Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums

Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums Helen Graham …you were the first – in your books and in the practical sphere – to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this ‘theoretical’ conversion. To appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. - Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Michel Foucault, 1972 …an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, and responsibility in their construction. - Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto, 1991 Introduction (A) This book is questioningly titled ‘Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities’. Let us think about some of the everyday meanings of ‘engagement’ for a moment. For a much more developed and worked throughout critique of the ‘engagement’ idea, see the PhD research of Joanne Williams (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds). If a toilet is engaged, then it means someone is using it and you cannot; you must wait your turn. If you are engaged to be married, you cannot marry anyone else, and you wear a ring to show this exclusiveness to others. An engaged person is not open to others, or other romantic or sexual possibilities. To want to engage someone or something is not, therefore, a neutral act; it is claiming something total. It is a monogamous kind of claim. In contrast, this chapter will explore a more plural and open approach to the relationships between museums, ‘heritage’ and people. That is, participation instead of engagement: a non-exclusive, non-deferential and non-loyalty-based politics of self-determination, affinity and collectivism. To begin – and throughout – I want to share particular stories of my own. I also want to offer some critical interventions. The one leads to the other and then back again. Here is the first: I am coming back from another event on museums and communities. I am on the train. The day has left a knot in my stomach. The knot is all too familiar. It is the knot of knowing things are not right. All day, being yet again in that schizo-frame of any institutional space focused on participation and community engagement, we have either not asked enough questions, celebrating projects that have been ‘good’, or we have worried, we have confessed and we have talked about failures ‘to empower’. Both are somehow awful. We seem to pass over the political challenges too quickly. Or – almost as prevalent now – we hold on too tightly to specific ways of thinking about power and use them to interpret and explain too readily. Either way, we live with an almost impossible weight. The weight of trying to remake Victorian institutions (whether museums, heritage organisations or universities) founded on hierarchy and the desire to represent, classify or ‘act on’ others. Through all this unresolved shuttling between celebration and anxiety, do we even know what we need? Does part of us not want to just shrug it off? Do we not just want to somehow be free to just be, and be with, others – to become free and equal in an unequal world? I have spoken and written elsewhere about museums and a politics of horizontality (Graham 2014). When I suggest horizontality, what I am suggesting, to be explicit, is that museums become more influenced by libertarian/anarchist readings of power and forms of political practice. There is no question that post-structuralist philosophies have often been drawn on in museum and heritage studies (eg Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Yet, as Saul Newman (2010, 87) has argued, certain forms of libertarian and anarchist politics of Mai ’68 are the ‘missing link’ of many theoretical mobilisations of post-structuralism. Museum and heritage studies have been quick to take up the critique offered by post-structuralism, but slow to register the full implications for practice. Here, I want to explore how anarchist-inflected, post-structuralist approaches to power and change offer ways of thinking and acting, which see politics growing from the here and now, and the spaces and potentials arising from what already is. From this, ‘community engagement’ might be otherwise. The Political Problem of Museums and Heritage (A) I have been worrying about community engagement in museums for a long time now, caught up in, and between, various projects, social relationships, literatures and theories. Yet, it has become more visible over the years – as I have read more, got myself into more than a few scrapes and become involved in research projects exploring these type of questions A key context for my thinking is provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded project ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’; see: http://heritagedecisions.leeds.ac.uk/ [8 December 2015]. – that it is no accident that museums and heritage organisations find participation difficult to realise. It is a problem generated by their very political logics, logics that assume that decisions about museums and heritage need to be made ‘on behalf of’ everyone now, as well as everyone of the future. Or, as is still framed so clearly in the slogan of the UK National Trust: museums and heritage need to be managed so that they are ‘forever’ and ‘for everyone’ (National Trust n.d.). I am by no means the first to make this argument. In their writing, separately and together, Laurajane Smith and Emma Waterton (2009; 2010) draw attention to the power dynamics of ‘heritage’. Smith and Waterton have tended to approach this through a critical analysis mode that seeks to unmask power, an approach summed up through Smith’s (2006, 29) widely cited idea of ‘authorized heritage discourse’: The authorized heritage discourse (AHD) focuses attention on aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places