Paper short abstract:

Paradoxical, paratheatrical, parapolitical -- the multifacted inflections of the prefix para serves as the point of departure for this paper, which examines how a participatory art game design enabled a form of "parapolitics" to occur on a former steelworks site in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Paper long abstract:

Paramilitary, paramedic, parafiction, parapolitics -- the multifacted inflections of the prefix para serves as the point of departure for this paper, which examines how a participatory art game design enabled a form of "parapolitics" to occur on a former steelworks site in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. In my paper, I draw upon my ethnographic experience as a game player, literature in political science on citizenship, as well as the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ranciere, to argue that the game design generated a distinct "playing space" with temporal and spatial confines that was nonetheless continually breached through the act of playing. This paradox of the paratheatrical (Wilshire) within the game enabled another form of urban citizenship to be practiced by players—an alternative polis so to speak, beside or beyond that of the state—that challenged normative approaches to the urban development of the site. Drawing upon Arendt, I show how this alternative polis was constructed through forms of trust and contract via a visible and verbal accounting to one another, a form of accountability and mode of governance irreducible and distinct from Foucauldian notions of the biopolitical or bureaucratic oversight through which the state often exercises forms of control. As such, this paper offers a provocative angle to the discussion of offshore citizenship within Europe, showing how marginal zones might be generated not merely at its borders but also within leftover, devalued space in the heart of Europe.