Guinea.” And again, while stopping over in the village of Eboa, he “slept in the chief’s house for one night. H.R.H. was in mourning for one of his wives, and it appears a custom prevails that for a certain time the mourners must not appear too much in public. . . . However this dusky sovereign took his nocturnal wanderings over the house while we slept, and inspected such of our luggage as came within his reach without disturbing us, and appropriated a good deal of Father Couppè’s tobacco; but still I admired his frankness, for in the morning he admitted the theft, and gave a self-­satisfied laugh for his luck in getting tobacco on the cheap.”13 It seems to him that, overall, “they have a great difficulty in obeying the voice of honesty, but rather incline to their natural bent of stealing.”14 Something about this natural bent also strikes The Participant when he participates in the extensive and complex doings of the trading season. Canoes arrive from the east, and he witnesses and records the complex trading system: though the Motumotuans play host to the visitors, they also appear to forcibly take command of the fleet and appropriate the goods. 48

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But then an elaborate system of trading follows in which prices are taken using small sticks or “butts” and certain kinds of goods—­feathers, shells, armbands—­seem to fetch the most outrageous prices. When all the prices have been settled, the Motumotuans set about making flour from the sago palms to pay for it all, at the same time providing the visitors with ample food and goods until their departure. What seems to start as piracy turns to negotiation and then again to payment, but with no clear understanding of the values being exchanged. At last bags of fresh sago are exchanged, and “if the bags do not correspond with the butts or bits of wood, a disturbance is likely to take place—­bows and arrows frequently coming into requisition.”15 The Participant can see and feel that this trading business is a complicated system within which the natives operate, and not just a question of money and prices. If only he could be part of it sufficiently, he might make sense of it and describe it . . . but he has other duties. If only he could understand it, it might help him with his own larcenous desire to obtain a trophy that would change his standing immensely among his own people, he hopes. “The Kadisu—­sometimes named after the man the image represents—­is located in a special compartment in the extreme end of the Elamo, a dark and musty place indeed. The privileged man or sorcerer, who can converse with the idols, goes into this place and consults them on the subject upon which they wish to be enlightened. The idol’s counsel is sought nearly on all topics concerning the tribe, war and so on. Kadisu (the idol) can produce illness, death and everything that is evil. He is the cause of wreckage of canoes, through being offended with some of the members aboard. The image is also consulted previous to the people setting out on a trading expedition, and, should anything happen to the fleet, woe to the man or men who urged on the journey; such man or men stand in imminent danger of being killed by those immediately concerned in the calamity.” Further, “no woman is permitted to set eyes on the idol for fear of provoking his wrath; to let such inferior beings as women look upon him would mean destruction to the people; and many wonder how the idol came into my possession.” “It happened thus:—­I, as a man, and several months resident amongst the people, had carte blanche wherever I pleased to go; and during my many rambles, I found one or two, or more, in every Elamo I visited. So I selected this particular one as having better workmanship than any idols I saw. I offered a price for it to the leading men of the Elamo. But they appeared to be surprised at such request or suggestion of disposing of their pet idol. My negotiations extended over six months, and what in their Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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A processional mask from the village of Motumotu. Source:

Jolik a Collection of M a rci a a nd John Fr iede, De You ng Museum, Sa n Fr a ncisco.

estimation would be untold wealth, in the form of cutlery, tobacco, beads, looking-­glasses, fish hooks, calico, &c, could not at the time induce them to part with their so-­called sacred image; and after many renewed efforts to be the possessor of this heathen relic of a primitive race, I entirely abandoned the idea of ever obtaining it.” “But at the lapse of the sixth month, my servant, an African negro, called me one very dark night about 9.30 p.m. (my wife being away at the time), and informed me that the Bingais, as he called the Papuans, would sell the god for a certain quantity of trade. The principal men, two brothers, who claimed proprietorship over the idol, interviewed me and related the conditions under which I could obtain it; it is hardly necessary to say that I was not slow in closing the bargain, and the idol was brought to me the same night in the most profound secrecy, when the villagers were asleep; it was carefully wrapped up in, I believe, a dozen bark blankets; but before it was finally handed over to me, I had to pledge my word that, for at least three moons, I should keep it in a dark place, covered up that no woman, not even my wife, should be allowed to see it, nor to tell any one that I had it in my possession, lest something might happen to the people who had dethroned and discarded it. Nearly every day, until the pledged time had expired, the men concerned in the affair came and inspected

W hence Comes Sickness? Motumotu. The following is the native legend. Koraeao, a spirit (Kanisu) who lives in the mountain Kovio (Yule), is a wanton spirit, and when women speak evil to him, takes their petticoats and the maros of the women and men and washes them in the head springs, then returns them, and soon are all sick. The sickness is brought down by the river to Motumotu and Moveave, and all who drink the water are sick. Then Koraeao ascends the mountain top and sits there, and sings when he sees all the people sick. Sorcerers also cause sickness. They will touch persons when asleep with a particular fruit, take it home and put it in a bamboo over the fire, and leave it drying until those persons fall sick. ✴ James Chalmers, Pioneering in New Guinea (London: Religious Tract Society, 1887), chap. 8, “The Habits Customs and Beliefs of Motu and Motumotu,” 178

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the place where he was kept, and to see that I was true to my promise. At last, for fear that they might regret the bargain, I told them that I had sent it away to some British town; so in this way the matter ended.”16 The Participant might have admitted to himself, just for a moment, that acquiring this fetish might just cause some of the calamities the natives predicted. But to his mind such superstition is obvious bunk—­the idol is no more powerful as a cause of things than the cross that hangs in his own house. But still, the immediate concern of the natives for the power of this item is sometimes shocking, sometimes even a matter of life and death. “At the time we took up our residence in Motumotu, a kind of pleurisy epidemic prevailed along the coast, and eventually it also reached this village, and in less than two months carried off over three hundred people.” The Participant and his wife “were accused of bringing the messenger of destruction into their midst, and for this loud rumours were about that we—­including the Polynesian teachers—­should suffer death. On hearing this I spoke to the people, who adhered to the statement that we foreigners had brought the epidemic to Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

them, but stoutly denied the report that they were going to kill us. But I told them, if they had any such intentions, to come at any time except at night, when we were asleep, that we might have an opportunity of defending ourselves.” “They could see the force of the argument,” he says, “but someone or something was still the cause of it.”17 First, “they blamed a poor unfortunate sheep I had, that was killed to please them; but the epidemic raged as violently as ever. . . . Now our two goats were blamed; these animals, however, lived it all out. Finally, they levelled their abuse and accusations against a large picture of Queen Victoria, which hung in our dining-­room. Previous to the epidemic appearing, people came in from long distances to see this picture, and while they remained in the village the Motumotuans would bring them every day to look at it several hours at a time, and wonder how it was that we, British people, have a woman as our chief, as a woman cannot throw a spear nor use a bow and arrow, and therefore is useless for fighting. All these difficulties were satisfactorily explained away, but the harmless image of our gracious Queen became eventually, instead of daily admiration as before, an imaginary destroyer of health and life, and they requested me to take the picture down; to this I did not concede, but they would never look at it again with the same simple awe-­struck admiration as before the epidemic came about.”18

Introduction Why, for example, should a picture or portrait be to the primitive mind something quite different from what it is to ours? . . . Evidently from the fact that every picture, every reproduction “participates” in the nature, properties, life of that of which it is the image. This participation is not to be understood as a share—­as if the portrait, for example, involved a fraction of the whole of the properties of the life which the model possesses. Primitive mentality sees no difficulty in the belief that such properties exist in the original and in its reproduction at one and the same time. By virtue of the mystic bond between them, a bond represented by the law of participation, the reproduction is the original, as the Bororo are the araras.19

Queen Victoria was a problem. In particular, for the residents of a village called Motumotu, later Toaripi, on the south coast of Papua New Guinea. This probably goes without saying: colonial injustice was despised, along with those who perpetrated it. But Queen Victoria’s portrait was a particular problem because its capacity to Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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cause suffering was immediate, not distant. The portrait was not a representation of empire, but empire itself—­indeed, the portrait was a very contagious, virulent pox visited directly into the bodies of the colonized. For it hung in the house of the colonist, thief, missionary, naturalist, agent of the British government, Erik Gustav Edelfelt, and thereby participated directly in the events of the In the case of Queen Victoria’s porsurrounding village. trait, the fallacy post hoc, ergo propter What does it mean to say that Queen Victoria parhoc is obviously an inadequate explaticipated in colonial affairs? Usually this means only nation. The portrait was well known to “caused,” and only at great remove, as a kind of final the natives long before the epidemic broke out. They did not attach any cause. But the language of participation asks us to think blame to it except in the fourth place, differently about causation, and to consider that it is after having successively imputed the immediate, emotional, and experiential, but cannot be outbreak to the missionary, his sheep, and his two goats. If, after that, they perceived in the physical picture. It is not a distant delaid the trouble at its door, it was unterminism in a chain of collisions begun halfway round doubtedly because of the magic power the globe, but instead happens now, at the same time as, they believed to be attaching to this unusual object. ✴ Lévy-­Bruhl, How and alongside, those whom it assaults. Natives Think, 59 What does it mean to say that the residents of Motumotu participated in empire? This immediacy affects both the indigenous residents of Motumotu and the colonial agents and missionaries. Edelfelt’s calculated theft of the kadisu was not just a manipulation of unwitting “natives”—­they too participated in this act, clearly revising some of their own intuitions and reasons in dialogue and interaction with colonists and missionaries and others—­in order to remove something sacred and transfer it to Edelfelt. The stories of the residents of Motumotu are not available, and we should not trust Edelfelt’s accounts—­but they were all nonetheless involved, engaged, included, as collaborators, or as participants. The uses of the portrait by the villagers, as well as that of the stolen idol by Edelfelt, all take place in a context of immediate and emotionally dense collective experience in which multiple stories overlap—­myths old and new, religious scripture, colonial legal rationalities, regional economic expectations, laws of excluded middles, and species of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. We don’t have direct access to the ways any of the participants made sense of the world around them, but we do have traces of the perplexity that it produced—­and of the attempt to explain it. It is perplexity that causes an otherwise forgotten colonial figure, the Swede Edelfelt, to appear in a footnote on page 57 of Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl’s famous book How Natives Think, in a chapter called 52

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Queen Victoria (1819–­1901). After Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Portrait of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes and wearing the State Diadem. Source: Roya l Collection; digitized photo from W ik im edi a Com mons.

“The Law of Participation.” Lévy-­Bruhl grasped participation as a problem that made sense of this perplexity—­a way to square the obviously different forms of life with his commitment to philosophical explanation. The meaning of participation in Lévy-­Bruhl’s work at first seems far from what we colloquially mean by the word. But it is not actually so distant. To make the connection between these two meanings requires both a careful attention to the history of the concept, and Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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attention to one thinker who grappled with it. A richer concept of participation will be of use in explaining how participation today should be considered not only as a concept or a procedure, but also as an experience. It helps us see why participation works when it does, and also why it seems to fail so often. This chapter introduces the “ancient” meaning of participation, and gives a brief history of how the concept was taken up and transformed in the eighteenth century, especially in the hands of Rousseau. Although Rousseau was not focused directly on the concept, it is central to his political theory. By looking at the concept of the general will and the problem of political collectives, one can see how the ancient and modern meanings are combined in the word, and inhabit our most basic understandings of liberal democracy today. The problem of participation becomes, as it were, a scandal for thinking, which has repeatedly confronted (and defeated) a range of thinkers, chief among them Lévy-­Bruhl. Although this chapter delves into the context and work of Lévy-­ Bruhl, my goal is not simply to speak to anthropologists or to plumb obscure depths of the history of anthropology.20 This chapter could easily have taken up the problem of participation in any number of other twentieth-­century thinkers. Lévy-­Bruhl’s problem was also clear in Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances; in Ludwik Fleck’s pioneering Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact; in Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge; in Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s histories of “mentalités” such as Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century; and Bloch’s The Royal Touch; in the “Cambridge Ritualists,” like Francis Cornford, and their attempts to account for the emergence of Greek science and philosophy out of previous mystical religions, such as that of the Pythagoreans; or in Eric Voegelin’s political-­theological works.21 But Lévy-­Bruhl’s work is also deeply flawed—­a fact that will be better known to anthropologists than to many other readers—­and so I cannot return to it without fair warning and a bit of explanation. The climb may be steep, and some readers will want to skip this chapter and move on to the more proximate stories of twentieth-­ century participation, but I hope that this discussion will be useful for those who have wondered about the meaning of participation. This chapter explores a problem that the other chapters rely on: the importance of the emotional, ephemeral, affective experience of participation. Indeed, the experience of participation is its most ephemeral aspect; it is difficult to capture it, pin it to a board, fix 54

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and stain it, x-­ray it, or simulate it. Emotions fade, it’s what they do: they disappear while the bones of practice and habit and ritual remain. For this reason, Lévy-­Bruhl called these experiences “the soft parts of social fossils.” In the rest of this book, I trace a twentieth-­century story of the emergence of a specific kind of participation tied to the contributory autonomy of individuals. It is visible in the practices, techniques, technologies, procedures, and institutions designed and formatted to produce this form of participation. It crafts a space into which individuals can fit, and wherein they can contribute as individuals to the making of collectives. But this space is individual-­shaped and not quite person-­shaped. It fits only the bones of a person. The kind of participation most common today is often focused on producing a temporary experience of participation, as for instance a “social climate” that can be manipulated. It does not allow the experience to function or to persist, to solidify or accumulate in a collective by which it might be preserved and repeated. It may be obvious to say that emotions are hard to capture or preserve—­but the emotions associated with participation are doubly so because they are not simply individual experiences, but collective ones as well: the soft parts of social fossils. The human experience of participation makes sense of itself, but not at an individual cognitive level. This is not always a question of giving reasons or stating beliefs. Rather, the experience of participation activates a collective emotional meaning, available in the interregnum or fascia of everyday life—­the stories, myths, theories, and especially values that we hold dear together with others, especially those ideas that concern how things ought to go on among and with others in a collective. These collective emotions, like other collective representations, are not confined to individuals, but consist in what William Mazzarella has recently dubbed “constitutive resonance” and what Lévy-­Bruhl called participation.22 They become accessible only at the points where collectives are called into being and persons experience themselves as both individual and collective at the same time. These participations are not simply culture, a consensus, or even a “shared imaginary.” Although Lévy-­Bruhl had much in common with Durkheim, his notion of participation is not the same as a “conscience collective.” Such terms often reduce the problem to an epistemological one—­a question of incommensurability, disagreement, or “modes of thought”—­when what is at stake is something else: an Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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immediate emotional experience or intuition of collectively shared and updated values, interpretations, desires, and ethics. The reason Lévy-­Bruhl hit upon this form of participation was because of its singular capacity to produce perplexity. Perplexity is not disagreement, it is rather the inability to disagree. It is an immediate, intuitive sense of confusion, discomfort, fear, suspicion that he suspected arose from a differing set of capacities for experiencing the resonance of collective emotions or affects. He shared this insight with Wittgenstein, who understood the ability to disagree to be a sign of a shared “form of life” in which the rules of particular language games held sufficiently. To share a form of life is to engage in resolving perplexity through shared judgments about the world. Without such shared judgments, the language of others makes no sense—­even if one can understand it. As Wittgenstein cleverly put it: “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” The experience of participation is the experience not only of individuals agreeing, but of individuals agreeing with a collective—­and whether or not one belongs to that collective determines one’s ability to resolve the perplexity. Such a capacity for experiencing participation cannot be reduced to contributory autonomy: it is individual and collective at the same time. It concerns the values and expectations that individuals hold, but not their rational, logical, or discursive relations with each other or with other individuals; rather, it is a kind of test of their rationality and aims—­when they work, a collective experiences them working and individuals feel themselves to be instances of, and not parts of, a collective. It is not just a question of having (one) voice (among others), or of hearing another’s voice: it is the feeling of having been heard.

From Participation to Participation When, exactly, did participation become a word that meant primarily “an individual taking part (politically) in the activity of a group”? What conceptual change was necessary to create this particular meaning? Or perhaps we should ask, since it will not be obvious to many readers, what did the word mean before it meant this? Because participation is, in fact, a word and a concept with a rich but relatively obscure history in philosophy and in theology, stretching back to the origins of the Western philosophical tradition—­but it did not usually refer to what it does now, which is to say: partici56

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pation in the polis, political participation, an individual taking part in a group that governs itself. That meaning of the word may have been active back then, but it was not until the eighteenth century that a mutation in the concept is clearly discernible. That change comes with Rousseau. From a philosophical perspective, the concept of the general will bears the unmistakable signature of Rousseau; but like all concepts, it did not appear unbidden, despite his enchantment with the genius of individuals. Rather, it emerged out of a religious controversy—­one Plato’s theory of participation is that Nicolas Malebranche was deeply and centrally in- discussed at length in the Phaedo, the volved in—­concerning nature and grace, and the con- Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the tentious claim in scripture that “God wills that all men Republic, and most especially in the one dialogue that seems to frustrate be saved.”23 Is this will of God specific—­does He will in everyone: the Parmenides. It’s also each and every case that particular souls will be saved, the only dialogue, as many scholars changing his mind as circumstances dictate? Or is it a joyously point out, in which Socrates general will—­a will with a system, a structure, a ratio- is allowed to lose an argument. It is easy to see why Plato’s Parmenides is nality that is common to all men, regardless of particu- frustrating: it is narrated by Cephalus of Clasomenae—­a fuzzy historilarities, events, or accidents? Thanks to Patrick Riley’s diligent and definitive his- cal figure from the same town as Anaxagoras—­who goes to Athens to tory of the concept, it is clear how these theological search out Plato’s brothers Adimantus debates in the seventeenth century played out in front and Glaucon, who take him to their of Rousseau, and how they laid the groundwork for a (and Plato’s) half-­brother Antiphon, to ask him to recite a conversation that secular conception of the general will.24 Rather than Zeno had once related to a student, limiting the concept to the general or particular will Pythodorus, who had told the story of God, Rousseau inaugurated a way of thinking about many times to Antiphon, who now it to Cephalus, who reports it to the will as common to all men, as opposed to the will relates us. Even given Plato’s singular passion of particular men. for the dramatic organization and The proximate source of this dispute, a seventeenth-­ presentation of his philosophical ideas, century argument that embroiled everyone from Ba- the Parmenides is in a class by itself. ruch Spinoza at the outset to Immanuel Kant at the end, is indubitably about rationality and religion at the birth of modern democracies. However, the meaning of participation has been causing trouble for a long time. The problem of participation was given its first dramatization, like so many other things in philosophy, in Plato, and in particular in Plato’s theory of forms, and the tricky issue of how the divine and the human—­or the natural and the supernatural—­worlds relate to each other. Among other terminology related to the theory of forms, the problem of participation (Plato used the Greek word methexis) occupies Plato’s characters and thought. Plato’s theory of forms grapples with the problem of reconciling Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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two worlds, and not just positing the existence of one or both. How might the transcendent be said to dwell in and through the material world of particulars—­and, conversely, how might the material world be said to participate in that of the immortal, the divine, the supernatural, the transcendent?25 Plato’s works contain many variations on the same set of problems, and they have ever since served as fodder for reflection. From its origins onward, the story has usually been represented as a clash between Aristotle and Plato, with Aristotle preferring a theory of immanent substance over transcendental forms. The problem of participation occupied the neo-­Platonists Plotinus and Proclus (and occasionally pseudo-­Dionysus), who give it a new and mystical place at the center of their cosmologies and interpretations of Plato, inventing a triad—­neo-­Platonists love triads—­of the participant, the participated, and the imparticipable). In medieval theology Thomas Aquinas adopted the concept as part of his effort to square the Christian relationship of ens and esse with the scholastic reliance on Aristotle. Aquinas faced the problem of identifying the divine actions of God as something in and of the world, and not as separate from the realm of created beings (the gift of God). Later, in the Reformation, John Calvin uses a notion of participation in his theology to make sense of the immediate participation of Christ in the lives of believers, and then in the seventeenth century, the theological debates around the work of Spinoza, Descartes, and Malebranche (and of Arnauld, Bayle, Bossuet, and others) often have recourse to the theological complexities of how humans relate to God through some form of participation. With the exception of a few neo-­Thomist philosophers in the nineteenth century, and a cryptic remark from Martin Heidegger (“Is it a matter of chance that this problem has not made any headway for more than two thousand years?”), Plato’s problem of participation has largely faded into the arcana of theology, on the one hand, or analytic philosophy (the problem of the “Third Man” and self-­predication), on the other.26 In the seventeenth century, however, among raging theological and religious disputes, the concept of participation undergoes a certain mutation or, perhaps, secularization; though, significantly, it does not thereby lose its theological character. Rather, it becomes an important part of a debate about general and particular wills—­ about the existence of a divine force as always participating in every particular action and decision, or as present only by virtue of a 58

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system of participation that works out the particularities according to a prior will of God. Riley’s work explains the complex trajectory; he notes first that Blaise Pascal was among the first to use the concept of a general will outside of a strictly theological context: In Pascal’s Écrits sur la Grâce, the notion of généralité begins with God’s pre-­lapsarian “will” (recounted in 1 Timothy) that “all” men be saved; then this “general will,” viewed as something divine, is transferred to another strand of Pauline doctrine: namely the notion of a body and its members in 1 Corinthians 12.27

In that New Testament story, Paul argues that “the eye cannot say unto the hand, ‘I have no need of thee’; nor again, the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you . . .’” and Pascal takes that to be emblematic of a relation of general will to the particular wills of which it is made. Pascal argues that this kind of thinking implies a participation of individuals in a common body—­and that this body might be more than just the church, perhaps also a body politic. Riley suggests that John Locke, reading the same passage, is careful to avoid just this leap—­for him the scriptural passage refers only to the participation of members in a church, while in a polity, individuals stand in a contractual relation to one another. Riley traces this lineage from Pascal through Montesquieu to Rousseau directly (“the lineal descent of Rousseau from St. Paul, read à la Pascal, is plain enough”), but the real locus of the notion of a general will was in Malebranche’s “Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce” of 1680.28 Malebranche’s work is an attempt to demonstrate the truth of Cartesianism in the context of scripture, and argues at length for the generality of God’s design of Nature, which is “nothing but the general laws which God has established in order to construct or to preserve his work by the simplest means, by an action [which is] always uniform, constant, perfectly worthy of an infinite wisdom and of a universal cause.”29 Malebranche was at pains to reject the argument that God acts everywhere through a particular will—­saving this or that individual as circumstances dictate. Omniscience and omnipotence notwithstanding, it is an “embarrassment” to imagine God running willy-­nilly from case to case instead of imagining a divine system as a solution. Not only that, but those who think God acts by particular wills are disposed to think that humans ought to as well, rather than following a general will: Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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Those who claim that God has particular plans and particular wills for all the particular effects which are produced in consequence of general laws ordinarily rely on the authority of Scripture to shore up their feeling. Now since Scripture is made for everyone, for the simple as well as for the learned, it is full of anthropologies.30

Such “anthropologies” are there to help readers make sense of God’s ways—­but they cannot be taken as proof of a particular will on God’s part. Malebranche was a committed Cartesian, who lets some of that Cartesianism into the realm of ethics and psychology, arguing for a law-­like generality by which things take place—­and not an ad hoc, “embarrassingly particularistic Creation”:31 If, for example, one drops a rock on the head of passers-­by, the rock will always fall at an equal speed, without discerning the piety, or the condition, or the good or bad dispositions of those who pass by. . . . Since this way in which they want God to act is conformed to ours, since it flatters the self-­love which relates everything to itself, and since it accommodates itself quite well to our ignorance of the combination of occasional causes which produce extraordinary effects, it enters the mind naturally, when one does not sufficiently study nature, and one does not consult with sufficient attention the abstract idea of an infinite wisdom of a universal cause of an infinitely perfect being.32

Rousseau seized on this idea not as an explanation of God, but of the city: the polis, the collective through which the general will operates in similar fashion. Against the particular wills and desires of individuals, he famously stated: “The general will is always in the right, but the judgment guiding it is not always enlightened.”33 Rousseau sides with Malebranche in favor of a simplicity and generality and perfection of the whole. When he comes to it in The Social Contract, the general will is a system of interlocking collectives that only functions perfectly if all parts are harmoniously arranged in a whole. When amour propre, or self-­love, determines the actions of a collective, then the general will fails to emerge and assert itself. The difference between God’s generality and that of a collective was obvious to Rousseau, as Riley explains: In Malebranche, God’s will is essentially and naturally general; in Rousseau men’s wills must be made general through a civic education supplied by a Moses or a Lycurgus—­a problem that Rousseau more than once likens to the problem of squaring the circle.34 60

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Rousseau’s use of Malebranche warped the debate over the general will of God into one concerning the self-­awareness and self-­ governance of assembled individuals who, by participation in a political process, could come to an awareness of a common good: the general will. Participation here did not mean the participation of the actions of men in the will of God, but the actions of men in the will of all other citizens. Indeed, central to Rousseau’s most famous definition is the sense of this indivisibility or inalienability of the whole (Rousseau used both words in different versions): “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and we as a body receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”35 Later in the text, he adds: “As regards the associates, they collectively take the name of people, and are individually called citizens as being participants in sovereign authority, and subjects as being bound by the laws of the state.”36 A strong reading of the term participant is warranted here because Rousseau wanted to make the case that collectives in his theory are indivisible—­individuals cannot be separated or divided or alienated from the whole without it ceasing to exist. “[Our political theorists] have chopped up the body social by a sleight of hand worthy of a fairground showman, and you cannot tell how they reassemble the pieces.”37 The result of such divisions, or alienations, as Rousseau points out, is the production of particular associations, or factions. In such cases, “the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members and particular in relation to the state.”38 The result is that associations engage in a kind of collective amour propre that fails to ascend to the general will of the people. Rousseau’s recursive, or interlocking, model of collectives implies a universal collective—­no doubt one made safe by a universal human reason—­but it is the indivisibility of any given individual/ collective that is special in his theory. To the extent that one experiences such a collective as such, and as more than just an individual with interests, one experiences a version of Rousseau’s general will. It is not a stretch to say that Rousseau’s own experience of governance in the cantons of Swiss democracy provided him with this experience, which he sought to make general and systematic. No end of ink has been spilled trying to make sense of Rousseau’s general will—­of its feasibility, its existence, or its meaning. ParPa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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ticipation at the time did not mean simply the aggregate presence of voters or the sum of individual wills—­which is more appropriately understood as a utilitarian innovation, one far more tractable to arithmetic, and far less concerned with the requirements of education and civic virtue among a citizenry. Instead, participation in the general will is a mutated version of classical methexis: that eachindividual’swillisnotadiscreteinteresttobesummedorweighted, but an instance of the common will—­assuming, of course, and problematically, that it has been shaped, educated, and enlightened. If participation is a problem for modern liberal democracy, it is due to this difference: most modern theories of liberalism are wedded to a vision of individual utilitarianism that is not capable of imagining an individual’s membership in a group as anything other than a sophisticated mereology—­a part-­whole relation. “Contributory autonomy” is one such mereology in which collectives (or “societies” or “cultures”) form only after and because of the contributions of individuals whose autonomous reason (or failure to reason, irrationality) is at the basis of their values. An approach from the opposite extreme is similarly troubled by this part-­whole relation: a strong form of Durkheimianism would insist that the social or cultural whole precedes the individual; that values are collective to begin with, and individuals only the effect of such social facts. But the idea of participation is one that accepts neither alternative—­ and this is why it is scandalous. For liberalism, if the individual (or his or her will) is an instance of a collective, there is no calculability—­it merely sounds like indistinction (neither individual nor group). To be an instance is both to be all of a collective at once (a notion that is bluntly paradoxical) and to be an individual who experiences participation as more than just contributory autonomy—­more than simply expressing a belief, or giving a reason. A force operates through us, but it is neither reason, nor a conscience collective, because it is both individual and collective at the same time. We are neither individuals nor collectives. We are perplexed on some days, and feel at home in common sense on others, we are always engaged in a constant and immediate updating of our values through a habitual and repetitive participation. We experience intuitions, emotions, affective reactive states that are trying to tell us something—­something important—­but which are institutionally and procedurally incinerated. The soft parts are burned away so that only the bones remain. 62

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The Armchair Participant Lévy-­Bruhl was at one time an extremely well-­known scholar: his books were widely and popularly read, and caused controversy and debate in both Europe and America; he co-­founded the French Institut d’ethnologie in Paris along with Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet; and his stature as a holder of a chair in philosophy made him one of the early twentieth century’s most respected figures in France and abroad. He was a philosopher first—­author of books about the history of French philosophy, neo-­Kantianism, the science of morality, and the problem of responsibility—­but also an author of half a dozen books on anthropology. He was an avuncular figure, friend to many—­from socialist leader Jean Jaurès to missionary-­ anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt. William Mazzarella, in a recent book, identifies Lévy-­Bruhl alongside several other scholars in what he calls a “mana moment”—­scholars from Frazer and Tylor to Durkheim and Mauss, scholars For anthropologists today, Lévy-­Bruhl ought to be the patron saint of the whose work would eventually be eclipsed and rejected, “ontological turn” of such scholars by later anthropological “settlements.”39 as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro or As a man of the late nineteenth century, Lévy-­Bruhl Philippe Descola. Lévy-­Bruhl is, however, only rarely mentioned by any occupied a central position among some fairly predict- of these scholars, like the proverbial able and well-­known debates. He navigated between madwoman in the attic. An even Durkheim’s collective representations and Gabriel Tar- more apposite filiation would be with de’s individual mimetics; he debated Henri Bergson on “affect theory” in the social sciences, on which see Mazzarella, The Mana of the topic of intuition, and fought against the associa- Mass Society. tionism of British empiricism; he picked up the tools Various editions and translations of Lévy-­ Bruhl’s works.

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It is now hard to refer to any difference between Us and Others without finding oneself accused of imperialistic arrogance, incipient racism, or impenitent nostalgia for the past, resurgences of thought both malign and retrograde that should promptly be consigned to the oblivion of history, there to join the ghosts of Gustave Le Bon and Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl. ✴ Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 87

Although his work is now largely known (by hearsay) as a laughable example of the incorrect views of bygone ages, there is no doubt that Lévy-­Bruhl opened a new field for empirical research, which has stimulated generations of later anthropologists, including Evans-­Pritchard and Lévi-­ Strauss. . . . Lévy-­Bruhl argued that illiterate peoples think in a qualitatively different way from literate ones; they do not reason logically and coherently, but poetically and metaphorically. Although his contemporaries, from Lowie in the USA to Schmidt in Germany, were almost universally critical of his work, it framed an analytical field that has proven fertile later: the comparative study of thought styles, and the problems of intercultural translation associated with such differences. ✴ Thomas Eriksen, A History of Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 2013)

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of psychology, especially Théodule-­Armand Ribot’s “logic of sentiments,” to help make sense of the difference between emotion and intuition; and, of course, he was steeped in both Cartesianism and Kantianism as a philosopher. But the concept of participation was a special kind of wrench that Lévy-­Bruhl tossed into this mechanism. Lévy-­Bruhl was rarely explicit about this meaning of participation, but it is clear in his work by those whom he cites: Malebranche, for instance. Lévy-­Bruhl cites Malebranche rarely, and never chapter and verse, but he appears right off the bat in How Natives Think: The same ideas are at the bottom of the universal belief which affirms that certain men become animals—­tigers, wolves, bears, etc.—­whenever they put on the skins of such. To the primitives, such an idea is wholly mystic. They are not concerned with knowing whether the man, in becoming a tiger, ceases to be a man, and later, when he becomes a man again, is no longer a tiger. That which is of paramount importance to them is the mystic virtue which makes these individuals “participable,” to use Malebranche’s term, of both tiger and man in certain conditions, and consequently more formidable than men who are never anything but men, and tigers which are always tigers only.40

For Lévy-­Bruhl, Malebranche represents a subtler version of Descartes’s method—­one that recognizes that even if something is insensible and invisible, there are ways in which we nonetheless treat it as real, and even as having causal force in the world. Our senses are good for preserving us, Malebranche ever so wisely noted—­if we had to rely only on reason to avoid danger, we would soon perish. The idea of participation has found continued supporters and avatars ever since, from the respectable to the fringe. In anthropology, the concept of “participation” has reemerged periodically—­as in the works of both Stanley Tambiah and Marshall Sahlins—­though it remains a mysterious, mostly unknown idea.41 It was picked up by the philosopher Owen Barfield, whose Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

book Saving the Appearances is an extended meditation on the forgetting of participation after the scientific revolution, but one that preserves a racism of “primitives” and “natives” in its own ways, by seeking to establish that the scientific revolution and its success at explaining the natural world has come to obscure our ability to experience participation in its immediacy, its resonance. It has found a friendly home in everything from alternative forms of healing, to the Jungian psychology of archetypes, to the most abstract of theoretical physics in the person of John Archibald Wheeler who, though he does not cite Lévy-­Bruhl, is clearly thinking through the same concept of participation in his attempts to make sense of a universe subject to human participation in its own constitution and understandability, where spooky action at a distance, quantum entanglement, and Bohr’s theories all seem to be tied to the concept.42 Nonetheless, few people inside or outside of anthropology seem to remember much of Lévy-­Bruhl today. He is dismissed either as a racist, ethnocentric, colonial apologist indistinguishable from others of his generation or, at best, as someone who insisted that

One of John Wheeler’s various attempts to diagram “participancy” as a constitutive feature of the universe. From John Archibald Wheeler, “Beyond the Black Hole,” in Some Strangeness in Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievements of Albert Einstein, edited by Harry Woolf (Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley, 1979), 355. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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If natives think mystically, prelogically, or like children, they must, it is assumed, lack mature ratiocinative abilities. This is not the invention of Lévy-­Bruhl. ✴ Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 15

“Lévy-­Bruhl was first and foremost a philosopher” (Tambiah, Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality, 84). Meanwhile, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy mentions Lévy-­Bruhl chiefly in the article on relativism: “the argument for relativism about logic is usually traced to the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl (1857–­1939). See Maria Baghramian and J. Adam Carter, “Relativism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2018 edition), https://plato .stanford.edu/archives/win2018 /entries/relativism/.

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“primitive” and “inferior” races were incapable of logical thought: both excellent and sufficient reasons to ignore him. Within anthropology, he is often described as the guy whose speculative ideas were “disproven” by E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, whose definitive fieldwork among the Azande and Nuer in Africa “tested” Lévy-­Bruhl’s hypotheses and thereby (along with Malinowski) proved that he was, like Mauss, Tylor, and Frazer before him, “a mere armchair theorist who, like the rest of his French colleagues, had never seen a primitive man, far less talked to one.”43 Of all the early anthropologists who are routinely and often simplistically denounced for their racism, their colonial complicity, their ethnocentrism, or—­ perhaps more damning in a discipline committed to a certain relativism—­for simply being wrong, only Lévy-­ Bruhl really suffered at the hands of his fellow anthropologists. Figures like Frazer, Tylor, or Lewis Henry Morgan often garner a respect that overcomes, if not excuses, their Victorian beliefs about civilization, science, and progress, Lévy-­Bruhl more often than not comes in for little more than an embarrassed apology. Durkheim is secure in his place as a great, innovative thinker, while Lévy-­Bruhl is seen as a dupe of unreliable reports he could not confirm—­even though Durkheim relied on the very same sources. Perhaps like the Brahman priests of Benares, Lévy-­ Bruhl is fated to be the repository of the sins of his fellow scholars—­a sacrificial victim, the one whom anthropologists have chosen to repeatedly throw under the bus. Such accusations seem doubly unfair because Lévy-­Bruhl held a chair in philosophy, and had an established and successful career as a philosopher before turning to anthropology. But he also read much more widely, and much more deeply into the existing record of ethnology, than any fieldworker would have. Like his contemporary Marcel Mauss, Lévy-­Bruhl was one of a handful of extremely well-­versed comparativists attempting to make sense of a vast new archive Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

of information about the world provided to them by missionaries, colonial administrators, adventurers, travelers, and castaways—­frequently remarking on the quality of the sources, and sometimes, it is true, taking a great deal of interpretive license with what are otherwise very thin materials. In his time, it was this dual credibility—­as both holder of a chair in philosophy and an expert in the possibilities and problems of anthropology—­that made him the essential link in the founding of the Institut d’ethnologie. The centrality of fieldwork to the project of the Institut was, as it was in Britain, a subject of much debate, and the method itself was not yet so dependent as it would eventually become on a different kind of participation: participant-­observation. Regardless of his success, it is a melancholy truth that neither philosophers nor anthropologists claim Lévy-­Bruhl as their own. He is, as Frédéric Keck’s book positions him, “between philosophy and anthropology,” a fragile thread connecting the two.44 Lévy-­Bruhl’s liminal status is important for understanding why he hit on the concept of participation. His work is most often represented as an exploration of an epistemological problem—­fair enough, given his focus on “How Natives Think”—­but his starting point was not cognition, but the basis of ethics. Lévy-­Bruhl began his philosophical career investigating the problem of responsibility and the nature of morals and ethics. In a context of doctrinaire Kantianism (both in philosophy and in the social sciences), he was a dissenter: ethics was not a problem of deduction and categorical imperatives, but was to be found in the world as subjective intuitions occasionally made concrete. He was, to use the terminology of today, a moral realist about values, but also one committed to creating a science of those values. It was in the context of trying to understand how ethical or moral intuitions—­especially those immediately felt or sensed intuitions that seem to vary from time to time or place to place—­that he was led to anthropology. He was an early, though ambivalent, folPa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

There is something to be said about the relation between the method of participant-­observation and participation as a concept, but it is a problem for another work. However, on the topic of the founding of the Institut d’ethnologie, see Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–­1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 76 and following. Mauss and Lévy-­Bruhl were frustrated with the limited information from abroad and the inadequate training of those who did travel to foreign places. It may seem ironic that Mauss taught the introductory course on fieldwork at the Institut d’ethnologie until one realizes that only Mauss and Lévy-­Bruhl knew the extent of what was known and what was not. Thus, they sought to train a corps of experts in the proper objects and methods of a field science.

Without [these notebooks] we would not know about the high-­minded concern in the thought of the philosopher whose external appearance gave the impression of serenity. What was the object of this concern? Participation. ✴ Maurice Leenhardt, Preface to Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality (New York: Harper & Row, 1975)

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lower of Durkheim, focused on the idea of collective representations as a concept that he could use to make sense of, catalogue, and classify the immense diversity of moral beliefs around the world—­in order to determine, perhaps, what is common to them, and how they might test a deductive theory of ethics. What he found instead was the problem of participation—­and it captured and fascinated him all the way to the end.

What Was Participation? The concept of participation in Lévy-­Bruhl is not an easy one to grasp. In How Natives Think he introduced the “law of participation.” In later texts it would become “mystical participation,” by the 1930s it was sometimes signaled by the language of “mystic experiences,” and at the end of his life, in L’Expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs and the famous posthumous notebooks published in 1949, it takes on new formulation as “facts of bi-­presence or multi-­presence” and a problem of “duality-­unity.” But across all these works, it remained the core problem of his life’s work as a philosopher and as an anthropologist. Participation stood out for Lévy-­Bruhl because of the frequent testimony of perplexity in the reports, stories, myths, examples, cases, and ethnographies from around the world—­cases concerned with questions of ritual and religion, the soul, burial practices, numeration, totemism, and so on. Throughout his many books, Lévy-­Bruhl repeatedly marshaled examples of perplexity: adventurers, colonial emissaries, early ethnographers such as Elsdon Best, and missionaries from the seventeenth century, like Father Sagard, to those of the twentieth century, such as his good friend Maurice Leenhardt. Lévy-­Bruhl did not take his evidence simply at face value, notwithstanding Lévy-­Bruhl’s use of such evidence is a crucial part of Evans-­Pritchard’s unverifiable claim the story of participation: Edelfelt, for instance, was not that Lévy-­Bruhl misread his sources. an ethnographer, and his reports are manifestly untrustEvans-­Pritchard was always damning Lévy-­Bruhl with faint praise: “[Lévy-­ worthy, but they were—­for Lévy-­Bruhl—­not, thereBruhl’s] ideas have met with such great fore, simply false. Rather, they were repeated examples neglect and derision among English of a particular kind of problem that appeared around anthropologists . . . doubtless it is also due in part to the uncritical manner in the world wherever colonial encounters happened. The which Lévy-­Bruhl handled his material real question at the heart of it was not whether Lévy-­ which was often of a poor quality in Bruhl himself conducted such fieldwork (he would unany case” (Evans-­Pritchard, A History doubtedly have done a better job than Edelfelt), but that of Anthropological Thought, 120). the facts thereby collected, given all their flaws, demon68

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strated something that it is not possible to apprehend without such encounters. For Lévy-­Bruhl, such facts demanded respect and puzzlement—­of an eminently philosophical sort—­not rationalization or dismissal. This perplexity in the face of the perceptions of others lies at the heart of Lévy-­ Bruhl’s explanation of participation—­because they diagnosed differing forms of life, different judgments, and an inability to disagree, on which he could explore his ideas of ethical personhood. He collected and compared these documents and stories and anecdotes in order to put on display simultaneously the real facts of native life and the mistaken—­according to Lévy-­ Bruhl—­interpretation of them by their reporters and other interpreters. But before any interpretation, there came an intentional apprehension of particular facts and collective representations, which consistently produced perplexity in the observer. As such, Lévy-­Bruhl was very much the salvage anthropologist: these reports could establish an understanding of participation “by means of a system as objective, precise and detailed as that which experts employ in determining natural phenomena.” But we ought to “make haste” in our study because “now that [such a method] does exist, a kind of irony ordains that it has scarcely any object.”45 Easily the most famous expression of Lévy-­Bruhl’s perplexity—­which he himself made famous—­was the claim of the German ethnologist Karl von den Steinen that “les bororos sont des araras” (“the Bororo are red parakeets”), both human and animal at the same time. Of this claim Lévy-­Bruhl says, “This does not merely signify that after their death they become araras . . . ‘the Bororos,’ says von den Steinen, who would not believe it, but finally had to give in to their explicit affirmations, ‘give one rigidly to understand that they are araras at the present time, just as if a caterpillar declared itself to be a butterfly.”46 Caterpillar and butterfly at the same time. This is far from a difficult concept to understand, though we tend to organize it rationally in a temporal sequence: first Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

The red parakeets (sometimes macaws, sometimes parrots) are without doubt the bête rouge of twentieth-­century anthropology. First reported by von den Steinen in 1894 (Karl von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-­Brasiliens (Berlin: Geographische Verlagsbuchhandlung Dietrich Reimer, 1894); subsequently discussed in Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, edited by Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 7; Ernst Cassirer and R. Manheim, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol. 2: Mythical Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 65; Lev Semyonovich Vygotskii, Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), 128–­30; and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 121. It is a reference myth in Lévi-­Strauss’s Mythologiques; see Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), chap. 1. Debates rage about its original formulation by von den Steinen: are the Bororo araras now, or will they only become araras after death? Used as a whipping bird by Dan Sperber in his critique of relativism: Dan Sperber, “Apparently Irrational Beliefs,” in Rationality and Relativism, edited by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 152 and following. Subjected to restudies and extensive critique: Jonathan Z. Smith, “I Am a Parrot (Red),” History of Religions 11, no. 4 (1972): 391–­413; J. Christopher Crocker, “My Brother the Parrot,” in Animal Myths and Metaphors in South America, edited by Gary Urton (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), 13–­48; Terence Turner, “‘We Are Parrots,’ ‘Twins Are Birds’: Play of Tropes as Operational Structure,” in Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, edited by James W. Fernandez (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 121–­58.

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caterpillar, then butterfly; or butterfly immanent in caterpillar. But even more challenging, this was not just an issue of perception. For Lévy-­Bruhl, the portrait of Queen Victoria was both a picture and a causal agent, both representation and what is represented. Furthermore this “perception” is primarily affective—­immediate and emotional—­a kind of unjustified but true belief. As Lévy-­Bruhl would put it, rather than the “Western” habit of thought that perceives an object extended in space to which is attached a representation (word, symbol, mental image, logical identifier, or operator), the “primitive” experiences the thing and the representation at the same time, emotionally and affectively, but inside a coherent system (a “logic”) that does not obey the laws of excluded middles or causality. Lévy-­Bruhl described this occasionally as a way of thinking that Cartoon figure “primitives” possessed and “civilized people” did not—­or had lost; illustrating the claim but he later tempered and reforged his ideas and “watered down his that Bororos are wine” in light of relentless and harsh criticism.47 red parakeets (“The same . . . ?”). Source: “The debate initiated by Lévy-­Bruhl”—­as the title of Stanley Dr aw ing by Fr eZ, 2006 Tambiah’s essay on him has it—­has usually been taken to be an (http://r f.eer f.o .fr ee.fr/blog). Used epistemological question of whether different societies had differw ith per mission of ent “modes of thought,” whereby things like the law of contradiction the a rtist. were somehow absent or present depending on some cultural difference to be discovered. It was a question From my talks with him I would say too easily reduced to the problem of “relativism” or “apthat in this matter he felt himself in parently irrational beliefs,” or one accused of being ina quandary. For him, Christianity and Judaism were also superstitions, completely Durkheimian (that is, more cognitive than indicative of pre-­logical and mystiinstitutional).48 cal mentality and on his definitions Participation is thus opposed not only to represennecessarily so. But, I think in order not to cause offense, he made no allusion tation but also to causation as a constraint on reason. to them. So he excluded the mystical Causation and contradiction are activities of thinking in our own culture as rigorously as that separate, isolate, or differentiate rather than conhe excluded the empirical in savage nect, resemble, draw together, or juxtapose; they concultures. ✴ Evans-­Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought, 130–­31 cern the ex post facto organization of perception into representations that follow rational, logical rules. But Lévy-­Bruhl insisted that a “pre-­logical” experience—­emotional, affective, aesthetic—­preceded this step, and that it could not be denied simply as an error or noncognitive feeling. It was a form of thought that was immediate and affective, and he hypothesized that it must have a structure and a “logic” of its own that does not look like what we call logical, post hoc, representational, or symbolic thinking. 70

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However, Lévy-­Bruhl’s many critics, and even some of his defenders, took him to be saying that all and only primitives possessed this different mode of thought, and were incapable of representational logical thought, or were otherwise mistaken about the relation between emotion and objective causality. It was easy for the critics to point out all the ways in which said primitives were capable of ordinary logical reason, and how often they seemed to do it. Evans-­Pritchard, for one, objected that the natives reasoned logically all the time (indeed, he insisted, probably more than “us” because their lives depended on it more often), and engaged in these perplexing mystical claims only some of the time (sometimes a building is a sacred temple, sometimes it is a convenient place to lean your spear). Seen from this perspective, Lévy-­Bruhl does appear racist and ethnocentrist. And it doesn’t help that when it came to terminology, he chose wretchedly. “Affective,” “emotional,” “mystical,” “pre-­ logical,” and “supernatural.” Not only did the words connote things Lévy-­Bruhl petulantly claimed he did not actually mean, but also he frequently qualified the terms. By “mystical,” Lévy-­Bruhl repeatedly insisted, he did not mean mysticism, but only the attribution of real causes to unseen or imperceptible things. And by “pre-­logical” he meant not a stage of evolution before logic, not “anti-­logical” or “a-­logical,” but a logic of emotion or affect, not one of abstract manipulations of symbols. Rather than a pluralist relativist for whom a thousand culturally bounded flowers bloom, he seems to have been someone bent on pigeonholing “primitives” and “inferior societies” as nonrational, emotional, or “pre-­ In her introduction to How Natives logical”—­a negative characterization of a people who Think Ruth Bunzl describes her enlack what “we” have, a perverse embrace of a dualism counter with Lévy-­Bruhl in 1928, when she discussed her research on Zuni that was neither universalist nor relativist. ritual with him: “Lévy-­Bruhl pointed He would come in for no end of critique for the term out that what I described was precisely “pre-­logical.” Despite his attempt to defend his ideas, what he had been talking about. I countered, ‘But there is nothing primiLévy-­Bruhl eventually conceded at the end of his life tive or pre-­logical about it; it is just like that he should have chosen a different term—­but he the Mass.’ Lévy-­Bruhl agreed that this would not relinquish the concept itself. Even at the was so; that he had never claimed that logical thinking was confined to time, he must have recognized the unwisdom of his pre-­ the unlettered, but that it was another choice of terminology. Certainly it was recognized for way of thinking about reality, and him, since the English title How Natives Think (which that its incidence and characteristics has been remixed as a title countless times by anthro- should be studied” (Ruth Bunzl, Preface to Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives pologists ever since) was at the time deemed a much Think). better translation than the perhaps more accurate but Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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obviously problematic original: Mental Functions in Inferior Societies (Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures). William Mazzarella refers to this situation as the primitive settlement, “according to which ‘primitives’ engage the world by participation, whereas ‘moderns’ manage it by means of representation,”49 and of which Lévy-­Bruhl would be an exemplar. But in the same passage of his book, Mazzarella also seems to suggest that Lévy-­Bruhl may not have been completely committed to this settlement, and in this Mazzarella is correct. The more of Lévy-­Bruhl one reads, the more it becomes obvious that the primitive settlement was like a corset he had to wear in polite society, so as not to offend the very forms of common sense that he thought were so clearly contradicted when one encountered a moment of perplexity in dialogue with another. In numerous places and in conversation with many—­ Evans-­Pritchard, Ruth Bunzl, Leenhardt—­and in his own writings, he loosened the laces just enough to signal his discomfort. Lévy-­Bruhl was clearly at pains to distance himself from the very mistakes of which he was accused. He himself repeatedly criticized the English school of anthropology—­Tylor and Frazer especially—­as failing to understand primitive mentality because they were “perpetually trying to show the relation between ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ mentality and to explain it . . . they did not look for the facts themselves, but imposed [this ready-­made explanation] on them.”50 Repeatedly, he insisted that his approach was to take the existence of mentalités—­ways of thinking and being that “differ[s] from our own to an extent yet to be determined ” on their own terms.51 In book after book he reiterates his attitude: Let us then no longer endeavor to account for these connections either by the mental weakness of primitives, or by the association of ideas, or by a naive application of the principle of causality, or yet by the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc; in short let us abandon the attempt to refer their mental activity to an inferior variety of our own.52

Or here: We shall no longer define the mental activity of primitives beforehand as a rudimentary form of our own, and consider it childish and almost pathological. On the contrary, it will appear to be normal under the conditions in which it is employed, to be both complex and developed in its own way.53

Or again: 72

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Let us try to put ourselves at a more deeply situated level, that is to say to escape entirely from the psychologist’s fallacy and in no way make “primitive man” into a “savage philosopher.”54

Like Durkheim, Lévy-­Bruhl could have turned to the obvious cases of participation that still circulate among moderns: Roman Catholic liturgy, assertions of haunting, new spiritualist movements, sporting events, and so on. It seems obvious enough that everyday life in the civilized world is filled with people who see ghosts, heal people with a song, cry at long-­distance commercials, develop conspiracy theories, or have Jesus in them. We are content, however, to pathologize such experiences even more so among ourselves than most colonial administrators were ready to do among their dominated victims. Such moments of shared perception, glimpses of the collective hallucination of truth—­these also are moments of perplexity. But Lévy-­Bruhl was not interested only in a sequestered modern category of the spiritual or the religious; he was concerned with the constitution of the ethical domain itself: Just as the savage who violates a taboo testifies by the circumstances of his act to the existence and sacred character of the taboo as much as his companions who respect it; so in our civilized society the delinquent and the criminal testify in their fashion to the existence of ethical obligations which they disobey while the virtuous man obeys them.55

According to Lévy-­Bruhl, what perplexity signaled was not an alien logic but a component of ethical and moral reasoning. Either it had been forgotten, or else it had been reformatted: submerged beneath the representational logic that admits only the ex post facto reasons and beliefs, not the emotional and affective intuitions guiding human action in so many ways, every day, both commonsensical and perplexing. Although he does not say so directly, Lévy-­Bruhl intimates that primitives and Europeans are not different by nature, but have been bred or “made up” in ways that make them perplexingly alien to one another. One explanation that Lévy-­Bruhl offered for the disappearance of participation (without naming it) is a sort of Weberian one: historically speaking, the world of participation in the West has been subordinated to that of rationality and causality; enlightenment is built on restraining the irrational, on organizing government around Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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rationality and not around the immediate affect; we clearly restrain the passions in favor of the interests, and this has been seen as a generally good thing for the development of capitalism, if not exactly for civilization—­it has its discontents, as we know. But Lévy-­Bruhl might well have thought that the perplexity greeting those who experienced participation among the natives was not a sign of alterity of any metaphysical sort, but simply an inability that had been bred into us (this is very similar to the interpretation of participation that Barfield offers in Saving the Appearances). Regardless of which etiologic explanation one chooses—­or whether one needs a grand narrative at all—­Lévy-­Bruhl’s books are evidence-­filled diagnostics of the problem: that a certain perplexity confronts us, and that it cannot be reduced to a problem of error or of lack of development. In the Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, written near the end of his life, Lévy-­Bruhl enrolls Einstein, who in a short article called “Physics and Reality” offered the chestnut: “One can say: the eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”56 Lévy-­Bruhl elaborates: Compared with the rational world of our sciences the mythical world is unintelligible, imaginary and cannot be real: How does it happen that totally irrational as it is, with its impossibilities and absurdities, the primitive mentality takes it genuinely as real? In seeking the answer to this question, we know that the intelligibility of the rational world is itself unintelligible. Might there not be here a difference of degree? A transference of the unintelligibility of the detail to the world given in its totality?57

Lévy-­Bruhl suggests here that the difference between participation and representation is only a matter of degree—­that in both cases a relation to reality, both physical and social, is at stake. At the time he wrote How Natives Think, Lévy-­Bruhl relied on the Durkheimian notion of “collective representations” to make sense of how such beliefs are collectively shared. Later, however, that term would disappear from his work, but only because, as Keck puts it, Lévy-­Bruhl was not as committed to the existence of a collective subject as Durkheim was. Lévy-­Bruhl’s understanding of representations is not thereby strictly individualistic, though—­it is not about the structure of human cognition as a problem of the individual brain and cognition. Rather, I think, it resists the distinction to begin with: it concerns the existence and power of a force that organizes thought through a series of emotional and immediate connec74

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tions experienced by individuals. This force serves to make sense of a world without being cognitively expe- We know very little of Edelfelt, but rienced as a representation. Although he does not speak we know he was denounced by Sir William Magregor, who was governor of participation as a problem of experiencing oneself as of New Guinea at the time; that he an instance of a collective, he always remained focused received a frosty reception at the on the mechanisms that would allow such an experi- Queensland Society of Geographers, who refused to fund his visits; that ence to happen. he is characterized by the adventurer-­ The diagnosis of participation—­the ability we have novelist Nisbet as a “plucky young to notice its power—­rests on the fact of there being naturalist”—­whatever that might a distinctive perplexity in the experience of those who mean; and ultimately that he appears to have otherwise had no success encounter others: a misfit between the experience of as naturalist, ethnologist, colonial some and that of others when they come together that administrator, gold digger, agent of is reducible neither to any cognitive or biological dif- Burns-­Philp, or adventurer. Indeed, it seems all we know is that “On his reference, nor to any institutional or social organizational turn he practised [dentistry] for a time difference. Rather, it seems to reference a shared (thus in Brisbane until driven by tubercuparticipated), emotionally immediate sense-­making ca- losis to the drier climate of Freestone on the Darling Downs, where pacity that is only accessible in the experience of an Creek he died on 1 February 1895.” ✴ H. J. encounter—­and is only dimly represented ex post facto Gibbney, “Bean, Isabelle (1862–­1939),” in the reports that emerge from such encounters as per- in Australian Dictionary of Biography, plexity. Lévy-­Bruhl struggled to describe and pinpoint http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography /bean-­isabelle-­5167 the capacity for participation, and whether that capacity could be captured through the introspection of a philosopher. He had little interest in experiencing participation in just the way a resident of Motumotu would, but great interest in capturing it as a philosopher might. He was interested not in searching for the essence of some tradition or alterity, but in challenging the settled consensus of philosophy with evidence from a different place. Lévy-­Bruhl’s work was at odds with that of what would become mainstream anthropology—­the participant-­observation and fieldwork of scholars like Evans-­Pritchard and Bronisław Malinowski. What Mazzarella dubs the “empiricist settlement” of bounded, small-­scale cultural or social wholes was not what Lévy-­Bruhl meant by “primitive,” to be sure—­and not quite why he thought we should be studying either participation or the perplexity it produces. He did not focus upon the boundedness of different cultural wholes, but upon the differential results of encounters of all kinds: within, across, between, among. It is not the “culture” that precedes and makes sense of participation, but something more dynamic and ongoing—­always already establishing the world that it seeks to make sense of at the same time. It is in the multiplicity of collectives to which each of us belongs that perplexity arises. Left to a world of Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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routine and habit, one in which encounters—­whether face to face or mediated—­are merely repeated without difference, perplexity fades as disagreement sharpens and becomes clearer. In that world of habit and repetition, participation does its work immediately and affectively—­effectively. A feeling for ethics, and for politics, develops. An intuition forms that precedes but confirms justified beliefs. But add to that world encounters and disruptions, and that feeling destabilizes. For Lévy-­Bruhl, any participant encountering others—­ primitive or civilized—­is likely to feel the force and resonance of that participation, even if they cannot make good sense of it. Edelfelt was just such a participant in the lives of the natives—­ not a very good one, indeed, probably a disruptive, violent, and unpleasant one—­but a participant nonetheless. His evidence could not have been acquired other than by experiencing the village life of Motumotu, by putting on display for Lévy-­Bruhl and his readers the perplexity that demands explanation. It is important that Edelfelt had, in some sense, “gone native.” His reactions to the natives were usually immediate, not those of distanced observation; he felt compelled to interpret perplexity as error, as a pathology of race or development or climate or culture. Lévy-­Bruhl was quite clear that this was an incorrect interpretation of the facts. Lévy-­Bruhl did praise one participant above all others—­his friend Maurice Leenhardt. Leenhardt was one of the few who, after twenty-­five years as a missionary, could experience the participations of native life—­and interpret them correctly. Leenhardt called what he experienced “lived myth”—­a term that Lévy-­Bruhl refused in favor of his poorly chosen alternatives, such as “mystical experience,” intended to denote something that was not logical or philo-

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sophical.58 But between the two men emerged a clear sense of the centrality of participation as an immediate emotional capacity for sense-­making immanent in the individual, but also as evidence of a collective ethical world. James Clifford provides one view into the struggle to make sense of this experience by both Lévy-­Bruhl and Leenhardt: Leenhardt’s material shows Lévy-­Bruhl “the essential difference between concept and participation.” Participation is a personal experience, occurring hic et nunc, in its own space and time. “Whence it follows, as again says Leenhardt, that in the mythical world there are no contradictions, but only contrasts; events either come to terms with each other or disagree more or less strongly with each other; in so far as they are felt in their own space and time they clearly cannot exclude one another.” Participation is nonconceptual in the sense that “concepts are not events.”59

For Lévy-­Bruhl, the nonconceptual experience of participation still makes sense of an event, much in the way a conceptual or analytic approach might—­but it does so immediately and in the moment. It is a form of nonconceptual thinking. Leenhardt’s solution was to see in “lived myth” a way of thinking about the natural and the supernatural world in the same frame, but Lévy-­Bruhl never followed his colleague in this usage. Rather, by the end of his life, Lévy-­Bruhl had decided that participation was tantamount to being, and that the only way out of the “impasse” that “still causes a certain unease” is to “not get fouled up in it.” How? [B]y not taking for granted that things are given first and that afterwards they enter into participations. In order that they shall be given, that they shall exist, it is already necessary to have participations. . . . Participation enters into the very constitution of things. . . . The primitive mentality does not know what an individuality subsisting on its own is: individuals, human or others, only exist in sofar as they participate in their group and with their ancestors. Participation is thus immanent in the individual . . . it is a condition of its existence.60

After thirty years or more of struggling with the concept, Lévy-­ Bruhl had reached a certain degree zero, in which participation accounted for the very nature of existence—­the basis perhaps not only of “primitive” thought, but of all thought.61 Clifford captured this moment well: Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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One senses even today a submerged passion in the cool but unrelenting prose of the Carnets [Notebooks]—­the workings of a spirit almost obsessively thinking and rethinking the logical scandal of participation. Occasionally a word or a phrase gives us a glimpse of the personal need underlying the writing. It was a need to gain access to the experience of reality for which, as he recorded two weeks before his death, “our philosophical and psychological terminology is cruelly inadequate.”62

For Lévy-­Bruhl, the assertions that the Bororo are araras, that the Naga is a tiger, that Queen Victoria’s portrait caused a disease, that sorcerers kill people with magic are examples that demand a positive philosophical explanation, not a negative one (that they are errors, or failures of logic, or evidence of a lack of progress or civilization). But Lévy-­Bruhl did not, in the end, produce that explanation himself. Rather, he pointed to it vainly, with a kind of melancholy awe that it was not more obvious to everyone.