and/or landscapes that current generations ‘must’ care for, project and revere so that they may be passed on to nebulous future generations for their ‘education’, and to forge a sense of community identity based on the past. In the formulation of AHD, the role of the professional who designates, decides and manages is key: ‘Essentially, the AHD is characterized by the privileging of expertise and efficiency. Heritage is imagined as something old, beautiful, tangible and of relevance to the nation, selected by experts and made to matter (Smith and Waterton 2009, 29). Smith and Waterton (2009, 27) trace this back to John Ruskin and William Morris and their enshrining of a logic of stewardship in early preservation movements, but I would also argue that contextualising Morris’ conservation politics within his contributions towards early libertarian communism is also crucial here. Here, Smith and Waterton argue that it is this particular relationship between the past and future that places an enormous amount of power in the hands of professional heritage ‘stewards’. Nonetheless, the reason why this formulation has proved so compelling and enduring in museums and heritage is worth examining. To do so, I will draw on a talk I gave at the 2013 Group for Education in Museums Conference in Leeds as a way of evoking specific issues that have arisen in my own working life; each are tangible moments when the questions of the political logics of museums and participation have become visible (see Graham 2014). The three examples are: In terms of collections: the museum wanting to value personal contributions (such as oral histories or other stories) by accessioning them into the collection, but then requiring ‘ownership’ over the oral history or story to pass from the individual to the museum; In terms of co-curation: working with a group to co-curate aspects of an exhibition, but under the assumption that key interpretative decisions will be made by professionals; and In terms of inclusion: in-depth work with a small group on a co-collecting project while concerned with not involving enough or the ‘right’ people. You could easily read each of these examples via the critical mode deployed so powerfully by Smith and Waterton (2009) and view museums as manipulative, acting in tokenistic ways and retaining power illegitimately. Here, you could say about each: Collecting: museums appropriate people’s personal histories; Co-curation: museums take control behind people’s back; and Inclusion: museums dismiss individual people’s contributions. While there might be some truth to all of these critical interpretations, I wonder whether it might be possible to see the political logics of these resistances to participation if these examples are viewed from a more sympathetic standpoint (for a moment, at least): Collecting: rather than seeing the museum as appropriating people’s personal stories, it could be viewed that the museum needs to ask individuals who donate their stories to sign transfer of title/copyright forms to ensure that the institution can make collected items available to everyone for posterity; Co-curation: rather than seeing the museum as making decisions behind community members’ backs, it can be viewed that museums draw on professional standards to ensure high quality and accessible visitor-focused exhibitions; and Inclusion: rather than viewing the questioning of small group work as failing to value individuals’ contributions, museums can ask whether they are working fairly, equally and inclusively with the widest range of individuals and groups in their local area. In other words, the three examples may not only be interpreted in terms of control, or exertion of power; rather, they may be understood by those involved as reflecting their civic responsibilities to offer public services. Through discussions with one of my recent research teams, as part of the ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ project (see Heritage Decisions 2015), it has become evident that many of the frustrations I have encountered in working with participative approaches in museums have a shared political logic, which echo Smith and Waterton’s (2009) frustrations with stewardship. In particular, this political logic is based on the fact that museums are explicitly ‘public’ organisations, and are organised by the powerful idea that they should work ‘on behalf of…’. In this light, the ‘on behalf of…’ notion shapes museum efforts in ways that can be reflected through the three examples: Collecting: collect on behalf of everyone of the present and future; Co-curation: curate and display objects, ideas and experiences on behalf of all visitors; and Inclusion: inclusively use public resources on behalf of all in a way that is mindful of who is not represented, and who is and is not visiting. ‘On behalf of…’ is one version of public service, and it echoes the idea of striving for the ‘greater good’. Moreover, it is born from the notion of delegated authority to professionals (Marquand 2004, 77). It is an idea with which we are all familiar – whether in relation to town planners in local authorities, or the role of National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to decide which drugs to use in the UK’s National Health Service. In other words, it is the act of making decisions about the use of public money for the good of all. However, the legitimacy of this process – of delegated authority via representational democracy – is currently under pressure across the UK, and beyond. Today there is less trust of elected officials, as well as of professionals (Marquand 2004, 75–9). In addition, there is a wider sense of ‘democratic deficit’, which has led to all sorts of participative movements (Cornwall 2008, 11). Yet, simply adding participation into existing ‘on behalf of’ public service logics has caused enormous problems for ‘community engagement’ and ‘participation’. Every time participation is just ‘added in’ then the criticism comes back, a criticism always motivated by the best public service intention: ‘why these people and not other people?’ Or, ‘if you cannot involve everyone, then how can you justify involving anyone?’ Questions like these have been used to dismiss many ‘community engagement’ efforts. They are serious questions coming from political logics that have defined public services in the late 20th century. Nevertheless, questions such as these also fail to acknowledge that ‘participation’ is derived from a different political tradition; instead of being served by those working on our behalf, participation is ‘those directly concerned’ (as Deleuze put it to Foucault, 1972) speaking for themselves. As discussed in the following section, one tradition from which ‘participation’ is derived is anarchism. Anarchism: A Politics of Horizontality (A) Anarchism is a form of politics that began to emerge, and was given its name, in the late 19th century. While interpreted differently by various groups and individuals, a point of connection is its critique of the State, of government and, indeed, of the idea of ‘public’ and ‘public service’. For a libertarian Marxist critique of the logics of ‘public’ see: Hardt and Negri 2009, 282; 2012, 78–80. As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, purportedly the first person to declare themselves an anarchist, states: To be ruled is, at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. It is, on the pretext of public utility and in the name of the common good, to be put under contribution, exercised, monopolized, concussed, pressured […] Such is government! And to think that there are democrats among us who claim there’s some good in government! (Proudhon quoted in Ward 1973, 11) Here, two processes are brought together. Firstly, there is the process of ‘knowing about’ those ruled; the ruled in Proudhon’s account are ‘noted’ and ‘counted’. Secondly, through being ‘known about’, the ruled can be ‘admonished’ and ‘prevented’, both constituting familiar evocations of State power via methods of law and police, but also, interestingly, ‘monopolised’. Echoing our opening exploration of ‘engagement’, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘monopolised’ includes: ‘to take exclusive possession of’, ‘control’ and ‘keep exclusive to oneself’. Proudhon also draws attention to what is, in a museum and heritage context, a familiar justification for knowing about and managing visitors on the ‘pretext of public utility and in the name of the common good’. To apply Proudhon’s characterisation directly to the three previous examples, we have the following: Collecting: museums require formal and legal documentation to ensure that a personal story can be made publicly available; Co-curation and display: individual involvement in a display is regulated with the belief that this will create wider public appeal; and Inclusion: museums require people to classify themselves as coming from a specific socio-economic or ethnic background so the museum can ensure it is working with people often excluded, or deprived of public resources. If you take out Proudhon’s tone, you can see just how familiar these arguments are: people are known about through visitor research and collections, and sites are regulated by museum practitioners on behalf of everyone else and for the sake of a common good. In place of Proudhon’s (in Ward 1981) account of ‘State’ and ‘government’, alternatives have emerged from libertarian and anarchist thinking and practice. Perhaps the clearest and most compelling articulation of anarchism is the significance of interpersonal relationships, a ‘kind of ethics of relationships, as advocating and practicing very different relations of power than those of involved in the state, capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy’ (Heckert and Cleminson 2011, 3). Two principles can be viewed as enabling an ‘ethics of relationships’. The first concerns the fact that the ends do not justify the means. In this light, the means are the ends: how we live together is what we have – it is the fertile ground we have for change – and the future will emerge from how we work together. As Emma Goldman (2008 [1910], 29) in her essay, ‘Anarchism: What It Really Stands For?’, states: Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. Colin Ward (1973, 23), writing 60 years later, reinforced Goldman’s point very practically in Anarchy in Action: Far from being a speculative vision of a future society, [anarchism] is a description of a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society. A second principle guides us to not only view this pre-existing potential within everyday life, but to also actively cultivate it through decentralised and direct decision-making processes. This is sometimes understood as ‘federated’ or ‘syndicalist’ decision-making, or the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ (Graeber 2013), where decisions should be made by the people the decisions affect. A strong feature of anarchist and feminist writings of the late 20th century have been to develop processes of collective working that enable equality and consensus-seeking decision-making. In this line of thought, it has been recognised that some forms of structure, rather than reducing freedom, can be developed in ways that increase equality and, from that, support a form of freedom that disadvantages no one. This is an argument outlined well in Jo Freeman’s famous essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ (1972). Linked to ideas of federation are notions of ‘affinity’ – finding groups of people with whom you want to live, be and work, and with whom you can collectively decide and plan. Part of this, crucially, is the provision for ‘exit’, or to leave (to not be ‘monopolised’). This is expressed very well in one of the ground rules – the ‘law of two feet/wheels’ – for Open Space Technology, which is commonly used in environmental movements as a method for developing agendas and affinity discussions within large-scale meetings. The law follows the logic that ‘if you find yourself in a situation where you aren’t contributing, or learning, move somewhere where you can’ (Starhawk 2011, 9). These principles help to open up some of the specific locks that the ‘on behalf of’ and ‘forever, for everyone’ thinking has within museums and heritage. The first is to look at the practices of ‘community engagement’ as fertile ground for ‘ethics of relationships’ now. This offers a crucial riposte to the critical claims of participation in museums and heritage as already ‘co-opted’ by power structures. What matters, and offers potential, are the relationships that can be built through museums and community engagement. The second is to look carefully at direct democratic models of decision-making and also affinity models, where groups of people who have a shared interest are enabled to make decisions and act. The third concerns the idea that if the ends do not justify the means, then the temporal logics of ‘posterity’ and of a future ‘common good’ also need to be rethought. Instead of ‘preservation’ being used to institutionally manage ‘heritage’, and to keep it from dynamic use in the present, a ‘future’ might be best imagined as one that is always emerging from, and cultivated by, a politically legitimate present. Of course I have known for a while that the knot in my stomach represents the messy anxieties that come from trying to be with people and to work from these encounters, and to manage the political logics of ‘on behalf of’ at the same time. Is this knot a political necessity – a productive sense of being caught between political logics that drives the work? Or does the very attempt to navigate ‘on behalf of’ and ‘being with’ hold only the constant danger of indignity? Post-structuralist Critique / Post-structuralist Politics (A) As pointed to by the work of Smith and Waterton (2009), Proudhon’s anarchist account of the State and government, far from being an unthinkable critical lens, is actually well established and well rehearsed in the museum and heritage studies literature, and is one way in which post-structuralist theorisations have been pulled into the discipline. In The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, Todd May (1994, 1) opens with the idea that ‘political philosophy, especially in the continental tradition, is a project perpetually haunted by crisis, because it inhabits that shifting space between what is and what ought to be’. With this in mind, you could say that museums are institutions that live precisely in this crisis. A key tendency in museum and heritage studies has been to focus on ‘what is’, to diagnose the politics of museums/heritage and to seek to unveil how museum/heritage processes fail to live up to their claims and instead operate to control, limit and exclude. I can never explore these points without quoting Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum (1995). Looking at the logics of the late 19th-century museum, Bennett (1995, 90) argues that the politics of museums and heritage set off an insatiable demand due to their rhetorical claims to be ‘equally open and accessible to all’, and to meet the ‘principle of representative adequacy sustaining the demand that museums should adequately represent the cultures and values of different sections of the public’. What is will forever not quite meet the desires for what museums ought to be. As such, it could be said, that museum-logic causes its own perpetual crisis and sense of failure. Museums are never inclusive enough. Yet, a key danger is that in the critical movement towards what ought to be, the political centrality of museums/heritage remains intact. May (1994, 10) describes this as a difference in emphasis between ‘strategic political philosophy’ and ‘tactical political philosophy’. Strategic political philosophy imagines a certain immediate relationship between what is and what ought to be precisely because of how power is imagined and where it is located; both ‘power’ and thinking ‘proceed concentrically’. May (1994, 11) states: ‘strategic political philosophy, in arguing for or assuming a central problematic within the purview of which all injustices can be accounted for, carries with it the implication that power derives essentially, or for the most part from, the site upon which the problematic focuses’. Hence, the insatiability of the claims that museums are ‘always failing’; museums/heritage exclude and, therefore, museums must be made to not exclude. It is assumed that the site of the critique carries the solution. As May (1994, 12) articulates: In contrast, May (1994, 10-11) advocates a tactical thinking that ‘pictures the social and political world not as a circle but instead as an intersecting network of lines’. Thus, ‘for tactical political philosophy, there is no centre within which power is to be located’ (May 1994, 11). For museums, the crucial implication is that museums do not ‘own’ history, culture or heritage; these entities are happening all the time. Top of Form Museums are just one set of intersecting lines in a much more complex landscape within which they exist. May (1994, 11) argues that understanding power as an ‘intersecting network of lines’ is useful since it also shifts the locus and meaning of change: Tactical thought opposes strategic thought