Publics, Politics and Participation

Kırlı 177

Surveillance and Constituting the Public in the

Ottoman Empire

Cengiz Kırlı

In large part, the history of political struggle has been the his-

tory of the attempts to control significant sites of assembly and

spaces of discourse.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,

The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

Few concepts in the last decade have been invoked with more frequency
and across more disciplines than that of the public sphere.^1 We are grow-
ing accustomed to the widespread use of the term “public” for people and
“public sphere” for society. Harold Mah, in a timely and incisive analysis
criticizing recent European historiography’s appropriation of the concept
of the public sphere, called it “a phantasy.”^2 Drawing attention to the con-
tradiction between social historians’ recent quest to recognize different
identities and represent their varying interests in the public sphere on one
hand, and the basic condition for Habermas’s ideal public sphere in which
diverse groups set aside their particularities and assume collectivity on
the other, Mah points to the “inescapable instability” in the representa-
tion of Habermas’s universal public sphere based on an order of abstract
individuality.^3
or somewhat different reasons, I argue that the enthusiastic appro-F
priation of the concept of the public sphere in Middle Eastern historiog-
raphy (and in other non-Western historiographies as well) is related to the
political imaginary, to a phantasy that the concept promises to offer.