Brawl in the Parliament of Things: Participation, conflict and the representation of non-human actors.

Whereas most democratic theory on participation reveals an uneasy attitude to passion and conflicts, practices of participatory democracy are often initiated and intensified by conflict and opposition. Moments of open conflict emphasize and explicate stakes, stirring up the emotions and passions necessary to fuel political engagement and stimulate collective action. But what to do with the interests of those non-human actors/actants who are not themselves activated by emotions? In environmental conflicts, participation by non-human actors affected or involved in the process sits uneasily with classical procedures of representative participation. In this paper, we argue that the representation of non-human actors is often conceived in de-sensitized, emotionless, scientific, juridical forms, as an ‘external factor’ imposing its rules as boundaries on the participatory process. When looking at concrete conflicts in participatory processes however, we can observe other ways of non-human representation which are more embodied, affective, lived and which open up perspectives towards democracy as co-creative processes in which non-human actors are actively involved with and through the bodies of human participants in the production of our lifeworld. We will build up this argument based on case studies in Brussels and Antwerp.