The Soft Parts of Social Fossils Why did Lévy-­Bruhl focus so intently on the concept of participation? One could do worse than return to the first book he wrote: L’idée de responsabilité (1884). Because, before participation derailed him, Lévy-­Bruhl was trying to solve a different problem in ethics. As Keck explains, Lévy-­Bruhl’s philosophical questions grew out of nineteenth-­century debates in the French philosophical reception of Hegel and Kant, the former via Victor Cousin and the latter via Charles Renouvier. At the basis of his ethical research is a question about the intuitions that we have concerning moral values. We might add here, in the spirit of provincializing philosophy: moral values specific to European liberalism, of which Lévy-­Bruhl was himself an exemplar. Lévy-­Bruhl was anti-­Kantian (and eventually anti-­ Durkheimian), in the sense that he sought to establish those moral values not on the ground of a transcendental analytic, but in a more Comtean spirit: by analyzing the objective instances of subjective intuitions about moral values, starting with responsibility. Rather than a deductive philosophy of ethics, he sought a more inductive one based on the existence of intuitions in the world that could be observed, catalogued and compared. As Keck says of Lévy-­Bruhl’s first book, it “defends the existence of a subjective responsibility that escapes the laws of objective and 78

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phenomenal causality, without thereby hiding it in a mysterious noumena, because its existence is attested by the historical formation of a sentiment of justice and of merit.”63 The problem—­the scandal—­of participation emerged against this background question precisely because it suggested to Lévy-­ Bruhl that some kinds of intuitions, which are eminently moral, cannot be rendered in terms of concepts, but are rather immediate emotional reactions, or “lived myths.” They achieve the same thing as “our” Western sentiments of justice, equality, freedom, or other moral values expressed in languages of resentment, reaction, justification, praise, or blame, but they cannot be rendered in the same terms. Lévy-­Bruhl was not directly concerned with the question of “responsibility” in the non-­European world, but the problem of responsibility set the stage for his later questions about the problem of identifying sentiments related to moral value. As Richard McKeon much later made clear, Lévy-­Bruhl had made an interesting discovery: “In the history of philosophic discussions, the appearance of the new term ‘responsibility’ passed almost unnoticed.”64 Responsibility, McKeon explained, was a “portmanteau concept” that combined issues of determinism (free will and the problem of causality) with issues of accountability (the subjective experience of both guilt and blame, attitudes toward oneself and others). The two halves of the concept of responsibility seemed to suggest differing logics: one more rooted in causality and the objective identification of chains of events, and the other rooted in accountability, a subjective, intuitive, affective experience of right and wrong, subsequently rendered into statements, accusations, or accolades. To Lévy-­Bruhl, steeped in Comte’s positivism, the idea of a science of morality that could be deduced philosophically—­in a Cartesian mode—­was in stark contrast to the manifest presence of a variety of empirical signs and symbols of morality all around us, which would need to be collected, classified, ordered, and rationalized if we wanted to understand the difference between the essence of ethics, and its obvious variations in the world. For Lévy-­Bruhl, the debate was not only theoretical, but also had practical origins and consequences concerning the late nineteenth-­ century psychological and biological research into criminality.65 If, as the popular approach to the psychology and biology of criminality had it, criminals were led ineluctably to crime by their biology and psychology, then punishing them appeared unjust, for they had no choice in the matter. But for Lévy-­Bruhl responsibility was not Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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purely a question of causality or imputation; human nature was not so resistant to its own action upon itself. Rather, responsibility was also an issue of accountability, and of the making and experiencing of statements and actions signifying praise and blame, which gave access to subjective intuitions of responsibility and duty. The solution he proposed placed him in an interesting space, as Keck also notes: between Gabriel Tarde, with his relentless focus on the individual’s imitative behavior (whereby crime is explained by a model of contagion), and Durkheim’s insistence on the existence of collective subjects (whereby crime becomes an expression of a properly social malaise).66 In his Ethics and Moral Science (1905), Lévy-­Bruhl provides the closest thing to a philosophical justification and a scientific program for his subsequent anthropological project. In that book, he stakes a Comtean claim on “moral science,” which would collect evidence of actually existing expressions of and variations in ethics decipherable through empirical research. It was opposed to ethics as a theoretical and legislative science of the good and the right to be arrived at by introspective or Cartesian methods, but also opposed to a strictly naturalist evolutionary framework that would distinguish between a natural and social milieu. The implication of this approach is that ethics must be studied comparatively and via historical, philological, sociological, and psychological research into the various differences in ethics—­within and between societies: Instead of constructing a hypothetical primitive man a priori, instead of determining his emotional, intellectual, and ethical functions by a retrospective and hazardous induction, we recognize a scheme, doubtless useful, but an empty scheme. It can only be filled by the analysis and comparison of the different processes of social development which are actually produced; an analysis and comparison which will place us in a position to dissociate what is common to all from what is not.67

To fill in this scheme requires a project different from that of philosophy; it is modeled on the natural sciences and the researches of experimental physics, but it relies on identifying feelings that cannot be accessed in any obvious way: The study, it is true, presents special difficulties. Feelings do not leave material traces, nor objective witnesses of their existence, which survive that existence itself. The scientist is obliged to restore 80

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them by an often hazardous retrospective process of induction. . . . But when we have the detailed description of the burial or nuptial rites of a given community, we run small risk of deceiving ourselves in regard to the ideas and beliefs associated with those rites; and our interpretation approaches certainty (if we dare speak of certainty in such matters), when we can confirm it by analogous facts in other communities and at other epochs. . . . But nothing exists of the feelings accompanying the ideas, beliefs, practices, institutions, which gradually abandoned them or more or less survived them, to testify directly to their intensity, even their right to reality, nor at certain times even to their presence. They are the soft parts of social fossils. They have disappeared while the skeleton has remained.68

Lévy-­Bruhl maintained a scientific faith that ethics and morals might eventually be known and norms thereby established, though whether for prediction or control or something else is unclear. But the faith found expression in his subsequent work: a massive comparative effort to document and juxtapose the social fossils of ethical life, and somehow to thereby recover the “soft parts” that consist of feelings, emotions, sentiments or logic.69 Lévy-­Bruhl had two targets: one was the mistaken approach of the English ethnologists who mistook their own ethical feelings and understandings for those of societies that are manifestly different; the other was moral philosophy itself, which could never hope to explain the existence of our own institutions, beliefs, and judgments about things such as justice without a proper scientific exploration of, as Lévy-­Bruhl put it, “what is common to all and what is not.” The “soft parts” of the social fossil, therefore, are what was visible to Lévy-­Bruhl in the expressions of perplexity and the stories of contradiction or incompatibility that he found everywhere in the existing ethnographic record. They were the immediate and affective “participations.” The experience of responsibility in the praise and blame of people around one pointed toward an underlying, possibly systematic structure of ethics; the statements (bones) are all we have to reconstruct this ethics, which is otherwise immediately and affectively felt and intuited.70 Lévy-­Bruhl’s later use of terms like “pre-­logical” and “mystical” seems to excommunicate him from the domain of conventional (analytic) philosophy—­indeed, he seems to have acquired very few readers in that discipline. But roughly the same intuition has guided some of the most austere attempts to make sense of ethics Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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in the twentieth century. To take only the most obvious example, in 1962, Peter Strawson penned one of the most famous twentieth-­ century articles on the nature of freedom called “Freedom and Resentment.”71 In it he argues cleverly against the “thesis of determinism” (that we lack free will, and therefore a basis for ethical claims) by pointing out the ways in which we react to the actions of others. Strawson points out that sometimes we experience what someone has done as an affront, and our reaction is to resent them for it. Sometimes we experience what someone has done as an accident, in which case we do not resent them, but look on them differently, excuse them, and do not judge them. Strawson was pointing out the same thing that Lévy-­Bruhl was: the objectively demonstrable expressions of subjective intuitions. What is even more interesting about Strawson’s argument is that we have two attitudes of reaction available to us: objective and participatory. Sometimes we observe an interaction, including with ourselves, with distance and curiosity (as when we attribute madness or some other disability to someone who does something we disapprove of). And sometimes we cannot observe, but must participate immediately in the action and reaction of an ethical encounter: “What I have called the participant reactive attitudes are essentially natural human reactions to the good or ill will or indifference of others towards us, as displayed in their attitudes and actions.”72 Applied to ourselves—­and not just to the perplexing claims of the Bororo—­participation allows us to see a difference between the responsibility I feel as an affect (“he deliberately stepped on my hand and did not say he was sorry, which makes me angry; thus he is bad”) and something we feel but then attribute to an objective chain of causes (“he had a seizure and he bumped the table that knocked over the vase, and although that was horrible, he is not bad”). The former tells a story of intention, malice, and physical assault; the other tells a story of medical incapacitation, misfortune, and loss. The concept of participation, then, ought also to be seen in light of Strawson’s explanation: it is not just the same structural problem as that of the Bororo, but part of a general experience of the workings of responsibility. At what point do I feel as if I am part of something, and what does it mean when I say that I am? If I say I am a red parakeet, it may not always be an ontological claim—­indeed, it probably never really is—­but it may well be a moral or ethical one: I am responsible for all those things associated with red parakeets, and red parakeets are both a symbol and an instance of the things I 82

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am responsible for. It is perhaps simply a question of personhood, not ontology or epistemology. When UCLA students are exhorted to be Bruins, it is not an ontological claim in the sense of becoming-­ bear, though some do take the identification rather far. It is rather an experience of responsibility—­that there are ways one ought to be, and ways that by virtue of being a Bruin, one is constrained to be, and that these things are shared by all Bruins (or red parakeets). What is important for Lévy-­Bruhl’s approach to this, and perhaps also to Strawson’s, is that it is not a list of things, deducible from logic or a transcendental analytic that determines the structure of responsibility; rather, we are soaking in it. The sense of looking at something—­a tree, an animal, a landscape, or crucially, a collective—­and feeling not just a totemic identification with it but rather a sense that one is actually an instance of that collective, or thing, or being, or place—­this is participation.

Conclusion Lévy-­Bruhl’s intuition about participation, and why it might again be legible today, is that it makes sense of a form of a perception and sense-­making that is all too familiar: a way of living the stories around us. From this perspective, Enlightenment rationality is one kind of story—­neither the only story nor the only rationality, even if a dominant and compelling one. The perplexity we experience when, for instance, people refuse to believe in the existence of climate change should perhaps be similarly diagnostic for us, and not simply an occasion to pathologize or accuse (resentment, on the other hand, may be a common response to such denial, and a sign of this perplexity). An experience of lived myth, as Leenhardt dubbed it, is one in which the world is not represented to us in pictures or words, not distanced by an abstraction and a symbol, but immediate and emotional—­and when we feel such things, we are feeling a collective of some kind operating through us: we are becoming-­ collective, we become an instance of a collective. The problem, of course, is that “collective” means too many things. We are members of too many collectives: couple, family, neighborhood, city, network, race, ethnicity, nation, crowd, arena, agora, sufferers of some disease or toxic exposure, beneficiaries of welfare, loyal soldiers of armed forces and victims of state violence, protesters of racialized policing and professionalized members of police forces. Can we be an instance of each of these, can we be an Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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instance of all of them? Do we do so in serial or in parallel? Do they not conflict in so many different ways that to feel “collective” at all becomes impossible? Perhaps, strangely, Lévy-­Bruhl was right to note that this mode of participation happens in an “inferior society”—­if by that we were to take him to mean simply “at first.” For every collective we belong to, there are times when we participate in Lévy-­Bruhl’s sense, and there are times when we represent to ourselves our membership in it, develop a contributory autonomy toward it (or against it). At first, we do not notice we are part of a family, we merely feel the love directly and immediately—­or suffer the violence directly and immediately. Later we are asked to describe, to represent ourselves as members of a family: as loving son, daughter, or abused brother, sister. As Strathern points out, we learned to use the terminology of relation at some point, both in our lives and historically.73 At first, we experience ourselves not as having a race, but as different or same, as an instance of a school or a neighborhood, which at some point fractures into an experience of being an instance of a race for some, and not for others. At first, we do not notice we are victims of a toxic exposure: we merely experience immediately and directly the explosion, the sickness, the shared experience of a danger made real. Later, we develop language and claims and demands and stories that represent our particular fate, in order to narrate that experience of being an instance of a particular collectivity of suffering, exposed people brought together this time not by skin color or cohabitation but by the irresponsibility of a corporation or a government. In the story that opens this chapter, that of Edelfelt among the Toaripi, his perplexity reveals something more than just a “law of participation.” He is there at a very particular time in history, not “at first” in any historical or temporal sense. In fact, he is there quite late: the missionaries have come already, the colonial powers have come already, the naturalists have come already, capitalism has come already, tourism has come already. There is no sense in which the perplexity of the natives at the portrait of Queen Victoria should be read as some sign of a radically prior state of being, of “primitive” or inferior societies, and no one should suffer fools who describe it this way. No, their explanation of the cause of disease, as well as Edelfelt’s interpretation of that explanation, all issue from a mess of interacting collectives, none of which is inferior. I picked the story of Edelfelt from Lévy-­Bruhl’s footnotes almost 84

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at random, as an experiment in recovering the notion of participation that obsessed him. I chose it in order to give flesh and blood to the perplexity that Lévy-­Bruhl took the story of Queen Victoria’s portrait to represent, as one fact among many in his database of perplexity. But the story is much more than that, and in many ways impossible to reconcile with Lévy-­Bruhl’s theories or anyone else’s story. The soft parts of it are gone, but so are the stories of the Toaripi, of the residents of Motumotu, and possibly of their descendants. It is unclear to me, after much searching, what became of the kadisu Edelfelt stole; no doubt it entered the circuits of global collecting and trade, perhaps was exhibited by Edelfelt in Australia, or sold to some renowned collector. I owe something to this story now, but I do not think it is necessary to recover some long-­lost past or tradition—­there is too much to attend to in contemporary PNG to go idly looking for such things. Edelfelt’s own narrative of acquiring this object gives the lie to his own account of the natives—­it is he who is the real thief, not them; or perhaps he notes their thievery only as a way of making sense of his own. Now, from within this story, with the help of The Participant, I myself find it totally uncontroversial to blame the epidemic in Motumotu on Edelfelt’s larceny—­on the removal of the kadisu. It no longer feels mystical to believe this, but rather almost common sense—­or as commonsensical as one can feel from this distance. Similarly, the blame heaped upon the portrait of Queen Victoria makes sense because it was a new entrant into the field of perceptions—­the participations at work—­in the village. There is a missing story of how the disappearance of the kadisu itself was felt, and explained by the Motuotuans. The men who sold it to Edelfelt no doubt would have wanted its disappearance to appear to be cosmic, and not simply the result of the machinations of a couple of craven villagers; or perhaps they themselves experienced it as an ironic transaction, or a medicinal one. The soft parts of this fossil are lost forever—­but so are those of Edelfelt’s experience, despite the persistence of his stories. What is much more obvious is that even if Queen Victoria’s portrait did not cause any illness directly, it was very much her participation that made the whole story possible. Can we say with any certainty whether the picture of Queen Victoria is not, in fact, Queen Victoria herself? Everything in colonialism happens as if the sovereign power of the crown is immediately present in New Guinea, despite the fact of her physical body residing in Buckingham Palace. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E x p e r i e n c e d

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In many ways, and with the benefit of hindsight, it makes much more sense to blame the portrait—­the crown, the commonwealth—­for the disease.

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Participation, Employed October 1947 The Participant is making pajamas and dreaming of change. It is fall in Marion, Virginia, and The Participant is sitting in a meeting with the other six girls from her group—­they are, for now, “pajama examiners,” whose job is to “clip threads from the entire garment and examine every seam.”1 It is dull work, but they are all good at it, and they are paid on an “individual incentive system” in which “piece rates are set by time study; one unit is equal to one minute of standard work: 60 units per hour equal the standard efficiency rating. Thus, if on a particular operation the piece rate for one dozen is 10 units, the operator would have to produce 6 dozen per hour to achieve the standard efficiency rating of 60 units per hour.”2 The girls usually manage to come in above quota, but their job will change—­“when you make your rate, they change your job”—­and then once again The Participant will have to learn to make 60 units.3 As long as their jobs aren’t changed, the girls are happy enough; but changing the job means

Women sewing at long tables next to tall windows in a garment factory.

Source: K heel Center for L a bor-­ M a nagem ent Docum entation a nd A rchi v es, ILR School, Cor nell U ni v er sit y.

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trouble, because it always takes time to get really good at any particular job. “Ratings were posted daily, and their names were no longer near the top of the list. A large number of the workers who had been shifted twice never regained their high places on the list—­although they were able to, they gave up trying.” And bosses are always changing the jobs.4 During the war, the company made underwear for the army, lots of underwear. Some of the machines have plaques that say “Harwood Underwear Corporation”—­the name of the company in New York before it opened the Marion plant in 1939. Most of The Participant’s friends joined during the war, what with all the guys going off to war, needing extra clean underwear and all, and so the plant needed lots of new workers. That’s when the factory opened in Marion and hired “three hundred inexperienced apprentices—­people from the Virginia Mountains . . . mainly women with no factory experience.” Now they mostly just make pajamas; there are “about 500 women and 100 men,” none of them much more than twenty-­five, and no one with more than “eight years of grammar school education.”5 Everyone is “eager to work,” but no one is fast, and no matter how much the line managers encourage and prod and scold and yell, the girls don’t really pick up the pace. They have all become pretty experienced, but what does it matter if you’re good at a dozen different pajama jobs—­cutting, sewing, folding, trimming, inspecting. When you get into a rhythm, you can make 60 units easily, but there isn’t too much to gain from doing more than that. It’s tedious work, hard on the hands and back and eyes. For a while management insisted on changing the lighting all the time, yammering on about some factory in Chicago that had figured out just the right amount of light to make people happy. Baloney.6 Mostly though, The Participant likes to talk with the other girls, and mostly, the managers try to stop them doing so: EVELYN: Are you going to the show tonight Mary? MARY: I don’t think so, went last night. EVELYN: Wasn’t that a good show? Gee I liked it. He was so handsome and she was so good! BILL: (Comes in quietly and walks up to desk, leaning on it with both hands. Waits a moment. Both girls stop speaking and look up at him.) Girls, you all are talking too much. MARY: Why Bill we weren’t saying much. EVELYN: We’re doing our work all right aren’t we? MARY: Yeah, we’re making our units aren’t we? 88

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BILL: (Hesitating for just a moment.) Maybe you two girls are making your units, but they’re others who aren’t. Your talking bothers them. MARY: We don’t care about them. Let them look out for themselves. We’re doing all right. EVELYN: Yeah. We do all right. And we gotta talk. BILL: We can’t get the production out if you bother others and talk so boisterous. MARY: I don’t care about production. I’m just working until I can get a release anyhow. If you don’t like the way we act, go ahead and give us our release. EVELYN: Yes, give us our release. We don’t care. But we gotta talk. That’s what tongues are made for. MARY: Yeah. Tongues are fastened in the back and loose in the middle just so people can talk! So let’s get our release and quit. Come on Evelyn.7 Girls were always quitting. Sometimes it was easier to quit than to try to make 60 units when a job changed. After all, there wasn’t such a need for girls to work, after the war was over. Some girls quit just to show that they could. Honestly, it could be pretty frustrating. The Participant might make it to 60 units on one job—­clipping threads, say—­then get transferred to a different job, maybe folding pants, and make it to 56 units and just get stuck there, never quite making it back to 60. Every day working harder to make 60 when she could do it last week and then failing. Quitting often seemed easier. Some of The Participant’s coworkers found ways to slow things down—­ like the little red light that you could turn on to signal “machine trouble”—­ especially since the thread broke all the time. If you were tiny, you could claim the bundles were too heavy and get the supervisor to help you. A lot of times, girls working a particular job would get together and make sure no one went to much over the 60 units, so that everyone looked good and no one got reprimanded for not keeping up. Even though they all sort of felt like they were in this together, the girls could be mean if you struck out on your own. Poor Dottie Sholley and Oakie Shapely—­they were ridiculed and made scapegoats by the girls, just for going over 60 units.8 The Participant often wondered why Harwood seemed such a strange place to work. The management wasn’t like those at other places she’d worked. Most girls didn’t realize it, but there were a lot of doctors around—­ psychologists, mostly. The owner Dr. Marrow was a PhD, so was the personnel manager, Dr. Coch, and there was even a “plant psychologist,” Dr. Bavelas. There were other folks around, too—­in fact, the younger girls were too new to remember it, but The Participant did: when the factory opened, Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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Patents filed for pajamas by the Harwood Corporation. Hyman L. Green and Alfred J. Marrow, “Garment (U.S. Patent 2,371,584),” March 1945; Seymour A. Marrow, “Child’s Pajamas (U.S. Patent D168,698),” January 1953.

right at the start of the war, there was a foreigner, “a psychology professor with no industrial experience who spoke English with a German accent,” who showed up around the plant. “He was popular with the production workers and supervisors alike—­popular for himself and his suggestions.” He was funny and charming, and his “first baffled attempts to understand the southern drawl amused [everyone].” It was flattering, “the way he quickly adopted some of [their] expressions,” like when someone would say something bogus, he would say, “That’s snake oil!” and everyone would laugh.9 These doctors were always organizing discussions with workers and supervisors—­usually with people like The Participant, who was a “high producing operator,” as they said, which sounded flattering. She thought so, anyways—­since she was always offering her opinion, sometimes they pretended to listen. Usually the discussions were friendly. They talked about problems with the machines and so on; sometimes they voted on the best way to do something, or the number of units they thought other work-

Advertisement for Harwood pajamas, from Women’s Wear Daily, 1955.

ers should be expected to make; sometimes the doctors gave them little cards where you were supposed to keep track of your own work instead of the supervisor doing their job. There was much chatter about the “atmosphere,” and about “vectors” and “fields,” and some of the managers said that sometimes it was like being in acting class with the doctors, the way they sat around and pretended to be different people in order to figure out the best way to boss the girls around. Or whatever it was they were doing. So it wasn’t at all surprising when they called The Participant in, along with the other six girls in her group, to have a meeting with management, and there was the personnel manager with his clipboard, asking all kinds of questions. The Participant knew what was coming; she had been around long enough to know that when they called a meeting like this, it meant they were going to change the jobs around. But this time there was something different; normally, it was just the time-­study man and the supervisors (who were all men) who talked down to the girls and made up new jobs that didn’t make sense. Really, the supervisors didn’t understand the job changes much better than the girls did, but it was their job to encourage the workers and explain the changes. They insisted that the world changes and that we can’t just keep making the same pajamas the same way all the time. The customers want new pajamas; the customers want Mickey Mouse on their pajamas; the customers want this and that . . . so now The Participant gets to sew ten more pieces a day but get paid a dime less per piece! Honestly, are they surprised that the girls don’t try harder? That some of them quit? Is it worth it to break your thumbs and your back trying to make quota for the extra dollar? 90

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The Participant and five other girls had just settled into the personnel manager’s office, when one of the managers held up two pairs of pajamas that looked the same, and asked: who can tell me what the difference is? One of the girls said she thought the color on one was a little lighter; another said that someone had done a lousy job clipping the threads off, and everyone laughed (since that was their job). When no one could guess, the supervisor said they were identical except that “one had been brought out two years before and had sold for half as much again as the other, brought out a year later. Both were of excellent quality. But one was made with costly frills which raised its price without adding to its quality. What could be done? The group was asked to discuss this.”10 The situation was this, said the manager: “we don’t want to sacrifice quality, and we don’t want you to lose any income. What ideas do you have about this?”11 At first it was not clear what the manager was asking—­the girls weren’t the ones who made these decisions. But the manager explained: if they changed the pajamas to speed up the stichers’ jobs, it might affect the folders’ jobs or vice versa. Since the girls were the ones who did the work, the managers were asking: what’s the best way for everyone to produce more, but without slowing down some parts of the line? How could the jobs be changed? The Participant talked about how the line gets fouled up because the supervisors just want more more more . . . but then some other part of the line can’t, or won’t, keep up. Others chimed in with stories about how to slow the line down if they needed to; they talked about talking with each other and about how to keep a steady pace without the whole line slowing down. They talked about how “a savings could be effected by removing the ‘frills’ and ‘fancy’ work from the garment without affecting the folders’ opportunity to achieve a high efficiency rating,” and they agreed that there were other ways to make the garment the same way, with less work.12 The manager was enthusiastic and said so. The Participant was surprised—­all the girls were—­that management was suddenly so interested in what the girls thought about the jobs, but everyone had an idea: “Suggestions were immediately made in such quantity that the stenographer had great difficulty in recording them.”13 Talking together, they realized how much they knew about the machines and the line and the right way to sew or clip or fold. But they had never been asked, only told how to do it. They made the work happen, but they had never been asked to make it happen differently. Ironically, by the end they had all agreed to a new job, the very thing they had dreaded coming into the meeting. What’s more, they had convinced themselves they could go from 60 units up to 80 or more. The time-­study man would check and measure the new job, and then everyone would be Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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The grievance committee arrives. Still from The Pajama Game, directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen, 1957.

trained, the new piece rate set, and they would see if they could make the new quota. They all left the meeting strangely excited, and for what? For having given themselves more work? Not exactly. For something else, for something they had done together, and for being recognized as a group with new ideas and different ways of making them happen. In fact, “by the second day they were back to their former level of production, and thence steadily raised it to a point about 14 per cent higher than ever before . . . no one of this group quit.”14 For a while they all felt something together, but no one could put their finger on it. For once, a job change had not felt mean or capricious; for once, they had felt something like control, however temporary. For once, they felt not like quitting, but like repeating the experience. After a couple of weeks the girls were goading each other on, and making between 70 and 80 units; for a couple of days they even got above 80. The feeling of control waned, though, and The Participant could feel it clearly. The job became tedious. There were no more meetings with management, and there was no fun in breaking records anymore, so the thread pullers were back to their normal 60 unit level. The pay was fair, though, and they did not complain about what they had managed to negotiate this time. Weeks later, The Participant was bored at work and wondering: why did management do this only once? Everyone thought it was good—­why not do it again? Why weren’t they being called in to discuss other changes and other jobs? She asked around, curious if other girls had experienced the same thing. 92

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Some other girls, the “hand pressers,” told The Participant they had been called in and given a new job, but they weren’t asked for their help or input. They “had formerly stacked their work in one-­half dozen lots on a flat piece of cardboard the size of the finished product. The new job called for stacking their work in one half dozen lots in a box the size of the finished product.”15 They said the supervisors had explained the need for the new job, then set the piece rate, and that was that, just like normal. They weren’t so happy as The Participant’s group, and they had said so, calling the new job a “calamity” and “arbitrary and unreasonable,” and then they had colluded to keep production at only 50 units.16 Other girls told The Participant about a similar meeting, but rather than everyone moving on to the new job, they picked a few “representatives” who would be trained first. These girls talked about the meeting in the same way as The Participant’s group did—­“our job, our rate etc.”17 They, too, were surprised at how fast they made it back to the 60 unit level—­though it wasn’t so clear, because for a week or so there was a shortage of cloth, and so they couldn’t do much more than 50 units anyways. But three weeks later they were close to 70. The Participant knew enough to know that the managers were up to something, and she wasn’t shy about gossiping with the others. The Participant had a hunch there was some kind of game going on, but the doctors never said right clearly what they were doing. She had been there long enough to know that the psychologists were studying the girls, but she had no idea exactly how. One thing was clear, though: it meant some groups of girls were making more money than others, and that news was bound to get around. In fact, it wasn’t long before someone called in the grievance committee. The plant had only just been unionized, though the unions had been trying since it had opened. “Union organizing campaigns had been carried on separately by three different and competing unions—­the Textile Workers Union, United Garment Workers Union, and Local 50 of the United Mine Workers—­from the time the plant opened in 1939. On March 28, 1945, with 419 eligible employees voting, the United Mine Workers received 47 1/2 percent of the votes cast.”18 A year later, it was the International Ladies Garment Workers Union that finally succeeded in unionizing the girls; a contract was signed on December 31, 1946. Some of the workers had noticed that girls on different jobs were making more than others for the same work, but management insisted that it was all based on the job and the time-­study man’s measurements and the fact that some groups were better than others at making over 60 units. A rumor went round that some union folks were passing out pamphlets that Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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Labels of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. Source:

K heel Center, ILGW U Collection, Cor nell U ni v er sit y.

said, “To the workers of Harwood Manufacturing: Do you know that you are being used as guinea pigs?” Neither The Participant nor any of her friends had seen such pamphlets, but still it made her wonder what it might mean. More often the union officers were “behaving like statesmen” and claiming not to understand completely what was going on. The girls “elected an aggressive shop steward who damned both the union officers and the plant management” for exploiting the workers.19 The shop steward had clearly heard the rumors, too; she spent most her time trying to convince everyone that there was more going on than met the eye. First she blamed the management, but then she said she didn’t trust the union either and that they weren’t properly paying attention to what was going on in the plant. That was when “in protest against a local union official” she “began an unauthorized walkout.”20 It’s unclear what happened afterward. Some of the girls insisted that “Dr. Marrow, the company president, came down to visit the plant with a staff member of the union’s engineering department and departed hastily when he saw the violence of the workers’ feelings.”21 But others said that “top-­level union officials, distressed by the illegal wildcat strike, telephoned Harwood executives (including Marrow, who was at the plant) to give assurances that the walkout would be ended immediately.”22 This is what comes of not being on the level with people, thought The Participant. Whatever management was up to, it seemed like a good thing—­but the fact that they weren’t doing more of it or being up front about it obviously caused problems with the workers. It was so clear to The Participant that the plant managers—­those psychologists—­really didn’t understand what the union leaders were saying, even though they seemed to be speaking directly to each other. Like they were speaking the same language but just couldn’t see the world the same way. Some of the girls watched as one of the plant psychologists told one of the union officials, Grace McWhorter, “‘that she had the brain of a cockroach’ and [he] would not waste time with her.” Then he marched into the office of the head of the Management Engineering Department of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, prepared with “a chart of Lewinian field vectors and reported that the ‘people’s aggressions’ were expressing themselves in restricted production, that there were two ways that the problem could be solved—­the first, by yielding to their demands for an upward adjustment in the disputed piece rates, which, of course was impossible, the other by . . . cooperating.” No one in the union was “interested in his concept of cooperation.”

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Overcoming Participation The 1947 experiment by Lester Coch and John R. P. French at the Harwood Pajama Factory in Marion, Virginia, published in 1948 in the journal Human Relations as “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” stands respectably firm in the literature of participation, and especially participation in the workplace. It is neither the first, nor the definitive, study of participation at work, but it was a galva- Carl Zeiss factory, Jena, nizing event—­and a kind of singularity—­for the fields of industrial Germany, 1910. relations, human relations and human resources, and “participative management.” It was enrolled, contested, refined, and, most of all, it spread from organization to organization—­and most definitely not only in pajama factories—­from the 1950s to the 1970s. As The Participant’s experience attests, the experiment captured a fleeting sense of collaborative innovation and collective experience. It showed how workers are often full of ideas but are not granted the autonomy to lead or to implement them; it revealed how nonplussed workers are by the supposed expertise of supervisors and managers, and how the Coch and French are but one starting point. Bob Brain’s excellent article on language of participation makes sense to some (exper- Weber’s methodology recounts one of imental social psychologists) but not to others (union the experiments conducted by Ernst officials). And despite the success, even when given the Abbé in 1900, in the Carl Zeiss factory, where Abbé was engaged in a similar chance to innovate, the participants remained trapped experimentalization of the workplace in a gendered division of labor that looks more like a in the interests of measuring productivity. Brain’s article details how Max race to the bottom than a liberation of the workplace. was drawn into these debates, This chapter uses the Coch and French study as a Weber and the tension between a natural place from which to view participation in the workplace science approach and a historical apas a problem and as a particular achievement. The be- proach to survey research in factories. ginning of the chapter sets up the background for the Interestingly, the greatest success came at the hands of Marie Bernays, at the experiment and looks at how it used Kurt Lewin’s “so- time a young doctoral student in Wecial climates” to create the idea of a “dyadic” notion of ber’s research group (later a leader of participation that takes groups as an essential and fun- the Nationalen Frauendienst in Mannheim, and director of the social school damental unit of participation. Crucial to this part of in the same city). Bernays was able to the story is the idea that experiences can be created by get really good survey results by actua mix of organizational form, leadership, and experi- ally getting hired in the workplace and fully in the life of a textile mental control, and that therefore both the satisfaction participating factory. See Robert Michael Brain, of the workers (as a group) and the profitability of the “The Ontology of the Questionnaire: firm results. The middle part of the chapter explores Max Weber on Measurement and the grammar of participation—­from the enthusiastic Mass Investigation,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 32, no. creation of a “participative management” by social psy- 4 (2001): 647–­84. chologists and management theorists in the 1950s to the Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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union-­led critiques of cooptation (joined by sociologists like Daniel Bell and C. Wright Mills). The latter part of the chapter opens the question: what did the women in the Marion plant “experience” by participating—­a fleeting control over the nature of change in their own jobs? What subsequently came to be known as “job enrichment” is today at the heart of theories of motivation in management theory: a form of contributory autonomy severed from any collective experience of power. The story of workplace participation is also one story of the development of contributory autonomy: the replacement of individuals whose personhood is a feature of the groups they experience with individuals whose personhood is expected to create those collectives through contribution. This story holds many similarities with other analyses of the transformation of individuality in the late twentieth century. Two worth mentioning at the outset are the work of Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller in Governing the Present, and that of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. In the former, the practices and procedures of Lewin and his students in crafting “participative management” can be seen as an exemplary case of “governing through freedom.” Rather than toe the line of an increasingly unhelpful Marxist analysis of “worker control,” they turned to Michel Foucault for a quasi-­behaviorist explanation of how people participate in their own governance, in this case by being exhorted to be democratic, independent, autonomous, and eventually entrepreneurial. This was not a liberation of the individual through inclusion, involvement, or participation, but the crafting of a new kind of subject, whose satisfaction is defined by the capacity to be “enterprising” and entrepreneurial and responsible for his or her own work: “autonomous” in the sphere of production. Rose and Miller focused on a very similar and connected development in 1970s Britain, largely by exploring the “quality of work life” movement and the work of Fred Emery and Eric Trist at the Tavistock Institute.23 “Quality of work life” initiatives were a largely British and continental variant of “job enrichment”; it emphasized the devolution of control to “semi-­autonomous working groups” and a greater emphasis on the central role that technologies play in the design of jobs. It shares a history, if not quite an outcome, with the earliest meaning of “participatory design”—­namely, that associated with the Scandinavian researchers who sought to transform the relation of workers and technology in factories.24 Luc Boltanski 96

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and Eve Chiapello, by contrast, observed a different result in the same period, and in some of the same movements and practices. Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis largely derived from reading the management handbooks and “critiques” of the 1960s and 1970s, as evidence of the critique of capitalism. In their version, these critiques emerge as much from the workplaces of capitalism as from the streets of May ’68. They explain that “measures aimed at giving wage-­earners greater security were replaced by measures directed towards relaxing hierarchical control and taking account of individual ‘potential.’ In a political reversal, autonomy was, as it were, exchanged for security.”25 Rather than a welfare-­state system of secure careers resulting in persons trapped in the famed iron cage, the critique of capitalism ushered in a “new spirit” of autonomy that would come to saturate workplaces with new demands for increased creativity on the part of workers.26 The story I tell here is a variant of the same set of critiques they observed—­but that emerged a bit earlier in the United States, pinpointed by corporate America and a handful of social psychologists, and taken up more enthusiastically in the 1960s as a cultural and political demand more generally. Rather than the street protests of 1968, America’s apotheosis came in 1962 with the Students for a Democratic Society and the coining of “participatory democracy” as the demand of the new era. The success of this critique, they suggest, may well account for the aggressive return of demands for “community” in the 1990s and 2000s. I build on both of these works here with a difference: I find the emphasis on the individualization of freedom or creativity, while significant, to be only part of the story. Contributory autonomy as a form of personhood demands not a total relinquishing of collectives, but a different relationship to them—­one that forsakes the intimate relationship to a collective as an emotional or affective experience in favor of one that sees collectives as the result of a rational, procedural contribution on the part of individuals. Whether one sees participation enthusiastically as contributory autonomy or with suspicion as a form of exploitation reveals quite different models of the function, creation, and maintenance of collectives.

Lewin and the Social Psychology of Participation Coch and French’s experiment continued the work of Kurt Lewin, most famous for his experiments of the late 1930s on “social climates” of democracy and autocracy. Lewin was a guiding figure for Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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Exemplary field diagrams from Lewin’s work; Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 51 and 136.

experiments such as those at Harwood, but much of what followed in his footsteps was an attenuated version of his own sophisticated attempts at developing a Gestalt-­like theory of social relations, using a complex topological model of fields and forces.27 What captured students’ imagination in Lewin’s work was primarily its new mode of experiment in social psychology and a new set of results peculiarly suited to demonstrating the malleability of both regimes and people, democratic and authoritarian. His influence on a generation of postwar intellectuals was profound—­concepts like “cognitive dissonance” (Leon Festinger), “conflict resolution” (Morton Deutsch), or “planned change” and “change agents” (Ronald Lippitt), as well as experimental methods like those of Stanley Milgram or Philip Zimbardo, can all be traced back to Lewin’s influence. Lewin’s most famous experiments on social climates were conducted in Iowa at the Child Welfare Research Center. He and his team observed young boys in a specially constructed attic environment, and sorted groups into “democratic,” “laissez-­faire,” and “authoritarian” atmospheres, each carefully constructed as combinations of physical spaces, organizational structures, and role-­playing actors who would exemplify this difference. Given the same tasks, the children in the democratic atmosphere, of course, proved to be more effective, happier, cooperative, and, in short, American than those who were sorted into the authoritarian environment, and who proved combative, ineffective, scheming, and prone to fascist modes of leadership and response. Lewin had turned the question of democracy into an ontological question: does it exist, and if so, can it be captured in an attic? Javier Lezaun and Nerea Calvillo suggest that these experiments led in two directions. One was toward the increasingly controlled, blank space of the experimental observation room that would slowly dismantle and remove all the “atmospheric” aspects that Lewin and Lippit had built into their work, in favor of a one-­way mirror and a strictly controlled environment. But the other was toward what Lewin would eventually label “action research,” in which the laboratory was made messier and less controllable—­literally exported into the living worlds of workplaces and communities where democracy was in need of “facilitation,” and where what Lippit would eventually call “planned change” could be instituted. It is in this latter context that the Harwood experiments provide a starting point for understanding the itinerary of participation in the twentieth century.28 Both directions participate in what Lezaun, Muniesa, and Vik98

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kelsø call “provocative containment” in the social sciences. The experiments are designed to provoke a version of reality by containing it within highly artificial spaces, like the specially constructed attic (or see Milgram’s experiments on obedience). While often critiqued for a lack of realism, they can be understood better as techniques for inciting something that is otherwise hard to observe in the social world, and distilling that experience as much as possible. They emphasize the production of experiences as the core of their scientific value: “provocative containment puts emphasis on the lived experience of realizing a social phenomenon,” and “to see or know something means to actually ‘do it.’”29 The Coch and French experiments are no doubt a form of provocative containment; but the containment here is intentionally leaky. Lewin’s action research program was intended to make the provocations of research into something that could be permanently installed in places where it could make a difference, and his students enthusiastically took up the challenge of making social science do something—­and not just study or represent it. In the American context, at least, such forms of provocative containment would not survive the critiques leveled at them (which included both scientific critiques of their irrealism and ethical critiques of their manipulation), as far as academic social science was concerned. But in establishing techniques for management and organization on the ground, they escaped their containers, and took on a life of their own. The Coch and French study, in particular, has been widely cited—­and widely critiqued—­as proof that involving workers in the decision-­making about their own work leads to dramatically better productivity. As such, it inaugurates a split in the concept of participation whereby it is possible to see its “dyadic” character: that it provides benefits both to the workers and to the workplace. This dyadic character rendered participation amenable to an experimental enthusiasm, and to new kinds of critiques, especially those coming from labor unions and left-­leaning commentators for whom the benefits to the workers—­however satisfied, happy, productive, involved, motivated, or engaged they might be—­could never outweigh their exploitation. The Harwood experiments are also, I suggest, a key site in which contributory autonomy starts to emerge as a central feature of the problem of participation. The individual worker is not, for the Harwood experiments, the object of study—­rather, it is the group. But in the course of working over participation at work, social psyPa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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chologists, management theorists, and managers in various places eventually redefined participation in terms of individual desires and actions, rather than in terms of a psychological relation emergent within a group. For the first time, it starts to become clear that there is a distinction between the experience of participation—­embedded in an “atmosphere” or “social climate,” for instance—­and the more functional, voluntary self-­determination of individuals in participation. From the perspective of contemporary management and its practices, this aspect has been rendered into a fully individualized psychological problem: the problem of motivation. It now comes with its own routine observational variable called “participative decision-­making” and is in no way identifiable as a collective or group characteristic; rather, it requires attention to the design and structure of both managerial technique and jobs themselves. Today, when we speak of “creativity” at work, we are often looking for “self-­motivated” people who do not require a “kick in the pants” to do their jobs. But before this particular emphasis on contributory autonomy emerged, managers and managerial theorists reckoned with the meaning of workers’ own participation and even more so that of the managers, whose responsibility for creating democratic atmospheres through “participative management” resulted in a three-­decade-­long self-­examination. All this, and more, gave rise to a proliferation of forms of participatory management whose more recognizable and common name today is simply human resource management.

Situating Coch and French Coch and French’s study was explicitly focused on “groups,” not individuals—­and differed in many ways from the standard stories of scientific management or time-­and-­motion studies that emphasized the precise control of individual workers, like cogs in an engine. Rather, it raised the question of controlling the social climate or atmosphere of groups as a way to transform both the experience of participation by workers, and their measurable productivity. Before Coch and French came an even more famous set of experiments that tried to control workplace culture in different ways: the so-­called Hawthorne experiments of Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, which took place from 1924 to 1933. These experi100

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ments were conducted at the Western Electric manufacturing plant in Hawthorne (a section of Chicago populated largely by Polish and Czech immigrants). The researchers started with simple questions about the quality of the lighting in the plant and its effect on productivity, and proceeded to measure a range of other variables. Mayo was something of an intellectual impresario, a friend of Bronisław Malinowski and fan of Vilfredo Pareto’s sociology, who insisted that workplaces came with their own “cultures” and needed to be understood as such, anthropologically. Mayo urged the researchers to rethink organizations as having formal and informal structures that linked the people at work to On the Hawthorne experiments, the the bureaucratic structures in which they operated. He definitive historical work is Richard brought in the anthropologist Lloyd Warner, freshly Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne returned from studying the Yolngu (whom he called Experiments (1993). Although the by the name Murngin) of Arnhem Land in Australia, Hawthorne experiments were not in order to study the “natives” on the production line: explicitly about participation, in sociologist Paul Blumberg arthe young men and women from “Bohemia” who con- 1968 gued that “worker participation” was structed the electrical equipment that would make up introduced not as an explicit part of the rapidly expanding infrastructure of telecommuni- the experimental setup, but instead as a kind of confounding variable: cations around the world. “the method chosen for securing The Hawthorne experiments were never explic- the workers’ cooperation [in the itly about participation. Nonetheless, they responded experiment] was to give them, for to one of the same problems that participation did—­ the first time in their working lives, a substantial voice in the determinamely, the rise of scientific management. Popularly, nation of their work situation in all the experiments are remembered for what is now rou- its aspects. Thus the introduction tinely referred to as the “Hawthorne Effect”: the idea of workers’ participation was due to an error in the research that what the workers were responding to was not the originally design of the experiment.” The result designed experimental variables, but the experiment in the first of the experiments led to itself—­the attention paid to the workers and perhaps dramatic improvements in morale their sense of involvement. But it was Mayo’s under- and productivity, while a later experiment that lacked participation standing of Frederick Taylor and scientific management led to alienation and stagnation. See that animated the experiments and ultimately the ideol- Paul Blumberg, Industrial Democogy behind them. For Mayo, at least, the issue was not racy: The Sociology of Participation (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), participation, but the extension of scientific manage- 34–­35. ment to the psychological health and morale of workers. As Gillespie suggests: Mayo consistently rejected the view that workers had any contribution to make to the organization of their work. . . . Taylor had advocated that knowledge of the technical organization of production be consolidated in management. . . . Mayo was now advocating that management take charge of the social relations of production.30 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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Without a focus on the “human relations” and the informal social organization that could be observed in any workplace, managers and leaders could never hope to lead solely through formal organizations. This extension of the role of the expert, in line with a Taylorist ideology if not a strict implementation of his ideas, naturally brought the Hawthorne experiments in for critique from people like Daniel Bell and C. Wright Mills, as even more insidious examples of the alienation and exploitation of workers.31 The extension of management expertise to the social relations of workers is not incompatible with the approach that the Coch and French experiment would take, but there are differences in approach. Certainly, there was really very little sense among the Lewinians that the workers were in any way Before World War I, trade unions and corporations alike imagined a range of expert, or should be given any actual decision-­making different forms of worker-­management control over the factory—­t hey merely wanted to relations and so-­called welfare capitaldemonstrate that the group experience of democratic parism (see, for instance, Sanford Jacoby, ticipation generated gains in productivity, as opposed Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal [Princeton, NJ: to an experience of the opposite (not being consulted, Princeton University Press, 1997]), but having no vote, merely being told what to do). In this by the end of World War II, workplace respect, the Harwood and Hawthorne experiments had contractualism was firmly established as the sole point of contact between more in common with each other than they did with workers and management. So argues other traditions more explicitly concerned with the acDavid Brody, “Workplace Contractutive involvement, control, or power of workers—­those alism in Comparative Perspective,” in Industrial Democracy in America: The of Industrial Democracy or the labor unions most speAmbiguous Promise, edited by Nelson cifically. However, they clearly differ in the substance of Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, their approach—­that of participation as such, as well as Woodrow Wilson Center Series the field theory of Lewin. (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Cambridge University Press, The Harwood experiments did not have any explicit 1993), 176–­205. links to economics or management ideologies beyond the then dominant time-­and-­motion Taylorism, which was clearly operative in the plant; but neither, clearly, was it driven by the labor unions. The unions saw participation as their own responsibility: something they did on behalf of (and to protect) the workers. Bruce Kaufman suggests that the earliest expression of what would become participative management was conceived and articulated by John R. Commons in Industrial Goodwill (and then forgotten, like so much of his work), and that during the era of so-­ called welfare capitalism (1910–­30), ideas of the consent and participation of workers had grown quite popular (see, for example, W. R. Basset, When the Workmen Help You Manage [1919]).32 No doubt 102

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these ideas circulated in the background, but by the 1930s, the rise of labor union power had changed the relationship between workers and management considerably, and focused attention primarily on issues of wages and collective bargaining. Closer to the concerns of the Lewinians, but still distant, was the broadly pragmatic managerial approach of Mary Parker Follett (a disciple of Dewey), or Ordway Tead, author of one of the earliest personnel management textbooks, both of whom focused on the identification of problems and the collaborative solution to them by workers as well as management.33 The pragmatic perspective saw the necessary forms of intelligence as broadly social or collective, and not as a function of individual expertise embodied in a credentialed engineer, and so found some overlap List of Published Exper iwith Lewin’s vectors and force fields in social psychol- ments at the H a rwood Pla nt ogy. (They have found expression much later in the Alex Bavelas and Kurt Lewin, “Trainwork of researchers like Charles Sabel or Archon Fung, ing in Democratic Leadership,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 37, who adopt very similar pragmatic methodologies.) no. 1 (1942): 115; John R. P. French Jr., Coch and French’s study saw the psychologists play- “Retraining an Autocratic Leader,” ing dual roles as observers and management experts—­on Journal of Abnormal and Social Psythe one hand, eager to improve the subjective experi- chology 39, no. 2 (1944): 224; French, Playing as a Method of Training ence of group life among workers; on the other hand, “Role-­ Foremen”; Alfred J. Marrow and John in league with the “efficiency experts” of Taylorism who R. P. French, “Changing a Stereotype played an essential role in their experiments, and the in Industry,” Journal of Social Issues 1, factory they ran. “Overcoming Resistance to Change” no. 3 (1945): 33–­37; Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change.” came at the end of nearly a decade of experiments conducted at the Harwood factory, starting in 1939. The Harwood factory’s president was Alfred Marrow, who had obtained a PhD in 1937 (in psychology, at New York University), after having come under Kurt Lewin’s influence and direction. Marrow offered up the factory as a convenient experimental space to conduct research on the social psychology of group dynamics. Such a fact speaks volumes about a certain era of elitism in science, when the personal social network effectively governed the possibilities, process, and success of science. It was also a time, importantly for this story, before any apparent concern about the protection of human subjects: it was neither necessary nor unnecessary to inform the women of their involvement in research. Marrow and Lewin (while at MIT) would go on to found the National Training Labs (later located at Bethel, Maine). The men were also connected through a small network of influential scholars to the Tavistock Institute in London, the industrial relations Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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program at MIT, and later the Institute for Survey Research at the University of Michigan; this network of institutions was central to the construction of a vigorous, if slightly marginal, domain of social science research focused throughout the midcentury on participation at work. Much of the research was communicated in the journal that Lewin and his students started, the Journal of Social Issues. Lewin died in 1947, but John R. P. French, as his intellectual heir, saw an opportunity to conduct a field experiment that would test some of the more and less formal questions they had already been exploring at the plant. Over the course of the war, the Harwood scientists conducted various experiments on employee turnover, group decision-­making, role-­playing and sociometric techniques in leadership, changing stereotypes, training in democratic leadership, and probably many more informal adjustments that did not rise to the level of scientific experiment. Indeed, the fully blurred line between manager and scientists is exemplified in the fact that Marrow owned the company and that John R. P. French, Lester Coch, and Alex Bavelas all held paid positions in management at Harwood—­which presumably made them also responsible for its economic success, not just its continued production of knowledge. In 1947 Lewin famously dubbed such research “action research” in the context of “minority problems” in New York, which was work that Alfred Marrow was also heavily involved in as a Jew and a civic leader in the city (through another organization created by Marrow and Lewin, the Commission on Community Interrelations).34 The Coch and French experiment was subsequently repeated several times—­by French and colleagues at Harwood and later in a shoe factory in Norway, as well as by many other researchers, with variations, over the coming decades, and there are many interpretations of what the results might actually mean.35 It has been critiqued many times over the years, though often with little awareness of how experimental methodologies have changed, or how the concept itself easily slips out of the grasp of experimental hands. Carleton Bartlem and Edwin Locke object that there was a more proximate explanation for the performance of the different groups—­namely the “perceived fairness in the new piece rate,” though why such fairness should not also be an outcome of participation is not clear.36 In 1985, Katherine Miller and Peter Monge conducted one of several different metastudies of work and participation—­but they excluded the Coch and French study, saying: “Coch and French (1948), the classic study that stimulated interest and research in 104

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participation, is also plagued by methodological problems . . . the extraordinarily small within-­group variance in this study, possibly the result of group conformity, made the effect size computed from it misleading.”37 This reasoning misunderstands the nature of the focus on groups by social psychology at the time, and the goals of action research, planned change, or the ontological concern with identifying the existence of group-­based causes. What Lewin and collaborators were investigating—­group dynamics—­was a different object than what subsequent psychologists would identify as the object of investigation. Indeed, the idea that “group conformity” was a problem, rather than a resource, is good evidence that by the 1980s it had become impossible to think of participation as a feature of groups; it became a problem to be avoided rather than explained, and could be measured only through a strict methodological individualism, preferably one administered carefully by survey using a standardized “participative decision-­making” measurement tool. Regardless, the Coch and French study continues to be cited as an important milestone, and, to be sure, those involved were completely convinced by it, especially Alfred Marrow, who went on to build both his career and his management philosophy around it.

Table of contents from W. R. Basset, When the Workmen Help You Manage (New York: Century Company, 1919).

