Agonistics

Just a few remarks about Chantal Mouffe's Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013). This is a thin book in which she extends previous arguments to the issue of a multipolar world and devotes more space to discussing the role of art in hegemonic struggles. I won't repeat my criticism of what I see as some of the major shortcomings of her approach. Instead, I will just briefly mention two things I found interesting, namely her criticisms of Arendt and Badiou. I'll end with a remark on her claim that antagonism is inescapable and why I find it problematic.

First, she distinguishes her own agonistic approach from that of Arendt: “In my view, the main problem with the Arendtian understanding of ‘agonism’ is that... it is an ‘agonism without antagonism’” (p. 9f). Arend stresses the element of contention and struggle in her view of the public, but continues to believe in the possibility and desirability of consensus. Therefore “Arendt ends up, like Habermas, envisaging the public space as a space where consensus can be reached” (p. 10). Against those, like Benhabib, who see Arendt and Habermas as exponents for two contrasting models of the public, Mouffe thus claims that Arendt's “pluralism is not fundamentally different from that of Habermas” (p. 10). Although she stresses struggle more than logical argumentation, “neither Arendt nor Habermas is able to acknowledge the hegemonic nature of every form of consensus” (p. 11).

She then turns to thinkers inspired by Arendt, such as Bonnie Honig. Here her criticism changes tack. Honig isn't criticized so much for consensus-orientation as for focusing too much on contestation around identities, forgetting “the necessity not only of challenging what exists but also of constructing new articulations and new institutions” (p. 11). “The main shortcoming of the agonistic approaches influenced by Arendt and Nietzsche is that, because their main focus is on the fight against closure, they are unable to grasp the nature of the hegemonic struggle. Their celebration of a politics of disturbance ignores the other side of such struggle: the establishment of a chain of equivalence among democratic demands and the construction of an alternative political hegemony” (p. 14). Acknowledging that antagonism is ineradicable “requires that we do not elude the moment of decision, and this will necessarily imply some form of closure. It might be that an ethnical discourse can avoid this moment, but a political one certainly cannot” (p. 15). Here I recall her criticism of Occupy activists for focusing too much on disruption, the mere challenging of status quo, and too little on constructive engagement with the political system.

Her criticism of Badiou is that he makes truth a category of the political sphere. He asserts the politics produced by subjects defined by their particular relation to a truth event. “The decision of a subject to remain faithful to an event is what produces a truth” (p. 16). She claims that this emphasis on fidelity privileges an ethical perspective on politics, undermining the political as such. The ethics of unconditional truth is a odds with politics, since the latter deals with the conditional: a hegemonic order is always contestable and “should never be justified as dictated by a higher order and presented as the only legitimate one” (p. 17). Later in the book she also criticizes Badiou for his adherence to communism or the “communist hypothesis”, which she claims connotes an anti-political vision of a society without antagonism (p. 82f).

A few comments. Is this criticism fair? To start with Badiou, fidelity to a truth can be politically important without necessarily leading to the legitimation of order. How about fidelity to the truth of radical democracy, or to some cause such as helping refugees or the homeless? Implicit in her criticism that fidelity implies an "ethical" perspective is the charge that it denies the essentially agonistic quality of politics and hence promotes depoliticization. But this is not convincing: to a large extent it is fidelity of this sort that propels and constitutes political action. Without it, much political action would simply die. Nothing in an ethical perspective per se is inimical to struggle or antagonism. Mouffe's own stress on the role of emotions in political struggles also strongly suggests that something like fidelity to the "truth" embodied in the central nodal points or empty signifiers that serve to unify discourses are constitutive of political struggle. Her defense here would probably be that the "ethical", even where it promotes struggle, projects a possible end-state of restored peace where the political would again be occluded. In other words, her defense would be that fidelity to truth by necessity implies the other great error Badiou commits, namely embracing an anti-political vision of a society without antagonism.

Why is this an error, according to Mouffe? Behind this, of course, lies her idea of antagonism as an inescapable dimension of the political - a dimension so important that she rejects not only all those theories that "post-politically" deny or cover up conflicts in the present but also all utopian visions of a future end to antagonism. This is one of her central ideas. But it's also a very ambiguous idea. While insisting on inescapable antagonism may sound very radical, it also, paradoxically, has very un-radical implications. To put it harshly, insisting on inescapable antagonism is reactionary in the same sense that the realist school of international relations or the idea of a homo oeconomicus driven only by self-interest are reactionary. These ideas all dogmatically assert “war” as an ahistorical constant. Again and again, Mouffe rejects theoretical opponents by simply referring to their supposed neglect of the ineradicable antagonism, but she never explains why antagonism must be a constant. Her idea is ahistorical since it neglects the fact that antagonism too is a historical product - something that is shaped by history and that varies depending on the overall historical or societal situation. A possible defense might be that the assumption of antagonism is "ontological" and hence independent of "ontic" or merely historical circumstance. But the drawback of positing antagonism as ontologically given is that it becomes inexplicable and hence only possible to assert dogmatically. I find it hugely problematic that this dogmatic assertion is used by her as the basis for her strictures on activists and radical intellectuals, who are told to either adhere to her logic - strive for hegemony, but give up your utopias - or face the charge of being "post-political".

A word, finally, on the utopia of consensus. I can't help finding Mouffe's understanding of consensus crude. For instance, she writes that “those who foster the creation of agonistic public spaces will conceive of critical art in a very different way than those whose aim is the creation of consensus” (p. 92). But to Arendt and to critical theorists, consensus is aimed at through critique. How different is that, in practice, from what Mouffe wants to do? She might reply, of course, that her aim is a hegemony that is self-aware of its merely hegemonic and hence transitory nature. But such an approach fails to account for the various Utopias that protesters have aimed at for millennia. Can she declare them all wrong? Isn’t it rather that Utopia always exists as a transcendental element, which is never fully realized but which informs all radical action and serves as a regulative idea (as in the case with Karatani's "X" or even Habermas’s ideal speech situation) which is always presupposed in critique for critique to be effective and persuasive? If so, then Utopia is needed for politically efficatious action. This Utopia doesn't need to to be spelled out or even be given much substantial content. As Bloch pointed out, it exists in rudimentary fashion whenever people feel that "something is missing" (etwas fehlt). In communicative action, the content of a future consensus can never be fixed or stated in advance. Yet even as an insubstantial ideal, it spurs people to engage in protests and criticism, simply because they cannot rest content with letting prevailing viewpoints or opinions dominate society. What activists or protesters long for is usually not just another round of hegemonic struggle, but a better world that is supposed to be the result of that struggle. That longing isn't an obstacle to the struggle, but something that spurs it on. If that is so, then isn't it Mouffe's own strictures on Utopia - rather than the "post-political" striving for consensus - that risk undermining the political? 

Chris Bracey

What is the relation between the public sphere and public space?

Right now I'm trying to put together a theoretical piece for a presentation next week. It's going to be about the relation between the public sphere and public space.

Here's a brief summary of part of what I'm going to say.

