INTERSTICES 08 5

Introduction: 
Consensus versus Disagreement

A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul 

Post-millennium consensus politics are, to French philosopher Jacques Rancière, 
everything but a model of “social peace”. On the contrary, they suppress the 
struggle constitutive of the political (la politique), destroying the space of the  
political (le politique), and producing various forms of identitarianism, and gloom, 
as their flip side. Consensus politics re-established racism and xenophobia  
(Rancière, 2000: 119). Consensus reduces people to populations, and rights to 
facts, and incessantly works to fill in the gaps between things (2006: 6), denying 
what makes them different. This filling-in and ironing-out is also the concern 
of the police, which is, for Rancière, not identical with the uniformed arm of the 
State executive but a

partition of the sensible characterized by the absence of a void or a 
supplement: society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes 
of action, in places where these occupations are exercised, in modes 
of being corresponding to these occupations and these places. In this 
fittingness of functions, places, and ways of being, there is no place 
for a void (2001: Thesis 7).

In the space of the political, the police and the political confront each other as  
regimes of visibility, which strive to police the current distribution of the sensible  
or, respectively, to disrupt and re-partition it.1 Their confrontation and conflict is a 
disagreement (mésentente) about what it means to speak, and over the distribution  
of the sensible that delimits what can be said, and determines the relationship  
between seeing, hearing, doing, feeling, making and thinking: “Political  
litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it 
from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance ... Politics is 
first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable” (Rancière, 
2001: Thesis 7). Politics is about altering the visibilities of places and “abilities of 
the body in those places, … the partition of private and public spaces, … the very 
configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to what can be said 
about it” (2003: S5). Art and architecture can have a part in politics (certainly,  
they are not apolitical), but correspondences between aesthetic and political  
virtue are difficult to ascertain. There are no criteria “for establishing an appropriate  
correlation between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics” (2004a: 
61). Aesthetics has its own politics of changing perceptions and asserting invisible  
rights: for instance, the right not only to labour and suffer, but also to observe or 
take part in a spectacle. And, “to read what was never written” (Hofmannsthal 
in Benjamin, 2002: 416). 

As this issue of Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts goes to print, 
stages being set up – and up-set – in Aotearoa/New Zealand highlight this  
predicament. On 15 October 2007, abc NEWS reported on “the first [anti-terrorism  
raids] under New Zealand’s tough new anti-terrorism laws” (2007, 15 Oct). The 

Thanks to Julia Gatley, Ross 
Jenner, and Moana Nepia for 
peer-review.

1. Rancière calls the “distribution  
of the sensible the system 
of self-evident facts of sense  
perception, that simultaneously  
discloses the existence of some-
thing in common, and the delimi-
tations that define the respective  
parts and positions within it. 
A distribution of the sensible, 
therefore, establishes at one 
and the same time something 
common that is shared, and ex-
clusive parts … based on a dis-
tribution of spaces, times and 
forms of activity that determine  
the very manner in which  
something in common lends  
itself to participation, and in the 
way in which various individuals 
have a part in this distribution” 
(Rancière, 2004a:12).



INTERSTICES 08

 

5

same day, New Zealand’s TV3 news broadcast The “Terror” Plot about the arrest  
of 17 activists. The report openend with 2005 footage of Māori activist Tama 
Iti challenging members of the Waitangi Tribunal before the beginning of the  
hearings at Tauarau Marae (Ruatoki, Tuhoe; TV3, 2007).2 Iri Akarana-Rewi said 
of this event, that it took Māori culture, which had become “catalogued and  
contained on performance stages”, into the valleys, roads and streets as “a  
functioning part of everyday life” (Indigimedia, 2005). According to Iti, the  
performance, of which the challenge was a part, sought to make the Tribunal 
“feel the heat and smoke, and Tuhoe outrage and disgust at the way we have 
been treated for 200 years” (Indigimedia, 2005).3 “Remembered most for his  
outrageous protests” (TV3, 2007), Iti honed his theatrical sensibilities in  
The Tempest, a collaboration with the Mau dance troupe, in early 2007 – at a time 
when Professor Paul Moon found interest in the Treaty of Waitangi at a dangerous  
low. Now on remand in Mt Eden Prison, Iti explores further the “delicate  
interstices of constitutional law” (Jackson, 1999).