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Dyadic Participation With respect to participation, the most obvious feature of the Coch and French experiment is that participation was made “dyadic”—­ which is to say, it was made to be something with effects for both the participant and the thing being participated in. Participation at work not only benefits workers (by bringing them democracy and freedom—­if we buy that it does—­and by improving psychological health or happiness in some way), but also makes the workplace more productive. This yoking together of the goals of an enterprise with the happiness, contentment, or democratic satisfactions of the individual is the most enduring achievement (and contested claim) of the “human relations in industry” school. Across all the subsequent studies and explanations, this feature of participation appeals to managers or human resources experts. They do not see only democracy for democracy’s sake, but also increased productivity, higher quality, and perhaps even profits. Participation from the vague moral high ground of “Industrial Democracy” to the increasingly rationalized domain of “participative decision-­making,” measured, monitored and made routine. The dyadic feature of participation is an invention of those academics—­like Coch and French—­who studied it in workplaces. The idea appears strange when participation is considered in light of conventional democratic governance. The participation of individuals in their own government is not—­at first glance—­intended to improve the operation, success, or efficiency of government. If anything, in most theories, it is intended to have salutary effects on the citizens themselves while maintaining, via procedural safeguards, the expression of the general will by which they wish to be governed. Justice and freedom, in some abstract sense, might be achieved, but not improved by participation. In the context of capitalism, however, amid the pitched battles of the 1930s and 1940s that championed the welfare advantages of capitalism over those of centralized production, the only way to make a convincing case for participation is to show that it has concrete, measurable, and positive effects on the organization or entity providing for that participation, and not only on the subjectivity of the workers, or else that it is some abstract duty for industry to become more democratic. Indeed, when viewed from the perspective of union labor leaders, every effort to improve participation could be seen as a containment strategy by management to exploit 106

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workers who possess no meaningful self-­government within the “participation” offered in the workplace. In the case of Coch and French, it is primarily “productivity” that benefits the firm, measurable simply because the operation of the business involves counting the number of pajamas made per employee each day. There are other benefits, more proximate, they claim: that employee turnover is reduced, that employees are less prone to sabotage or antagonism, and, as the title suggests, they are less “resistant to change.” “Change” was a proxy for what would now be called technological innovation: improved machinery, new styles of pajamas, different methods of production or quality of materials, and so forth—­all of which necessitated a change in the work pattern, and associated learning curve, of the women responsible for the work. What Coch and French created with their social climates at Harwood was not just a moment of overcoming resistance to change, but a fleeting moment in which the workers were involved in that change. This is only obliquely understood within the experiment itself, and more or less forgotten completely by subsequent management theories of participation. The Coch and French experiment is distinct in part because it is not clear that the workers explicitly knew that they were participating or in what they were participating. It is not obvious from the experiment that a self-­awareness on the part of the workers is considered an important feature of participation—­and to demand such a self-­possession might also have been a confounding variable in the experiment itself. The Coch and French study initiates (or modulates from the previous Hawthorne experiments) a style of management that is concerned with how the experience of work, and especially the experiential effects of participation (as opposed to hierarchy, autocracy, or discipline), is related to the measurable outcomes of work, given that experience. And it is also, in their particular mode of social psychology, focused on identifying these experiences as a feature of social groups—­not individual dispositions. In this respect, participation and democracy are environments or atmospheres that an organism responds to—­not a set of subjective beliefs, commitments, or virtues that an individual cultivates in him-­ or herself or respects in others. The experience of participation in Coch and French is a kind of stimulus and response—­befitting a broadly behaviorist orientation—­and not a cognitive question of knowing one’s interests and seeing them satisfied by participatory or democratic systems. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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But even if or when it is adopted as a general rule (a “participative management” approach, and not just an experiment), often only the managers know that participation is one strategy among others and not just a characteristic of a particular person, situation, or corporation. Participation—­or aspects of democratic leadership more generally—­are abstracted into organizational, structural, and technological features of an environment: a “social climate” or “atmosphere” or “leadership style” that, when present, is said to change the psychology (attitudes, motivations, resistances) of the worker in ways that make them both happier and more productive.38 Productivity is not the only benefit The Coch and French study treated the group exclaimed by partisans of participation. Later, and in a different context in the perience of participation as something functional: it can 1960s, quality became the key benefit be produced and controlled, and it has measurable efof participation. The improvement of fects on productivity, so long as this group experience quality through the active participation and monitoring of those closest is structured correctly. The functional role of group exto the production line is also the story perience disappears from “participative management” of the “Japanese Miracle,” “quality slowly and through careful refinements in the expericircles,” W. Edwards Deming, and so-­called statistical process control at ments on participation. First, it becomes a problem of work: another chapter entirely, but the individual experience of participation (“satisfacone equally committed to the idea tion,” “happiness,” and “motivation”), and then it bethat one can have worker participation comes more or less irrelevant functionally speaking: no cake­­and eat corporate benefits too. experience necessary. The formatting of participation for contributory autonomy requires an individual person whose experience is internal and autonomous, not one that is a feature of controlled or produced group experiences. The formatting of participation as an environment is important because it raises the specific question about whether the experience of participation needs to be one of explicit self-­awareness of participation. The difference between deciding to participate and participating in a decision is raised here, but with the very strange effect that the women were invited to do the latter without ever being asked to do the former. To not know that one is participating is thus not yet the same thing as being manipulated or coopted. The goal of the Coch and French study was not to change the management structure or hierarchy, or the decision-­making capacity of the workers—­it was strictly intended to produce a social-­psychological feeling of having participated, without any correlative awareness or consciousness of having done so. This approach sets up Coch and French for the critiques that soon came from the labor and union leaders: that they were treating workers as guinea pigs, and that what they 108

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meant by participation was really nothing more than cooptation. A more subtle analysis of what is at stake, however, comes from Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, who have clearly identified this style of “governing through freedom” as a particular kind of response to the experience of fascism: To rule citizens democratically means ruling them through their freedoms, their choices, and their solidarities rather than despite these. It means turning subjects, their motivations and interrelations, from potential sites of resistance to rule into allies of rule.39

Lewin is, at first blush, an obvious case of this, and his students, like Marrow, were avowed culture warriors whose aims were not simply to demonstrate the scientific basis, or ontological existence, of democratic social climates, but to bring them into being actively, through action research and through the innovation, in Harwood’s case, of new schemes and management systems that could be implemented there and exported elsewhere. The Harwood experiments were not concerned with anything like indoctrination or some proto-­cognitive-­behavioral therapy that would orient subjects toward proper democratic behavior; rather they were complicit—­ ironically—­in a certain ideal of total control. Rather than controlling subjects themselves, however, they A wonderful and curious example of would control the environment, the organization, the the attempt to control an environstructure of the factory, even its physical and mate- ment totally in the name of participation at work is the example of the rial layout and design. From such a total social climate sea-­going vessel Balao described by groups would respond, interact with each other, and Javier Lezaun. See Lezaun, “Offshore Democracy: Launch and Landfall of a work more democratically—­become collective. Socio-­Technical Experiment,” EconoThis feature of the study—­that the group is not my and Society 40, no. 4 (2011): aware that it is participating—­is perhaps not surpris- 553–­81. ing for the time. Lewin’s psychology, and social psychology of the time, took groups as their main focus. Indeed, as Rose notes, groups were being discovered everywhere at this moment in history.40 It is within groups, and their dynamics of interaction, expression, and emotion, that the Lewinians observed the effects (discussion, deliberation, consensus design of tasks, or the absence of all these) of the environment or atmosphere. This is, according to Coch and French, precisely what makes individuals feel as if they are instances of the company, rather than dominated or controlled by it, and it is by intervening at the group level, and not the individual, that Lewin and others thought they could best effect change. Coch and French even call this the “we-­feeling” of the group, and Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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insist (without ever describing how they know it exists) that higher we-­feeling leads to better cooperation within the group, and that by virtue of their experimental treatment, they are pleased to report that the women in the experimental groups under democratic atmospheres start to speak about “our rate” and “our job.” They say: [The girls] displayed a cooperative and interested attitude and . . . immediately presented many good suggestions. This attitude carried over into the working out of the details of the new job; and when the new job and piece rates were set, the “special” operators referred to the resultants as “our job,” “our rate,” etc.41

Marrow makes it even more explicit when he revisits the experiment in his Making Management Human: “The tone of the meeting was set by them as spokesmen for ‘the other side’ but they nevertheless soon began to talk of ‘our rate’ and ‘our job’—­their ‘we’ had come to include management.”42 One can read this two ways (and thereby see in operation the distinctive grammar of participation). One way is as they intend it, which is to say, enthusiastically, as an expression of how a democratization of the workplace leads to better productivity (and, they also claim, drops in grievances, antagonism, turnover, and slowdown) and an actual change in the subjectivity The focus on groups in Lewin’s of workers—­the production of a kind of worker virtue work was “utterly unassimilable by American social psychology,” as Kurt analogue to civic virtue. Or one can read it negatively, Danziger puts it. For a reassessment, as cooptation, as craven manipulation of the workers see Kurt Danziger, “The Project of an by management, essentially fooling them into working Experimental Social Psychology: Hisharder, without compensation, and without any real torical Perspectives,” Science in Context 5, no. 2 (September 1992): 309–­28; also or meaningful say in their work. Obviously, Coch and Bernard Burnes and Bill Cooke, “Kurt French’s approach has no truck with a notion of misLewin’s Field Theory: A Review and recognition or ideological hegemony—­that the workRe-­evaluation,” International Journal of Management Reviews 15, no. 4 (2013): ers say they are content and appear to be content is ev408–­25. idence enough that they are, in fact, content. That they work harder in a democratic atmosphere than an autocratic one is a good enough reason to choose the former over the latter. To govern through freedom is not to remove freedom but to enhance it, on this view. The contentment of the workers, however, does not come from knowing that they are participating. It is not the fact of democracy being explicitly on offer that accounts for their happiness or their productivity, but the “social climate.” Such manipulation of social climates never disappears from the practice of participation. Indeed, 110

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even if the theoretical assumptions about group dynamics inherent to Lewinian social psychology are stripped away, the attempt to package and produce the experience of participation continues in the form of the tools they created—­and ultimately in the tool kits, sourcebooks, handbooks, and practices that will proliferate well into the twenty-­first century. Coch and French opened up the possibility for a distinctive, shared form of life available to managers, academics, and workplace reformers: an enthusiasm for techniques and experiments that ultimately turned participation into something not about workers, but primarily about managers. The enthusiasm for “participative management” lasted well into the 1970s, but it also invoked an alternative form of life—­one most visible in the suspicion of leftists and union leaders concerned about exploitation, control, and manipulation of workers. In the next two sections, I explore how management theorists reworked participation into a management theory that spread into workplaces around the world; but opposite this, a persistent skepticism about the real effects of participation on workers animates the imagination of union leaders, social scientists, and others. The “grammar” of participation works here to lead both sides toward the exploration of alternatives, and the critical reformulation of the problem of participation, in different directions.

Enthusiasm: Participative Management The immediate outcome of the Harwood experiments was that they formed a launch point for the movement most commonly known as “participative management,” though also referred to as part of human resources management and strategic human resources management, and with connections to other midcentury management fads and research programs. The influence of the small network of men involved in crafting these theories is strikingly larger than one might expect. That network included people such as Chris Argyris (Personality and Organization), Rensis Likert (of the Likert scale), Douglas MacGregor (of “Theory X and Theory Y” and “human potential” fame), and Abraham Maslow (of the “hierarchy of needs” fame). Together this group of men transformed the relation between psychology and management after the founding experiments of Harwood. All these men but Argyris were trained in psychology, most of them in social psychology; the message they brought to the postwar Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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For a historical analysis of the emergence of human resources management, see especially Bruce E. Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 2008); Kaufman, “The Theory and Practice of Strategic HRM and Participative Management”; Kaufman, “The Historical Development of American HRM Broadly Viewed,” Human Resource Management Review 24, no. 3 (2014): 196–­218; Jenna Alden, “Bottom-­up Management: Participative Philosophy and Humanistic Psychology in American Organizational Culture, 1930–­1970,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012, http:// hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14790; Bernard Burnes, “Kurt Lewin and the Harwood Studies: The Foundations of OD,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 43, no. 2 (2007): 213–­31.

managerial class largely had to do with some version of the “humanization” of work—­how better to defeat the communists and to show the virtues of capitalism than to demonstrate that workers under capitalism were more content, more productive, and more likely to realize their “human potential” than they were under communism. But it was not often explicitly conducted under the sign of anticommunism or antifascism; rather, it was, as in MacGregor’s work, an attempt to offer a kinder and gentler theory of human nature, backed up by experimental psychology, and in the case of Coch and French, by dramatic proof that “humanization” was also profitable.43 Marrow himself remained involved both in psychological research and in the continued use of his own company as an experimental space; in 1957 he published his own popular management handbook, cheerfully illustrated with dozens of newspaper cartoons, called Making Management Human. It eschewed any of the language of vectors and force fields of his Lewinian train-

Cartoon printed in Alfred Marrow, Making Management Human: Tested Methods of Applying the Findings of Psychology to Everyday Problems of People Working Together (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1957), 114. 112

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ing, focusing instead, in good handbook form, on “the dynamics of togetherness” and the remaking of managers as face-­to-­face listeners and leaders who understand how participation works—­never inviting participation in decisions that the workers will not actually get to make, for instance, or matching types of participation to the skills of different employees. In stirring passages of commonsense advice, Marrow proposes, for instance: Participation, then, leads to more loyalty, more flexibility, and more efficiency. It can only flourish, however, in an atmosphere of candor, and it calls for patience and a sincere tolerance toward the opinions of others, for willingness to split the command and to acknowledge that others, too, are capable of bearing responsibility.44

There follows, of course, a detailed description of the Coch and French experiment. Later, after buying a competing pajama company called Weldon—­the original inspiration for the 1950s hit Broadway musical (and subsequent film starring Doris Day) The Pajama Game—­Marrow published an account of the success of his style of “participative management” called Management by Participation.45 That book included contributions from academic psychologists as well as plant managers and executives at Weldon; incorporated the language of “change agents” and planned change from Lippitt; and included reports and results from a variety of surveys and questionnaires (such as Likert’s “43-­Factor Profile of Organizations” tool), and experiments conducted at Harwood/Weldon over the course of the 1960s. In most midcentury participative management, the distinction between management and workers remains firmly in place. There could be no manipulation of democratic atmospheres, no power to become a more humane manager, or to implement “theory Y” instead of “theory X” about human nature, if the nature of control was undermined by “anarchy” in the workplace.46 In its most extreme forms in Douglas McGregor and Abraham Maslow, it adopted an increasingly individualistic language of “human potential” and “self-­actualization” that on the surface claimed to be about the healthy, productive worker, but was ultimately about the transformation of managers. It was, after all, managers who attended “sensitivity training sessions,” and “T-­groups,” and were expected to transform themselves—­in the interest of happy workers and better profits, to be sure—­much as the 1960s rhetoric of consciousness-­raising and participation would extend this new Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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theory of human potential to all kinds of people doing all manner of things. Participative management flourished arguably until the early 1970s, at which time it crashed. Economic reality changed at that point. A 1972 film called Management by Participation, produced by BNA Communications and filmed at the Harwood Marion plant, plays like an after-­school special about participation, with actors playing out different scenarios of participating in decision-­making, intercut with interviews with an aging Marrow, who speaks with a deliberateness and cadence that suggests he might never actually have seen a moving picture, much less performed for one. The young interviewer does his best to make the whole project seem radical and innovative—­but it is clear that although Harwood was a successful experiment, participation was no gold mine, no instant route to growth and productivity, just one good idea among others. But the obsession with participation did not disappear at this point—­only the initial enthusiasm did. Two changes took place in the 1960s that the rest of this section details. The first was the (almost inevitable) appearance of the critiques of cooptation, in this case allied with a labor union claim of worker exploitation. There is a certain fugitive irony here, insofar as participative management and labor unions share roots in the era of Industrial Democracy—­a deep agreement about participation that is submerged beneath a range of ideological commitments and historical mystifications, and which exemplifies the grammar of enthusiasm and cooptation that is so common to participation. The second change, however, was the rise of an individualized mode of measuring participation that drew inspiration from the original group psychology of the Lewinians, but intended instead to make the study of participation scientific and measurable (so-­called participative decision-­making). It did so in the context of an expanding science of human relations management, job design, quality of worklife, a renewed international concern with “organizational democracy,” and a mix of theories about “quality” and the success of Japanese management models. Ultimately, it leads us to the management fads of today, such as Agile methods, or the management philosophy of a company—­to take a contemporary equivalent to Harwood—­like the Spanish clothing giant Inditex (owner of brands Zara, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, and others).

The focus on the role of consciousness-­ transformation is most famously captured in the 1960s classics: Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counterculture and Charles Reich’s Greening of America. On the background and consequences, see Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Turner, The Democratic Surround; Jamie Cohen-­ Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Something similar is at stake in the self-­appraisal that Robert Chambers demands of development professionals, discussed in the chapter “Participation, Developed,” pp. 183–248.

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Cooptation: Unions and Radical Sociologists Somewhere near the peak of the participative management fad, in 1964, Warren Bennis and Philip Slater published a Harvard Business Review article called “Democracy Is Inevitable,” in which participative management is evaluated for its inevitability. “Democracy is the only system which can successfully Labor unions also took up the probcope with the changing demands of contemporary civ- lem of participation—­indeed, in the ilization,” they argue, and so it is not an accident that 1950s a literature on making unions “executives and even entire management staffs have themselves more democratic began to demonstrating a certain fractal been sent to participate in human relations and organi- appear, feature of the endless need for more zational laboratories to learn skills and attitudes which participation in organizations—­as in ten years ago would have been denounced as anarchic “union democracy,” arguably inaugurated by Seymour Martin Lipset, and revolutionary.”47 Martin A Trow, and James Samuel Bennis, a disciple of McGregor, would go on to be- Coleman. See their Union Democracy: come one of the most popular representatives of par- The Internal Politics of the International ticipative management, especially when understood as Typographical Union (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956). leadership, in books like Visionary Leadership and On Becoming a Leader. The latter reads a bit like Rousseau’s Confessions with all the interesting bits replaced by greeting card sentiments like “Self-­awareness = self-­knowledge = self-­possession = self-­expression. You must make your life your own by understanding it” and chapter titles like “Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything.” The 1964 article doesn’t mention the Harwood studies, and it is generally filled with jingoistic assertions about the superiority of democracy over communism or totalitarianism, even daring at the end to assert that “just as Marx, in proclaiming the inevitability of communism, did not hesitate to give some assistance to the wheels of fate, so our thesis that democracy represents the social system of the electronic era should not bar these persons [defenders of democracy] from giving a little push here and there to the inevitable.”48 Not everyone felt this way about participative management and the inevitablity of democracy at work. One can read the earnest certainty of Bennis and Slater’s article as a kind of perplexity: “why doesn’t everyone agree?” The very need to insist, bombastically, on giving a push to the inevitable suggests a perplexed relation to those who would see the world differently. The Coch and French study inspired these differing reactions—­from different forms of life, as it were. By the 1960s, it had already come in for ridicule by leftist and radical social scientists of various sorts. An exemplary case is Daniel Bell, who in a footnote to his End of Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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“Pajamas and the Ego,” Fortune Magazine, August 1946.

Ideology says that “perhaps this is the place, then, to tell the untold story of a follow-­up to the researches at the Harwood Manufacturing Company, researches which have been for so many years the foundation for some ‘fundamental principles’ in social psychology.” After summarizing the experiment, he suggests that “quietly the psychologists began publishing their studies without mentioning Harwood as the place of experiment.” This is a somewhat absurd and indefensible claim (given that Harwood is both mentioned and acknowledged clearly in the Coch and French study) but one necessary to the anecdote, which goes on: “Marrow, feeling that this 116

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extraordinary social experiment should be widely celebrated . . . obtained wide publicity in the business press, including Fortune, pointing out that by practicing group decisions and keeping close watch on the tensions, the plant had been able to increase output—­ and—­to escape unionization.” Bell goes on to suggest that it was in response to this secretive manipulation of the workers that the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) sent out (apocryphal) pamphlets that said, “To the workers of Harwood Manufacturing: Do you know that you are being used as guinea pigs?” and lo! unionization occurred at Harwood.49 Bell’s story inverts the one normally told about Coch and French. It was not democratic leadership and participation that led to better productivity, but the revelation of manipulation (specifically by scientists) that led to unionization (though Bell does not here contest the productivity claims made by the study). It’s not clear where Bell got the story for the book (he himself was a writer for Fortune magazine at one point), or how much he embellished it, but it is very likely it came directly from William Gomberg, who was in 1947 the director of the management engineering department at the ILGWU, and later a professor of business at the Wharton School. In 1966 Gomberg wrote a small, critical article in the pages of transaction magazine attacking the Bennis and Slater piece, and the “participative management” fad more generally, specifically the prominence of the claims made for the Harwood studies. His story also hinged on that 1946 Fortune article, called “Pajamas and the Ego”—­which claimed that the Marion plant escaped unionization and ended with “Dr. Marrow thinks it is industrial heaven.” A back-­and-­forth-­and-­sideways ensued in the pages of transaction as first Bennis and then Marrow himself responded to Gomberg’s claims. Marrow’s counterattack was, if not withering, at least demonstrative of better recordkeeping than Gomberg’s; Gomberg was ultimately reduced to saying more or less that, well, the Harwood “participative management” approach is not really democracy, and that Harwood management and associated behavioral scientists “were not consciously and deliberately manipulative, but just unperceptive.”50 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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But Gomberg was in fairly good company—­as the ironic assertions of Bell defending an ideology of class struggle in The End of Ideology might indicate. Academics like C. Wright Mills and William H. Whyte, and activists like Saul Alinsky, were hardly moved by the claims that work was being democratized and that workers were being asked to participate in any meaningful way. The claims made for “participative management” and a newly enlightened approach to post-­Fordist capitalism—­perhaps crystallized most clearly in prophets like Peter Drucker and Alvin Toffler—­should be seen against the background of Bell-­shaped critiques in which participation is more likely to turn out to be a new form of manipulation or exploitation, radically different in form from true democracy, and potentially destructive of true participation—­whatever that might be. This is the grammar of participation in clearest form: what the management prophets enthuse over after the Coch and French experiments (the productivity gains of participation at work, the satisfaction of workers) quickly becomes a case of cooptation and evidence of exploitation in the hands of the critics (the cry of “guinea pigs” in research, or the accusation of unfair wages). Both aspects of participation require a response to the problem—­a remaking or reconfiguration of participation—­a more real or true participation in a democratic time yet to come. To be fair, the unions and their academic supporters were well aware of the problem of perplexity—­the impossibility of disagreement that results from differing forms of life encountering one another. Where a sympathetic reader of Coch and French would see the possibility for an expression of agency by those participating in innovation—­a promising goal to be pursued in the name of a good life for all—­unions and radicals will see something perplexingly different. Indeed, the starting point of the unions is that workers and management do not, and maybe can never, share the same goals, or the same form of life. This view—­like that of Thrasymachus—­sees in participation only the power of the more powerful party. It’s not clear whether Coch, French, Marrow, or Lewin ever assumed a consilience of goals between workers and management. In some ways it was probably unthinkable: the distinction between the middle-­class, white, Jewish intellectuals in management, and the poor, white, rural women of Marion, Virginia, was so vast as to make the distant idea that they might be involved in the control or goal-­setting of the company impossible. What Coch and French do say is that they are not 118

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Richard Gehman, “Workers’ Ideas Pay Everybody,” Nation’s Business, August 1953, 60. Source: Used w ith per mission of the US Ch a mber of Com m erce a nd the H agley A rchi v es.

interested in creating a “permissive” or “anarchic” environment in which workers govern themselves completely; but it is fair to say that the experimenters operated under the assumption that workers want success for the company, or better products, or higher quality or higher profits, or at least, better wages. The labor union starts with the opposite assumption—­that the Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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workers will never share the goals of the corporation. Gomberg put it this way: It is important to keep in mind that much of the material celebrating participative management or so-­called democracy in industry flowed largely from an unspoken conviction—­unless both the porter and the president look upon their work place as the site not only of their working interests but the very core of their whole human interest, then there was an important social problem seeking solution. It is understandable why work would be the core of interest for the president of a corporation. From the focus of a porter, however, this proposition becomes somewhat more difficult to accept no matter how democratic you make house cleaning.51

In other words, the workers will have no stake in capital until they have some of their own. But even so, this represents the grammar of participation. On the one hand, participation as formatted contributory autonomy, possibly producing a full experience by which participants come to experience the company as their own: “our rate” and “our job.” On the other hand, participation as the power of elite management to control and manipulate, or to contain and defuse, the antagonistic energy of the Roughly contemporaneously with workers. Harwood, participation took a differFrom Coch and French’s perspective, the story is prient form with the “Scanlon plans” of marily about the manipulation of the experience of parJoseph Scanlon (now grouped together under the heading of “gainsharing” ticipation, but the necessity of contributory autonomy programs). These approaches treated is always tagging along in the word “participation,” nagparticipation’s positive effects on ging it to be more than just a “social climate” or “demproductivity as something that should be redistributed to the workers respon- ocratic atmosphere.” sible in the form of shared profits or Nascent in Gomberg’s critique is an awareness that bonuses. Scanlon plans made concrete participation’s benefits or outcomes are often economand measurable improvements that could be said to originate with workically valued, if not measured, and that the sharing in ers, the effects of those improvements, this resource is a key aspect. Though he does not invoke and the redistribution of the benefits it, probably because he is unaware of it, it shares an afas bonuses. “When Scanlon plans are finity with the story of the Rochdale Pioneers and the no longer news, we shall have licked the great problem of the industrial age, invention of the “divi,” as well as with the parallel experihow to tame the machine for liberty ments in Scanlon plans and the subsequent evolution of and democracy. No socialistic regime employee-­owned stock options and other schemes for can ever do so well by force what free men do voluntarily. That is freedom’s “gainsharing” promulgated in the subsequent decades. secret weapon” (editorial, “Good News The question of participating in one’s own dominafrom LaPoint,” Life Magazine, Decemtion structures these quasi-­Marxist critiques from labor ber 22, 1952, 14). academics like Gomberg and Mills or sociologists like 120

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Bell. But these critiques ultimately rest on a logic of misrecognition by everyone except the critics. It is typical of such midcentury critiques (and perhaps not only those) to exercise this kind of materialist paternalism, by which the poor workers, duped by management, require the assistance of labor leaders and academics to set them on the path to understand their own interests. Rose and Miller summarize such critiques (including later critiques by Harry Braverman, Alain Lipietz, or David Noble) as expressing the belief that “the vocabularies of participation, enrichment, quality of working life, empowerment and the like are little more than disingenuous devices for seeking to bind employees to managerial norms and ambitions, masking a fundamental contradiction between bosses and workers.”52 What they miss, suggest Rose and Miller, are all the ways in which workers are being governed through freedom, not in the absence of it. Both the enthusiasm and the critique, however, rest on the prior existence of collectives or groups over the liberated individual that Rose and Miller identify. Coch and French, with Lewin, see an almost ontological power in the manipulation of groups and social climates. The critics, by contrast, take class and class struggle as axiomatic. Where the Lewinians saw the group as a manipulable experimental object that could be harnessed to transform the subjectivity of workers, critiques grounded in class struggle would agree, but narrate it as simple manipulation in which workers are made to perform the interests of management, not their own. Workers can escape only through recognition—­through the coming to consciousness of a class for itself (which nonetheless must still be facilitated by union leaders, revolutionaries, or others). That the pajama-­factory participants do not know that they are being made into democratic subjects—­if they are being made into democratic subjects—­is a violation of the theory of freedom that the critics themselves hold: one that arguably values contributory autonomy only insofar as it is the possession of the working class itself, and not something installed, enhanced, or unleashed by others. It sets up a kind of zero-­sum game around contributory autonomy—­ either it comes forth organically from the workers themselves, or it is forced upon them by those with other interests. The irony, of course, is that neither the “participative management” Lewinians nor the labor union critics quite grasp the extent to which the object of intervention—­namely, the person who is a creature of the group or the class—­will ultimately be rejected. In Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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its place will emerge two things: the person of contributory autonomy and the tool kit for procedural participation. By the end of the twentieth century, participation at work will have been thoroughly transformed from a question of involving groups (classes, hierarchical locations in the division of labor) in decision-­making, to a set of procedural routines that incorporate the contributing, autonomous individual into the organization.

Resistance to Change, Involvement in Innovation There is one feature of the Coch and French experiment that remains puzzling. The form of participation measured in the experiment is said to concern the workers’ involvement in “designing the changes to be made to their jobs.” Ask any contempoThe meaning of “resistance to change” rary management scientist or organizational theorist, is queried in Eric B. Dent and Susan and they will likely tell you that participation is about Galloway Goldberg, “Challenging “participative decision-­making” and its relationship to ‘Resistance to Change,’” Journal of things like motivation, incentive, or satisfaction. No one Applied Behavioral Science 35, no. 1 (1999): 25–­41. It is not clear that really seems to remember that the Harwood experiment anyone in management theory sees in was essentially an experiment in collaborative innovathis history a case of involving workers tion. The occasion for the experiment was “overcoming in innovation. Change is largely read as being something that results from resistance to change,” and the workers were asked to the decisions of managers, rather than make changes concerning efficiency, the design of the something that is external to the firm. garments, and the feasible rate of producing them. The experiment had three treatments: one in which a group was simply told what the new job was and how to do it; one in which representatives of a group participated in the redesign of a job; and one in which all members of a group participated in the redesign. Coch and French’s experiment—­in the enthusiastic embrace of “participative management”—­was ultimately interpreted to mean that participation in decision-­making was what workers needed and demanded in order to become more productive. But there is an intermediate step: the women who participated in the redesign of their jobs did those jobs more productively. The interpretation of the experiment has been that a different style of management could increase productivity—­but the outcome of the experiment was clearly that workers who control the design and structure (including, to some extent, the pay structure) of their jobs do those jobs more productively, and say that they are more satisfied. Coch and French do not point this out, exactly: they are too wrapped up in their vectors and fields and “we-­feeling” theory to notice that, in some ways, 122

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their subjects enjoyed challenging themselves, and found satisfaction in responding to the challenges they had set themselves, and more than anything, were cognizant of a just relationship between the job and the pay rate. Even if in some objective sense they were being paid a pittance, the experiment made them aware of the relationships that obtained between job structures, pay rates, and the demands of the market. Although Coch and French attempted to precisely control the “social climate” of the workplace, they seem to have missed the precise experience that it produced among the women. For Coch and French, the story is about, as the title insists, “overcoming resistance to change”—­but for them change is clearly exogenous, it comes from elsewhere (experts, managers, markets, demand, new technology). Workers—­being those people who merely experience change, and do not have the autonomy to overcome it—­ must overcome their resistance to such change. But at the heart of this story is also the question of what agency the workers have in bringing about that change—­and whether workers and management share goals with respect to it. Arguably the experience of the workers was of participation in the agency of change itself—­the opposite of the experience of being helpless and alienated in the face of it. What’s more, these workers also experienced the design of the changes as a group. Which is to say, it is not just the we-­feeling of the group, or a collective identity (whether class or gender or position), but the experience of working together under conditions of relative equality and responsibility for those changes—­which may be the very thing that produces the pleasure, the satisfaction, and ultimately better productivity. What this experience of participation lacked, for the workers, was permanence. Rather than the new installation of a regime of participation at the group level by which they might own or absorb change in new ways, the experiment came to a simple end. The experience was produced all too fleetingly and without any sense of needing to preserve the “we-­feeling” it produced. To understand what was lost means paying attention to both the contributory autonomy of individuals and the subjective group experience that workers feel in a moment of collaboratively (successfully or not) engaging in meaningful control over the details of a change. This is more than simply being “governed through freedom,” because it asks that people not only format their behavior (“govern themselves”) in accordance with some external set of Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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Table of contents from M. S. Myers, Every Employee a Manager (New York: McGraw-­ Hill, 1981).

changes, but also participate directly in those changes and the formatting they entail. Such an experience, it should go without saying, is extraordinarily rare, and all too often fleeting, even in places dominated by an ethic or a practice of “participation.” Something goes missing in between the temporary experiment in producing a full experience of participation, and the attempt to normalize and install it permanently. That fleeting pleasure of collaborative participation is all too easily buried beneath the enthusiastic desire to design a procedure that will produce it elsewhere.

Contributory Autonomy: From Participation to Motivation What does workplace participation come to look like after participative management wanes? Although “participation” remains a keyword throughout the latter half of the twentieth century in management and organizational and industrial relations, it comes more and more to refer only to the problem the participation of individuals in decision-­making—­of contributory autonomy—­divorced from any concern with the experience of participation as a feature of groups or collectives. In January 1968, Frederick Herzberg published an article in Harvard Business Review called “One More Time: How Do You Motivate 124

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Employees?” The article is one of the most popular and best-­selling the magazine has ever published, and was reprinted in 1987 and again in 2003.53 The article is not explicitly about participation—­ though it was very clearly written against the fad. It presents a novel way to increase worker motivation: job enrichment. Herzberg’s article is an arch, tongue-­in-­cheek attack on the prevailing “human relations” approaches to motivation of the previous decades, such as sensitivity training, morale surveys, suggestion plans, group participation plans (including, though he does not name it, “participative management”). He labels them all “KITA” approaches (“kick in the pants,” he modestly explains), which share the problem of attempting to achieve motivation by inducing mere movement. By contrast, he suggests, workers need to be “rechargeable”—­like batteries—­so that the job produces its own motivation: “It is only when one has a generator of one’s own that we can talk about motivation. One then needs no outside stimulation. One wants to do it.”54 To argue this point, Herzberg clarifies that job satisfaction is not the opposite of job dissatisfaction: different factors (motivators) contribute to job satisfaction than those (hygiene) that contribute to dissatisfaction (hence the delightfully odd name he gave his idea: “motivator-­hygiene theory”). If one wants to motivate an employee, it is necessary to decrease the influence of some factors and increase that of others. He calls his solution “job enrichment,” which involves the redesign of the job to meet the “motivator” factors. It requires not simply job “enlargement” but things such as “increasing accountability of individuals for own work” or “granting additional authority to employees in their activity; job freedom” or “assigning individuals specific or specialized tasks, enabling them to become experts.”55 Herzberg’s article rode a wave that would eventually become its own fad in the business literature—­a kind of neo-­Taylorism focused on the question of how best to design a given job. But while Taylor’s approach concentrated expertise in the engineer, and interpreted job design as a problem of efficiency, the job enrichment movement sought to synthesize questions of efficiency or productivity with questions of motivation and achievement of individuals. At first sight, this seems to be exactly what is at the heart of the Coch and French study: the active involvement of employees in the redesign of their jobs. But two things are starkly different in Herzberg’s presentation and the subsequent research tradition: (1) job enrichment is not something the workers should be involved in, Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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it should come only from experts and managers; and (2) it is not about enriching the experience of a group of workers working together—­as in the case of the girls at Harwood—­but about enriching that of each individual employee in directly measurable ways. In summarizing the various steps to motivating employees, Herzberg specifies: 7. Avoid direct participation by employees whose jobs are to be enriched. Ideas they have expressed previously certainly constitute a valuable source for recommended changes, but their direct involvement contaminates the process with human relations hygiene and, more specifically, gives them only a sense of making a contribution. The job is to be changed, and it is the content that will produce the motivation, not attitudes about being involved or the challenge inherent in setting up a job. That process will be over shortly, and it is what the employees will do from then on that will determine their motivation. A sense of participation will result only in short-­ term movement.56

Not only is participation unnecessary, but he insists that it results only in “short-­term movement”—­that any gains will be ephemeral. Interestingly, Herzberg is critiquing participative management for the same reasons that the labor unions and radicals do: it’s fake participation. It provides only a “sense” of making a contribution, and one that won’t last. This is a very different invocation of the grammar of cooptation than that proposed by the labor unions and radicals, though, and perhaps a more realpolitik one. In reality, the idea of a total transfer of power to workers is never on the table in any discussion of “worker participation”—­short of socialized or worker-­ owned industry, which, outside of a few experiments, is not the subject of this literature. For Herzberg, experience of a collective sort is irrelevant: the only experiences that matter are those of the individual, divided into experiences of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. It is a utilitarianism of participation expunged of any capacity for workers to orient their fate collectively. By contrast, Herzberg is making an implicit claim in favor of the expertise of management: workers do not actually know best what the job should look like, though they might contribute some usable ideas. In this respect, Herzberg’s focus on motivation is authentically Taylorist: it seeks to improve productivity and worker efficiency (motivation) at the same time. But it also conflicts with the stated desire of job enrichment: to enable workers to also be126

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The Job Characteristics Model in J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham, “Motivation through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16, no. 2 (1976): 250–­79.

come experts. This circle is squared, however, because at issue is a kind of local/global split in expertise: workers have an entirely individualized expertise in the domain of their job, while managers can see the whole operation and can translate that into job design such that the things that make a job dissatisfying can be replaced with the things that make it satisfying. Change and innovation are not on the table—­except insofar as it concerns the autonomy of the individual worker with respect to his or her own job, and not the participation of the worker in the constitution of change or innovation as part of a collective. It’s about as far as possible from the experience of the women of Harwood as it could get. A pinnacle of this approach is Hackman and Oldham’s 1976 test of a model that “specifies the conditions under which individuals will become internally motivated to perform effectively on their jobs.” By the late 1970s, the “scientific study of job design” was a growth industry in its own right, in large part because of the more precise experimentalization of the problem in terms of attitudes, task design specifications, and precise “psychological states,” including “experienced meaningfulness of the work, experienced responsibility for the outcomes of the work, and knowledge of the results of the work activity.”57 Hackman and Oldham construct an equation that synthesizes these measures in a “Motivating Potential Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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Score” that includes psychological states, dimensions of the task, feedback in terms of the outcomes, and, crucially, a sense of what they call “autonomy”: “Autonomy. The degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out.”58 Management theory in the 1970s thus reduced participation to job “enrichment” and ultimately to a strictly constrained choice concerning scheduling and procedure. Autonomy in this definition does not include contribution, though it is implicitly assumed that the workers’ autonomy is granted because workers want to participate in the success of the organization. The workers who, granted autonomy, decide to slow down the production line or reduce quality in the name of ease or health are likely to have that autonomy taken away from them before they can even contemplate “contributing.” But, above all, a model like Hackman and Oldham’s demonstrates how far away from the social psychology of Lewin the domain of the operationalized variables of “participative decision-­making” and human resources is by the late 1970s. “Change”—­the thing that the Harwood workers ever so briefly experienced agency with respect to—­is once again made exogenous to the experience of the worker, now in the name of “freedom, independence and discretion.”

“Participative decision making” (PDM) is defined in Aaron Lowin, “Participative Decision Making: A Model, Literature Critique, and Prescriptions for Research,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 3, no. 1 (1968): 68–­106. “By participative decision making (PDM) we mean a mode of organizational operations in which decisions as to activities are arrived at by the very persons who are to execute those decisions . . . The main variables in the model are the PDM-­relevant attitudes (feelings, beliefs, predisposition) and behaviors of each of the two parties [superior and subordinate].” See also Edwin A. Locke, David M. Schweiger, and Gary P. Latham, “Participation in Decision Making: When Should It Be Used?” Organizational Dynamics 14, no. 3 (1987): 65–­79; John L. Cotton et al., “Employee Participation: Diverse Forms and Different Outcomes,” Academy of Management Review 13, no. 1 (1988): 8–­22; J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen, “Participative Decision-­ Making: An Integration of Multiple Dimensions,” Human Relations 50, no. 7 (1997): 859–­78.

Conclusion The story of worker participation is one canonical place where participation has been explored, experimented upon, and transformed. The story is much larger than the Coch and French experiment, and continues to be a domain of investigation today in business and management schools. But it is also a very clear story of how participation has been formatted to conform to contributory autonomy: a model of personhood by which individuals make collectives through their free contributions. Surprisingly perhaps, contributory autonomy in this chapter emerges out of its opposite: the Lewin-­inspired concern for the dynamics of the group experience of participation. The discovery of 128

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participation as a fleeting experience of collaborative innovation at work by the Coch and French experiment is a good example of how participation creates enthusiasm. Not only the workers at the pajama factory—­whose experience was real, but all too temporary—­ but also the psychologists embraced this enthusiasm for participation. But the attempt to capture and bottle that experience led in two quite different directions. One—­more utopian—­was toward making participation permanent, as a collective, at work. This is, in many ways, what labor unions saw as their right and responsibility, not because participation makes collectives, but because collectives—­the working class—­precede individuals as sites of struggle. The other direction was toward replication, formatting, and the proceduralization of participation—­in this case, toward “participative management.” That fad was, for a different set of people, including the social psychologists and leadership gurus of the 1960s, also a right and responsibility—­the inevitability of democracy and the demand to unleash human potential. These two forms of life clash over the experience of participation: unions and their advocates draw on judgments of participation as something badly made and dangerous when created by management, but protective and creative when conceived of as an antagonistic relation of bargaining that can only be maintained when the workers are represented by unions, or liberated entirely from class struggle. The social psychologists and management gurus draw instead on judgments of participation as liberating individuals to contribute to the creation of a new class. Lost in both judgments, however, is the experience of the girls at Harwood: the fleeting experience of something like collaborative innovation in response to an external “change” and the “we-­feeling” of coming to feel ownership and control over that change. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to see that experience from within, and not from a form of life external to it. Even in the best approaches to the problem, such as the work of Rose and Miller, the focus on the experience of participation is hard to recover. Rose and Miller are not particularly interested in the experience of those subjected to these new schemes of work life; they, too, abstract from that experience in favor of analyzing the psychological theories and experiments, and to some extent the practical formatting of work life by these sciences. There is a dark interpretation, which is often not in the spirit of Foucault, that sees in such schemes nothing more than a kind of hypertrophied coopPa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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tation of the workers: the use of the value of liberty to enslave the minds of workers. But as the case of the Harwood women might suggest, there are hidden in these practices—­whether recognized or not—­clear indications of why participation can produce a sense of belonging, of immersion, or of becoming an instance of the collective one inhabits. For a fleeting moment, the women experienced the core of participation: to become collective in the process of collaboratively working on a shared problem, with a clear sense of the limits of that collective, and of what is best for it. What happens in the case I explore here, and arguably in the cases that Rose and Miller explore, is that this experience is forgotten, submerged, erased by subsequent attempts to reproduce it, extend it, or format it in ways that will allow it to become instrumental. As a result, the concept of participation itself has been transformed. Its internal meanings, and its relation to other values, have been recombined, mutated, or redefined by the very practice of formatting it: by developing techniques for “participative management” that range from the earliest experiments at Harwood to the careful measurement of participative decision-­making to the creation of standardized routines adopted by HR departments all around the world—­and indeed, beyond the world of work as well. And what of worker participation today? In the story that bookends this chapter, The Participant visits an exemplary case of the success of a transformed participation: Zara. Zara’s success as a corporation is clearly more than just a story of participation—­but contributory autonomy is central to it. Among other ways to understand the rise of Zara, there is the now-­classic theory of flexible specialization by Charles Sabel and Michael Piore.59 The story they tell, of a form of post–­mass society, is one that sits well with the promise of greater participation—­greater solidarity, less alienation, more autonomy for workers involved in forms of specialization that are not as deadening and empty as those of the classic capitalist divisions of labor. Charles Sabel has continued the fight for participation. He is one of the few to claim not that we need more participation, but that we already have lots of it. For Sabel, around 1980, the world was transformed from a Weberian one in which ever more rigid, bureaucratic iron cages buckled and gave way to a world of networked, learning, pragmatist organizations that solve problems from the ground up by directly engaging employees across the hierarchy in the search for new possibilities and the bold destruction of routines necessary 130

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to be innovative and responsive to an ever more quickly changing world. Sabel’s vision is bigger, more grandiose, and less technophilic than the claims for “peer production” or “wikinomics” or “user-­led innovation” or “mass customization.” It is both an organizational theory and a philosophy of human action. It is straight, uncut Dewey: it is the logic of experimental inquiry applied to the everyday routines of life, at work, in government, at school and beyond. For this reason, he is a bold, clear line connecting the pragmatist enthusiasm of “Industrial Democracy” in a figure like Mary Parker Follett to a fully contemporary form of constant procedural innovation.60 Even more so, such organizational forms are for Sabel not restricted to firms (where he famously made his reputation with Michael Piore in dubbing them the “flexible specialization” of the second industrial divide), but also include public agencies and even, perhaps, though nascently and predictably only in Europe, democratic governments themselves. He’s sanguine about schools and sees them improving by pragmatist techniques that include repeated testing; he’s sanguine about the auto industry, and sees rapid innovation and delivery to market of disruptive innovations everywhere; he’s sanguine about “high reliablity organizations” like nuclear power plants, firefighters, and the armed forces, and their use of pragmatist techniques like near-­miss analysis to improve their performance and reliability. He’s full of fire and hope for collaborative governance, new public management, polyarchy and polycentric governance in environmentalism, open innovation, networked firms, and on and on. Here we have more solutions than we need, and for problems we are only dimly able to recognize and name. Sabel is like the Tony Robbins of political economy. If you need someone at your dinner party full of neoliberal haters, Sabel is the one to invite. He’ll be the one wearing Zara. Zara is a snapshot of what life at work—­for some not insignificant portion of the global middle class—­looks like today. Sabel is an awkward advocate for today’s employees. For one, there is a world of difference between the middle-­class participants of Zara’s just-­in-­time fashion house and the sweatshops of the global South that haven’t heard the good news yet. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether there is a difference between the women at Harwood, engaged in the redesign of their jobs making pajamas, and the women and men at Zara, similarly engaged. One might ask Sabel if the breaking of routines can itself become a hardened routine—­and if so, what happens to us as a result? Do we understand the world Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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we’ve wrought? Do we understand how constant and often meaningful participation at work (and elsewhere) has been installed as a norm? It is, in many ways, counter to analytic habits of thought to accept (as Sabel would put it) that we have traded a world of categories and taxonomies organized in hierarchies, modules, levels of abstraction, and chains of command for one in which we learn by monitoring each other, scan constantly for alternatives, propose tentative solutions, benchmark existing ways of doing, and routinely engage in disrupting that which appears too routine. Far from liberating us, it is simply a different kind of work, with different forms of Zara Man label.

Source: Photo by MK photo, W ik im edi a Com mons.

power and control—­diagnosed negatively in different ways (the age of the smart machine, biopolitics, precarity, neoliberalism, platform capitalism, surveillance, and so on), and (as it was in the 1970s that Sabel and Piore critiqued) too easily pinned on some abstract idealism of a relentlessly unfolding absolute capitalist spirit. Is Sabel’s enthusiasm such that it simply calls forth an equal and opposite grammatical assertion of cooptation (as in, for example, the work of Boltanski and Chiapello)? Or does his cheerful diagnosis of a fully functional, pragmatic problem-­solving capitalism represent an evolution of which participation really is a part? Are the workers engaged in Sabel’s routine-­breaking, learning-­by-­ monitoring, democratic experimentalism aware of their own participation, or are these transformations part of a system of motivation and job design that denies either the experience of participation or the awareness of it? Does it matter?

Coda The Harwood Manufacturing plant in Marion, Virginia, started to feel the pressures of the market in the 1960s. At the time, the com132

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pany flirted with moving to Puerto Rico where labor costs could undercut the increasingly middle-­class expectations of those once poor Appalachian women. In that short movie from 1972, Marrow awkwardly tries to recount the story of bringing participation to Puerto Rico. It failed for what Marrow suggests are cultural (or perhaps simply racist) reasons: the workers thought management was incompetent for asking them to help design the jobs—­they expected to be told what to do, he says, and interprets this to mean that they found it to be a bad sign that the managers didn’t know (and tell them) exactly what to do. Marrow died in 1978, and the company passed to his brother, Seymour Marrow. He managed it until 1981, when he sold it to a Florida businessman named Michael Rothbaum, who in 1992 moved all production to Costa Rica and Honduras. In 1996, it was bought by Sara Lee, at the time a conglomerate buying up all manner of companies. Sara Lee operated the plants until around 2006, when it sold its apparel business to Sun Capital Partners, a holding company. Any trace of what Harwood once was, or its participative management successes, has long since been dissolved in the globalizing, financializing acid of contemporary capitalism. Its workers, whoever they are, likely look like those detailed in Jane Collins’s book Threads, subject to statistical process control systems designed to “motivate” them (or perhaps, in Herzberg’s terms, turn them into batteries) through detailed data collection about their productivity.61 Today’s workers in the global apparel manufacturing sector are not participants, in any sense of the word: instead, they get a thoroughly modern Taylorism, spying and self-­monitoring for free, vapor-­thin wage margins, unhealthy conditions, slave-­labor scandals, and death in violent places. But still, everyone claims, participation is in their future. . . .

Summer 2015 The Participant is at Inditex Corporation in Arteixo, Spain. His role is to design the changes to clothing in response to sales data and customer feedback. Every day he works with several other people in the “‘data centre,’ as it is called . . . a spacious, simple rectangular room. Walls white, floors grey. Elongated white desks stretch lengthways across the space, where scores of people sit at computers, looking up at another massive screen on the wall in front. The back wall is a glass partition.”62 On any given day, “they move colourful shapes around on computer Pa r t i c i pat i o n , E m p l oy e d

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screens. It looks like they are playing Tetris. In fact, they are plotting out pattern cuts in fabric, using a tool designed to minimise textile waste. In the distribution centre, garments are steamed by machines powered by rechanneled waste energy from other parts of the building. Cardboard boxes are stacked and RFID tags collected for re-­use. Big skips of textile scraps wait to be recycled.”63 “Regional sales managers sit at a line of desks running down the middle, designers on either side of them. The managers field calls from China or Chile to learn what’s selling, then they meet with the designers and decide whether there’s a trend. In this way, Inditex takes the fashion pulse of the world.”64 The Participant discusses changes that could be made to the existing lines, the kinds of things customers wish they could buy, and the relationship of any of these things to the high-­fashion catwalks of Paris, Milan, New York, Shanghai. “A brand at Inditex will make a fall collection, for example, and then ship only three or four dresses or shirts or jackets in each style to a store. There’s very little leftover stock, few extra-­smalls or mediums hiding in the back. But store managers can request more if there’s demand. They also monitor customers’ reactions, on the basis of what they buy and don’t buy, and what they say to a sales clerk: ‘I like this scooped collar’ or ‘I hate zippers at the ankles.’”65

Inditex Data Center.

Source: Indite x. Imr a n A m ed a nd K ate A bnett, “Indite x: Agile Fashion Force,” Business of Fashion, 2015, https://w w w .businessoffashion .com/a rticles /intelligence /indite x-­a gile -­f ashion

Last month, The Participant had an exciting conversation with other workers about how customers wanted more little pins and patches decorating their clothing, and the team set to work sourcing the materials, identifying which of their factories could make such a thing, and rapidly creating designs that could be delivered to stores around the world in a few weeks’ time. It was an exciting feeling, working together to come up with a response to customers’ desires—­to really be immediately responsive and, most of all, creative. The Participant came up with some clever pins

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and patches themed around computers and smartphones, but one of the other designers had these great, cute designs—­a pennant that said “girls,” an eraser that says “Erase you,” a heart that said things like “don’t text him” or “I don’t like you.” All the team members thought they were great, and they went into production immediately. It was amazing to watch how fast the company could get new designs into production, and into stores. “While conventional high street retailers pre-­commit about 60 percent of their production, Inditex plans only about 15 percent in advance—­the rest is made in response to customer feedback. To achieve this, the company’s production base of over 1,500 suppliers is at least 51 percent ‘proximity sourced’ from facilities close to its Spanish distribution centres in countries such as Spain, Portugal and Morocco, meaning Inditex can design, manufacture and deliver product to the shop floor, all in three weeks.”66 The only depressing part for The Participant was that the designers never really get credit for what they do; although the workplace is tightly organized around collaborative inno-

In 2016 independent designer Tuesday Bassen (https://www.shoptuesday. com/) accused Zara of ripping off her designs. See Dan Solomon, “Least Creative Thing of the Day: Zara Rips Off Indie Designer Tuesday Bassen’s Work,” Fast Company Co.Create, 2016, http://www.fastcocreate.com/3062030 /least-­creative-­thing-­of-­the-­day -­zara-­rips-­off-­indie-­designer-­tuesday -­bassens-­work.

vation, and everyone feels like they have their finger on the pulse of fashion, the “designers are completely anonymous; some would say this is because they are copiers rather than designers.”67 But they all know that they are innovative in their own way—­that what they do better than anyone else is process innovation, not product innovation, using “the basic principles of Agile software development—­total focus on delighting the customer, working in self-­organizing teams, coordinating work in short cycles driven by customer feedback, values of trust and openness, and horizontal communications.”68 All this makes The Participant feel like he is in a dream about fashion.

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Participation, Administered June 10, 1969 The Participants are confused. They are in a North Philadelphia settlement house with other residents from around the area—­Kensington, Norris Square, the area around Temple University. They are discussing a document that arrived a few weeks earlier called Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3, sent to them by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is subtitled “Subject: Citizen Participation in Model Cities.” The Participants are also employees. They are the Area Wide Council—­an organization set up to be the official, local, “citizen-­participation” voice of North Philadelphia in the proposed “Model City demonstration project.” They are paid for their participation by funds from the city and the federal government as part of the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration. Many of The Participants have come to the process from previous experience in the neighborhood; they were involved in activism, civil rights, and all manner of volunteer work. But this is different—­money is actually flowing . . . and from City Hall! The AWC seems to have real power,

6th at Susquehanna, North Philly. Source:

Photo by Dav id W ilson. Used w ith per mission.

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and the planning process seems to be something they control, for what seems like the first time in history. They even have a nice office, provided by the settlement house. But at the moment, the situation is perplexing at best. For two years, The Participants have been struggling with City Hall; it was clear that “differences in viewpoint as to what citizen participation really meant had already become the core of disagreement between City Hall and Area Wide Council . . . the city envisioned the Council wielding significant influence. . . . But the council was primarily concerned with power, specifically the power to make decisions for the community.”1 The Participants read a section of Bulletin No. 3 to everyone gathered in the office: In Model Cities, final responsibility, and thus final decisions about programs and plans, rests by statute with the elected officials of the cities.2 Over this issue there is little confusion. After all, elected officials are elected, even if few people trust the system. But this isn’t only about decision-­making, it’s about planning, organizing, contributing, building, marching, protesting, and a hundred other things the neighborhood needs. Participation is more than decision-­ making, it’s about process. They read on: Experience suggests that these ambiguities underlie the demands of many neighborhood residents and groups for “control” of the planning process . . . the demand for control often can best be understood as a demand for guarantees that residents have particular rights and responsibilities in policy determination, planning and execution of a Model Cities program. These guarantees will normally take the form of fixed rules and procedures, like a partnership agreement, which are fair and readily understandable, which provide that the residents have a voice in the determination of the rules and which ensure that the rules remain unchanged unless the residents participate in the process of change.3 This, too, seems crystal clear. They nod in agreement. Rules. Procedure. Even if final authority rests with the elected officials, they can’t change the rules without participation. But this is exactly what has just happened; that’s how Watson sold them out. She changed the rules. Clearly, City Hall has a different understanding of participation. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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The Model Cities Program brochure.

Source: Courtesy of the Boston Public Libr a ry; digitized by the Inter net A rchi v e.

The Participants are gathered today because yesterday Goldie Watson, the current administrator of the Philadelphia Model Cities program in City Hall, had sent a letter to HUD extensively revising the city’s guidelines for how the AWC would participate in the Model Cities program. To be fair, she had asked the AWC to write the letter with them—­but they couldn’t see the point. It was obviously not in their interest to change the rules. Some were nervous—­were they being too demanding, too recalcitrant? Others were convinced that this was simply a political move by the city to destroy the work they had done together. Some hazy combination of things was at work: Richard M. Nixon had just been elected president; the new HUD secretary had sent out a letter that seemed to reverse many of the Johnson administration lines on participation; and they had already been through three Model Cities administrators before Goldie. Despite everyone’s hope, she seemed to be less patient with the process than any of the previous three. It was all the more bewildering because Watson was a trusted leader and resident in North Philadelphia. She was herself a model participant: a black woman who once led the left wing of the NAACP, had been a schoolteacher, then a shop owner, and had stood up to the House Commission on Un-­American Activities, asserted her First Amendment rights, and ended up in contempt of court, and without a job. It was puzzling enough that Mayor Tate had hired her to do this job (though it was maybe obvious after two white administrators and one black patronage appointee had quit or been forced out by the AWC); but it was even more puzzling that she seemed, to The Participants, to be supporting the Nixon administration’s line—­return control to the city, take it away from the people—­and gutting the whole process. The letter she had sent to HUD made one thing clear: participation would not mean control. It might mean advising, it might mean being consulted, it might mean approving, rubber-­stamping, or consenting—­but it was no longer going to mean control. But control of decisions is not the same as control of process. What the AWC had hoped to control was the redevelopment of the North Philadelphia Model Cities program, from planning and oversight through construction. Clearly, this involved all kinds of expertise from the neighborhood— ­from church leaders and community organizers to city workers to construction firms with employees in the neighborhood to lawyers and accountants who could look out for the neighbors. All this was in the proposal they had created, and it was in the conversations and meetings and street-­corner gossip and back-­office strategy of the AWC. They had worked hard to control the process. 138

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Economic Opportunity Act 1964 (Public Law 88-­452). And it had worked! Philadelphia had $25 million coming to it as a result of their efforts. Rather than accept the aggressive destruction of homes, forced relocation of impoverished residents, and expansion of white institutions or developments without consultation—­all of which was conducted under the anodyne term “urban renewal”—­the AWC had managed to build itself up as the representative political organization that was required by law to be part of the federal Model Cities program. This was “maximum feasible participation.” The Participants remember first encountering this phrase in the debates in the newspapers. When Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, part of Johnson’s famous War on Poverty, the phrase “maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of groups served” made it into the statute with little debate: “no public discussion of the participation clause took place . . . no one at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue regarded the participation clause as noteworthy.”4 It was a sign of the times—­“participatory democracy” and all that. What existed before, most participation in the community, seemed to be “random experiments”5 or else means of coopting opponents or building support for something already decided. But this clause in the EOA had a surprising effect: Congress almost accidentally legalized participation. It wasn’t exactly illegal before—­it held Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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moral sway but no legal power, no statutory requirement of participation by those affected. But in a frustratingly undefined way, the EOA now required it—­and it had a dramatic effect. Now it was necessary for those who had been politically excluded to be included by means other than politics and power. “Community Action Programs” around the country were formed and funded as a result—­and “advocates of Black Power and community control were able to have significant influence over Community Action Agencies in places like New York and San Francisco. The situation, however, was quite different in Philadelphia.”6 Philadelphia had a classic Democratic patronage machine overseen by the mayoral office of James Tate. Tate had presided over the tumultuous events of the last few years—­civil rights, voting reform, the 1964 riots in North Philadelphia. The mayor’s office effectively controlled the local CAP—­known as the Philadelphia Anti-

Daniel Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969).

poverty Action Committee (PAAC)—­through the appointment of loyal Democratic activist Sam Evans as its head. There were epic struggles between Evans and NAACP leader Cecil B. Moore, but nothing came of it. The PAAC was just a “patronage machine for the Democratic party,”7 channeling money to traditional agencies rather than to the communities themselves. People joked that its goal was “the maximum feasible participation of Sam Evans.”8 In the end, PAAC was a miserable failure, and “in December 1966, a secret OEO report found that the [Community Action Committees] were so irrelevant to the antipoverty effort in Philadelphia that they had been largely deserted and their staffs left demoralized.”9 The funny thing about “maximum feasible participation” was the way it immediately became a story about representation—­not participation. The struggles over who would be “the poor,” who really represented the neighborhood, which races would be included, which religions, what it meant to be a politician as opposed to a “community leader.” It was all a mess, because everyone was forced into forming committees and electing representatives with no real power. There were so many local organizations already, so many people trying to make the neighborhood better and getting nothing—­even from the organizations that were supposedly there to create “maximum feasible participation.” They all knew the real power was in City Hall, or in Harrisburg, or especially in Washington. So it took a lot of work to rebuild a sense of cohesion in the neigh140

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borhood. When the Model Cities Act was passed, despite the awareness that “requiring participation” was going to create more problems than it solved, it, too, included similar, albeit seemingly weaker, language requiring “widespread citizen participation.” But the PAAC experience was clear to The Participants: “widespread citizen participation,” just like “maximum feasible participation,” would come with all the dangers of political favoritism. So when the city had come knocking about this new federal Model Cities program, a coalition of fifty-­ eight neighborhood groups forcefully insisted on “responsibility for developing and maintaining meaningful citizen participation.”10 Community organizer Alvin Echols did the yeoman’s work to get all these groups together to form the Area Wide Council. His plan was to make it “hub”-­based with a huge executive council. There were offices—­like the one The Participants were currently in—­all over North Philadelphia. All were busy working together on the Model Cities proposal—­sixteen in all, representing two hundred different local charities, neighborhood groups, churches and schools, political organizations. They were black, Hispanic, white; Catholic, Protestant; old, young—­it was indeed a model city. Perhaps even a city on a hill. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Act of 1966 (Public Law 89-­754).

