Gambetti 95hat is missing from the recent anthropological turn in stud-W
ies on publicity is the challenge faced by all democratic politics: how to
order collective life according to rules that we ourselves have set? Often
related to power structures or conceptualized as the effect of dominant
discourses, norm-bound practices provide the condition of existence
for anthropological public spheres. The focus of attention is, curiously
enough, on how these norms are contested and perverted from within
and through a gradual and anonymous process. Both the reproduction
of norms and their perversion is thought to occur in the institutionalized
space of everyday practices. Social movements are then conceptualized
as the mere reproduction on a larger scale of the latter. As seductive as it
may be, an overly textual reading of the “fruitful perversity”^13 of public
discourse fails to address the question of political action which, needless
to say, is one of the most pressing questions of social and political thought
at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
y objections to both the Enlightenment and the anthropologi-M
cal accounts of the public sphere are informed by the Kurdish uprising
in Turkey (1984–1999). I have dealt elsewhere with what I called the
“conflictual (trans)formation” of the public sphere in the urban space of
Diyarbakir, the largest city in Kurdish-populated southeastern Turkey.^14
Here, I will draw on theoretical insight obtained from that study to
rethink the public sphere in its event-character, in its relation to conflict
and political struggle and, consequently, with respect to its distinguish-
ing feature of self-determination through collective action. In doing so,
I will engage (albeit briefly) with a highly thought-provoking exchange
between Dana Villa and Craig Calhoun regarding resistance and political
action.^15 The whole meaning of the otherwise scholarly exercise of trying
to rethink the public sphere in its connection to struggle, collective action
and self-determination is actually contained in this exchange whereby the
question is not about whether the public sphere is a theoretically valuable
concept or not, but about whether political action is possible at all in the
present era.