94 Philosophical Frames
the main and foremost distinctive features of the theoretical horizon in
which the notion of public sphere was conceptualized does away with the
normative potential inherent in the liminal moment. Developed primar-
ily by the anthropologist Victor Turner, liminality denotes antistructure
or a threshold on the periphery of everyday life. Turner talks of liminal
periods or episodes (social dramas), as well as of spheres or spaces in
which structural and norm-bound constraints are lifted in such a way as
to allow for a creative distancing or alienation from social life.^9 Liminality
is what distinguishes public relations from kinship ties. As Sirman notes,
in liminal public spaces characterized by encounters with strangers, “each
exchange marks a performative moment when the subject has to find
the proper code to behave according to.”^10 The temporary suspension of
norms and structures paves the way for a refounding of modes of rela-
tionality upon new and potentially egalitarian grounds. Thus, opening up
venues for collective agency, and eventually for self-determination, is a
distinguishing feature of the public sphere.
nalytically speaking, the difference between a community that is A
passively constituted within a structure of communication (“passively”
meaning independently of the expressed wills and conscious intentions of
its members) and a community actively shaped through communicating
agents must not be obliterated. The consequences of such an obliteration
are not slight. To illustrate what I take to be a mere public, let me refer to
Benedict Anderson’s account of the nation as a fictive binding together
of otherwise unrelated individuals through modern vernaculars, mainly
capitalism and the invention of print.^11 Imagined but not actively con-
structed, the nation is a typical example of a community structure that
individuals are subjected to without being its subjects in the constitutive
sense of the term. As seen from this perspective, such a community can-
not be said to have emerged through collective self-determination. Rather,
as in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” everyday modes of communication
and interaction are thought to add up to produce a structure that is both
different than what the deeds were intended to achieve and beyond the
making of specific agents. The spectral shadow of Marx’s notion of alien-
ation, long denigrated for its essentialism, looms above such structures. To
wit: “Powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till
now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.”^12