100 Philosophical Frames
not totally eradicated from the modern world, the public realm is such
that conferring any amount of permanence to new spaces of freedom has
become highly exceptional indeed. As the recent degradation of the “com-
mun-ication” established between the Kurdish and Turkish publics seems
to demonstrate, power structures operating in the wake of the twenty-first
century are too resilient to acts of subversion on a microscale.
s sobering as this admonition may be, however, there seems to be A
a catch in the conceptual framework. Owing in large part to the ambigu-
ity of Arendt’s own postulates, the question of whether action requires
the prior existence of a public sphere where it can establish freedom
rather than wreak havoc (or lead to hubris, in Arendt’s terms) or whether
public spheres are themselves results or effects of collective action is
left un answered. Adopting a Foucauldian mode of local/everyday resis-
tance or taking a negative-critical stance much like what Adorno, in his
despair, proposed as the sole way of circumventing the trap of ideology,
would indeed be the only alternatives left if it were agreed that a common
world is the prerequisite of action and politics. The question is not merely
a scholastic one, as is readily indicated by Villa’s (and Foucault’s, not to
mention others’) claim that the condition of possibility of political action
per se has almost disappeared from today’s world.
e claim to the contrary, defended by Calhoun, is that public space Th
is a result of political action and that refraining from action would actu-
ally spell disaster in the form of the comeback of the totalitarian reflex
inherent in modernity as an epoch. Calhoun, in fact, rightly argues that
if action should be conceived as a new beginning in the Arendtian sense,
no institutional arrangement can be regarded as its condition—action is
what creates public spheres or new meanings, relations and identities.
The problem facing us in late modernity is not whether or not we are
to recover some historical model of the public sphere—the agora or the
salon—but whether or not new conditions of publicness can be created. In
fact, the quest for a single retrievable model of the public sphere is itself
problematic, according to Calhoun. One alternative seems to be “to think
of the public sphere not as the realm of a single public but as a sphere of
publics.”^24 As such, the issue links up with that of down-to-earth demo-
cratic politics and not with some ontological conception of authentic
political action.