“We live in a time in which abstraction, as a programmatic condition of modernist economies, has taken on an overwhelming and oceanic darkness. The violent terms of the debt economy have made finance the sole determination of who and where we are, even before we arrive. But strangely, at the core of democracy there is another, perhaps inverted, aspiration of abstraction: the idea of the empty room of politics. This is a nonspecific space where nothing exists other than agonism. Known as the parliament, the forum, the congress hall, it is a place that demands to be filled with forms—with anything that can be said within the conditions of that room. From that place, ideas about how history could change or how subjectivity could reform itself would become thinkable.”
Doug Ashford, 2013