Reimagining democracy as playful co-becoming

In this paper, I explore the potential for playful democratic encounters between humans and more-than-humans to cultivate new democratic imaginaries. Assuming that democracy has no ‘fixed core’ (Felicetti, 2021) but that it must rather be incessantly reimagined (Rosanvallon, 2018), I argue that we need to cultivate a more experimental orientation ‘aimed at re-generating democracy’ (Schlosser et al., 2019, p. 28).

I draw on a series of design experiments where humans have encountered a range of more more-than-human entities, in forms such as physical materials, plants and larger landscapes. Through these experiments, similar to democratic interruptions (Asenbaum, 2023, p. 5), participants have explored and challenged assumptions about ‘human rationality and mastery over nature’ (Asenbaum et al., 2023, p. 5). The affective, bodily encounters between humans and more-than-humans nurtures an affective attunement, the kind of sensitivity that is required for us to live well together (Ingold, 2021, p. 3) as well as a more ‘generous ethos of engagement’ (Connolly, 2005, p. 31).

The experiments does not point to any universal solutions, but rather to ‘minor gestures’ (Manning, 2016) and local, temporary instantiations, where new democratic practices can be prefigured (Carroll et al., 2019; Piccardi et al., 2022). Existing conventions about who participates how are destabilized, when the ‘myth of disembodied rationality’ (Machin, 2022, p. 14) is punctured. Through these vibrant assemblages and emergent more-than-human webs of relations, new conceptions of democracy may shimmer at the edge of our grasp. Rather than constituted around modern individuals, a relational ontology (Escobar, 2018, 2020) is surfacing, where democracy can be reinterpreted as incessant processes of co-becoming (Country et al., 2015; Humphris et al., 2024; Suchet-Pearson et al., 2013) between both humans and more-than-humans.