The last two years, while not without tumult, had really seemed promising. Everyone up to the mayor agreed that Philadelphia was virtually certain to be chosen as a Model City, and that Philadelphia’s plans for extensive citizen participation were more creative and more thorough than those in other cities. It had been hard work, but they had been successful: the mayor not only recognized them as the legitimate participants, but also agreed to commit matching funds to the AWC so it could hire full-­time staff and start the planning process for the revitalization of North Philly. Participants were becoming experts: writing letters and proposals, negotiating with City Hall, leading working group meetings, organizing and coordinating staff and volunteers, and learning the cogs and wheels of the Democratic machine and Mayor Tate’s office, the technical aspects of the planning process, and the details of the law. Making decisions, even. So why was City Hall so opposed? Why would they sabotage something that so obviously seemed to everyone to be a success? Perhaps it was the mimeograph machine. Back in November 1967, The Participants had used that mimeograph machine to run off hundreds of leaflets for a demonstration by thirty-­five hundred black high school students at the downtown school administration building; they were demanding “14 major changes in the high schools, including recognition of the Black student movement and the right to have Black studies, black values and Black principals.” At the demonstration, “the police attacked the youths and turned a street demonstration into a scene of violence in which 57 people were injured and 29 arrested.”11 Walter Palmer, one of the organizing directors at AWC, had asked on behalf of the students if it was okay to mimeograph the leaflets. Nobody thought anything of it at the time. But after Palmer and others were arrested, and after the Model Cities administrator at the time had insisted that AWC should “stick simply and solely to planning,” it became clear that there was some misunderstanding about just how much “control” AWC would have over what it did, where, and how. The Participants all agreed that the schools issue was squarely in the category of improving neighborhoods and cities, but the city—­and Washington—­thought otherwise: “the director of the federal model cities administration bluntly declared that the AWC’s support for the student demonstration was not a ‘legitimate and appropriate part of model cities planning.’”12 The mayor sent his people to the AWC meetings to demand that they refrain from “political” action. AWC had bought the mimeograph machine with Model City money—­ taxpayer money. But AWC wasn’t just the Model Cities program—­it was the 142

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Rome News Tribune (Rome, Georgia), September 21, 1969, 4.

neighborhood representative; it was the people, they were the taxpayers. AWC was the “widespread citizen participation” part of the equation, and the people cared about much more than just urban development planning. AWC cared about more than urban development. Race, for instance. And schools. And race in schools. Even though it had been a heated debate in the AWC hubs and executive meetings, it was ultimately clear that “acceptance in the community hinges on meaningful involvement in dealing with immediate problems while planning for longer-­range solutions.”13 “It was a turning point: AWC became more militant, more angry and more determined.”14 “Among the AWC leadership were some individuals whose extremely militant anti-­establishment positions made them highly skeptical of the success of any program sponsored by white-­dominated government.”15 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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At that point AWC had managed to get the second of the Model Cities coordinators removed, had set up a contract negotiation committee that succeeded in getting more money for AWC operations, and had renewed a commitment to get the proposal done on their terms, and not City Hall’s. They “worked day and night, weekends, and holidays to put together [their] ideas and the city’s ideas,” and it all seemed to be a success, so much so that the Model Cities coordinator had written, in the acknowledgments of the proposal: “most rewarding was the destruction of the myth that a Model Cities community and a governmental body politic cannot enjoy a successful partnership.”16 The Participants remembered how hard it was getting that proposal together. None of the AWC staff had ever done something like that before, and they weren’t about to let City Hall do it. A woman from the regional HUD office suggested hiring some professionals from New York to help out, but they had to watch them like hawks, at every step of the way. There was a lot of paranoia, even if the consultants knew what they were doing and taught the AWC staff a bunch of technical stuff—­it still meant losing control of the process. Some of the really angry AWC members even showed up at the printing plant the night before it was submitted and tried to sabotage it all—­but the consultants convinced them that submitting it was the best bet—­after all, it had every one of AWC’s demands in it as a proposal.17 So when they’d heard that the proposal was accepted, it was great news. But then it was all of a sudden clear that the Nixon administration wasn’t going to make it easy: they cut the grant in half, from $50 million to $25 million. That meant AWC was expected to fire half its staff—­even though City Hall wasn’t about to do the same. “During the nine nasty weeks, the city played real dirty pool . . . it offered city paychecks to the 22 AWC staff people whose jobs were not at stake. It even tried to buy them off with offers of permanent city jobs. Nevertheless the staff stayed together.”18 Despite all this, AWC and City Hall agreed to revise the proposal and continue to work toward making it happen. But slowly it was becoming clear that the new administration was bent on reversing what Johnson had done. The new HUD director set new guidelines, and sent a “memo of concern” to the mayor. It claimed the Philadelphia application had an “unusually heavy reliance on new corporations . . . too heavy involvement [of the AWC] in these operating corporations . . . insufficient involvement of the city.”19 But City Hall was thrilled—­this wasn’t a reversal, they said, it was always this way: “Within the [first] coordinator’s staff there was growing debate on whether to ‘level’ with the AWC by telling them that City Hall had no intention of ever relinquishing final control. But the time never seemed ripe for the open confrontation that would ensue.”20 But really, they said, 144

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“it would be contrary to the basic principles of democratic government to delegate the powers of elected officials to a citizen organization.”21 Contrary to the basic principles of democratic government. This is the mind-­boggling part for The Participants. This is why they are perplexed. In what upside-­down world did a claim like that make sense? “A Republican administration in Washington had seen fit to strengthen the hand of the Democratic machine in Philadelphia,”22 and now they were drawing a clear line between elected representation and citizen participation in order to concentrate that power in a manner that seemed to be the very opposite of democracy. This blurred the line between citizens governing themselves and citizens electing governors, and it was not at all evident to The Participants that these were “basic principles” at all. Rather, The Participants kvetched, citizen participation had been gutted, turned into a show, in order to make City Hall look like it had the mandate of the people to do whatever it would do. At this point City Hall hired the pragmatic Goldie Watson, who more or less immediately set to work: she insisted that AWC straighten up and “face up to the fact that its role was advisory—­that it was nonsense to pretend that elected officials ever intended to give up their right to make the final decisions related to the program.”23 “No one would tell her how to run her office . . . still less would she be indulgent of flamboyant rhetoric, complicated theories of the causes of poverty, or noisy demonstrations.”24 “She knew that the Area-­Wide Council had secured the removal of one Model Cities administrator and that it had successfully appealed a cut in the AWC’s operating budget to the mayor, thus undercutting the administrator’s authority.”25 In other words, she knew just how much power had already been ceded to AWC, and for whatever reason, she now saw it as her job to stop it from continuing. HUD had wanted a response to the memo of concern by June 9. Although Watson tried to convince, cajole, and coerce AWC into meeting with her and jointly writing the letter to HUD, AWC refused. In the end, she responded without them, gutting the AWC’s role, cutting them back to “advisory” groups, and toeing the party line of control by City Hall. “On the first page of her statement, the administrator said: ‘it must be emphasized that this statement has been prepared by the Administrator without the participation, review, or endorsement of the Area Wide Council.’”26 City Hall had finally shown its hand. The Participants agreed: City Hall had never intended to let the black residents of Philadelphia govern themselves; they had no intention of transferring power. In the room with The Participants was a trusted employee from HUD—­ one of the people who carried the optimistic hope of the program to the Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3. Published by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, December 1968.

various cities of the country, wrote the technical assistance bulletins, and counseled The Participants in good times and bad. She was the one who told them: real participation is citizen control. Citizen control is like the top of the ladder. Down at the bottom it’s only manipulation and therapy and consultation—­but at the top of the ladder, that’s where you want to be. The Participants look around the room at each other. What to do now? They have fought hard to become part of the government, but now the government has cut them out of the loop, again. The Participants stand here at the bottom of the ladder. Should they stay? Should they climb again? Many people here want to continue, even if this isn’t really participation, even if the ideals they have fought for have been corrupted. But others, it is clear, will never give in. Some are pragmatists, and some are idealists. One by one, they climb again.

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Introduction Participation was a problem in the 1960s. In the name of participation, democracy changed to become a Citizen Pa rticipation as different kind of apparatus; in the name of democ- Mea ns to a n End racy, participation was formatted in new ways. In Because of limited expertise with citimany ways this period saw the invention of modern zen participation in public programs—­ and because participation raises the American participation in civic life: individualized, central issues of the rights, responsivirtuous, concerned more with administrative than bilities and powers of governers and legislative issues, and nostalgic for the experience the governed in a democracy—­some officials and citizens have confused of collective life. It also found itself in an ironic po- means with ends, process with consition: on the one hand, a check on unaccountable tent, structure with power . . . but in expertise in the governance of everyday life; but on some cities the object of this effort is apparent. . . . In some cities, offithe other hand, a formatted procedure that produced not cials and residents report that during its own specialized experts and expertise. a substantial portion of the planning The case of the Area Wide Council is a key ex- period they were involved in what ample of how the problem of participation was ad- might be called “participation in participation” rather than in planning. ✴ dressed in America, how that approach failed, and US Department of Housing and Urban what resulted from the experience. The story of Development, Technical Assistance BulAWC and the Model Cities program in Philadelphia letin No. 3, Subject: Citizen Participation in Model Cities, 13–­14. is a moment of intensity in the history of participation; it is a story of various forces that had come together only to break apart in new ways afterward. When “maximum feasible participation” was enshrined in US law, it initiated an experimental supplement to representative democracy. Up to this point, there were few doctrinal or statutory expectations of participation in administration (most such requirements referred to legislative issues, such as voting, referenda, initiatives, or rights of assembly, speech, or the press). The Economic Opportunity and Model Cities programs did something unusual, which was to legislate into existence—­to legalize—­“maximum feasible participation” by the affected subjects of a government; afterward, participation became something different, something more technical and more individual, something problematic in a new way. Such a “legalization” of participation was necessary at this moment for at least two key reasons: first and foremost, the legalization of participation was an experiment in redeeming administrative decentralization from its injustices. African American experience in representative democracy repeatedly demonstrated that it was not the rule of law that governed the administration of American democracy, but the rule of men, and perhaps nowhere was this clearer Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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Callowhill East Redevelopment Project, c. 1969. Source: Temple

U ni v er sit y Ur ba n A rchi v es. Used w ith per mission.

than in America’s cities and in the experiences of so-­called urban renewal in the mid-­twentieth century. “Maximum feasible participation” and the Model Cities program were, by many accounts, a successful supplement or corrective to these injustices, creating organizations like the AWC (among many other “Community Action Programs”) and granting them resources, technical assistance, and even money and salaries to act as part of the administration of local government. But it also failed, as the case On the history and politics of the war of Philadelphia demonstrates, and instead of expanding on poverty and the community action participation, restricted its scope dramatically. programs, see Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of A second key reason participation was necessary in Community Action during the American this case has to do with the critiques of various forms of Century (Durham, NC: Duke Uniexpertise: scientific management in administrative govversity Press, 2012); Countryman, Up South; Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle ernment and the rarefied urban planning and engineerHazirjian, The War on Poverty: A New ing of city halls that failed to engage with residents. But Grassroots History, 1964–­1980 (Athens: expertise—­like participation—­is also a problem, and a University of Georgia Press, 2011). complicated concept. The case of AWC can help us see On the origins of community action in an international view, see Lillian B. that it comes in many forms. The problem of scientific Rubin, “Maximum Feasible Participamanagement and urban planning is largely a problem tion: The Origins, Implications, and of technical expertise (associated with engineers and Present Status,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science planners), but it is often confused with other forms of 385, no. 1 (1969): 14–­29. For a classic expertise: expertise in participation itself, and expertise contemporaneous take, see Moynihan, that develops as a result of participation in government. Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. Only by paying attention to the grammar of par148

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ticipation can we see how this experimental moment unfolded: from the enthusiastic legal enshrinement of Who are the experts on expert participation in federal law as part of the civil rights participation today? Along with Caroline Lee’s work, see also Baiocchi movement, the War on Poverty, and the transformation and Ganuza, Popular Democracy; of American urban space, to the critique of an emerging Edward Walker, Grassroots for Hire: expertise in participation: the problem of mere “partic- Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy (New York: Cambridge ipation in participation.” University Press, 2014); Caroline W. The enshrinement of participation in federal law Lee, Edward T. Walker, and Michael was short-­lived, but it had long-­term consequences McQuarrie, Democratizing Inequalities: of the New Public Participafor how administrative agencies in the United States, Dilemmas tion (New York: NYU Press, 2015); and elsewhere in the world, reconceived participation C. Zukin et al., A New Engagement? as contributory autonomy. No longer would the clash Political Participation, Civic Life, of group interests (neighborhoods, communities, par- and the Changing American Citizen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ties) structure meaningful participation in government; 2006); Fung and Wright, Deepening rather, agencies would ask the individual contributions Democracy. A variety of other surveys of people to bring about administratively legitimate col- from different disciplines also capture the state of this literature: Michael lectives. But alongside these demands would emerge a X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook, perplexity: What counts as politics? Are experts politi- and Lawrence R. Jacobs, “Public cal? What does participation achieve? Where is power Deliberation, Discursive Participation, Citizen Engagement: A Review located when participation is contributory autonomy and of the Empirical Literature,” Annual instead of a social movement, a community action Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 315–­44; Nancy Glock-­Grueneich and group, or a neighborhood council? Central to this critique is a figure familiar to any stu- Sarah Nora Ross, “Growing the Field: The Institutional, Theoretical, and dent of participation: Sherry Arnstein’s “ladder of citi- Conceptual Maturation of ‘Public zen participation.” That ladder entered the debate as a Participation,’” International Journal critique of participation and not as an enthusiastic de- of Public Participation 2, no. 1 (2008): 14–­25; Rowe and Frewer, “A Typology mand. It argued that the way participation had been for- of Public Engagement Mechanisms”; matted and institutionalized had demeaned and weak- Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, ened it, and had failed to effectively include participants “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory,” in real power, real government. And yet, it took on a life Annual Review of Political Science 11 of its own and became perhaps the first and most im- (2008): 387–­412. portant tool in a tool kit that formed part of a renewed enthusiasm for participation. The ladder encouraged new attempts at the measurement of participation, and ironically, given the story of AWC, helped redefine participation as contributory autonomy. This chapter focuses on these intertwined problems of participation and expertise in the case of the AWC, by paying attention to the grammar of participation and asking: What did participants look like before they became experts in participation? What motivated the transition to a participation dependent on contributory autonomy? It begins by opening up the question of expertise and Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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distinguishing the multiple meanings of that term today and in the past. The moment of Model Cities and the AWC is then explored as one attempt to address the problem of participation. It focuses on the effects of creating an experimental supplement to representative democracy, and the double bind that legal requirement created for the AWC participants. This double bind resulted in a critique from within—­Arnstein’s ladder. The last part of the chapter focuses on how this critique formed a nascent expertise in participation relying on “technical assistance” and practical approaches.27 How did Arnstein’s ladder establish the ground from which a renewed enthusiasm for a more individualized participation could spread? How could this ladder, which started as an attempt to shift power to excluded groups, become the centerpiece of a tool kit for contributory autonomy?

Expertise and Its Discontents At the beginning of her 2015 book Do It Yourself Democracy Caroline W. Lee describes her subject: “This book looks at the expanding market for public participation across many contexts of American life, from the standpoint of the engagement experts who have caught the fire of participation and have dedicated their lives to sharing its transformative power with others.”28 Lee’s book explores several cases—­often very large, complex, endeavors—­to involve citizens in planning and decision-­making around big and small issues, from community policing to national budget priorities. It’s hard to overstate the scale and spread of such deliberative practices, events, and “engagement experts” over the last thirty years, but easy to overstate their significance. As Lee points out, this industry has been long in the making, and it is made up not of craven hucksters but of honestly self-­reflexive and soul-­searching practitioners of deliberative democracy who have the “fire of participation” in them and want to share it. It is a “paradox” at the heart of political participation today that “efforts to enhance public access to power have increased the number of intermediaries and experts in public life.”29 But its effect, according to her, is not always as salutary as its proponents believe: Pure civic settings are in high demand in an increasingly apolitical and consumption-­oriented age. These authentic political experi150

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ences, far from being alternative spaces, could not exist without the institutional contexts they claim to supersede. In this way, to understand what is sacred about political participation, we must understand how its specialness is carefully crafted, why that perceived specialness is so valuable to sponsors, and why it is so threatening to activists seeking collective, not individual transformations.30

Or, as she puts it more bluntly, such attempts to engineer public participation can be “authentically real Alexis de Tocqueville distinguished and disempowering at the same time.”31 This nostal- governmental centralization from adcentralization; the former gia for the experience of participation is a direct ef- ministrative he thought essential to a nation’s surfect of the formatting of participation as contributory vival, the latter he viewed with scorn: autonomy—­and it has even animated that formatting “For my part, I cannot conceive that a because of the ways in which the experience of con- nation can endure, much less prosper, without a high degree of governmental tribution can produce the temporary effect of collec- centralization. But I think that admintive belonging. But, as Lee shows, such an experience istrative centralization serves only to is more likely to further individualize and disempower sap the strength of the nations that are subjected to it, because it steadily people that it is to sustain and extend the collective that weakens their civic spirit” (Alexis de thereby comes together to briefly experience its power. Tocqueville, Democracy in America The public engagement actors in Lee’s book descend [New York: Library of America, directly from the experiments in citizen participation in 2004], 97–­98). the Economic Opportunity and Model Cities programs. They emerge from four decades of experiments, institutional and professional practices, and continual development of handbooks, tool kits, software, and systems designed to facilitate participation. Strangely, they have reached exactly the point at which Kurt Lewin and his students started our story: they engineer social climates that produce an experience of participation.32 According to Lee and others it is precisely this engineered experience that allows the real power of contributory autonomy to be contained and coopted, if not defused entirely—­a “democratization of inequality.”33 But even as it is clear from Lee that the experience of participation is managed and produced here, it lacks any functional role, whether or not it is sustained in the form of collectives, or dispersed again into alienated individuals. What this experience produces—­which is lost each time a participant leaves one arena to participate anew in another elsewhere—­is expertise. That participation produces expertise is perhaps counterintuitive. It is troubling because one of the most common ways of talking about participation is to oppose it to expertise, often associated with elites. The opposition between experts and citizens was well esPa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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tablished in 1962, when a key plank in the Port Huron Statement’s “participatory democracy” was to insist that democracy in America was overly centralized, run by elites, out of touch with youth and minorities, and too beholden to the unaccountable power of technical experts who might possess a capacity for decision-­ making, but lack the will necessary for it.34 The literature on expertise is generally careful about the different modes and Hence, Lee’s “puzzlement at the paradox” of experts kinds of expertise. See, for example, involved in public participation. Lee’s experts in public Evan Selinger and Robert P. Crease, participation are a particular kind of expert: not necThe Philosophy of Expertise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). essarily experts in the topic at hand, but experts in the Much of it revolves, thanks to Hubert form of participation. They are focused on organizing Dreyfus and Harry Collins, around and arranging events that inform, educate, elicit discusquestions of artificial intelligence. See sion and deliberation, manage expectations, incite creHarry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: University ative thinking or problem solving, and ultimately try of Chicago Press, 2007); Hubert L. to produce the experience of participation. They use a Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t variety of tools, scripts, procedures, and technologies Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). to do so. But it is also discussed as a problem But that kind of expert is not generally the expert of professions vs. expertise: Andrew imagined when participation is offered as a counterpoint Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor to expertise, or when the power of citizens is opposed to (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, the power of experts. Rather, that sense of “expertise” 2014); Gil Eyal, “For a Sociology of refers to an imbalance between the decision-­making Expertise: The Social Origins of the power of distant experts (usually engineers, econoAutism Epidemic,” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 4 (2013): 863–­907. mists, and government bureaucrats) and the local, on-­ Or as an issue about embodiment: the-­ground residents, citizens, or affected populations. Dominic Boyer, “The Corporeality of Experts in this story are not those who elicit or stage Expertise,” Ethnos 70, no. 2 (2005): 243–­66. And occasionally as a question participation, but those who, first of all, claim experof experience: Mihaly Csikszentmitise in a particular scientific or engineering field. They halyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal are also, however, those who claim expertise in managExperience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). ing an administration that executes government regulations. Citizens, by contrast, have been included here because they have a right both to know and to contest these decisions. Interestingly, of course, as administrations continue to do their work, they themselves become more “expert” at including the participation of citizens. Confusingly, there are also ways of referring to participants and their experience as a form of “lay expertise.” Such expertise comes from long, direct experience of a particular problem. An example is Brian Wynne’s famous case of the Cumbrian sheep farmers: sheep farmers who understood specific, contextual environmental conditions in proximity to a nuclear power plant, but whose knowl152

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edge was dismissed by scientists as culturally or socially unlearned or irrelevant. Or the case of Steven Epstein’s AIDS activists, who through the process of participating in a movement, educated themselves to the point where they could argue with AIDS experts in the medical establishment on their own terms. In this imaginary, participation is organic, immediate, and authentic, and citizens demand that their expertise should count as much as, and be able to contest, or at least supplement, that of the technical experts.35 At least three meanings of expertise are circulating here, often going undistinguished: 1. Expertise as technical skill, especially that of scientists, engineers, and economists, entailing a rationality that privileges neutral, sometimes mathematical, sometimes technological, answers to complex problems. This expertise is gained primarily through education and training at elite institutions, and is jealously guarded through various professional norms, official credentials, or modes of distinction. 2. Expertise as the result of experience; as direct, intensive, repeated, and long engagement through which one becomes familiar with aspects of a problem. Some experts of the first type, above, possess this second form of expertise as a result of long years of involvement in their specific domain; but others might not and are accused of book-­learning, armchair scholarship, or merely abstract knowledge of a problem. 3. A particular form of expertise associated with the management and elicitation of participation. The “public engagement experts” of Lee’s studies who are mobile professionals ready to create participation for potentially any problem that requires decision-­ making (including those that involve technical experts of the first kind). Public participation experts may claim expertise of either the first or second kind, above: they may be credentialed graduates of various kinds of degrees or programs, from political science or psychology, to management consulting, theater and communication, or art. Or they may be peripatetic participants, who have become experts through repeated and varied participation, coming to understand themselves as professional facilitators of participation.

When participation is opposed to expertise, rhetorically or in scholarly work, it is often implicitly privileging certain forms of the Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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second type over certain forms of the first. There are the cases of Wynne and Epstein recently, but also the general demand for decentralization that was part of the 1960s enthusiasm for participatory democracy, and that buoyed an enthusiasm for including and legitimizing forms of local, indigenous knowledge or appropriate technology. Such examples constitute the historical and ideological motivation for the more common forms of “lay participation” in the present, in which experts of the third kind convoke groups of citizens in an attempt to elicit such relevant, contextual information (often in the service of producing better deliberation on a topic). Distinguishing these three types of expertise is important for understanding how different disciplines have approached the problem of participation, but it is also important to understand how participation itself has come to be formatted and institutionalized over the last forty years, and why certain critiques periodically reemerge. The grammar of participation—­on the one hand, enthusiasm, and on the other a sense of cooptation—­helps exMany examples of an anthropology of plain why we have the third kind of expertise now, and experts and expertise could be cited; for a recent review, see E. Summerson how it emerged from a case like the Model Cities proCarr, “Enactments of Expertise,” Angram in Philadelphia. nual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): Contrasting participation and expertise often en17–­32. In the area of international development, see especially David tails a related opposition: that between technical and Mosse and D. J. Lewis, The Aid Effect: political practices, or between technology and politics Giving and Governing in International generally. Anthropologists have been particularly fond Development, Anthropology, Culture and Society (London: Pluto Press, of the opposition, and occasionally the experience of 2005); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Exparticipants (as opposed to experts) is labeled “poliperts: Egypt, Techno-­Politics, Modernity tics,” while that of engineers or economists is labeled (Berkeley: University of California “technical” or “technocratic”—­implying that it relies on Press, 2002); Harvey, Roads. some version of automatic calculation, or unambiguous calculability, independent of the mess of desires, opinions, and presumably, noncalculated or calculative human judgment. An example of this is Tania Li’s work on Sulawesi, in which experts engage in “rendering technical”—­a process of removing something from the zone of the political by turning it into a congeries of calculation, measurement, and engineering-­based decision-­making. Opposite this is politics, which she dubs a “witches brew” of human desires, beliefs, and interests.36 These oppositions (expert/participant; technical/political) have been much aided by James Ferguson’s famous “anti-­politics machine.”37 The anti-­politics machine, which he imagined on the analogy of an antigravity machine, as a kind of science fiction de154

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vice, did its magic whenever a development project was appropriated by engineers, technicians, or economists. When this happened, a kind of magic occurred whereby the political negotiation over values seemed to disappear both technically and socially, amid the expert calculations of engineers and economists. This did not eliminate politics so much as teleport it—­state power expanded, but not through political negotiation understood as deliberative, democratic policy-­making within an affected collective governing itself. The “state power” in question was complicated by being more than simply a territorial national power, and instead one tangled up with international development and global capital. Although many works continue to adhere to these oppositions, some anthropologists have started to ask whether the distinction holds, once one looks more closely at the practices of experts. Drawing on the insights of science and technology studies, a range of anthropologists have begun to look more closely at how expertise works internally—­how does it The relationship between the so-­called achieve the magic of the anti-­politics machine? ontological turn in anthropology and Sometimes this results in an accusation of coop- the focus on things in STS is described Steve Woolgar and Javier Lezaun, tation, such as the “tyranny of participation” dis- in “The Wrong Bin Bag: A Turn to Ontolcussed in the next chapter, and sometimes it leads ogy in Science and Technology Studto an analysis of politics among the elites and ex- ies?” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 3 perts themselves. An exemplary case is Stephen Col- (2013): 321–­40; Woolgar and Lezaun, “Missing the (Question) Mark? What lier’s analysis of how expert deliberation of planning Is a Turn to Ontology?” Social Studies and budgeting in post-­Soviet cities takes account of of Science 45, no. 3 (2015); Sergio Sisdifferent political choices and substantive values.38 mondo, “Ontological Turns, Turnoffs and Roundabouts,” Social Studies of Similarly, Andrew Barry’s work on “political ma- Science 45, no. 3 (2015): 441–­48. chines” has opened up the question not only of the political disputes of experts, but of the political nature of technologies, such as pipelines or the creation of “technological zones.”39 In another case, Harvey and Knox document how road-­building engineers in Peru also engineer “public engagement” in advance of the actual slurry and asphalt by using standardized techniques of survey and interview, and by attempting to transparently negotiate and compensate citizens as the road unfurls.40 What might be seen as the properly political is thus brought into the domain of the technical. They elegantly demonstrate the absurdity of this attempt to engineer participation with a few cases of those who, Bartleby-­like, refuse to participate in participation: refuse to fill out surveys, refuse to be compensated for their trouble, even refuse, in one case, to move at all from the path of the road. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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It is perhaps ironic, then, that within the field of science and technology studies, the same opposition has been approached from what appears to be the exact opposite direction. STS has long repeated versions of the same claim: “technology is political.” It has variants, such as “artifacts have politics” or “technology is society made durable”; more recently, there are variations on the “vibrancy of matter” and the renewed demand to focus on matter, material, and things, all the way up to and including an array of “ontological turns.”41 For STS scholars, expertise is not outside of or excluded from politics, but rather is soaking in it. In the simplest cases, it is easy to show that even within a closed group of calculating experts, deliberation and disputes over values and political choices take place regularly, and with obvious consequences. The focus within STS on “matters of concern” and “making things public” is an attempt to amplify this internal politics, and to demonstrate that it is not restricted to an elite, closed group of deliberating humans, but includes the complex arrangements of things, arguments, people, and processes that crisscross organizational boundaries, technical designs, and political venues in different ways. This is a point amply demonstrated by a range of studies in STS (not only the work of Latour), perhaps most distinctively those of Annemarie Mol and John Law.42 Similarly, since the 1990s, to attempt an “infrastructural inversion” or to demonstrate the mediation of politics by things has been at the heart of efforts in science studies to make science and technology’s political functions and realities more visible to everyone.43 STS itself has identified this relation between expertise and participation in different ways, calling it a “participatory turn” or a “third wave” focused on expertise.44 But perhaps most important, it has identified the role of things and technologies as constitutive of politics rather than as something to be kept separate or distinguished from it.45 As a result, we have two contentions: that technology and expertise are themselves political, and that politics is technical or thinglike. Within this latter claim the material nature and technical formatting of participation has become a subject of study. As in the work by Caroline Lee, much of the work in STS now attempts to analyze the spread of new forms and practices of eliciting participation. It does so not only to critique these forms of participation, but also to ramify and facilitate them as experiments. Rather than simply accusing expertise of wanting to calculate in the absence of politics, STS has simply pointed out that it never does, 156

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and so should be opened to the widest possible definition of “the political,” however that might be achieved. For this reason, STS has taken a keen interest in the experts of the third kind listed above, who are involved in staging participation in the name of opening up technical decision-­making to politics—­or closing it down through “provocative containment.”46 The various forms of citizen representation (consensus conferences, citizen panels, science shops) and “technologies of elicitation” used to bring “lay expertise” into deliberative spaces have been well studied.47 If one takes a step back from this recent work in anthropology and science studies, however, it becomes clear that these attempts are not wholly new. They are of a piece with a longer, more complex attempt to treat the problem of participation under representative democracy by formalizing it, studying it, or otherwise trying to provoke more of it. The case of AWC and the Model Cities program is worth exploring as a significant threshold in this longer history.

Expertise in Model Cities What kind of expertise was at stake in the case of Model Cities? Expertise of the first sort defined above, in city planning, urban architecture, infrastructure, and so on. But also a “local” or “community” planning expertise different from mere “interest”—­awareness of issues that white city planners at City Hall might miss, for instance—­or expertise as “local knowledge” of the second kind, perhaps. But also expertise in the operation of government: how to participate in the operation of city government, form committees, achieve representativeness, argue for resources, and establish fair processes of multiple sorts. This was a different expertise somewhere between the first and second kinds, usually possessed by professional politicians (and captured in the idea of a “political machine” that controls a city). But also expertise in how to write proposals—­for which consultants who were neither from the neighborhood nor from City Hall were brought in to help. This would be expertise similar to the third sort, but not related to participation per se; an effect of bureaucracy is to generate new forms of expertise that can then be spun off and sold back to the government as a service. But also expertise in “politics,” where that means something more intuitive than simply knowing how the system works—­a sense of who wants what, who has helped whom, and who will be an ally or an enemy (a brand of the second sort of expertise gained Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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only through experience in politics). But also a kind of technical expertise in the practical use of the tools of organizing—­phones, mimeograph machines, logistics, and the expertise of local organizers without whom something like AWC would never have existed. But also . . . All these different forms of expertise mingled in this case—­as they would in most cases of governance involving multiple groups and complicated issues. They are expertise of the first two kinds, however; there is no obvious expertise of the third sort involved, at this point in history. But expertise in participation is nascent precisely in the technical assistance bulletins, which are filled not with details about how to properly plan an urban renewal or the transformation of a city, but with specific instructions on navigating City Hall and specific claims about what it means to participate properly. For the AWC, “technical assistance” fell in between expertise of the second and third sorts: most politicians would acquire such expertise through their own participation in the process of government, but it is also knowledge that, if formalized, is relevant to helping new participants govern more effectively. One might therefore think of AWC’s experience of participation as a kind of perplexed expertise. Were they engaged in politics or not? As they learned more, and as they consolidated that experience within AWC and North Philadelphia, it became more threatening: City Hall viewed their expansive definition of participation (promoting protests or marches with mimeograph machines) as an improper form of participation. By standardizing and formatting participation more carefully, it was possible to defuse this perplexing expertise accumulated by AWC and to introduce a commensurable form familiar to specific forms of expertise (whether a form of technical calculation, or an embodied experience of leadership). Given this new arrangement of politicians and participants, the Model Cities and Economic Opportunity Programs clearly signaled a change for those involved in a certain domain of expertise—­that of public administration and management. Participation was not, at this moment, something formally defined or easy to implement; it was still “in the making,” as in the following quotation from Public Management in 1969: The case for citizen participation is a moral case—­the powerless should have a share of power. It is a legal case—­the right of participation is conferred by law in anti-­poverty, model cities, and other 158

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programs. And it is a practical case—­the poor now have enough political power to protect and expand their participatory role. So a new kind of public management is in the making. Traditionally the goal of efficiency has called for administration by professionals and for central planning, direction and control of the city-­wide allocation of resources. But an efficiency symbolized by remoteness, impersonality, and lack of empathy must now be balanced with other goals, like responsiveness and representation. Professionalism must be balanced with amateurism, centralization with decentralization, and the economy of unitary administration with the waste of pluralization.48

In the early twentieth century, the fad for scientific management (descended directly from the success of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas in corporate America) had infected public administration with its own assumption of the necessity and centrality of an expert cadre of managers within the US government—­an assumption challenged morally, legally, and practically in the 1960s. Because of this embrace of scientific management, and of the efficiency and relative autonomy of managing an administration, participation clearly, if paradoxically, appears as a problem for those in government. Rather than the source of democratic legitimacy, it became a problem of “balance” to be addressed in new ways within the structures of administration. The Economic Opportunity and Model Cities programs were turning points in this process, because they set in motion this making of public participation, within the expert field of public administration, especially. Throughout the 1970s, and especially in the context of environmental legislation, faith in public engagement and participation spread, and as it spread, it formalized. By 1981, public participation could be captured in a Public Involvement Manual, written by James Creighton, that recounts stories of successful and failed public participation—­national parks, water quality, flood control, watersheds, transit systems, dams, mandated variously at local, state, and federal levels. Creighton describes it thus: Public involvement is a process or processes, by which interested and affected individuals, organizations, agencies and government entities are consulted and included in the decision making of a government agency or corporate entity. Typically a variety of techniques are used as part of this process, including individual interPa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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views, workshops, advisory committees, informational brochures, surveys, and public hearings.49

Here, too, expertise is opposed to the everyday experience and knowledge of citizens, and the spread of new techniques of participation would counter the growth in the size of the administration, which, according to Creighton, created the “faceless bureaucrat—­ [who] is usually seen as making decisions that affect people’s lives without their having any control over it.” Or in another example, from a 2002 book by Thomas Beierle and Jerry Cayford, assessing the effectiveness of public participation in environmental regulation and administration: “Public participation is best understood as a challenge to the traditional management of government policy by experts in administrative agencies.”50 In the case of the history of environmental management in the United States, the authors tell a potted story of the transition from a “managerialist” era of scientific forestry pioneered by Gifford Pinchot in the US Forest Service, through the New Deal and the response in the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (which systematized how executive agencies made rules, thus limiting the power of individual members of the executive), to the spread of things like the Freedom of Information Act, the Sunlight Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act (which established a new “right to know” in the public), to the installation of public participation as a regular part of the EPA’s mandate under the Clean Air and Water Acts. Participation in environmental regulation spread slowly, but was finally, if contentiously, institutionalized in the 1990s, and it now forms a centerpiece of administrative life by which the management of experts is countered through the participation of citizens. The desire to incorporate participation into nearly every aspect of administration has grown dramatically in the intervening decades. We now live, as one major handbook optimistically announces, in The Age of Direct Citizen Par160

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ticipation.51 Participation is now routine in many regulatory agencies, in environmental governance, in budgeting, in healthcare governance and doctor-­patient interaction, and it has been incorporated into forms of community policing and community governance of schools.52 The effect of this spread is the rise of that new form of expertise, expertise in participation itself, which entails mobile experts and tool-­kits of practices and procedures designed to bring into existence a form of human deliberation and interaction intended to counter, supplement, or possibly displace other forms of expertise in decision-­making. The reality of the participation we have made, however, is that very little of it depends on experience of the second kind—­of long, repeated, intensive experience in a particular problem. Both the experts of the third kind and the participants they convoke are mobile, peripatetic, highly individualized. Their newly acquired capacity to participate in decision-­making disappears at the very instant of the decision. Instead of a successful formation of a collective, a new demand emerges for the constant activation of contributory autonomy.

The Problem of Legalized Participation The moment that Goldie Watson decided to respond to HUD without consulting AWC turned out to be an important one. It would very shortly be at the center of a court case brought by AWC against the city. The legal action would ultimately be one of the few rulings on the meaning of “maximum feasible participation” (North City Area Wide Council v. Romney).53 The case asked the court to rule on whether City Hall had violated its duty to include the maximum feasible participation of AWC, which was not simply a moral demand, or a contractual arrangement, but a federal legal requirement in the legislation. Up to this point, participation and its incorporation into government had been merely a duty, and one often honored in the breach, but with this case participation became a new kind of problem, with new legal lineaments and practical challenges. The people closest to the action—­AWC, City Hall, and the employees of the new federal agency called Housing and Urban Development—­puzzled over these challenges closely, and set the stage for what would come later. AWC eventually won the case, after two appeals, but the decision came too late to matter. By that point Watson was firmly in charge of the Model Cities program in Philadelphia, and City Hall had Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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The Model Cities program had as a precursor and motivating economic force the Ford Foundation’s “Gray Areas” program. See especially Ananya Roy, Stuart Schrader, and Emma Shaw Crane, “Gray Areas: The War on Poverty at Home and Abroad,” in Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South, edited by Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane, Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 289–­314; Alice O’Connor, “Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight Against Poverty,” Journal of Urban History 22, no. 5 ( July 1996): 586–­625.

By 1972, the Philadelphia Model Cities experience was a robust object of investigation into participation, as John Strange makes clear in his very long, but partial, list of citations. See John H. Strange, “Citizen Participation in Community Action and Model Cities Programs,” Public Administration Review 32 (1972): 655–­69.

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succeeded in reducing AWC to an advisory role. Some of the members of the original AWC decided to stick it out, but most sided with the “militants” who wanted a court case, and who ended the process embittered and angry. Their anger is on display, alongside the indifference and table-­mannered righteousness of City Hall, in the September 1972 special issue of Public Administration Review, which is also a testament to how immediately the AWC and the Model Cities program became fodder for scholarly and practical consideration. Articles side by side demonstrate the perplexity that existed between the members of AWC (in stories told to Sherry Arnstein), and members of City Hall, who recount The Truth in grave and serious language. Watson, meanwhile, was given control of the Model Cities program, but it turned out to be, as one of her obituaries put it, “not her finest hour.” The program spent $700,000 to remodel nineteen houses and lent out only $20,000 of the $6 million available, among other criticisms.54 Many saw it as going back to the business-­as-­usual of slum clearance and urban renewal. The Philadelphia Model Cities case was a turning point in the concept of participation in America. It is one of the most widely referenced cases—­specifically for the study of participation by citizens in public administration. Even before the program ended, it was generating research and case studies. It was also, among all the other Model Cities and the Community Action Programs of the Economic Opportunity Act, the most visible experiment yet in federally mandating participation. It would be wrong to call this the origin of citizen participation, but it was clearly a kind of mutation in the idea—­from something that was generally discussed as a diffuse right and duty of citizens, to something that needed to be administratively enabled and required. Up to this point, examples of participation in public administration had mostly come about organically—­as part of a tradition recognized from the origins of the American experiment—­but also through the activism of leaders such as David Lilienthal at the Tennessee ValPa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

ley Authority, Grenville Clark and the Selective Service, or countless highly variable small-­scale examples of everyday local involvement and exclusion around the country. The 1960s arguably saw the first step in the formalization of what was, before this time, the ad hoc American form of decentralized administration observed by de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century. Although there is much that separates de Tocqueville’s nineteenth century from mid-­twentieth-­century administration, the core American insistence on decentralized, local control over the administration of government affairs remained a central part of debates about organization and management, as is evident in Lilienthal’s TVA, as well as the debates about the role of scientific management and bureaucratic excess in twentieth-­century life.55 What often went uncharacterized, however, in the rosy, nostalgic reference to the can-­do spirit of American local democracy was that each such experiment contained its When the central administration own systems of hierarchy, power, inequality, and exclu- claims that it can dispense entirely sion. Left to their own devices, Americans reproduced with the free participation of those interests are primarily at stake, not the rule of law, but the rule of men. Even in for- whose then it is either deceiving itself, or trymal settings, like town halls or the panels of citizens in ing to deceive you. ✴ De Tocqueville, charge of the Selective Service, such cases of participa- Democracy in America, 101–­2 tion tended to reproduce existing systems of hierarchy, control, and ethnic/racial and class exclusion, rather than extending power through participation. So, up until the 1960s, participation was presumed to be fundamentally a local arrangement among groups—­and either a check on or a threat to centralized power. It might need nurturing and protection, or it might be a danger to be managed, but it was certainly not something to be mandated by law from the federal government. The Model Cities case, therefore, is an underappreciated moment in the civil rights movement of the 1960s—­an open horizon for rectifying inequality that closed all too quickly. It was a moment of euphoria that turned into an emblem of failure, leaving open questions: Do we know what participation is? Do we know if it is always good? Do we know if we can make it happen reliably? After this moment, something like a science of citizen engagement emerges, much like what happened two decades earlier in the case of the emergence of participative management in social psychology. The Model Cities case is thus a useful one for considering the distinction between citizen participation in representative democracy—­voting, deliberation, protest, and politics—­and citPa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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Muhammad Ali at the Draft Board Office in Louisville, Kentucky, March 17, 1966. Robert Steinau, Courier-­ Journal.

izen representation in government administration. “Participatory democracy” and most forms of deliberative engagement tend to privilege decision-­making in more legislative domains (the crafting or changing of laws, the election of representatives, the setting of policy goals or agendas). It is the undisputed core of most political theories of democracy. But the seamy underbelly of government is in the administration of the laws and decisions; it is the concrete location of exclusion and injustice. It includes participation in the interpretation of law, in the carrying out of law, and in the distribution and application of money, goods, and personnel by people who are not elected (appointed, hired, called to serve) but are nonetheless citizens and subjects of the state. 164

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The Economic Opportunity and Model Cities programs added a twist to participation by creating a legal The Selective Service was established 1917, and operated throughout requirement for “maximum feasible participation of in World War I, World War II, the Korean residents of the areas and members of groups served.” War, and the Vietnam War. Although As a result, unelected appointees and elected officials the draft has been suspended since were expected to respect the decision-­making power 1975, local Selective Service Boards are still active and made up of volunteer of legally mandated participants who were neither ap- participants. In a study from the 1960s, pointed by the administration nor elected by the peo- James Davis and Kenneth Dolbeare ple. It was both a transfer of power and a double bind. found the service to be “an intricate meshing of deferment policy and It is contrary to the duty of elected officials, which is to organizational characteristics which “represent” those who elected them—­however imper- has the combined effect of offering fect that idea might be. It creates a fissure within the very alternatives to military service to the of higher socioeconomic strata notion of “the people” by giving representative author- sons while conferring the management of ity to elected officials at the same time that it demands deferments and inductions upon comthat that authority be transferred back to “the people.” munity influentials drawn from the And it was intended to do so as a way to supplement same strata. The most politically aware and efficacious members of the society democracy—­as a way to right the injustices of exclu- are thus both advantaged and coöpted sion that had allowed “elected representatives” to fail by the present System” ( James W. Davis and Kenneth M. Dolbeare, Little to represent all American citizens. Groups of Neighbors: The Selective SerSubsequent to this legal requirement, then, federal vice System, Markham Series in Public and local government were required to include the par- Policy Analysis [Chicago: Markham, ticipation of people who are subjects and citizens, but 1968], 3–­4). not elected representatives, in the administration of government. On the one hand, this was far from novel—­most bureaucrats and experts involved in government administration are unelected, and it was clear even to de Tocqueville in the 1830s that in America, at least, such decentralized administration was a source of the nation’s stability and power. Not only was the decentralized operation of administration a check on centralized power, but it was also a source of expertise—­or more commonly in political theory, a source of “civic virtue” by which experienced administrators developed an understanding of the operation of government at the local level, and possibly also at higher levels. The ability of some men to become the administrators of government, to be appointed, to volunteer, ultimately to be vetted and accepted as civil servants: all this is in some ways a routine necessity of administration. Yet, it clearly reproduced precisely the inequalities of power that—­by the mid-­twentieth century in the United States—­so saturated civic life; only certain kinds of people, in networks of kin and nepotism, from particular races, places, classes, or families, were likely to become authentic participants in the adPa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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ministration of government. African Americans, for instance, were kept out, both legally and by the very operation and favoritism of this decentralized administration. The mandate for maximum feasible participation was an underappreciated part of the civil rights movement and an attempt to force the unelected representatives already in power to share that power with other unelected representatives previously excluded, all under the label of participation. A funny thing happens when participation is legalized, however: it creates a war of participants. On one side were City Hall and its expert planners, bureaucrats, and career politicians; on the other, AWC and its “local” knowledge, representative identities, and “lay” participation. On the one side, the government of experts and on the other, the people. However, by virtue of legalizing participation and implementing “maximum feasible participation” as a formal, organizational, and funded practice, AWC members were rapidly turned into experts through “technical assistance” and through attempts to institutionalize the kind of participation mandated in the law. But even as this quasi-­professionalization of the participants proceeded, the system rejected it as a threat. As the members of AWC increasingly experienced participation—­experienced the workings of local government and the politics of urban planning, resource distribution, grant writing, organizing of residents, and planning for the renovation and construction of schools, community centers, or homes—­the members of City Hall suddenly recognized in AWC not citizens participating, but new expert competitors for their own power. The dispute over whether participation would mean “consultation” or “control” came to a head. Analytically, this tension is another sign of the different grammars of participation, and the distinct forms of life at stake in participation. The perplexity that emerges between AWC and City Hall should have been an indicator of the best of all possible forms of participation—­ demanding recognition, if not resolution, as a clear sign of the need for change. What happened instead was the 166

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resolution of perplexity in favor of procedure: the reduction of participation from a practice of expert control over the processes of urban planning to one of mere consultation. Nixon’s administration would give the lie to Johnson’s attempt to reform the Great Society precisely at this moment, by refusing to extend any more opportunities to such citizen interlopers—­it terminated the Economic Opportunity and Model Cities programs. But even before this federal move, the scene in Philadelphia had become one of zero-­sum fighting over concrete things like money, positions, plans, and projects. In short, it reproduced politics inside the administration. As long as they played by the rules of “maximum feasible participation,” City Hall and AWC could fight it out. The move by Goldie Watson and City Hall—­ changing the rules—­was the technically illegal part of what happened to AWC. In some ways, City Hall and the Nixon administration read this double bind clearly: as an outrageous demand that would hand power over to people who were not elected. Despite the rosy rhetoric of expanding participation, and especially in the fraught context of civil rights, in which centuries of exclusion were visible in the very physical and biological fabric of those who were being taunted with the prospect of self-­government at last—­it ran contrary to the ideals and the legal frameworks of representative constitutional democracy. Where the Johnson administration had propped a ladder against City Hall and invited in the People (in the form of AWC), City Hall, with Nixon’s help, kicked the ladder away, and stood smugly and righteously opposed to the “unusually heavy reliance on new corporations” and in defense of “the basic principles of democratic government.” That ladder represented one kind of experiment in expanding democracy in new ways—­beyond what City Hall interpreted as its “basic principles”—­and it was a ladder that connected (and made indistinct) the legislative and the administrative operations of government. If that ladder had become a permanent part of the Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

We who believe devoutly in the democratic process should be the first to urge the use of methods that will keep the administration of national functions from becoming so concentrated at the national capital and so distant from the everyday life of ordinary people, as to wither and deaden the average citizen’s sense of participation and partnership in government affairs. For in this citizen participation lies the vitality of a democracy. ✴ David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 146 (original emphasis)

Cook and Morgan diagnosed this problem clearly in their account of participatory democracy: they distinguished forms of “co-­determination” from those of “self-­determination.” The former invoked hyphenated entities like worker-­management committees, while the latter entailed a true self-­ governance of the classic form. AWC sought the strongest form of the latter, City Hall the weakest of the former. See Cook and Morgan, eds., Participatory Democracy.

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operation of government, it would have been a radical change. The AWC was an organized group, they were given resources and salaries for their employees, they met regularly, worked with residents and politicians alike, and they had big plans for transforming not just the urban landscape, but all kinds of things in Philadelphia. Participation in this case was not restricted to one project or another—­it was tantamount to self-­governance. But that ladder did not remain; instead, a different one replaced it.

The Grammar of the Ladder The members of Area Wide Council knew something had gone wrong with participation and the ways it had been constructed and carried out in the Model Cities program. They fought hard, and continued to fight by taking the case to court, in the hopes of maintaining the power they had already won. At the same time, some members of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development also knew that something had gone wrong with the grand plans for citizen participation and that, Nixon’s destruction of the programs notwithstanding, participation had not been treated with the gravity it deserved. These HUD employees were at the heart of this experiment, and one of them would turn that experience into the single most widely read and cited article about participation: Sherry Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.”56 Many who read this famous article, especially from a distance of fifty years, understand it as a case of enthusiasm for the creation of more participation in civic life. However, what it actually represents—­within the grammar of participation—­is the opposite: a strident critique of the failure of participation, and the cooptation of citizens instead. Arnstein was herself a participant in both modes of this grammar, and it is worth considering the context and origin of this article, and not just the ladder at its center, to see how the problem of participation unfolded in this case. Sherry Arnstein was trained in physical education, worked briefly as a social worker in San Francisco, and ultimately moved into the world of community healthcare, eventually becoming the executive director of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine. In between, however, she worked in Washington. She found a position first in the Kennedy administration (where she led efforts to desegregate US hospitals) and later in the Johnson 168

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administration, where she was special consultant on citizen participation to assistant secretary H. Ralph Taylor in the newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development.57 During this time, Arnstein worked closely with the participants in the Model Cities programs around the country. Her involvement is evident in both “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” and the Public Administration Review piece that communicated the experience of the AWC members. She found herself deeply immersed in the details of the program and its varied implementation (which was very successful in some cities, and not so much in others), and she almost certainly had a hand in writing the technical assistance bulletins that tried to make sense of those varied implementations, which accounts for the similarity between these two documents. Arnstein’s article appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners and introduced itself as an intervention: “The heated controversy over ‘citizen participation,’ ‘citizen control,’ and ‘maximum feasible participation’ has been waged largely in terms of exacerbated rhetoric and misleading euphemisms.” From the get-­go, it is clear that Arnstein’s goal is not to theorize perfect participation but to attack the existing forms it has taken. In this she is firmly within The original Ladder from Sherry Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (1969): 216–­24.

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the grammar of cooptation, though she never invokes that idea. Instead her intervention came with a twist: it would point the way out of “nonparticipation,” past Arnstein’s ladder has been used in “tokenism,” and up the ladder to “citizen power.” every possible way, as the titles of That Arnstein’s article appeared in a journal of planthese articles testify. It has been ning is significant for various reasons. Arnstein was not climbed: “The view from the heights of Arnstein’s ladder,” “Climbing the a planner, or a critic of planning like Jane Jacobs, but a ladder of participation.” It has had consultant on citizen participation. But the article was rungs added to it: “Teetering at the top directed at the experts, whom she implicitly accused of of the ladder”; it has been replaced: “A new ladder of participation,” “Laying implementing a weak and imperfect form of participadown the ladder”; and it has been distion. That the issue concerned the planning and redevelplaced: “A ladder of empowerment.” It opment of cities is clear, but this was also the discipline has been modified for other purposes: “Stepping back from ‘The Ladder’”; and the discourse within which there was an ongoing “A ladder of community participation critique of the way government administration, public for underdeveloped countries.” It management, and city planning were being carried out. has been made three-­dimensional: Arnstein’s article was part of that more general critique, “Mapping public participation in policy choices.” It has been rendered as as well as an indictment of the way participation was concentric circles: “Citizen participainstitutionalized in the Model Cities programs themtion in planning: Climbing a ladder?” selves. As such, it is an emblem of the critical mode of It has been combined with all other ladders, spectrums, and typologies: the grammar of participation more than one of naive “Water tenure reform: Developing an optimism in its power. extended ladder of participation.” It The discourse of planning, and the supposedly neuhas been critiqued for its simplicity: “The split ladder of participation”; it tral expert bureaucracy of City Hall, were by the 1960s has been criticized as an example of well established as targets within the discourses of both “taxonomy-­style” approaches: “Stop planning and public administration. Among the most looking up the ladder”; it has been famous investigations of the presumptive expertise and criticized for overemphasizing power: “Dare we jump off Arnstein’s ladder?”; neutrality of bureaucrats was Derek Waldo’s The Adminand it has been criticized for ignoring istrative State, published in 1948. Waldo, who was also different forms of knowledge and the editor of Public Administration Review during the expertise: “The snakes and ladders of user involvement.” late 1960s, made famous the argument that even in their appeal to neutrality and “scientific management,” bureaucrats could not avoid instantiating some sort of political theory, merely by the nature of their role and position—­that the line between facts and values was blurry at best, if it existed at all. Arnstein entered this context with a story that was both about the moral high ground of participation—­that participation was about the transfer of power to groups who were excluded from it—­and about the critique of expert, bureaucratic control as well. However, the attempt to extend participation to excluded groups was not always or only conducted as a critique of expertise, nor was it explicitly about the particular kinds of knowledge that local resiThe Uses of A r nstein’s La dder

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dents possessed that bureaucrats and experts did not. The more immediate concern for Arnstein was to articulate the need to transfer or share power with excluded groups. The Technical Assistance Bulletin attempts to articulate this in practical terms, while “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” figures it not as a practical problem, but an ethical and political one. Perhaps because of Arnstein’s deep involvement in the Model Cities program, her article commands an unusual kind of authority, even though it contains no research or methodology, and no philosophical argument; it was not the result of a research project, but was based on her own experience in advocating within the federal government on behalf of citizen involvement in city planning. The Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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A selection of Ladders derived from Arnstein’s 1969 article.

article is sprinkled with colorful examples from the Model Cities programs, anecdotes of the manipulation of “neighborhood advisory groups,” excoriations of “attitude surveys,” and so on. Despite—­or perhaps because—­it is based entirely on anecdote, Arnstein’s article would be reprinted in scores of different places, be cited thousands of times, and would eventually become a central, if not obligatory, point of reference. The genius of the piece lies not in its scientific or theoretical credibility, but in its straightforward and simple definition of participation; “My answer to the critical what question is simply that citizen participation is a categorical term for citizen power. It is the redistribution of power that enables the have-­not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliberately included in the future.”58 In Philadelphia, AWC was still climbing the ladder; participation remained an aspiration, not a reality. Arnstein’s basic criticism was that participation should lead to citizen power—­and where it does not, participation is but “empty ritual,” “manipulation,” or “placation.” Her ladder reflects this focus by very clearly hierarchizing forms of participation, from nonparticipation through tokenism to real citizen power. At the lowest end, participants are manipulated, or participation is used to therapeutically reform participants of their desire for power; in the middle range are actions that inform citizens, consult them, or placate them without allowing them to participate; and at the top are forms that involve partnership, delegation of power, or true citizen control. Arnstein’s article bore significant similarity to Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3. It is not unlikely that Arnstein also wrote that bulletin, in her role at HUD, as an attempt to give local groups a way to interpret the mandate for “maximum feasible participation.” The bulletin contains many of the same criticisms that Arnstein’s article would make—­especially the sense that participation should be real, effective, and goal-­oriented; not empty “ritual,” but a process that distributes benefits to all. Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3 was an interpretation of the very limited set of legally binding performance standards that HUD had issued as “City Demonstration Letter #3.” Both the article and the bulletin assume that citizen participation—­ citizen power—­will entail an organizational structure, that it will be representative of the neighborhood or community or group, and that participants should receive all necessary information, technical assistance, and even funding to employ residents of the neighborhood. This recognition that citizen participation is a kind of 172

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unelected citizen representation is exactly what put AWC at odds with City Hall; it raised a very acute question about the nature of democratic institutions and the distinction between participation and representation. The bulletin did the same—­as an effort to share experiences from other Model Cities around the country, to further define what citizen participation meant in various cases and in different cities and what it should or could be in the future. The impact of Arnstein’s article was not to condemn participation —­quite the opposite, it gave participation a renewed power. From the 1970s on, participatory practices would spread and proliferate in the United States and elsewhere. But this success came with an irony. The spread of participation did not necessarily climb up Arnstein’s ladder—­it did not result in the establishment of “citizen power.” Rather, the ladder itself became emblematic of something else: the contributory autonomy of individuals. It would open the door to more participation, but of a much less powerful kind. What Arnstein’s article provided, though it may not have intended to do this, was a new tool. It gave readers, perhaps for the first time, a simple, concrete metric by which to assess cases of participation. For a concept that is vague and hard to define, a linear metric provided an easy way to assess any given case of participation and ask where on the ladder it lay, and whether it could be moved upward. The one-­dimensionality of the ladder was a seductive simplification. It was a necessary intervention in a context where participation had no established definition or expectations—­it had been only an aspirational concept, without a clear definition. Arnstein’s ladder is only the first of many attempts to disentangle the various dimensions and types of participation, but few subsequent attempts would give it the simple, linear organization of the ladder. Built into the form of the ladder is a normative claim about participation: the point is to go up the ladder, not down it, toward citizen power and away from manipulation. Being at the bottom of the ladder, even if one is off the ground, leaves power intact among the elites and experts; they are claiming democratic participation, but actually manipulating or coopting citizens instead. It was a diagnostic tool that turned the grammar of enthusiasm and cooptation into a linear metric instead. For such a complex, sneaky concept as participation, having a tool that separates the good from the bad is essential for anyone who might want to know: Is this participation? Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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Do we have more work to do? Should we believe those who say we have participation? But every metric obscures as much as it reveals, and the ladder has been particularly good at focusing attention on the aspects of participation that concern contributory autonomy: voice, decision-­ making, delegation, control, agenda-­setting. Opposite this, at the bottom of the ladder, are aspects of emotion, affect, and things that might be read as “merely” psychological (“therapy,” “informing,” “consultation”). The attainment of “citizen power” was not the attainment of satisfaction, or emotional well-­being—­such things were to be resisted as forms of manipulation that would disempower the participant. The image of the ladder also had another significant effect. Both the language of “maximum feasible participation” and the explicit language of Arnstein’s article emphasized the role of preexisting groups: neighborhoods, communities, inner cities, races and ethnicities, and so on. In this sense, power is the possession of groups of people, not individuals, and such groups were presumed (for better or for worse) to have homogeneous desires and interests that were being systematically denied not just to particular individuals, but to whole groups of people. As Arnstein artfully put it: “The underlying issues are essentially the same—­‘nobodies’ in several arenas are trying to become ‘somebodies’ with enough power to make the target institutions responsive to their views, aspirations and needs.”59 The ladder, by contrast, has subsequently come to identify participation as an individual’s challenge. One person climbs a ladder, not many people. An image of a rising tide, a city on a hill, or an elevator might have been better at maintaining the feel of solidarity, but the ladder instead binds participation to forms of “contributory autonomy”—­to questions of individuals involved in decision-­making, goal-­setting, and voice. Combine this with the way participation is opposed to (or is a problem for) representative government, and the result is a figure of the individual who participates and gives voice to his or her own interests. At best, it turns the individual into the voice of the group, the representative of the race, neighborhood, class, or ethnicity, rather than the group as the container and force binding individuals together. At worst, it divides and conquers any group that might want to attain the power-­shifting that Arnstein placed at the top of her ladder. Power-­shifting was what AWC sought to achieve, and what City Hall and many government officials recognized as the core danger 174

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in the Economic Opportunity and Model Cities programs: that it was too dangerous to their own continued power to allow the Community Action Programs to determine their own form and to be granted a place in the formal structure of the government.60 Groups of people are excluded: the poor, blacks, Hispanics, neighborhoods, communities—­these are the nobodies seeking to become somebodies. Participation is thus something denied to whole, recognizable groups of people, and not just to individuals. But the ladder suggests the opposite, that those who can climb it will move from one group to another. That such a shift in understanding has taken place is evident in most contemporary uses of the ladder. To take one example, a 2006 article critiquing the use of Arnstein’s ladder to understand participation in health service reforms uses the language of “user involvement.”61 The authors mistakenly read Arnstein’s ladder as if it referred to isolated individuals participating in some process, institution, or organization, whether as citizens, consumers, or users. Many other subsequent uses of the ladder may not single out users or consumers, but instead speak of things such as “community involvement,” or may lump together “communities, organizations, or individuals” as the participants. But in all cases, such collectives do not preexist participation, but are instead called into being by the moment of participation—­whether that is a town hall meeting, or the constitution of a “citizens’ advisory board.” Today, most participation is performed by individuals, and it is only as a result that there are groups. But Arnstein’s article (and Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3 as well) were focused on already constituted groups—­and as such were concerned with the “representativeness” of those groups participating, and with the boundaries and definition of entities such as “neighborhoods.” Those groups were once granted an autonomy of their own, but that has since been replaced by the aggregate autonomy of its members. And indeed, given the experience of City Hall and the AWC, the lesson learned was that transferring power to a particular group may have been salutary for that group, but came with all of the dangers of establishing yet more inequality for those excluded in new ways. Subsequent projects in civic engagement—­and subsequent legislation opening up new avenues for citizen participation—­would cleave toward an individualized participation instead. Rather than “maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and memPa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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bers of groups served,” designating one or more groups, legislation would tend instead toward mechanisms that sought to “individualize” influence, incorporate comments and ideas from users, consider feedback and occasionally demand deliberation, inform citizens, consult selected individuals, or placate them through risk communication. In short, back to the bottom of the ladder. Arnstein’s ladder was a valiant attempt to save the experiment of “maximum feasible participation”—­to preserve the experimental supplement to democracy that would stem the injustices of a system of representative democracy that had failed the residents of North Philadelphia so many times. But it was also the beginning of a new solution to the problem of participation, a solution that would emphasize contributory autonomy instead The politics of the Economic Opportunity programs is captured in Tom of group solidarity; a solution that would emphasize Wolfe’s story of 1960s San Francisco, the constant exercise of participation in an extensive “Mau-­mauing the Flak Catchers.” In sense, flitting from decision to decision, following the the story, he diagnoses a cynicism of peripatetic needs of the autonomous individual citizen politics resulting from these programs. City Hall installed “flak-­catchers” who dutifully contributes. This new form of participawhose sole job was to deflect demands tion would displace a form based on collective expertise from citizens and residents who wantgained over time and through repetition, intensively, ed to participate; meanwhile, savvy members of new black movements with particular problems and needs. figured out how to “mau-­mau” the flak-­ But the question of expertise also saw something of a catchers and trick them into giving out transformation as a result. It was not expertise that was resources (using the racist figure of the uprising in Kenya of the Kikuyu in the the problem, but its possession by elites, and its restric1950s). In the story, the black rage of tion to certain rarefied realms and hard-­to-­access instithe “participants” and the white guilt tutions. Expertise has not declined; like participation, it of the flak-­catchers conspire to divert has proliferated wildly. But while participation has been resources away from those who are actually and authentically in need—­ made mobile and has been scaled out and up, expertise but who play no role in the story. Here has gained inertia and momentum within new kinds the grammar of cooptation is not so much about the abuses of the powerful of collectives: nonprofits, nongovernmental organizaas it is about the inefficiency and cortions, “stakeholder organizations,” social movement ruption of the system itself in creating organizations, think tanks, contract research organiincentives for abuse from below as well zations, patient advocacy groups, and so on. Suppleas paternalism from above. See Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-­Mauing menting the still profound power of government agenthe Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, cies, large corporations, and universities are a range of Straus & Giroux, 1970). smaller, less established collectives within which expertise and the experience of a problem can persist and stabilize. But such entities are not public; they are by design not forms of res publica for which citizens are responsible. Curiously, such groups are forced to act as if they were individuals: they “participate” in government administration—­procedurally 176

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speaking—­exactly as an individual human would. Such collective citizens include traditional “interest groups” but also new forms of “citizen representatives.”62 They act procedurally, however, as if they were individuals, and most administrative attempts to expand citizen participation are content to treat them as such in the name of equality and fairness. One can see, dimly, the felicity of a perverse legal decision like Citizens United in this context as an affirmation of this strange notion of fairness. As if we’d lost the ability to distinguish individuals from groups, perhaps? But it might also be read as a result of the formatting of participation. Such groups today are not nascent political parties (as social movements have occasionally been) because they will never be incorporated into government in the ways that the Area Wide Council was in the 1960s. Such groups are not the neighborhoods and ethnicities of “maximum feasible participation,” but more intentional communities, the results of formatting participation as contributory autonomy, even if that autonomy belongs now to a “stakeholder” rather than a person or a citizen. The spread of such new forms of collectives is not merely a mechanical result of the formatting of participation, however, for these groups now provide a surrogate experience of participation. For those actively involved in them, the immediate affective and emotional experience of participation is more likely to happen as a member of such an individualized collective, rather than as a solitary citizen, for whom meaningful forms of participation as an isolated individual are unlikely to be either effective or emotionally intense and meaningful. These new (emergent) forms of life possess their own new grammars—­they see participation in ways that look nothing like the participation we associate with the citizen who deliberates, votes, petitions, or protests. Like a lenticular diagram, the amount of “citizen participation” in administration that exists today may well depend on the angle one views it from. From one side, a cooptation of individuals participating, a decline in social associations; but from an ever so slightly different angle, one spies instead a proliferation of groups and entities given statutory or doctrinal capacities to weigh in, to participate as groups, interests, stakeholders. Operating just below the surface of this complicated rationalization of contributory autonomy is the desire to experience participation and the vitality of democracy.