Many have suggested that the relation between the two concepts is insufficiently researched. Here I would like to 1) suggest two reasons why this might be so, 2) propose a rather simple model that might clarify the relation, and 3) briefly discuss some conclusions that might be drawn. In particular, since some theorists seem to be suggesting that the idea of public space is more suited to a radical politics open to the excluded or disadvantaged than that of the public sphere, I will try to evaluate that claim and indicate in what ways it might hold true.


1. Why the confusion?

To begin with, the public sphere is not at all an un-spatial concept. Habermas cannot be accused of neglecting the physical places or mediums in which the public sphere has developed - private homes, for instance, or coffeehouses, salons, assemblies, street, theatres, or newspapers. What is true is that the public sphere is not necessarily linked to any particular place or medium. It is also true that the relation to space has become further blurred by so-called globalization (and the growth of "diasporic public spheres", "transnational public spheres", "global public sphere moments" etc). The indeterminate relation to space is, I suggest, one important reason for the confusion regarding the relation between the concepts of the public sphere and public space.

To at least begin to clarify the confusion, I will argue as follows. Although not necessarily linked to any particular physical space, the public sphere can surely be described as a social space - a particular kind of social space characterized by political deliberation about common affairs. Using a concept of space that is socially rather than physically defined should be fine. As I will show, concepts of public space are in fact also usually socially defined.

A second reason for confusion is that there are two kinds of theories of public space. Both use the term "public space" but they do so in opposite ways.

On the one hand, there are theorists of urban sociability like Erwin Goffman, Georg Simmel, Richard Sennett, Lynn Lofland, or Jane Jacobs. What they have in common is that they all link ”publicness” to concrete urban space. But there is no real link to the public sphere, to politics. What matters is that people are visible to each other, not that they talk or discuss. What they research is how strangers behave when they share a space where they are mutually visible to each other. What sustains "publicness" is the system of norms that regulates this interaction. Goffman's "civil inattention" is a well-known example of this norm-guided behavoir. Jane Jacob's Hudson Street "ballet" is another example. The formal etiquette between strangers which Sennett sees as so crucial to the publicness of the ancient régime is a third.

On the other hand, there are scholars like Jacques Rancière, Don Mitchell or Bruce d'Arcus, whose main interest is in "dissent public space" (this is d'Arcus' term). I've already discussed their idea of public space in a previous blog entry ("Public Space and Public Sphere: Notes on Reading Don Mitchell"). Common to them is that they see publicness as arising through acts that manifest or visibilize dissent. If the theorists of urban sociability see publicness are maintained by an intricate system of norms, the theorists of dissent see it as erupting when the norms are disrupted.

The former group of scholars associate public space with norms of bracketing - or systematically disregarding - differences in status among people. Where all are strangers, there is no high or low. We refrain for inquiring to deeply into the background of the strangers we meet. By doing so, we maintain the semblance that everyone is equal. The second group of scholars, by contrast, associate publicness with un-bracketing, with the "uncivil" taking or occupation of place where injustice is visibilized. Rather than bracketing marginalization, oppression or status differences, they are brought out into the open.


2. Contention and bracketing: a model

A solution requires that we start, not from the dichotomy of "sphere" and "space", but by investigating two dimensions of "publicness" which I believe are more fundamental.

As I argue in "Public Space in Recent Japanese Political Thought and Activism: From the Rivers and Lakes to Miyashita Park" (forthcoming in Japanese Studies 31:3, December 2011), two dimensions are constitutive of the public in classical theorists like Habermas and Arendt: verbal contestation and the bracketing of dependencies and inequalities in wealth and status. Typically, deliberations in the public sphere rest on the presence of both of these two dimensions. Deliberation can be seen as a form of communication in which contestation is moderated by the norms of bracketing, which are necessary in order to create a semblance of equality among the participants. Bracketing is thus ambivalent: it is thanks to bracketing that egalitarian arenas can be created, but it also prevents real inequalities in wealth, status and power from being openly thematized and challenged.

To summarise, the public is not only a realm of free and open communication or debate, but also an arena in which important parts of social life are systematically bracketed in order to create a semblance of equality among participants. This means that the public – against the commonsensical view – must be viewed not only as an arena of debate and communication. It is also constituted by a certain silence, a ‘bracketing’ that is needed to prevent it from dissolving back into the ‘real’ world.

Interestingly, challenges to the exclusivity of the mainstream public sphere have come from two directions, one emphasizing more thoroughgoing forms of bracketing (Karatani Kôjin's defence, in Transcritique, of bracketing as crucial to a Kantian public can be seen as one version of this) and another emphasizing more unrestrained forms of contestation (here a good example is Nancy Fraser's subaltern counterpublics and her advocacy of "unbracketing").

An important point here, which I feel it is necessary to stress in order to grasp the function of bracketing more fully, is that there are multiple public with alternative norms of bracketing. Bracketing thus openates also in the subaltern counterpublics. There's a sociological classic, The Hobo (by Nels Anderson), that provides a wonderful insight into the camps (or "jungles") of the homeless people in early 20th century America. Just as the Simmelian salons or Habermasian coffeehouses, these were egalitarian and "democratic" arenas. People exchanged information and told stories over the fire. But they never inquired too deeply into a person's name or previous life. Just as in the salons and coffee houses, they bracketed each other's background.

Let us now try relating the various theories of public space and public sphere to these two dimension.

The "classical" theories of the "public sphere" (or "public realm") are found in the upper right quadrant, i.e. they are theories that stress both bracketing and contention. Grasped from its spatial aspect, we might call it "space for deliberation".

We can also observe that the most influential theories stressing "public space" fall into two distinct groups, which have very little in common.

So we see: the classical theories are not radically divorced from the theories of public space. They share the stress on dimensions such as bracketing or contestation. Hence the first difficulty of separating and counterposing "public sphere" and "public space" in a clearcut fashion.

The second difficulty stems from the fact that theories of public space are not uniform. "Public space" is a catchword for very heterogeneous conceptions. These tend to fall into two camps, which are mutually more opposed to each other than either are to the theories of the "public sphere".

To summarize: the reason that the relation between public sphere and public space is so hard to clarify is that the public sphere arises in the convergence of bracketing and contestation, i.e. that it requires a mixture of both elements. Conceptions of public space arrange themselves in two compartments on either side of this.


3. Some consequences

Theories of public sphere have been criticized for being exclusive, hierarchical, and too restrictive. Some - most explicitly Don Mitchell - seem to propose "public space" as a more radical notion, more open to the excluded. What conclusions can we draw?

Well, public space theory exists in two forms which both "radicalize" certain aspects of the "public sphere". Some point to spaces that provide refuge from "real" social status, others to spaces for contesting and renegotiating the order.

At whichever of these two senses of public space one looks, one finds a political significance geared to those excluded from or disadvantaged in the politics of the public sphere. Are we then entitled to conclude that "public space" is more suited to be the focal point of a radical politics than the "public sphere"? The correct way to put it is surely that public space is not inherently radical in itself, but rather a crucial and irreducible element in all politics. What goes beyond the regular politics of the public sphere is not space in itself, but rather acts that use space to unbracket or visibilize inequalities or to construct arenas based on alternative forms of bracketing.