Writing, itself, is partitioned by a blurring and contested interstice. Through  
disagreement, politics and writing can open up new ways of perceiving. The 
printed word has a mobility that frees the “orphan letter” to wander aimlessly 
around, to talk to anyone, to undermine the sensible co-ordinates of a current 
aesthetic regime (Rancière, 2004b: 14). As an artistic practice, writing intervenes 
in the “general distribution of ways of doing and making, as well as in the  
relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (2004a: 
13). Printed text stages a theatrical “partition of identities, activities and  
spaces”, exhibiting fantasies capable of disturbing the status quo to “a community  
of readers … formed only by the random circulation of the written word” (14). 
However, as in politics, where those who previously had no-part will inevitably 
take part in Rancière’s police (once they succeed in making themselves heard and 
becoming a part of society), writing can institutionalise, legitimise and control 
perception. However tentative, written words make permanent a new distribution  
of the sensible. This tension is a galvanizing and productive one. Interstices, as an 
academic journal (and particularly in its refereed section), is implicated in this 
force field. We invite readers to disagree, and thereby be part of this tension (and 
perhaps contribute to the next issue).

Michael Ostwald’s “Dissent and Dissensus: Politics and Labour in the Architecture  
of Brodsky and Utkin”, which opens this issue, is about the impact that blurring  
and changing lines between police and politics have made on the reception and 
critique of two representatives of the Russian paper architecture movement:  
Alexander Brodsky and Illya Utkin. Their work became internationally known in the 
wake of glasnost, and was immediately perceived as a form of rebellion against the 
authoritarian Soviet state. Ostwald questions the ways in which it was constituted  
as an aesthetic affront to the communist state, and investigates the nature of 
Brodsky and Utkin’s defiance. In the force field between architectural aesthetics 
and politics, was their position one of juridical opposition (dissent), or a political  
dispute (dissensus)? Only the latter would make their practice one of Rancièrian  
disagreement proper. When can disagreement even take place? In “Travel  
in Tropical Islands – Enemies Co-existing in Peace”, Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul  
explores the potential for creative conflict at the Tropical Islands Resort at Brand, 
Germany. Set in the ruined surrounds of a former Soviet military base in the 
Brandenburg province, it now stages a ‘One-world-village’, with a Samoan Fale 

2. For information about the  
Waitangi Tribnal and the Ure- 
wera Hearing, see http://www.
wait angi-tribunal.gov t .nz / in-
quiries/teurerewa_inq/

3. Iti was subsequently convicted  
on two charges, which were 
later overturned by the Court 
of Appeal (TV3, 2007).



INTERSTICES 08INTERSTICES 08 7

in the centre of a Tropical Village that conjures up dreams of Pacific life styles. Do  
visitors and operators recognize historical and current conflicts in the politics of display 
between locals and foreigners, former colonial power and colony?

Carl Douglas’ “Barricades and Boulevards: Material transformations of Paris, 1795-1871” 
is about a clearly conflictual and tumultuous series of configurations. Spatial operations  
of barricading effected a redistribution of the sensible as they transformed Paris in  
different ways. The city’s materials, spaces and activities are not a neutral surface. Rather,  
they make the city what it is, prescribe who inhabits which parts, and how. Barricades 
and boulevards are provisional metaphors for politics and police, for those who have  
no-part and those who want to control what they have. In Haussmann’s Paris, middle-class  
individuals and the mob were allocated different spaces. In Australian refugee camps, 
says Hélène Frichot in “Striving for a Coming Community and the Question of a Life”, 
architectural practices disregard inmates’ personal characteristics to create artificial, 
categorical groupings. Architecture can augment, as well as diminish, life in geopolitical  
conflicts, and Frichot argues for an ethico-aesthetic striving toward a coming  
community, a future people and a life, to suggest modes of acting collectively, beyond 
the isolated point of view of individuals who believe that what they do can make no  
difference. Frichot draws on concepts by Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Félix  
Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot to outline alternatives to a spatial  
organization where refugees, strangers and others are segregated in the midst of a  
global body politic that is increasingly fragmented.

Leonhard Emmerling engages with a politics of recognition that is not identity politics, 
is even explicitly opposed to it. In “PLZKLME”, he stages disagreements between him 
and himself. Starting with a quote by bell hooks, he reflects on the relationship between  
the global art business and identity-art. To Emmerling, the art business perpetuates 
the assimilation, instrumentalisation, incapacitation and paternalism that Western  
colonisation has inflicted on the rest of the world. In identity-art, it does so by providing  
a stage for the restitution of identity, as compensation for that which is, in reality,  
denied: redress of injustices, equal rights and the realisation of an undamaged life. A 
reticence that Emmerling finds lacking in identity-art, with its eagerness to expose and 
demonstrate, made Linda Walker and Stephen Loo consider the role of writing in, “And 
the open bridge: labour, enchantment, There Forever“, their reflections on a 2007 Ephemeral  
Public Art Project in Adelaide. Explorations of Rancière’s writings are interwoven 
with poetical vignettes describing the events, spaces and objects of this project. No  
community is taken for granted, the role of the political only tentatively circumscribed, 
as writing itself is tested to see how much it “conceals itself in the flesh”, and how much 
it “openly reveals itself as the disembodied condition of any glorious flesh” (Rancière, 
2004a: 60). In any event, writing applies a different language to the languages of the 
unwritten, and may even stand in the way of reading what was never written.