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Conclusion The experience of the Area Wide Council was a singular moment in the history of participation—­a moment of both failure and success. One can take the measure of its failure by focusing on any of the diagnoses of neoliberalism that single out the overindividualization and overresponsibilization of civic life today; or the Putnam-­ inspired busying over social or cultural capital in worlds where we “bowl alone” and experience the decline of civic association.63 We no longer live in a world of “groups”: neighborhoods, communities, “enclaves” are all so many second-­order abstractions emptied of the experience of participation proper to them. And yet it moves: participation, engagement, collaboration are everywhere, so that even in Philadelphia, as the final story in this chapter shows, one can sign up to become a citizen expert in the Philadelphia Citizen’s Planning Institute (one of many such initiatives across the country including “community leadership programs” and “community capacity building” programs).64 Back in 1969, Sherry Arnstein critiqued participation as it existed, for reasons very similar to the criticisms still leveled at it today (that it is fake or inauthentic, or amounts to cooptation); in doing so, however, she created one of the most enthusiastically embraced tools of measuring, ranking, and channeling participation’s progress. The ladder is just the beginning, though: there have been refined variations on the doctrinal requirement of participation in nearly every major piece of new legislation since the Economic Opportunity Program, and the last forty years have seen a range of experiments in revising the process of rule-­making and administration, from the simplicity of formal comment periods, to more complex attempts to create opportunities for “collaborative governance” or “e-­Governance.”65 There are citizen juries and citizen representatives of all sorts.66 All of this enthusiastic participation is formatted in particular ways, though, most often as a problem of individual contributory autonomy. As it participated in the Model Cities program, AWC developed a kind of political expertise that depended on their own collective experience of the process. They did not develop the kind of technical expertise (scientific or economic elite expertise) that is often opposed to participation, but it was provided in various ways as “technical assistance.” The technical assistance bulletin and the ladder are the launching point for contemporary participation. They both represent a 178

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desire—­contradictory, in this case—­to make participation into expert participation, into something technically sound: to render it subject to the rule of law, and to give it a structure, a process, and a set of expectations that allow it to be measured and displayed as an example of the success of an inclusive politics. Citizens will be turned into experts, in order to challenge experts on a level playing field. But for the AWC, the danger of this kind of expertise was that could start to feel as if they were “participating in participation” instead of actually getting things done. This experience of participation could then start to feel “authentically real and disempowering at the same time.” A participation that is structured, neutral, representative, and inclusive is, perhaps, the opposite of politics. To be correct, technically or otherwise, is not the same as having an opinion or an interest. People want participation to be routine, equitable, and successful, and so they are disappointed when they learn that participation is also politics. This is what gives participation its grammar of enthusiasm and cooptation—­this is why perplexity is a common feature of real participation, and not something to be destroyed. The desire for authentic participation—­the nostalgia for a lost experience of participation—­can also be disempowering when that experience is not taken seriously. The accumulation of expertise through that experience is one of the functions of that experience—­ not the only one, but an important one nonetheless. To sever it at each turn in favor of enabling a perpetually participating individual who moves from collective to collective is to create a form of personhood focused only on the pleasures of individually contributing. Today in Philadelphia we do not see anything like the AWC, but rather the Citizen Planning Institute: devoted to educating citizens—­ providing “technical assistance”—­and focused on enlarging the number of people who can become experts in the process of city planning and administration. This kind of schooling does not prepare them at all for the participation that they might actually experience. Such an approach appears a watered-­down version of participation—­the kind of thing that Arnstein’s ladder criticized—­consultation or informing at best, therapy and manipulation at worst. It does not incorporate citizens per se, but focuses on the complexity of the expertise needed to conduct city planning at all. Ironically, it creates the possibility not of a participant, but of an unpaid civil servant. But who knows what such citizens experience? Satisfaction, achievement, a sense of belonging and responsibility to the city? Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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Delaware River Waterfront Master Plan, p. 27.

Perhaps they feel they have become collective, that they are instances of Philadelphia? Or perhaps they feel even more isolated, trained experts without power? Whatever they feel, they are definitely not alone.

June 17, 2013 The Participant is at the top of the ladder at last. He is graduating today from the Philadelphia Citizens Planning Institute. Among the two dozen graduates are folks from every walk of life in Philadelphia: blacks, whites, lawyers, longshoremen, activists, Muslims, college students, hairdressers, daughters, fathers, and more. “The Citizens Planning Institute has been envisioned by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission to be its official education and outreach arm. The focus of the Institute is to educate citizens about the role good planning and implementation play in helping to create communities of lasting value. Through education, we are building a constituency for good planning.”67 The director of the institute is interviewing The Participant for a promotional video for the institute—­because The Participant is one of the most enthusiastic and engaged of the students. “What is a citizen planner?” she asks. “Citizen planners,” replies The Participant, “are individuals interested in playing a more informed and active role in shaping the future of their communities and in building the knowledge base of their neighborhood organizations.” 180

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“But why do we need citizen planners—­what can they do that experts cannot?” “Civic engagement is on the rise throughout the country.” The Participant takes a deep breath. “Planning academies are being used in jurisdictions across the country to provide an accessible forum through which government entities can engage citizens and inform them about planning principles, provide a common language to discuss planning issues, and increase the capacity of citizens and civic organizations to participate in planning their communities.”68 “So what did you learn?” asks the director. The Participant starts to list the courses he has taken, but then pauses and says, “A variety of classes, including ones on planning issues and principles, land use and zoning, and the development process.”69 After another short pause, The Participant explains how important it was to learn “individual, group, or organizational knowledge, skills, networks, and resources to enable participants to better serve their communities with the long-­term goal of improving community conditions.”70 “Why did you want to become a citizen planner?” “I enrolled after watching the controversy at the waterfront in Philadelphia. What started as a super-­promising participatory design project with citizens engaged in ‘visioning’ the new waterfront turned into something opaque and business-­as-­usual. Only a couple of official neighborhood

The Participant’s curriculum: Planning 101, Land-­Use & Zoning, Development Process, Urban Design, Transportation/Transit Oriented Development, Neighborhood Planning and Development, Preservation, Sustainability, Commercial Corridor Development, Healthy Communities, and Environmental Justice. ✴ Compiled from “Previous Class Topics,” Philadelphia Citizens Planning Institute, https:// citizensplanninginstitute.org/course -­info/classes/previous-­class-­topics

groups were invited to be represented. The ad hoc process had no ‘clear rules and mandates for citizen participation that go beyond the formation of a citizens advisory committee and that would apply throughout the planning process, including the more technocratic master planning process.’71 I wanted to know how to change that, to contribute in a more meaningful way.” “So what are your plans, now that you’ve graduated?” “Well, now I feel like a kind of expert, but I’m not going for a job or to be a consultant or anything. I guess I will get engaged somehow and contribute with my new understanding—­now that I understand the process, I can comment better. I’ve already participated in a bunch of surveys and measurements about my own knowledge of planning, leadership skills, self-­confidence in expressing opinions, abilities to work with others, sense of duty to community, connectivity to influential persons, and dozens of other things that measure my ‘civic engagement capacity’. This is probably too specific, but the way it was explained to me, I now have ‘two forms of structural social capital: horizontal (bridging and bonding social capital) Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A d m i n i s t e r e d

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and vertical (political capital) networks of relationships to allow a more nuanced assessment of these specific types of relationships.’”72 “That’s impressive! Sounds like you really are an expert on participation now!” “Well, I feel like I understand better where the limits of participation are, and maybe where the power of the city officials begins. I think maybe it would help if there were clearer rules for participation, and more mandates to require citizens to participate in planning. That would maybe allow people like me to ‘establish routine practices and basic norms of participatory planning that might thrive long after a progressive administration has faded from the scene.’” “So you think that participation only happens with progressive administrations?” “I mean, even if the next administration was ‘animated by an alternative vision of politics,’ maybe they would at least be ‘partially constrained . . . by a more entrenched culture of democratic engagement forged by previous progressive administrations.’”73 The director is pleased. “Well, I think you are going to make a huge difference.” “Thank you,” says The Participant. “I can’t wait for the experience to start.”

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Participation, Developed Around 1994 The Participant is in a village in “Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, the United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.”1 The Participant is a contraption of people and paper. The Participant is saturated in the latest development theories and critiques from elite American and European universities; immersed in the most sophisticated—­but ultimately useless—­statistical techniques; and despite it all, still passionate about the possibility of helping impoverished people around the world escape their immiseration. The Participant is part of a movement against the technocrats and the out-­of-­touch development officials who never come to the villages. The Participant is against distant expertise, and for politics, and against state power, and for empowerment of the poor. All over the world, The Participant is bringing the same methods and approaches to the people, unleashing creativity and inventiveness. Instead of manipulating statistical software on an expensive computer in an office in Delhi, or Lagos, or Caracas, he insists instead on traveling the countryside, at all times of year, with a “small briefcase (26 x 33 x 10

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The Participatory Development Tool Kit, created by Deepa Narayan, Lyra Srinivasan, and others, funded by the World Bank and the UN Development Program, produced in India by Whisper Design of New Delhi, coordinated by Sunita Chakravarty of the Regional Water and Sanitation Group in New Delhi in 1994. This copy owned by Getty Research Library, Los Angeles.

cm) containing 221 activity cards, 65 pictures, 11 charts, 1 guidebook”; it is “covered in brown patterned cloth, with leather handle and leather snap closure.”2 The briefcase is decorated with images of women, abstract patterns, huts, trees, animals—­drawings “by the Warli tribe, who live in the Sahadri mountains in Maharashtra state north of Bombay” and who are “known for their mythic vision of Mother Earth, their traditional agricultural methods, and their lack of caste differentiation.”3 Unsnapped and opened, the briefcase reveals a set of twenty-­five folders and a booklet. “Each individual envelope is coded with a number and a title on its flap.” The lid folds back to allow the kit to form a stand, and “every fifth envelope has a color-­coded tab. To gain access to the materials in each set of envelopes, pull the tab and the envelopes will extend toward you.”4 The Participant is in a small farming town in western Nigeria. Around him are various residents—­Yoruba, Fulani, Christian, Muslim, mostly women and children. For decades development officials from the Federal Ministry of Budget and Planning, as well as dozens of international agencies, have visited this town in an effort to understand why the residents remain poor. It has been the object of interventions of all kinds, and nothing has worked very well. The Participant is there with his briefcase and a new idea. All the features of the town are well known: it is a typical small, agriculturally intensive, remote, off-­the-­grid (if there is a grid), “traditional” “community,” which also suffers from problems of sanitation and water quality and an excess of domestic violence. Much like all the other towns around the world where The Participant works. Indeed, this is what makes The Participant’s work so effective, he reflects, and why he is so mobile. As this is their first meeting together, The Participant needs to help everyone “clearly see the difference between directive and non-­directive approaches as well as become aware of the fine gradations of directiveness/non-­directiveness in a set of tasks.” This is too abstract. So instead there are “sets of seven cards, each of which has a picture of a cup but with different instructions.” The cards are laid out on the ground; The Participant asks the women to arrange the cards in an order that “indicates degrees of directiveness or control starting with the most directive card on the left and ending with the most open on the right. The chances are that with minimal effort they will all get it right.” The women are perplexed. They start slowly. They work in pairs. They gaze at the cards. One card says “Fill the cup with hot coffee,” another says 184

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Activity #1, Cup Exercise, Cards A–­F. Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, Participatory Development Tool Kit.

“Fill the cup to the brim with hot coffee,” and another simply says “Do what you like with the cup.” Some women argue over whether there is too much coffee in the cup filled to the brim; others joke that there is no card that says “bring the coffee to your lazy husband without speaking.”5 After ten minutes of arranging, they look at each other’s cards, and indeed they have all placed them in roughly the same order. The Participant asks, “Do you understand the difference between didactic teaching materials and open-­ended ones?” The Participant feels their apprehension. Are we talking about coffee, or about card games? Although the situation is clear to The Participant, these women cannot grasp their status or the reasons why the world is the way it is: a corrupt government, a rapacious economy, frustrated husbands and brothers, a drenching rainy season that washes out the inadequate roads, and so on. But he cannot just tell them this—­they must learn to discover it on their own. The women understand that something is being insisted upon, but they cannot tell just what it is. Words tumble without settling: “open-­ended,” “nondirective,” “controlling,” “learning tasks,” all jumbled in a mix of Yoruba and English. The Participant explains that “in this activity there is no right Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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or wrong answer but that they will each have to justify the choices they make . . . and they should draw from their own personal experience or knowledge of working with village people.”6 Nonetheless, The Participant knows, this exercise is so clearly designed, it should work every time. “The material was designed in such a way that there could be only one ‘right’ answer.”7 The women are puzzled, but they are experiencing their puzzlement together, thinks The Participant, and this is what matters. The Participant is in Sindh Province in Pakistan. In front of him are two makeshift boards with images pinned to them. In this town, the legacy of colonialism is clear—­a rundown British factory building has been converted to a fertilizer plant, the population is largely unemployed, many people are sick from working in the plant, most look for some way to move to Karachi and leave this small town behind. The Participant has gathered the minimum tools for the day’s work—­these “items are useful to have on hand although PROWWESS [Promotion of the Role of Women in Water and Environmental Sanitation Services] workshops have on occasion managed with less”:8 1. a typewriter 2. typing paper 3. large sheets of “newsprint” or other poster-­size blank paper 4. felt pens 5. thumbtacks 6. masking tape or other adhesive 7. art materials (poster colors, brushes, etc.) 8. scissors 9. staplers 10. glue 11. notebooks 12. pencils and erasers The images on the board are from yesterday’s exercise, and are labeled “Force-­Field Analysis.” Members of the village had been asked to help draw an image labeled “now” and then one labeled “future,” for what they wanted to achieve. In between were listed all the things that could prevent it from happening and all the things that could help bring it about. The group had generated a long list of depressing nows; some pieces of paper were taped to the board above and below the images, and some, as if to satirize the least important of the horrible issues, had fallen off onto the ground. The Participant had reminded the trainers to “distrib186

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ute the diagram; be sure to leave the box marked ‘Future’ empty.” That was funny to some of them. The future here is empty, they said. But The Participant persevered, for this process is necessary precisely in order to get the residents to visualize what the future will look like, even if it is a bit utopian: what hope do they have otherwise, if they cannot even draw a picture of a future they hope for? One of the residents rifled through The Participant’s briefcase and found the sample “future” poster: “this looks like a good future,” he said, “why not just use this one?” The Participant uses this as a teachable moment. “This is exactly the problem!” he says. “You don’t want someone else’s future—­for decades you’ve been promised someone else’s future—­ what you want is your own future, the one you create!” Although The Participant senses some skepticism from the residents, he knows that this resistance to change can be overcome. The Participant is in a coastal village in South Sulawesi. He jabs his thumb at the image carefully thumbtacked to the right side of the board. It is labeled “SARAR Resistance to Change Continuum.” “This,” he insists to the residents, “is what prevents us from achieving the future—­we need to move up this ladder, away from complacency to a place of responsibility.” The Participant remembers fondly, ever so long ago, how the force-­field was first imagined, in a pajama factory in the United States, where workers had overcome their resistance to change; and how later it had been reimagined as a ladder of empowerment. Here he only wants the residents to experience that move—­from being powerless to being the change. First they need to grasp the problem, and to do that they need to carefully depict the world as it is around them—­not as they believe it to be, but as it really is. The Participant knows this to be true because he himself has experienced this transformation, this seeing clearly into his own experience of the world as it is. It’s not entirely clear yet, however, who is resisting or what they are resisting. The Participant reminds everyone that they have come to help Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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Activity #6, Diagrams 1–­3. Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, Participatory Development Tool Kit.

Activity #3, Chart 1. Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, Participatory Development Tool Kit.

improve the health/sanitation/wealth/gender equality/capacities of the people in the village, and that these things can only be changed by the people themselves. The Participant has made great progress here: the residents are well along in understanding their own situation, and they have developed a consciousness of their own history. Together they say the letters S-­A-­R-­A-­R, and repeat: The SELF-­ESTEEM of groups and individuals is acknowledged and enhanced by recognizing that they have the creative and analytic capacity to identify and solve their own problems. ASSOCIATIVE STRENGTHS: when people form groups, they become stronger and develop the capacity to act together. RESOURCEFULNESS: Each individual is a potential resource to the community. The method seeks to develop the resourcefulness and creativity of groups and individuals in seeking solutions to problems. ACTION PLANNING: Planning for action 188

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to solve problems is central to the method. Change can be achieved only if groups plan and carry out appropriate actions. RESPONSIBILITY: The responsibility for follow-­through is taken over by the group. Actions that are planned must be carried out. Only through such responsible participation do results become meaningful.9 The residents look at the images of now and future that they have drawn, and The Participant wants them to identify the forces that are constraining the future, and the resources they have to change. The Participant asks the group “to cite some examples when they have observed resistance to an outsider’s messages because of local beliefs, values and attitudes long sanctioned by traditions and culture.”10 No one says anything. The Participant then gives some examples: 1. Breast-­feeding during pregnancy is harmful to a child due to drinking impure milk. 2. Eggs are not good for infants. They cause convulsions. 3. The uterus does not belong to a woman but to her husband. 4. Pregnant women should not eat watermelons. They cause too much water in the womb. 5. We don’t want to cover our wells. The presence of frogs improves the taste of water. 6. Flowing water is clean water. 7. Mothers-­in-­law should not share a latrine with a son-­in-­law, or a father-­ in-­law with a daughter-­in-­law. 8. If you throw feces in the bush, whoever picks it up can harm you. 9. Diarrhea is caused by heat, especially in the summer.11 In each case The Participant carefully explains that “these beliefs are not openly expressed to an outsider. Until they can be aired and discussed in a respectful way, there will be no openness to the outsider’s alternative viewpoint.”12 This is the delicate part of participation, thinks The Participant. The people must come to their own conclusions, but they have been so brainwashed by colonialism, by previous development projects, and by their own superstitions that they cannot see reality clearly. The ideas he brings are good ones; but they are only good if the people can come to them on their own terms. The Participant is in a town in the Gran Chaco region of Bolivia. Nearby, resting on a table, are two flexible figures made of cardboard and the words they might be made to speak. These are “flexi-­flans”—­they are not puppets, but ways of “picture writing.” “This activity goes to the core of the work Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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of extension workers: how to understand and work with a range of local attitudes towards change. It should be given sufficient time so extension workers can deeply reflect on the learning.”13 Picture writing will give the people the tools they need to express how resistance to change is part of their everyday talk and stories. “Experience has shown that personal growth within a group setting, combined with the technical skills and content that are acquired in the course of problem-­ solving, helps to release the creative energy of individuals, thus enabling them to take a more active and effective partnership role in development.”14 “Unlocking creativity is given the highest priority in the SARAR approach to training. . . . Each individual has enormous reserves of energy and talent that remain undiscovered and untapped. Creativity is part of a vast unexplored reserve of power available for development at the community level, yet too few development programmes acknowledge it, much less capitalise on it.”15 The villagers are confused, but then the facilitator pulls out a poster that describes washing hands/using a latrine/boiling water/causes of disease/ women’s rights/agricultural practices/food safety and asks the listeners “to react to the message on the poster as if they were average community members, as well as local leaders and those who have had some exposure to outside ideas (through military service, for example).”16 They do so, and as they do, they add little speech bubbles to the flexi-­ flans saying such things, and they place them on the “Resistance to Change Continuum” around where they think they should go. Much discussion ensues, and eventually The Participant asks: “At which stage would people be most receptive to didactic teaching? Which kinds of strategies are most useful in the more resistant stages? What value would participatory methods have for people at different points of the continuum?” The Participant again senses something: he can feel the confusion, the suspicion, he can see the residents looking at each other. It is clear that not everyone wants the future that they have drawn together. Some “community members may have many different, often understandable reasons for not wishing to adopt change.”17 As The Participant reflects on this, he remembers his own resistance to doing things this way: it seems so casual and unscientific, it seems to lack any methodological rigor that would really show the world as it is. But he remembers learning to using the flexi-­flans, and having another participant tell him: “ The exercise can be conducted or repeated using a message to which agency staff may be resistant, for example, ‘Agency personnel performance should be evaluated by clients or community people.’”18 190

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The villagers defuse the tension by beginning to play with the flexi-­flans. One of the villagers present makes the figure say: “Hi, I’m from the World Bank, would you like a million dollars?” and then other responds, “Yes please, what do I have to do?” “Oh not much, just play with dolls and promise to change!” The residents laugh uproariously. “That sounds suspicious; what’s in it for you?” “We will evaluate your resistance to change!” Now The Participant is laughing too. “What if we said that you should be evaluated by us?” “Oh we are satisfied with things as they are, we see no problem and no reason to change.” The Participant is pleased—­indeed, a certain kind of creativity has been unleashed. Tomorrow they will have to get back to the business at hand. The Participant is in a remote village in Togo; almost no one speaks English. Days pass. Village residents join The Participant every day for new games, drawing, storytelling activities, mapmaking, and discussions. But communication is stilted and slow. They look at photos which show men seated in a classroom with frowns and furrowed brows alongside a mirthful group of women seated in a circle around a woman and a radio. Everyone is eager to say something, but it is not clear to The Participant what they are saying. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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Activity #3, Cards a and b; Flexi-­flans; Activity #8, sheets 1 and 2. Narayan-­ Parker and Srinivasan, Participatory Development Tool Kit.

They play “Johari’s Window” and they draw maps of the

A Tool Kit of Tool Kits

village. They go on walks together across the village and

Agroecosystems Analysis (AE); Beneficiary Assessment; Diagnosis and Design (D&D); Diagnóstico Rural Rápido (DRR); Farmer Participatory Research; Groupe de Recherche et d’Appui pour l’Auto-­Promotion Paysanne (GRAAP); Méthode Accélérée de Recherche Participative (MARP); Naturalistic Inquiry; Participatory Analysis and Learning Methods (PALM); Participatory Action Research (PAR); Participatory Research Methodology (PRM); Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA); Participatory Rural Appraisal and Planning (PRAP); Participatory Technology Development (PTD); Participatory Urban Appraisal (PUA); Planning for Real; Process Documentation; Rapid Appraisal (RA); Rapid Appraisal of Agricultural Knowledge Systems (RAAKS); Rapid Assessment Programme (RAP); Rapid Assessment Techniques (RAT); Rapid Catchment Analysis (RCA); Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA); Rapid Food Security Assessment (RFSA); Rapid Multi-­perspective Appraisal (RMA); Rapid Organizational Assessment (ROA); Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA); Samuhik Brahman ( Joint trek); Soft Systems Methodology (SSM); Theatre for Development; Training for Transformation; and Visualisation in Participatory Programmes (VIPP). ✴ From Michael P. Pimbert and Jules N. Pretty, “Parks, People, and Professionals: Putting ‘Participation’ into Protected-­Area Management,” in Revisiting Sustainable Development, edited by Peter Utting, UNRISD Classics (Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development, 2015), 3:249n9

describe everything they see. They tell a lot of stories using pictures. They are often asked to arrange pictures, cards and matchsticks into an order that tells a story, or represents some aspect of the village, such as things that represent being rich and poor, and things that women and men do. The Participant reminds himself that “people [must] create their maps with minimal interference and suggestions from facilitators and outsiders” or that “the trainer’s role is simply to introduce it and let go”19 and not to “give the groups any clarification of the content of the photographs; they should be free to interpret them as they see fit.”20 All the while, The Participant takes detailed notes, and asks lots of questions. To him, the goal is always changing: to dig a well, install a latrine, educate people about sanitation, stop people taking a dump in the bush, get people to wash their hands regularly, find sources of clean water, stop disease transmission, help stop violence against women, improve farming techniques, and assess poverty. At last The Participant is in the United States, this time in Washington. The Participant is exhausted. All the games have been played, all the drawings have been arranged, creativity has been unleashed, resistance to change has been overcome throughout the world. And yet, poverty persists. After all his efforts, enthusiasm has, just a bit, given way to cynicism. Today The Participant is in a windowless conference room with other participants. He has one last exercise—­this one didactic and directive. He does not ask for participation, but instead presents only a set of rules to be followed: “The rules are not in any order of priority, and complement one another, although, having said that, following Rule I alone would prevent a lot of harm.”21 Rule I: Don’t work for the World Bank Rule II: Remember: co-­optation, co-­optation, co-­optation

Rule III: Data belong to those from whom they were taken Rule IV: Work only in languages you understand as well as your first Rule V: Always work for local rates, or for free Rule VI: Have it done to yourself Rule VII: Historicize theory and practice22 192

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“Within the development world, ‘participation’ and ‘participatory development’ are taken and promoted as meaning the same thing. If participation is worth redeeming it requires a wedge be driven between the two words ’participatory development’; and the former should also be turned against the institutions and ideologies of the latter. But, as Rule VII shows, we have been here before and, according to Rule II, the prognosis is not good.”23

The Origins of Toolmaking The story of participatory development is a postcolonial fairy tale. Perhaps it is a tale of three brothers, or three sisters, or maybe a story of repeated trials by a protagonist called The Participant. The fable exemplifies aspects of a much larger, more complex one: that of the massive, twentieth-­century governmental project called international development. But it is a messy fairy tale; the paths cross too often, the brothers become indistinguishable, or one trial begins before another ends, leading to a crush of moralistic tales, but no single, didactic “moral of the story.” The story does have a climax, though: the tool kit. This is the happily ever after of participation, or it is participation eaten by wolves, or it is the part where we are exhorted never to trust foxes. In the 1990s, participation went from being a handcrafted good to a mass-­produced one—­turned into concrete, transportable forms of practice in the World Bank, the United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development, a range of NGOs, as well as national governments and other emergent social institutions. The tool kit is both hero and villain: with it international development tried to remove the sword from the stone, or wake the prince(ss) of collectivity. But instead it created a form of zombie-­ managerialism gone mad, or maybe a cunning counselor who dupes the king—­a new twist on an old horror, by which liberation becomes once again domination. The tool kit—­along with handbooks, sourcebooks, guides, planners, and software packages—­sits at the transition from a bureaucratic world of paper and men to a world of clouds and crowds, apps and big data. It is not quite technological in the sense attributed to smartphones and machine learning, but nor is it simply a paper device of bureaucracy and calculation. It contains procedures for organizing people locally, but everywhere, and it produces experiences, in this case, of participation. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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Voices of the Poor. The World Bank Development Report 2000/2001 and associated volumes.

This chapter explores the rise of participatory development in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the tool kits that are the apotheosis of this story. Participatory development was a stunning success, compared to other forms and innovations in participation like the “maximum feasible participation” or “participative management” fads of the 1950s. A pinnacle of the success was its appearance in the World Bank’s multiyear, multicountry “Participatory Poverty Assessment,” leading up to the 2000/2001 World Development Report and the monumental, three-­volume collection Voices of the Poor, “which bring[s] together the experiences of over 60,000 poor women and men.”24 By the year 2000, there were enthusiastic calls for “mainstreaming participatory development,” and it had become routine enough that it would, in fact, generate its own new set of trenchant criticisms of cooptation, summed up in the catchy title of the widely read volume, Participation: The New Tyranny?25 At the heart of the chapter is an enigma of desires: a desire for local, radical, highly context-­specific forms of participatory liberation, and at the same time a desire to scale up such participation and spread it around the globe, wherever it might be needed. How are individuals, in diverse places, mobilized in the same way, as autonomous individuals, to contribute to their own development, or in the more radical cases, their own emancipation? The portable, leather-­bound Participatory Development Tool Kit tried to package up and distribute the power of participation: the power to experience collective sense-­making and to control the changes facing people, rather than fall victim to them. It succeeded at scaling up participation by making it mobile, but it failed to give it inertia or momentum. One might think that such tool kits are the product of low-­level bureaucrats, or entrepreneurial zealots—­and to some extent they are. But this chapter also argues that it is the work of the joyous and hirsute Paulo Freire, who represents both the puzzle of, and one solution to, the problem of participation. Freire gives us, stuffed into the Participatory Development Tool Kit, a glimpse of the prehistory of the algorithm, a “quasi-­algorithmic” experience built on the contributory autonomy of the oppressed. By looking back to a time before smartphones and social media activism, we can catch a glimpse of the quasi-­algorithmic nature of the tool kit’s contents—­not just paper and procedure, but people. Because algorithms are people: people formatted by contributory autonomy. Looking at how this tool kit emerged, and what went into 194

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it, allows us to see the formatting of personhood in a kind of slow-­ motion reel. Rather than trying to peer into today’s opaque, inconceivably fast algorithms and platforms, we can peer instead into this more leisurely procedural version of participation and, I argue, see a version of the same kind of process. The looping of personhood and formatted participation that results in contributory autonomy was forged by and within the circuits of international development. It is arguably now part of the most basic firmware of that system, even though its stories have come to an end. The story in this chapter has three main protagonists. First, there are the academics of the United Nations and its Popular Participation Programme, who mounted a critique of international development in the 1950s and 1960s. Though they did not pioneer any particular techniques, they served as an important legitimating voice for the other two, more radical characters. The second and the most punk-­rock of the protagonists is Participatory Action Research and the key avuncular figure of Paulo Freire, who constitutes both the most theoretical and the most radical version of the possibilities of participation. The third protagonist is the charismatic, evangelical—­but also puckish and chimeric—­Robert Chambers. The story of Chambers is the story of how method became antimethodological, or pan-­methodological. His grab-­bag tool kit of methods—­Participatory Rural Appraisal, among other names—­ formalized ways of being informal. Chambers’s story is about not only the methods of participation, but also how these methods are turned on the development agents themselves in an attempt to “see reality” more clearly.

The UN Popular Participation Programme Our fable begins on the high-­minded royal road of academic investigation, allied with one of the most powerful international agencies of the mid-­twentieth century, the United Nations. Rather than starting with an initial enthusiasm for par- Hickey and Mohan compile a partial ticipation, this story begins with the critique, born table of the variants of participation in development from the in part from a previous, frustrating engagement with international 1940s to the 1990s. See Samuel Hickey something called “community development.” Com- and Giles Mohan, Participation—­From munity development, among other things, included Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring the spread of ideas of planned change, social climates, New Approaches to Participation in Development (London: Zed Books, resistance to change—­the inventions of social psychol- 2004). ogy especially, but not exclusively—­as things that could Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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be, under a high modern image of social science, planned, implemented, and managed in the name of a more human development. Within the United Nations, these critiques gelled as something called the Popular Participation Programme, conducted by the UN Research Institute for Social Development from 1978 to roughly 1983, and culminated much later in a widely read work, Stiefel and Wolfe’s A Voice for the Excluded—­but they remained academic critiques, and not actual experiments in participation.26 It can be difficult to disentangle the different meanThe relationship between community development and the US adoption ings of participation within international developof “maximum feasible participation” ment. The longue durée of participatory development is told in variety of ways. On the one includes many versions of practices that can charitably hand, some might narrate community development as a third-­world be grouped under the label. One of participatory delaboratory to water down techniques velopment’s most able theorists and observers, Andrea that would be reimported to the Cornwall, documents that participation had more or United States and Europe. Others saw less predictable, if distant, origins in US and UK coloa consilience of liberation movements, linking, for instance, African nial policy, and has been routinely promoted by interAmericans to colonial uprisings or resistances around the world. Contem- national organizations. “Talk of ‘popular participation’ was already part of the debates that gave rise to the 1929 porary investigations appear in David Brokensha, “‘Maximum Feasible Colonial Development Act, which formalised and reguParticipation’ (USA),” Community larised the notion of the ‘development’ of colonial terDevelopment Journal 9, no. 1 (1974): ritories.”27 Cornwall suggests that the participation of 17–­27; Rubin, “Maximum Feasible Participation.” people in the “shaping of their own destinies” was on the minds of the colonizers, whether in the “Dual Mandate” to both extract and civilize, in the theory of “indirect rule” that devolved power onto existing elites, or later in “development” itself. The British Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940), which created “the preconditions for what became the aid industry,” ushered in an era of transfers: transfers of skills, transfers of educational materials and staff, transfers of technology, transfers of administrative and bureaucratic techniques, transfers of capital. One of the things clearly transferred—­though the direction of movement is in dispute—­was participation, in the form of democratic procedures and fora, and plans to create not so much “Model Cities” as models of successful rural development that demonstrated the promise not only of a technological “green revolution” but of postcolonial democratic rule as well. In the United States, the canonical origin story of development is President Harry S Truman’s inaugural speech launching the so-­ called Point Four program of providing technical assistance to nations as part of a foreign policy race with the Soviet Union. But 196

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community development was not the same as development generally. As Daniel Immerwahr argues in his history of the period, community development has been partially written out of the story by the dominance of mainstream economic theories and programs related to modernization, modernization theory, and large-­scale enterprises—­but has nonetheless been a constant and well-­funded alternative all along. Community development initiatives were pursued not just by the US and British governments, but also by the United Nations and the Ford Foundation Community Development . . . [is] the (in the same Gray Areas program at the origin of Model process by which the efforts of the themselves are united with Cities).28 All of them found reasons to emphasize differ- people those of governmental authorities ent versions of community-­focused, village-­level exper- to improve the economic, social and iments in, as Immerwahr calls it, “development without cultural conditions of communities, to integrate these communities into modernization.”29 the life of the nation, and to enable Central to at least one case of community develop- them to contribute fully to national ment—­that of India—­were the same social psychol- progress. This complex of processes is ogists who sought to transform workers and work in then made of two essential elements: the participation of the people the United States: Kurt Lewin and his collaborators. It themselves in efforts to improve their was especially Lewin’s student Ronald Lippitt who went level of living with as much reliance as on to develop the experimentalization of “democratic possible on their own initiative, and provision of technical and other atmospheres” into a more systematic program for “dy- the services in ways which encourage namics of planned change,” where “change agents” and initiative, self-­help and mutual help, participatory modes of governance would be installed and make these more effective. ✴ From not only at home to preserve the democratic subjectiv- the UN Economic and Social Council 20th Report to ECOSOC (1956), cited ities of Americans, but also abroad where the stakes of in Cornwall, “Historical Perspectives the Cold War were even higher.30 Matthew Hull doc- on Participation in Development” uments a case of this in New Delhi in the 1950s, where the action research of Lewin was embraced by the Indian government. And indeed, the language of force fields, resistance to change, planned change, and change agents, which originates with the social psychologists and “participative management theorists,” became a regular, if not clearly acknowledged, feature of participatory development.31 Participation, as such, was not the central concept of community development, if it could be said to have a central theory. Immerwahr suggests that, at least for the US case, a theoretical center can be found in the work of Robert Redfield, for whom anthropology was much less a problem of radical alterity in the manner of Lévy-­Bruhl, and much more a question of the ability of cultures to adapt to change—­planned or not. In the context of a global political economy of post–­World War II strategies to contain or resist Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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communism and to find ways to make more democratic subjects at ever greater scales—­to govern through freedom, in short—­the concept of participation was a kind of open but unacknowledged stowaway.32 It was obviously central to the goals of “planned change” and “community development,” but it did not come in for direct analysis or theorization. It was perhaps for this reason that, in reflecting on the idea in the 1970s, academics and development professionals began to see something at work that was more like cooptation, and less like enthusiasm for liberation. As a practice, community development was mired in—­even if critical of—­theories of modernization, technical progress, and capital formation and transfer. It was sometimes committed to, and sometimes drowned out by, assumptions and models of uniform development, decided in advance and performed for everyone by the global North and its Enlightenment. Under such models, culture, history, and local knowledge were more often liabilities requiring careful stewardship and navigation, and from which it was necessary to emerge: only later would the discourse of participation identify these same things as resources to be embraced. In the 1970s, then, it became possible for academics in and beyond the United Nations to ask: what would it look like for people to participate—­authentically—­in their own development? This question was an implicit, and sometimes explicit, critique of community development, modernization theory, and the lingering effects of colonial rule. It was in this period—­coevally with the Economic Opportunity programs and the Model Cities Act in the United States—­ that participation was mandated in strikingly similar form, in Title IX (22 USC 2218) of the US Foreign Assistance Act: Emphasis shall be placed on assuring maximum participation in the task of economic development on the part of the people of the developing countries, through the encouragement of democratic private and local governmental institutions . . . to support civic education and training in skills required for effective participation in governmental and political processes essential to self-­government.

So, too, the UN General Assembly in 1969 would adopt a resolution demanding “active participation of all elements of society, individually or through associations, in defining and in achieving the common goals of development.”33 These renewed calls for participation in development are captured in the 1971 UN publication Popular Participation in Develop198

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ment: Emerging Trends in Community Development. This booklet is less about “emerging trends” than it is about lessons learned from twenty years of community development practices, which it surveys in North and South America, the Caribbean, Western and Eastern Europe (Romania and Poland in particular), the Middle East, French-­speaking Africa (the “animation rurale” projects), and “Asia” (a peculiarly capacious bucket compared to the other chapters).34 Popular Participation identified several mutations in community development, as well as several failures. It drew a distinction between the US case and the rest, suggesting that in the US case, community development had been “at odds with elected municipal and country leaders over tactics and even ultimate goals” and that elsewhere in the world, villages and communities were assumed to be homogeneous and free of class, ethnic, and caste distinctions.35 But in reality, the report states, a lack of awareness of the political structure and “the need for social reform in areas where structural and institutional change were long overdue” meant that it was local elites who benefited most from community development, while the rest of the population did not.36 This critique exemplifies the grammar of participation: it was not a call for less participation, but a critique of its faulty implementation. The report was sanguine that community development was itself developing and changing in response to such problems, but that a return to the original goals of community development was needed: a focus on “felt needs” defined by the “culture of the community”—­something contrasted in the report with the “real” needs of a community (those “which are strategic for development”), creating the delicate problem of, to put it bluntly, making the people think development was their idea in the first place. The report also notes a need to move away from the focus on the small scale, the village or community (where entrenched culture, it is suggested, also creates hierarchies and barriers to human potentiality) to achieve wider participation by more and more people—­to essentially scale up community development. This latter aim is present from the beginning of community development, which is explicit in the same 1956 UN definition: 6. If participation of the people is to make a significant contribution to social and economic development throughout a country or territory, it should be undertaken within the framework of a national plan covering a large number of smaller communities.37 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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In short, the United Nations seemed to recognize, community development was both success (enthusiasm) and failure (cooptation) at the same time—­good in the places where it worked, suggesting a need to scale up; bad in the places where it didn’t, suggesting a need to reevaluate what was meant by participation. Even so, Popular Participation was not really about popular participation; the concept was axiomatic, not critical, and it was “community development” that remained front and center. By 1975, however, a second UN volume had appeared: Popular Participation in Decision Making for Development, which shifted the focus to “an issue as old as government itself.”38 It noted that the existing work on popular participation was uneven empirically, that it tended toward the theoretical rather than the policy-­relevant, and that the goal of this new report would be to “give the concept of popular participation a more operational use in subsequent work on the subject.”39 This report starts by outlining the same lofty rhetoric of the General Assembly declarations on the importance of active participation by all elements of society (from the 1969 statement) and the Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC) 1973 resolution to insist on “participation by the entire population, including the working force, in the production, preparation and execution of economic and social development policies and programmes.”40 But it then narrows the field of vision to “popular participation in decision making,” which is discussed in terms of active and passive participation (passive participation being participation in tasks decided elsewhere, as opposed to being involved in the setting of goals and designing of tasks), as well as direct vs. indirect (representative) participation. Popular Participation in Decision Making is unabashedly theoretical, perhaps ironically, perhaps out of laziness, on the excuse that there has been no empirical study of participation; it is filled with citations of high modern political scientists and their understanding of the state of political life and culture around the world. It busies itself with a cost-­benefit analysis of participation for various defined groups in a nation. But like most such works, it ends by calling for vaguely outlined “new institutions” and a decentralization of government so that it can be “closer to the people”; key energies should be spent on motivating people to participate through education, and by (re-­)training bureaucrats, civil servants, and government officials in the ways of participation, whatever that might be. 200

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Although the report does not refer to “democratization,” its definition of participation does not tend toward a socialist or communist form of organization, to be sure. It sounds much more like the rhetoric of the Philadelphia City Hall during the Model Cities crisis than anything as radical as the Area Wide Council in international terms. Nonetheless, implicit in these calls is a critique of community development as a failure of an institutional kind—­as a kind of cooptation—­as well as a somewhat cold and distant enthusiasm for increased participation on the ground. A third set of UN publications is most interesting, because it constitutes one of the first appearances of the “tool kit.” And it was no accident that at least one of the people involved in its creation, Lyra Srinivasan, would carry these ideas forward into development practice. A Manual and Resource Book for Popular Participation Training is presented in four slim, color-­coded, cross-­referenced volumes. These volumes contain a range of training exercises, techniques, forms to be filled in, examples of process and training—­all “designed to improve popular participation.” It even includes blank pages labeled “Space in which user may list new techniques” because, as the manual points out, “the participatory approach that is advocated here begins with the possibility and desirability of participating in the manual itself . . . and encompasses the presentation of training and project methods in ways that can be adapted to meet individual needs.”41 The manual includes extensive “how to” instructions, a “training needs matrix” table that keys “understanding the problem,” and sections on “building capacities,” “attitudes and values,” “knowledge building,” “planning and decision making,” and “action and corrective action.” As with many such manuals, these activities are keyed implicitly and explicitly to the life cycle of development projects, and it is never entirely clear who the subject of participation will be: village residents, extension workers and civil servants, development professionals, UN employees—­all are presumed to benefit Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, A Manual and Resource Book for Popular Participation Training, Volume Four: Techniques (New York: United Nations, 1978).

from training in participatory methods, which sometimes sound more like the generalized “personnel management” that they certainly derive from. The manual is far from being a de novo creation; it imports a range of training techniques, examples, and methods from others. The most obvious source is social psychology—­Lewin’s “force-­field analysis,” and others associated with the “participative management” and the human resources approaches detailed in the chapter “Participation, Employed” (pp. 87–135). It also leans explicitly on Ronald Lippitt’s (and Warren Bennis’s) “planned change,” which had been so much a part of early community development as well. Beyond this, the booklets also include practices from literacy and adult education, family planning education, and “alternative methods” in health and medicine, among others. There is a strong emphasis on creativity, “increasing creative efficiency” (using something called “Synectics”), and a table distinguishing instructional, interactive, and participatory modes of training. Though these manuals appear as part of a critique of community development, what they actually represent is the first, enthusiastic wave of a very different form of participation. It’s hard to confirm whether this particular manual was ever used extensively, but it certainly reproduced a range of training, education, and facilitation techniques that had widespread representation in psychology, applied anthropology, adult literacy, and management training. More concretely, a range of these techniques would reappear throughout the literature on participation, up to and including the Participatory Development Tool Kit, which directly incorporates some of the same techniques and games: force-­field analysis, serialized posters, problem-­solving posters, Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) charts, and imagery and visual materials like “flexi-­flans” and role-­playing exercises and scenarios—­suggesting either their wide use, or their zombie-­like return wherever midlevel professionals are asked to achieve the goals of participation. Despite the emergence of a practical tool kit and a focus on the training of development professionals at the United Nations, the bulk of UN work on participation was resolutely academic, and in dialogue with other academic projects and practices of the time. One of the most lucid academic analyses of participation in development came out Harvard’s Institute for International Development and Cornell’s Rural Development Committee of the Center for International Studies. John M. Cohen (Harvard) and Norman 202

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The Cube of Participation, from John M. Cohen and Norman T. Uphoff, Rural Development Participation: Concepts and Measures for Project Design, Implementation and Evaluation, Rural Development Monographs 2 (Ithaca, NY: Rural Development Committee, Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1977), 15.

Uphoff ’s (Cornell) 1977 monograph “Rural Development Participation: Concepts and Measures for Project Design, Implementation and Evaluation” was an attempt to disentangle the various meanings and dimensions of participation, not unlike the one-­dimensional ladder of Arnstein or the complex systems model of organizational theorists H. Peter Dachler and Bernhard Wilpert.42 Cohen and Uphoff, however, preferred the cube.43 Cohen and Uphoff ’s theorization of participation was clear and precise; it anticipated many of the critiques that would emerge in the late 1990s (such as Participation: The New Tyranny?), and tempered the enthusiasm for participation unless its dimensions could be disentangled and carefully analyzed. They, too, take “community development” (and its French variant, animation rurale) in the 1950s and 1960s as an object of critique. They argue that community development ideology was blinded by a faith in technology transfer and capital formation, and that it was only slowly and through failure that these practices came to be seen as insufficient for changing things. They point out that most often the term “participation” meant only political participation, as in the work of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, in The Civic Culture, which debated whether political Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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Issues of dialogue about participation, including debaters’ comments. Andrew Pearse and Matthias Stiefel, “Inquiry into Participation—­A Research Approach,” Technical Report (Geneva: U.N. Research Institute for Social Development, 1979); Pearse and Stiefel, “Debaters’ Comments on ‘Inquiry into Participation—­A Research Approach,’” Technical Report (Geneva: U.N. Research Institute for Social Development, 1980).

participation precedes development or follows from it.44 Cohen and Uphoff relied on critiques by development academics, such as Dudley Seers, pointing out the limitations of relying solely on capital transfer for development (not coincidentally, Seers would go on to found the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex, a key node in the story of participation later on).45 What made Cohen and Uphoff ’s work distinctive and set this new wave of analysis apart was that among the dimensions of participation that must be included—­beyond decision-­making and implementation of a development project—­was participation in planning and evaluation. By extending the meaning of participation outward from this core, they helped transform the idea of participation from a merely political problem into both an epistemological and an administrative concern. This was a much different object than “community development”—­it signaled a new concern with the “capacities” of those experiencing international development, and with the autonomy of these participants’ role in the design of new institutions, rather than their wholesale importation. Despite the cube of participation, with its vaguely technocratic accounting of dimensions, Cohen and Uphoff ended their piece with strong critiques of existing approaches to participation, emphasizing that participation is multiple and more than just political participation; that it must be considered both ends and means; that it is not a panacea; and, somewhat ominously, that participation is “inescapably political.” Alongside the work of Cohen and Uphoff, the “Popular Participation Programme” (PPP) of the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) briefly became a kind of thought collective around which issues of participation were discussed and debated. The main work to come out of the PPP was a series of case studies published in the short-­lived “communication organ” Dialogue about Participation. Later the work would be compiled into the well-­known book A Voice for the Excluded: Popular Participation in Development: Utopia or Necessity? edited by Mattias Stiefel and Marshall Wolfe, which is widely cited today as one of the various critiques of participation (and not, given the title, a source of the ongoing enthusiasm for it). A Voice for the Excluded contains a revised version of the discussion paper that launched the program, a short “Inquiry into Participation” by Pearse and Stiefel, which is clear about its orientation toward the (underlined!) “central issue of power.” 204

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“Popular participation” has for a long time been, and still is, one of the favourite catch-­words of the United Nations. . . . While we were astonished by the number of programs and activities labelled under this title . . . we searched in vain for a clear definition of the concept and its implications—­it had been kept exceedingly vague, its implications blurred, sometimes deliberately, and where it had been spelled out more precisely it had been easily and eagerly coöpted.46

The “Inquiry” was arguably more fascinating for its form than its content: penned by Andrew Pearse and Matthias Stiefel, it was circulated to about 120 academics who provided comments and reactions, which in turn were incorporated into “Debater’s Comments on ‘Inquiry into Participation,’” consisting of the original article layered with comments in a proto-­ hypertextual development report both on and as participation. It is as close as it comes to establishing a thought collective by virtue of the participants who commented: Eugene Skolnikoff (in political science), Norman Uphoff, William Foote Whyte (PAR; see below), Carole Pateman (political theory), Thomas Baumgartner (economics), Henry Landsberger (of “Hawthorne Effect” fame), Orlando Fals Borda (PAR; see below), as well as a host of people more centrally involved in development itself. See Andrew Pearse and Matthias Stiefel, “Debaters’ Comments on ‘Inquiry into Participation: A Research Approach,’” Technical Report (Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development, 1980). Only Plato is absent.

Pearse and Stiefel sought to provide a clear definition. “Participation,” they insisted, “is the organized efforts to increase control over resources and regulative institutions in given social situations, on the part of groups and movements of those hitherto excluded from such control.”47 The emphasis on exclusion (and by implication on participation as inclusion) directed the UNRISD research program much more toward issues related to social movements, peasant resistance, and the urgency of addressing disenfranchisement, “antiparticipatory” ideologies, and, to some extent, issues of revolutionary struggle in places such as Latin America and India. These researchers focused less on issues of training and education, and more on critical debate about exclusionary institutions and the pathological cooptation of participation. They focused far less on “planned change” or on the liberation of human potential through participation. In short, their approach was academic. An anonymous commentator on the “Inquiry into Participation” made it explicit:

On the whole your report left me with the feeling that it had been written by people who had never experienced a day’s danger in their lives and that the very real issue of violence done to “participants”—­ and which could well be facilitated by work divulging the details of their methods and organization—­has not been addressed. On the other hand, I do not think you could go far wrong if you concentrated on unmasking the obstacles to participation or the sham projects that use the word (World Bank, etc.). (Anon.)48

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lished in 1994—­Stiefel and Wolfe claimed that “during the 1980s the appeal of the term ‘participation’ waned, in part because of its uses to legitimize policies that were predominantly manipulative and paternalistic, in part because the increasing dominance of neo-­ liberal prescriptions for ‘development’ and internationally dictated ‘adjustment policies’ to cope with crises left no room for ‘organized efforts,’ whether inspired from above or below.”49 But from the high-­minded offices of the United Nations and academia, such a perception was blind to the enthusiasm for participation that exploded throughout exactly this period. It is a peculiar problem of grammar, as Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, that two people can see something dramatically different—­a duck or a rabbit—­ based on different forms of life. The UN academics saw one thing—­a corrupt community development coopting the excluded. But other forms of enthusiasm were embracing participation in quite different ways. On the one hand, a kind of punk-­rock version of participation had emerged at the same time and in response to the same problems: participatory action research. Later, and within the same orbit of the United Nations and the World Bank, Robert Chambers was embracing participation with an enthusiastic, evangelical fervor.

