User:Eleanorg/thesis/draft1.1/groan zone

Adopting the consent-as-collaboration approach poses a similar challenge to the one that consensus decision making does. It challenges us to enter a space in which the outcome has not yet been articulated, let alone decided. It demands that we enter a negotiation without either 'seeking' a yes or merely 'giving' one, but creating something cooperatively. (quote D. Sokolov on contracts vs collaboration) This phase is referred to as the 'Groan Zone' by the Facilitator's Guide for good reason. If the discussion is allowed to continue past the 'clean' outcome of a vote, and people begin negotiation in earnest, things get much more difficult.

It is necessary to draw a distinction at this point between consent-as-collaboration, and consensus decision making. In consensus, the aim is to exit this zone with an outcome agreeable, if not ideal, to everybody. For feminists, by contrast, the aim of consent is to avoid unwanted outcomes - even at the cost of indecision and inaction. ("Maybe also means no" - Holsomback workshop materials.) Consent, and especially consent-as-collaboration, demand an exceptionally high tolerance for the Groan Zone, with no guarantee of agreement at the end.

As Millar (2008) says, our attachment to perfunctory and problematic grammars of consent comes from the imperative for "commerce to thrive". By contrast, consent-as-collaboration demands an open space in which outcomes are not pretedermined; in which no eventual "deal" is guaranteed. We shouldn't underestimate the demand made by this approach. Resistance to the spectre of indecision and inaction that it raises is strong. This was illustrated to me by a man I met once on the street, who rebuked me for calling him out on his sexist harrassment. If it weren't for behaviour like his, he claimed, human reproduction would cease. I owed my life, literally, to a cultural disregard for consent. This sentiment is echoed less baldly by the comments heard by Holsomback (2013) in her consent workshops: "that's not something I want to bring up, it kills the mood." Holsomback's reply, typical of the 'consent is sexy' approach, is telling: "I'm like, 'no it doesn't, raping someone will kill the mood'" (ibid).

When I asked Clare Cochrane (2013) what connection (if any) she sees between her work as a consensus facilitator and her feminist work on consent, she said, "it's about making space. ...In all the things I do, what I'm trying to do is make space for dialogue." Why, I asked, is 'making space' so important? "For consent and for consensus, when you've got a safe and held space, you can let go of outcomes." I countered that it is precisely its inefficiency in producing outcomes that is the chief criticism levelled against both consensus, and feminist demands for consent. She replied that not only is risking the outcome better than risking coercion, but "if you let go of outcomes and you can really be in a process (in either consensus or in a consent situation), then actually [the outcome] is more beautiful" (ibid).

Holsomback and Cochrane employ elegant and irresistible paradoxes: avoiding 'killing the mood' with non-consent kills the mood; letting go of outcomes delivers better outcomes. This may be true in some contexts. But the problem with this approach is that consent can "kill the mood". In Kerney's terms, "chaos and confusion" are "a natural integral part of the decision making process". And not only can a genuinely consensual discussion "kill" the elusive "mood", it may well rule out your desired outcome - or any outcome. I think glossing over these facts misses a valuable opportunity. By stressing that consent-as-collaboration produces better outcomes, we are co-opted by the old instrumentalism which stops us appreciating that a tolerance for the Groan Zone, and a commitment to "space for dialogue", may themselves be the winning features of feminist consent.

Any system that encodes consent-as-collaboration must therefore encode a tolerance for difference, indecision, and inaction. This poses a problem if we propose applying such a decision-making process to publication design - which, by its nature, involves the elimination of most of the options ("sea of content") to produce a singular outcome (edited "best-of"). For example, the Be The Media collective must decide which RSS feeds to pull in, and how to arrange their content in the limited space of a webpage. This imperative for decision is intensified in print, on a paper page which cannot avoid editorial decisions though dynamically served content, overlays or user queries. The withering phrase "design by committee" is traditionally levelled against those processes which fail to understand that indecision and compromise do not work in this context. But if we understand consent as a process of dialogue, then to 'agree to disagree' is a valid outcome. To agree to do nothing, or to do nothing now, or to continue talking - all of these are, in fact, decisions. Could these decisions count as such in the context of publication design, though? 'Agreeing to disagree' or 'deciding not to decide' is a rich ethical approach; could it be an aesthetic one too?