In Nato Thompson’s essay, Participation and Spectacle: Where are We Now in Living as Form, he discussions Ranciére’s essay, “The Uses of Democracy” from 1992. He explains that “Ranciére notes that participation in what we normally refer to as democratic regimes is usually reduced to a question of filling up the spaces left empty by power.”
While Thompson further summarizes Ranciére, “Genuine participation […] is somthing different: the invention of an ‘unpredicatble subject’ who momentarily occupies the street, the factory, or the museum — rather than a fixed space of allocated participation whose count-power is dependent on the dominant order.”