208 Between Private and Public
nterpreting the bazaar’s collective identity and operation as a con-I
sequence of protracted, polycentric, and multifaceted relations resonates
with the Arendtian notion of the public sphere. The production of the
public is conceptually related to interpersonal relations and exchanges
that fashion private citizens and their potentials for politics. Arendt
emphasizes that the public is something that is experienced (even pro-
duced) through social action and intercourse with others in a “web of
human relationships.”^10 Actions would be meaningless without the pres-
ence of others (a public) to witness, judge, and give meaning to them
(publicity). In his later writings Habermas makes the connection between
the concepts of public sphere and networks even more explicit. The public
sphere, he writes, “can best be described as a network for communicat-
ing information and points of view (i.e., opinions, expressing affirmative
or negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in the process,
filtered and synthesized, in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of
topically specified public opinions.”^11 Yet in order to import Habermas’s
essentially normative notion of the public sphere into empirical studies,
it is important not to treat the means of communication and dissemina-
tion of discourses as given or static. The pattern of interpersonal relations,
the way that they bring people together and hold them apart, has con-
sequences for accessibility, accountability, secrecy, and exclusion—i.e.,
publicness. By understanding the bazaar both as a unit of analysis and as
the reality constituted through networks, the public nature of the bazaar
is automatically treated more heterogeneously and dynamically. In other
words, patterns of networks or interpersonal relations tell us a lot about
how and why publics emerge, transform, and wane.
econdly, a sometimes forgotten matter is that Habermas understood S
the emergence and transformation of the public sphere as intimately related
to the mercantile and bourgeois class and the development of capitalist
market economies. Thus, studying merchants and commercial institutions
would be a potentially fruitful means to assess the particularities of public
sphere(s) in Iran, and the Middle East region more generally. Additionally,
this agenda helps relate political-economic and cultural issues to one
another, rather than treating them as separate and autonomous realms.
abermas, and Arendt before him, was quite clear that the public H
sphere is distinct, or more precisely becomes distinct, from the realm of