"The Radical Democratic Museum"-A Conversation about the Potentials of a New Museum Definition

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“e Radical Democratic Museum”- A Conversation
about the Potentials of a New Museum
Denition
By Farina Asche, Daniela Döring and Nora Sternfeld
Abstract
What ‘is’ a museum in the 21st century? How can it be rethought in a time when right-wing populist voices are getting louder,
neoliberal conditions are omnipresent and democracy is in crisis? Can we persist by claiming public and democratic spaces
under the current social and economic conditions? And which possibilities for processes of democratization from inside and
outside of institutions are conceivable and realizable? Questions like these shall be in the focus of our contribution, which we
have set up as a conversation between Nora Sternfeld (documenta Professor in Kassel, artistic and cultural mediator), Farina
Asche and Daniela Döring (doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in the elds of critical exhibition studies and museology).
The starting point of our conversation is Nora Sternfeld’s new book The Radical Democratic Museum (2018). In the following
conversation, we discuss the future of the museum as a political space – not without discussing its present and past, questioning
its western perspective from a western perspective – to push for the re-denition of the museum as radically democratic and
post-representational space of conict.
Keywords: Critical Museum Practice, New Museology, Critique of Representation, Democratization, Participation.
Prologue1
‘The museum is dead, long live the museum’, is stated
by Nora Sternfeld in her book Das radikaldemokratische
Museum (2018: 13; The Radical Democratic Museum). In
this collection of twelve essays, Sternfeld designs the concept
of the post-representational para-museum, which responds to
the multiple crises of museal representations of the past years,
and actualizes them. The author assumes a paradox – namely,
that struggles, which are critical of representation, are matter-
of-factly shaking up the foundations of hegemonic institutions
and their routines of display, but that they also run the risk of
being instrumentalized by neoliberal economies and politics.
To approach answers to this dilemma, Sternfeld courageously
intervenes into these struggles and debates. She describes both
practices of museum-making in transformation as well as an
imagined museum of the future, interconnecting theoretical,
reexive and cultural historical analyses of museums with
numerous examples from her own exhibition and mediation
practice. Sternfeld suggests a new denition of the museum,
1 We would like to thank Friederike Landau for the translation of our article.
which has signicant implications for archives, collections and
exhibitions as well as approaches to memory and mediation.
In this article, which is designed as a conversation, we discuss
the central theses as well as challenges and pitfalls of such
a radical democratic new denition of the museum with the
author herself. In this context, it is to be discussed whether
‘the’ institution persists on its hegemonic function or whether
structural processes of transformation and democratization
are actually possible.
Farina Asche and Daniela Döring:
You stress that the museum has always been a politically
contested place of representation and participation, thus a
‘post-representational’ space, and identify this as early as in
the beginning of the museum as institution with the conquest
of the Louvre during the French Revolution. Since the 20th
century, the museum has been problematized as a hegemonic
space, starting with demands for the democratic opening
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of museums in the 1960s, post-structuralist discussions
emerging in the 1990s up to current feminist, anti-racist and
queer positions. In all of these debates, the museum has been
problematized as a hegemonic site where the production of
visibility and recognition is permeated by social and cultural
power structures. Part of this critique is that museums are
paralleling and thus reinforcing the production of visibility
and recognition along structures of cultural and societal
power. In light of the currently diagnosed condition of
political disenchantment and an economistic and neoliberally
disavowing post-democracy, you consider the museum as an
adequate institution and place to push for a ‘democratization
of democracy’? How can we imagine this process?
Nora Sternfeld:
The museum, just as any other institution, in a hegemony-
theoretical perspective, is a ‘contested terrain’, a societal
context, in which hegemony is actively fought for. So, what
does the term ‘radical democratic’ mean? While some thinkers
have identied an age of post-democracy since the 1990s,
describing political disenfranchisement as both the neoliberal
rationalization of the public sphere and politics as well as
the undermining of democratic structures via precisely this
economization. In contrast, the radical democratic discourse
opposes this idea of the end of politics.
Representatives of such a repoliticization and democratization
of democracy are rst and foremost Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, whose publication Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy rst introduced the term ‘radical democracy’ (Laclau;
Mouffe 1991). They refer to Claude Lefort, who is further
regarded as a pioneer of radical democratic discourse, and
Jacques Derrida, who describes democracy as a never-ending
project, which is always only just beginning. In addition, the
thinking of Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière is directed
towards a democratization of democracy. Two aspects are
crucial to the discourse of radical democracy: First, democracy
is based on conict and partiality, not merely on consensus
and individuality; second, there is no essential or fundamental
contradiction to which this conictuality is subordinated.
