Gambetti 107“mere appearance.” This type of publicity is necessarily a mode of action,
as opposed to being a mere modality of coexistence. Instead of being
characterized by the more passive and gradual process of circulation, it
tends to be a willed and conscious endeavor of articulation.
e actor in a social drama is surely an agent of novelty, but she is Th
not the sole agent. The situated meaning of action is different from the
meaning attributed to the action by the actor herself. It is the way an event
is narrated by others that inscribes action within the spatiotemporal real-
ity of any given community. The dependence of action on a public of both
spectators (onlookers) and narrators (storytellers) hints at the incredibly
productive and intricate ways in which a web of relations and significa-
tions are created in social spaces. But the spectator’s judgment not only
confers its sense on action, but also determines whether the action will
be carried through or not. The distinction Arendt makes between the two
moments of action, to begin (arkhein) and to carry through (prattein) is of
particular importance here.^41 Something new may be begun by a solitary
actor or group, but no transformation can acquire any amount of perma-
nence without being sustained by others.
e point that needs to be made here is that given the relative clo-Th
sure of the space of action in today’s world, the visibility of different forms
of relationality may actually depend much more upon the effectiveness
of dramatic staging than in previous eras in human history. It is also true
that this capacity pertains only (or mainly) to what Warner calls “counter-
publics.” These depend more heavily on performance spaces than on
print media, supply different ways of enacting stranger-relationality and
are even dependent on stranger-circulation for their very constitution.
Counterpublics differ from dominant publics in that the latter are “those
that can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted,
misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as univer-
sality or normalcy. Counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is
hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replica-
tive merely.”^42 Merely being “counter,” however, does not guarantee the
opening up of a sphere of collective action. A counterpublic that has not
created the right conditions for appealing to other publics in the process
of self-reflexivity will probably fail to obtain an adequate modification in
the power structures that it is opposing.