Homo spectator: Public space in the age of the spectacle

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Volumn 34, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 467-486

  Kohn, Margaret ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

Citizenship; Democracy; Festival; Jean Jacques Rousseau; Public space; Richard Sennett; Spectacle; Theater

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249116389     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708089194     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), pp. 16-17.
2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991);
3. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
4. Susan Bickford, 'Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship', Political Theory 28(3) (2000): 355-76;
5. Iris Marion Young 'The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference', in L. Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990);
6. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder (New York: Knopf, 1970).
7. Jodi Dean, 'Publicity's Secret', Political Theory 29 (2001): 624-50.
8. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
9. Paul Thomas and David Lloyd, Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998).
10. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. xiii.
11. Christopher Kelly, 'Rousseau and the Case against (and for) the Arts', in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 20-42;
12. Fonna Forman-Barzilai, 'The Emergence of Contextualism in Rousseau's Political Thought: The Case of Parisian Theater in the Lettre à D'Alembert', History of Political Thought 24(3) (2003): 435-63.
13. Thomas and Lloyd, Culture and the State.
14. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
15. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 84.
16. ibid., p. 131.
17. David Marshall, 'Rousseau and the State of Theater', Representations 13 (Winter 1986): 84-114 (86).
18. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 17.
19. ibid., p. 80.
20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract and Discourses, trans. D. A. Cross (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983).
21. Forman-Barzilai, 'The Emergence of Contextualism in Rousseau's Political Thought'.
22. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 59.
23. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 93-4.
24. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 99.
25. ibid.
26. ibid., p. 125.
27. ibid., p. 17.
28. ibid., p. 126.
29. ibid., p. 105.
30. For an excellent discussion of the way in which Rousseau mobilizes highly gendered rhetoric in this text, see Elizabeth Wingrove, 'Sexual Performance as Political Performance in the Lettre à M. D'Alembert Sur Les Spectacles', Political Theory 23(4) (1995): 585-616;
31. Richard Brooks, 'Rousseau's Antifeminism in the Lettre à d'Alembert and Emile', in Charles G. S. Williams (ed.) The Age of Ideas: Essays on the French Enlightenment Presented to George R. Havens (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1975), pp. 9-27.
32. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 105.
33. Wingrove, 'Sexual Performance'.
34. Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
35. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 125.
36. ibid., p. 126.
37. ibid.
38. For an interesting historical study of attempts to apply Rousseau's ideas in the context of the French Revolution, see Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
39. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 95.
40. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 125.
41. ibid., p. 129.
42. ibid., p. 128.
43. Timothy Costelloe, 'The Theater of Morals: Culture and Community in Rousseau's Lettre à M. d'Alembert', Eighteenth-Century Life 27(1) (2003): 52-71.
44. Bloom translates the term 'spectacle' here as entertainment, thereby obscuring the fact that Rousseau uses the same word that is usually translated as theater.
45. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
46. Benjamin Barber and Janis Forman, 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Preface to Narcisse'", Political Theory 6(4) (1978): 537-42.
47. Benjamin Barber, 'Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination', Daedelus 107(3) (1978): 79-92;
48. Kelly, 'Rousseau and the Case against (and for) the Arts'; Forman-Barzilai, 'The Emergence of Contextualism in Rousseau's Political Thought'.
49. Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), p. 156.
50. Cited in Shklar, Men and Citizens.
51. In The Figure of Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau and Mary Shelley (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1988) David Marshall argues that Lucretius' description of the pleasure of watching a shipwreck from safety becomes the paradigmatic aesthetic experience of watching suffering from a perspective of non-identification.
52. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Random House, 1976).
53. ibid., p. 118.
54. ibid.
55. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Government of Poland, trans. W. Kendall (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1985), p. 13.
56. ibid., p. 14.
57. ibid., p. 15.
58. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 87.
59. ibid., p. 217.
60. ibid., p. 125.
61. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 18.
62. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 81.
63. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 18.
64. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 86.
65. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 26.
66. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 12.
67. ibid., p. 22.
68. Tracy Strong, The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p. 47.
69. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 17.
70. ibid., p. 126.
71. Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996);
72. James Bohman, Public Deliberation; Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
73. Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
74. Habermas' subtle reflections on the psycho-social dynamics of the public sphere also help reveal why Sennett's 'action at a distance from self is a problematic model for revitalizing the public realm today. According to Sennett, public man's body was a mannequin and his speech was treated as a sign rather than a symbol (Fall of Public Man, p. 64). This meant that speech signified in and of itself, rather than by reference to outside situations or the person of the speaker (ibid., p. 65). But, as we know from linguistics, if signs do not signify then they simply refer to a position in a system of signs. If speech does not express something distinctive about the views of the speaker, then it refers to some other position in the system. According to Habermas, this was precisely the character of representative publicity under the aristocracy of the ancient regime. Speech was not oriented toward expressing one's opinion but was rather a way of asserting one's place in a hierarchy of relationships. Speech did not facilitate intersubjectivity because meaningful subjectivity failed to emerge in a realm dominated by public appearances.
75. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 51.
76. ibid., p. 151.
77. ibid., p. 159.
78. ibid., p. 162.
79. I do not want to exaggerate the similarities between Rousseau and Habermas. In The Social Contract Rousseau notoriously concluded that citizens should not deliberate in public about their interpretation of the General Will. Habermas called this a 'democracy of unpublic opinion' (Structural Transformation, p. 98).
80. William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974).
81. Hanna Pitkin, 'Justice: On Relating Private and Public', Political Theory 9(3) (1991): 327-52.
82. Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2004).
83. Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Private Residential Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994);
84. Setha Low and Neil Smith (eds) The Politics of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2006).
85. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).
86. Deliberative democrats and other theorists influenced by Habermas have faced a similar challenge. How is it possible to revitalize the public sphere when historical development seems to have undermined its preconditions? Habermas' own recent work on deliberative democracy takes up this challenge. It suggests the possibility of communicative rationality re-emerging in new social and institutional contexts (see Between Facts and Norms, note 2). Even though certain institutions such as the café disappeared, new social movements have given birth to alternatives.
87. Young, 'The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference'.
88. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958);
89. Bickford, 'Constructing Inequality', p. 257.
90. Michael Sorkin (ed.) Variations on a Theme Park: the New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992).
91. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 99.