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Malcolm
Miles |
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RECLAIMING
THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Earlier
versions of this paper were delivered to the conference 'Art and
the City', University of Amsterdam, May 10th-12th 2006; and the
International symposium 'Public Sphere: Between Contestation and
Reconciliation' National Association of Art Critics, American University
of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia, October 25th-27th, 2005.
INTRODUCTION
If a public sphere is where members of a democratic society determine
the shape and values of that society for themselves, a conventional
identification of that sphere with urban public spaces is problematic.
The concept of a public sphere relies on historically specific precedents
linked to geographical sites yet those cited, such as classical
Athens, do not support the concept. Perhaps a public sphere has
never fully existed. And, while understanding the necessary defence
of public spaces in face of encroachment by private-sector developers,
I do not see it in the new public spaces of urban redevelopment
schemes. These are more like a residue of nineteenth-century monumental
space, a site in which the values a society's subjects are required
to hold are presented in the form of statuary and devices to control
the flow of people through the city (or today in the blander forms
of public art). To find a public sphere means looking to a critical
social imagination, as in the consensus decision making of alternative
settlements, and remains to be realised in the wider society.
CONTEXT
Discussion of the public sphere in architecture and urban design
privileges the provision of new public spaces, as if this constitutes
a public realm to replace one that is disappearing. Urban redevelopment
schemes tend to include piazza-like spaces alongside internationally
accented cafés, designer bars, boutiques, and art spaces.
The schemes are often culturally led in that culture industries
constitute key users of the spaces provided when redundant industrial
buildings are remodelled or hitherto devalued sites are refashioned
as urban villages for young professionals. Perhaps the designers
of such spaces see themselves as reintroducing the public aspect
of a site such as the Campo in Siena, if on a smaller scale. The
gesture parallels the efforts of property speculators to disguise
themselves as Renaissance patrons by commissioning or collecting
public sculptures. But the efforts of the designers should not be
dismissed, echoing those of the International Congress of Modern
Architecture (CIAM) for a new society to be achieved, after the
defeat of fascism and return of humanism after a devastating war,
by design and social engineering (Curtis, 2000). If their failure
was predicted by some members of CIAM, and followed a privileging
of functionalism over participation by users - a denial of the poor's
ability to determine their own spatial practices (Robbins, 1996)
- this does not detract from the intention. Rather it returns attention
to the mismatch of the means used to the utopian ends desired, ends
which in this idealistic respect characterised international modernism.
The failure of inter- and post-war urban planning to produce a better
world also draws attention to the inappropriateness of some of the
histories said to have supported a public sphere, from the agora
of Athens to the medieval city square - campo or piazza - and the
modern public space. In effect, this is a history of a lack of such
spaces: the agora was a market; the medieval city square was a space
for the display of power, and until the nineteenth century of public
executions; civic squares of the Enlightenment era reflect the creation
of a bourgeois city. The latter is, of course, progressive in rejecting
feudal ties to land and introducing structures of power appropriate
to a secular merchant class; but the broad avenues and paved squares
were again sites for display, if now of wealth rather than inherited
authority. In the ninetenth century they become the sites of promenading,
alonmg with the glass-vaulted arcade, and of a decidedly masculine
gaze. I return to these histories below, and here add only that
the public sphere as it is generally envisaged is absent, too, for
the most part, in the literature of ideal societies. The plan of
More's Utopia, like Campanella's City of the Sun,
suggests a centralised authority in the regulation of its spaces,
not a society in which users continuously adapt and modify space
in accordance with their needs and values.
The literatures of urbanism tend to emphasise the city as dystopia,
in fiction and academic writing. Thomas Hardy represents the ideal
city - Christminster (Oxford) - as site of catastrophic rejection
for the non-privileged Jude (the obscure), while representing a
rural world already encapsulated in history when he wrote about
it. Neil Smith (1996) sees 1990s New York as site of a new frontier,
a new class of young professionals its pioneers. And Mike Davis
(1990; 1999) observes armed response signs on suburban lawns and
likens the future script of Los Angeles to that of the disaster
movie. Putting Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958)
beside these sources - men's war stories of the city - draws out
the quaintness of her appeal to the democracy of classical Athens
as precedent for a quality of publicity; but also the abiding concern
for a society of empathy. For Arendt, publicity means the condition
in which identity formation is enabled amid the perceptions of others,
and only amid such perception. Denial of publicity is deeply painful,
and for Jews in 1930s Germany a precondition, as oblivion, for annihilation.
