The politics of copresence: an ecological approach to resistance in top-down participation Open Access

Over the past decade, the practices set up for participatory democracy in city planning policies have become a full-fledged sector for research in social and political sciences. Several of these works have aimed to grasp the potentials and shortcomings of participatory politics through the study of lay people's talk in the context of city assemblies and neighbourhood meetings (for a bibliographical synthesis: Carrel, 2007). From this angle, the unfavourable assessment that is generally made of these state-generated forms of participation often extends to the citizens’ speech in itself (Blondiaux, 2008). Today, it is the very idea that ordinary citizens are able to express themselves in a relevant and fruitful way during technical and tightly framed public discussions that seems to be called into question.

Through a three-year-long ethnography of a participatory city planning programme in Brussels, the Neighbourhood Contracts (NC's),¹ I conducted systematic analyses of the infelicities of citizens’ talk in such meetings. The aim was to define the nature of the communicational obstacles encountered in situ by non-expert and non-mandated participants (Berger, 2008, 2009a, 2012).² Whereas other research works concluded that it was often highly difficult for actors of participatory politics to enter into a proper deliberation (Blondiaux & Sintomer, 2002; Lefebvre, 2013), the study of the discussions in the Neighbourhood Contracts’ assemblies, the Local Commissions for Integrated Development (LCID), shows that even before any question of deliberation is raised, it is the lay participants’ access to representation – in the cognitive, discursive, pragmatic and political meanings of the word – which in itself already constitutes a problem. In these commissions, representation remains a privilege reserved for elected officials and appointed experts. Places such as the NC's are stages where the drama of ‘delegative democracy’ (Manin, 1995; O’Donnell, 1994) is played out under crude light: delegation of the power to represent people, but also of the power to represent reality. Delegation of the power to take the final decisions on an urban planning project, but also further up, of the power to speak about the city, to start a slide show, to make generalized statements, to elaborate an argumentation, that is, to symbolize.

How do the citizens respond to such severe limitations to their participation? How do they react to this difficulty to express their ideas or concerns about their neighbourhood, in a forum where they have been invited to do so? ‘Exit’, ‘voice’ and ‘loyalty’ are three typical reactions to dissatisfaction (Hirschman, 1970) which could be observed at the NC sessions among the disillusioned citizens. This paper, however, will describe situations where the citizen participants chose a fourth option, which French sociologist Francis Chateauraynaud, completing Albert Hirschman's categories, calls ‘internal resistance’ (Chateauraynaud, 1999). Unlike exit and voice, internal resistance proposes an adaptive – rather than disruptive – form of reaction to dissatisfaction in situations of domination or ‘ascendancy’ (Chateauraynaud, 2006, 2015). Like loyalty, internal resistance implies maintaining and repeating the unsatisfactory relationship in the assembly between the citizens and the officials in charge. Yet, unlike loyalty, where the asymmetrical relationship is maintained at the price of the weak party's docility and resignation, internal resistance incorporates latent criticism and a horizon of subversion.

These ‘arts of resistance’ mentioned by de Certeau (1980), and elaborated by Scott (1990), these ways of ‘hinting at or suggesting one's disagreement, disdain or insubordination, all the while saving appearances of loyalty or submission’ (Cefaï, 2007, p. 575), are seen by some observers as one reason to place a degree of hope in the institutional apparatuses of participatory democracy (Rui, 2013). They remain also ‘one of its least studied dimensions’ (Blondiaux, 2008, pp. 84–85; see however: Barbier, 2005; Berger, 2011; Carrel, 2013). By definition, internal resistance does not express itself as transparently as outright protest or denunciation, which can be interpreted through a superficial observation of the discussions and ad hoc tools of discourse analysis. Phenomena of internal resistance ‘resist’ a strictly logocentric analysis. To study them, the researcher is forced to look more closely at the participants’ global expressive behaviours (voice tones, hesitations, interjections, facial expressions, postures, gestures) in their specific experiential context.