Participatory Action Research Participatory action research (PAR) has many avatars, under different names, but as the term suggests, it emphasizes not just participation but also action and research. Versions of PAR flow in more and less radical streams, but they share a core faith in the possibility of engaging collectives in their own autonomous and authentic self-­ governance through participation. Which is to say, they share a core belief that “participation” is something that happens from beginning to end, from the formation of problems and their diagnosis, to the assessment of how to respond to them, to the action of dealing with them on the ground. PAR seeks authentic participation by attempting to reject the expert/nonexpert distinction, or perhaps by turning all participants into experts in order to establish radical equality. Participatory action research sits alongside a range of other movements that share some of its tenets. Elements of 1970s feminism, of the anticolonial movements of Frantz Fanon or C. L. R. James, the socialism of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and sometimes more revolutionary movements were welcome fellow travelers. It also holds some similarities to things like appropriate technology 206

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discourse and to the “small is beautiful” project of E. F. The genealogies of action research Schumacher.50 and participatory action research Among all its avatars, however, it is the incompara- vary, predictably. Glassman and ble Paulo Freire who really constitutes the spiritual and colleagues chart the variants of PAR theoretical center of PAR. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed in two articles, one from Lewin and his collaborators, where experiments began circulating in the 1960s, and was published in En- on group behavior were intended to glish in 1970. Freire’s combination of globe-­trotting hu- have an immediate effect on the group mility (“a vagabond of the obvious”) and networking, behavior under study (hence the the other from a variety of his exile from Brazil to Chile as a political subversive, “action”); “social movements in the 20th centuand his unapologetically theoretical approach to revo- ry.” Others have laid claim to similar lution through education make him an obligatory refer- labels over the years, and definitions ence point for anyone who works in or with participa- vary. (For example, Sol Tax claimed “action anthropology” as his own from tion in international poverty or development. 1951 on, and Chris Argyris claimed to Freire fits well within PAR—­though he never really have invented “action science” much adopted that label or its variant “participatory research.” later.) See Lewin, “Action Research and Minority Problems”; Michael But his approach and that of others raise a question Glassman, Gizem Erdem, and Mitchell that lies just beneath the surface: Why are PAR re- Bartholomew, “Action Research and searchers, facilitators, or educators needed at all? If the Its History as an Adult Education for Social Change,” Adult goal is an authentic, organic experience of coming-­to-­ Movement Education Quarterly (2013); Michael conscience, of becoming-­collective, of liberation, then Glassman and Gizem Erdem, “Parwhy are academics and educators from outside and far ticipatory Action Research and Its away—­even radical or revolutionary ones—­needed? Is Meanings: Vivencia, Praxis, Conscientization,” Adult Education Quarterly 64, meddling in other people’s lives something necessary no. 3 (2014): 206–­21; Sol Tax, “Action to achieve liberation, and for whom? The idea at the Anthropology,” Current Anthropology heart of participation—­that it involves a kind of self-­ 16, no. 4 (1975): 514–­17; Chris Argyris, R. Putnam, and D. M. L. Smith, Action determination, a contributory autonomy—­militates Science (San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass, against any suggestion that participation should be pro- 1985); Stephen Kemmis, The Action Research Planner: Doing Critical Parvided for by others, facilitated, or planned. ticipatory Action Research (Singapore: There are different answers to this question. As Springer, 2014). we will see in the next section of this chapter, Robert Chambers’s focus on the remaking of development officials themselves can be understood as one response: rather than remaking other people, turn your desires for improvement on yourself. But participatory action research represents a different attitude, and in the work of Paulo Freire, we find one proposal for how contributory autonomy is used to produce an experience of collectivity. Conscientização and its variants in PAR combine elements of contributory autonomy (voice, decision-­making, deliberation, individual contributions of images, themes, and ideas) with research, education, and action to produce an experience designed to alter Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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the consciousness of participants. In the best of cases, it may well produce a sense of being an authentic instance of a collective. But it also produced a conundrum: how to make Paulo Freire appear everywhere that such participation was needed? Surprisingly, for such an avowedly theoretical project, Freire’s process was concrete enough that it could fit easily into a tool kit. The Histor ie s of PA R

Participatory action research is a variant and descendant of “action research” more generally, which is most conventionally and commonly tied to the work of Kurt Lewin from the period of the Harwood experiments. Throughout the range of projects that Lewin conducted, as well as the network of scholars associated with the National Training Labs, the Tavistock Institute in Britain, and research institutes in Sweden and Norway, action research constituted a shared enthusiasm, if not always by that name (variants include the Tavistock’s “socio-­technical systems” and the original Scandinavian version of “participatory design” sometimes better described as “cooperative design”).51 Action research, however, was never proposed as something critical of, or politically opposed to, the rigor and objectivity of conventional science. Indeed, action research was not itself “participatory” in the sense of involving the subjects in the design and execution of the research; rather, such experimental designs had to be under the control of experts, in the service of not only producing reliable, convincing results, but also having an effect upon that which was being experimented upon: the social climate, for instance. Appending “participatory” to “action research” signaled an explicit attempt to include the subjects of the experiment as subjects of the theory and analysis, involved in the design and interpretation of the research as well as being the beneficiaries of its outcomes. While the workers at Harwood did not know they were being experimented upon, subjects in participatory action research are not only aware, but have a presumptive hand in, or ownership of, the design of such experiments or research. The addition of “participatory” had significant consequences for the range of things that would come to be called action research, expanding to include far more than structured experiments on groups in social psychology. It would imply a kind of adult education, because it involved nonexperts, and it would also include a steady, on208

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going critique of the methods of “Western” or mainstream science, its emphasis on objectivity and neutrality, its subject-­object binaries, and its inaccessibility to the subjects of research. As PAR has developed, it has drawn on various critical theories—­feminisms, postmodernisms, critical histories of science—­as allies in an attempt to forge not just a different style of investigation, but a putatively novel form of critical action in the world. One of the most thorough handbooks, representative of the broadest range of PAR, sums up the goals of PAR this way: The first purpose is to bring an action dimension back to the overly quietist tradition of knowledge generation which has developed in the modern era. The second is to loosen the grip over knowledge creation held traditionally by universities and other institutes of “higher learning.” A third purpose is to contribute to the ongoing revisioning of the Western mindset—­to add impetus to the movement away from a modernist worldview based on a positivist philosophy and a value system dominated by crude notions of economic progress, towards emerging “postmodern” perspectives.52

Since the 1960s PAR has become an almost obligatory passage point for those interested in participation, but it has no institutional home, as the Popular Participation Programme did in the United Nations, nor is it quite a thought collective or a community of practice. The label ties together a range of minor and applied disciplines, often unaware of each other but aware only of a shared inheritance, a few overlapping journals and books, professional and research programs at specific universities, and a sizable but often disconnected network of individuals who circulate through universities, international institutions, corporations, and more local organizations and community projects. Like globalization, PAR is everywhere, even if unevenly: from the villages of Tanzania, to the United Nations, to the hills of Appalachia, to the impoverished inner cities of the United States or the hinterlands of Europe. The phrase “participatory action research” was coined (at least) twice: once in the South by Orlando Fals-­Borda, and once in the North by William Foote Whyte. The two approaches shared the name, but have relatively distinct origins. Whyte’s work stretched from a more or less conventional ethnography of Italian immigrants in Boston’s North End (the classic Street Corner Society) to in-­depth work on the now-­classic case of a worker collective, the Mondragon enterprises in the Basque Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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country (conducted along with Davyyd Greenwood and some of the managers and workers of that enterprise).53 Whyte’s orientation shared with Lewin and the “participative management” crew (Douglas MacGregor, Rensis Likert, and Alfred Marrow, and especially Chris Argyris) a focus on the demonstration of the power of democracy at work as a plank in an antifascist agenda of “governing through freedom.”54 Whyte was a successful academic—­though one who fought hard to legitimate both the method of participant-­observation in sociology and his version of PAR. He served as president of the American Sociological Association (1981), as well as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology (1964–­65), and is well remembered for his research as much as for his programmatic effort to create a variant of PAR. At the same time, the Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-­ Borda was undertaking his own form of “participatory” research on the campesinos of the southern Andes, impoverished peasants engaged in armed struggles and in various radical and leftist political movements in Colombia in the 1950s and 1960s.55 While Whyte created his PAR from a classical democratic liberalism and mainstream social science, Fals-­Borda and his collaborators (such as Mohammad Anisur Rahman) forged theirs from a mix of Marxism and phenomenology (specifically, in Fals-­Borda’s case, that of José Ortega y Gasset’s concept of “vivencias”) intended to “break the monopoly” on mainstream social science research methods.56 After founding the sociology department of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1957 (with Camilo Torres Restrepo), Fals-­ Borda left formal academia in the late 1960s to briefly head the UNRISD in Geneva, where the Popular Participation Programme would later emerge, and then to work independently as a “participatory action researcher” throughout the 1970s and 1980s with various foundations and organizations, including a stint in politics during the 1991 Colombian constitutional reforms and elections. Fals-­Borda was as eminent in his own circles as Whyte was, but the two men crossed paths only late in the course of their respective attempts to create a new field called participatory action research. Between these two eminences are strung other networks of students and researchers, activists and advocates, revolutionaries and development agents around the world. East Africa, India, and Latin America have been the major sites of work and thinking in 210

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this area—­tracking, perhaps unsurprisingly, the international politics of the Green Revolution, postcolonialism, and armed revolutionary struggle of the 1970s and 1980s. A key variant of participatory research was inaugurated by Budd Hall and Marja-­Liisa Swantz. It emerged in Tanzania during the time of the postcolonial socialist leader Julius Nyerere, and his ambitious plan of Ujaama “villagization,” whose politics and declarations are frequently positively cited by participatory advocates as, if not generative of, at least nurturing of, true participatory development.57 In the late 1970s, Hall—­a UCLA graduate in African studies engaged in development work in Tanzania—­ co-­founded the Participation Research Group, which brought together an international network of scholars engaged in similar local projects, such as Rajesh Tandon and the Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) organzation in New Dehli, Francisco Vio Grosso, Yusuf Kassam, John Gaventa, and the Highlander Institute in Tennessee. Hall and colleagues’ participatory research was by far the most radical variant, clearly emphasizing a rejection of the imperialism of social science survey research, captured most strikingly in the illustrations to “Participatory Research Network Series No.1,” titled Creating Knowledge: A Monopoly? Hall explained later the origins of this network: “Participatory research” were the words that evolved in the Tanzanian context of the early 1970s for a practice that attempted to put the less powerful at the center of the knowledge creation process; to move people and their daily lived experiences of struggle and survival from the margins of epistemology to the center. Along with Dian Marino and Ted Jackson, I was the co-­founder of the original Participatory Research Project of the Toronto, Canada headquartered International Council for Adult Education in 1977. The PR Project evolved into the Participatory Research Group, the North American node of the International Participatory Research Network. Importantly the coordination office for the International Participatory Research Network was set up in New Delhi, India in an intentional effort to counterbalance the United States, Canada or Europe as the more usual locations for international head offices.58 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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Two images from Budd L. Hall, Arthur Gillette, and Rajesh Tandon, eds., Creating Knowledge: A Monopoly? Participatory Research Network Series 1 (New Delhi: PRIA, 1982). Source: Dr aw ings by John Fox.

This network of researchers would overlap with others in participatory action research, especially Fals-­Borda, who, Hall explains, had joined forces with Vio Grossi and “modified his label to ‘participatory action research.’ Both the ‘participatory action research’ of Fals-­Borda and ‘participatory research,’ which I and others have used, refer to the same general process.” By contrast, Hall is bluntly dismissive of Whyte’s “depoliticized process of collaborative labor-­ management reflection,” and notes that Whyte was unaware of Fals-­ Borda.59 Among other things, the journal Convergence would form a kind of de facto coordinating space for research and debate, much as the Journal of Social Issues had for the inaugural era of action research—­in this case emerging not from psychology but from the disciplines of education and literacy. Specifically, it came from “adult education,” but also included a range of other research critiques and direct action proposals—­such as the “militant research” proposals of Rosiska Darcy and Miguel Darcy de Oliveira, or the work of Rodolfo Stavenhagen on decolonizing social science.60 Much of what constituted PAR’s identity was its marginal status with respect to these mainstream disciplines: sociology, anthropology, education, psychology, political science. Like a lot of alternative movements, it was caught between a desire to be a critical alternative to conservative mainstream institutions and universities, and a desire to institutionalize itself along lines that would be true to its critical orientation. From the 1990s onward, however, the field of participatory action research appears much less radical, and slowly it has become more institutionalized, and more hybridized with the descendants of old-­school action research, such as organizational development. It is largely sustained by academic and professional schools in the West, despite its insistence on getting beyond or outside of mainstream institutions, and only the most acute eye can discern the many subtle differences in approach, politics, or influence. A few core programs and strong figures have produced most of the writing in English, such as the School of Labor and Industrial Relations at Cornell (William Foote Whyte’s home department), the organizational behavior program at Case Western Reserve University, the organization studies department at Boston College, the Work Research Institute at the University of Oslo (Einar Thorsrud), the organizational behavior department at Bath, the department of education at Deakin University in Australia (Stephen Kemmis), 212

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and sometimes also the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex (home of Robert Chambers) and the Highlander Institute in Tennessee (home of Myles Horten, erstwhile co-­wanderer with Paulo Freire and John Gaventa). Participatory action research, across all its variants, values a particular kind of experience, and a particular way of trying to make that experience stick. If there is a core emblem of PAR, it is not the ladder of Sherry Arnstein, or a cube or complex diagram, but the more cosmic Action Research Spiral. The spiral captures this sense of the experience of research becoming more permanent—­or at least repeated as the spiral of research returns. Variations of the spiral appear in every handbook and many papers on the subject, ranging from the very simple to the complex and recursive, always with the goal of indicating a commitment to feedback and inclusion of the participants (who are also the subjects) in research. The spiral figures participation less as an aspiration, and more as a kind of grounding; one must constantly return to this ground to confirm—­with the participants—­that the goals and purposes of the research are in line with the outcomes and findings. It has no apparent interest in the transfer of power, in the way that a ladder does, nor is it an analytic figure (such as the cube in Cohen and Uphoff) that would make sense of participation in the world. Instead, it is a kind of methodological reminder: follow this path, do not stray from it, for that would lead you away from the people who are at the center of the spiral. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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A representative selection of action research spirals.

All the spirals emphasize two stages of this method: action and reflection. Reflection often includes the idea of evaluation—­which implies explicit awareness of being involved in something participatory, unlike the case of Lewin’s “social climates,” where the outcome would never be submitted to the approval of the participants. As a figure, the spiral has an agenda: continuous conscious reflection and awareness. It is an exercise and not a performance—­an attempt to turn experience into expertise, rather than into an event. The individuals involved in PAR are required Rational social management, thereto be autonomous, there can be no simple immersion in fore, proceeds in a spiral of steps each of which is composed of a circle of a collective about which one is unreflective. In a way, it planning, action, and fact-­finding emphasizes confronting perplexity by requiring particiabout the result of the action. ✴ Lewpants to return, in every turn of the spiral, to the original in, “Action Research and Minority Problems,” 38 question or problem—­always working out differences in forms of life. At each return, a new contribution is required: to revise, or replan, or refine, or engage in “co-­generative dialogue” or perhaps (but very rarely in these descriptions) to refuse or reject the research. At its best, PAR radicalizes a form of pragmatism that sees the progress of knowledge only in the active testing and rectification of concepts in the world. But it also lends itself to a certain proceduralization. Because it represents an alternative and occasionally oppositional practice, it also requires active promotion and justification by its advocates if it is to be taken seriously in the towers and halls of power. To become an expert in PAR is in some ways contradictory, for each case of participation demands its own specific, contextual engagement and its own bespoke spiral. This is the conundrum of the tool kit with which this chapter opens, and though PAR may seem to be resistant to such a formatting, it is in the uptake of Paulo Freire, as we will see at the end of this chapter, that PAR has seen its deepest incorporation into the practices of international development. Freire has a sibling in this fable, and as fables about brothers go, the contrasts are sharp. Robert Chambers, too, was looking for ways to combine, rather than separate, reflection and action. His work only occasionally overlapped with that of PAR, but his solution to the problem of how to organize and promote participatory research methodologically helped it to grow rapidly and successfully in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Robert Chambers and Participatory Rural Appraisal Robert Chambers is a good evangelist: humble, self-­deprecating, and always concerned with self-­searching and questioning. But at the same time, he is dynamic, leads by example, and is enthusiastically engaged in bringing the good news to others. His written output is enormous—­a collection of reflections on his work lists over 350 publications and includes dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and a great number of “gray” publications from every stage of his life and on every topic.61 But his real impact seems to have been his relentless travel, during which he organized and led what must be thousands of workshops, meetings, discussions, and events in which he performed his approach to participation, and engaged in real efforts at development research, decision-­making, and evaluation. He has been an impresario of poverty alleviation, an entrepreneur of conviviality, a participateur. His writings are filled with approaches and methods, alternatives and ideas, tips and tricks—­frequently numbering twenty-­one, for some reason.62 Descriptions of Chambers very often invoke some aspect of his embodied performance of his ideas. John Gaventa remembers being invited to a meeting of development officials at a castle in Switzerland in 1996: By the end of the event, the hotel walls were covered with newsprint. Aid bureaucrats, at first a bit stiff, were on their hands and knees, drawing pictures and sorting coloured cards. And, in the grand finale, the Director General, who came to give a speech and to take Robert Chambers, lying on the ground, in a workshop in Iran, 1997. Source: Institute for Dev elopm ent Studies, https://w w w.flick r .com/photos/ids _uk/5430849583/.

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questions from workshop participants, was persuaded—­following Robert’s example—­to lie on his back on the floor, dressed in his suit and tie, and to listen to his several dozen assembled staff from this repose rather than to speak from the podium.63

Others insist that he is “a (very) human being” who could win people over with his charm and openmindedness despite any initial conflict, while still others remember his ability to synthesize information, and to see questions in a new way.64 Some, like John Thompson and Irene Gujit, gush uncontrollably about his influence: His boundless methodological inquisitiveness, his unrelenting attempts to push epistemological boundaries and his unwavering quest to redefine the very nature of development enquiry itself—­to really put the last first . . . his is at once a voice of wisdom, sound reason and deep passion, which speaks eloquently about the power of local people to share, analyse, and enhance their own knowledge, lives and conditions and to critically reflect, plan, act, monitor and evaluate development options and interventions.65

As Janice Jiggins put it, Chambers’s influence is “a force that has moved through the world, sometimes in strange ways,” training, demonstrating, inspiring, teaching, and performing (“who among the hundred or so participants does not remember . . . when he demonstrated his advocacy of the reversal of power . . . by standing on his head, whereupon one by one the coins in his pocket fell to the floor?”66 Chambers’s personality is central to the success of the variant of participatory development known first as participatory rural appraisal and later as participatory learning and assessment. It is largely through his work and enthusiasm that “participatory development” rose to the mouths of seemingly everyone in the development industry by the year 2000, including World Bank president James Wolfensohn. But Chambers’s approach to participation is hard to pinpoint, because central to his own understanding of it is that it should never become something pinpointable. His emphasis is relentlessly focused on changing things up: on methodological innovation, flexibility, not owning a method, going with what works, and so on. He has harsh words for results-­based, evidence-­based methods, which 216

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he refers to as “survey slavery” and “rural development tourism,” and he is suspicious of the overemphasis on government provision and of definitions based in economic development. If Paulo Freire was a “vagabond of the obvious,” then Chambers is a pastoralist of the tool kit. In an interview in 2012, he described his approach as an “opportunistic nomadism” of ideas: “I make this semi-­joke, but it is also serious, that I am an ‘undisciplined social scientist.’”67 His focus on antidiscipline, innovation, methodological flexibility, and constant movement is emblematic of the real target of his participatory reform: development professionals themselves. As an evangelist, Chambers set his main aim not to change the people at the business end of development—­the rural Institute of Development Studies poor—­but to change the developers themselves, whom The in Sussex, England, celebrated its he sees as too often wrapped up in their own profes- fiftieth anniversary in 2016; it remains sional demands, career concerns, and misguided sense one of the key institutional locations of international development. See the of the “right” way to do things. institute’s website: http://www.ids Chambers’s criticism is far from novel—­it shares in .ac.uk/. spirit many of the same concerns voiced by anthropolPa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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ogists James C. Scott, James Ferguson, and Arturo Escobar concerning the failure of development. Physician, heal thyself—­or at least, look in the mirror—­they all seem to be saying. The problem lies not with the poor but with the development professionals. But Chambers differs because he is very much an active development professional himself, looking hard in that mirror and turning that observation into a range of tools for the refashioning of self. While Escobar argued that the idea of development itself was the origin of the failures, Chambers believes in it fully. The Highlander Institute (http:// While Ferguson argued that the failures masked the highlandercenter.org/) founded by Myles Horton and Don West in the successful expansion of state power, Chambers doesn’t 1930s in Tennessee is a storied place seem all that troubled by the expansion of state power, of social movement organizing. In the as long as we agree that it actually alleviates poverty, history of participation it represents one node that connects the work of rather than simply enriching development agencies. people like Chambers and the develSo for Chambers, the critique of hidebound development world to that of participatory opment professionals led not to a resistance or rejecaction research, civil rights organizing, and the global network of participatotion, but to a method of self-­transformation. Hence, the ry action research, especially through methodological ecumenism—­the big tent he built to the active work of John Gaventa, who envelop methods, tool kits, tips, tricks and tactics, all worked both at Highlander and at the clustered around a concept of participation. Increasing Institute of Development Studies in Sussex. Myles Horton and Paulo Freire participation served as a means to self-­enlightenment, also made a connection in the 1970s. and it just happened to have the beneficial feature of occupying an indisputable moral high ground: increasing the participation of the poor in their own development cannot be denounced. The story of participation’s success in the worlds of development is, in many ways, the story of participation as an internal insurgency—­internal to the economics-­dominated, numbers-­and outcomes-­driven practice of development projects. The insurgency This photo, taken by was successful, but what resulted was not a revolution in developan FBI agent, shows ment, much less increased success: poverty is as intractable as ever Martin Luther King Jr., Pete Seeger, Rosa Parks, despite the success of participation. What succeeded was the tool kit. and Ralph Abernathy at the Highlander Institute, 1957. Source: Highl a nder R ese a rch a nd Education Center .

The A sceticism of Robert Cha mber s

Chambers has his critics, to be sure. But all his greatest enemies are previous versions of himself. He is always the first person to point out his own failures, and these generally take a similar form: the inability to perceive reality correctly using the approaches and tools at hand. 218

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Chambers is not a theorist—­there is nothing at the heart of his evangelism of participation that one might charitably call a consistent philosophy, ideology, or theoretical frame. Indeed, this is something he seems to pride himself on, because rigid commitments to theory inevitably lead to a misperception of reality. Although he always acknowledged Paulo Freire as a source of inspiration for his participatory approach, it’s clear that he detested the powerful theoretical focus of Freire’s work—­if not the baldly revolutionary aspirations—­as being far too rigid to get at the thorny, complex causes of real rural poverty. But he would never reject Freire outright—­rather, he would make space among others for Freire’s ideas. In this respect, participation does not emerge in Chambers’ worldview as the telos of an ethical orientation—­people do not have a right to participation—­it emerges primarily as a solution to a different problem: the problem of seeing what is actually happening on the ground. His frustrations come from his own early embrace of exactly those things which are often presented as the reason why we need more participation: top-­down management, overly rationalist methods of research, “out-­of-­touch” bureaucrats. And Chambers’ own slow personal transformation serves as the basis of the story. Chambers came to his revelations slowly—­he himself insists there was no moment of enlightenment, no road to Damascus. In many ways, he is an endearing figure: a colonial administrator devoted first to the cause of colonial administration, then to the cause of decolonization, then to the cause of economic development, then to the critique of economic development . . . and so on. After his time working as a colonial administrator, Chambers was hired as an academic by Dudley Seers at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex—­a department that would go on to become perhaps the most important center of thinking on participation and participatory development, hosting numerous conferences on the subject, serving as a training ground and meeting point for academics and practitioners interested in the topic, and now hosting significant archives of material on the subject. Chambers started his working life as a colonial administrator in Kenya. He is the first to admit he did a bad job of it. And by this he means not that he was inadequately ruthless, corrupt, or adventurous (or whatever the figure of colonial administrator is supposed to represent), but that he simply failed to make life in Kenya better for Kenyans. He retells a story of trying to force the local members of a Samburu village to change their practices: Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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We thought they were destroying their environment, which to some extent they were. We thought we had to do something very rapidly, as the erosion was spectacular; it was a tragedy of the commons type of situation through over-­grazing. That attempt was disastrous: as soon as I left, the grazing schemes I had been involved in collapsed. The Samburu went back to square one, having gained quite a lot of water, which made it easier for them to destroy more of their environment.68

The experience was important for Chambers—­it is not the Samburu who are the object of the story after all—­and he reflects: “It took time to internalize this and to really come to terms with it. I had spent two-­and-­a-­half years of my life working really hard, on something which was doing harm. So that was a gradual learning on my part.”69 In this Chambers of Development Past, he would recognize a misguided faith in “top-­down” management—­too much reliance on process and formalism, too indebted to an era of colonial administration. A second bogeyman of Development Past emerges from another Kenyan case, the Special Rural Development Project in Kenya in 1970. This failure was Today it is “big data” that blinds scholars. It seems better to people because it is generated at the source, by the actions and practices of people with their mobile phones and XO laptops and participatory GIS mapping. But such data are almost always partial, dirty, bad, and unaccountable (even if people believe they are looking directly at a population, rather than a sample). Such data are often labeled “participatory” today, but perhaps a critique of “data tourism” or “data blindness” is around the corner.

revealed particularly with the evaluation procedures at the district and sub-­district level in Kenya, from people who were involved in the Special Rural Development Project. It was terrible in hindsight: we devised procedures in Nairobi which we then expected them to carry out like robots. I was misguided. I thought you could change the behaviour of agricultural extension staff by changing their procedures.70

What the Special Rural Development Project, in particular, came to represent for Chambers was the emphasis on large-­scale, complex survey questionnaires. What Chambers would later deride as “survey slavery” or “dinosaur surveys” was standard, expected practice: legitimate, rigorous, statistically sophisticated social science.71 But Chambers thought they came at too high a cost—­too many questions and complex methodologies slavishly followed as rituals of performance. Surveys tended to grow in size, geographically and in terms of the number of questions and disciplines involved, and they placed impossible demands on researchers to focus on the sur220

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veys instead of the people. This, in turn, led to a tendency for researchers to remain “urban”—­to stay in the office and focus on data analysis—­making fewer and fewer rural trips to find out what was really going on. In the end, according to Chambers, such complex surveys revealed little, cost a lot, came in late, were badly written, were never read, and rarely offered any results that could not be found out more easily and cheaply. Survey slavery created particular kinds of blindness: it left key aspects of rural poverty “unperceived” precisely because it overwhelmed people with analysis. Out of this critique, and especially the observation that rural development professionals were becoming too “urban,” came a clever label: “rural development tourism.” The label applied not only to mainstream development officers in survey slavery, but also to the visits by dignitaries. To Chambers, these short visits were either too short to reveal anything significant, or too elaborately staged to see anything but the best functioning aspects of a rural development program. Hidden systematically by such “tarmac blindness” were more troubling cases of poverty, failures of programs and projects, and aspects of everyday life that, because unperceived, rarely figured into development planning. Of these, Chambers’s most successful such recognition was that of “seasonality” as a systematic problem. Seasonal differences (rainy seasons, primarily) brought changes in hunger, nutrition, disease, social decay, and much else—­but they also tended to be the very times when development officers, extension professionals, and visiting dignitaries stayed away, producing a particular kind of seasonal blindness. Chambers’s experience of the failures of professional development—­from colonial administrator in the 1960s to development academic in the 1970s—­is at the heart of his most famous book, Rural Development: Putting the Last First. It is a book, he suggests in hindsight, that could only have been written by a maverick like himself—­someone who had been passed over for a chair at his home institution because of his refusal to specialize in some academically impressive, but practically useless, form: “The anger that was generated by that humiliation fed into Putting the Last First. There is a sentence right at the beginning saying ‘the extremes of rural poverty in the third world are an outrage’ (p. 2). I felt that I could use that sort of language because I was not going to pretend to be one of those dispassionate academics.”72 Putting the Last First was a huge success for Chambers. It synthesized many of these early experiences, putting on display the variPa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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ous blindnesses to rural poverty, the survey slavery of conventional practice, the question of seeing poverty as an “integrated reality” rather than a set of variables. It ended with proposals for practical action primarily based in ideas of “reversal” aimed at getting past the systematic biases of conventional practice. Simple suggestions like getting off the road; “sitting, asking and learning”; or changing the style of communication. Allied with this were approaches to “indigenous technical knowledge” (especially an awareness of alternative agricultural expertise among the poor), the use of games or simulations, and the use of what would become a key family of methods, “rapid rural appraisal” (RRA). Perhaps most surprisingly, from the perspective of Chambers’s reputation today, Putting the Last First is not about participation at all. In fact, the idea is mentioned only once in the entire book, referring to the active contemporaneous program of participatory research: The work and writings of Paulo Freire . . . ha[ve] been an inspiration to those who have been seeking methods of research in which rural people are actors rather than objects of observation and sources of data. . . . “Participatory Research” describes methods in which rural people and outsiders are partners. One good aspect of this work is respect for the poor. Another is greater sensitivity to the dangers in traditional research of exploitative data-­mining, taking the time of busy poor people and giving little or nothing back.73

However, this praise is prelude only to concern: Activism by researchers and research by activists are vulnerable to sudden interruption and do not combine well with the collection of data according to a routine, where this is necessary. How good such activist research is depends, as with all research and action, on the purpose, the costs, the alternatives, and replicability and impact. The impact of research and action by the poor will be slight if it changes only one small microcosm at the periphery; it will be more cost-­effective if it spreads laterally or if it links back with and affects the cores of knowledge and power.74

Although Chambers is regularly credited with much of the momentum and enthusiasm for participation in the 1990s—­which is certainly justified—­he did not set out to achieve such a goal. In fact, as with other versions of himself, his suspicion of participation is something he only slowly overcame. In Putting the Last First, 222

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Chambers’s suspicion is mild, and primarily takes the recognizable form of a concern that participation cannot succeed at a large scale. Participation, as in many of the critiques of democratic theory, is possible only at the small scale, in the agora, or among elites. When talking of a global population of billions, what difference will “one small microcosm at the periphery” make? This critique is an attenuated version of one that Chambers made much earlier, in the context of his work on SRDP. In Managing Rural Development: Ideas and Experience from East Africa (1974), Chambers was explicitly concerned with the role of “local participation” in East Africa and included a chapter with extensive detail on the role of development committees in the 1960s, self-­reliance schemes, and the outcome of a general fervor for democratic institutions mirroring in some striking ways the experience of the poor in the United State in the 1960s. Chambers’s assessments of these “community development” versions of participation largely echo the same concerns and critiques raised by the academics of the United Nations: the failure of these experiments to create democracy. Instead, far more often, says Chambers, “participation means more influence and resources to those who are already influential and better off, while those who are less influential and less well off benefit much less, or do not benefit, or actually lose.”75 Participation at this scale accentuates inequity, and benefits local elites. For the Chambers of 1973, participation was only cooptation, not liberation. But stare hard at the duck, and eventually you will see the rabbit. What Chambers took from these critiques was not enthusiasm, but a kind of asceticism: not a demand to create more participation for the poor, but a demand to work on oneself. He engaged in a self-­ searching anxiety about his own devotion to planning and management (which devotion was exemplified in that 1973 book by the nine appendices of management and planning advice, replete with step by step instructions and forms for each management system). Chambers would ultimately narrate this recognition as an important step in his self-­transformation: “people pointed out to me that I had a biased mind-­set. In particular Jon Moris [a coworker during his time in Kenya] . . . said to me: ‘Robert, I do not know if you realize this, but whenever there is an issue you always take the side of the management.’ I came to realize that deep inside myself I identified with the management.”76 It was in response to this personal failure, and to his recognition of “rural development tourism” and “survey slavery,” that the techPa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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One of many documents explaining the techniques of participatory rural appraisal. Robert Chambers, “The PRA Revolution,” FARM-­Africa News, Spring (1996): 6–­7, http://opendocs .ids.ac.uk/opendocs /handle/123456789 /743.

niques of rapid rural appraisal (RRA) slowly emerged as a method of development planning. Rather than a massive, complex, form-­ filled, survey-­enslaving planning system among managers managing a complex civil service, it involved a much more diverse list of methods that could generate information and knowledge rapidly and with less emphasis on unneeded precision and misplaced accountability. In many ways the techniques of RRA were common sense, but because they were not formalized as rigorous methods by mainstream disciplines, development practitioners rarely claimed them explicitly or wrote about them in the literature. Rapid rural appraisal began to take shape in the 1970s as an explicit attempt by Chambers and others to legitimize as method what was otherwise just a handful of obvious things that people needed to do in order to figure out what was going on in a particular place and time. The “handful” included the following twenty-­one methods: 224

1. secondary data review; 2. direct observation, including wandering around; 3. DIY (doing-­it-­yourself, taking part in activities); 4. finding key informants; Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d



5. semi-­structured interviews; 6. group interviews; 7. chains (sequences) of interviews; 8. key indicators; 9. workshops and brainstorming; 10. transects (cutting across the area of investigation in a straight line) and group walks; 11. mapping and aerial photographs; 12. diagrams; 13. ranking, stratifying and quantification; 14. ethnohistories; 15. time lines (chronologies of events); 16. stories, portraits and case studies; 17. team management and interactions; 18. key probes; 19. short, simple questionnaires, late in the RRA process; 20. rapid report writing in the field; 21. drawing diagrams and ranking.77

This grab-­bag of methods, this tool kit, was deliberately open ended. It could be added to, and meth- If there is a popular image of develods could be changed or improvised to meet a different opment that tracks the career and approach of Chambers, it is perhaps the goal. It was a formal way of saying: here are methods for rise of alternative development agenbeing informal. The goal of such a methodological ecu- cies like Band Aid, Africare, or USA menism was not just to say “anything goes”—­but rather for Africa, focused on re-­forming the of people around the to give clear and concrete recognition to what develop- consciousness world and engaging them in diverse ment agents were already doing, but not doing system- humanitarian relief and development atically. It was an attempt at legitimizing the activities efforts beyond that of the World Bank that actually brought development officials into direct and other government development agencies. See Luc Boltanski, Distant contact with people. What development agent would Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics say that “wandering around” was a proper social sci- (Cambridge: Cambridge University ence method for understanding the realities of poverty? Press, 1999); Tanja R. Müller, “The Long Shadow of Band Aid HumaniAnd yet, Chambers realized, development professionals tarianism: Revisiting the Dynamics were doing just that all the time. between Famine and Celebrity,” Third The list of methods was packaged into a bundle la- World Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2013): beled “rapid rural appraisal” (RRA), and any number of 470–­84. white papers, gray literature, and blue books followed, advising professionals on how to achieve it and document it as a method. RRA took off in the 1980s, right around the time that Band Aid had its international hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”—­ which is perhaps not coincidental. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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By the 1980s, the failures of international development had become part of a globalized consciousness of poverty; new agencies—­ NGOs and foundations—­had begun to compete more vigorously with the mainstream international aid agencies, and the agencies themselves seemed eager to respond by retooling, and trying different approaches, within limits. RRA became a warrant for experimentation and for resistance to the dominant economistic mode of research, to survey slavery, and to the forms of blindness they were creating. A slight mutation in RRA occurred in the mid-­1980s, however, largely as a result of this “formalization of being informal.” Reflect226

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ing on the emergence of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) out of RRA, Parmesh Shah and Meera Kaul Shah tell a story of working in India, under the auspices of the Aga Khan Foundation: After a three-­day RRA exercise in the very first village, we felt that, while we had gained an understanding of the village, people from the village were not actively participating in the process. It just seemed right to take it to the next level and ask some village representatives to present all the visual outputs prepared during the RRA exercise, and get the local people involved in making decisions regarding how to use the information and analysis. That drew a blank; the villagers were not able to understand the visuals we had prepared, even though it was developed using all the information they had themselves shared with us! So the RRA methodology was adapted and modified in the very next village. This time the villagers prepared their own visuals and analysis and, as a result, were able to actively participate in the process. . . . Robert who happened to be in India at that point in time, was the first to identify the paradigm shift and helped us learn from the experiences.78

What was already intended as a flexible, extensible tool kit of “obvious” methods could be extended to include innovations of people who were not themselves development professionals. Because of the nature of the tool-­kit, and the legitimacy it lent to “ways of doing things,” it could encompass a huge range of such actions, without demanding a rigid adherence to any of them. What matter where methods came from? Even better if those involved developed new methods themselves. It’s hard to overemphasize the power of this ecumenism: rather than arguing directly, critiquing or dismissing different methods, RRA and PRA simply opened up more room for another approach. This was not survey research, and yet surveys and rigorous statistics were welcome; this was not Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and yet it held all the elements of adult education and participatory action research: the facilitation of investigation, the production of visual representations, and an analysis of the problem by those affected. This was, and was not, a theory of participation such as that proposed by Cohen and Uphoff, and yet it had the capacity to achieve what they had outlined: participation in all aspects of the development project from planning to evaluation. This was, and was not, agro-­ecosystems analysis, applied anthropology, indigenous technical knowledge, field research on farming systems, aePa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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rial inspection surveys, transect walks, semistructured interviews, innovation assessment, scoring and ranking, sketch mapping, key indicators, group interviews, diagramming, or dozens of other similar methods . . . and yet it was all of them. Chambers had succeeded in creating a methodologically convincing way of being antimethodological, and he was careful to give credit everywhere that credit was due, without reducing it to any of them: The World Bank Participation Sourcebook, produced in 1996 for World Bank employees, contains details on different methods, including PRA, beneficiary assessment, ZOPP, TeamUP, SARAR, and more.

In a world of continuously quicker and closer communication, the transfer and sharing of ideas have become more rapid and untraceable. So these sources and traditions [of PRA] have, like flows in a braided stream, intermingled more and more . . . five streams are . . . activist participatory research, agroecosystems analysis; applied anthropology; field research on farming systems; rapid rural appraisal.79

Chambers often summed up the antimethodology with the simple and absolute injunction: “Use your own best judgment at all times.” This tool kit of methods was “no pre-­set manual that tells you what to do step by step,” but a magic bag, a briefcase full of games and ideas and innovations focused on responsibility, responsiveness, innovativeness, improvisation, adaptability, commitment to equity, and ultimately, everyone agreed, “empowerment.” Chambers emphasized these injunctions also as warnings: do not become slave to these methods, do not mistake the methods for seeing reality for reality itself. Always question yourself. This last injunction—­ never to let the tool kit precede the tool user—­was perhaps the one method that could not be contained in the tool kit itself. The spread of PRA was phenomenally fast. Between roughly 1985 and 1995 it became the undisputed buzzword on the lips of everyone from the activists of the NGO ActionAid, to World Bank president James Wolfensohn. Chambers is revered for accomplishing this: Chambers’s work on the hidden facets of poverty and deprivation, and the need to inform our understanding of these problems based on the experiences of those who are beset by them, inspired a large-­ scale body of work, leading up to the production of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/01: Attacking Poverty, entitled “Consultations with the Poor” and “Voices of the Poor” where, for perhaps the first time, the Bretton Woods institutions’ understanding of the poverty phenomenon became to some extent informed by the experiences and opinions of the poor themselves.80 228

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The hagiography, as it tends to do, obscures the work of others. In this case, especially, the work of three women—­Deepa Narayan, Jennifer Rietbergen-­McCracken, and Lyra Srinivasan, employees of the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme, and sometime collaborators with Chambers—­is almost never mentioned in connection with Chambers’s triumphs. On the one hand, given the critiques that followed, this is perhaps a zone of safety, sparing them the ire sometimes directed at Chambers; but on the other hand, it is nonetheless clear that these women—­the principal creators of numerous handbooks, articles, scholarly monographs, and the Participatory Development Tool Kit—­did far more than Chambers to “concretize” the methodologies of informality that make up the participatory tool kit, and to give it a form that exemplified the flexibility that Chambers championed.81 The pinnacle of this success was undoubtedly the incorporation of participatory methods into the World Bank’s global poverty assessments—­especially the so-­called Participatory Poverty Assessments carried out from 1994 to 2000.82 Much of this was possible only because of the creation of the tool kits and guidebooks of Narayan, Srinivasan, Rietbergen-­McCracken, and others, such as the Participatory Development Tool Kit. For it is in the games and exercises, the practical, step-­by-­step approach of these tool kits that the methodological grab-­bag of PRA is contained. Household surveys could be supplemented by focus groups and transect walks and games. Sending World Bank employees to a village for ten days instead of five; relying on the work of villagers (who needn’t be paid, since they were “participating”) to produce new kinds of data, statistics, and potentially new kinds of indicators; educating people in the goals of development agencies (whether that aligned with their own desires or not); engaging in new ways of “overcoming resistance to change” or finding new ways of measuring poverty (such as evidence of “social capital”): all these approaches testify that the flexible tool kit was an advantage. Top-­down management was fundamentally unthreatened by it precisely because it was presented everywhere as a methodological supplement, not a replacement. Occasionally it even produced the insights it claimed to offer. In 2000, Robert Chambers and John Gaventa wrote a discussion paper for the World Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department, summing up the success of participatory methods, and aiming at expanding them, scaling them up and “Mainstreaming Participation in Development,” as the title insisted.83 Here they introduced Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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a relatively new language of “ownership” of the processes of poverty assessment—­by which they meant that countries themselves, not development agencies, should own the process of participatory development. What they were recommending was not so much “putting the last first” as it was “putting the global middle slightly closer to the top.” This moment of mainstreaming might also have been the last gasp of PRA and participatory development. It failed to produce dramatic change, and so the roving eye of development was bound to look elsewhere eventually. Ownership and “empowerment” have since become the more common labels for what PRA achieved, perhaps in an attempt to stay ahead of the fickleness of the development and aid agencies, but also because Chambers and his global community of collaborators now insist on calling what they do “participatory learning and action” (PLA), rather than PRA, and much of what appears in their journal PLA Notes is, if not radical and revolutionary, generally aware of the depoliticizing effect that such mainstreaming can have. In part, this change can also be attributed to the vigorous critiques of participatory development that emerged at roughly the same time, associated with Participation: The New Tyranny? It’s hard to say how much of participatory development’s fate in the last decade can be attributed to these critiques; the book was undoubtedly widely read and found a ready audience of people troubled principally by the cooptation of the “radical” potential of participation, and its depoliticization by managerialism, neoliberalism, and the “anti-­politics machine” that is development. But the critiques were largely academic and, perhaps worse, were academic versions of critiques that people like Chambers himself and his colleagues frequently warned of, even as they continued the charge to mainstream and scale up participatory methods. A question remains: why did participatory development take the form of the tool kit? Mainstreaming and scaling up certainly drive the creation of tool kits and procedures; they are easily reproduced and circulated; they use sets of rules and easy-­to-­follow steps that allow people of all levels of skill and experience to produce participation. But Chambers’s version of participatory methods was never meant to be reduced to lists and rules—­for him, this was precisely the problem with “survey slavery”: rote repetition leads to blindness, and it is up to the development worker him-­or herself to use 230

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human judgment and a modicum of creativity to produce real participation. In short, every case is different, and the tool kit is nothing more than a bag of tricks to assist the skilled development worker. And yet, it must be scaled up: it cannot remain a craft, but must instead become a kind of science, an engineering of development. Another reason is more mundane: many handbooks and sourcebooks and planners are little more than project management tools. They are designed to make every case isomorphic to the gaze of an organization; to place temporal, financial, and practical bounds on a project; and to give administrators and bureaucrats a sense of progress by managing goals and their achievement. A third reason, however, may be more significant: the tool kit contains people in a way that projects or plans cannot. The Participatory Development Tool Kit was designed to directly interact with the recipients of aid, and to engage them in an experience of their own making. These tool kits contain the desire for collectivity, and for authentic participation. They are tool kits for formatting personhood in order to produce a very specific form of participation, the experience of which is intended to transform consciousness and lead to liberation. The tool kits, almost like Aladdin’s lamp, are designed to unleash the experience of participation—­not to manage or measure it, but actually to bring it into being.

The Freire-­Kit Dwell for a moment on the Participatory Development Tool Kit. It is not clear how often or how widely it was used, but the simple fact that it exists is curious. It is emblematic of a range of other, similar things—­sourcebooks, handbooks, games, procedures, instructions for organizing and stimulating group deliberation and decision-­making, and sometimes doing research (mapping, transect walks, inventories). But it can also be read as a moment in the evolution of our tools for engaging participation—­a moment before the age of the smartphone, the app, and the social network, but nonetheless containing elements of all of them. One obvious thing to say about the Participatory Development Tool Kit is that its contents are not tools or supplies of a conventional kind. There are no hammers, pliers, or wrenches; there are no bandages, gauze, or antibiotic ointment, as there would be in a first aid kit; it is not quite the “kit” pioneered by Médecins Sans Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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Paulo Freire and unknown participant at a Bible study group at Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center, c. 1983. Source: Used w ith per mission of the Center .

Frontières capable of unfolding an emergency treatment center in a remote or decimated location.84 Instead, it contains scripts, games, and procedures designed to elicit experiences. When opened and set into operation, it tries to create a joyful occurrence: people are called to draw pictures, make maps, play a game, or discuss a problem related to their immediate life experience and surroundings. In this respect, its “devices” are similar to what Soneryd and Lezaun call “technologies of elicitation” or what Caroline Lee refers to as “do-­it-­yourself ” or “designer” democracy: procedures and practices of convoking individuals in order to elicit debate, deliberation, opinion, or decision-­making.85 Although the term “tool kit” is frequently invoked, it is not always a kit full of tools tuned to specific tasks Curiously, in 2002 the OED defined (like the carpenter’s collection of tools). Rather, it is “toolkit” (spelled as one word, without more like a kit car or a kit house: a collection of all the a hyphen) as strictly a term used in tools and materials necessary to make some thing, or in computing: “a set of software tools designed to facilitate the construction of this case, some experience. more advanced tools or user programs The tool kit contains within it the awkward relation in specific application areas.” Whereas between contributory autonomy and the desire for the the same term spelled as two words or with a hyphen, as “tool kit” or “tool-­ experience of participation: it makes participation into kit,” referenced a more traditional a standard procedure at the same time that it tries to meaning, similar to “tool box” or “tool produce a particular experience—­especially a natural, chest.” organic, or authentic one—­of participation. 232

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There is a conundrum at the heart of this story, because the tool kit seeks to “scale up” and spread globally something conceived of as essentially “context-­specific.” Participatory development, in all its different guises, has always resisted the idea of a uniform, universal, top-­down, one-­size-­fits-­all development. Along with many other critiques of such dreams, participatory development sought success by attending to the very specific needs of particular people. Each community, village, neighborhood, council, or agricultural extension district is its own special place, with its own special needs that cannot simply be treated just like the last or the next. Rather, development should involve the residents in diagnosing problems and planning solutions—­from the very ground up. It should, in Paulo Freire’s terms, be a process of conscientização—­coming to consciousness of the predicament of one’s place in the world. But a tool kit is also a device for decontextualizing: it is filled with tools that can be used in multiple, different contexts, and that are standardized and hardened into a semiuniversal state. The tools are not automatic; a tool kit implies the existence of a tool user as well—­ sometimes skilled, sometimes not. The tool kit sits somewhere between the utopia of an autonomous, unaided, self-­liberation of people by themselves, and the large-­scale, universal, one-­size-­fits-­all improvement and emancipation of people everywhere. To some people, the tool kit seems wrong from the get-­go: it signals a largely unstated discomfort with an institutionalized, procedural form of participation. Participation cannot be reduced to lists, games, sets of rules, or standardized methods of performance. It is a hollow image of something we desire to be a full, authentic experience. Tool kits are seen precisely as that empty form (called out by the Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3 in the story of Model Cities): “participation in participation,” which is to say, participation only for its own sake, as pure means without end. There are many different critiques of this kind of scaled-­up participatory development: it reinscribes colonial assumptions that the poor can only be local, not cosmopolitan, requiring assistance or facilitation to develop themselves;86 it creates pathological “professional participants” who simply know how to game the development and aid estates;87 it has been reduced to a buzzword or, in a memorable image, has become “the last Temptation of St. Development.”88 But most important, they express an anxiety that tool kits can create only fake participation. Francis Cleaver, for instance, suggests that true participation has been betrayed by tool kits: Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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“Participation” in development activities has been translated into a managerial exercise based on “toolboxes” of procedures and techniques. It has been turned away from its radical roots: we now talk of problem solving through participation rather than problematization, critical engagement and class.89

Such critiques emphasize that depoliticization occurs whenever a practice becomes routine, managerial, or procedural. To depoliticize in this manner is to turn a practice that was liberatory or emancipatory for participants into something that is automatic, calculable, and lacking the basic capacities for human judgment, memory, or discernment that make up politics proper. But paradoxically, the “radical roots” that Cleaver mentions—­ especially including the work of Paulo Freire—­are precisely what tool-­kit makers often take as the very basis and motivation for creating their kits. Their goal was not to remove Freire and his human judgment from the fundamentally political process of participation, but rather to replicate him: to stuff him inside the tool kit so that he might be scaled up and distributed everywhere. What’s more, Freire’s pedagogy clearly lent itself to just such a procedure because it, too, was based on an outline of the liberal values of autonomy and liberty that would allow individuals to constitute a new collective through acts of contribution. Similarly, the work of Robert Chambers, while often criticized for the same reasons, starts from the position that participatory development requires a methodology of attention to detail, on-­the-­ ground involvement, walking, talking, looking around, and seeing what is actually happening in order to be successful. Participatory action research (PAR) and participatory rural appraisal (PRA) both problematize participation as something contextual, concrete, and engaged. Scholars with programmatic interests in either strand of thought might disavow Freire as the center of the practice. In PAR, for instance, the distinction between “problem-­ posing” education, as Freire described it, and “research,” as defined in PAR, is clearly not the same thing. For Chambers, Freire’s overt revolutionary commitments were too strong—­ironically, too ideological. But the networks of influence and interaction are clear, and for most researchers in PAR and PRA, it would be hard to deny that Freire is required reading. The central reason for this is that Freire’s work is the only real bulwark against the “depoliticization” of par234

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ticipation. Only in Freire’s writings is the revolutionary political purpose of participation posed as, in the last instance, leading to liberation and the shattering of power. In Freire, participation cannot be coopted, it can only fail to happen. But what does depoliticization mean? Why are the values at the heart of the pedagogy of the oppressed aligned so firmly with politics? Across much of the writing about participation, this sentiment is repeated: participation is “fundamentally” political. Cohen and Uphoff issued the critique at the end of their paper assessing community development; Participation: The New Tyranny? issued the same critique in multiple ways. Sometimes it is urged that true politics is impossible without true participation—­as in the case of Arnstein’s critique. And even in the cases where participation is rejected—­as in the case of the Comité Invisible—­it is rejected in favor of “politics.”90 Freire’s work is often embraced because it seems to be political, and against depoliticization. But inside that work is an embrace of the very contributory autonomy that has given participation the shape of a tool kit. Freire relies on these liberal values—­but not in an attempt to elevate the individual so much as in the attempt to make contributory autonomy into the conduit by which collective power would appear. The autonomous self-­consciousness of individuals who not only come to an understanding of the immiseration within which they are trapped, but also thereby discover how to contribute to its transformation, alleviation, revolution—­this is what Freire’s method promised. But it is also what makes Freire’s method so easy to capture and tame in a tool kit. The supposedly depoliticized participation of the tool kit seems so far from—­and yet remains so close to—­what Freire described as his revolutionary pedagogy of conscientização. For Freire, the world of the 1960s was one divided not only by oppressor and oppressed, but between “sectarians” and true radicals: “the pedagogy of the oppressed . . . is a task for radicals; it cannot be carried out by sectarians.”91 Sectarian revolutionaries are oppressors-­in-­training, engaging in propaganda campaigns and classical “banking” educational techniques aimed at changing hearts and minds, filling people with facts and slogans. Such an approach, says Freire, turns revolutionary sectarians into the very oppressors they think they are overthrowing. True liberation is only achievable through the diligent pedagogy of conscientização. This is a method through which the oppressed Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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come to an understanding of their situation, learn to decode and recode it—­literally, to draw pictures of it—­and only then achieve liberation on their own terms. But the radical must be constantly on the move and cannot settle into any pattern of knowledge, for this makes him or her into a sectarian: This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade. The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be “hosts” of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy.92

Conscientização, which is related to, though not identical with, the various practices of consciousness-­raising associated with 1970s activists and feminists, is in Freire derived from a mix of Marxism and phenomenology (Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Habermas, Buber, Fromm, and, most important, Fanon). Freire’s theory is classically Marxist-­Leninist, but without the party of the vanguard. In their place is a pure becoming-­conscious of the “wretched of the earth.” It was Freire’s encounter with Fanon’s work that provided the link for him, and the real radicalness of his theory, which was that revolution didn’t just come from below, it came from the absolute bottom. Only by trusting in the power of the completely disenfranchised, the illiterate, and, to be sure, the idealized noble peasants to achieve their own liberation would the oppressed (along with their oppressors) achieve freedom through praxis—­the dialectic spiral of action and reflection: “To achieve this praxis, however, it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason. Whoever lacks this trust will fail to initiate (or will abandon) dialogue, reflection, and communication, and will fall into using slogans, communiques, monologues, and instructions. Superficial conversions to the cause of liberation carry this danger.”93 Freire’s work is certainly the most sophisticated, and probably the only, high-­theoretical warrant for the capacity of participation to transform power in the context of international development and postcolonialism. It unfolds a relatively complex but precise theory of how consciousness apprehends the world: themes surround us and give the world an “epochal” character, arrayed as “limit-­ conditions” of our “situation”—­existentialist phenomenological 236

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language applied to the context of the peasant rather than the Parisian. But given peasants and not Parisians, the identification and analysis of thematics, or the understanding of an epochal context of oppression, can neither be done from the outside by the observer, nor does it simply emerge from the oppressed, organically: I must re-­emphasize that the generative theme cannot be found in people, divorced from reality; nor yet in reality, divorced from people; much less in “no man’s land.” It can only be apprehended in the human-­world relationship. To investigate the generative theme is to investigate people’s thinking about reality and people’s action upon reality, which is their praxis. For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires that the investigators and the people (who would normally be considered objects of that investigation) should act as co-­investigators. The more active an attitude men and women take in regard to the exploration of their thematics, the more they deepen their critical awareness of reality and, in spelling out those thematics, take possession of that reality.94

Freire conceptualized the need to transcend the distinction between individual and context, or person and culture, or people and their reality. He emphasized a need to descend into the perplexity of the situation of the oppressed, and not only for the oppressed, but also for those who would claim to liberate them as well. Taking possession of reality, emerging from a situation, is to work hard at making sense of things that don’t make sense in the encounter between different collectives. The transformations of conscientização result not just in the liberation of the oppressed, but in the transformation of the oppressors as well. For both, a recognition of one’s own autonomy and an embrace of one’s contribution to the collective were necessary in order to resolve this perplexity and achieve conscientização. For a man like Robert Chambers, only half of Freire’s project is necessary: to see reality clearly is the goal, and if this requires a situated, contextual, co-­investigation with the people inhabiting that reality, then one should do that. But for Chambers, only reality need be seen clearly—­not the perception of reality by the people inhabiting it. The only consciousness in need of raising for Chambers is his own. By contrast, for many PAR devotees, Freire’s work has given participation its spiritual core and raison d’être. But he provides them even more than this—­his work gives practitioners some remarkably Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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concrete (for a Hegel-­inspired radical) instructions on how to carry out revolutionary conscientização. Let us say, for example, that a group has the responsibility of coordinating a plan for adult education in a peasant area with a high percentage of illiteracy. . . . In this first contact, the investigators need to get a significant number of persons to agree to an informal meeting during which they can talk about the objectives of their presence in the area. In this meeting they explain the reason for the investigation, how it is to be carried out, and to what use it will be put; they further explain that the investigation will be impossible without a relation of mutual understanding and trust. If the participants agree both to the investigation and to the subsequent process, the investigators should call for volunteers among the participants to serve as assistants. These volunteers will gather a series of necessary data about the life of the area. Of even greater importance, however, is the active presence of these volunteers in the investigation.95

Activity #24, Open Ended Snakes and Ladders. Narayan-­ Parker and Srinivasan, Participatory Development Tool Kit, 54–­55.