Nancy Fraser and transnational public spheres

Nancy Fraser makes an interesting attempt in her "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere" to conceive of a "transnational public sphere" in a way that preserves the normative force invested by Habermas in his original concept of the public sphere, which was tied to the nation-state. The paper exists in at least two versions, one from 2005 and one from 2007, with some interesting differences between them. Let me comment briefly on these differences.

Both papers take their point of departure in the same problem. Since Habermas' classical Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere from 1962, “public sphere theory has been implicitly informed by a Westphalian political imaginary: it has tacitly assumed the frame of a bounded political community with its own territorial state” (Fraser 2007:8). Implicitly, the concept of a public sphere has assumed the existence of a national citizenry, a modern state apparatus, a national communication infrastructure, a national language, and so on. So the problem is: “can the concept be reconstructed to suit a post-Westphalian frame?"

Fraser points out that this isn't as easy as it seems. As a normative idea the concept is dependent on two yardsticks: normative legitimacy and political efficacy. Without them, it would lose "its critical force and its political point" (ibid 7f). The problem is how to ensure legitimacy and efficacy under transnational conditions, without relying on the "Westphalian" nation-state infrastructure.

In the 2005 version of her paper, I found her to be surprisingly conservative, basically keeping all the central features of the Westphalian public sphere and hoping for their transnational expansion/extension. The weaknesses of this position seemed to be obvious. In claiming that the transnational public sphere depends on some form of super-Westphalian framework in order to have democratic potential, she was in effect condemning it to irrelevancy in practical politics. Denying the possibility of a public sphere before the establishment of transnational institutions, she also seemed to be leaving today's transnational social movements in a limbo, with no room for them to ground their claims to legitimacy. 
 
This position is modified in her 2007 paper. Here the argument is more intricate and the outcome more fruitful. To begin with, she revisits Habermas' classical work in order to assess two lines of criticism directed against it. Firstly, there was the "legitimacy critique" which focused on Habermas' neglect of the "systemic obstacles" that prevented subaltern groups in society - such as workers, women, the poor, or various minorities - from participating on a par with others in public debate. Her own 1991 essay, "Rethinking the Public Sphere", which highlighted the role played by "subaltern counter-publics" in challenging exclusions, is a well-known rendering of this line of criticism. Secondly, there was the "efficacy critique" that argued that Habermas had failed to register the full range of systemic obstacles that prevented communicatively generated popular will from being effectively implemented in state policy.
 
Both these lines of criticism, however, "took for granted the Westphalian framing of political space” (ibid 12) since they identified the public with the citizenry of a territorial state.

So can the two ideas of normative legitimacy and political efficacy can be detached from the Westphalian premises? She begins with legitimacy. The legitimacy of public opinion, she argues, rests on two conditions: inclusiveness and  parity. Discussion should not exclude anyone with a stake in the outcome, and all participants should enjoy equal chances to state their views and place issues on the agenda. In the Westphalian public, however, these two conditions were not always clearly distinguished.

Seen from the perspective of the Westphalian frame, both the inclusiveness condition and the parity condition were yoked together under the ideal of shared citizenship in a bounded community [...]. The effect, however, was to truncate discussions of legitimacy. Although it went unnoticed at the time, the Westphalian frame encouraged debate about the parity condition, while deflecting attention away from the inclusiveness condition. (ibid 20f)

Moving to a post-Westphalian stage could therefore increase the legitimacy of public opinion by stimulating discussion about inclusiveness. But how should the inclusiveness condition be understood in a post-Westphalian age? The answer is already provided by Habermas himself in the form of the "all-affected" principle, which holds that "all potentially affected by political decisions should have the chance to participate on terms of parity in the informal processes of opinion formation to which the decision-takers should be accountable" (ibid 21). This principle should hold true regardless of citizenship.

Henceforth, public opinion is legitimate if and only if it results from a communicative process in which all potentially affected can participate as peers, regardless of political citizenship. Demanding as it is, this new, post-Westphalian understanding of legitimacy constitutes a genuinely critical standard for evaluating existing forms of publicity in the present era. (ibid 22)

Next, she turns to the criterion of political efficacy. Efficacy too rests on two conditions: the "translation condition" according to which public opinion must be translated into binding laws and decisions, and the "capacity condition" according to which the political system must be able to implement these measures. Again, the Westphalian frame truncated discussions of efficacy, fostering interest in the translation condition but obscuring the capacity condition.

It is hard, however, to imagine how an efficacious transnational public should be understood since there is nothing corresponding to a territorial state that might possess the administrative capacity to implement the demands of a transnational citizenry. “The challenge, accordingly, is twofold: on the one, hand, to create new, transnational public powers; on the other, to make them accountable to new, transnational public spheres. Both those elements are necessary” (ibid 23). As Fraser admits, "the job is not easy". But "only if public sphere theory rises to the occasion can it serve as a critical theory in a post-Westphalian world” (ibid 24).

After having read her 2005 draft, I was agreably surprised by reading this. This is better. In the draft, she appeared to neglect social movements and instead called for institutional renovation in a rather strident voice, arguing that the idea of the public would lack critical force and political point without it. Here she “saves” the idea of the public without making it dependent on prior existence of global institutional structures. Instead, the emphasis is more on the public as a normative force that actually only comes fully into its own in the global age. Concerning both the legitimacy and the efficacy condition, Fraser manages to show that globalization can contribute - at least in part - to liberating the emancipatory potential of the public from its truncated form in the Westphalian age, when aspects of inclusion and capacity were obscured. Both these aspects are now highlighted thanks to the flows of people, the potential of decisions to affect people globally, and the weakening of individual states against the transnational power of capital.

The problem is thus no longer posed as how to reconstruct the Westphalian public on a global scale. While she is obviously still seeing the construction of some form of global institutional framework as an urgent task, she is also suggesting that the public might serve as an important transnational arena even in the absence of such a framework. She is no longer categorically saying that the idea of a transnational public sphere is not viable without transnational institutions (an assertion that would have been very tied to an “empirical” understanding of the public sphere as something really existing). Instead she approaches a position which may be rendered as follows: the idea of a transnational public sphere is viable as a normative guideline or yardstick, even in the absence of transnational institutions, just as the public functioned as a regulative ideal guiding criticism in the Westphalian age.

I do, however, have three reservations:

Firstly, alternative notions of public also exist. There is no shortage of reconceptualizations that emphasize the freedom and universality of “publics” far more open than "Westphalian" one. Take Karatani Kôjin, who even opposes the public to any bounded spaces and sees it as essentially located outside all national communities. Amino Yoshihiko's idea of muen is another example. Relying on such conceptualizations doesn’t mean jettisoning the normative content of the public sphere concept, since they are tied to their own very normative concepts of freedom.