The methodological challenge also arises from the very nature of the elements upon which internal resistance is based. Whereas specialists and elected officials can rely on background elements (specialized studies, diplomas, statutes, etc.) and resources extraneous to the situation (such as a savvy PowerPoint presentation cooked up the day before), the elements available to the citizens for an effective contribution – one their partners will give ear to – are found mainly in the immediate vicinity, right under their nose, in front of them, in the state of perceptible affordances (Gibson, 1979). While the ‘starters’ – elected officials or city planners – place themselves in the meeting through their opening remarks (welcome, presentation of the general context, etc.) and enjoy a relatively large autonomy to do so, the citizens, given a more modest role of ‘responders’ can merely try to reposition themselves, enmeshed as they are in a pre-ordained normative environment and system of relations. In these conditions, unlike the contesting citizen, who rejects the whole situation in which he finds himself, the citizen showing internal resistance is careful to honour the ‘given’ situation, and to refer to what is ‘already there’ (déjà là). Here, the attention paid to the situation seems to be the very condition of its subversion and of the lay participant's repositioning in the asymmetrical relation.

Effective internal resistance is thus a question of attentional and ecological aptitudes,³ rather than a matter of discursive proficiency or ‘symbolic capital’. In such an unbalanced relationship, where some participants are assigned the role of protagonists and others considered as mere ‘extras’, where the frame given to the discussion often puts the lay participant in a bind, the contingent proceedings of situations and the immediate environment of the gathering offer footholds which sometimes make it possible to rework one's position. Ill at ease with the official and symbolic order of the activity, which takes away initiative and denies the capacity for representation, the non-expert and non-mandated participant can attempt to salvage the situation by turning to the civil and tangible order of the interaction.

The basic ‘encounter-centric’ reality of the public discussion (Goffman, 1983a, p. 16), the fact that those participating in a meeting find themselves, quite simply, co-present and visible to one another while sharing a common focus of attention, can indeed be exploited by the citizens in a tactical move to regain their footing in the interaction, while saving appearances of loyalty.⁴ Three such methods will be described and analysed in the following pages, each illustrating one of the principles which underlie Erving Goffman's concept of the ‘interaction order’: focusing, mutuality and equality.⁵

In a nutshell, the aim of this paper is to shed a light on the ecological and attentional dimensions of citizen resistance in asymmetrical participatory processes, by completing Certeau's, Scott's, and Chateauraynaud's works with Goffman's microanalysis of the interaction order. While participatory democracy is sometimes conceived by political theorists as a way to implement – to quote Anne Phillips’ book (1995) – a politics of presence, this ethnography of ‘actually existing participation’ is an attempt to expose the more mundane and discrete politics of copresence operating in these gatherings.

A participatory assembly is first and foremost a special type of focused gathering, in other words a space in which at least two people maintain a focused attention (Goffman, 1963a, p. 96). Through the common orientation of body idiom and glances, the participants establish and maintain a single main attentional contact which stands out from the rest, like a figure from a background.⁶ It is the object of their attention, the centre around which a dominant communication is organized, coupled with an invitation to ‘follow’ or to ‘concentrate’.

This focal area is not something fixed once and for all. It can, for example, move from the face and upper body of one person towards those of another, then from this second person to a screen. For instance, on the occasion of the inaugural meeting of LCID in Brussels neighbourhood Callas, the district burgomaster Jacky Decaux moves to the centre of attention for some introductory remarks before passing the floor to the project manager, Luc Deschamps, to whom all attention immediately turns. After a short explanation of the ‘general context’ of the NC programme, Deschamps focuses more closely on the characteristics of the urban area around rue Callas, as certain urban renewal operations can be planned on this block. As he begins to discuss details and attempts to present things ‘in a more practical way’, he switches from an essentially symbolic use of language – employed to establish the general context – to a more indexical form of expression,⁷ all the while directing his words and his pointing finger, thus his audience's attention, towards a screen displaying a map of the Callas neighbourhood.

Even if someone who did not attend the meeting would be able to understand Luc Deschamps's presentation of the ‘general context’ for the Neighbourhood Contract by reading the report after the meeting, only someone who physically participated in the presentation, someone who saw him talking, would understand what Deschamps meant in Excerpt n° 1. The prevailing code of meaning is, indeed, indexical: the verbal signs refer directly to a real existing thing – a point, a line, a zone in colour on a map. The reference of the words requires visual perception to be interpreted. Although considerations of this sort may appear a commonplace to ethnomethodologists accustomed to understanding social practices in their irreducible indexicality, they will pose a major problem to those who still see participatory politics solely as an interchange of ‘discourses’ and ‘ideas’.