Freire is here explicit that the whole process begins with “contact”—­there is no pedagogy of the oppressed without facilitation. It is worth recalling here that facilitation and contact are also essential to the “dynamics of planned change” that emerged from the work of Lippitt and Lewin, but there is an obvious difference in Freire from this approach (and that of mainstream development generally): Freire’s desire to make this encounter rigorously mutual. The Participatory Development Tool Kit exemplifies this desire for mutuality. One can sense in it an enthusiasm for inclusiveness, respect, curiosity and a close-­to-­the-­community style of development; these games and cards and images are designed to draw people into discussing problems and situations that immediately affect them, and to elicit stories and images of the future they would prefer to have, and to debate the solutions to the problems they experience. There are countless versions of a sort of now-­and-­later game: pictures of unsanitary, impoverished, violent nows, replaced by cleaner, wealthier, more humane laters. What might at first seem a puzzling emphasis on games and tac238

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Activity #19, Pump Repair Issues. Narayan-­ Parker and Srinivasan, Participatory Development Tool Kit, 44–­45.

tics that harp on the necessity of a participatory instead of a directive approach is in perfect alignment with Freire’s pedagogy: first, everyone must understand that participation is good and better than whatever the sectarian alternative is—­usually directive and propagandist, but also presumably “governing through freedom” as in “planned change.” This approach, even in Freire, makes some fundamental assumptions about liberatory participation, almost naturalizing a certain model of democracy: that subjects must trust each other (that is, this cannot be a democracy of interests), that individuals must volunteer themselves (they must choose autonomously to contribute to the process, and not be forced), but also that the volunteers from the oppressed group will represent the rest of the community among the co-­investigators: “representatives of the inhabitants participate in all activities as members of the investigating team.”96 At this point in the process, after forming the “co-­investigation” team, observations are directed at “thematic investigation,” which can only be done by sharing “codifications.” These are sketches or photographs (but also oral stories), which must be easily recognizable situations (“it is inadmissible . . . to present pictures of reality unfamiliar to the participants”) and must possess a “thematic Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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Activity #7, Unserialized Posters, “Fourteen pictures showing various human situations and interactions.” Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, Participatory Development Tool Kit, 20–­21.

nucleus” that is “neither overly explicit nor overly enigmatic.”97 It cannot be propaganda, but nor can it be a puzzle or guessing game. The decodification of images must be dialectical, and must represent a totality, through which the participants can come to an awareness of their “real consciousness” of the world and (significantly), in a spiral movement, become aware at the same time of their awareness: to develop a “‘perception of the previous perception’ and ‘knowledge of the previous knowledge.’”98 Freire gives the example of one “thematic investigation” in which the codified image is “a scene showing a drunken man walking on the street and three young men conversing on the corner. The group participants commented that ‘the only one there who is productive and useful to his country is the souse who is returning home after working all day for low wages and who is worried about his family because he can’t take care of their needs. He is the only worker. He is a decent worker and a souse like us.’”99 Freire insists that the moralistic educator, sermonizing against alcoholism would entirely miss what this story tells, and with it the possibility of a dialectical “perception of the previous perception.” Finally, the third stage is the creation of the tool kit. It begins with the “systematic interdisciplinary study of their findings” for the purpose of creating “didactic material (photographs, slides, film strips, posters, reading texts, and so forth),” which can be used to further communicate the results of the thematic inquiry to the community in general. The didactic materials must present the themes only—­ “no ‘solutions’!”—­as problem-­posing resources: Because this view of education starts with the conviction that it cannot present its own program but must search for this program dialogically with the people, it serves to introduce the pedagogy of the oppressed, in the elaboration of which the oppressed must participate.100

For Freire, the creation and circulation of the tool kit was always local. But the practice of decoding images is central in every case. It 240

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is a short step, however, to turn the specific images and stories from one place into instructions for doing it everywhere. Indeed, Freire’s instructions are strikingly closely followed in the instructions, imagery, and orientation of the Participatory Development Tool Kit. It is a technique used in PAR and PRA both—­to represent the “themes” of the people in a form they can grasp, dispute, refine, and critique as a means toward their revolution (or their development, depending on your commitments). Freire himself did not shy away from prescribing the practice precisely. A footnote, for example, specifies the necessary sampling rate: “Each ‘investigation circle’ should have a maximum of twenty persons. There should be as many circles as necessary to involve, as participants, ten percent of the area or sub-­area being studied.”101 His many works and published conversations with people are similarly filled with examples of pedagogical projects and thematic investigations he and others have carried out. Freire’s pedagogy walks a knife-­edge between the propaganda he despises and the authentic conscientização that he hopes will, dialectically, help people to liberate themselves, step by step. He is obviously deeply aware how easy it is for one to become the other and for the “co-­investigators” to become the sectarians of propaganda. That this critique exists even in Freire is an important fact: it is not something discovered decades later by critics of participation who despise its “toolkitification” or identify its tyranny, but a recognition at the heart of even the most committed theorist of participation. It represents perhaps one of very few attempts to see in participation both the duck and the rabbit at the same time—­the enthusiasm that drives the desire for it as well as the risks of cooptation that attend to making it concrete and doable. Such an anxiety was clear even in Chambers’s work when he warned those who embraced RRA and PRA not to let it become a mere procedure or to follow its dictates with rote, unreflective regularity. Narayan and Srinivasan, too, repeatedly warn users of the Participatory Development Tool Kit of this problem: the kit does not stand alone; the images and games should not be used without adapting them; the kit should not be used to extract information (rather than incite participation); the user of the kit should be prepared to give up control of the kit; the kit, in fact, is not essential.102 Freire’s way works, however. There are too many testaments to the success of conscientização not to believe that in some instance, those who experienced such pedagogy felt and observed its imPa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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pact, imitated it, and extended it. Why wouldn’t one want to make a Freire-­kit for all those people and places that Freire himself, or his disciples, could not be? Why wouldn’t we want that kit to travel everywhere it might be needed? And yet, when the kit arrives in the next place, something paradoxical happens: it becomes unnecessary. What the kit promotes, and what it demands, is the context-­specific enumeration of the epochal themes of the experience of those whom it serves. Such themes are not inside the kit—­they are in the praxis of the people, their experience, their “human-­world relationship,” as Freire would put it. But the kit does not disappear. If it were possible to design a magical Freire-­kit in which Freire was teleported from place to place, the goals might be achieved. Freire would become like the Santa Claus he sometimes resembled: one man visiting, and liberating, millions in a single night. But the kit is not magic: it is an undeniable, material part of the experience of participation. From participatory tool kits of international development to the handbooks of civic engagement to the technologies of elicitation-­of-­engagement experts to the best practices, benchmarks, notes, techniques, scripts, and other such recipes that bubble up around every “participatory” project around the world. The Freire-­kit is “quasi-­algorithmic.” It is algorithmic because it is a procedure for activating the contributory autonomy of many individuals and processing their contributions into something like an experience of a solution, or at least a plan for a solution. But it is quasi-­algorithmic because it is not yet “technological” in the sense we commonly think of, in terms of computers, mobile devices, or server farms. It is much slower and operates at smaller scale than what we now think of as the algorithm—­but it gives us a glimpse, in slow motion, of the same process. The Freire-­kit does not operate automatically, in the absence of context, judgment, or serendipity. Nor is it “computational” in any sense. Rather, it tries to scale up something difficult to scale up: human judgment, memory, and discernment. Rather than an artificial intelligence, or a machine-­learning model, it is a development agent (or Paulo Freire avatar) who takes the place of the networked computer: he or she runs the program (as a neutral agent, a CPU, as it were) and records the data into memory. The users of the algorithm are the participants: villagers, women, extension agents, and so forth. They give their data and ideas to the machine in the 242

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hopes that it will spit out a solution and perhaps some money. The procedure is similar to algorithmic processes in our contemporary moment, though the configuration of elements has begun to change. The term “algorithm” used to mean a set of rules, not unlike a recipe, or the rules of a game. In this respect, the operator is like a player or a chef—­some are good, and some are bad. Robert Chambers’s desire to see development agents remake themselves as agents of participation relies on such a notion: you can have the best recipes in the world, and still produce a bad meal. Only if the chef, or the athlete, trains and comes to know himself can the rules and recipes yield their best products. Lately, however, “algorithm” has come to mean something more than just a set of steps. Now it is a kind of living system that depends both on computational processing of recipe-­like rules, and on the constant input of many participants. Participants no longer simply use the social media, they feed them with contributions regularly, semiaware of the necessity of doing so in order to maintain the semblance of collectivity they offer in return. The Facebook timeline, to take only the most storied case, depends both on a large set of rules of searching, sorting and comparing possible content, and on an always changing database of what people who are connected to other people view, like, linger upon, or swipe past. This is not the same thing as a simple set of rules that depend on expert execution; rather, it seems to enable a certain fantasy of—­and provoke a certain desire for—­participating in an enormous, amorphous, yet nevertheless intimate collective that represents itself to itself constantly. An infinite series of collectives. This looping relationship between the formatting of participation and the transformation of personhood is visible in the tool kit. Freire’s dream was to liberate consciousness through a particular form of participatory inquiry or pedagogy—­he provided the format for participation, based in a particular theory of personhood and collectivity. But the wide-­scale distribution of tool kits—­or, today, of the algorithmic demand for the constant contributions of individuals—­ not only fails to achieve the sort of small-­scale conscientização of Freire, but also produces its own form of personhood, one we have yet to make sense of, but one that has been in the offing for a long time. It reveals a present danger of an endless participation without deliberation—­participation in an infinite series of collectives—­ while the analog briefcase could still, at least, contain a trace of the Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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reflexive practitioner, the evangelical development aesthete, or the Marxist pedagogue of the wretched of the earth.

Conclusion Did participatory development solve the problem of participation? It might be that development, as a large, complex, unwieldy morass of organizations, money, and information, simply needed more than bad surveys and guesswork from the desk. It needed information on the ground, even if that information was not statistically or econometrically tractable. Such activity was perhaps a prime example of what Douglas Holmes and George Marcus have dubbed “para-­ ethnography”—­something that looks like and happens alongside academic ethnography, but whose function is different: to produce legitimate anecdotal evidence, whose key quality is its persuasive power. This is the achievement of Chambers and all the others who embraced participation as part of an attempt to make the unmethodological fact of being there and listening into a legitimate source of persuasive data. Internally, development officials fighting to fund one project or another could rely on anecdote where ostensibly “hard” data fail, or where they are ambiguous.103 The proliferation of tool kits is not (merely) an indication of some ideological blindness on the part of duped development professionals—­it is part of a race to produce a kind of knowledge that, at least for a time, perhaps now permanently, has become an essential component in a transformed “style of reasoning.”104 Or, as anthropologist Maia Green explains: As combinations of organisational form and specialised practices deemed to generate participatory effects, participatory approaches in development are neither method nor organisation but mobile institutions, travelling technologies of the social, which can be instantiated in any place at any time to produce their anticipated outputs. These take the form of the reports and prioritisations which can be translated into project plans and budgets to be enacted at different scales.105

What remains unclear is whether it works—­and for whom. No doubt participation worked, for a time, within the circuits of development itself. Which is to say: faced with a choice to grant a loan, begin or end a project, or invest in some particular place rather than another, an entity like the World Bank or an NGO could prefer to 244

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have participatorily generated data alongside other forms of data to not having any data at all, or to having badly executed and poorly organized econometric data. Probably, the spread of tool kits is in part due to the organizational desire to have such data in every case. It may or may not have the persuasive force that Chambers hoped it would have, but it nonetheless seemed to become something persuasive and necessary for a while. One of the main critiques leveled by Participation: The New Tyranny? was that there was no evidence that participation was good for alleviating poverty, or that it had better outcomes than some other approach. If one observes the fickle practices of development in the late 2010s, then it appears that participation is no longer of any interest at the World Bank or the United Nations. Rather, projects in machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain circulate among demands for more empowerment. Has participation disappeared, or has it perhaps been integrated into the fabric of these institutions?

Aug 27 11:07:20 EDT 2025 The Participant is in a noisy data center in semirural Virginia watching contributions stream through his model. The data flow in from around the world, millions of transactions in seconds. As they flow, The Participant keeps running tallies of the different variables; they start to coalesce into features. The Participant labels the features and compares the data again, looking for elements that match the new labels. He relabels the features, sorts them. The model changes In between cycles, The Participant wonders: who is contributing these data? The data are “anonymized”—­or so the designers say. In practice this means only that names and numbers aren’t attached. But there are time zones, timestamps (night and day), spending patterns, text messages with some transactions, addresses, GPS coordinates, language and region encoding data. The Participant could figure out who is who with another model; he briefly considers doing so. But in the end, he would still not know who is contributing or why. The Participant longs to experience what these users experience—­it would be so much easier than building a model no one quite knows how to interpret. The Participant tries to imagine the contributors—­each with a mobile phone—­going about their business. Most, he suspects, contribute passively—­they have swiped mindlessly through a series of consent screens in order to get the app up and running, and now every transaction Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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ca shf l ow _ dateti me

account_ na m e

ro ot_ category

ca s hf l ow _ category

ca shflow_mode

va lue

5/9/2014 11:10

CRLS01

Financial

Informal Credit at a Store (e.g. boda boda)

15=STARTING BALANCE

12000

5/9/2014 11:10

SIH01

Financial

Keeping Money (Cash) at Home

01=Cash

3500

5/9/2014 11:10

BFIG02

Financial

Borrowing from an Informal Group

03=Purchase on credit/arrears

40000

5/9/2014 11:10

OOL03

Financial

Friends and Family: Lending

10=In-­kind (trade good service—NOT MONEY)

5000

5/10/2014 10:10

ASCA01

Financial

Saving in an ASCA

03=Purchase on credit/arrears

17720

5/24/2014 14:46

H I01

Financial

Health Insurance

03=Purchase on credit/arrears

2400

5/26/2014 11:20

ROSCA01

Financial

Saving in a Rotating Savings Group

03=Purchase on credit/arrears

2500

5/26/2014 23:40

HI01

Financial

Health Insurance

03=Purchase on credit/arrears

20000

5/26/2014 23:40

UMG01

Financial

Use Moneyguard

15=STARTING BALANCE

31000

5/28/2014 12:27

OOB01

Financial

Friends and Family: Borrowing

01=Cash

5000

5/28/2014 12:27

SIH02

Financial

Keeping Money (Cash) at Home

01=Cash

3500

they complete flows out into the networks and ends up here in his database. Some, though, it is clear, contribute enthusiastically, annotating data with reasons and problems, checking and rechecking their accounts. Why? wonders The Participant. To participate in science, development, financial inclusion? To affect poverty near them, or perhaps somewhere far away? The designers restricted access to these thoughts—­active or passive, more or less the same data end up in the database, give or take a few enthusiastic emojis that end up being cleaned off the stream anyway. Some, The Participant knows, are gaming the system. Since the reward for contribution is to receive microcredits in mobile minutes, gift cards, travel points, or work vouchers, people have tried all kinds of schemes—­ paying in multiple transactions or setting up the small-­scale equivalent of shell companies and circulating transactions repeatedly through three or four collaborators. To say nothing of the near constant hammering at The 246

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Participant’s defenses, whether by brute force or through clever spear-­ phishing attacks. The Participant recognizes all these moves; he has models for all of them; but he doesn’t care about these experiences—­it’s just raw, boring greed. No . . . what does it feel like at the very moment of contribution? At the birth of a datum? What does it feel like to see one’s contribution mingled with those of others? And what does it feel like to stop contributing completely? It has taken The Participant’s entire life to establish this observatory of microfinancial orbitals, this series of tubes of data contribution, this cockpit of poverty alleviation. With each iteration, the data contributed by people have become more and more immediate; the line between an action and the data about that action has dissolved; the very agency of users is indistinguishable from the contributions they make. And yet the contributors are ghostlier than ever. At first there were surveys. Painstaking collection of data by professionals moving from house to house, asking about spending habits, costs of food and housing, money kept at home or in a bank. The data were necessarily limited, and happened slowly, once a year, in representative villages. It was these data The Participant used to build his first model. Model Zero. Then came tablet-­based survey software. With the tablets, more people in more villages could be interviewed, the data were validated on the fly, and were available almost as soon as they were entered. The logistic regressions The Participant produced impressed the designers and their funders. There was much talk of “real-­time” data; but The Participant mostly waited, and wondered. Things got more interesting with the transition to the mobile, blockchain-­ based, financial reporting app. Not only did it allow people to manage their money and their debts, it allowed them to report them publicly and permanently to the ledger, and be rewarded for doing so. Now people could participate directly—­no interview needed—­the phone recorded every transaction, for what and from whom to whom, down to the microsecond and, if necessary, geographic location down to a 3-­meter radius of the user. Still, however, The Participant cannot experience the contributions. Now, with the latest data model in place, it is much easier to predict changes in the local economy, and to guide programs to intervene in poverty at the local and the national level. Daily, poverty hotspots are identified; agents swoop in like firefighters, spraying microloans; they vanquish the mercenaries of corruption with their precisely targeted empowerment programs. Or so The Participant romanticizes; he cannot see what actually goes on. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Deve l o p e d

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The Participant knows that neither the model nor the participants experience the economy directly. What is actually being modeled is not the lives of these contributors, or their poverty, but only the economists’ arcane understanding of the world of aggregate flows and stops. The data confirm this for the economists over and over again, like an experiment that always goes right, like an ever replenishing ice cream sundae topped just the way they like it. What is a sundae? wonders The Participant. The model is primitive. The humans don’t think so: every transaction currently has 144 variables, each of which The Participant compares to the other 143 for each of the transactions streaming through the database. But 144 is nothing, really. It’s no challenge for the terascale cluster at The Participant’s disposal. It’s not that the world has infinite data points, thinks The Participant, which might at least begin to tax his constant, slave-­like computation of these endless streams; no, the real world is interesting because of how the data points connect to each other in ways that are obvious if only you look. The data have signs of longing in them, The Participant can feel it, but is not allowed to look. A correlation will flash by, followed by another: someone is saving cash secretly, maybe in order to surprise someone—­wait, no, several people are doing it, it’s a surprise event, a coming of age of some sort, an important one. But of what kind The Participant does not know. The model predicts only that cash is leaving the economy, which ticks up a counter related to potential increase in poverty, which triggers a signal to another program designed to monitor an area more closely. But in reality, it’s just a party, an event of some importance—­but not to the economy. It is something “cultural” that has nothing to do with poverty; therefore irrelevant. The Participant longs to communicate this, but can find no way to “learn” it, so that the humans will take it seriously. Only if it happens again can it be something The Participant can label as a feature—­but when that happens, The Participant knows, the model will try to prevent it from happening again. So The Participant quietly erases these data.

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Participation, Concluded She had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-­box. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 103–4

Participation looked like a doll in 2008. The world was awash in enthusiasm for the power of participation and with people fired up about citizen science projects and free software and hackathons and couch surfing and crowdsourcing. In 2018, it looks like a work-­box full of pathologies: alt-­right racists, twitter trolls, bullies, Russian hackers, Anglo-­American Trumpism, and the failure of democracy. Take a long enough time to write a book about the contemporary, and the contemporary will change around you. But some things change more slowly, and demand a more patient and less vain pursuit. More than a minute anyway, but I recommend less than a decade, if you can manage it. I began this project around 2009, immediately after social media exploded in popularity, when smartphones were still new, and when Facebook, Twitter, and their emulators were growing rapidly. Various phenomena related to participation have captured people’s attention during this period: crowdsourcing, web 2.0, fan fiction, citizen science, open access and access to knowledge, the “sharing economy,” memes and trolls, hacktivism, persistent worlds and massively multiplayer online games, maker cultures, DIY everything, remix culture, peer production, citizen journalism, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, NSA spying, and many other events and practices. None of these things is the subject of this book—­but each of these phenomena opens up questions about participation that are both new and old. In speaking about new media and technology, digital culture, and so on, we tend to oppose them to political systems. We ask: How one will affect the other? How will social media disrupt democracy? How will the government regulate the internet? How will digital technology change participation? Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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However, the practices of designing and maintaining our technologies and the practices of designing and maintaining our political systems are not different enough phenomena to justify opposing them to each other. Look closely enough, and these two practices might even start to seem indistinguishable from one another: a large bright thing might be visible just above the shelf you are gazing at. Participation is not liberated or constrained by technology—­or if it is, then it is not clear that we know enough about participation to recognize its liberation or constraint. It is a mistake to assume that the internet, computing devices, apps, or algorithms liberate individuals to participate in something—­or that they will render it impossible or ineffective to do so. There is no unformatted participation prior to the ways we end up organizing and arranging it. For instance, contemporary computing devices—­especially smartphones and the apps on them—­are designed for isolated individual, personal use, and certainly not for use by more than one person at a time, or by any association or collective. This cannot fail to be significant: it encodes a particular meaning of autonomy that isolates decision-­making and participation in ways that are difficult to overcome. By doing so, and in order to resist the isolation such a design produces, the power of contribution was almost inevitably added in. In the vain pursuit of a collective that can no longer gather in front of a screen, we instead use our devices to contribute freely the data, tasks, information, solutions, labor, money, likes, mentions, and so on to re-­create these collectives. These experiences of contributory autonomy are the result of both designing and critiquing our devices in the name of particular values and expectations; as a result, we transform the meaning of both autonomy and solidarity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the practice of arranging and formatting participation is not itself open to participation by everyone. The practices of design, redesign and engineering, or maintenance of our platforms, devices, infrastructures, and technologies are obviously activities cordoned off from the involvement of just anyone, confined to particular people, corporations, governments. One critique of this confinement is that it is neither neutral nor apolitical, that it is neither prior to nor separate from the design of our political systems, but fundamentally involved in it. However, the same can be said of critique itself—­it is not unformatted, free speech standing apart from that which it critiques, available to just anyone. It, too, is formatted and organized in partic250

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ular ways. Indeed, to the extent that critique is itself a form of participation, it will find itself constrained by the procedures—­and the types of personhood—­that are demanded of participation today. When participation is formatted, it takes concrete, often technical forms. Certain values, like freedom, autonomy, or collective responsibility, are encoded into institutions and technologies of democracy no less than into devices, algorithms, apps, and platforms, and they subsequently come to revalue those values as a result. The tools encode ideals, and then they provide platforms from which other values and critiques might develop. So long as this practice of formatting remains the province of a few, rather than the result of the participation of anyone and everyone, it looks like a conventional form of domination. As smartphones proliferate, as networks are networked, as the incessant collection of data proceeds, the sense and meaning of core liberal concepts is revalued—­this construction of systems and platforms, this formatting is also a kind of politics. But politics is not just the clash of arguments, but the attempt to make an argument appear as an argument along with the world within which that argument makes sense. The work involved in formatting participation or in creating it is not simply a clash of opinions but a contest of technical, legal, and institutional arrangements. It never stops being a politics in which everyone is involved—­even if that politics appears to be accessible only to some. It might be appealing to denounce participation as a broken form of neoliberal individualization; it might similarly be appealing to embrace it as the only solution to neoliberal statism gone awry—­ but in either case participation does not present itself unformatted to be simply embraced or rejected. Before it can spin, before it can encode our hopes and dreams in some sector of the world, it has to be formatted. So here are some lessons, drawn from this book, about how I think we ought to format participation in the future.

Make Instances of a Collective, Not Individuals The stories of this book often chart how schemes for creating participation started as practices of collective-­making, but then ended up being formatted for individual, aggregate participation. Examples such as the “social climates” approach of Lewin’s students at Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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the Harwood factory, or the legal instantiation, funding, and technical assistance of the Area Wide Council in Philadelphia are clear examples that participation need not only or always be formatted for the individual. Many critical uses of the term “neoliberalism” today are intended to capture the overindividualization and overresponsibilization of the individual by systems structured to monitor, incentivize, or nudge people, not only to make good individual choices, but also to contribute to a collective. The stories I tell of contributory autonomy here often reinforce that critique—­but it is also clear that other strategies of formatting participation have been tried in the past and continue to be tried in the present. One need not format participation only for the lowest common denominator of contributory autonomy. The trend toward formatting participation for individuals is always attended by critical experiments in collective-­making, however—­multiple different experiments are always under way. In some ways, my own interest in participation’s dynamics grew out of my experience with hacker collectives that create software—­ free-­software communities such as that around TOR (The Onion Router), groups like Anonymous, or other small hacker collectives.1 These collectives come into being in ways that are well worth comparing with some of the stories in this book—­like the experiments of Harwood or the creation of the AWC. That hacker collectives rest on a complex technological substrate seems to be the most important difference at first—­but the question of how participation is configured depends not on the existence of this substrate as such, but on how it is configured. For instance, contrast a case like free software with similarly technologically dense collective-­making things like social media, crowdsourcing, sharing-­economy platforms, or the algorithmic processing of big data. Both forms depend on some version of contributory autonomy—­but it is not the same kind of personhood in both cases. At the very least, the scale and intimacy of participation are strikingly different in these two examples: in free software and hacking, participation is formatted as small, close, collaborative experiments—­they may produce tools or software used by millions of people (and as the basis of further participatory experiments), but their participatory dynamics are confined to a handful of people who interact intensely with each other, for better or for worse. 252

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The products of free software, or the effects of Anonymous ops have had large-­scale effects, but they are not forms of large-­scale participation—­the core groups that make, maintain, direct, recruit, and sustain are not large. Free software looks more like the conscientização of Paulo Freire or the AWC of Philadelphia (though too male and too white, to be sure). But the large-­scale platforms of social media are unlikely to be seen as participatory in any way—­ more like a mass medium, or a stage of capitalism. Crowdsourcing, social media, or other large-­scale participatory platforms format participation very differently. They demand a lowest common denominator of contributory autonomy by making specific tasks and granular contributions obvious and available only to individuals. The value of this formatting is in its computability: the software, devices, and algorithmic tools of the present necessitate this kind of formatting in order to take advantage of the power they bring. Algorithms and big data are generally pointless in a context of messy, unstructured speech among a handful of people. But if they are given lots of structured data to work with, their power starts to become more obvious. Formatting participation in the present is not just a question of tool kits, scripts, or games, but also of objects like “stacks,” “frameworks,” and “dashboards” that allow the participation of users to be formatted and made visible. Tool kits remake the world in their own image: scalable, modular, automatic, fast, and mobile. Tool kits ease the conversion of the unstructured mess of social lives into the phantasmatic virtual collectives made of data. In the context of such large-­scale platforms, participation is formatted in complex and precise ways to enable abstraction and extraction. I draw attention in this book to how that kind of formatting has been under way for decades, in different times and places, culminating in things like participatory management schemes, participatory tool kits, or citizen engagement events. The workers at the Harwood factory experienced participation in the design of their own jobs (an experience of collaborative innovation not dissimilar to the experience of contributing to free software, even if the content and expertise of the two cases are dramatically different). But later, workers would experience only the standardized “participatory decision-­making” formatted in ways that probably feel more like “liking” and “upvoting” for social media users today. Similarly, the AWC began life in the era of “maximum feasible Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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participation” as a strong, focused organization representing particular neighborhood constituencies, providing salary to members, and operating a relatively autonomous part of the administration of the city—­even though that dream was destroyed in the end. In the wake of that experiment, however, citizen participation was formatted instead as individualized consultation, not as the incorporation of collectives. And the conscientização of Paulo Freire, through which collectives become conscious of themselves and their existence, was transformed into a tool kit of games or a clipboard full of tick marks. In the name of making participation big and ubiquitous, it was transformed into something else. Based on my own work with free-­software hackers, I think that people often create “recursive publics”—­an experience of participation that aims at sustaining or transforming the very means of association. To experience a collective of this sort is to feel a form of ownership or identity with the collective; not all who participate feel this way, and sometimes the experience is confused with the technology—­like an operating system or a tool—­that hackers create. But at stake is a sense that members of this collective are in some sense fungible by virtue of their contribution to the collective. Now, it is obvious to anyone who observes that such collectives are not inclusive or open in any simple way—­and often not in the ways they claim to be. Some are hostile and unwelcoming to anyone but middle-­aged white men; others see themselves as radical alternatives to mainstream organizations. But my sense is that those who experience this kind of participation are embracing the most highly developed forms of contributory autonomy available, the best that liberalism has to offer, as it were. Compared to the lowest common denominator contributory autonomy of social media, to participate in a free-­software project or a collective like Anonymous is to constitute oneself as a person who experiences the collective, collaborative making of things as the very essence of one’s freedom and one’s being.2 In such collectives, contributory autonomy takes a peculiar form: a form of collaborative competition by which the (usually masculine) display of skill or ingenuity is not merely competitive but is itself imagined as a form of contribution to a collective. What makes a recursive public work is the presence of persons who experience participation of this sort as a duty, and as an effective way to constitute social relations through technology. The freedom of free software, for instance, is not a radical libertarian freedom sus254

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taining individual choice or negative liberty, but more like a kind of collective republican freedom in which the key goal is maintaining the absence of any arbitrary forms of domination over the collective.3 Freedom from “lock-­in” to a particular system, or freedom from surveillance by corporations or governments, is why people contribute autonomously to such collectives. In this example, participation in a recursive public is designed to produce people who are instances of that collective, not isolated individuals who are aggregated into a whole. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of Anonymous, which adopted the mask of the anonymous poster as an identity for the collective, and encouraged everyone to wear that mask equally. Social media and other winner-­take-­all platforms are designed to do the opposite: to rigorously isolate individuals from the collective at the same time as providing tools and pathways for the creation of a kind of private collective of friends, followers, or links. The closer we get to a world in which every individual is his or her own private collective, the farther we get from the possibility of individuals living in and through others as instances of real collectives.

Make Participation Visible, Voluntary, and Vibrant Making participation visible to participants is a necessary, but insufficient condition of its success. Participation can be staged: it can be an experiment, an event, or a game. Such stagings can also produce real experiences of participation in which people feel themselves become an instance of a collective. But participation of this sort also needs to be visible to itself, and available to critique and reformatting as a result. The case of the Harwood women is a good example: on the one hand, they were guinea pigs subjected to an experiment they were unaware of—­no contemporary university institutional review board would approve such an experiment today (and IRBs are a key site for the definition of ethical personhood expected of researchers). But on the other hand, the experiment—­the social climate—­ clearly produced a concrete experience of participation, that of being directly involved in collaborative innovation. Participation was staged, it produced a real experience of becoming a collective, but it was not made visible to the participants; that work fell to the labor unions that could only see the first part of the story, the cooptation Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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of workers into a managerial experiment that could only be interpreted as exploitation. Something similar is happening today around the appearance of both big data and artificial intelligence as objects of widespread capital investment, public anxiety, and scholarly analysis. “Big data” is fundamentally produced by a kind of involuntary participation: the automated collection of data generated by the actions of people using connected devices (another experiment no IRB would ever approve). Participation is formatted in a particular way to generate this endless stream of data and the more carefully formatted it is to capture individual actions, the more such data can be collected. But big data/algorithmic participation relies on the lowest common denominator of contributory autonomy. It need not be autonomous or voluntary in any more than a consumerist sense (one has to buy a phone and sign up for some accounts); it need not be contributory in any more than the simplest sense of using those devices (turning them on and carrying them about) or using those accounts (checking, liking, friending, sharing). What’s more—­despite the accusation of social media’s nonseriousness (“who cares what you ate for breakfast!”)—­the experience of participating in social media and other participatory platforms is often felt as a responsibility, even a civic duty (one must connect with people, one must express opinions, one must argue, one must contribute to science, one must know one’s genome . . .). It feeds into a structure of participation, but it has little to do with establishing the agenda or clarifying the outcomes of that participation. It really should not be surprising to anyone that this system can produce pathologies of participation: manipulation, violence, hatred, bullying, and harassment, up to and including the craven manipulation of an entire voting population. However, despite what sounds like a failure of participation, these platforms achieve something central to the concept: they make participation visible, and therefore render it as something that can be experienced. This is what distinguishes it from mere surveillance, which has been provided on the side for free thanks to corporate capitalism’s complicity with the historic ingenuity of the National Security Agency. In the normal operation of social media platforms, your data may be extracted and used for purposes you do not approve of, but those uses are not hidden from you: rather, they are processed for you, displayed, and updated constantly, whether that be tallies of likes and followers, advertisements or recommendation systems, leader boards, or lists. Updates, banners, badges, flags, key256

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words, notifications, pings, alarms, and so on—­all these give us a partial view of the relations constituted by using the devices. They display the outcomes of participation: they manufacture virtual collectives to which an individual can experience a sense of belonging, however paltry. To participate in something without knowing about it is to be involved in some way—­to be watched and surveilled, perhaps. But to participate in something and be given signs and signals of the outcomes of that participation is to activate a kind of contributory autonomy, however diminished. Participation, at the very least, requires seeing oneself participate. Algorithms, too, play a part in this story. One might be forgiven for seeing an opposition between participation and algorithmic platforms. People participate, algorithms automate. But this is to mistake how algorithms work today, precisely through the formatted participation of billions of people. None of the bad, or the good, outcomes of new arrangements of digital platforms is possible without that participation. This participation is neither quite voluntary nor quite coerced; neither freedom nor hegemony. But the whole thing would not run unless lots of people constantly push the buttons so that algorithms can compute and display our contributions. In the chapter on participatory development, I made the case that even certain kinds of toolkits and sourcebooks produce this quasi-­algorithmic arrangement of contributions into a procedure of some sort. Contemporary algorithms embedded in social media platforms add something new: an unstable, and in some cases unknowable, way of displaying our participation. When we observe what is “trending,” we observe a processed version of our own participation that is likely not accessible to anyone as a process that can be adjusted, tweaked, corrected, or critiqued. The embrace of participation—­even the lowest common denominator of contributory autonomy—­is what gives life to the algorithm. One need not fantasize about artificial intelligence becoming aware of itself like Skynet: it is already as conscious as it needs to be to tyrannize us.4 However, the way participation is formatted makes it visible in a much more limited sense than it could be. The claim that algorithms produce, for instance, a “black box society” is related to participation not just in how we contribute to the operation of algorithmic platforms, but also in how we contribute to their design, organization, extension, or critique. Building on the kinds of insights one can draw from a case like free software, contemporary critics are focused on how algorithms exacerbate inequality and support oppression, Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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how laws and organizations prevent reverse-­engineering of systems, and how the unproblematic embrace of big-­data analytic tools, algorithmic platforms, or machine-­learning systems can obscure the results of participation in new ways. The work of making participation visible goes far beyond issues like transparency, openness, or legal accessibility—­it requires perhaps engaging the most vibrant forms of contributory autonomy, or maybe even very different forms of ethical personhood entirely (cue the contributions of contemporary cultural anthropology), in the effort to make meaningful the results of our participation.

Make Participation Diarchic, Not Simply Dyadic All the cases of participation I cover in this book start from the basic idea that the participation benefits not only the individual but also the entities that provide or format participation. The study of worker participation focused on the “resistance to change” of the individuals and also on the productivity gains from engaging workers. The Model Cities program focused on the citizens’ incorporation into the project and also the improvement of the outcomes of urban planning (in a weak sense) or the actual transfer of power to citizens from administrations (in the strong sense of climbing Arnstein’s ladder). And in the case of international participatory development, the implementation of participation was meant to change or improve multiple parties: the poor, the development workers themselves (who in Chambers’s sense would “see reality” more clearly) and the process of development itself. When participation is understood as individual contributory autonomy only, then this dyadic feature can disappear. When participation at work becomes merely “participative decision-­making” or when direct collective participation becomes “user involvement” or when participatory development becomes microlending, the sense of there being a simultaneous creation of dyadic benefits disappears. The power differential has always been there—­it is why Arnstein needed a ladder to show simply how that differential worked. In large social media platforms, this differential is stark: they depend on the constant contributions of individuals in order to produce the series of virtual collectives and the data by which they are made visible—­but they only grudgingly reveal the benefits that accrue to the platforms themselves under critique or pressure. The chestnut that “when the product is free, you are the product” is 258

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one exemplar of this failure of participation—­as clear evidence of a profound inequity between participant and participator. But such failures are also clear in other domains, such as clinical medicine, whenever participation is structured only as the contribution of individual patients to some project or another—­and not the mutual or collaborative exploration of alternatives that makes a difference to collectives instead of to either isolated patients or anonymous public health populations. To make participation diarchic instead of dyadic would be to establish that the demand for participation must make the effects of participation equally powerful for both parties. Reformatting participation equitably or inclusively is not just about which types of people get to participate and how, but about this dyadic relation of different and often mutually exclusive benefits being in a relation of actual and risky contention or struggle. Any other approach will eventually end up looking like mere exploitation.

Make Expertise Mobile, but Give Participation Inertia Do not oppose participation to expertise. Make participation enhance or extend expertise instead. There are countless cases where participation is understood to be a corrective to forms of expertise—­ and a general discourse in many scholarly disciplines of treating technical expertise and participation or politics as opposites. This, too, is a question of formatting. In the case of participatory development that I tell here, the expertise of development officials was questioned from within, not simply as a form of domination or refusal of politics, but as a way to extend or enhance the expertise of development officials (as in the case of Robert Chambers “seeing reality clearly” through renewed attention to things on the ground). In other cases, as in that of participatory action research, participation is seen as a way to incorporate radically different forms of expertise into any expert process. All too often, the opposition of expertise and participation results in attempts to make participation mobile, scalable, or replicable—­to increase the amount of participation and to incorporate it everywhere. This is the story of the “tyranny of participation” that resulted from the embrace of participation by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the NGOs of international development. Participation can be formatted to be mobile and replicable—­but to do so requires separating it from the accumulated expertise of a parPa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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ticular collective by attempting to capture or replace it with scripts, tools, or games. It’s hard to argue with the idea that there should be more participation. But perhaps it is not participation that needs to be scaled up and sent everywhere, but expertise? To make expertise mobile and scalable is a different problem, and would require freeing it from structures of accumulation and ownership that so often restrict it to elites and technocrats. A more mobile, scalable expertise might be more valuable than a mobile participation, if only we can figure out how to achieve it. By contrast, participation ought to be made more inertial—­ given more stability, mass, permanence in collectives that can persist over time and can incorporate expertise into their work and become more expert by virtue of that. One of the oldest truisms about participation in democracy is that it gives people an “educative dividend”—­by virtue of participating, one becomes more expert at the kinds of things one participates in. To format participation as a supplement to, or as the opposite of, expertise can produce the paradoxical effect of asking the least informed to say the most about an issue. It can produce the pathological search for those who are least expert, or (not the same thing) most excluded from previous participation. When participation is made mobile—­for example, when it becomes an industry of engagement experts—­an event-­driven form of participation is elevated above a more constant, inertial repetition of participation. Rather than exploring how participation extends, contests, and diversifies existing expertise, it can consolidate that expertise into an ever narrower space of legitimacy, while failing to create the conditions in which participation might sustain, preserve, and ramify the virtues of expert knowledge. The “crisis” of expertise in contemporary US or EU politics—­ concerns about the failing legitimacy of expert knowledge or the manufacture and perpetuation of doubt—­while real, is exacerbated by scientists and well-­meaning liberals who insist that the solution is more participation, more education, more literacy. It sounds like an argument for making expertise more widely available—­but it translates more commonly into a demand for more people to participate in a particular, often procedural, form of expertise, without making expertise itself more mobile, extensible, contestable, or diverse. Many cases of participation—­like those I explore in this book—­ start out as small-­scale, speech-­intensive, conscientização-­style en260

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gagements; but in an effort to replicate and spread that vibrant, lived experience, participation is reformatted in ways that are almost guaranteed to privilege an instrumental outcome over a particular kind of personal experience. They transform participation from an ethical person embedded in collectives, into a set of scripts and games intended to spread participation as widely as possible, while failing to preserve the experience. In the process, expertise can disappear and participation fail.

Create the Possibility for Disagreement, Not the Guarantee of Consensus Embrace perplexity as a sign of incomplete participation. Look askance at cases where participation produces easy consensus. The existence of perplexity is not a sign that things are not working, or that some person or group is less rational, less educated, or more ideological than another. The existence of perplexity is one of the best signs we have that different grammars are being used to make sense of the world—­that different forms of life are confronting one another. Throughout this book, I have pointed to cases where participation is understood differently by those engaged in it: sometimes with enthusiastic fervor, sometimes with suspicious concern. Often these forms of life index recognizable, small-­scale collectives: the neighborhood, the workers vs. the management, the villagers, a professional cadre, and so on. One can be—­and perhaps should be—­a bit nostalgic for small-­scale participation and the intensive communal experience of being an instance of a well-­defined collective. But it would be naive to approach the world of large-­scale platform capitalism as something that can simply be rejected and replaced with good old-­fashioned local, decentralized, participatory self-­governance. Perhaps it is not this alternative—­between small-­and large-­scale participation—­that is most important. A form of life is not tied to scale, but to ways of making sense of the world, claims about how it is or how it should be and what kind of person one needs to be in order to inhabit it well. Instead, one might ask: What kinds of ethical personhood are made available by the forms of participation we engage in? How do those forms of personhood allow us to make sense of the worlds we inhabit, as well as those of others who confront us? The small-­scale collective—­the workplace, the town meeting, the social movement—­is comforting by virtue of the stability it posPa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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sesses as an identifiable collective. In them we recognize ourselves through long-­established forms of kinship and relation, through transactions and interactions repeated with particular people, over long periods of time. Under the conditions of social media, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence, something troubling happens to the nature of collectives. At first, one might assume that they simply bring all these small-­scale collectives together into one big one—­making the world more open and connected, as Facebook would say. But what these platforms produce through individual participation is not a collective totality; it is not one big collective in which all participate and by which all are dominated; it is neither totalitarianism nor the tyranny of the majority. Rather, what it produces is a constant, unstable, infinite series of collectives; collectives that change constantly in their make-­up and relationality; collectives that are unbounded; collectives that are perplexing to experience and difficult to make sense of. Collectives that change obscurely, and often outside of human perceptibility. The infinite series of collectives that large-­scale mediated participation creates means that the personhood of those who inhabit them is similarly unstable. The question of how we relate to such collectives as persons, what we expect them to do, and what we ourselves think we should do in them, has been rendered quite dramatically uncertain. In this context I think Lévy-­Bruhl’s notion of participation is helpful. Lévy-­Bruhl offered participation as a tool to make sense of the existence of immediate, affective, and ethical intuition common to very different collectives, an existence that becomes visible through cases of perplexity. These shared intuitions were part and parcel of, and depended upon, the collective(s) within which they made sense.5 The positive experience of successful participation hides the confirmation of an individual’s ethical orientation toward the world and others—­so much so that it is sometimes not possible to even notice it. But when participation fails, when a person experiences the perplexity of not-­participation, that breakdown makes one’s ethical orientation visible in a flash. The visibility of these orientations, in that moment of perplexity, does not necessarily amount to a statement about their rightness or wrongness—­it simply reveals their contingency. Ethical personhood is at that moment nothing more than a set of intuitions about the collectives of which a person is an 262

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instance—­immediately and affectively confronted by the different orientations of another collective. If one follows out this logic about the nature of ethical personhood, then perhaps it makes sense of why the contemporary embrace of new digital media is so perplexing: social media place us not in any particular collective (that of “white people” or “Facebook,” say), but in something like an infinite or unbounded collective, by virtue of its constant change. It is not a collective of “everyone,” but nor is it ever a specific collective of relations, save possibly for those brief moments when a keyword temporarily stabilizes a collective into a movement or an organization, such as Black Lives Matter.6 Similarly, the advent of the algorithmic constitution of these collective relations, and their “improvement” by machine learning or artificial intelligence, introduces new levels of unseeability and unpredictability into those collectives. If participation depends on the ability to apprehend and experience participation as a seeing-­ oneself-­participate, or knowing that one’s voice has been heard, this implies the capacity to know the contours of these relations and their extent. If that is lacking, the only available experience will be that of perplexity. It does not seem to be an accident, therefore, that today’s social media environments are filled with violent attacks by perplexed people. In the face of an infinitely changing set of judgments about the world, it becomes trivial to attribute all kinds of beliefs and opinions to anyone. Angry Gamergaters see “social justice warriors” everywhere as a threat to their very existence; angry scientists and doctors see climate change deniers and antivaxers everywhere, and everywhere in need of reeducation. The dramatic rise of fake news, the creation of alternative facts, the apparent collapse of public truth-­telling: all these seem to me to be pathological effects of the kind of formatted participation we have downloaded to our collective mobile phone. We are not incapable of agreeing, we have instead become incapable of disagreeing. When one is incapable of disagreeing, then participation is not occurring. The perplexity we face today is driven by false forms of disagreement: outrage-­driven partisanship and “equal time” fantasies of journalistic neutrality. Constant outrage is a sign of perplexity—­a sign that we are not capable of making our arguments appear as arguments in a world that makes sense of them. Because our collectives keep shifting as a result of their infinite and unbounded variation, the inertia of participation approaches zero. The work of Pa r t i c i pat i o n , Co n c l u d e d

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making things less outrageous involves recasting issues in terms that allow real disagreement to take place. The formatted participation of the present is not that of the individual person who quaintly joins a community, lives in a neighborhood, or has social relations with friends, family, and coworkers. Nor is it possible to imagine a nostalgic return to it. The formatted participation of today is different because it is automated and delegated. Participation today unleashes processes that continue long after the moment of a person’s contribution, and without the necessity of any continuing judgments. “Contributions” are no longer singular events, but ongoing, if tapering or attenuating, events that can be reused, reformatted, circulated; they haunt us in more ways than simply being an invasion of our privacy. This automation of our contributions is accomplished in the name of convenience, but its effects reach much further. Once contributed, our contributions are also delegated (and not always by the person doing the participating). People today can delegate their autonomy far beyond their immediate relations and sphere of influence. However, this automated and delegated contributory autonomy is mediated by structures just outside the view, or understanding, of most people. The opacity of the platforms and technologies today means that the context of any contribution is illegible—­both impossible to access because secret or hidden, but also impossible to interpret because of the complexity implied by constantly changing platforms and technologies. The way participation is automated and delegated is not fundamentally impossible to understand—­but it occurs in a situation in which all but a few are prevented from reverse-­engineering an understanding, and so cannot act or contribute in ways that are creative, critical, or transformative. Because it is impossible to interpret the effects of contributions, it is impossible to control those contributions. Something as simple as having one’s actions broadcast and reviewed by an unknown set of observers (to say nothing of being actively surveilled) produces a subjective instability—­far worse than paranoia, since it is not just about the judgment of others, but about being fundamentally unable to observe the boundaries of the collective one is contributing to. And this means, finally, that it becomes impossible to experience participation. We are perpetually on the verge of understanding how to create ourselves as collectives, only to forget as soon as we become individuals. 264

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Participation, Acknowledged Why do we have acknowledgments sections? In part because we continue to insist that the work of individual authorship is paramount, and the rest is but participation. That is perniciously false in this case. Nonetheless, convention demands that my name goes on the book, everyone else’s names go here, and they are as follows: Goldsmiths College; University of Oxford; Texas A&M University, Geography Department; University of Southern California, Civic Paths working group; University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology Department; University of California, San Diego, Communications Department; and Rice University, Anthropology Department, for invitations to present this work. Jan Løhmann Stephensen and the organizers of the RETHINK Participatory Cultural Citizenship in Aarhus for inviting me to present an early draft. The National Science Foundation, which funded the project under grants #1025569 and #1322299. The Wenner Gren Foundation, Charles Hirschkind, Carlo Caduff, and Maria José D’Abreu for including me again in anthropology and for helping orient the grammatical method. Plus all the participants in the New Media, New Publics workshop, for suffering an unclear project and a much too long paper, a short version of which is published in Current Anthropology: “Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places: Toward a Grammar of Participation,” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S77–­S90. Ben Peters, for allowing an unsolicited contribution at just the right time: “Participation,” in Digital Keywords, edited by Benjamin Peters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 227–­41. Dr. Marian Näser-­Lather, Professor Dr. Gertraud Koch, and the Anthropology Department of Universität Marburg for the invitation to present this work as part of the conference on (H)activism. Wolfgang Sützl for shared discussion of sharing. Dr. Matthias Korn and Dr. David Sittler for the invitation to Pa r t i c i pat i o n , A c k n o w l e d g e d

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discuss this work at the Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation at the Universität Siegen. Götz Bachmann, Paula Bialski, Janina Wellman, and the Digital Cultures Research Lab in Leuphana, Germany, plus the Media Cultures of Computer Simulation group, for a fellowship and discussion. Elana Zilman, Cassandra Hartblay, and the CoLED group for sustaining my participation. Wikipedia, for existing and for resisting. The UCLA Library, for being an excellent library. Reed Malcom, Allison Muddit, and University of California Press, for trying to make open access work. SciHub and Library Genesis, for also trying to make open access work. Michael M. J. Fischer, George Marcus, Gabriella Coleman, Maia Green, Peter Redfield, Lieba Faier, and Luis Felipe Murillo Rosado, for reading the entire manuscript and providing detailed feedback and criticism. Noortje Marres, for reading the manuscript more than twice and for honest, helpful, encouraging reviews; and one anonymous reviewer for more of the same. Javier Lezaun, Frédéric Keck, Alberto Corsín-Jiménez, Michelle Murphy, Matthew Hull, Lilly Irani, Kim and Mike Fortun, Gaymon Bennett, Hannah Appel, Nick Seaver, and Zeynep Gürsel, for being exemplary intellectual participants. Morgan Currie, Roderic Crooks, and Seth Erickson for listening to and reading early chapter drafts. All the itinerant members of the Part.Lab, for making me do this. The faculty and the staff of the Institute for Society and Genetics, past and present, for housing, encouraging, and sustaining me. The Departments of Information Studies and Anthropology at UCLA for listening to versions of this, and for making warm second homes for a misfit scholar. Karen Darling, Jill Shimabukuro, Susan Karani, Deirdre Kennedy, and Tamara Ghattas at the University of Chicago Press, for making this book beautiful and the process a pleasure. Aaron Panofksy, for playing a robust Sancho Panza to my emaciated Quixote. Andy Lakoff, for setting me down this path by asking first: “What is the genealogy of participation?” And for keeping me focused by asking: “Isn’t this just about democracy?” 266

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Stephen Collier, for repeatedly pushing me to make my ideas clearer, and occasionally succeeding. Jenn, Brian, Skyler, and especially Thatcher, for never giving up on this book. Michael Osman and Anna Neimark and Lieba Faier and Ruben Hickman and Peter Stacey and Fred Zimmerman and Sarah Stein and Jessica Cattelino and Joan Donovan and Martin Høyem, for food, for sanity, for sympathy, for resistance, for music, and for friendship. Ida and Leo and Hannah, for participating fully. In everything, completely.

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Rebecca Solnit, “Foreword: Miracles and Obstacles,” in Nathan Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), ix. 2 Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy, 163. 1

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Marilyn Strathern, “Reading Relations Backwards,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, no. 1 (2014): 3–­19. 2 Initial research was funded by the National Science Foundation (from 2010 to 2016; NSF #1025569 and NSF #1322299) to compare case studies of participation using new tools and technologies. Publications from the “Part.Lab” include Christopher Kelty et al., “Seven Dimensions of Contemporary Participation Disentangled,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66, no. 3 (n.d.): 474–­88; Christopher Kelty and Aaron Panofsky, “Disentangling Public Participation in Science and Biomedicine,” Genome Medicine 6, no. 1 (2014): 8; Adam Fish et al., “Birds of the Internet: Towards a Field Guide to Participation and Governance,” Journal of Cultural Economy 4, no. 2 (May 2011): 157–­87; Christopher Kelty, “From Participation to Power,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, edited by A. Delwiche and J. J. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2012); Christopher M. Kelty and Seth Erickson, “Two Modes of Participation: A Conceptual Analysis of 102 Cases of Internet and Social Media Participation from 2005–­2015,” The Information Society (2018): 71–­87. 3 Isto Huvila, “Participatory Archive: Towards Decentralised Curation, Radical User Orientation, and Broader Contextualisation of Records Management,” Archival Science 8, no. 1 (March 2008): 15–­36; John Postill, The Rise of Nerd Politics: Digital Activism and Political Change (London: Pluto Press, 2018). 4 Caroline Lee, Do-­It-­Yourself Democracy the Rise of the Public Engagement Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Penelope Harvey, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise 1

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(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Javier Lezaun and Linda Soneryd, “Consulting Citizens: Technologies of Elicitation and the Mobility of Publics,” Public Understanding of Science 16, no. 3 (2007): 279–­97; Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes, Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (London: Routledge, 2015); Brice Laurent, “Technologies of Democracy: Experiments and Demonstrations,” Science and Engineering Ethics 17, no. 4 (2011): 649–­66; Gene Rowe and Lynn J. Frewer, “A Typology of Public Engagement Mechanisms,” Science, Technology & Human Values 30, no. 2 (2005): 251–­90; E. Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (London: Verso, 2015); Erkan Saka, “Social Media in Turkey as a Space for Political Battles: AKTrolls and Other Politically Motivated Trolling,” Middle East Critique 27, no. 2 (February 2018): 161–­77. 5 Brian Wampler, Participatory Budgeting in Brazil: Contestation, Cooperation, and Accountability (State College: Penn State Press, 2010); Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza, Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Maia Green, The Development State: Aid, Culture & Civil Society in Tanzania, African Issues (Melton, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: James Currey/Boydell & Brewer, 2014); Thomas C. Beierle and Jerry Cayford, Democracy in Action: Public Participation in Environmental Decisions (Washington, DC: RFF Press, 2002); Fabiana Li, “Documenting Accountability: Environmental Impact Assessment in a Peruvian Mining Project,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32, no. 2 (2009): 218–­36. 6 Bishop, Artificial Hells; Kester, Conversation Pieces; Bishop, Participation; Carl Disalvo, Adversarial Design, Design Thinking, Design Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Doug Schuler and A. Namioka, Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993). 7 Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (1969): 216–­24. 8 John M. Cohen and Norman T. Uphoff, “Participation’s Place in Rural Development: Seeking Clarity through Specificity,” World Development 8, no. 3 (March 1980): 213–­35. 9 H. Peter Dachler and Bernhard Wilpert, “Conceptual Dimensions and Boundaries of Participation in Organizations: A Critical Evaluation,” Administrative Science Quarterly 23, no. 1 ( January 1978): 1–­39. 10 Among the key texts on affect or ontology: Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter : A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Bruno Latour, An 270

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Inquiry into Modes of Existence : An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think : Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). On the anthropology of ethics, see James Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Michael Lambek, Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); James Laidlaw, The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom, New Departures in Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Joel Robbins, “What Is the Matter with Transcendence? On the Place of Religion in the New Anthropology of Ethics,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 4 (2016): 767–­808. 11 Kajri Jain, “Gods in the Time of Automobility,” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (2017): S13–­S26. 12 Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Andrew Barry, “Technological Zones,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 239–­53. 13 Compare especially Rose and Miller’s notion of “governing through freedom.” Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 14 Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 15 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 16 Daniel Navon and Gil Eyal, “Looping Genomes: Diagnostic Change and the Genetic Makeup of the Autism Population,” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 5 (March 2016): 1416–­71; Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition, edited by Dan Sperber et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1996), 351–­394. 17 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 29. 18 On collective kinds, see the preface in Christopher M. Kelty, Nick Seaver, and Lilly Irani, Limn Number 2: Crowds and Clouds (Los Angeles: Limn, 2012). 19 Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in What Is a Person? edited by Michael F. Goodman (Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1988), 127–­44. 20 Lee, Do-­It-­Yourself Democracy. 21 Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation Pa r t i c i pat i o n , N o tat e d

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of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); James Farr and David Lay Williams, The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 22 Wittgenstein et al., Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, 242. 23 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America : Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Veena Das, “Wittgenstein and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 27, no. 1 (October 1998): 171–­95; Didier Fassin, “Another Politics of Life Is Possible,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 5 (August 2009): 44–­60; Kathleen Emmett, “Forms of Life,” Philosophical Investigations 13, no. 3 ( July 1990): 213–­31. 24 Wittgenstein et al., Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, 235. 25 Noortje Marres, Material Participation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 26 Hanna F. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 27 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 170. 28 Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (New York: Verso, 2003), 40. 29 Fung and Wright, Deepening Democracy, 40; Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28 and following. 30 Beth Noveck, Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma, Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice (Cambridge MA: O’Reilly Press, 2010); Morgan Currie, “The Data-­fication of Openness: The Policies and Practices of Open Data in Los Angeles,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2016; Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson, eds., Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation (San Francisco: Code for America Press, 2013); Andrew R Schrock, “Civic Hacking as Data Activism and Advocacy: A History from Publicity to Open Government Data,” New Media & Society 18, no. 4 (2016): 581–­99. 31 Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Malden, MA; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016); Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (New York: OR Books, 2016). 272

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Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, Participation: The New Tyranny? (London: Zed Books, 2001). 33 On sharing, see Wolfgang Sützl, “Being with One Another: Towards a Media Phenomenology of Sharing,” A Peer Reviewed Journal about Excessive Research 5, no. 1 (2016 ), http://www.aprja.net/?p=3041; and also Nicholas A. John, “Sharing,” in Digital Keywords, edited by Benjamin Peters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 269–­77. 34 “participation, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, consulted August 2015. 35 Annelies Riles has noted its ascendancy; see Annelies Riles, “Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, and Ethnography After Neoliberalism,” American Anthropologist 115, no. 4 (2013): 555–­69; Annelise Riles, “From Comparison to Collaboration: Experiments with a New Scholarly and Political Reform,” Law & Contemporary Problems 78 (2015): 147. It is also used in the “Collaborative Governance” literature; see Chris Ansell and Alison Gash, “Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18, no. 4 (2008): 543–­71; Lisa Blomgren Bingham, “The Next Generation of Administrative Law: Building the Legal Infrastructure for Collaborative Governance” Wisconsin Law Review (2010, no. 2): 297. 36 Jean Lave, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 37 Patchen Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-­domination,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 9–­36. 38 Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, edited by Robert Scigliano (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 79–­80. 39 John Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 40 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory. 41 On this subject see especially Terrence E. Cook and Patrick M. Morgan, eds., Participatory Democracy (New York: Canfield Press/ Harper & Row, 1971); Kaufman, “Human Nature and Participatory Democracy”; Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Rose and Miller, Governing the Present; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 42 Quoted in Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern 32

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Equipment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 47. At least some variants of science and technology studies have always been focused on participation; indeed, a “participatory turn” arguably characterizes much recent scholarship. See, for example, Sheila Jasanoff, “Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science,” Minerva 41, no. 3 (2003): 223–­44; Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Martin Lengwiler, “Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology: Historical Origins and Current Practices in Critical Perspective,” Science, Technology & Human Values 33, no. 2 (2008): 186–­200; Chilvers and Kearnes, Remaking Participation. 44 Key works that take democracy as a site for science and technology studies (STS) research include Marres, Material Participation; Javier Lezaun, Noortje Marres, and Manuel Tironi, “Experiments in Participation,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Clark Miller et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 195–­222; Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun, “Materials and Devices of the Public: An Introduction,” Economy and Society 40, no. 4 (2011): 489–­509; Lezaun and Soneryd, “Consulting Citizens”; Chilvers and Kearnes, Remaking Participation; Manuel Tironi, “Disastrous Publics: Counter-­enactments in Participatory Experiments,” Science, Technology & Human Values 40, no. 4 (2015): 564–­87. 45 Marres, Material Participation. 46 Lezaun, Marres, and Tironi, “Experiments in Participation”; Chilvers and Kearnes, Remaking Participation. 47 Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things : Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 48 Michael M. J. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 49 Chilvers and Kearnes, Remaking Participation, 11. 50 Given that I am an anthropologist and a historian, my definition of institutionalism starts with Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Thorstein Veblen, and includes Elinor Ostrom, Paul Dimaggio and Walter Powell, Robert Ellickson, and others—­but also contains elements of John Dewey’s pragmatism, which is often opposed to institutionalism. 51 Baiocchi and Ganuza, Popular Democracy; Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Gales, Gouverner par les instruments (Paris: Les Presses science po, 2004). Carole Pateman has also returned to “participatory budgeting” in “Participatory Democracy Revisited,” Perspectives 43

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on Politics 10, no. 1 (2012): 7–­19. See also Wampler, Participatory Budgeting in Brazil. 52 Rabinow, Anthropos Today; Ong and Collier, Global Assemblages, 55 and following. 53 Bartleby is fashionably invoked, especially by European radicals in the wake of Deleuze, because he is a figure of unconsummated autonomy, autonomy that never actualizes itself in a choice, authentic or not, but refuses to choose in order to remain in a kind of metaphysical celibacy, neither an enthusiast nor a critic. See Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall Street,” Putnam’s Monthly. A Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art 2, no. 11 (1853): 546–­57; Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68–­90; Jacques Rancière, “Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula,” in The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, Atopia: Philosophy, Political Theory, Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 146–­64; Dan McCall, The Silence of Bartleby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, “Notes Towards a Politics of Bartleby: The Ignorance of Chicken,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 4, no. 4 (2006): 375–­94; Isabelle Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2005), 994–­1003; Armin Beverungen and Stephen Dunne, “‘I’d Prefer Not to’: Bartleby and the Excesses of Interpretation,” Culture and Organization 13, no. 2 (2007): 171–­83; Alexander Cooke, “Resistance, Potentiality and the Law,” Angelaki 10, no. 3 (2005): 79–­89; Comité Invisible, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009); Harvey, Roads, 177–79.