Hence, when we nd ourselves on contested territory; nothing
has always been like it is now, and nothing must remain this
way. In particular, I am referring to the writings and thinking
of political theorist Oliver Marchart, whose next book The
Democratic Horizon draws on Laclau and Mouffe to inquire
about the democratization of democracy. This democracy
is more egalitarian and driven by solidarity (Marchart,
forthcoming 2020). Inevitably, this goes hand in hand with
the realization that actually existing democracy is not at all
as free, egalitarian and solidarity-centered as it presents itself
to be.
So, what does that mean for the museum? It seems important
to situate the function of the museum as public institution: It is
neither the street of protest nor the parliament. It is however a
deeply political place – let us not forget that the history of the
modern museum is signicantly indebted to the occupation of
a museum, the taking-over of the Louvre during the French
Revolution. The museum is a public institution which is
related to the street as a place of protest and the parliament
as a place for gathering, but it can also do more and other.
A radically democratic museology takes the museum at its
word and, at the same time, challenges it. Because, as a public
institution, the museum belongs to everybody – which means
more than being open and accessible to everyone. I would say
that the museum promises the possibility to call into question
who ‘everybody’ even is and who remains excluded from that;
it allows to face the question ‘what happened’, to negotiate
what the past means for the present and how, based on this
past, we can imagine a future which is more than just the
extrapolation of the present.
Nowadays, when the ‘museum of the future’ is repeatedly and
gladly talked about as contact zone, platform, arena or space
of assembly, I do not want to hollow out or water down these
terms, but take them seriously and, in this sense, understand
the museum of the future as radical democratic (as continuing
politics). This would also mean that the conictuality of such
a space would be open for assembly and negotiation.
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Farina and Daniela:
Hence, a radical democratic approach aims to facilitate the
partisan and conictual negotiation of power relations,
associated with questions of representation – both understood
as depiction and as stand-in for political opinions. Radical
democracy seeks to enable a partial and conictual encounter
with the existing relations of power. Although we nd this
argument compelling, it remains unconsidered that in the
struggles for and against representative public spheres, actors
of these struggles have different resources at their disposal.
The occupation of the Louvre, for example, was primarily
directed against the representational dominance of the
nobility and the church. However, it was the already emerging
(male-dominated) industrial and educated bourgeoisie,
which succeeded in claiming this representational dominance
for themselves. The opening of museum collections to the
general public in the 19th century was accompanied by a
closure – the division into exhibition and depot or archive –
thus restructuring relations of power what to show and what
to conceal. Shouldn’t the concept of the post-representational
museum pay closer attention to who has specic resources to
engage in counter-hegemonic struggles, and how to engage
in such struggles?
Nora:
My book is situated in the framework of critical museology.
I am explicitly placing my work in the tradition of a critical
engagement with the museum, its colonial undertones and
exclusions and the interrelated Western prot achieved from
colonial rule and theft, its bourgeois, national narratives,
orders, strategies of collection, its role in the invention of ‘the
nation’ (Benedict Anderson), its ‘voluntary self-regulation’
of the people (Tony Bennett) und its patriarchic, Western
‘gestures of showing’ (Muttenthaler; Wonisch 2006). When
I assume modern history of museums as a revolutionary
history, then, this is also a history, which is deeply entangled
with colonialism. Accordingly, the Louvre is not only a space
of revolutionary re-appropriation, but also a place of colonial
booty and ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1985/2008). In post-
colonial theory, this term of epistemic violence refers to the
powerful production of knowledge that appoints itself as a
universal subject of knowing and seems to appoint others as
objects of knowledge. But I can only say all of this because,
throughout the entire 20th century, there were social struggles
that preceded, and thus enabled, the reexive emergence of
critical museology. It was those anti-colonial, feminist and
anti-racist struggles that provided the base for a critique of
representation in cultural studies, museology, art and theory.