While Excerpt n° 1 shows us how an institutional actor may shift down from a mostly symbolic use of language to a less sophisticated form of expression, one that is less stable, more strictly situated, these possibilities to refocus on ‘the directly perceptible for all’ are also available for the citizen participants, whose full attention has been required. We have seen that the position of ‘follower’ or ‘responder’ that is expected from lay participants calls for them to inscribe their own words in the frame and at the heart of the signifying matter already brought up by the ‘starters’ – the elected officials, project managers and urban planning experts. Yet, these lofty symbolic sets, these speeches, PowerPoint presentations, as seamless and polished as they are meant to be, are also offered to the perception of the citizens who, struggling with the objects submitted to them, can catch hold of some aspects and detect some ‘hitches’, some ‘folds’ (Bessy & Chateauraynaud, 1995). Although ordinary participants can be asked to pay attention to a slide show, it is not known what exactly will grab their attention, which angle they will adopt, which aspect they will linger on. Nor is it known, among this continuous flow of signs sent their way, whether they hunt for the pea under the mattress.⁸ These situations are the most interesting when studying the internal resistance of citizens and non-experts attending a meeting, since it is hard for the city planner to keep the resident from re-presenting (in a particular sense here, meaning ‘to present once again, in a different way’), or from putting her finger on something the expert has already presented and which everyone is now in position to see:

This excerpt is an apt example of how an integrated signifying object, the expert's PowerPoint presentation, intended to stabilize a proposal, here a project for a public park, can be tested by a mixture of elementary indexical and iconic signs⁹ voiced by a resident who makes no claim to any special expertise on the matter. Quite the contrary, by adopting this form of speaking, she puts forward her role as a layperson.

So, what has happened here?

To begin with, there is the preface ‘I don't want to take up all your time’, which suits to the role of ‘extra’ that is assigned to citizen participants, and indicates that the speaker intends neither to intervene several times, nor at length. As she is willing to keep her appearance short, no one can deny her that occasion.

We also have the indexical expression she employs to invite her co-participants to take another look at the photo, to delve back into the matter presented by the expert and to return to a precise moment and object of the presentation (‘Not that one, the one just before, yes that’, ‘that thing there’). The pointed finger and the words that accompany it are invested with a degree of urgency, and thus manage to bring ‘local objects or events not theretofore in the centre of attention [ … ]. A shift from unnoticed to in-consciousness is achieved through this directing of sensory attention’ (Goffman, 1983a, p. 14).

Then there is this metaphorical or, to continue with Peircian vocabulary, ‘iconic’¹⁰ expression Macchiatto uses to present, once again and from a different angle, what she has seen. To her eyes, it is not a public park as the expert claims, but a ‘thing’ more like a ‘ski run’. We should note as well that she is mindful to maintain all the fragility and instability of the iconic signification she suggests by adding ‘which to me looks like a ski run, but maybe that's not what it is’. She continues in this iconic-indexical mode when she accompanies her opinion of the slope of the land with a plunging hand gesture and a frown suggesting vertigo. Here, she does not argue on the basis of a conventional calculation of the correct slope for a site to be used for a public park, she mimics a slope which seems too steep.

Despite the sophisticated setting and the skilled presentation of the architectural project, despite Jean-Pierre Frusquet's scientific credibility, the lay participant's down-to-earth intervention is an incredibly efficient criticism, convincing all the citizens present, who laugh with her, but also the urban planner who seems to eat his words on two occasions (‘let's say that the park, well what you see as a park’, and ‘it is pretty steep’). What is it that makes the citizen particpant’s criticism felicitous? First, it returns forcefully and concisely to an aspect (the slope of the land) to which the expert did not bother to draw attention during his presentation, but which is now highlighted as an amusing curiosity, thus as a serious hitch in such an expert presentation, the type of element that is surprising to see overlooked by a city planner worth the name. Secondly because, in this situation, the ski run is an image which through its ability to ‘make see … as … ’ (Wittgenstein, 2009 [1952]), through its unexpected redescription of reality, recalls what Paul Ricoeur calls a ‘metaphorical truth’ (Ricoeur, 2003 [1975]). All those who saw Jean-Pierre Frusquet's slide the first time had the chance to reconsider it from a different angle and come to the conclusion that ‘gosh, it sure does look like a ski run’, and burst out laughing.