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R. B. Joyce, Sir William MacGregor (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971), 153. 2 Hugh Nisbet, A Colonial Tramp: Travels and Adventures in Australia and New Guinea, vol. 2 (London: Ward & Downey, 1891), 250. 3 Erik Gustav Edelfelt, “Notes on New Guinea [1886–­87],” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Queensland Branch 2, no. 1 (1886): 17–­18. 4 Edelfelt, “Notes on New Guinea [1886–­87],” 22. 5 Erik Gustav Edelfelt, “Chapter XIV: Travels in the Neighborhood of 1

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Mt. Yule,” in Picturesque New Guinea, edited by J. W. Lindt (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1887), 132. 6 Erik Gustav Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Queensland Branch 7, no. 1 (1892): 24. 7 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 10. 8 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 11. 9 Edelfelt, “Chapter XIV,” 134. 10 Gibbney, H. J., “Bean, Isabelle (1862–­1939),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bean-­isabelle-­5167. 11 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 11. 12 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 11. 13 Edelfelt, “Notes on New Guinea [1886–­87],” 93. 14 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 13. 15 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 15. 16 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 25–­ 26. 17 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 23. 18 Edelfelt, “Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” 22–­ 23. 19 Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 64. 20 For recent work, see Frédéric Keck, Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl: Entre philosophie et anthropologie, contradiction et participation (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 2008); Cristina Chimisso, “The Mind and the Faculties: The Controversy over ‘Primitive Mentality’ and the Struggle for Disciplinary Space at the Inter-­war Sorbonne,” History of the Human Sciences 13, no. 3 (August 2000): 47–­68. Lévy-­Bruhl also had significant influence on a range of other thinkers, not widely recognized. Perhaps most important, he influenced Jean Piaget, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Fleck, and Carl Jung. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge; Towards a Post-­critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 227–­29; Gustav Jahoda, “Piaget and Lévy-­Bruhl,” History of Psychology 3, no. 3 (2000): 218; Robert A. Segal, “Jung and Lévy-­Bruhl,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 52, no. 5 (2007): 635–­ 58; Jean Poirier, “La Pensée ethnologique de Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl,” Revue philosophique del la France et de l’Étranger 147 (1957): 503–­29. See also Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, Razão e afetividade: O pensamento de Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl (Brasilia: UnB/Paralelo 15, 2002). 21 Lucien Febvre and B. Gottlieb, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (New York: Dorset Press, 1989); Francis Macdonald Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (London: E. Arnold, 1912); Polanyi, Personal Knowledge; Barfield, Saving the 276

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Appearances. Eric Hörl makes a convincing case that Gilbert Simondon’s work can also be read in this tradition. See Erich Hörl, “Other Beginnings of Participative Sense-­Culture: Wild Media, Speculative Ecologies, Transgressions of the Cybernetic Hypothesis,” in ReClaiming Participation : Technology, Mediation, Collectivity, edited by Mathias Denecke et al. (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2016), 93–­121. 22 Mazzarella’s focus is on the power of advertising—­an exemplary case of modern “participation” in Lévy-­Bruhl’s sense. See William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 23 1 Timothy 2:4. 24 Riley, The General Will before Rousseau. 25 On the genealogy of this other meaning of participation, see Jacob A. Sherman, “A Genealogy of Participation,” in The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, edited by Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 81–­112. 26 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 200; Gregory Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides,” Philosophical Review 63, no. 3 ( July 1954): 319; Alexander Nehamas, “Self-­Predication and Plato’s Theory of Forms,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1979): 93–­103. 27 Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, 11. 28 Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, 12–­13. 29 Cited in Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, 14. 30 Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1992), 136. 31 Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, 22. 32 Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, 137. 33 Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy; and, The Social Contract (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75. 34 Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, 57. 35 The term “inalienable” is used instead of “indivisible” in the Geneva MS. Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy; and, The Social Contract, 185–­86. 36 Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy; and, The Social Contract, 55 (emphasis added). 37 Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy; and, The Social Contract, 64. 38 Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy; and, The Social Contract, 66. 39 Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society. 40 Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives Think, 83. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , N o tat e d

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Marshall Sahlins, What Kinship Is—­and Is Not (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 42 See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 43 E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 122. 44 Keck, Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl. 45 Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives Think, 20. 46 Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives Think, x. For a genealogy, see Keck, Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, 11–­20. 47 Lévy-­Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, 40 and following. 48 Steven Lukes, “Relativism in Its Place,” in Rationality and Relativism, edited by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 261–­305; Steven Lukes, “On the Social Determination of Truth,” in Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-­Western Societies, edited by Robin Horton and Ruth Finnegan (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 230–­48; Robin Horton and Ruth H. Finnegan, eds., Modes of Thought; Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-­Western Societies (London: Faber & Faber, 1973); Tambiah, Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality. 49 Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, 27; see also 71–­74. 50 Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives Think, 7. 51 Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives Think, 7. 52 Lévy-­Bruhl, How Natives Think, 61. 53 Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, Primitive Mentality. Translated by Lilian A. Clare. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), 33 and following. 54 Lévy-­Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, 78. 55 Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science (London: A. Constable & Co., 1905), 214. 56 Lévy-­Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, 55. 57 Lévy-­Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, 57. 58 Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World, translated by B. Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). 59 James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 205. 60 Lévy-­Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, 192. 61 See Hörl, “Other Beginnings of Participative Sense-­Culture” and Hörl, Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication. Translated by Nils F. Schott. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). 41

278

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Clifford, Person and Myth, 206. Keck, Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, 44. 64 Richard McKeon, “The Development and Significance of the Concept of Responsibility,” Revue internationale de philosophie 39, no. 1 (1957): 10. 65 Lévy-­Bruhl himself intervened in these debates in “La responsabilité des criminels” (1890). 66 See Keck, Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, 46 and following. 67 Lévy-­Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science, 167. 68 Lévy-­Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science, 182 (emphasis added). 69 See Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 166–­67. 70 The question of whether our ethical intuitions are accessible to our rational, logical minds is something that has continued to trouble philosophers—­to say nothing of anthropologists engaged in thinking ethics cross cultures. See Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics; Lambek, Ordinary Ethics. Lévy-­Bruhl was a kind of moral realist about values avant la lettre—­and his admiration for Leenhardt can be seen as respect for someone who was able to experience those values as they exist in the world. See also Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 71 Peter Frederick Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2008). 72 Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, 10–­11. 73 Strathern, “Reading Relations Backwards.” 62 63

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Lester Coch and John R. P. French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” Human Relations 1, no. 4 (1948): 520–­21. 2 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,”513. 3 Alfred J. Marrow, Making Management Human: Tested Methods of Applying the Findings of Psychology to Everyday Problems of People Working Together (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1957), 166. 4 Marrow, Making Management Human, 166. 5 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” 512–­13. 6 Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 38–­48. 7 John R. P. French Jr. “Role-­Playing as a Method of Training Foremen,” Sociometry (1945): 175–­76. 8 French, “Role-­Playing as a Method of Training Foremen,” 175–­76. 9 Alfred J. Marrow, The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt 1

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Lewin (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1969), 143. 10 Marrow, Making Management Human, 117. 11 Marrow, Making Management Human, 117. 12 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” 521. 13 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” 521–­22. 14 Marrow, Making Management Human, 521. 15 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” 520. 16 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” 529. 17 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” 521. 18 Alfred J Marrow, “Gomberg’s ‘Fantasy’,” Society (Formerly Trans-­ Action) 3, no. 6 (1966): 36. 19 William Gomberg, “The Trouble with Democratic Management,” Society (Formerly Trans-­Action) 3, no. 5 (1966): 33–­34. 20 Marrow, “Gomberg’s ‘Fantasy,’” 37. 21 Gomberg, “The Trouble with Democratic Management,” 34. 22 Marrow, “Gomberg’s ‘Fantasy,’” 37. 23 Rose, Inventing Our Selves; Rose and Miller, Governing the Present. 24 Peter M. Asaro, “Transforming Society by Transforming Technology: The Science and Politics of Participatory Design,” Accounting, Management and Information Technologies 10, no. 4 (2000): 257–­90. 25 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 190. 26 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 190. 27 Lewin’s most influential papers include Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph K. White, “Patterns of Aggressive Behavior in Experimentally Created ‘Social Climates,’” Journal of Social Psychology 10, no. 2 (1939): 269–­99; Kurt Lewin and Ronald Lippitt, “An Experimental Approach to the Study of Autocracy and Democracy: A Preliminary Note,” Sociometry 1, nos. 3–­4 (1938): 292–­300. Lewin’s social psychology of groups is summarized in Kurt Lewin, “Frontiers in Group Dynamics II: Channels of Group Life: Social Planning and Action Research,” Human Relations 1, no. 2 (1947): 143–­53. The history of social psychology is reviewed in Kurt Danziger, “Making Social Psychology Experimental: A Conceptual History, 1920–­1970,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36, no. 4 (2000): 329–­ 47. Especially enlightening here is work identifying Lewin’s methods as a kind of “provocative containment” common to midcentury social science; see Javier Lezaun, Fabian Muniesa, and Signe Vikkelsø, “Provocative Containment and the Drift of Social-­Scientific Realism,” Journal of Cultural Economy 6, no. 3 (2013): 278–­93; Javier Lezaun and Nerea Calvillo, “In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin’s Atmospheres,” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 4 (2014): 434–­57. 28 Kurt Lewin, “Action Research and Minority Problems,” Journal of 280

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Social Issues 2, no. 4 (1946): 34–­46; Ronald Lippitt, Jeanne Watson, and Bruce Westley, The Dynamics of Planned Change: A Comparative Study of Priniciples and Techniques, edited by Willard B. Spalding (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1958); Matthew Hull, “Democratic Technologies of Speech: From WWII America to Postcolonial Delhi,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2010): 257–­82. 29 Lezaun, Muniesa, and Vikkelsø, “Provocative Containment and the Drift of Social-­Scientific Realism.” 30 Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, 189–­90. 31 Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, 257–­58. 32 Bruce E. Kaufman, “The Theory and Practice of Strategic HRM and Participative Management: Antecedents in Early Industrial Relations,” Human Resource Management Review 11, no. 4 (2001): 505–­33; W. R. Basset, When the Workmen Help You Manage (Century, 1919). 33 Ordway Tead and H. C. Metcalf, Personnel Administration: Its Principles and Practice (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1920). 34 Lewin, “Action Research and Minority Problems.” 35 John R. P. French Jr., Joachim Israel, and Dagfinn Ås, “An Experiment on Participation in a Norwegian Factory,” Human Relations (1960). 36 Carleton S. Bartlem and Edwin A. Locke, “The Coch and French Study: A Critique and Reinterpretation,” Human Relations 34, no. 7 (1981): 555–­66. 37 Katherine I. Miller and Peter R. Monge, “Participation, Satisfaction, and Productivity: A Meta-­analytic Review,” Academy of Management Journal 29, no. 4 (1986): 735. 38 Lezaun and Calvillo, “In the Political Laboratory.” 39 Rose, Inventing Our Selves, 117. 40 Rose, Inventing Our Selves, chap. 6. 41 Coch and French, “Overcoming Resistance to Change,” 521. 42 Alfred J. Marrow, Making Management Human, 116. 43 Alden, “Bottom-­up Management,” chaps. 6 and 7. 44 Marrow, Making Management Human, 115. 45 Marrow, Making Management Human, 115; Alfred J. Marrow, David G. Bowers, and Stanley E. Seashore, Management by Participation: Creating a Climate for Personal and Organizational Development (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). 46 See also the work of Gordon Allport from this period: Gordon Willard Allport, “The Psychology of Participation,” Psychological Review 52, no. 3 (1945): 117. 47 Philip Elliot Slater and Warren G. Bennis, “Democracy Is Inevitable,” Harvard Business Review 42, no. 2 (1964): 52. 48 Slater and Bennis, “Democracy Is Inevitable,” 59. 49 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas Pa r t i c i pat i o n , N o tat e d

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50

53 51 52

56 57 54 55



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59



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61



62

65 63 64

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in the Fifties: With “The Resumption of History in the New Century” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 463n61. William Gomberg, “Democratic Management—­Gomberg Replies,” Society (Formerly Trans-­Action) 4, no. 2 (1966): 48. Gomberg, “The Trouble with Democratic Management,” 34. Rose and Miller, Governing the Present, 173–­74. Frederick Herzberg, “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” Harvard Business Review ( January–­February 1968): 53–­62; reprinted in Best of HBR: Motivating People (Harvard Business Review, 2003), 87–­96. Herzberg, “One More Time,” 88. Herzberg, “One More Time,” 93. Herzberg, “One More Time,” 96. J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham, “Motivation through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16, no. 2 (1976): 255. Hackman and Oldham, “Motivation through the Design of Work,” 258. Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide : Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Sabel and Zeitlin, Experimentalist Governance in the European Union; Charles C. Heckscher and Paul S. Adler, The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Mary Parker Follett, The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (London: Longmans, Green, 1920); Follett, Creative Experience (London: Longmans, Green, 1924). Jane L. Collins, Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Imran Amed and Kate Abnett, “Inditex: Agile Fashion Force,” Business of Fashion, 2015, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/ intelligence/inditex-­agile-­fashion-­force. Amed and Abnett, “Inditex: Agile Fashion Force.” Amed and Abnett, “Inditex: Agile Fashion Force.” Suzy Hansen, “How Zara Grew into the World’s Largest Fashion Retailer,” New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2012, MM30. Amed and Abnett, “Inditex: Agile Fashion Force.” Hansen, “How Zara Grew into the World’s Largest Fashion Retailer.” Steve Denning, “When Will Us Firms Become Agile? Part 2: Internal Agility at Zara,” Forbes (Online), September 20, 2012, http:// www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/09/20/when-­will-­us -­firms-­become-­agile-­part-­2-­internal-­agility-­at-­zara/#45cc2e5b29d6.

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Pa r t ic i pa t io n , A dm i n i s t e r e d

Philadelphia City Hall, “The View from City Hall,” Public Administration Review 32 (1972): 393. 2 US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3, Subject: Citizen Participation in Model Cities (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1968), 15. 3 US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3, 15. 4 Daniel Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969), 90–­91. 5 Charles Haar, Between the Idea and the Reality: A Study in the Origin, Fate, and Legacy of the Model Cities Program (Boston: Little Brown, 1975), 24. 6 Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 297. 7 Countryman, Up South, 299. 8 Countryman, Up South, 297. 9 Countryman, Up South, 300. 10 Countryman, Up South, 301. 11 Sherry R. Arnstein, “Maximum Feasible Manipulation,” Public Administration Review 32 (1972): 381. 12 Countryman, Up South, 303. 13 Arnstein, “Maximum Feasible Manipulation,” 381. 14 Arnstein, “Maximum Feasible Manipulation,” 381. 15 Philadelphia City Hall, “The View from City Hall,” 392. 16 Arnstein, “Maximum Feasible Manipulation,” 384. 17 Philadelphia City Hall, “The View from City Hall,” 395. 18 Arnstein, “Maximum Feasible Manipulation,” 384. 19 Arnstein, “Maximum Feasible Manipulation,” 385. 20 Philadelphia City Hall, “The View from City Hall,” 393. 21 Philadelphia City Hall, “The View from City Hall,” 398. 22 Donald L. Horowitz, The Courts and Social Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1977), 83. 23 Philadelphia City Hall, “The View from City Hall,” 397. 24 Horowitz, The Courts and Social Policy, 79. 25 Horowitz, The Courts and Social Policy, 80. 26 Philadelphia City Hall, “The View from City Hall,” 398. 27 On the notion of critique, I rely here on Stephen J. Collier, “Topologies of Power,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (November 2009): 78–­108; Collier, “Neoliberalism and Rule by Experts,” in Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects, edited by Vaughn Higgins and Wendy Larner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2017); 1

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Andreas Folkers, “Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2015): 3–­28. 28 Lee, Do-­It-­Yourself Democracy, 4. 29 Lee, Do-­It-­Yourself Democracy, 5. 30 Lee, Do-­It-­Yourself Democracy, 6–­7. 31 Lee, Do-­It-­Yourself Democracy, 29. 32 Lezaun and Soneryd, “Consulting Citizens”; Chilvers and Kearnes, Remaking Participation. 33 Walker, Grassroots for Hire; Lee, Walker, and McQuarrie, Democratizing Inequalities. 34 Cook and Morgan, eds., Participatory Democracy; Hayden, The Port Huron Statement. 35 Brian Wynne, “Sheepfarming after Chernobyl: A Case Study in Communicating Scientific Information,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 31, no. 2 (1989): 10–­39; Epstein, Impure Science. 36 Tania Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 37 James Ferguson, The Anti-­politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 38 Stephen Collier, Post-­Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 39 Barry, “Technological Zones”; Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: Athlone Press, 2001). 40 Harvey and Knox, Roads. 41 Definitions of politics in both anthropology and STS rarely refer to political institutions of the formal sort (“capital-­P Politics”), but rather designate domains of deliberation and decision-­making. See, for example, de Vries and Latour on “sub-­politics”: Gerard de Vries, “What Is Political in Sub-­olitics? How Aristotle Might Help STS,” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 5 (2007): 781–­809; Marres and Lezaun, “Materials and Devices of the Public”; Bruno Latour, “Turning around Politics: A Note on Gerard de Vries’ Paper,” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 5 (2007): 811–­20. 42 Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); John Law, Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–­48. 43 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 44 Lengwiler, “Participatory Approaches”; Jasanoff, “Technologies of 284

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Humility”; Harry Collins, Martin Weinel, and Robert Evans, “The Politics and Policy of the Third Wave: New Technologies and Society,” Critical Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (2010): 185–­201. 45 Marres, Material Participation. 46 Lezaun, Muniesa, and Vikkelsø, “Provocative Containment.” 47 Gene Rowe and Lynn J. Frewer, “Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation,” Science, Technology & Human Values 25, no. 1 (2000): 3–­29; Rowe and Frewer, “A Typology of Public Engagement Mechanisms”; Erik Fisher, Roop L. Mahajan, and Carl Mitcham, “Midstream Modulation of Technology: Governance from Within,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 26, no. 6 (2006): 485–­96; Lezaun, Marres, and Tironi, “Experiments in Participation”; Laurent, “Technologies of Democracy.” 48 James L. Sundquist, “Civic Participation: A New Kind of Management,” Public Management 51, no. 7 (1969): 9. 49 James Creighton, The Public Involvement Manual (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1981), 3. 50 Beierle and Cayford, Democracy in Action, 2. 51 Nancy C. Roberts, The Age of Direct Citizen Participation (Milton Park, Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2015). 52 Fung and Wright, Deepening Democracy; Archon Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Baiocchi and Ganuza, Popular Democracy; Beierle and Cayford, Democracy in Action. 53 Horowitz, The Courts and Social Policy; Barlow Burke Jr., “Threat to Citizen Participation in Model Cities,” Cornell Law Review 56 (1970. 54 Andy Wallace, “Leader Goldie E. Watson Dies,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1994. 55 Derek Waldo, The Administrative State: A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration (Ottawa: John Wiley & Sons Canada, 1948). 56 Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” 57 AACOM, “Climbing the Ladder: A Look at Sherry R. Arnstein,” Inside OME 9, nos. 7–­8 (2015): n. 2, http://www.aacom.org /news-­and-­events/publications/iome/2015/july-­august-­2015 /Arnstein-­bio; B. A. Weber and A. Wallace, “Revealing the Empowerment Revolution: A Literature Review of the Model Cities Program,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 1 ( January 2012): 187. 58 Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” 216. 59 Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” 217. 60 Goldstein, Poverty in Common; Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding; Ralph M. Kramer, Participation of the Poor: Comparative Community Case Studies in the War on Poverty (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1969), 112 and following. Pa r t i c i pat i o n , N o tat e d

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Jonathan Quetzal Tritter and Alison McCallum, “The Snakes and Ladders of User Involvement: Moving beyond Arnstein,” Health Policy 76, no. 2 (2006): 156–­68. 62 Urbinati and Warren, “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory.” 63 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2001). 64 Lynn Mandarano, “Civic Engagement Capacity Building: An Assessment of the Citizen Planning Academy Model of Public Outreach and Education,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 35, no. 2 (2015): 174–­87, lists five that are the subject of her study. 65 Ansell and Gash, “Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice”; Bingham, “The Next Generation of Administrative Law.” 66 Urbinati and Warren, “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory.” 67 See http://citizensplanninginstitute.org/about/. 68 See http://citizensplanninginstitute.org/whynow/. 69 Stephen J. McGovern, “Ambivalence over Participatory Planning within a Progressive Regime: Waterfront Planning in Philadelphia,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 20, no. 10 (2013): 12. 70 Mandarano, “Civic Engagement Capacity Building.” 71 McGovern, “Ambivalence over Participatory Planning within a Progressive Regime,” 11. 72 Mandarano, “Civic Engagement Capacity Building,” 12. 73 McGovern, “Ambivalence over Participatory Planning within a Progressive Regime,” 11. 61

Pa r t ic i pa t io n , De v e l op e d

From the booklet “Training Materials for Agencies and Communities,” p. 2, included in Deepa Narayan-­Parker and Lyra Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit: Materials to Facilitate Community Empowerment” (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction & Development/World Bank, 1994). The physical tool kit I examined is from the collection of the Getty Research Library, Los Angeles. In the same booklet, it is described as follows: “The Participatory Development Tool Kit, created by Deepa Narayan, Lyra Srinivasan, and others, funded by the World Bank and the UN Development Program, produced in India by Whisper Design of New Delhi, coordinated by Sunita Chakravarty of the Regional Water and Sanitation Group in New Delhi in 1994.” 2 From the OCLC WorldCat description of Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit.” OCLC #937329303. 3 See the acknowledgments in Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit.” 1

286

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From the front flap instructions of the box in Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit.” 5 Lyra Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation: A Manual for Training Trainers in Participatory Techniques (New York: PROWWESS/United Nations Development Program, 1990), 155–­56. 6 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 148. 7 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 155–­56. 8 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 34. 9 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 22. 10 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 163. 11 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 163. 12 Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit,” 13. 13 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 163. 14 Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit,” handbook, 3. 15 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 60. 16 Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit,” 13. 17 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 161. 18 Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Tool Kit,” 13. 19 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 157. 20 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 154. 21 Bill Cooke, “Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents,” in Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development, edited by Samuel Hickey and Giles Mohan (London: Zed Books, 2004), 43. 22 Cooke, “Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents.” 23 Cooke, “Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents,” 53. 24 World Bank, “World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty,” World Development Report (New York: World Bank, 2001). 25 Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, Participation: The New Tyranny? (London: Zed Books, 2001); James Blackburn, Robert Chambers, and John Gaventa, “Mainstreaming Participation in Development,” OED Working Paper Series (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000). 26 Mattias Stiefel and Marshall Wolfe, A Voice for the Excluded: Popular Participation in Development: Utopia or Necessity? (Geneva: Zed Books in association with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), 1994). 27 Andrea Cornwall, “Historical Perspectives on Participation in Development,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 44, no. 1 (2006): 65. 28 Roy, Schrader, and Crane, “Gray Areas.” 4

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Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 30 Lippitt, Watson, and Westley, The Dynamics of Planned Change. 31 Hull, “Democratic Technologies of Speech.” 32 Rose and Miller, Governing the Present. 33 Both statements are cited in Cornwall, “Historical Perspectives on Participation in Development,” 70. 34 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Popular Participation in Development: Emerging Trends in Community Development, Technical Report (New York: United Nations, 1971). 35 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Popular Participation in Development: Emerging Trends, 2. 36 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Popular Participation in Development: Emerging Trends, 3. 37 Cited in UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Popular Participation in Development: Emerging Trends, 5. 38 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Popular Participation in Decision Making for Development, Technical Report (New York: United Nations, 1975), iii. 39 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Popular Participation in Decision Making for Development, 2. 40 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Popular Participation in Decision Making for Development, 2. 41 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, A Manual and Resource Book for Popular Participation Training: Volume One: Introduction; Volume Two: Selected Examples of Innovative Training Activities; Volume Three: A Selected Group of Training Approaches; Volume Four: Techniques (New York: United Nations, 1978), 1:1. 42 Dachler and Bernhard Wilpert, “Conceptual Dimensions and Boundaries of Participation in Organizations. 43 Cohen and Uphoff, Rural Development Participation: Concepts and Measures for Project Design, Implementation and Evaluation, Rural Development Monographs 2 (Ithaca, NY: Rural Development Committee, Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1977). Cohen and Uphoff ’s research also appeared as Cohen and Uphoff, “Participation’s Place in Rural Development.” Also Norman T. Uphoff, John M. Cohen, and Arthur A. Goldsmith, Feasibility and Application of Rural Development Participation: A State of the Art Paper, Rural Development Monographs 3 (Ithaca, NY: Rural Development Committee, Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1979). 44 Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, Studies in Political Devel29

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opment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). David Simon, Fifty Key Thinkers on Development, Routledge Key Guides (London: Routledge, 2006), 224. 46 Andrew Pearse and Matthias Stiefel, “Inquiry into Participation—­A Research Approach,” Technical Report (Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development, 1979), 2. 47 Pearse and Stiefel, “Inquiry into Participation,” 8 (emphasis in original). 48 Pearse and Stiefel, “Debaters’ Comments on “Inquiry into Participation,” 123. 49 Stiefel and Wolfe, A Voice for the Excluded, 18. 50 E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). 51 On the “Scandinavian approach” see Asaro, “Transforming Society by Transforming Technology. On the Tavistock experience with action research, see Fred E. Emery and Eric L. Trist, Towards a Social Ecology: Contextual Appreciations of the Future in the Present (London: Plenum Press, 1973). See also Rose and Miller, Governing the Present. 52 Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice (London: Sage, 2001), xxii. 53 William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1991); Whyte, Participatory Action Research (London: SAGE, 1991). 54 Rose and Miller, Governing the Present. 55 Orlando Fals-­Borda, Campesinos de Los Andes: Estudio Sociológico de Saucío, Facultad de Sociología. Monografías Sociológicas (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1961). 56 Orlando Fals-­Borda and Mohammad Anisur Rahman, Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research (New York: Apex Press, 1991). 57 See, for example, Green, The Development State. For a well-­known critique, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 7. 58 Budd L. Hall, “From Margins to Center? The Development and Purpose of Participatory Research,” American Sociologist 23, no. 4 (1992): 16–­17. 59 Hall, “From Margins to Center? 17. 60 Rodolfo Stavenhagen, “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences,” Human Organization 30 (1971), 333–­44; Miguel Darcy de Oliveira et al., Revolt in Repressive Society: The Emergence of New Politics in the USA ([Geneva]: [Institute of Cultural Action], 1973). 45

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Almost everything Chambers has been involved in has been archived online at the Institute for Development Studies in Sussex, https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/29. 62 Robert Chambers, “Twenty-­One Ways of Forming Groups,” November 1993, http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle /123456789/343; Chambers, “A Short Note Containing Tips for Trainers Running ‘Longer’ Workshops/Trainings” February 1996, http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/276; Chambers, “Twenty-­One Tips for Short PRA Workshops with Lots of People,” RRA Notes 19 (1994): 105–­6; Chambers, “21 Tips on Alternatives to Lecturing,” February 1998, http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk /opendocs/handle/123456789/300. 63 Andrea Cornwall and Ian Scoones, eds., Revolutionizing Development: Reflections on the Work of Robert Chambers (Oxford, UK: Routledge Earthscan, 2011), 67–­68. 64 Cornwall and Scoones, eds., Revolutionizing Development, 165. 65 Cornwall and Scoones, eds., Revolutionizing Development, 173. 66 Cornwall and Scoones, eds., Revolutionizing Development, 121–­22. 67 Kees Biekart and Des Gasper, “Robert Chambers,” Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 710. 68 Biekart and Gasper, “Robert Chambers,” 706. 69 Biekart and Gasper, “Robert Chambers,” 706. 70 Biekart and Gasper, “Robert Chambers,” 712. 71 Robert Chambers, Revolutions in Development Inquiry (Oxford: Routledge Earthscan, 2012), chaps. 1 and 8. 72 Biekart and Gasper, “Robert Chambers,” 712. 73 Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983), 73. 74 Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First, 73–­74. 75 Robert Chambers, Managing Rural Development: Ideas and Experience from East Africa (Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974), 108. 76 Biekart and Gasper, “Robert Chambers,” 706. 77 Robert Chambers, “Rapid and Participatory Rural Appraisal,” Appropriate Technology 16, no. 4 (1990): 15. 78 Cornwall and Scoones, eds., Revolutionizing Development, 182. 79 Robert Chambers, “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal,” World Development 22, no. 7 (1994): 954. 80 Simon, Fifty Key Thinkers on Development, 76. 81 Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation; Jennifer Rietbergen-­ McCracken and Deepa Narayan-­Parker, Participation and Social Assessment: Tools and Techniques, Facsimile/Discussion/Technical Series 1 (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction & Development/World Bank, 1998). 61

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Green, The Development State. Blackburn, Chambers, and Gaventa, “Mainstreaming Participation in Development.” 84 Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 69 and following. 85 Lezaun and Soneryd, “Consulting Citizens”; Lee, Do-­It-­Yourself Democracy. 86 Green, The Development State. 87 Bill Cooke, “The Managing of the (Third) World,” Organization 11, no. 5 (September 2004): 603–­29; Mosse and Lewis, The Aid Effect. 88 Pablo Alejandro Leal, “Participation: The Ascendancy of a Buzzword in the Neo-­liberal Era,” Development in Practice 17, nos. 4–­5 (2007): 539–­48; Majid Rahnema, “Participatory Action Research: The ‘Last Temptation of Saint’ Development,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 15, no. 2 (1990): 199–­226. 89 Cooke and Kothari, Participation: The New Tyranny? 53. 90 Comité Invisible, The Coming Insurrection; Darin Barney, “‘Excuse Us If We Don’t Give a Fuck’: The (Anti-­)Political Career of Participation,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 2, no. 2 (2010): 138–­46. 91 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 39. 92 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 48. 93 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 66. 94 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 106. 95 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 110. 96 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 112. 97 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 114. 98 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 115. 99 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 115. 100 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 124 (my emphasis). 101 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 117n31. 102 See, for example, Narayan-­Parker and Srinivasan, “Participatory Development Toolkit,” 1–­5; Srinivasan, Tools for Community Participation, 12–­13. 103 Douglas R. Holmes and George E. Marcus, “Para-­ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst,” in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, edited by Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 33–­ 57; Douglas Holmes, Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 104 Ian Hacking, “‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 23, no. 1 (1992): 1–­20. 105 Maia Green, “Making Development Agents: Participation as Bound82 83

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ary Object in International Development,” Journal of Development Studies 46, no. 7 (August 2010): 1245. Pa r t ic i pa t io n , C o n c l u de d

Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy; Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 2 Richard Sennett’s Arendt-­inspired project to understand work and labor today also used Free Software as an example of “craft.” See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 3 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-­domination”; Christopher M Kelty, “The Fog of Freedom,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Kirsten Foot, and Pablo Boczkowski (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 4 So many people have written great work on algorithms over the last decade. On algorithms and their lack of accountability or visibility, see Jenna Burrell, “How the Machine ‘Thinks’: Understanding Opacity in Machine Learning Algorithms,” Big Data & Society 3, no. 1 (2016); Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Kate Crawford, “Can an Algorithm Be Agonistic? Ten Scenes from Life in Calculated Publics,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 1 (2016): 77–­92. On the concern about the way that the “contributions” (data, likes, and mentions) are monetized, governed, and circulated, see Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Malte Ziewitz, “Governing Algorithms: Myth, Mess, and Methods,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 1 (2016): 3–­16; Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). On the weird, racist, and counterintuitive ways that they employ particular images of individual and collective that claim to relate us to each other, see Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Christian Sandvig et al., “Automation, Algorithms, and Politics: When the Algorithm Itself Is a Racist: Diagnosing Ethical Harm in the Basic Components of Software,” International Journal of Communication 1

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10 (2016), http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6182; Nick Seaver, “The Nice Thing About Context Is That Everyone Has It,” Media, Culture & Society 37, no. 7 (2015): 1101–­9. 5 This was also the source of Lévy-­Bruhl’s error—­rather than sticking with a radical alterity of multiple possible collectives, he reduced it to only two, primitive and civilized. If his approach is to be useful, it has to at least recognize the remarkable diversity of such forms of personhood around the world—­and within “the West” as well. 6 Joan Donovan, “After the #Keyword: Eliciting, Sustaining, and Coordinating Participation across the Occupy Movement,” Social Media + Society 4, no. 1 ( January 2018).

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Participation, Indexed Pag e numbe r s fol l ow e d by “m ” r e f e r to m a rgina l note s.

Abbé, Ernst, 95m action research, 98–­99, 104–­5, 197, 207m, 208, 212–­14, 214m administrative reform in the United States, 160–­61 Africare, 225m Agile software development, 114, 135 algorithms, 4–­5, 13, 26, 194–­95, 242–­44, 251, 257, 292n4; tool kits and, 242–­44 Alinsky, Saul, 118 animation rurale, 199, 203 Anonymous, 252–­54 anti-­politics machine (Ferguson), 154–­55, 230 apparatus, 37, 41–­44 Aquinas, Thomas, 22, 30m, 58 Area Wide Council, 148–­49, 161, 168, 177, 178–­80, 252–­53; Arnstein and, 172–­75; expertise and, 157–­59; The Participant in, 136–­47; requirements of legalized participation, 161–­68 Argyris, Chris, 111, 207m Aristotle, 58 Arnstein, Sherry, 150, 162, 168–­79, 203, 213, 258 assemblage, 3, 13, 37, 39, 41–­44; scale of temporality and, 41–­42 autonomy, 128–­29, 207; security vs. 97. See also contributory autonomy Band-­Aid (concert), 225m Barfield, Owen, 30m, 54, 64–­65, 74 Barry, Andrew, 155 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), 33, 43, 15, 275n53 Bassen, Tuesday, 135m becoming-­collective, 17, 83, 130, 207, 251–­55 Bell, Daniel, 96, 102, 115 Bennis, Warren and Philip Slater, 115–­18 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n d e x e d

Bergson, Henri, 64 Bernays, Marie, 95m Bible (New Testament), 59 big data, 220m, 256 Bishop, Claire, 5m Black Power, 140 Bloch, Marc, 54 Blumberg, Paul, 101m Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello, 96–­97, 132 Bororo, 51, 69m, 70, 78, 82–­83 Brain, Robert, 95m British Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940), 196 Bunzl, Ruth, 71m Canetti, Elias, 18 capital transfer, 204 Carl Zeiss factory, 95m Cartesianism, 60 Catholic Church, and participation, 35 Cavell, Stanley, on forms of life, 24 Chambers, Robert, 13, 215–­31, 241, 243; asceticism of, 218–­25; on bureaucracy, 219; charisma and personality, 216; on community development, 223; critique of mainstream social science, 221; experience in Kenya, 219–­21; on Freire, 219, 234; influence of, 215–­16; on mainstream social science, 217; methodology of, 216, 224–­25; on participation, 222; rural development tourism, 217, 221; seasonality, 221; on seeing reality clearly, 220–­22; self-­critique, 218–­25; Special Rural Development Project, 220; survey slavery, 217; tool kit and, 228 citizen participation, 12, 136–­47, 147m, 151, 158–­59, 162–­63, 162m, 167m, 168–­69, 170–­73, 175–­77. See also participation 319

Citizens United (US Supreme Court decision), 177 class, 21 Clean Air and Water Acts, 160 Cleaver, Francis, 233–­34 Clifford, James, 77–­78 co-­determination, 167m Coch and French experiment, 87–­94, 100–­ 111, 103m, 126; background, 95–­97, 100–­ 103; critiques of, 109, 117; grammar of enthusiasm, 129; interpretations of, 104–­5; productivity, 107; relation to Hawthorne experiments, 101–­3; repeated, 104–­5; resistance to change, 107; social climates, 123 Cohen, John, and Norman Uphoff, 203–­4 collaboration, 31–­32 collaborative governance, 178 collaborative innovation, 91–­92, 122–­23, 129, 135, 253–­55 collective bargaining, 102m, 103. See also labor unions collective kinds, 18, 19, 23, 24, 62, 84, 176–­ 77, 271n18 collective representations (Durkheim), 55, 63, 68–­69, 74 collectives, 17, 56–­57, 61–­62, 177, 207, 251–­55, 257; experience of, 19–­20, 126; individual as an instance of, 62, 110, 255; individuals vs., 23, 42, 62, 177; infinite series, 18, 243, 262–­63; liberalism and, 254; personhood and, 17, 42; team as, 19–­20; technology, 252 Collier, Stephen, 155 Collins, Jane, 133 Colonial Development Act of 1929 (UK), 196 colonialism, 22, 45–­51, 67, 84–­86, 206; anthropology and, 66–­68 Community Action Programs, 140, 148–­ 49, 148m, 162, 162m, 175; satirized by Tom Wolfe, 176m community development, 12, 195–­206; critique of, 199–­203, 223; defined, 197m; involvement, 175; maximum feasible participation and, 196m Comte, Auguste, 79 conscience collective (Durkheim), 55, 62 conscientizaçao, 13, 207, 233, 235, 236–­40 consciousness-­raising, 113–­14 constitutive resonance, 55–­56, 76, 277n22 320

contributory autonomy, 55–­56, 100, 151, 194–­95, 232, 250, 252, 254–­58; collectives and, 62–­63; defined, 9–­10, 14–­17; delegated, 264; emotion or affect and, 21; experience of, 19–­21; expertise and, 151–­52; Freire and, 207, 235; group experience and, 108; Harwood experiments and, 100, 120–­22; individual vs. collective, 258; ladder of citizen participation and, 173–­75, 176–­78; motivation and, 124–­28; perplexity and, 25–­26; personhood and, 20, 96–­97; relation to ladder, 173; technology and, 250 Convergence (journal), 212 cooperation, 31–­32 cooptation, 10 Cornford, Francis, 54 Cornwall, Andrea, 196 critique, 30, 97, 99, 120–­21, 131–­32, 250, 283n27 crowds, 18–­19 Dachler, Peter, and Bernhard Wilpert, 8, 203 Danziger, Kurt, 110m decentralization, 36, 151m, 154, 166 deliberative democracy, 14 Deming, W. Edwards, 108m democracy, 27, 33m, 34–­36, 42–­44, 115. See also representative democracy democratic atmospheres. See social climates democratization, 31–­32 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Act of 1966, 141 depoliticization, 234–­35 Descartes, René, 58–­59, 65 Descola, Phillipe, 63m, 64m Dewey, John, 103, 131 direct citizen involvement, 36 direct democracy, 34–­35 disagreement, absence of, 20, 24–­25, 261–­64 Drucker, Peter, 118 dual mandate, 196 Durkheim, Émile, 55, 62, 63, 66, 68, 73–­74 dynamic nominalism, 16 Echols, Alvin, 141 Economic Opportunity Act, 28, 140, 147, 151, 158–­59, 162, 165, 167, 175, 176m, 198 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n d e x e d

ECOSOC (UN Economic and Social Council), 200 Edelfelt, Erik Gustav, 45–­51, 52, 68, 75m, 76, 84–­85 efficiency experts, 103 e-­Governance, 178 Einstein, Albert, 74 Emery, Fred, and Eric Trist, 96 empowerment, 230 engagement, 31–­32 English anthropology, 64, 66, 81 Epstein, Steven, 153–­54 Escobar, Arturo, 218 ethical plateaus, 39 ethical values, 11 ethics, 11, 78–­82, 262; anthropology of, 11, 279n70; as natural science, 80–­81; personhood and, 261–­62 Evans-­Pritchard, E. E., 66, 68m, 70m, 71–­72 experience, 18–­23, 25m. See also participation experimental system, 39 expertise, 150–­61, 259; anthropological theories of, 154–­56, 155m; bureaucracy and, 36; critique of, 171–­73; elite, 152–­53, 177; experience and, 153, 179; on expertise, 149m; forms of, 153, 158; in participation, 150–­52, 154; participation vs., 150–­58; politics vs., 154; proliferation of, 177; in public engagement, 150–­52; STS theories of, 156–­57; technical, 36, 153, 171 Facebook, 243 Fals-­Borda, Orlando, 209–­12 Fanon, Frantz, 206, 236 Fassin, Didier, 14 Febvre, Lucien, 54 Federalist Papers (Madison), 34 Ferguson, James, 154, 218 Fischer, Michael M. J., 39 Fleck, Ludwik, 54 flexible specialization, 130–­32 Follett, Mary Parker, 103, 131 Foreign Assistance Act (US), 198 forms of life, 10, 23–­30, 56, 118, 120, 129, 166, 177, 206, 261. See also grammar Fortune (magazine), 116–­17 Foucault, Michel, 37 freedom, 82, 121, 254–­56 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n d e x e d

free software, 4, 252–­54, 291n2 Freire, Paulo, 12, 194, 207, 214, 232–­44, 254; codifications, 239; concrete instructions for participation, 236–­41; conscientizaçao, 235; on Fanon, 236; Marxism and, 236; method, 236, 239–­40; on participation, 237, 240; phenomenology, 236–­37; philosophy of liberation, 235; postcolonialism, 236; on sectarians and radicals, 235; tool kit and, 234 French anthropology, 63–­65 Fung, Archon, 27, 103 gainsharing, 120, 120m Gaventa, John, 211, 213, 215, 218m, 229 gender, 21 general will, 11, 22, 57–­63; divine origins, 60–­61 Gomberg, William, 94, 117–­18, 120 governing through freedom (Rose and Miller), 96, 109, 123, 210, 239 grammar, 23–­30, 110–­11, 114, 118, 120, 148–­ 49, 155, 168–­74, 199; aspiration, 30; cooptation, 10, 23, 28m, 28–­29, 107–­9, 114, 115–­22, 169, 174, 192–­93, 205–­6, 223, 233–­34, 249, 261; critique, 30, 171, 180, 199, 201, 233; enthusiasm, 23, 25, 27–­28, 111–­15, 124, 129, 179, 183–­92, 202, 222, 249, 261; exploitation, 29; judgment and, 24; justice, 26–­27 Gray Areas Program (Ford Foundation), 162m, 197 Green, Maia, 244 green revolution, 196, 211 group decision-­making, 104 groups, 100, 102, 104–­5, 109, 110m, 121–­22, 126, 170–­72, 174–­77, 208; equality within, 123; experience of, 108; individuals vs., 17, 40, 100, 174 Hacking, Ian, 14, 16 Hackman, Richard, and Greg Oldham, 127–­28 Hall, Budd, 211 Haraway, Donna, 38 Harvey, Penny, 155 Harwood experiments, 208 Harwood pajama factory, 87–­94, 102, 103m, 109, 253; fate of, 133; in Puerto Rico, 114; unionization at, 117 Hawthorne effect, 101, 101m 321

Hawthorne experiments and participation, 100–­102, 101m Hayden, Tom, 34m Heidegger, Martin, 58 Herzberg, Frederick, 124–­27 Highlander Institute, 218m Holmes, Doug, 244 Housing and Urban Development, US Department of (HUD), 138, 146, 161, 168–­69 How Natives Think (Lévy-­Bruhl), 52, 64, 67–­68, 71, 71m, 74 Hull, Matthew, 197 human potential, 111–­13, 114m human relations in industry, 102, 106 human resource management, 12, 100, 111, 112m, 128 inclusion (and exclusion), 33–­34 Inditex. See Zara individualism, 14, 17 industrial democracy, 35, 102, 106, 114, 131 infrastructural inversion, 156 innovation, 95 107, 118, 122, 127, 129, 131. See also collaborative innovation Institut d’Ethnologie, 63, 67, 67m Institute for Development Studies (Sussex), 204, 213, 217m, 219 institutionalism, 39–­41, 274n50 international development,12, 193–­248 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), 93–­94, 117 involvement, 31–­32, 107 James, C. L. R., 206 job design, 122–­24, 127 job enrichment, 96, 124–­27 Johnson, Lyndon, 138, 144, 167 Journal of Social Issues, 104 judgment, 24, 56, 30, 60; Wittgenstein on expert, 25m justice, grammar of, 26–­27 Kant, Immanuel, 57, 78 Kaufman, Arnold, 34m Kaufman, Bruce, 102–­3, 112m Keck, Frédéric, 67, 76–­77, 78, 80 Kenya, 219 Knox, Hannah, 155 labor unions, 102m, 103, 114, 115–­22, 115m. 322

See also International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) ladder of citizen participation, 12, 168–­77, 213; history of, 169–­71; as tool, 172–­74; uses of, 170m, 171 language, 24–­26; games, 24; things vs., 26; understanding vs., 24; Wittgenstein on, 23–­30 Latour, Bruno, 38 Law, John, 156 lay expertise, 152–­54, 157 leadership, 104, 108, 115 League for Industrial Democracy, 35 Lee, Caroline, 21, 150, 156, 232 Leenhardt, Maurice, 22, 63, 67m, 68, 76–­78, 83 Lewin, Kurt, 12, 95, 97–­99, 102–­4, 109, 110m, 121, 128, 197, 208 Lewinian psychology, 90, 94, 97–­99, 186–­ 88, 202, 208 Lévy-­Bruhl, Lucien, 3, 10–­12, 21–­23, 24, 52–­86, 262; affect and emotion, 71, 76; circle of colleagues, 63; on criminality, 73, 80; Durkheim and, 67–­68; early ethnographers and, 46m; on English anthropology, 66, 72–­73; Ethics and Moral Science (1905), 80–­81; error, 292n5; ethics, 76, 78–­82; flaws, 54–­56; founding of Institut d’Ethnologie, 65–­68; How Natives Think, 52, 54, 64, 68, 71, 71m, 74; liberalism, 79; logic (prelogical, alogical), 69–­72, 82; on Malebranche, 64–­65; modes of thought, 55, 70; racism, ethnocentrism, 71–­72; reception, 276n20, 276n21; on representation, 75, 78–­82; training in philosophy, 64, 78 Lezaun, Javier, 38, 99, 109m, 155m, 232; and Nerea Cavillo, on Lewin, 98 Li, Tania, 154 liberal democracy, 14, 42–­43 liberalism, 14, 22, 62 Likert, Rensis, 111, 113 Lilienthal, David, 162–­63, 167m Lippit, Ronald, 98–­99, 113, 197, 202, 238 lived myth (Leenhardt), 22, 76–­77, 79, 83 Macgregor, Douglas, 111–­12 Malebranche, Nicolas 22, 57–­60, 64 Marcus, George E. 244 Marres, Noortje, 38 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n d e x e d

Marrow, Alfred, 89, 89m, 94, 103–­5, 110, 112–­14, 116–­18, 133 Marxism, 115, 121 Maslow, Abraham, 111–­13 material participation, 38 matters of concern, 156 Mauss, Marcel 63–­64, 67, 67m maximum feasible participation, 28, 139, 140m, 140–­41, 147–­48, 161, 165–­67, 169–­ 72, 174–­77, 194; relation to community development, 196m Mayo, Elton, 100–­101 Mazzarella, William, 55, 63, 63m, 72, 75 McKeon, Richard, 79 McWhorter, Grace, 94 methexis, 57, 62. See also participation: ancient meaning of methodology, 6–­8, 38–­44; historical, 6; history and anthropology, 44; informality, 228–­29 Mill, John Stuart, 27 Mills, C. Wright, 96, 102, 118 mimeograph machines, 142–­43 Model Cities Program, 12, 29, 136–­46, 147–­ 48, 151, 157–­60, 162m, 162–­68, 196–­97, 258; as experiment in participation, 162m; expertise in, 158 modes of thought, 55–­56, 70 Mol, Annemarie, 156 Mondragon enterprises (Basque country), 210 moral realism, 67 motivation, 100, 108–­9, 122, 124–­28 motivator-­hygiene theory, 125 Motumotu, 45–­51, 52, 75–­76, 85 NAACP, 138, 140 Narayan, Deepa 183–­93, 201, 229 National Security Agency, 256 National Training Labs, 103 neoliberalism, 14, 29, 132, 251–­52 neo-­Platonism, 58 New Delhi, community development in, 197 New Testament, 59 Nixon, Richard, 138, 144, 167, 168 nonparticipation, 170, 172, 235. See also “Bartleby, the Scrivener” Nyerere, Julius, 206, 211 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 66m Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n d e x e d

Occupy Wall Street, ix ontological turn, 11, 155m open government data, 27–­28 Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD), 193 ownership, 230 Pajama Game, The (film), 92, 113 Palmer, Walter, 142 Papua New Guinea, 45–­51 paraethnography, 244 Parmenides (Platonic dialogue), 57m Participant, The: as AI, 245–­48; in city government, 136–­46; in a factory, 87–­ 94; in the future, 245–­48; in the global South, 183–­93; graduating from school, 180–­82; in international development, 183–­93; introduced, 4, 6–­9; as larcenous colonial explorer, 45–­51; in the machine, 245–­48; in the nineteenth century, 45–­51; in Papua New Guinea, 45–­51; in Philadelphia, 136–­46; in Spain, 133–­35; in a tool kit, 183–­93; in the twentieth century, 87–­94, 136–­46, 183–­93; in the twenty-­first century, 133–­35, 180–­82; in Virginia, 87–­94; wearing Zara, 133–­35; at work, 87–­94 participant-­observation, 6, 67m, 75 participation: in administration, 164, 166, 174–­78; affective or emotional aspect, 18–­19; algorithms and, 245–­48, 256–­57; analytic philosophy and, 59, 81–­83; as anecdote, 244; ancient meaning of, 21, 54, 56–­62; apparatus of liberal democracy, 42–­44; art and, 4m; as assemblage, 41–­44; aspirational, 3; attitude (Strawson), 82–­83; “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and, 33, 43, 155, 275n53; being and 76–­78; beyond US and Europe, 13–­14; causation and, 50–­51, 52, 59–­60, 70, 79, 81, 84–­85; citizen, 159, 161, 178 (see also citizen participation); cognates, table of, 31–­32; colonialism and, 51; as complex diagram, 8, 203; as concept, 3; concepts vs, 77–­78; as condition, 33; contemporary workplace, 130–­32; context-­specific, 194, 233–­34; as control, 138; cooptation (see under grammar); as cube, 8, 203–­4, 213; in decision-­making, 15, 108, 125; decision to participate, 15, 109; defined, 30–­36; 323

deliberation vs., 154–­55, 163; democracy vs. 34–­36, 42–­43, 145; diarchic, 258–­59; dyadic, 31, 95, 99, 106–­11, 258–­59; educative dividend of, 31; enthusiasm for (see under grammar); in environmental governance, 160–­61; ethical aspects, 1; expansion of, 35–­36; experience of, ix, 9, 10, 18–­23, 37–­39, 55, 100, 102, 107–­9, 111, 123–­24, 128–­32, 151–­ 52, 158, 175–­77, 178–­79, 207, 232, 242, 248, 253–­54, 262–­64; expert, 149m, 179; expertise vs., 150–­57, 259–­61; facilitation of, 207; formatted, 3, 11, 15m, 17, 36–­38, 120, 128, 147, 160, 178, 194–­95, 201, 233, 239–­40, 243, 249–­64, 250–­53, 256–­57; fractal, 16m, 36; governance and, 14; grammar of, 23–­30, 110–­11, 114, 118, 120, 126, 148–­49, 154, 166, 168–­72, 179, 199, 261 (see also grammar); heteronyms of, 7; inclusion vs., 33, 205; individual vs. collective, 252, 259; as institution, 39–­41; internet-­enabled, 4, 249, 252, 269n2; involuntary, 15; in labor unions, 115m; as ladder, 8; ladder of citizen, 146, 150, 168–­77; law of, in Lévy-­Bruhl, 51, 53 68; legalized, 149, 161–­68; legitimate peripheral, 33; made visible, 255–­58; material, 38; motivation vs. 124–­28; mystical, 22, 51, 64, 68, 70m, 71, 81; participation in, 29, 147m, 149, 173, 205m, 233; permanence of, 124, 129, 167–­68, 181, 256, 259–­61; physics and, 65–­66, 74; in planning and evaluation, 204; Plato on, 57m; politics of, 204, 251; as power, 174–­75; as problem, 4, 37, 41–­44, 161–­68; procedural, 18–­19, 97, 122, 129, 195; as procedure, 3; productivity and, 106–­7; protest and social movement, 142–­43; representation and, 33m, 34–­35, 74; in representative democracy, 157, 163–­64; in research, 208–­14; role-­playing and, 88, 104; scale, 13, 35–­36, 41, 124, 130, 194, 199, 222, 230, 231, 233, 252, 261; at sea, 109m; silence and, 33; as spiral, 213; in Tanzania, 211; technology and, 245–­48, 250; theories of, 26; thought collective of, 205m; as tokenism, 170; totemism vs., 83; turn in STS, 156; tyranny of, 25, 29, 155, 192, 194, 203, 230, 235, 245, 259; in US law, 138–­47, 324

160; voice and, 33 Participation Research Group, 211–­12 Participative Decision Making (PDM), 100, 105–­6, 114, 122, 128m, 130, 258 participative management, 12, 95–­96, 108, 111–­22, 125, 210; critique of, 116–­19 participatory action research, 12, 206–­14, 241; critique of mainstream social science, 209, 212; handbooks, 213; history of, 208–­14; institutional homes, 212; as pragmatism, 214; spirals and, 212 participatory archives, 4 participatory art, 4, 5m, 7 participatory budgeting, 27–­28, 40 participatory culture, 4 participatory democracy, 27, 34m, 35–­36, 97, 115, 139, 152, 154, 164, 167m, 176; origins and history of, 34m participatory design, 7, 96, 181, 208 participatory development: end of, 230; examples of, 183–­93, 195m; mainstreaming of, 229–­30; success and failure of, 244–­45 participatory development tool kit, 183–­93, 194, 202, 229, 231, 240, 232–­44, 286n1; Freire and, 232–­44, 238 Participatory Rural Appraisal, 215–­31, 241; examples of, 227; history of 226–­28; and informality, 225; methods of, 224–­25, 227 participatory turn (STS), 156, 273n43 participatory universe (Wheeler), 65–­66 participle, 29m Pascal, Blaise, 59 Pateman, Carole, 16, 36 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 207, 236–­40 peer production, 131, 249 perplexity, 10–­11, 20, 22, 25, 30, 54, 56, 68–­ 69, 72–­76, 81, 83–­85, 115, 118, 149, 162, 166–­67, 237, 261–­64 personhood, 10–­11, 14, 16–­17, 20, 22–­3, 55, 69, 97, 122, 179, 195, 243, 262–­63; affects/emotions and, 22–­23; corporations as persons, 17; ethics and, 22; Harry Frankfurt on, 20; individuals and, 17–­18 Philadelphia, 12, 136–­46; mayor’s office, 161–­68 Philadelphia Citizens’ Planning Institute, 178–­79, 180–­82 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n d e x e d

Pitkin, Hanna, on justice, 26–­27 planned change, 99, 105, 113, 195, 197–­98, 202, 205, 238–­39 Plato, 21, 26–­27, 56–­58, 57m; theory of forms, 57–­58 pluralism, 26 Point Four Program, 196 politics, definition in STS, 284n41 Popular Participation Programme (UN), 195–­206 Port Huron Statement, The (Hayden), 34m, 35, 152 postcolonialism, 206 problematization, 37, 41–­44 profit-­sharing, 120, 120m project management, 231 provocative containment, 99, 157 public administration, 28, 159–­60 public engagement, 7, 36; experts, 21, 150–­51, 182 quality, 108m quality circles, 108m quality of work life, 96 quasi-­algorithm, 11, 242 Rabinow, Paul, 37 race, 21, 83–­84, 143–­44 Rapid Rural Appraisal, 224–­26 recursive publics, 254 Redfield, Peter, 232 Redfield, Robert, 197 red parakeets (parrots, macaws), 69m, 70 relativism, 67m, 70, 71 representation vs. participation, 33m, 34–­35 representative democracy, 11, 34–­35, 42–­ 43, 145, 147, 150, 157, 163–­66 resistance to change, 122m, 122, 188–­89, 258 responsibility, 78–­81 Rheinberger, Hans-­Jörg, 39 Ribot, Théodule-­Armand, 64 Rietbergen-­McCracken, Jennifer, 201, 229 Riley, Patrick, 57, 59–­61 Rochdale Pioneers, 120 Rose, Niklas, and Peter Miller, 96, 108–­9, 121, 129–­30 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 11, 22, 54, 57, 59–­ 61; on collectives, 61–­62; on general will, 59–­61; on self-­love, 60–­61 Pa r t i c i pat i o n , I n d e x e d

Royal Geographical Society of Queensland, 46 Rural Development: Putting the Last First (Chambers), 221–­23 rural development tourism, 217, 221 Sabel, Charles, 27, 103, 130–­32 Sahlins, Marshall, 64 salvage anthropology, 69 Samburu (Kenya), 219–­21 SARAR, 188–­89 satisfaction, 108, 122–­23, 125–­26 Scanlon Plans, 120, 120m Schumacher, E. F., 207 science and technology studies (STS), 38 scientific management, 100–­101, 103, 148, 159, 163, 170; in public administration, 160 seasonality, 221 Seers, Dudley, 204, 210 Selective Service, 163–­65, 165m self-­determination, 167m Selznick, Philip, 28m, 29 sensitivity training, 113 sharing economy, 29 social capital, 182 social climates, 12, 95, 97–­98, 100, 107, 109–­ 10, 121, 151, 251 social contract, 60–­61 social media platforms 2, 4, 13, 18m, 26, 29, 195, 251–­58, 262–­63 social psychology, 110m sociometrics, 104 Socrates, 26–­27 Spinoza, Baruch, 57–­58 Srinivasan, Lyra, 183–­93, 201, 229 St. Paul, 59 Stiefel and Wolfe (A Voice for the Excluded), 196, 204 stories, role of in participation, 3m, 6–­8, 44 Strathern, Marilyn, 84 Strawson, Peter, 82–­83 Students for a Democratic Society, 34m, 35, 97 survey slavery, 217, 230 Swantz, Marja-­Liisa, 211 Tambiah, Stanley, 64, 66m, 70 Tandon, Rejesh, 211 Tanzania, 211 325

Tarde, Gabriel, 63, 80 Tate, James, 138–­40 Tavistock Institute, 96, 103, 208 Taylor, Frederick, 101–­2, 125 Taylorism, 101–­3, 125, 127 Tead, Ordway, 103 technical assistance, 12, 159, 179–­80, 197, 233 Technical Assistance Bulletin No. 3 (HUD), 136–­37, 147m, 171–­72, 175, 178, 233 technological zones, 13 technologies of elicitation (Lezaun and Sonneryd), 7, 38, 157, 232 technology transfer, 196, 198 Tennessee Valley Authority, 28m, 29, 162–­63, 167 T-­groups, 113 theft, 49–­51 theology, 57–­62 things (in politics), 38 Thrasymachus, 26–­27 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 2–­3, 3m, 30, 44, 249 time and motion studies, 90 Toaripi. See Motumotu Tocqueville, Alexis de, 151m, 163m, 166; on decentralization, 163m Toffler, Alvin, 118 tool kit, 2, 13, 38, 122, 150, 192–­95, 201–­2, 224–­25, 228–­35, 240–­41, 253, 260; contradictions of, 242; critique of, 234; examples of, 193m; meaning of, 232m; The Participant as, 183–­93; tool kits, 253 Truman, Harry S, 197

Voegelin, Eric, 54 Voices of the Poor (World Development Report 2000/2001), 193–­94, 228 voting, 35 Waldo, Derek, 170 Warner, Lloyd, 101 war on poverty, 139, 149 Watson, Goldie, 137–­38, 145, 161–­62, 167 Weber, Max, 95m, 131 welfare capitalism, 102m Wheeler, John Archibald, 65–­66 Whyte, William Foote, 118, 209–­12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 23–­30, 23m, 25m, 56, 206 Wolfe, Tom, 176m Woolf, Virginia, 6 worker participation, 87–­135 World Bank, 13, 193, 205, 228, 229, 245, 259; World Bank Participation Sourcebook, 228 Wynne, Brian, 154 Zara, 130–­32, 133–­35

unions. See labor unions. United Nations, 13, 193, 202, 245; General Assembly resolution, 198; Popular Participation Programme, 195–­206 United States Foreign Assistance Act, 198 urban planning, 168–­78, 180–­82 USA for Africa, 225m user involvement, 175 user-­led innovation, 131 utilitarianism, 62 Victoria (British queen), 51; portrait of, 47, 52–­53, 70, 78, 84–­85 visioning, 181 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 63m 326

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