In the non-refereed section of Interstices 08, contributors take issue with architects 
and academics, juries and judging and books and buildings. The first two papers are 
from, and about, East Asia. Hong-Chi Shiau’s, “The Glamorous, but Doomed, Bamboo  
Forest” narrates Tsai-Ho Cheng’s competition winning memorial project to the victims 
of the 1999 earthquake in Taiwan. Shiau reveals misalignment between intellectual and 
local desires and interpretations, and shows how a lack of consultation with locals led 
to the project’s failure. Tom Daniell, in “The Letter of the Law”, explains how Tokyo’s  
volumetric building regulations shape an unusual skyline of steeply angled roofs.  
Daniell shows how, in the pursuit of interesting urban form, it is possible to manipulate 
the regulations to good effect. 



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INTERSTICES 08 7

Bill McKay, in “A Short Venting of the Spleen on the Subject of the Architect and 
Science”, reflects upon what scientists have learnt about spherical planets and 
gravitational forces over the last 500 years, and wonders why these discoveries  
have not filtered through into architectural thinking, drawing and practice. In 
“The Myth of the Nation”, Andrew Leach targets New Zealand’s architectural  
profession, and suggests that local architects embrace an overly simplistic  
understanding of this country’s architectural history. Celebrating “exquisite 
apartness” and myths about New Zealand-ness, they ignore recent scholarship 
and alternative possibilities. Similarly, Paul Walker finds a lack of awareness in 
Architecture Inspired by New Zealand (2006), a book on houses in New Zealand 
landscapes, pointing to naivety in its conceptualization, and reliance upon  
clichés in its realization. In contrast, Peggy Deamer’s re-creation and analysis 
of “Dick Toy’s Last Lecture”, presented during the 2007 Auckland Architecture  
Week, demonstrates the desired levels of both complexity and nuance.  
Following, Julia Gatley, in “New Measures for Other Moderns”, navigates  
a path between historiography and pedagogy, reflecting upon the past,  
present, future and historiographical implications of the Measured Drawing 
course at the University of Auckland. 

Kerstin Thompson Architects and Architecture Workshop’s competition entry 
for the Waitangi Precinct on Wellington’s waterfront (2005) is a scheme that  
warrants a more substantial place in the published record than it has been given 
to date, the local contributors having earned their place in the international field 
of entrants. Finally, Tim Adams’ translation of Daniel Payot’s “Le Jugement de 
l’Architecture” (“The Judgement of Architecture”), is concerned with criticism in 
the broadest sense, and architectural criticism in particular. One of Payot’s key 
points is that all criticism is ultimately positive. 

 
References 

abc NEWS. (2007, 15 Oct). Anti-terror raids in NZ. Retrieved  October 28, 2007, from http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc_VAf5Fb20 

Benjamin, W. (2002). The Arcades Project (H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Cambridge 
(Mass.): Harvard University Press.

Indigimedia. (2005, 19 Jan). The Ruatoki valley blazes as Tuhoe stands tall. Retrieved October 
28, 2007, from http://indymedia.org.nz/feature/display/28216/index.php

Jackson, M. (1999, 30 September 1999). Looking In. Paper presented at the Public Service 
Senior Management Conference “Weaving the Future”, Te Papa, Wellington.

Rancière, J. (2000). Dissenting Words. A Conversation With Jacques Rancière. diacritics, 
30(2), 113-126.

Rancière, J. (2001). Ten Theses on Politics. Theory & Event, 5(3).

Rancière, J. (2003). Comment and Responses. Theory & Event, 6(4).

Rancière, J. (2004a). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (G. Rockhill, 
Trans.). London: Continuum.

Rancière, J. (2004b). The Politics of Literature. SubStance, 33(1), 10-24.

Rancière, J. (2006). The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics. Critical Horizons, 7(1), 1-20.

TV3, N. Z. (2007). The “Terror” Plot. Retrieved October 28, 2007, from http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Zj2IxDfcnnM