at another crucial point. If there is a central problematic and a central site of power, then it is possible that there are those who are peculiarly well placed to analyze and to lead the resistance against the power relationships of that site. Their well-placed position may derive from their knowledge of that site, or from their involvement with it, or from their place within the social order which allows them effective access to means of pressure. One of the issues May (1994) draws attention to concerns the way in which the strategic critique distributes insight, and then responsibility and agency, to specific people and not others (the idea of the vanguard in Marxist theory). May’s target here is the idea of the vanguard, associated with Leninist strands of Marxist politics. For a satirical take on vanguardist politics, see Shelia Rowbotham’s (1983) ‘The Little Vanguard’s Tale’, in her collection Dreams and Dilemmas. Here, the tension between ‘on behalf of’ versus ‘participation’ is, in fact, a consequence of competing explanations of power. If power is conceived of as centralised, then participation cannot maintain direct or affinity models of decision-making, which in turn leads to the critique: ‘if we cannot involve ‘everyone’ and ‘future generations’ in decision-making, then what is the point?’ Participation can be viewed as a political response to the more diffuse and complex way power is often experienced. To flourish, participation needs to be tactical. While critique has dominated museum and heritage studies, an intriguing shift is currently underway in the field as theories from other disciplines make their way in at an increasing speed. Specifically, theories that describe the world as networks or ‘assemblages’ are being applied to museum and heritage (see Macdonald 2002; Morris 2003; Bennett 2013; Byrne et al 2011). A crucial contribution of these approaches is that they not only utilise the same types of practices, collections and displays often described through a hegemonic lens in museum and heritage studies, but push further to show how they are comprised of specific interactions and connections. This theoretical shift has a key point of reference: science and technology studies and, specifically, Actor Network Theory (ANT) (see Latour 2005). The main conceptual shift offered by ANT is to not assume anything about ‘what is going on’ in any given assemblage, but instead to trace connections. For instance, in an early example of deploying ANT in a museum studies context, Andy Morris (2003) shows how Tate Britain creates itself as a ‘centre of calculation’ both for ‘art’ and ‘Britishness’ by drawing certain paintings and ideas of nation together. Tony Bennett (2013) has also used assemblage theory and ANT to develop his 1995 notion of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ into the ‘culture complex’. While Bennett’s (2013, 26) interest has always concerned the ‘role played by epistemological authorities of various kinds in producing new collectivities of actors and endowing them with specific capacities for acting on and changing conduct’, he (2013, 39) argues, ‘the advantages of assemblage theory […] consist in the pliability it brings to the analysis of such networks, flows and relations’. The most prevalent use of ANT has offered accounts of museums and heritage as they are, or what is. Here, the question for us is what this might mean for a reimagined politics of participation that works as ‘a living force in the affairs of our life’, in the words of Goldman (2008 [1910], 29). Tactical Practices of ‘Participation’ (A) When I feel less attached to the question of who I really am – activist or scholar, homosexual or bisexual – I find myself experiencing a deeper sense of connection with others. Whether that’s through the writing I do, in meetings of shared projects, in talking with friends, family and neighbours or with strangers on trains or in parks, possibilities arise that have been closed off when I want them to know, or want to keep secret, what I might imagine to be the truth of myself. (Heckert 2011, 205) Jamie Heckert (2011, 201) writes about ‘sexuality as state form’: that the State is not only that which operates though laws, police, schools and asylums; it also works through social and cultural forms and norms. Drawing on the idea of ‘overcoding’ from Deleuze and Guattari (2004), Heckert (2011, 201) extends a reading of ‘state form’ to be the ‘colonizing strategy of declaring, with authority not to be questioned, both how things are and how they should be, regardless of the local and particular knowledge of those who are always, already living with these questions’. Heckert’s (2011) approach and tone – open and committed to what might emerge through being with others – will be our guide. Yet, as one of the recurring issues faced by those facilitating ‘community engagement’ and ‘participation’ in museums and heritage, we also need to engage with the impetus behind the nagging question, ‘why these people and not other people?’, which represents the well-intentioned public service desire to manage equality and diversity. As such, I will suggest that more horizontal, decentralised and non-representational ways of working might open up this political logic of ‘on behalf of’ while still recognising some of the serious concerns of inclusion, equality, diversity and legitimacy that ideals of public service and the ethos of ‘on behalf of’ have been used to address. To accomplish this, I take cues from two places that offer different visions of horizontality. The first, interested in the fertile ground of relationships, is current thinking on networking approaches to community development, which emphasise developing communities by working within these existing networks, working to cultivate connections and interactions and to link networks together (Gilchrist 2009, 14). This approach, which most of us will recognise, is likely to be more effective than convening meetings, and expecting people to act as if they do represent others. However, with these benefits also comes the danger of only working with people whom you know and who know each other; thus, there is a risk of not addressing the question: ‘who is not a part of this network?’ As a result, the important understanding of horizontality as working through networks and interpersonal relationships also needs some kind of self-awareness about who is there and how decisions are made. The second form of horizontality we will draw on is from the Alterglobalisation Movement, which has developed horizontality as a way of referring to participatory and non-representational decision-making processes (see Maeckelbergh 2009). What is so relevant about these approaches, as explained, is that they suggest ways around the sticking points of ‘on behalf of…’ while also keeping equality and diversity fully in mind. The following sections provide some ways of thinking and acting that might help. Not black box ‘community engagement’ (B) To begin with, and in keeping with the descriptive approach to ANT and assemblage theory, what we might show – to bring ‘ethics of relationships’ to the fore – is that ‘community engagement’ is not one entity, and that ‘it’ should not be black boxed. Even if you accept, in Tony Bennett’s (1998, 212) terms, that community engagement is ‘a programme of the same type’ as 19th-century forms of shaping people’s conduct and behaviour, then the variability within ‘the same type’ matters, as I’ve argued elsewhere (see Graham 2012). In contrast, the critical readings of community engagement that have circulated have tended to gather all community engagement practices together and black boxed them so then it might become possible to reveal/unmask their politics. To give one example, Waterton and Smith (2010, 11) describe what they see as the assimilationist tendencies of ‘engagement’ produced by a too narrow and cosy reading of ‘community’: Indeed, the way that ideas of community have become intertwined with heritage discourses and practice has rendered communities, as much as their heritage, as subject to management and preservation. That is, community or group identity becomes the object of regulation through the heritage management process, not only reinforcing the power differentials in community-expert relations, but also ensuring the legitimacy of essentialist notions of ‘community’ and their continual misrecognition. In effect, Waterton and Smith (2010) argue that ‘community’ has been too ‘black boxed’. Nevertheless, they return their critique of the oversimplified evocation of community with an almost equally ‘black boxed’ evocation of practices. Smith and Waterton (2009, 139) suggest that, for professional practice, this means: ‘honesty, dialogue, recognition of power, a holistic and integrated approach, and a critical regard for the political and social context of community engagement’. This is all fine as a shorthand, but if we think of politics as ‘networks of intersecting lines’, then it has to be the tone, texture, subtlety and ethos of these practices that need to be illuminated. As I hope is clear by now, a commitment to specificity of practices is not simply about the type of knowledge produced. Rather, allowing any practice to be thought of in only an abstract way also simplifies and centralises ‘power’, leads to strategic thinking and limits the political potential of the everyday encounter, as evoked by Goldman (2008 [1910]) and Ward (1973). (2005, 251) summarises this by stating: ‘if there is a society then no politics is possible’, by which he meant: Of course, appealing to ‘social domination’ might be useful as shorthand, but then it is much too tempting to use power instead of explaining it and that is exactly the problem with most ‘social-explainers’: in their search for powerful explanations, is it not their lust for power that shines through? If, as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely, then gratuitous use of the concept of power by so many critical theorists has corrupted them absolutely – or at least rendered their discipline redundant and their politics impotent. (Latour 2005, 85, his italics) Years ago now, I first walked into a Resource Base that was one of many sites for a two year oral history project with people with learning difficulties, exploring the histories of recently closed day centres. Somewhere, back in the new office that I had taken up as part of that job, was a document with deliverables agreed with the project’s funders: numbers of interviews conducted, an archive to be made, a booklet to be written and a simple Gantt chart of its timeframe. I remember meeting the member of staff with whom I initially had contact, but then he just left me to get on with it… to somehow ‘begin the project’ within the ongoing daily life of the centre. So, I began to introduce myself to people who were service users at the Resource Base. I brandished a piece of paper that, I had hoped, set out the project as clearly as possible. I tried to explain the project and see if I could ‘get them involved’. But our worlds could not mesh. They spoke of the day centres, but I understood almost nothing: names, connections, memories… this happened, then that, and someone had left and they had seen them recently somewhere I did not know and someone else had said something about something. Nothing could come into meaning for me. Equally, my words – Project, Archive, Exhibition – could not come into meaning for them. Slowly, over months and months, one conversation and cup of tea at a time, I was shown that