By being persistent and politically organized, these movements
forced existing institutions of knowledge production to
be more self-reexive and self-critical. They revealed the
hegemonic interest of those perspectives that make their own
dominant position invisible, thus implicitly declaring it as the
norm. In this respect, you both are absolutely right to raise the
question of the who and how of the struggle; it is not enough
to merely put museum-related emancipatory achievements
into perspective – a concrete discussion of the power-related
consequences of changes in museums always have to be part
of the conversation as well.
Farina and Daniela:
The central challenge, which repeatedly arises in your essays,
is the contemporary ‘alliance of critical discourses and
economic concerns’ (Sternfeld 2018: 17). Subsequently, the
critique of representation always runs the risk of stabilizing
power rather than dislocating and challenging it. You
illustrate this dilemma at the example of the ‘imperative of
participation’, which has been used within museum practice
as well as interdisciplinary museum scholarship to insistent
on opening up and democratizing the institution. Within
the eld of participatory cultural mediation, you describe
conicts between neoliberal appropriation and the concurrent
erosion of democratic structures on the one hand, and the
emancipatory potential of participation on the other hand.
The problem is that critique is being integrated without calling
into question neither the relations and structures of power nor
the conditions of exclusion. If at all, the institution opens up
incrementally – on the level of individual and/or temporary
exhibitions, but structurally, it reproduces old patterns of
power. Could you explain the implications of conict you talk
about in more detail: To what extent does participation, in
contrast to its own original intention, turn into a hegemonic
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strategy, and how can we address this dilemma?
Nora:
Unfortunately, my nal thoughts on examining the
developments of the institution of the museum are not very
enthusiastic – on the contrary. While criticism of the museum
has become ever more outspoken since the rise of new
museology, and some of the insights of these discourses have
even partly entered into museum practice, the institutional
structures of museums have by no means become more
democratic. On the contrary, public museums across the
globe are increasingly economized: Today, they mostly
follow rationales and logics of private management. Museum
budgets now are often smaller and more dependent on
external funding. Simultaneously, expectations on museums
rise, working conditions become more precarious, museum
workers have to perform under rising pressures to succeed. It
seems ironic (if not cynical) that the (semi-)privatization of
institutional structures of the museum is often accompanied
by the increased and staged address of ‘the public’. In
exhibition announcements and the like, we often read about
assemblies, platforms, contact zones, open collections and
public programming. The issue of participation is a good
example of the hollowing out of a democratic term: With the
‘imperative of participation’, neoliberalism has succeeded in
many respects to tame and even replace democratic demands
for co-determination with the empty gesture of participation.
‘Everyone’ is constantly urged to ‘participate’ – to participate
in a game, whose rules are however usually not subject to
debate. In this context, participation is not an emancipatory,
but a hegemonically-infused institutional strategy, which
Antonio Gramsci called ‘transformism’. According to Gramsci,
hegemony is never achieved (only) through coercion, but
always also introduced and maintained via processes of
education.
‘Every relationship of hegemony’, he writes, ‘is necessarily
an educational relationship.’ (Gramsci 2000: 348) Taking
seriously the reform pedagogical insight that learning is not a
one-way street from teacher to student, but a relationship of
mutual learning, Gramsci makes it clear that hegemony also
consists in learning from the margins. Today, this learning
seemingly works best when participation, evaluation and
assessment take place – for example, in processes of mediating
gentrication, university reforms and the general scaling-
down of public institutions – when participatory strategies are
employed to actually maintain the existing power relations,
rather than to challenge them.
Farina and Daniela:
Time and time again, under the guise of participation,
participation is outsourced to independent experts and
consultants instead of enabling engagement in a democratic
decision-making context. Nevertheless, as you argue in your
book, the museum is an intriguing space or negotiation and
intervention, in which the old question of ‘everybody’ can be
asked anew. We are wondering why the museum in particular
is predestined to provide such a place for democratization
processes, and what potential your conceptualization of the
para-museum has to change museum practice? Why is the
museum suitable to be a radical democratic space, in contrast
to the street, the university or other public spaces?