One more word about this ‘clever trick of the weak in the order established by the strong’ (de Certeau, 1980, p. 40). At first, the ski run incident may appear harmless. What practical impact could such a statement have? Well, in the context of the Callas NC, that impact was quite considerable. In the months following this meeting, the ski run image would be brandished by various actors to describe a public park project seen as grotesque, particularly by citizen participants who found in this comical image an especially efficient tool to gradually sap the credibility of the NC programme in general. Mrs Macchiatto's witticism gave birth to a public controversy. Throughout this controversy, it is interesting to note that the planners themselves sometimes adopted the lay term of ‘ski run’ to designate their own project, demonstrating a certain sense of humour which was not solely a matter of self-derision. Speaking ironically about ‘their’ sloping park enabled them to distance themselves from it, classifying it as a project of little significance compared to their office's overall production, a project which could not endanger the respectability and reputation of the office and its director, Jean-Pierre Frusquet. In a subtle way, the expert's humoristic use of ‘ski run’ also enabled him to infer that neither he nor his technical colleagues, mere formulators, were morally responsible for the sloping park proposal. Irony about the ski run enabled Frusquet to show his ‘footing’ (Goffman, 1979), his limited contribution in the polyphonic interplay of project production, and in this way publicly disown the elected representatives behind the project: the ultimate fathers of this outlandish idea.¹¹ Eighteen months later, the officials responsible for the Callas NC abandoned the proposal. The ambitious project for a public park was reduced to a minimum plan to create a simple ‘passage’ between rue Grise and avenue du Joyau.

With this first principle (focusing), which the participants could bring into service to point out a common reference and to re-present the object of reference on the simple basis of the way it looks, we have discussed the LCID as a ‘focused gathering’, a space where attention and watching converge. However, the ecological setting at the centre of our interest is what one could call a ‘centred gathering’. The centred gathering is a certain type of focused gathering which combines the characteristics of the focused gathering with that of the ‘encounter’ (the face-to-face, eye-to-eye relation – Goffman, 1961b). In other words, in addition to its conditions of shared attention, the centred gathering adds that of mutual attention (Conein, 2005, p. 151).

This specificity gives rise to two interesting characteristics. Firstly, the ‘centred gathering’ corresponds to what Adam Kendon calls a ‘jointly-focused gathering’ to distinguish them from ‘common focused gatherings’ (Kendon, 1988, 1992). In the latter, the mutual focus of the gazes and the attentional contact do not require a high degree of mutuality, and the definition of the focal point is relatively independent from the participant's commitment or non-commitment. An example would be people sitting together in a theatre watching a movie.

In the ‘centred’ configuration, however, the participants’ attention orientation is not the only thing shared. What is shared is also the effort to maintain an attention contact. In a ‘round table’ type gathering, both the focal point maintained and the pursuit of the event completely depend on the involvement the participants are prepared to demonstrate. This is because the focus of attention¹³ is formed and fed through the participants’ bodies, their gestures, voices and the direction of their gazes. In the case of a ‘centred gathering’, a participant's failure to maintain minimal commitment in the interaction jeopardizes not only the participation of one or another person, but the whole ‘social situation’ as well.

Secondly, as the ‘centred gathering’ is situated about midpoint between the focused gathering and the encounter, we find an overlapping interplay between a rule of focusing (basis for the focused gathering) and a rule of mutuality (basis for the encounter). Thus, the participants’ attention is multiplied and divided between a ‘main track’ of attention organized around a focal point and a ‘disattended track’ (Goffman, 1974, pp. 201–222) over which the participants remain aware of their co-participants, of objects and other phenomena found outside the focal area (Figure 1). It is through this disattended track that, while they follow the main flow of communication at a meeting and continually return to the focal point, a participant is nevertheless able to notice the person in the next seat scratching her nose, or see that it has started to rain.

The existence of an additional activity of mutual surveillance, subordinated to a joint main activity, engages the capacities of the citizen and lay participants both as objects of a diffused control by the co-participants, and also as active subjects of this control over their entourage. As objects of a vague monitoring, they must show that they are sufficiently and correctly involved in the situation. Obviously, unlike the people holding the floor, at the centre of attention, who must show a relatively high level of involvement in the communication process, the participants at the margins of the focal region do not need to show such intensity. They must nevertheless demonstrate the minimal engagement of someone who is ‘still in play’, adopt a certain bearing, show a minimum of ‘interactional tonus’ (Goffman, 1963a, pp. 25–30).