we needed to begin in the middle of where it matters and build a new project both like and unlike the one on the funding bid. I needed to slowly, carefully and gratefully become part of their world first. They needed to engage me and involve me before I could ‘involve them’ in any way the funder would recognise. The ‘someones’ I did not know became specific people; people’s names started to have faces. And places that were only ‘somewhere’ for me at first became places I knew, too. See museums from the outside (B) In May’s (1994) terms, we often see museums as a ‘centre’, as the centre that needs to be critiqued and changed. Yet, museums are not the centre of most people’s lives. Yet in thinking ‘on behalf of…’ we are in danger of placing the museum right at the centre of our thinking that can lead to seeing the world from the museum out, or ‘museocentrically’. With thanks to the volume’s co-editor, Michelle Stefano. Nonetheless, it is necessary to view the museum from the outside in, and the museum, through other people’s eyes, will only be one place and organisation among many they are in contact with. There is no such thing as ‘everybody’, but there is ‘anyone’ (B) The idea of networking is quite different from the idea that museums need to work ‘on behalf of...’. A characteristic of the ‘on behalf of…’ logic is its vertical view (as if from up high) that assumes differences between people are known, such as ‘lower socio-economic group’ or ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’, and then strives to balance out their various interests and needs fairly. There is no doubt that the desire to balance out resources fairly and to always address ‘who is not here’ comes from a place of fairness and equality, the typical aims of professional public service. However, to build up towards this idea of ‘everyone’, successive groups tend to be worked with one after another through a one-at-a-time fashion. This solution to the problem of ‘everyone’ leads to a participative ‘catch 22’, where ‘participation’ is often criticised as being a box to tick, and of not being sustainable (because relationships are eventually left behind). In her book on community development, The Well-Connected Community, Alison Gilchrist (2009, 76) outlines the benefits of networking: ‘Networks are generally able to accommodate divergence and dissent, rather than attempt to impose either unity in action or a spurious (and often fragile) consensus. Networks are particularly adept at managing contradiction and are useful organisational tools for promoting genuine understanding […] Diversity challenges dogma and orthodoxy by generating alternatives’. Yet, Gilchrist (2009, 145) also recognises the dangers, by stating: Networking is easier and more enjoyable where there are common interests and mutual affinity. People tend to associate with people who are like themselves, and this dimension of networking militates against inclusion and equality of opportunity […] Personal affiliations and antipathies are endemic in community networks and this creates a quandary for people who are committed to principles of equal opportunity and democracy. One of the ways she reconciles networking with equality and inclusivity is to draw attention to the spirit in which networking is conducted and advises to constantly diversify networks. Gilchrist (2009) outlines some of the tactics used by community development workers, such as hanging out in places where you will bump into people, as well as more formally developing a working picture of the locality and mapping where your networks are strong, weak or non-existent. While ‘everyone’ cannot really exist, individuals, groups, friendship networks and local networks do. Investment in the type of small group work that has defined participation in museum and heritage contexts becomes a lot less problematic if, rather than seen successively (one group after another), it is seen as adding new nodes into a wider network. And rather than viewing these participants as facing into the museum-as-centre, and as making a contribution that is then managed on behalf of ‘everyone’, community development can be better conceptualised in a multilateral way: people developing relationships with each other through, in and with the museum/heritage organisation. It is about how decisions are made, not (only) who makes decisions (B) A significant question is not only who makes decisions, but how they are made, and by what processes. While museums have often consulted with partners about what to do to engage communities, there are fewer examples of approaches that openly and transparently explore how decisions should be made about engaging communities, as well as other museum functions. How should museums decide what to collect? How should they decide on exhibitions? How should they decide which groups to work with? In other words, there are few examples of museums attempting to build shared understanding around the processes of decision-making, and the legitimacy of such decisions. Marianne Maeckelbergh (2009, 108), who has written an ethnography of the Alterglobalisation Movement, describes horizontality as working with conflict and difference, but without the use of hierarchy: Horizontality is about creating equality […] The practices of the collective space of movement organizing show that equality is not assumed to be born into human beings but rather created through active construction of non-hierarchical relationships by challenging inequalities between people (gender, sexuality, language, skills, etc) […] Within a diverse community, horizontality is a means of limiting the abuse of power to avoid the exclusion that many actors presume to result from hierarchy. Consequently, it is a method for turning adversarial conflict into