Nora:
To conceptualize the para-museum, I refer to museum and
artistic practice I have been learning from for the last fteen
years. It is with their help that I could develop the idea of
the para-museum. It currently seems appealing to many
contemporary artists to create their own museums within
existing established museum spaces. They turn the museum
into a museum, far from any anti-institutionalist critique
of the establishment. In contrast to the understanding of
institutionalization as petrifying and depoliticizing, which
was dominant in the 1970s, artists today understand
institutionalization as a chance and potential. I take these
strategies of artistic or creative ‘re-appropriation’ as an
example to suggest the para-museum as an institution within
the institution. The para-museum is an institution that calls
into question the powerful functions of the museum on
the basis of its own emancipatory potential, ranging from
the reassessment of values to public assembly to critical
education. It appropriates the museum as a museum with
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its own means. In so far as the para-museum refers to the
museum’s potential for socio-political change and its possible
engagement in emancipatory social struggles that undermine
logics of domination, it is both part of the museum and part
of another, newly emerging order of what a museum is.
This complicated relationship, which is neither against the
museum nor entirely dened by it, is captured in the prex
‘para’. The Greek prex παρά means both ‘from ... to’, ‘at’,
‘next to’, ‘alongside’ (spatially), as well as ‘during, along’
(temporally). In the gurative sense, ‘para’ also means ‘in
comparison’, ‘in difference’, ‘against and against’. However,
in Greek, ‘para’ emphasizes deviance over oppositionality,
while the Latin term ‘contra’ underlines the more oppositional
dimension of the term.
Farina and Daniela:
Such a re-appropriation of changing the museum with its own
means is to be identied at various institutional levels of the
museum: For example, the collection of a para-museum might
offer a ‘reservoir of possibilities, alternatives, contradictions,
relativizations and critical objections’ (Sternfeld 2018: 102).
It is thus fundamentally open to new interpretations and
arrangements. This openness becomes more complicated in
your reections on the so-called ‘object effect’, in which you
criticize the strict separation of subject versus object with
the help of actor-network-theory (ANT). In this context, you
emphasize the agency of objects. In light of the boom of the
ANT, you state an averting and weakening of post-structuralist
approaches and critiques. In lieu of this, you mention Derrida’s
reading of Marx reading, which underlines the ghostly and
‘magical’ moment, in which desire enters into a thing and
gives it agency. With the analogy between museum object
and commodity, you want to work against economization of
cultural artefacts with the very means of the economy. How
exactly does this process work?
Nora:
In that text, I describe conicts that are inherent in the process
of the becoming of commodities. I refer to Derrida, who reads
Karl Marx’s understanding of commodity fetish in such a way
that unfolds the magical dimension in ‘the thing’. I set out to
conceptualize this ascription of desire as a violence inscribed
or embedded in the object. If we assume that commodities
are always results of a production of desire, and that desire is
possibly intricately linked with violence, then, they could be
part of the magical processes of commodity-becoming. This is
how I also read the process that Walter Benjamin calls ‘aura’.
I think it is closely related to Benjamin’s reading of Marx. We
see things that turn somehow magical through a certain ‘aura’.
I would say that these things can be lled with that ‘magic’
because of the violence that is inscribed in them: violence of
exploitation, violence of theft, but also violence as a means of
revolutionary struggle. Hence, I ask myself to what extent and
how this violence, which simultaneously inheres and conceals
violence with desire, can be made productive. The materiality
of things seems to be one aspect, in which things are literally
objects, things that are able to object. Materiality is revealed
as a reservoir for sedimented conicts. I call this the ‘power of
the factual’ (Sternfeld 2018: 131), which is an approach I owe
very much to the reading of Walter Benjamin. Thanks to his
reections, I capture the sedimentation of conicts in objects
and explore how these conicts can come to the fore (again).
Farina and Daniela:
This is without doubt an exciting aspect of the intertwined
history of museum and economy, but we are still curious
to learn more about the overarching conclusions that can
be drawn from bringing together economic and cultural
theories – what are curators to take away from your book?
Isn’t it precisely the characteristic of museal collections that
the various forms of violence you are talking about are made
invisible and become supposedly objective or ‘factual’? What
is problematic about this invisibilization or objectication?
On the one hand, you place emphasis on the ‘power of the
factual’ mentioned above and on the agency of things, on the
other hand, you see objects as (passive) carriers of petried or
sedimented conicts that have to be ‘kissed awake’ (Sternfeld
2018: 122), implying that those objects need to be ‘brought to
life’. This mystifying notion of object agency reinforces those
authorial narrative strategies in the museum, which present
objects as passive testimonies of immutable historical facts,
realities or even conicts. Moreover, you draw attention to
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the blurring lines of the subject-object-dichotomy in favor of
objects’ agency, however, the increasing objectication and
capitalization of precarious and economically marginalized
museum workers as human resources persists.