We can therefore see that for the citizen and lay participants, following the action underway on the main track brings a dual issue into play, one that is both cognitive and moral. On the one hand, and at a first degree, they follow to keep up, to catch hold of aspects on which to base their replies. In other words, they follow ‘for themselves’. On the other hand, and at a second degree, following also enables them to show their attention to the co-participants who have included them in their marginal track of attention. By manifesting their involvement through a certain tonus and a certain bearing, they show the others that they are assuming their participant responsibility in a shared ‘social situation’, in other words that they are respecting their side of the bargain.

As mentioned above, the lay citizen participants are not mere objects of a diffuse surveillance. They themselves contribute actively in diffused surveillance, assuming their share of visual control over their co-participants’ level of engagement. We can thus imagine a third issue at stake – as yet of a moral, if no longer cognitive, nature – associated with an attentive attitude in a meeting. If the fact of being present, involved and attentive enables a citizen or a layperson to show the others that she is following, this attitude also arms her with a critique she can make towards those who exhibit less attention. Those who are absent – both literally and figuratively, physically and mentally – those who express a certain lack of interest in what is going on, and those who display a certain nonchalance. Those who yawn, study the floor, or glance at their watch. Although their attempts of speaking are often thwarted by the official order of the activity and its institutional constraints, the citizen participants can nonetheless develop their capacities from within a civil order of the interaction and, through a conspicuous respect of its rules, appear as defenders of the face-to-face interaction and the mutual engagement. They are the crusaders against impoliteness and incivility. They fight against disdain, lack of esteem and disregard for others.

Let us venture a bit further. In the meetings I observed, the citizen participants often showed a surplus of vigilance compared to their expert and elected official partners, and tended to divide their attention more equitably between a main track, where the official and often disconcerting drama takes place, and a marginal track with a more diffused control over what the others are doing. Here, a moment of reception that mobilizes an ‘all signals’ attention (on both tracks) may be followed by a moment of expression, in their case, one of re-presentation during which they try to superimpose the rules of the interaction order over those of the symbolic order of the activity. In other words, they attempt to invert the hierarchy of the attention tracks, to bring the underlying sociability to the forefront. This is because, to the same extent as the official matter, the map displayed on the screen where all eyes are turned, other things going on in the room are part of the situation and worth noting. This may include an elected official speaking loudly on the phone during the meeting, the abrupt disinvolvement of an expert who leaves the room without an explanation, or the negligence of a coordinator who fails to provide enough photocopies. Lay participants perfectly understand this reality that ‘once the exchange of words has brought individuals into a jointly sustained and ratified focus of attention, once, that is, a fire has been built, any visible thing (just as any spoken referent) can be burnt in it’ (Goffman, 1981, p. 37).

Of course, such shifts in focus are of a nature to mark resistance and interrupt the course of things. These swift transitions from the main to secondary channel and from the official to the responsive order take those involved off guard, through the ‘reflexive frame-breaking’ (Goffman, 1983a) they produce. The effect is the same whether they occur in the formal setting of a NC assembly or in everyday conversations where, as Goffman notes (1983a, pp. 12–13), ‘initial speaker can thus find that an unanticipated aspect of what she has said comes to be employed as the reference point for next speaker's utterance’:

• A: Say, did I tell you, I got a new car last week.

• B: Your voice sounds funny; did you do something to your teeth?

Returning to our concertation meetings with this example in mind, we can note that, unlike other instances of ‘frame breaking’ (Goffman, 1974, pp. 345–378) that occur when a citizen participant strays from the ongoing topic and his statements, ideas or proposals fall way off the mark, ‘reflexive frame breaking’ is harder to disqualify and thus often tolerated. Indeed, unlike the former, reflexive frame-breakings are not errors in the grammar of a situation. If they infringe on the rules of the official order of the activity, it is only to respect other rules and activate a different order, the civil order of the interaction which benefits from a certain autonomy and which can be legitimately referred to, as soon as people are gathered in the same place and are invited to interact and follow what is going on. And it is in this sudden ‘switching of grammars’ that we can find a key to the ordinary form of criticism expressed by the citizen participants:

