Dancing Toward Democracy— unimagined publics

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But is the nation/state at its core a community or a public sphere? Benedict Anderson's (1983) work locates an imagined community as the logic of the early nation-state formation, and we can see evidence of this logic in current national discourses. But a democratic state can no longer see itself in these terms alone, as we shall see. It is precisely the public sphere that challenges (or fails to do so) the monological imagination of a nation as a national community. This is particularly true today as mobile populations, goods, imaginations, and even locations (such as European villages being constructed in Japan) bring strange persons, objects and ideas into cities and towns. But strangeness is not itself strange today, and “strangers” play pivotal roles in public spheres.

Communities may seek to locate friends and strangers, binding the former into imagined kinship based on residence, language, or common heritage; and marking the latter as potential enemies. But public spheres work within an opposite logic: they demand that individuals find a commonality¹ with strangers who occupy the same territory, and, if necessary to speak and act against their imagined or real kin group and its interests.

Warner (1993) calls this distancing from communal identity “disincorporation,” and he notes that is it somewhat easier for those whose bodies are already “unmarked” in the public sphere (e.g. in Kyoto, male college-educated ethnic Japanese not living in buraku areas) to abandon collective identity politics as a feature of the public sphere. He notes, “the rhetorical strategy of personal abstraction is both the utopian moment of the public sphere and a major source of domination” (Warner 1993, 239). But he fails in this argument to see that an alternative solution to this situation is to re-mark the unmarked bodies. It is unjust that those who have achieved recognition and acceptance in the public sphere fill this with a “public habitus” that they control, as this reflects their tastes and desires.

The Domestication of cultural expression in public is a major obstacle to wider participation by groups who are not already accepted in this arena. Cultural domination in this fashion needs to be countered by what Nancy Fraser (in a 1997 talk in Santa Barbara) called a “politics of recognition.²” The public sphere is the ongoing arena for this political struggle. In this process the imagined community of the nation is re-imagined in hitherto unimaginable ways.

I don’t know you

In order for a public sphere not to collapse into a discourse of a “natural” national community, as this is imagined and reproduced during nation-state formation, the public sphere must remain a place of, by, and for strangers. This is most important. At the moment when voices are heard in public, each voice must not be identified with its body, it must speak for all bodies. But it must also be heard, and so barriers that remove certain voices from the public must be removed, and not permitted to be reconstructed in some other fashion. The politics of recognition looks at the ways in which the ken of individuals is managed, and it interrogates this mis-management as a source of symbolic violence. As citizens must become strangers within the public sphere, any stranger—expatriates, refugees, guest workers, international tourists, and even anthropologists—has access to this sphere. There are no privileged positions in an (ideal) public sphere, even as there are no public spheres that currently meet this ideal. But the recognition of the place of strangers within the public sphere moves this toward its ideal condition.

“For instance, the unforgettable and hence unforgivable original sin of the late entry: the fact that he [the stranger] had entered the realm of the life-world at a point of time which can be exactly determined. He did not belong ‘initially’, ‘originally’, ‘from the very start’, ‘since time immemorial’. The memory of the event of his coming makes of his very presence an event in history, rather than a fact of nature”
(Bauman 1990, 149).

Each stranger is a diaspora of one, a nomad of democracy. A stranger is someone who has entered into a locale at a certain time, and has not, as yet, gone away again. The stranger cannot make a primordial claim of residence. Her presence is dated, and potentially ephemeral. This presence interrupts the naturalizing features of nation-states as imagined communities. To allow strangers to become citizens, and to demand that citizens act as strangers in the public sphere—to assume that they ignore their identification with family and community—is a fundamental aspect of dialogic democracy in late modernity.

¹Affirmative action programs are based on this concept: on placing the good of the public—as a place of inclusion—above the privileged interests of any one gender or ethnic group. It takes an active public sphere (backing up a strong public sphere within the government) to summon the participation of those who would abandon privilege in favor of inclusion.

²A term she borrowed from Charles Taylor.