Secondly, although I understand her desire to focus on the normative rather than the emprical components of the concept of the public sphere, I do believe her argument would have profited from paying greater attention to questions of what form the empirical existence of a transnational public sphere might take, or what forms it does take already today in those "global public sphere moments" (Eide and Kunelius) when it is temporarily realized. In her old 1991 article, her model was one of a central or mainstream public sphere (the “liberal bourgeois public sphere”) which was opposed by "subaltern counter-publics". This idea of one single center hardly holds if we are to picture a transnational public sphere. In such a transnational setting, subalterns or excluded groups will need to be able to form their own counter-publics in reaction to whatever public oppresses or excludes them, regardless of how "central" it is. Such a conception would allow for a plurality of “centers” in reaction to which a plurality of counter-publics can form. Interestingly, these alternative publics can today, more easily than before, take transnational form. That means that counter-publics will no longer necessarily be more local than the various “mainstreams” against which they are reacting. Interestingly, in her 1991 paper she raised the concern that the counter-publics might turn into parochial “enclaves”, and emphatically claimed that they always return to the mainstream public and expand it. Today, by contrast, the risk that counter-publics will turn into enclaves is probably smaller. In fact, often it is rather the national “mainstream” public spheres that become “enclaves” – closed, parochial and local. That might also mean that there is no longer the same burning necessity for the counter-publics to “return” to the mainstream. To at least some extent they can bypass it. So what I want to suggest is that the key to how a transnational public sphere might arise would lie not only in how the mainstream national public sphere can be made to expand, but also in how the counter-publics from different nations join together into transnational networks.

Thirdly, I am skeptical to her claim that "efficacy" is really essential for the idea of the public to have critical potential. "Legitimacy" appears to be a far more essential component, and as she notes herself, it is not in principle so difficult to construe legitimacy in transnational terms. In fact, a Habermasian framework would seem to demand it. I would therefore like to downplay the tendency in Fraser to portray the construction of transnational institutions as a task for critical theory. Take what is happening right now in North African and the Middle East - the coming into being of a beautiful and revolutionary transnational public sphere from Morocco to Syria. Surely, it would be ridiculous to claim that the critical potential of this public sphere would be enhanced by erecting some supranational governance framework with the "capacity" to respond to and implement the popular demands. Whatever "efficacy" this public has, it possesses because of the strength of its legitimacy and the weakness of the institutional orders opposing it. 

Social movements can certainly contribute to calling global institutions into being by holding politicians accountable and forcing them to act in order to take responsibility for global problems. I disagree, however, that the creation of such institutions per se is a central task for social movements. Their task is not to build those institutions, but to call them into being by their dissent. The pragmatic problem may remain concerning where best to apply pressure – on national levels, on corporations, on supranational organizations etc – but the guiding principle should simply be one of flexibility: hit the weakest link and act so that you will grow stronger, by gaining allies and supporters. Make the opponent and potential allies see that it is in their interest to work together with you. Here a measure of strategic reason is permitted. Transnational movements should not feel confined to addressing transnational institutions. Just as the old "national" movements would sometimes address local governments or companies and sometimes the national governments, transnational movements should feel free to choose their targets flexibly and pragmatically, according to their present needs - just as they are in fact doing today.

The criticial potential of the idea of the public stems above all from the "legitimacy" condition. "Efficacy" is a secondary quality, and a dangerous one. Building institutional "capacity" will also heighten the capacity of institutions to contain criticism and dissent. To build that capacity is not the task of the dissenters. To believe that the public sphere can only function critically if such capacity exists is a delusion, and arguing that dissent lacks force unless such capacity is first created is about as clever as teaching your opponent judo before you start attacking him. Capacity will come in time, as soon as protests make the established elites realize the need for containment. The public, however, gains its critical force by outrunning capacity. The public lives only as long as it is the seedbed of more demands than can be granted.

Habermas 1960 - still a Westphalian public sphere?

References


Fraser, Nancy (2005) “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere”, March.

Fraser, Nancy (2007) “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World”, Theory Culture & Society 24(4):7-30.

Mobility and politics: notes on Sheller & Urry

Automobility

I'd like to make a short note about Mimi Sheller and John Urry's “Mobile Transformations of `Public' and `Private' Life” (Theory, Culture & Society 20:3, 2003). I read this text because I was interested in how it would treat the relation between public sphere and public space. 

The authors discuss various meanings of public and private - public and private interest, public and private sphere, public and private life, public and private space, and publicity and privacy - and argue that none of these conceptions is suited to capturing the mobility and fluidity of political action today, the age of automobility and electronic communications. To support their claim that these conceptions are "static" or linked to space they refer to a few examples, such as Habermas' discussion of coffee houses and Arendt's of the agora (p.114). Instead of thinking "in terms of ‘spheres’ or ‘spaces’, concepts that are often static and ‘regional’ in character”, the authors emphasize "the increasing fluidity in terms of where (or when) moments of publicity and privacy occur” (p.108). Along with the rejection of static conceptions, the authors also reject the complaint among thinkers like Habermas or Sennett that the boundaries of public and private are being eroded, “colonized” etc.

We show that cars, information, communications, screens, are all material worlds, hybrids of private and public life. Despite the heroic efforts of 20thcentury normative theorists to rescue the divide, the various distinctions between public and private domains cannot survive. The critical theorists reviewed above each in different ways diagnosed the erosion of boundaries between public and private as the cause of democratic decline; maintaining or restoring the boundary, they imply, is crucial to the continuance of democratic citizenship in the contemporary world. We argue, in contrast, that the hybridization of public and private is even more extensive than previously thought, and is occurring in more complex and fluid ways than any regional model of separate spheres can capture. Any hope for public citizenship and democracy, then, will depend on the capacity to navigate these new material, mobile worlds that are neither public nor private. (p.113)

In order to stress the political potential of mobility, the authors mention examples such as Reclaim the Streets. The “proliferation of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization social movements emerged within the context of new mobilities of bodies, capital, objects, money, information and images. Such fragmented and fluid temporalities of public and private exceed any simple notion of boundary erosion or colonization - if anything it is more like ‘creolization’” (p.121). 

A summary of the argument might look like this. The authors attempt to reduce the public sphere to static public space in order to more efficiently criticize it by directing attention to spatial processes that dissolve static space. They then try to suggest a new notion of the public more in tune with these processes.  

I have two criticisms.

Firstly, it strikes me as rather curious that the authors claim that all the conceptions of the public mentioned above are static and linked to space. This is a bit surprising, since the "public sphere" is usually thought of precisely as a despatialized concept. Arendt is explicit in pointing out that the public realm is not place-bound. "The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958:198).

Habermas, to be sure, talks of coffeehouses as places where the bourgeouis public sphere once took form. It is quite clear, however, that the public sphere cannot be reduced to deliberations going on in public space. It can occur in a lot of places, some of them private - at the breakfast table, for instance. "Every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second-person attitude, reciprocally attributing communicative freedom to each other, unfolds in a linguistically constituted public sphere" (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Polity Press 1996:361). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas explicitly states that only certain publics are placebound (distinguishing between episodic publics that can arise anywhere, occasional publics that arise when people gather together in certain institutionalized contexts such as concerts or political meetings, and abstract publics that are held together by mass media). It seems strange to claim that cars or the Internet per se are enough to upset a public sphere conceptualized in this fashion.

