The idea of 'making publics’ post-Habermas. A844 Ex. 1.3.4.
Sunday, 18 Nov 2018, 19:05
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Monday, 19 Nov 2018, 09:34
The idea of making
‘publics’ post-Habermas. A844 Ex. 1.3.4.
Return to your notes about the public
(from 1.3.1) and contemplate whether your ideas about the
public and its historical shifts have changed after reading Habermas and, if
you had the time, after listening to the Making Publics introduction.
I decided to read also: Introduction to Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe—Performance, Geography,
Privacy Steven Mullaney and Angela Vanhaelen (2013)
My earlier ‘notes’:
Public in these examples (‘public opinion’ and the ‘public
sphere’) is used adjectivally in which case it appears to invoke its
binary antonym, ‘private’. Yet a private opinion whilst functioning in a
similar binary relationship with public opinion is not the sole or probably the
main usage of the term ‘public opinion’. As a known ‘the public’ might in part
be synonymous with the ‘public sphere’ (or even ‘public domain’ but not quite,
since it implies other spheres or domains. The public seems to name a ‘thing’.
In that latter sense it relates to notions of the communal. But it isn’t the
same either because we can’t define public without its binary private. In fact,
the public is a splendid invention for capitalist and other societies where
privilege, ownership and wealth are unequal. To talk about the public is to
imply, and perhaps defend the notion of the private particularly in relation to
issues of ownership, entitlement and access. This is so even where private
means ‘subjective’ and ‘secret’ or ‘reserved’, although the relationship
between meanings is nuanced. We have public entrances only to distinguish and
justify the need for need for private entrances. We train administrators of
bureaucracies and large enterprises ‘deal with the public’ since that ‘sphere’
needs to be constrained lest it or any part of it feels it has a right to
demand access to what is reserved as private. Public then is a constrained or
constricted area where the public is maintained in prescribed or permitted
roles that do not allow the appearance of either the private or fully communal,
where the private is perceivable as unnecessary.
Of course, these
like all definitions are historically specific and will vary according to
numerous historical and other factors. The major one here may be the discourses
available to any period which may generate neologism and then vary the meaning
of generated words by varying its contextual uses by the forces of conventions,
accrued practice or ‘rules and laws’. The notion of multiple publics may emerge
when we talk of specific groups.
For an image
‘having’ or possessing a public, seems to me a vague concept. In a sense here
‘public’ may suggest a determining bottom-up force that helps create or sustain
an image in its present form and interpretation. This might be true of the
‘image’ associated with celebrity, although ere as elsewhere the determining
factors are probably much more complex. But it could be applied to religious
images or images of gender, race, disability and so on. In that sense are some
'publics' more influential and / or entitled than others. Do women for instance
have public entitlement over images of them or are images of women as we have
them in current society the possession and entitlement of those who use and
abuse them, maybe men. The possibilities are endless.
The image is
unlikely to have force to determine its public alone, since it feels impossible
to attribute agency to an image. But the point remains that some images do have
agency attributed to them – from religious icons to pornography. Is this a
function of how those susceptible to that belief (in the magical power of the
image (Freedman) become that images ‘public’ (those Catholics who visit Lourdes
for instance or even followers of celebrity).
Returning to those (now green) notes is sobering. They were
written in ignorance of what was to come and are therefore tangential to the
narratives that follow in the course, although these too have
multi-directionality. I benefitted from reading the Habermas essay, and more
from continuing reflection, in terms of ideas about representation, which are
still growing. The relationship between power, images and representation is
obviously central to all the questions but I’ not at the point of articulating
any of the thousand ideas that are spinning around rather disjointedly.
Other than that Habermas doesn’t offer much that might be usable.
I was pleased that my notes anticipated some of these criticisms, although
obviously not in the form of developed arguments, especially the hunch about ‘multiple
publics’ (in the zeitgeist and its discourses anyway). My access to this idea
comes from a long-life in the complex relationships between the politics f
different publics of which I could be said to be a member. Some hints of how
these ideas link to representations and images appeared, without me knowing it
at the time, in recently sent-off TMA01. For instance, Burra seems to represent
imagined communities by charging imagined space between figures as charged with
interactional meaning. For me this says something about the relationships
between art-objects, ‘publics’ and curation-spaces.
However, this material on ‘making publics’ is ever-so-important.
Watching the video was time-consuming and I need to get to more to it. There
are great quotations on ‘public spheres’ (Mullaney & Vanbaelen 2013:3):
A heterogeneous
and conflictual ensemble of social entities ….a multiplicity of publics and
counterpublics that produce and occupy, in turn, a multiplicity of social
spaces where collective identity and voice can be created, discovered, asserted
and exercised.
There are even more feelers outwards in ibid:5 –
Publics are imagined communities,
to adopt and expand Benedict Anderson’s rich concept, that are more or less
concretely realized in physical or material spaces as well.
