Dancing Toward Democracy— denaturalizing citizenship

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“Citizenship” is promoted by the state to strengthen the sense of shared commonalty at the national level, to strengthen the idea of the nation as a community, and to thus naturalize obligations to civic duties, including warfare. And so, one might also argue that, at this limit, citizenship also works against the logic of the public sphere, which must remain “above” all communal interests—including an imagined national community.

We have to look critically at practices that seek to limit public sphere access within a nation to citizens of that nation, and/or that require or encourage citizenship to be emblematic of a single “naturalized” national community. For a public sphere to remain open to counter-state expressions, there can be no fixed one-to-one correspondence between the nation-state, its formally recognized citizens, and the public sphere.

Minority/diasporic groups who recognize a lack of access to the public sphere are often the first to bring issues of citizenship and exclusion into public view. But the manner through which the community brings this message to the public sphere is actually quite important. For any group to operate as a legitimate voice within the public sphere, the group must articulate issues that are within the “public” interest. For example, a demand for inclusion requires that the group opens itself up to a moment of reidentification with the larger “public.”

Class and publics

One reason why private interests are not legitimated, is class¹. Class, specifically the notions of an “upper-class,” with its corresponding “lower-” is a clear example of potential for the “privatization” of place and power. Class is also a good example of “community,” of the “alibi” (in Barthes's sense) that (even imagined) shared heredity can provide as a basis for group identity.

One can say that public sphere formation in the Western Enlightenment period in Europe was at one moment, a counter-class practice, although it has subsequently assumed and promoted the desires of those who prowl it most effectively. This slow but thoroughgoing appropriation of the public sphere by and for corporate² interests gets noted more often than critically addressed in critiques of the public sphere. Gupta and Ferguson note: “The production and distribution of mass culture—films, television and radio programs, newspapers and wire services, recorded music, books, live concerts— is largely controlled by those notoriously placeless organizations, multinational corporations. The ‘public sphere’ is therefore hardly ‘public’ with respect to control over the representations that are circulated in it” (1992, 19). But how is this situation liable to change³?

“‘One month later, on August 16, 1819, the movement reached its high point and turning point. A chain of mass rallies carried out in a disciplined manner raised the morale of the movement and, at the same time, disturbed the establishment. “The peaceful behavior of so many thousands of unemployed is not natural,” commented General Byng, incensed by the phenomenon of the working classes having begun to solve their organizational problems. The “transformation of the rabble into a disciplined class” was due not least of all to the experience of failure with underground and revolt actions. The mass demonstrations, with their hundreds of group leaders, bands, banners, and so on, revealed an organized exploitation of the traditions that stood available to the movement, in the form of army veterans, trade unions, auxiliary classes, and Jacobin rituals. ’”
Michael Vester, Die Entstehung des Proletariats als Lernprozeß. Frankfurt am Main, 1971. 174ff.
Quoted in:(Negt and Kluge 1983, 189).

A public sphere is not immune to the presence of inequities of capital and status. Instead, over time, it tends to articulate (and to mimic and diffuse) the institutional practices and pre-established priorities—the complex social topology—that forms its ground. There is no mechanism internal to it to prevent it from warping in this manner (there is actually no mechanism to it at all, it is merely the total of available institutional and organizational practices). Without reflexive attention, a public sphere can become the quasi-property of those who manage its information flows, as Habermas noted: “The public sphere, simultaneously prestructured and dominated by the mass media, developed into an arena infiltrated by power in which, by means of topic selection and topical contributions, a battle is fought not only over influence but over the control of communication flows that affect behavior while their strategic intentions are kept hidden as much as possible” (1992, 437).

Current critiques of the bourgeois public sphere are usually aimed at opening up rival configurations, counter-publics that can recode the bourgeois logic of the public sphere into something more inclusive and heterogeneous. And so the current problem of the public sphere in Asian/Pacific places begins not with the issue of bringing private (marginalized, communal) interests into the public sphere/space, but removing privileged/privatized access to this sphere.

“On August 16, following a week-long drilling of peaceful demonstration forms, a mass demonstration was staged on the St. Peters Field in Manchester consisting of 60,000 to 100,000 workers, who were bloodily scattered by the cavalry units known as ‘heroes of Waterloo.’ The slaughter, since designated as ‘Peterloo,’ resulted in 11 dead and over 400 injured.”
Michael Vester, Die Entstehung des Proletariats als Lernprozeß. Frankfurt am Main, 1971. 174ff.
Quoted in:
(Negt and Kluge 1983, 189-190).
Absent in Kyoto are similar fields of Peterloo, missing is a history of the public struggle for the appropriation of place and power.

This double movement of evacuating entrenched privatized interests from the public sphere while articulating the right to heterogeneity within the public sphere is emerging as the central counter-public discourse within the Korean diaspora in Japan. I would suggest that this discourse has applications in other parts of the Asia/Pacific. But where can we locate the connections between civil society, civic spaces, and the public sphere? And how can we further examine these connections?

Three notions are particularly helpful here: Henri Lefevbre's notion of the “appropriation of space;” Nancy Fraser's use of “subaltern counterpublic;” and Michel deCerteau's idea of “tactics,” that is, of strategies behind enemy lines.

The Higashi-Kujo Madang festival is, I would suggest, a tactical maneuver that appropriates a public space and constructs a subaltern counterpublic event. Looking at the festival in this manner allows us to understand how local practices of resistance can anchor a transnational diasporic group to the city where it dwells.

¹The public sphere, as this emerged, for example, in Great Britain, was the result of conflicts between the landed (and politically active) gentry and workers in the new manufactories who sought to bring democratic pressure to bear on issues of access to political power (As Negt and Kluge noted). The issue of access was potentially to be fought in the streets, with the potential (and, at times, imminent) result being a physical defeat (and then death or displacement) of the gentry. Public sphere agencies: newspapers, courts, parliaments—in each case subject to reflexive reforms to make them more open, more public—allowed the conflict to be concluded in other, discursive, arenas, and the resulting compromise favored neither the gentry nor the general worker, but rather, the emerging middle-class of literate professionals and urban skilled workers, who claimed also to speak for “the workers,” but whose interests were coincidental with those of the gentry. The resulting bourgeois public sphere occupies the center of information production in Great Britain, and through similar circumstances, in most Western European and North American states.

²The role of corporations in the bourgeois—is there anything more bourgeois than Microsoft?— public sphere needs much more attention. My notion of the market-state attempts to describe the latest movement in this global process.

³ Habermas (1989, 1989a, 1992) outlines the progressive degeneration of the public sphere, but offers inadequate advice on how this might be reversed: inadequate because of the deficiencies of his linguistic theorizing, and also weak, I would say, because his picture of the degeneration of the public sphere is so formidable that it is very difficult to imagine a solution. But the current condition of public spheres in various places may be less severely “degenerate” and more tractable than he first allowed.