Local Spaces and Identities— recoding public space
Publicity, visibility, and ownership: participation in a public sphere brings varying degrees of such signals of inclusion to those persons and groups who find a place in its now highly mediated space. I will have much to say about the notion of “public sphere” below, but here I will start with the claim that a public sphere is the arena where transnational persons must negotiate their place within the democratic state. And I also propose that a public sphere has its own spatial properties, and this is determined by and serves to define those spaces we call “public places,” which are anchored by physical places—streets and plazas—but which extend today into a variety of mediated interactions, from broadcast and print media, to the internet (See also: The Street). We have some recent demonstrations of the use of the street as a public sphere arena.
The use of crowd visibility on the street as a warrant for democratic inclusiveness was demonstrated in Belgrade, when mass crowds occupied the streets for more than two months.
SOURCE: CNN
The recent (November 1996-February 1997), prolonged, mass demonstrations in Belgrade, and the attempts by the government to repress reporting of these, shows how confrontations within the public sphere can include both physical spaces and media institutions.
- “...We must rehabilitate our sense of ourselves as active human subjects, and liberate ourselves from the captivity of a purely national perception of the world. Through this “subjecthood” and the individual conscience that goes with it, we must discover a new relationship to our neighbors, and to the universe and its metaphysical order, which is the source of the moral order.”
(Havel 1993, 9)
The final decision of the government to accede to the demands of the demonstrators also shows how concerted, visible group action in the street can force access to a public sphere, at least when the state is not willing to escalate its response through its control of the means of violence (as what happened in the Tienanmen demonstrations). But where there are no visible confrontations, we cannot simply imagine that the public sphere is therefore open to counter-articulations.
- “If one wanted to advance a modern version of the theory of national character—which has gone completely out of fashion, although we encounter national differences in everyday life without knowing how to specify or analyse them—it would begin, for me, with a theory of the educational systems in as much as they are formative of the structures of understanding, and constructive of our taxonomies.”
(Bourdieu 1992, 39)
The most effective controls of expression are often preemptive ones. And the main strategy (certainly in Kyoto) for preempting competing/counter-appropriations of the public sphere is to saturate the discursive field/space where civic identity is constructed. The public sphere is an important site for counter-state discourse. But often counter-expressions are lost in a fog of expressions produced by and for the state. These state-provided expressions may also include normative content and force.