Separating the unreality of Arendt's appeal to Athens as a proto-democratic
site in which the idea of publicity can be intellectually established
- which jars with the fact that Athens depended on a slave economy
- from the idea itself allows a reconsideration of publicity which,
I suggest, remains a viable point of departure for a re-conception
of the public sphere. Turning to accounts of the sites of an alternative
society in intentional communities and eco-villages today (Bang,
2005; Barton, 2000), in which the perceptions of others are freely
and regularly communicated, a further difficulty arises: the cases
cited are in most cases localised and micro-scale, separated from
the dominant society by pursuit of rural self-sufficiency or claims
to spirituality. If, however, experiments in social formation from
squatting to eco-village living revolve around the 'work' of social
life, then they act as a practical counterpart to Arendt's philosophical
image of a self-determining world in which subject-citizens interpret
that world and their views of others for themselves. It seems a
long way from the bright new piazza-style spaces of urban redevelopment,
and the ersatz civic values of new urbanism in north America.
DEFENDING PUBLIC SPACES
The vogue for public spaces follows its demise in the marketised
city. Sharon Zukin (1995) critiques Business Improvement Districts
in New York City, and the complicity of cultural institutions. Zygmunt
Bauman (2000) argues that the task of critical theory today is to
defend a vanishing public realm on which private space encroaches.
I find his qualification more helpful, when he says, "... or
rather [the task is] to refurnish and repopulate the public space
... [after] exit of the 'interested citizen', and the escape of
real power into the territory which ... can only be described as
'outer space'." (Bauman, 2000: 39). I think outer space means
the de-centred geography of trans-national companies whose key functions
are out-sourced.
Bauman's case is coloured by the growth of neo-liberalism, the architectural
form of which is new urbanism. Samir Amin reads neo-liberalism as
reinforcing a danger of "anti-democratic regression" (Amin,
2000: 102-103, in Harootunian, 2006: 32), and Harry Harootunian
argues that it contradicts the rhetoric of democracy in its management
of crisis (Harootunian, 2006: 32) – which I take as the production
of permanent crisis. But then liberalism always was a form of social
control, a mix of good intentions with an apparatus of reform designed
to lessen the possibilities for revolt. This does not decrease the
beneficial impacts of reform, as in installing sewers in metropolitan
cities and providing clean drinking water to citizens - a process
only recently turned over to the private sector as a new area for
exploitation.
This ambivalence informs Adorno and Horkheimer ([1949] 1997) in
Dialectic of Enlightenment. While they argue that there
is a continuity of the mythical within Enlightenment, they also
argue that this should not lead us to junk the project of Enlightenment
but to seek revision within the rationality which is Enlightenment's
primary claim. It sounds like permanent cultural revolution and
implies a non-teleological dimension. This refusal of end=domination
is found also in utopian theory, described by Simon Tormey as, "contingent,
open, negotiated, unpredictable, beyond capture" (Tormey, 2005:
402). I cite this because I think the question of public space and
the associated but distinct question of a public sphere require
a similar critical approach, in which the good is recognized and
the failure of delivery - which stems from the unkept promise and
undelivered dreams of Enlightenment - is interrogated.
To sum up this part of the argument, to defend public spaces is
to refuse the encroachment on them of a seemingly total privatization.
It is viable to see in this an allegiance to a public sphere; but
also to imagine other ways in which that sphere, as yet metaphorical,
may eventually be given form than in design or material provision.
