Celebrations in Cities— Emotions in public

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Emotions are important to public spheres. For Kluge, it is the failure of cementing and verifying a consonance between emotional content and rational discourse that led to “1933.¹” But not only have emotions been subtracted from the face of the public space, but this subtraction in the public sphere then proceeds to rationalize the “private sphere,” as Habermas concluded in his critique of Weber, and in his theory of the transformation of the public sphere:

“...It is not the irreconcilability of cultural value spheres—or the clash of life-orders rationalized in their light—that is the cause of one-sided life-styles and unsatisfied legitimation needs; their cause is the monetarization and bureaucratization of everyday practices both in the private and public spheres. This places Weber's critical diagnoses in a different light.

To the degree that the economic system subjects the life-forms of private households and the life conduct of consumers and employees to its imperatives, consumerism and possessive individualism, motives of performance, and competition gain the force to shape behavior. The communicative practice of everyday life is one-sidedly rationalized into a utilitarian life-style; this media-induced shift to purposive-rational action orientations calls forth the reaction of a hedonism freed from the pressures of rationality. As the private sphere is undermined and eroded by the economic system, so too is the public sphere by the administrative system. The bureaucratic disempowering and desiccation of spontaneous processes of opinion and will-formation expands the scope for engineering mass loyalty and makes it easier to uncouple political decision making from concrete, identity-forming contexts of life. Insofar as such tendencies establish themselves, we get Weber's (stylized) picture of a legal domination that redefines practical questions as technical ones and dismisses demands for substantive justice with a legalistic reference to legitimation through procedure (Habermas, 1989 [1981], 325).”

civil intimacy

Civic intimacy as a common and ongoing practice, brings people to express their own emotions in the crowded street (or in a public school room, or on a public television program). After chasing public opinion/practice into private spaces, we have little choice but to go in after this through bureaucratic intervention. We cannot verify the presence and quality of justice in the “private” lives of people who are deskilled in expressing feelings in public. The absence of venues for emotional display in public creates a legitimation/information gap that opens up to a call for legal procedures to enforce practices that should be voluntarily monitored.

As Cohen and Arato (1992, 545) note, these legal interventions do not increase the availability of intimacy or the building of relationships, quite the reverse, they substitute client/expert relationships (with the courts or social workers) for interpersonal relationships between strangers—which is another term for “friendship.” Like fences with neighbors, laws make poor friends.

But where Habermas would strengthen both the private and public spheres, and the boundary between them, hooks would bring intimacy into public, and evacuate the private/domestic sphere. For her, (ibid, 225) privacy is an alibi that covers up something shameful. But the only —but overlooked (misrecognized)—reason for shame in this situation is the domination that supports the separation of the public sphere from private/domestic spaces. From these two perspectives, the engendered aspect of “privacy” becomes apparent. Probably nowhere on the globe is the public sphere more “masculinized” than in certain locales in the Asia Pacific region.

¹“Since 1933 we have been waging a war that has not stopped. It is always the same theme—the noncorrelation of intimacy and public life—and the same question: how can I communicate strong emotions in order to build a common life? (Kluge 1988, 33)”