Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

92 Philosophical Frames


of various discursive practices and narratives.^1 Social imaginaries and
representations of collective selves emerge, shift, change and reestablish
themselves through microprocesses that create and recreate an array of
over lapping publics. Not only are publics formed as performative conse-
quences or effects of everyday social interaction,^2 but the latter also con-
stitutes a basis of resistance to domination. These relatively recent studies
have been valuable in detecting minute forms of subversion where none
had been noticed by political or economic analysts. In addition to laying
bare the intricate relation between social practice and publicity, anthro-
pologists have also outstripped political theorists in theorizing hitherto
unidentified dynamics of change, resistance and insurgence. Much light
has been shed on how unexpected and uncontrollable alter-narratives
or counternarratives seep through the cracks and leaks in dominant dis-
courses to performatively subvert them.^3 By expounding upon the plu-
ral character of processes of textualization, anthropological studies show
how spaces of communication gradually emerge or wither away in the
interstices of everyday social activity. The state also becomes enmeshed
in the micropractices of everyday life. What political scientists call “state”
is but a bundle of multilayered structures and discourses that set com-
pelling norms and subjectivate subjects by regulating their behavior. At
the same time, however, the negotiation and eventual subversion of these
same norms is also enabled by the state’s own ambiguity and “illegibil-
ity.”^4 Instead of separating state and society into neatly identifiable entities,
then, anthropologists point to the complex interaction between the two.
o the public sphere can and does incorporate several interrelated S
levels of activity, from everyday intercourse to state-related activity,
passing through rational debate and communication, all of which open
spheres of circulation between strangers. Subversion, after all, is a risk
inherent in stranger-relationality^5 and public spheres are those venues in
which otherwise unconnected strangers enter into nonintimate relation-
ships that either make or break sociopolitical hierarchies and norms.
ut in the anthropological context, a crucial question remains: is B
there no difference between public and public sphere? Is mere stranger-
relationality (as opposed to kinship ties) a sufficient basis on which to
ground the notion of public sphere? Indeed, don’t the various ways in
which the public is distinguished from the private, predicated either

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