Secondly, I don’t agree that all “static” or “place”-bound concepts of the public must be discarded. Here I agree with Don Mitchell – what is necessary for public visibility is often "static" public space. If homeless people about to be evicted from a park want to make a public issue of their struggle, they usually do better by staying put in the park and refuse to move than go for an Internet campaign. The uprising in Egypt today may have begun with mobile and elusive gatherings springing up in the alleyways and disappearing just as quickly when the police arrived, but as soon as the protesters grew in strength they started gathering at Midan al Tahrir, occupying the square and guarding it by staying there night after night. Not everyone is mobile, and not everyone wants to move. That's the problem with building a politics only on the idea of mobility and ignoring the importance of sometimes being stationary. What is needed is a combination of both. Politics is about friction. Where capital is already hypermobile, isn’t the most effective way to offer resistance often simply to stay put, to hold on to space, to refuse to go along and escape though the lines of flight? To say “no” when welfare is being cut or the homeless evicted? Isn’t the “public” often what flares up, like fire, through the friction created when capital or authorities encounter resistance?

So the authors are clearly at least half wrong: the idea of “navigating” mobility risks becoming a justification of those who want to obliterate public spaces or the public sphere, an ideology neglecting those who are not or do not want to be hypermobile.

 

But perhaps they are also at least a little bit right. The categories of public and private are problematical. There does exist a realm that is admittedly difficult or perhaps even impossible to theorize in the old terms, something like Deleuze’s nomadic “smooth” space and the new modes of politics that such a space would offer, or the half hidden network “hinterland” that Bey or Negri mention as an indispensible base for revolts. By trying to approach this realm, they sketch a politics for a possible future in which public spaces or static spheres have vanished, and instead everywhere has become a potential point where politics may again flare up on the global “public screen”. 

The limits of agonistic pluralism

Two models of public space

A month or so ago I read through  an interesting booklet, Global Democracy and the World Social Forums, written jointly by no less than twelve (!) social movement researchers. It's nice book, with lots of statistics and some interesting arguments, not least concerning the logic of networking and the role of autonomous forums in relation to the WSF (World Social Forum).

One section, however, struck me as a little too simplistic. The authors claim that there are two models of public space that inform the WSF. The dominant one is a Habermas-inspired model of "deliberative public space" in which the forum is conceived of along the lines of a lifeworld or haven of communicative reason offering resistance to the system. This idea, the authors suggest, is expressed in the WSF charter in which the WSF is conceived of not as an actor in its own right but as a space, neutral in itself, offering the infrastructure for deliberation between a multiplicity of actors. The weakness of this model is that it neglects that the forums are  contested terrain. They are not fully open or neutral, but contain their own hierarchies (p.38).

The other model, that of "agonistic public space", is offered by Chantal Mouffe who in turn is inspired by Arendt. Here the presence of power is recognized. The forum is seen as a "space of appearance" in Arendt's sense, where politics is meant to be enacted in public as theater. The authors add that the forums are excellent examples of how threatrical public spaces emerge outside territorially based institutions. “In this sense, the forum is not only a space for rational discourse, but it is also a space of performance” (p.37). The authors see an interaction between these two models in the way activists set up "autonomous" spaces in an ambiguous  “one foot in, one foot out”-relation to the official main social forum, utilizing the deliberative space provided by the official forum while transforming it into an agonistic space through a mixture of discursive debate and spectacular conflict (p.44-47).

What appears to me to be insufficiently illuminated here is how agonistic public space relates to the issue of exclusion. Early on in the book, the authors stress that they view the WSF as an arena precisely for the excluded. “In this sense, it constitutes a new body politic, a common public space where previously excluded voices can speak and act in plurality”(p.13).The problem, however, is in what sense an "antagonistic" public space is less exclusive than a "deliberative" one. 

The reference to Arendt here is hardly helpful. Indeed, it is precisely because the authors so explicitly raise the issue of exclusion that the reference to her seems so mystifying, and the juxtaposition of these two "models" of public space appears so glaringly insufficient and simplistic. The truth is that in neither of the two models is public space conceived of as a space for the "excluded". In Arendt no less than in Habermas - and, as I will discuss below, in Mouffe - public space is in fact constituted by exclusion. What needs to be thought through, I believe, is precisely this all too common act whereby "openness" or "publicness" is constituted by restrictions on openness itself.

It is correct that for Arendt, the "space of appearance" is where participants appear as political beings by virtue of play-acting, but this is not play-acting in the sense of musical or theatrical performances. What is necessary for public life is play-acting in the sense of a bracketing of private life - of things such as work or labor, of the material and bodily aspects of life.  This is why, to her, public life is threatened by processes such as the "rise of the social", by the rise, in other words, of the labor movement and the welfare state. Seeing her as the forerunner of Mouffe's agonistic pluralism is fine, but one should also recognize that there are limits to her pluralism. Critics of Habermas often refer to the supposedly exclusive nature of his model of consensus-oriented political action and its insensitivity to difference. Even if Arendt doesn't use the word "consensus" as Habermas does, her conception of politics both presupposes a certain consensus (since people must agree on what aspects of the private should should be bracketed in order for a separate sphere of political activity to come into being) and idealizes it in the sense of "acting in concert" or "acting and speaking together". This can be seen in her famous concept of "power". Unlike violence, which is purely instrumental, power  is the “human ability not just to act but to act in concert” and never belongs to an individual but “to a group” and “remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (Arendt 1970:44).

Note that I am not claiming that Arendt is idealizing the idea of a possible universal consensus, as Habermas does. There are certainly many differences between Arendt and Habermas. What I want to emphasize is that it is not possible, on the basis of these differences, to claim that Arend's public is less exclusive than Habermas'. A universalist ideal of rationally achieved consensus certainly often tends to be exclusive, but so does Arendt's idea of power.

My aim here is not to criticize Arendt in particular, but to point out that it simply isn't seem sufficient if one really wants to provide a space "for the excluded" to rely on Habermas or Arendt. So what about Mouffe?


Mouffe on agonistic pluralism

I have two criticisms of Mouffe's "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism": 1. She misunderstands Habermas, 2. Her model of “radical democracy” is insufficiently radical.

Firstly, she criticizes Habermas for "postulating the availability of a public sphere where power and antagonism would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus would have been realized". By portraying the ideal of "impartiality" and of democratic decisions "equally in the interests of all" as possible to achieve through "the appropriate public processes of deliberation that follow the procedures of [his own] discourse model", his model of democratic politics "denies the central role in politics of the conflictual dimension" (Mouffe 1999:747, 752). I doubt that Habermas has ever portrayed "impartiality" or decisions "equally in the interests of all" as actually achievable through the procedures he delineates. From a critical theoretical standpoint, the reason is obvious: that would be ideology. Neither has he ever, as far as I know, portrayed a public sphere without power or antagonism as "available" (denying such availability is the very point of making a distinction between what he calls real and ideal speech situations).