Nora:
I argue that there are numerous societal conicts that can
frequently be found in museums and that need to be addressed
and tackled. A radical democratic museology is committed to
deal with these conicts. Curatorially speaking, this means
that conictuality needs to be acknowledged and that spaces
need to be created, in which these conicts can be negotiated
– spaces, in which power relations shall be challenged and
transformed.
Farina and Daniela:
The greatest potential and thematic focus of your book lies in
the analysis of cultural mediation as theory and practice with
the aim of radicalizing it. Mediation – just as the critique of
representation per se – faces a dilemma: It is both an afrmative
component of economizing education and attempting to
propose a critique to that economization. You understand
cultural mediation not only as a form of governance that
legitimizes political hegemony but precisely as a demand
to politicize this contradiction. Instead of rejecting forms of
mediation as governmental attempts at reconciliation per se
and the maintenance of hegemonic rule, you are concerned
with nding or reinventing practices of mediation that can
make existing truths debatable again, or provoke other forms
of knowledge. The moment of radicality, as we understand
you, then does not lie in the mediation of ready-made truths,
but in the collective negotiation of unexpected knowledge in
the cultural mediation process.
Based on the examples from your own mediation practice, it
becomes wonderfully clear how this could work. For example,
you have described the post-representational representation
practices of ofce trafo.K – the Vienna-based collective
for cultural mediation and critical knowledge production
which you art part of – which strives to work with other
(i.e., queer, activist and artistic) images rather than with
(hetero-)normative practices of (visual) representation.
While this approach is plausible for mediation, for us, it
remains debatable to what extent this mediation practice is
transferable to other areas and practices within the museum,
especially the management of exhibitions and collections. It
seems that concrete examples of radical cultural mediation
are generalized all too quickly to be applicable for ‘the
museum’ per se. After all, in the museum, we are dealing
mostly with normative images that are incomparably more
difcult to compare with each other because of their specic
embeddedness in most different systems of representation
(e.g., the authority of the institution, the supposed neutrality
of narration, objectifying approaches to display, etc.). How
exactly can the radical moment of openness and the unexpected
be realized in practices of collecting and exhibiting? After
all, and despite all openness of reception, the act of curating
is always also a process of limiting and xing meanings and
interpretations.
Nora:
Yes. Every curatorial action and choice require us to take
a stance; they are nested within political circumstances.
Curating is therefore not neutral, whether this is disclosed or
not. At the same time, however, curatorial practice also cannot
completely dene, determine or control its own reception.
Curating can thus turn out to be received quite differently
from what was intended. Here, the curatorial moment opens
up a space for debate and reection. This space is the space of
the agency of museum education.
Farina and Daniela:
In the last chapter of your book, an essay called ‘Why exhibit at
all?’, you create an almost post-apocalyptic utopia. You project
ahead into the year 2030, imagining a political, authoritarian-
fascist turn to the Right, in which you and a collective of artists,
activists, researchers and dissidents will live in a museum
that you have occupied and taken over. In this context, you
have developed an exhibition about the representational
struggles of the last years from 2013 to 2023 in museums,
art academies and other cultural institutions that are critical
of representation. For this exhibition about practices of
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exhibiting, you gather snapshots from arts activism, funding
programs and work from artist collectives, and let us readers
gain insight into the processes of writing and creating this
exhibition. In this context, too, you are concerned with the
question of whether the numerous anti-racist, feminist and
post-colonial struggles, which have problematized the history
of violence, the dominance of certain cultures, the multiple
exclusions and inequalities in museums, are or are not part
of the capitalization of critique, and thus legitimize rather
than challenges structures of power. You do not embrace this
paradox, which you weave through the whole book, with the
prospect of a ‘happy end’ or the promise of ever being able
to resolve it. Rather, you demonstrate the contradictions of
the struggles for a ‘different’ culture of exhibition and, at the
same time, demonstrate how we might not resign in the face
of these contradictions, but would rather actively counter
them. However, the way in which the designed exhibition is
imagined remains quite conventional. As researchers, we are
interested in the transformation of exhibition practices and
are particularly concerned with other and new implications
of strategies of collecting and exhibiting. What does such a
meta-exhibition really show beyond historical documents
and digital material, and how does it proceed? What could
exhibition texts in the museum space look like, how could they
go beyond objectifying narratives? Can we exhibit activism,
conict and negotiation without shutting them down? Can
these issues be fed into conventional frameworks of exhibition
and representation at all, or do we have to imagine a radically
different way of thinking exhibitions?