constructive conflict. Horizontality is where diversity meets equality; it is the means through which movement actors break the mental link between equality and sameness, and challenge the political project of homogenization implicit in liberal democracy. David Graeber (2013), an activist and anthropologist, describes two key principles of horizontality linked to ‘subsidiarity’ in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement. In the first, everyone involved in a particular project, or piece of work, should be involved in decisions relating to it. As such, in a museum context this might mean that people involved in contributing to an exhibition should be actively involved in all decisions relating to it. This does not mean jettisoning professional insights, experience, display standards or ideas about audience engagement; however, it does mean opening them up for discussion and scrutiny. In other words, there needs to be space for affinity groups – people who want to get together to make things happen – and small-scale collective decision-making. Graeber’s (2013) second principle is to make it possible for anyone who might be affected by a decision to get involved. During Occupy Wall Street, working groups went off and took the initiative for various protest components, from food to setting up libraries and entertainment (the principle of subsidiarity). Moreover, there was a General Assembly each day where anyone could bring an agenda item, and working groups could shelve issues which they felt needed wider discussion. The second principle’s notion of including anyone who is affected by a particular decision in the making of it may, in the museological context, take us back to the problematic issue of engaging ‘everyone’. Yet, one interpretation of the horizontal aspects of the Alterglobalisation Movement would be that they were explicitly not concerned with manifesting ‘everyone’, or the ‘public’. Rather, and in line with the equality component of horizontality, the movement was more concerned with the potential for anyone who wanted to get involved and, thus, granting them an equality of entry into the process of decision-making. Anyone could take part in the process directly and equally, rather than upholding the ethos that decisions are made on behalf of an imagined everyone. It is critical to examine how ‘anyone’ who wants to can get involved in making decisions about museums and heritage, because the small group collaborations through which participation seems to work best become less problematic if the burdens of ‘representation’ (in both its ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ meanings) are completely and openly removed. Instead, small group work can be complemented by a variety of open pathways to be used for sharing, discussing and deciding what the museum does and how it uses its resources. For example, practical ways of creating open pathways include: making available the contact details for specific members of staff on a website; transparent processes for deciding on exhibitions; and clear guidelines on how to propose an object for collection by the museum. The capacities for people to then be proactive and use these open pathways, in turn, need to be developed using networking approaches. In essence, what the networking approach to community engagement in museums can offer is a view of the museum not as the centre, but as a node in a wider network of place, and active in building a network in, and through, the museum and its localities. The future will take care of itself (B) ‘On behalf of everyone’ is directly linked in museum contexts to ‘on behalf of the future’. The future is often imagined implicitly in heritage contexts as linear, stable and predictable, a bit like a timeline stretching onwards. In its current iteration, as we have explored, it is as if the ends of preservation ‘for the future’ can be balanced with access in the present only though the delegated authority of professionals. Yet, if we focus on the ethics of working together, then the question of the future can be openly debated and decisions that are made now and will affect the future might be properly earned. The future can unfold from the present. In Conclusion (A) I am meeting up with someone whom I have been working with on a participatory research project. Elsewhere in the funding paperwork, and when we are explaining the project at the university and when he is acting as a self-advocate, he describes himself as a mental health service user. We have been starting to try to write together, something that I have not been finding easy. We are meeting in a cafe. I am late, falling through the door exhausted after teaching and other meetings. Not quite knowing, as I rushed down the hill, that I did not have the physical and emotional resources to be able to take responsibility for the encounter. Almost knowing, as I rushed down the hill feeling guilty and fraught, how fragile all of our well-being is. Yet, my professional failure opened up something else, a mutual care, a listening ear that is paving the way – not for me ‘to engage’ him in research and writing, but for two people to now more fully choose to collaborate. Acknowledgments (A) I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their comments. Thanks to the Heritage Decisions team and the Connected Communities programme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for creating the contexts within which these ideas were shaped – not least discussions about Do-It-Yourself approaches with Danny Callaghan and ‘freedom of self’ with Kathy Cremin, Mike Benson and John Lawson. Thanks especially to my networks in York, which have, for a very long time now, included more than a few anarchists. 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