Habermas is, I think, partly a historicizing social theorist inspired by pragmatism (public debate is not perfect but the closest thing to perfection since it is at least more open to input from the other than outright struggle or a reliance on silent empathy). Partly he is also a Kantian who believes in universal consensus  as a regulative ideal transcendentally presupposed in language use (in order to believe something to be true or right we need to believe that it could withstand criticism in an ideal speech situation). He is, in other words, far from the easily demolished strawman Mouffe makes of him. Habermas could, I believe, reply to Mouffe's criticism both in a pragmaticist way (would hegemonic struggle be any less exclusive of the other?) and in a Kantian way (when we engage in discourse struggle, how do we know that we are right in believing in the things we are struggling for?).

As a more "adequate model of democratic politics", Mouffe presents her own "agonistic pluralism", which is based on the recognition of "the ineradicability of power, of antagonism, and of the fact that there can never be total emancipation but only partial ones (ibid 752). Mouffe is quite open about how exclusive this kind of politics must be, partly because it necessarily defines itself against an adversary, and partly because it can only tolerate "legitimate" enemies with whom one shares the same "ethnico-political principles":

Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an "us" by the determination of a "them." The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them distinction – which is what a consensus without exclusion pretends to achieve – but the different way in which it is established. What is at stake is how to establish the us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy.

    In the realm of politics, this presupposes that the "other" is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an "adversary," i.e., somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question. This category of the adversary does not eliminate antagonism, though, and it should be distinguished from the liberal notion of the competitor, with which it is sometimes identified. An adversary is a legitimate enemy, an enemy with whom we have in common a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of democracy. (ibid 755)

This, I think, is a remarkable passage. Apart from the fact that Mouffe stresses the constitutive role of the us/them distinction more than Arendt, the resemblances to her are many. We find the same emphasis on acting in concert, the same emphasis on power rather than violence, and the same emphasis on the need to restricting political interaction to those who share a similar set of basic principles. What is a bit surprising is how close Mouffe's vision is to mainstream liberalism (despite her disavowal of the "liberal notion of the competitor") and to the classical liberal defence of the freedom of speech. Although what she calls "discourse" is much broader than mere speech, it is clear from the context that discursive struggle must at least refrain from acts aimed at destroying the opponent. There are echoes of Voltaire here (the statement ascribed to him about being ready to die for the right of opponents to express their views) and of Kant too. Saying that we are free to engage in discursive struggles so long as we refrain from non-discursive ones sounds like one of the most famous sentences from Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?: "Argue as much as you like, but obey".  

What, by the way, are the "ethico-political" principles that Mouffe thinks political adversaries need to share? She doesn't say. What we get is nothing more than the following statement:

To be sure, pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus, but such a consensus concerns only some ethico-political principles. Since those ethico-political principles can only exist, however, through many different and conflicting interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a "conflictual consensus."(ibid 756)  

But if interpretations of these principles are so conflicting, how can they serve as criteria for "legitimate" adversaries? What are the limits for when the adversary ceases to be “legitimate”? What does the idea of restricting political engagement to "legitimate" enemies mean in reality? It sounds a bit like: there can be no negotiating with terrorists. But how about Nazis? Can't an adversary be "legitimate" even if she or he doesn't share my ethico-political principles - for instance, if he or she belongs to another religion?

Not only does Mouffe, like Arendt and Habermas, presuppose a rather restrictive notion of consensus as the basis of legitimate politics, she also appears to be less radical and less open to "others" than some thinkers, like Rancière, who recognize that democratic politics is more about the public visualization of dissent by previously marginalized or "invisible" groups, than about the struggle of discourses. Such a visualization, Rancière claims, usually takes the form of a "breach of the ordering of the sensible" - or, in other words, of an upsetting or shattering of the discursive field, rather than a discursive struggle among adversaries sharing an ethico-political framework. 

A final quote:

To deny that there ever could be a free and unconstrained public deliberation of all matters of common concern is therefore crucial for democratic politics. When we accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power and that always entails some form of exclusion, we can begin to envisage the nature of a democratic public sphere in a different way (ibid 756) 

Wouldn't such a vision risk leading to a democracy that is openly exclusive and that has given up hope about a stop to exclusion?  I have nothing particular against the assertion that power in a certain (Foucauldian or Arendtian) sense is inescapable in politics or even something good, but to accept exclusion as necessary seems to me to be a far more serious concession. Isn’t there another way out, namely to constantly work against exclusion, even without ever presupposing that end to be realizable? Isn't that the third model that is missing in the account of the models of public space in the WSF?

References

Arendt, Hannah (1970) On Violence, Orlando: Harcourt Books.

Mouffe, Chantal (1999) “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?”, pp 745-758, Social Research 66(3) (Fall).

Smith, Jackie et al (2008) Global Democracy and the World Social Forums, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers

The Commons and the Public Sphere: Five Clarifications

Below I clarify how I view the relation between the commons and the public sphere (plus related concepts such as public property, muen and no-man’s-land).


Clarification 1: The relation of the commons to public and private property

The words public and private are used in many senses. Often, they are used to designate ownership (as in “public sector”). In this sense, the words belong to a wholly other dimension than words like commons or no-man’s-land. The reason is that the latter words have to do with usus, not with dominium or formal ownership. The commons does not negate property. A resource is “free”, according to Lawrence Lessing, if it can be used without permission (or if the permission is granted neutrally). The question is thus not who owns the resource but whether it can be used freely (Lessig 2007). A squat house is a house that has been made into a commons despite being privately or publicly owned. What squatters want is the right to use the house, not to own it. In many countries, public or private land such as forests, mountains and beaches approximate commons since they can be used freely by visitors for camping, making fires, or picking berries, mushrooms or nuts. The commons, then, is what can be freely used, regardless of who owns it.


Clarification 2: The difference between the commons and the public sphere

Many who use the word "commons" focus on the economic aspects of the commons, on its opposition to capitalism and private propoerty (e.g. the fine articles by Nick Dyer-Witheford available here). Here I will highlight the political aspect of the commons by focusing on the relation between the commons and the public sphere.

Affirming what I have called commons or no-man’s land is not incompatible with endorsing a public sphere. To a large extent the public is of course a common, since speech and debate is freed up for circulation (as long as it doesn’t come with copyright). More importantly, the commons is what endows the public sphere with its best and most sympathetic trait: the idea of an arena without hierarchies in which anyone is welcome to participate. My argument for that can be read below. This argument also suggests that the commons is what nourishes the public sphere, the source of the constant renewals without which it would stagnate.

The “public sphere” is, however, a narrower notion than that of a “commons” in three respects.