Yet this is not, either, to relegate it to aesthetics or literary
fiction. If utopia is no-where, in the earliest texts a distant
island the description of which is narrated not by the author but
a mysterious voyager, a public sphere is a concept in the social
imagination durable enough that it can be thought of as at some
stage transmuting to a viable social form. That form will not be
absolute or fixed but a negotiated position (Laclau, 1996: 19);
and will be always open to renegotiation, and already compromised
in its inevitable derivation from the conditions of non-publicity
in which it was conceived. The contingency of the public sphere
can be likened, perhaps to this description by Paul Carter: "Public
space incubates a desire that cannot be satisfied, the same desire
that keeps the space 'public', open to the prospect of better times
... [and] not a place at all in any static sense, but the setting
of a mass mobility made sociable ... " in which the art of
inscription "can contemplate its own disappearance." (Carter,
2006: 260-261).
PUBLIC SPHERES?
I want to look further, now, at Arendt's idea of a public sphere
in The Human Condition (1958), and to juxtapose Arendt's
idea to Nancy Fraser's (1993) critique of Habermas' concept of communicative
action. Arendt appeals to the Athenian polis as site of a proto-public
sphere where "everything that appears in public can be seen
and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity"
(Arendt, 1958: 50). In public, a growth to a mature self is possible
through the self's perceptions of others and others' perceptions
of the self, and the continuous interaction, like parallel mirrors,
this invokes. Such mature selves, produced explicitly in the condition
of publicity, can build a political life. Without publicity there
is darkness and ossification. Kimberley Curtis sums up Arendt's
argument,
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Denied
that movement in relation to others in a public sphere, denied
the dense and pressing presence of speaking and acting beings,
our own urge to appear remains unprovoked. Our potential to
call forth something that had never been before, to 'change
every constellation' is crippled. And if this were not sufficient
cause for despair, the denial of this political freedom over
time may well undermine our capacity for inner freedom as
well (Curtis, 1999: 73). |
To understand Arendt's position it helps to remember that her work
is haunted by the rise of fascism in industrialised Germany, after
the failure of revolution in 1919, and by the anti-semitism which
caused her to flee Europe to north America - which she re-encountered
as an observer at the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem. When she writes
that "The privation of privacy lies in the absence of others"
(Arendt, 1958: 58), she hints at another privation in Germany, as
precondition for oblivion.
Denial of publicity is thus not only painful in a personal sense
but in an urgent social sense as well. But while a public realm
"gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each
other" (Arendt, 1958: 51, 52) this is at the cost of intimacy,
which is bundled together with the private realm of domesticity
as secondary to the public realm. I would question this, and counter
the relegation of the realm of intimacy through Herbert Marcuse's
argument, in an essay on French literature under the German occupation,
that the art of intimacy - in love stories and poems - is a last
resort of liberation in times of total oppression such as those
of the occupation (Marcuse, 1998: 199-214). For Arendt, the dimension
of privacy is an uncertain and obscure area exemplified by the experience
of pain, "truly a borderline experience between life as 'being
among men' ... and death ... so subjective and removed from the
world ... that it cannot assume appearance at all" (Arendt,
1958: 51). It suits Arendt to refer to the remote past of classical
antiquity, from which the public life of agora, pnyx and
acropolis is recoverable in archaeological evidence while the private,
everyday lives of diverse dwellers are more difficult to ascertain.
Eyal Weizman writes that for Arendt, "the political realm of
the Greek city was guaranteed, quite literally, by two kinds of
walls (or wall-like laws): the wall around the city, defining the
zones of the political, and the walls between the public areas and
the private house, guaranteeing the autonomy of private space."
(Weizman, 2006: 19). The walls were gendered, or divisions of two
discretely gendered realms - men's discourse in the open air, and
women's domestic lives and cthonic rites in dark spaces indoors
or in the Earth. This is conjecture, given my previous comment on
what archaeology preserves. I wonder if Richard Sennett is captured
by his material when he describes Greek society's polarisation of
a masculine world of light, heat, and men's symposia, and a cool,
dark feminine realm (Sennett, 1995: 52-81). The effect for Sennet
as for Arendt is to relegate the private to a restrictive condition
of the household or an interior world we might, after Freud, read
as a part of mental life characterised as an unconscious. Arendt
writes that a feeling for reality rests on a public realm where
"things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence
... [so that] the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate
lives is ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the public
realm." (Arendt, 1958: 51).