The ecology of the face-to-face interaction brings a third set of situational resources for resistance, available for participants whom the institutional plan of the concertation has placed in a position of weakness. These resources arise from a third feature of the interaction order: the ultimate ideal of equality that underlies human encounters. Among Goffman's readers, Anne W. Rawls is the one to have taken most seriously this dimension of the interaction order, all the while pointing out its critical and democratic implications (Rawls, 1990, pp. 64–65):

Many social situations are spatially arranged and materially equipped in such a way to protect them and those they favour from pure reciprocity and expectations of equality that may arise from the face-to-face encounter. This is the case for the LCID assemblies which, as we know, are arranged so that the front of the room is occupied by the people in charge. This front vs. back asymmetry is often coupled with a high vs. low asymmetry, when the elected officials are seated on a raised platform and the citizens in chairs at floor level. We should note in passing that in some heavily attended meetings when all seats have been taken the last to arrive literally sit on the floor. So although we do have here a ‘centred gathering’, it is one that bends itself to the institution, replicating in the structure of the physical space the structural asymmetry of roles. The participants are invited to join a process, to become involved in an encounter and at the same time, they remain held at bay through the austere scenography of the assembly.

The episode described above is relevant, in that it sheds a new light on this capacity, for non-specialist non-mandated participants, to adapt to the meeting environment proposed to them, to seize opportunities and develop forms of internal resistance. The man in the wheelchair uses his new location at the front of the room to develop a protagonist register. Placed among the ‘VIPs’ (burgomaster, alderwoman, general coordinator), he plays on the equality morals of the interaction order. He also lays claim to a certain freedom of movement and to the possibility to take the floor and address the audience. As he can rely on the scene setting, he can interfere more easily with Claessens's serious presentation, without ever truly being ‘put in his place’.

This favourable and rare location for a citizen is combined with another situational resource, the wheelchair. Here, disability works as a true resource on two different levels. Firstly, we can see that in this situation, the normally unnoticed material world of the meeting room loses the ‘unobtrusiveness’ (Heidegger, 1988) which should enable the citizen participants to sit in the zone attributed to them without any questions or problems. In this case, however, the narrow corridor and the people standing block the wheelchair and the distribution of places for the people in charge and the citizens is no longer taken for granted. This unfortunate event gives the man a ‘good reason’ to place himself in the middle of the unencumbered space up front. This ‘good reason’ appears necessary both for the man to think to install himself at the front and for his intention to be accepted without a word. From this moment on, everything happens as if the organization team which had chosen this tiny classroom, user-unfriendly for the participants in general and especially for the disabled, were saddled with the moral duty to bear the consequences, in this case, expressed in the hyper-exposition of the man in the wheelchair at the front and the multiplication of possibilities to interfere with the coordinator's presentation.

Secondly, we can also consider that the wheelchair, no longer seen in its materiality but in its visibility, thus as ‘stigma’ (Goffman, 1963b), accentuates the man's vulnerability in the eyes of the participants. Under the interaction order, he is owed some special treatment. Some straying from the rules – speaking out of place – are more easily pardonable, even more so when the interactions with this person occur on the front stage of a public event.

We should also notice the evolution of the man's performance and the way the audience receives it. His performance, in fact, commences on a series of false notes. For example, the man borders on ‘insanity of place’, to follow the concept forged by Goffman (1969), when he attempts to involve the burgomaster in a private conversation in the middle of a public meeting, harassing him with questions, and then proposes to teach the coordinator something about the law. At this stage, for his co-participants, he seems to represent the typical ‘gadfly’ found in almost every meeting. We should nevertheless note that although his words and attitude irritate some people in the audience, one lady lends him support and praises his courage. In any case, the incident demonstrates something other than a mere ‘failed representation’. To begin with, the man's statements, although multiple, are always brief and offered ‘in response’. If, in addition to being tactless, he tried to take the floor with a long speech, he probably would be stopped or called to order more explicitly by the officials. Secondly, his protests and the barbs launched at Claessens are moderated by irony and stepping back somewhat from the rebellious role he first announced. His more amenable tone (‘Hey, I was just joking. I like you guys’), the evolution of his attitude, the one of someone who does not take himself too seriously, along with the concern expressed for others (‘my Turkish, Moroccan, and Yugo friends’), earn him the good will of his co-participants. They do not – or no longer – laugh at him but with him. In the end, this man placed accidentally on front stage turns out to be a competent entertainer whose frank speaking, tinged with humour and unusual personality win the people over. The special circumstances for the appearance of the man in the wheelchair, his ability to adapt to a front stage position and his skill at winning over an amused audience produced a subversive effect on the public event in general and, in particular, on the severe performance of the communal authorities.