This is very rich. Again, it recalls how I used Anderson in
relation to ‘imagined’ LGBTIQ+ communities.
The idea of 'making publics’ post-Habermas. A844 Ex. 1.3.4.
The idea of making ‘publics’ post-Habermas. A844 Ex. 1.3.4.
Return to your notes about the public (from 1.3.1) and contemplate whether your ideas about the public and its historical shifts have changed after reading Habermas and, if you had the time, after listening to the Making Publics introduction.
I decided to read also: Introduction to Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe—Performance, Geography, Privacy Steven Mullaney and Angela Vanhaelen (2013)
My earlier ‘notes’:
Public in these examples (‘public opinion’ and the ‘public sphere’) is used adjectivally in which case it appears to invoke its binary antonym, ‘private’. Yet a private opinion whilst functioning in a similar binary relationship with public opinion is not the sole or probably the main usage of the term ‘public opinion’. As a known ‘the public’ might in part be synonymous with the ‘public sphere’ (or even ‘public domain’ but not quite, since it implies other spheres or domains. The public seems to name a ‘thing’. In that latter sense it relates to notions of the communal. But it isn’t the same either because we can’t define public without its binary private. In fact, the public is a splendid invention for capitalist and other societies where privilege, ownership and wealth are unequal. To talk about the public is to imply, and perhaps defend the notion of the private particularly in relation to issues of ownership, entitlement and access. This is so even where private means ‘subjective’ and ‘secret’ or ‘reserved’, although the relationship between meanings is nuanced. We have public entrances only to distinguish and justify the need for need for private entrances. We train administrators of bureaucracies and large enterprises ‘deal with the public’ since that ‘sphere’ needs to be constrained lest it or any part of it feels it has a right to demand access to what is reserved as private. Public then is a constrained or constricted area where the public is maintained in prescribed or permitted roles that do not allow the appearance of either the private or fully communal, where the private is perceivable as unnecessary.
Of course, these like all definitions are historically specific and will vary according to numerous historical and other factors. The major one here may be the discourses available to any period which may generate neologism and then vary the meaning of generated words by varying its contextual uses by the forces of conventions, accrued practice or ‘rules and laws’. The notion of multiple publics may emerge when we talk of specific groups.
For an image ‘having’ or possessing a public, seems to me a vague concept. In a sense here ‘public’ may suggest a determining bottom-up force that helps create or sustain an image in its present form and interpretation. This might be true of the ‘image’ associated with celebrity, although ere as elsewhere the determining factors are probably much more complex. But it could be applied to religious images or images of gender, race, disability and so on. In that sense are some 'publics' more influential and / or entitled than others. Do women for instance have public entitlement over images of them or are images of women as we have them in current society the possession and entitlement of those who use and abuse them, maybe men. The possibilities are endless.
The image is unlikely to have force to determine its public alone, since it feels impossible to attribute agency to an image. But the point remains that some images do have agency attributed to them – from religious icons to pornography. Is this a function of how those susceptible to that belief (in the magical power of the image (Freedman) become that images ‘public’ (those Catholics who visit Lourdes for instance or even followers of celebrity).
Returning to those (now green) notes is sobering. They were written in ignorance of what was to come and are therefore tangential to the narratives that follow in the course, although these too have multi-directionality. I benefitted from reading the Habermas essay, and more from continuing reflection, in terms of ideas about representation, which are still growing. The relationship between power, images and representation is obviously central to all the questions but I’ not at the point of articulating any of the thousand ideas that are spinning around rather disjointedly.
Other than that Habermas doesn’t offer much that might be usable. I was pleased that my notes anticipated some of these criticisms, although obviously not in the form of developed arguments, especially the hunch about ‘multiple publics’ (in the zeitgeist and its discourses anyway). My access to this idea comes from a long-life in the complex relationships between the politics f different publics of which I could be said to be a member. Some hints of how these ideas link to representations and images appeared, without me knowing it at the time, in recently sent-off TMA01. For instance, Burra seems to represent imagined communities by charging imagined space between figures as charged with interactional meaning. For me this says something about the relationships between art-objects, ‘publics’ and curation-spaces.
However, this material on ‘making publics’ is ever-so-important. Watching the video was time-consuming and I need to get to more to it. There are great quotations on ‘public spheres’ (Mullaney & Vanbaelen 2013:3):
A heterogeneous and conflictual ensemble of social entities ….a multiplicity of publics and counterpublics that produce and occupy, in turn, a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice can be created, discovered, asserted and exercised.
There are even more feelers outwards in ibid:5 –
Publics are imagined communities, to adopt and expand Benedict Anderson’s rich concept, that are more or less concretely realized in physical or material spaces as well.
This is very rich. Again, it recalls how I used Anderson in relation to ‘imagined’ LGBTIQ+ communities.