Firstly, the term “public sphere” evokes a specific form of verbal interaction, namely rational deliberation on shared concerns among citizens, the outcome of which is the “general will”. The sphere of work, family and everyday life, by contrast, are consigned to the private sphere, a sphere in which our statements are denuded of general relevance and whatever we do is our business alone. Compared to the “public” the “commons” is a much wider concept, since it includes not only language and discussion but also nature, environment, all kinds of resources that can be used, the items and activities of a shared everyday life, the toil of work as well as that of festivities. It allows for the expression and manifestation of life, whereas the “public” generally demands that we "behave", that we bracket whatever is private and not of common concern.

Secondly, while one of the chief characteristics of the “public” according to Habermas is its opposition to state power, the commons is much more: any form of shared life partakes of the commons. Intriguingly, the commons appears to work as a concept without having to be counterpoised to anything corresponding to the “private”. Indeed, it is often used in ways that suggest that it includes many of the areas of life – daily life, the economic activities of production and consumption – that are usually considered private.

Thirdly, the “public sphere” has never ceased to be accused of foul play: of complicity with order, of reproducing social hierarchies, of excluding women, slaves, the working classes, foreigners, children, all groups considered beneath the dignity of responsible male bourgeois citizens. In short, of being a club for the privileged. Not only are people excluded. We also see an exclusion of “unworthy” topics, of “unserious” media, of dialects and sociolects (and entire languages), of times and places deemed unfit for serious discussion, and so on. These exclusions contradict the universalistic ideal of openness, but ultimately follow from the fact that public sphere is constituted by, or founded on, a distinction between public and private and on an exclusion of the private. Although the content of exclusion is variable, exclusion as such will probably remain endemic to the public sphere as long as it founds itself on a separation from the private.

Oh sure, there has been lots of resistance too towards this exclusion. The “private” has always reappeared with a vengeance, idealized on the one hand as a “sheltered island” and feared on the other as the unruly abode of the excluded. Think of the working class cafés functioning as “incubators of revolt” (Haine 1996) or the “subaltern counter-publics” that so often have provided disgruntled minorities with “bases and training grounds for agitational activities” (Frazer 1992:124). Typically, these resistances have resulted in an expansion of the public, in the lifting up of topics to be treated in public discussion from the private sphere to which they had been relegated (“the personal is political”), in apparently ever closer approximations of the Ideale Sprechsituation. However, although the borderline between public and private has repeatedly been challenged and renegotiated, the distinction as such has remained firmly in place. It is as if, already from the beginning, as soon as we began thinking the notion of a “public”, the stage was set for a dialectics to unfold whereby the subaltern or excluded would take refuge in the private only to return, emboldened and empowered, to claim their rightful place in the mainstream public and thereby expand its limits without ever abolishing them.

This dialectic cannot be found in the commons. The common does not exclude. It’s where you end up after you are excluded. It’s where the zabbaleen are looking for garbage, where the homeless sleep. It’s what’s left. It’s what always accepts you, no matter how poor it is or how poor you are. It’s where you don’t need keys.

Note that many of the things, and activities found in the commons – take sleeping or eating on the street – are not only distinct from what you find in respectable “public” intercourse. They are also liberated from their confinement in the private. Let’s say that you want to be alone: if you can lock the door around you, then that’s private space, but if not, then it’s the commons. So: how do you do to ensure that you’re not disturbed? Either you walk up into the mountains, or else you ask the others to let you be alone for a while. In either case, you’re in the commons. You manage without keys.


Clarification 3: The persistence of the commons within the public sphere

Here the argument is going to be a bit intricate. I mentioned that the commons somehow inhered in the public sphere, as what constituted the core or foundation of the freedom, egalitarianism and openness which we associate with the idea of the public sphere. This openness and egalitarianism is not simply an ideological pretense but also expressive of a certain “truth-content” which in reality is often betrayed.

Here’s the first step of my argument. To put it simply, we need to relativize the usual explanations of why the public would be a well-spring of freedom, egalitarianism or openness. In the canonical account by Habermas, this potential is located above all in the force of reason inherent in language or communication, in the fact that whatever is said will survive critical scrutiny only to the extent that it is supported by good arguments. Whenever we try to achieve understanding through communication, we let ourselves be guided by the ideal of a free and egalitarian discussion in which no-one concerned is excluded. There is thus a tendency in language itself to counteract the distortions of the public sphere. To Habermas, the liberating potential of the public sphere is therefore located in language. The more that is transposed from the realm of unquestioned belief to the realm of communication, the greater the emancipatory effect will be. To Arendt too, the freedom inherent in the political act is inseparable from the word, from public speech. “Only sheer violence is mute” (Arendt 1958:178).

My criticism of Habermas and Arendt here will be very mild. All I want to add to their account is the word “sometimes”. Discussion is the best way to increase freedom and equality, but only sometimes. A very easy way to make this point would be to refer to Albert O. Hirschman: sometimes our freedom is best furthered not by “voice” but by “exit”, by deserting rather than protesting. Here, however, I will try to advance a slightly different argument since I’m more interested in where the emancipatory potential of the public sphere actually originates than in attacking the belief in the benefits of communication per se.

My next step is to make a very simple point: even Habermas, in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, mentions a source of freedom and egalitarianism in the emerging public sphere of the 18th century that has nothing to do with language per se. In the coffee houses, salons and Tischgesellschaften, he writes, status was disregarded in social intercourse. The nobility and grande bourgeoisie “met with the ‘intellectuals’ on an equal footing”, and the “sons of princes associated with sons of watchmakers and shopkeepers” (Habermas 1989:33). Neither social hierarchies nor economic dependencies were supposed to have any influence on the discussions, which at least in principle were left solely to the “authority of the better argument”. This certainly indicates the ascendancy over traditional status of communicative reason, to use the term which Habermas would later make famous. Here we should point out, however, that this semblance of equality was also simultaneously the result of a systematic bracketing of status. Space for rational discussion was created by leaving things unsaid. To put it concisely: an important source of freedom and openness in the public sphere was silence.

The realization that bracketing is crucial for freedom can be found in Arendt too, when she points out that participation in public life requires a form of theatre or play-acting. “Theatre”, she says, is the political art par excellence (Arendt 1958:188). The public is the realm to which people, who are normally deeply embedded in a variety of dependencies, withdraw in order to meet as equals, where they engage so to speak as abstract citizens, stripped of the power-relations in real life. This doesn’t mean that public life is “fake” or divorced from reality. On the contrary, to Arendt play-acting is essential for the constitution of the perhaps most emphatic reality we will ever know, the public realm in which we make ourselves visible to the world. “Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest form of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence...” (ibid 50). Paradoxically, the only way we can become “visible” as political beings, is by keeping our concrete social circumstances and our rootedness in economic and biological necessity invisible.

The public realm is therefore not constituted by communication alone, but rather by a delicate balance between what is said and what is unsaid, by what is visible and what is not.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me underline that the unsaid is not at all mysterious or ineffable. It is silence only from the point of view of the public that excludes it or pretends not to hear it. It is the sound of daily life – the trivial speech that surrounds us like air, the murmur that never makes it to the public, but which nevertheless structures daily life. It is everything said in jest, every irresponsible remark; it is all the speech by which we litter our everyday lives. It’s the criticism that’s too controversial to be “taken seriously”. It can be abrasive speech, garrulous speech, tactless speech, indecent speech, speech with the wrong accent or in the wrong dialect – everything that must be bracketed in order for speech to attain the dignity of public speech.

