6.5 Political autonomy within KPC: Room 1
Kinning Park has two main halls and then lots of smaller rooms that function as studio/rehearsal/office spaces for various groups. In August 2012, Room 1 was set up in what was previously a studio, by Jonathan and some of the activists working in the building; they wanted to create another independent zone within KPC.
We wanted to experiment with the idea of using sub-committees to drive new projects forward at KPC. We hoped that devolving responsibility for delivering the Room 1 project to a small group of interested committee members, volunteers and building users would develop the existing volunteer model in two main ways, whilst minimising the impact of the increase in building capacity on the workload of the building manager. Firstly, it would give more room for those involved to act on their own initiative and direct their own work, and secondly, it would create a space for collective decision making which could respond to the interests, skills and ideas of the people contributing. Although there have been glitches along the way, we feel that in the main this experiment has been successful. (Room 1 report)
Room 1 was a physical and ideological space arguably created through agonism; ‘a we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognise the legitimacy of their opponents’
(Mouffe, 2005:20). Room 1 can be seen as a space for the activists to enact their own political project, ‘belonging to the same political association, as sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place’ (ibid). This was a result of social tensions between Lindsay and some of the activists, and their desire to bring new groups and different facilities into the building. These events constitute throwntogetherness in its most contested sense; fraught with political antagonism and conflict, yet inherent and essential. KPC is a ‘field of agonistic engagement’. KPC is and has been a dynamic space since 1996, unregulated by the state; this ‘leaves a heterogeneous urban population to decide who really is going to have the right to be there’ (Massey, 2005:152). Room 1 created conflict, and conflict is fundamental to politics. Massey emphasises notions of conflict informed by Mouffe’s ideas about political antagonism in her account of throwntogetherness (2005):
Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires that they be brought to the fore, making them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation. (Mouffe, 1993:149)
Jonathan and some other people formed a sub-committee and it became an experimental space for people to carry out an alternative organisational structure within the building.
There was thus a ‘configuration of a specific world’ with the creation of Room 1 (Rancière, 1999:28).
I wanted to be involved in the Room 1 thing, because I felt that it related to stuff. I think it’s good to push for things within what KPC is, but I think it would take a lot of work to change this overall framework of KPC. (Jonathan)
Previously, Lindsay had managed the entire building. There were discussions, disagreements and debates amongst the board and between Lindsay and the volunteers, but at some point consensus would be reached or a pragmatic decision would be taken.
Rancière would see the creation of Room 1 as breaching the ‘distribution of the sensible’ at KPC, breaking the consensus. Room 1 was created because those involved had become disillusioned at the direction KPC was going, in terms of its organisational and
management structure and its increasing promotion of arts-based activities in the building.
Jonathan suggested that KPC had become a brand:
Because it is at this point where it’s like, this branded thing, and it’s doing a lot of the stuff that these kind of organisations are ‘meant’ to be doing now. But it’s also getting hammered by those very people. As you more accurately fit the mould they want, you get more disciplined, they sort of treat you mean and keep you down the line they want. (Jonathan)
Jonanthan’s contestation to the way he could see the space being complicit and being disciplined speaks to a more contentious notion of throwntogetherness. Indeed, Massey (2005) highlights the importance of conflict, antagonism and confrontation in the practice of place-making, and this example demonstrates these aspects. Massey draws on the work of Mouffe to emphasise the chaotic nature of producing radical democratic spaces such as KPC.
Mouffe (1999) describes the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. ‘Politics’
refers to ‘the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence’ (ibid: 754). We can observe ‘politics’ in the formation of Room 1 at KPC, through the creation of an autonomous space within the physical consensus of the building. Mouffe (1999) then describes ‘the political’ as ‘the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in all human society…that can take many different forms and can emerge in diverse social relations’ (ibid). This can also be observed in the points of contention identified by Jonathan and the others, and in their insistence that they organise their own rates of room hire, bring in different groups with particular agendas and manage this space differently. Thus, politics is always affected by antagonism and ‘the dimension of the political’ (ibid). KPC provides the physical and ideological space for ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Mouffe, 1999) to play out, as spaces such as KPC are not utopian spaces of consensus. They have their own internal politics and pluralities that are actually fraught with tensions from time-to-time. Therefore, spaces like KPC really are ‘creative crucibles for the democratic sphere’ (Massey, 2005:153), making them important spaces for people to experiment and participate in small scale politics, which could have wider implications for empowerment and political participation more generally.
The recognition of the antagonism inherent in politics at KPC was important to Jonathan:
There’s this relentless hope for things to be positive, the people who are hopeful and heart warmed about this stuff are not the people on the ground, it relates to this bourgeois mentality and not wanting to admit any negativity. It’s that community centres shouldn’t be shaping communities, the community centres that we need also need to be spaces where we talk about the bad stuff. Most centres are miles away from that, it would be such a long process to move it to something like that.
(Jonathan)
Throwntogetherness is indeed a process that is imbued with conflict as this section has shown: whilst writing about this conflict is easy, it caused a strain between certain people at KPC. This highlights the importance of relating abstract notions of conflict to real life and taking these into account in academic work. The next section will show how these tensions and moments of negativity that arise at KPC expose the tacit fractures between groups and the underlying pre-conceptions that people bring to the space as part of their habitus or personal history.