Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform1 / Edited by Okwui Enwezor; Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Octavio Zaya

Between October 9 – 30, Documenta11 and the House of World Cultures, Berlin in association with the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, will inaugurate an international symposium: Democracy Unrealized in Berlin that will bring to conclusion the series which opened in Vienna March 15. Democracy Unrealized is the first in a five-part series of public debates, symposia, film presentations, lectures, and art exhibition organized within the framework of Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany. Recently democracy has been the watchword for a range of disparate, yet apparently convergent contestations and negotiations within the global order. Democracy Unrealized, detailing the results of Platform1, the first of four conferences held in conjunction with Documenta 11, presents a context within which the interpretive and conceptual regimes surrounding democracy can be reargued against the claims of a neoliberal ideology. From this globalist viewpoint, democracy described as an unfinished project requires no structural changes, for it is complete in all its foundational features, requiring only small technical adjustments and minor tinkering. This is how the main Western democracies have seen themselves--at best as "incomplete implementations" of equality and justice, rather than as limited, flawed, dead-ended, and problematic. In response to this presumption, this book proceeds from the idea that realizing democracy is partly a matter of bringing to light what liberal democracy has promised but failed to deliver. The emphasis here is on the potential for revision, a reevaluation of values, and the extension and creative transformation necessary to keep in step with 21st-century globalizing processes. This is democracy as an ever open, essentially unfinishable project that in principle has fallen short of its ideals. -------------Contributors: Arquitectos Sin Fronteras, Upendra Baxi, Homi K. Bhabha, Akeel Bilgrami, Stefano Boeri/Multiplicity, Iain Chambers, Zhiyuan Cui, Manuel De Landa, Demokratische Offensive, Enrique Dussel, Boris Groys, Stuart Hall, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Cornelia Klinger, Ernesto Laclau, Oliver Marchart, Chantal Mouffe, Harbans Mukhia, Sean Nazerali, Bhikhu Parekh, Mark Potok, Florian Schneider/kein Mensch ist illegal, Wole Soyinka, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ruth Wodak und Slavoj Žižek.

English