Felix,
thank you for your remarks. I (sort of) understand the claim of the
demise of the "public sphere" if it is understood in the mythical form
of a horizontal space of exchange, negotiation, decision-making. But
maybe we are in agreement that this ideal form never really existed, and
that the space of negotiation has always been contested, and furrowed by
power/knowledge, gender, race, and other forms of conflict,
contradiction and stratification.
What I wonder is how you would describe the function of the space of
mediated communication that is today constituted by TikTok, F, X, etc.;
how is it different from what we used to call "the public sphere"? (I'm
thinking back, for instance, to the hundreds of newspapers that were
printed, a hundred years ago, in many large cities, every day of the
year; they manifested a great diversity of ideologies, opinions,
perspectives, yet taken together they constituted something of which you
say that it is now eroded?)
I believe that there is a connection between the political organisation
of postwar democracies and the way in which their public spheres were
structured (for instance through large-scale public and private media
monopolies). But as these structures are being transformed, what now
emerges might perhaps constitute a new type of 'public sphere', and one
that is also efficacious? (I'm imagining that the way in which you decry
the "complete dissolution" could be understood as an echo of those
voices for whom such paradigmatic changes in the media landscape have in
the past also looked like "the end" when, in fact, these were changes
and new beginnings - of course not necessarily for the better...)
Mind you, I'm not optimistic; I have the feeling that the way in which
public discourse is developing opens the door for the new fascism. My
question is whether it might not be the particular constitution of a new
type of public sphere, brought about by pattern-recognition-enhanced
"social" media platforms, that forms the basis of the popular support
for this new fascism. Can there not be something like a new, fascist
public sphere that manifests on X, or on Telegram channels, or Instagram
profiles, or elsewhere?
Only the architectural modernisms imagined that cities could be built
anew; most other people have always lived in ruins of what was there
before, building their houses from the rubble they found where they
arrived, where they fled or returned.
Regards,
-a
Am 26.01.25 um 14:03 schrieb Felix Stalder via nettime-l:
Maybe we can take these two points together. We -- people in the
cultural field doing exhibitions, publications, workshops and events
"open to all" -- have held out for this notion of a public sphere until
the very end, longer than almost everyone else. The hard right never
believed in it. For them, the public has always been something to be
molded in the pursuit of power.
The political center abandoned the notion of the public sphere in the
1990s. Analyses of "post-democracy" around the turn of the millennium
tracked the rise of technocratic leadership and spin-doctoring closely,
but it did so -- writing books and making rational arguments -- by
appealing to the very thing its dissolution it was tracking. Many of our
"critical interventions" did the same.
Now the dissolution has become so complete, it cannot be ignored, and
doing more of the same feels like feeding a zombie machine.
I absolutely continue to see the value of art, theory and education.
They are part of the human condition and aspiration. But we need to
reimagine them beyond the notion of the public sphere, yet without
reverting to nativist tribalism (now "accelerated" by technology, as
Frédéric and others pointed out).
The under-commons, fugitive forms of trust, solidarity and togetherness,
point to a way of living inside the ruins. But beyond that? There is
only so much that rhizomatic structures can hold. Another hard lesson
from the digital experience.
--
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