Spatialities of participation: Agencies between culture, politics and neoliberal subjectvation

Since 1960, participation has named a myriad of discourses and practices located between the fields of art and architecture and urbanism. Under this umbrella-term we find since the forms of reorganization of the construction site, as defended by Sergio Ferro, to the current technologies of urban planning called intelligent, inclusive, or sharable; we also find experimentations with alternative intersubjective relations between perception, body, and space, such as Hélio Oiticicas deconditioned experiences or as currently pursued by the appropriations of buildings and free spaces practiced by the so-called artivisms. What unites these and many other examples is the dissolution of conventional limits that ruled the production of space in favor of a focus on all kinds of social processes. However, far from being a common place for experimentations, what we are calling spatialities of participation reveal: 1) a field of permanent dispute over its aesthetic and also political meanings; 2) a contradictory process of diffusion and institutionalization of what, in the turbulent 1960-70´s, seemed to configure different horizons of political and social transformation; and, finally, 3) The re-semanticization of terms such as open work, experience, collaboration, creativity or interactivity, today confused with the productive, cultural and subjective transformations carried out by the emergence of neoliberal rationality: the one that, according to Dardot and Laval (2016), has surpassed the fixed and hierarchical rules of the Fordist world to ground the entrepreneurial subject - competitive, self-fulfilling, flexible, precarious, fluid, without gravity. We are interested in understanding, therefore, and this is the hypothesis of this research, if the discourses and practices of participation configure one of the central nodes in the set of transformations carried out by the discursive formation of neoliberal rationality, which has been affecting production and labor relations, redefining institutions and political organizations, guiding technological development and producing new forms of subjectivity and sociability. From this perspective, the research seeks to understand participation as a dispositive of biopolitical power; and the spatialities of participation as a set of social, cultural and political agency capable of putting into operation the exercise of entrepreneurial subjectivity.