Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

110 Philosophical Frames


the first place. Appropriating the “political universality”^49 made possible
by the rupture of former norms and establishing new forms of commit-
ment requires breaking out of the claustrophobic politics of resistance.
Remaining within (or lapsing into) the alternatives dictated by power
indeed opens up the way to being overwhelmed in the stages of redress
and reintegration.
t is necessary, therefore, to stress that the imagination and resource-I
fulness at play in creating new relations on more microlevels need also
to be summoned concerning forms of political organization. Not unlike
Marx and for much the same reasons, the council system, beginning with
the Paris Commune, is Arendt’s “political form, at last found”: this is the
“amazing formation of a new power structure which owed its existence to
nothing but the organizational impulses of the people themselves.”^50 The
particular form of the councils—the rejection of representative democ-
racy or party politics, the multiplication of spaces of participation, the
deprofessionalization of administrative tasks—is an alternative to politi-
cal structures considered as natural and inevitable today—the state, party
politics, bureaucracy. The council system opens the ground for plurality
and spontaneity, as well as reducing the gap between the rulers and the
ruled. Alternatives need not be limited to what was historically available,
though, especially when innovative local experiences such as those in
Porto Alegre or Chiapas provide sources of inspiration.
o conclude this roughly outlined theoretical proposition, my T
understanding of the difference between a public and a public sphere
entails reflection upon the chances that the normative elements contained
in the latter notion—self-determination, critical distance to power struc-
tures, “commun-ication” between divergent standpoints and participation
in decision-making—would turn into enduring features of society, rather
than being localized, temporary and eventually manipulated or overpow-
ered strategies of resistance. The relationship between action and the pub-
lic sphere then acquires much significance in that the passive intake that
constitutes publics no longer suffices to assume any deliberate “commun-
ity” formation is actually taking place. What we may need today is a new
theory of action, rather than of agency as is very much the inclination
today.

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