Gambetti 105dimensions. Furthermore, liminality may have different outcomes. Instead
of letting something new emerge, the phase of reintegration following a
crisis may reinstitute former behavioral codes or result in heightened sub-
jugation and domination.
s is what seems to be happening to the Kurdish movement in Thi
Turkey. Following a series of distressing and provocative events of national
concern,^38 methods were devised to have the dominant public close up on
itself so as to become impervious to alternative voices. Thus, the poten-
tially transformative effects of the new public spaces of action and inter-
action that emerged in Diyarbakir and elsewhere in Turkey over the past
decade have largely waned. More homogeneous and autocratic than they
have been in over twenty years, mainstream public opinion and political
actors have successfully been able to turn the liminal situation to their
advantage. Although much has been written on how this came about,
it suffices to point out here that a passive public such as that described
in Anderson’s Imagined Communities is potentially prone to ideological
manipulation and disciplining. That only a portion of the Turkish pub-
lic could actually become actors in the reshaping of cultural and politi-
cal norms prior to the orchestrated obstruction of alternatives points to
the validity of what I will presently argue. It seems that only when the
publicness created during social dramas ends up becoming the ground
for effective self-determination, understood as the collective shaping or
restructuring of the social space available to the communicating publics,
that a public sphere—or a sphere of publics—may be said to have staying
power. Without presuming to be exhaustive, I will explore two conceptual
elements that seem indispensable for rethinking the public sphere today:
visibility and world-making.
III. Crossing the threshold between resistance and
transformative action
Reformulating Simmel, the literature on public spheres now abounds with
references to stranger-relationality.^39 Unlike intimate or kinship-based
forms of communication, public discourse is conceptualized as perfor-
matively constituting the public to which it is addressed. Circulation thus