The sessions of the Local Commissions of Integrated Development that I have attended and observed in Brussels are an archetype of the tightly framed, strictly hierarchized gatherings, the kind that state-generated participation most often comes down to. The great difficulty for lay participants to engage in those public spaces on a straight representational, discursive mode, invites the ethnographer to focus on the variety of their attempts to reposition themselves through more basic ‘gathering competencies’ (Joseph, 1998, p. 48), and on their occasional successes to make these spaces slightly more viable. Michel de Certeau and James C. Scott have laid the groundwork for a series of studies focusing on the question of resistance and the analysis of the ‘weapons of the weak’ in contexts of asymmetrical interaction. In this paper, drawing from Chateauraynaud and Goffman, I have tried to sketch the outlines for a situational, ecological approach to phenomena of internal resistance. This approach was encouraged by the fact that, in the asymmetrical concertation organized under delegative democracy, such ‘weapons of the weak’ are to be found mostly in the flesh and blood of public sociability, in the immediate environment surrounding the actors, in the contingent proceedings of situations, and the ‘affordances’ or ‘footholds’ they provide.

Exploring situations which each time illustrated the founding principles of the ‘interaction order’ as conceptualized by Goffman (focusing, mutuality, equality), I have brought out three sets of ecological limitations to institutional asymmetries in top-down participatory meetings. We have seen (i) how the mere fact of participating in ‘what is going on’, attentively and down to the details, enables a non-specialist to point out and criticize in a convincing manner a problematic aspect of a project presented by a renowned expert; (ii) that it is worthwhile for lay participants to make use of their attention as a both cognitive and moral resource, as ‘showing that they are following’ tends to force the elected officials and specialists to maintain a mutual commitment towards the situation; (iii) lastly, that by re-locating oneself at the front of the meeting room, thus by subverting the order of visibility initially arranged by the officials, a lay participant can dramatize the interaction order in its ideal of equality, and become a protagonist among the protagonists.

Social situations, as structured and hierarchized as they may be on an institutional level, are always subject to contingency in their practical proceedings and outcomes. The approach that has been outlined here helps to improve our understanding of the indeterminacy of asymmetric relationships, through a better comprehension of what this indeterminacy owes to the dynamics and logics proper to the interaction among co-present, mutually visible humans.

Let us be clear: by choosing to stress the interaction level and its subtleties, we are not confining ourselves in a reductionist, radically micro-sociological conception of politics and power (Fuchs, 1989). In that respect, Erving Goffman's interest in the interaction order had nothing to do with Randall Collin's proposition to ‘translate all macrophenomena into combinations of microevents’, and to consider social structures as aggregates and extrapolations of encounters repeated in ‘interaction ritual chains’ (Collins, 1981, p. 262). Goffman himself found such claims ‘uncongenial’ (1983b, p. 8). In his last text, the 1982 ASA Presidential Address, he reminded that the micro level of face-to-face encounters was worth studying closely both for itself – ‘as a substantive domain in its own right’ – and for the ‘interface effects’ created between this ‘interaction order’ and the ‘social structure’ (1983b, pp. 2, 9). For Goffman, interaction and social macrostructure constitute social orders of a different kind that appear and are experienced in situations as ‘loosely coupled’.¹⁴ While he dedicated his life to study the interaction order, Goffman did not accord it primacy,¹⁵ or any direct causality with other domains of social life.

Although the significance of an internal resistance grounded in the interaction order should not be overstated (after all, none of the reported scenes managed to fundamentally endanger the continuation of firmly framed and hierarchized forms of participation in Brussels’ NCs), the irritations they tend to provoke in the settings of delegative democracy deserve further ethnographic observations and descriptions. It is indeed through such frictions among orders of a different kind that status and role asymmetries can sometimes be reduced, and that relationships of power and authority do not always deteriorate into pure control and domination.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.