For Sennett (1995) the harsher light is the sunlit sky against which
the speaker in the pnyx (assembly) was silhouetted in front
of an audience grouped according to the part of the city in which
they lived, who remained seated. I note the centrality of the performative
in Sennett's account, but also the selectivity of Arendt's view
of the polis as a model for a democratic society. For Sennett
a public realm is evoked less by the pnyx than the agora
(market). He draws attention particularly to the stoa,
built around 460 BCE on the north side of the agora of
Athens as a space "not built ... for the use of a single group
of officials." (Sennett, 1995: 54). This echoes Habermas' (1989)
idea of a public sphere as being separated from civic institutions.
Sennett writes of citizens strolling from one informal discussion
to another - a nice image. But decisions on state policy were not
made in the market, but the preserve of an elite, and not a vehicle
for grass-roots articulation of social ideas; and, as Sennett says,
only 5 to 10 per cent of the adult, native-born population of Athens
could take part in the pnyx (Sennett, 1995: 52) - all men. In her
critique of French Republicanism in the 1790s, Nancy Fraser reads
an etymological connection between the words 'public' and 'pubic',
"a graphic trace of the fact that in the ancient world possession
of a penis was a requirement for speaking in public." (Fraser,
1993: 5-6). In Athens a further requirement was possession of a
talent (6,000 drachmae, or 6,000 days' pay for a skilled worker).
The public realm of Athens is, then, a model for the bourgeois public
sphere more than for a democratic society, replicated according
to Geoff Eley (1992) in bourgeois society's philanthropic institutions
and professional associations. Fraser admits that in time exclusions
of gender, property, and race diminished in Western democratic structures
(Fraser, 1993: 10); but argues that interrogation of the concept
of a public sphere shows that difference is no more than set aside
"to the advantage of dominant groups and to the disadvantage
of subordinates." (Fraser, 1993: 11). Gary Bridge raises another
problem: Habermas' idea of communicative action is restricted to
language, and to a procedural approach based on claims to validity,
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The
contents of the validity claims relate to people's ideas of
the objective world, their social norms and their subjective
worlds. In order to defend these worldviews in debate people
must examine the basis of their validity - in terms of objective
truth, social legitimacy and subjective sincerity (Bridge,
2005: 6). |
Bridge identifies a broader idea of communicative action in "bodies
and gestures, as well as speech and thought" so that "performativity,
slips and excess in communication can be as much a resource for
social transformation as the more controlled communication towards
consensus, on which Habermas focused" (Bridge, 2005: 6).
CONCLUSION
If the public sphere, like music, comes into reality when it is
performed, it is diminished by alignment to urban public spaces
- sites not of formation but of selective representation, and of
regulation through narratives of national or civic identity in public
monuments, rituals, displays of power, and public art. I began by
saying that the public sphere was a metaphorical site. This enables
me to avoid the reification of publicity in forms such as the piazza.
Yet I do need a sense of how such a sphere takes place, that it
is not only metaphorical. A case which lends a material sociability
to the concept is a domestic, or on closer inquiry transitional,
space - the kitchen of Soviet communal housing.
Angela Harutyunyan (2004) sees Habermas' public sphere as constructed
in the discourses of citizens free from state interference, arguing
that it functions only in conditions of free association. She asks
what happens outside such conditions. In a leaflet publicising the
project public media space which she curated at the Armenian Centre
for Contemporary Experimental Art in Yerevan in 2004, Harutyunyan
writes,
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In
Soviet times the kitchen became a place where underground
discussions were going on and where alternative thought was
formed. So, the kitchen became a public space (if we follow
the definition of Habermas) (Harutyunyan, 2004, n.p.). |
Where does that lead me? Firstly, to understand a potential public
sphere as produced in social dialogue, not given in design. Social
dialogue enables the shaping of a social imagination, hence glimpses
of how else a society might be organised. This resembles Lefebvre's
idea of lived time - constituted by moments of liberation within
the routines of everyday life. And it leads me to ask to what extent
cultural work, as in contemporary dissident art within the affluent
society, might contribute to articulation of such a public sphere.
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