Nora:
The last text of the book ees into the future. Perhaps, I
am choosing to do that because I am concerned about the
consequences of a Midas logic of any new perspectivation in
the present – that is a logic of value exploitation, running risk of
wanting to turn everything into value. According to this logic,
any experiment can fall prey to the neoliberal void – however
immersive this void may be. Accordingly, my outlook on the
future entails that one does not merely aim at establishing
other practices of representation, but is invested to think of
them, above all, in connection with other anti-discriminatory
structures. I am increasingly concerned with the question
of how institutions could be organized differently, how we
can nally learn to stop thinking critically and continue to
act uncritically. There are two institutions that provide good
examples for me, who not only want the impossible, but
also implement that in their everyday museum practice and
structure: First, the Museum of Impossible Forms in Helsinki,
a self-organized meeting and exhibition space in eastern
Helsinki, and the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum
of Folk Life and Folk Art), which considers itself as a platform
for interaction with other scientic disciplines and elds of
art, as open space for research and the negotiation of social
discourses. In both institutions, experiments are developed to
collectively negotiate, shape and change hegemonic cultural
structures, ranging from improving working conditions
and budgets to programming. Laurence Rassel, Director
of the Brussels-based Ecole de recherche graphique (ERG),
is trying to implement exactly this for her Art School. She
conceptualizes ‘open source institutions’ as strategies towards
communing, to open institutional infrastructures and spaces
– especially the archive – to communities (Rassel 2019: 159).
Farina and Daniela:
In your book, you ask: Can the museal ‘house of the oppressor’
(Sternfeld 2018: 171) be rebuilt from the inside out, or does
it require a completely new construction? In a world in which
there is no longer an oppositional outside, you plead for the
sparking of new collective movements who move through,
along, across and in the middle of existing institutions and
their respective tools and techniques, and will challenge
and co-design them all. Such a para-museum – this is your
hypothesis – will question and rethink the museum institution
as a Western concept. It will re-narrate the museum as a
place for dealing with (violent) legacies, as a physical space
for contemporary counter-narration and as part of an order
that is always becoming. Your proposition is reminiscent of
the three episodes of artistic institutional critique since the
1960s, in the course of which critique shifted from the outside
of institutions into its very inside to transform the latter from
within. Artworks that were once critical of representational
practices of museums have by now been integrated and
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canonized into collections of those very institutions, that
were once at the center of critique. Whether institutional
critique can develop a critical potential at all, or whether
it rather contributes to the consolidation and legitimation
of the museum has been subject to debate ever since. For
example, there are currently requests that keep pushing for
making the everyday operations of museum institutions more
transparent, asking for reexive and (self-)critical techniques
of exhibition-making to give insights into conditions behind
the scenes.
If institutions make institutional self-criticism part of their
(own) programme, of course, the power of denition about
what and how something is displayed and made accessible
certainly remains within the power of the museums
themselves. At the same time, it becomes an opportunity for
the museum to present itself as an institution that is dynamic,
transparent, learning and (self-)critical. How would you
respond to this question you had raised yourself today? Can
the strategies you proposed lead to a real democratization
of institutional structures of the museum? How can we see,
identify or verify this change? When would your request
for the ‘democratization of democracy’ in the museum and
beyond be ultimately achieved?
Nora:
The next book in the series on curating, which I co-edited
together with Beatrice Jaschke and Matthias Beitl, is entitled
Organizing Counter-Publics. Critical Management in Curating
(Beitl, Jaschke, Sternfeld 2019). In the context of this volume,
we inquire about structures and forms of organization that
are guided not by economic but by democratic principles.
We ask: How do we want to work? And how can museums
and exhibitions be organized differently? Certainly, even
after years of collectively thinking about these questions, we
cannot provide one conclusive answer to these questions. The
‘democratization of democracy’ brings up claims that may
never be achieved. But it has become increasingly clear to us
that the impossibility to achieve these claims must always be
thought of, and be practiced in connection with questions of
institutional change, public spheres and future-oriented forms
of organization.
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