The best account of this balance between said and unsaid is Georg Simmel’s classical analysis of play and sociability in the salons of the haute bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. In the witty conversations and the coquetry differences in status or wealth were tactfully disregarded. Interaction had a “democratic” character, since everybody behaved as if they were equal. This interaction has the character of play since it aimed at nothing but the success of the sociable moment itself, separating itself from the "objective interests" of the real social world. “Wealth, social position, erudition, fame, exceptional capabilities and merits, may not play any part in sociability”, and “the purely and deeply personal traits of one’s life, character, mood, and fate must likewise be eliminated” (Simmel 1964:46). In other words, the democratic semblance of equality is premised on a systematic bracketing of the real world, on a leaving things unsaid. At the same time, this pretense is fragile. It breaks down whenever social reality reasserts itself - through lack of tact, by bringing up too "serious" subjects for discussion, or by falling in love. It works best when interaction takes place within the same social stratum, and breaks down if class differences are too great.

The democratic semblance is not entirely ideological. As we recall, it is exactly what Habermas extolled as a quality of the early bourgeois public sphere where the nobility would interact with intellectuals and watchmakers on an equal footing. The sociability of salons, cafés or pubs distance themselves from social reality, but at the same time create an atmosphere in which life in social reality can be viewed through a kind of Utopian distortion, as something that can be changed according to the playful imagination unfolding in the public discussions. An inebriated soberness is created in which we get a taste of how human relations without wealth or power might look. The lightness of a sociability divorced from the seriousness of social reality paradoxically means that you are for ever tempted to commit yourself, to fall in love or to become a revolutionary.

Similar mechanisms of bracketing appear to be crucial in all large-scale arenas that have a semblance of egalitarianism. What they all have in common is that they abstract from large areas of social reality, offering at least temporary relief from that realiy. Thus every game creates its own free zones of things it does not thematize. Chess, lottary and soccer allow you to forget about status, wealth or ethnicity. Games creates “equality” in the sense of a separation from the hierarchies of the real or secular order, but can also give rise to new forms of inequality by virtue of their own rules.

We can even generalize a step further: We participate in an arena not only because of what it highlights, its officially stated aim, but also because of what it leaves in the shade. As Simmel points out, the prominent economic role of minority groups like Jews, Armenians or the Parsis can be explained by the fact that the market brackets ethnicity. Karatani Kôjin argues that a similar mechanism holds true for politics. What protects the dissidents and the minorities from the revenge of the powerful, he points out, is not rational debate but anonymity. The “liberal” principle of anonymous voting, along with mechanisms for preventing the concentration of power, are more important than the “democratic” principle of common deliberation. The public is constituted by a freedom to keep silent and not to be a subject, just as much as it is constituted by the freedom of expression and of being a subject (Karatani 1999:128f).

I think the point is clear enough: much of the freedom, openness, egalitarianism and sense of empowerment that can be experienced by participating in the public sphere derives not from the “said” as such, but at least as much from what is “unsaid”. The reason is that a public in which people are allowed to participate on an equal footing can only come into being through bracketing.

What is unsaid is also what is left outside official discourse: unwanted, unidentified, without social definition.

This in turn means that the public sphere itself can only come into being by actively creating socially undefined domains. Such domains are what I have called no-man's-land or commons. They are domains that become off-limits to and unregulated by public speech, and whose fate becomes entrusted to the murmur of daily life.

The commons therefore persists indelibly in the public sphere.

The unsaid is not only the excluded flipside of public communication, but it also a condition and a source of the latter. Excluded, but at the same time reproduced and protected by the public sphere, the common is crucial to the latter’s vitality in two respects. Firstly, creating a commons outside of itself is a precondition of the semblance of openness and equality in the public sphere. As mentioned, this semblance is not totally ideological since it always involves the temptation to realize this equality in the real life of the surrounding society itself.

Secondly, the murmurings of the commons are the seedbed of what may one day become public speech – the speech of subalterns having had enough. This tactless reappearance of the subaltern in public brings about the collapse of the semblance of democratic equality, but also opens up the possibility of political struggle, of a participation in public that is no longer premised on the semblance of equality, and which lifts the reality of inequality up into the realm of the "said" only in order to denounce it. This too contributes to the public, to a better public. The commons is indispensible whenever opposition is to be renewed and counter-publics born. It is what helps turn the public into an arena of political struggle.


Clarification 4: Muen, public, and commons

It is because the commons is so crucial to the public sphere that Amino Yoshihiko can see muen – which I associated with no-man’s-land or the commons in my earlier post – as predecessors of a public sphere in Japan. At first sight this might seem bizarre, since muen didn’t have much to do with public deliberation or rational debate (the practice of kôron, a form of rational debate among monks, was an exception). It did, however, have much to do with bracketing: the cutting off of status relation and all other secular bonds of feudal society, and the semblance of the equality of all living beings in the eyes of Buddha. This bracketing, as I have shown, is just as crucial to the public as communication. Furthermore, bracketing is not only functional for the maintaining a “democratic pretense”, but also for generating movements challenging the established order. Just as salons, cafés and pubs were incubators of revolt, Amino believes that muen inspired the ikki, rebellious federations in late medieval Japan with a strong element of egalitarianism.


Clarification 5: The commons and no-man’s-land

All of what I’ve written so far about the commons also holds for no-man’s-land. However, there may be a point in keeping the two concepts separate. To put it simply, the commons is usually imagined as a space in which the question of sharing is more or less solved, in which people have already agreed, implicitly or explicitly, to let a resource to used freely. I picture no-man’s-land as a slightly wider concept that would also include the wilderness, a space in which nothing is yet resolved. No-man’s-land does not necessarily give birth to a commons. Interaction in no-man’s-land can also take the form of war.


References

Amino, Yoshihiko (1996a) Muen-Kugai-Raku: Nihon chûsei no jiyû to heiwa (Muen, Kugai, Raku: Freedom and Peace in Medieval Japan), Tokyo: Heibonsha.

Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick (2006) “The Circulation of the Common”.

Frazer, Nancy (1992) “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, pp 109-42, in Calhoun, Craig (ed) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Haine, W. Scott (1996) The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914, Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Hirschman, Albert O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Harvard University Press.

Karatani, Kôjin (1999) Hyûmoa to shite no yuibutsuron (Materialism as humour), Tokyo: Kôdansha gakujutsu bunko

Lessig, Lawrence (2007) “The Vision for the Creative Commons: What are We and Where are We Headed? Free Culture”, pp 36-49, in Fitzgerald, Brian (ed) Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, Sydney: Sydney University Press.

Simmel, Georg (1964) “Sociability: An example of Pure, or Formal Sociology”, pp 40-57, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (ed. Kurt H. Wolff), London: The Free Press.