Why does publicity matter? Power, not deliberation

ABSTRACT

Why does publicity matter for democratic politics? This article challenges the deliberative view of publicity’s democratic value, making the case that publicity matters because it brings together people who stand to one another in relations of power, constraining the powerful to engage politically those whose action they affect, and enabling the oppressed to form new, oppositional identities. It underscores the centrality of the study of power to debates about democracy and shows that answering the question of publicity’s democratic value requires careful power analysis of the sort that contributors to this special issue have developed over the past quarter century.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• power
• publicity
• public space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article has been a long time in the making. I first began thinking about the argument more than a decade ago, when I presented early versions at the University of Birmingham Symposium on Power and Identity in September 2010; the Washington University Workshop on Politics, Ethics, and Society in January 2011; and the Montreal International Conference on the Political Philosophy of the City in May 2011. In the intervening years, I returned to it periodically, but I never fully sorted out what I wanted to say. I am grateful to participants in those early meetings for their thoughtful criticisms and feedback, which improved the work. I am also grateful to Suzi Dovi, Giulio Gallarotti, Mark Haugaard, and Jen Rubenstein, whose comments on a much more recent version were invaluable in helping me (finally!) work out my view. No funding or potential conflict of interest to report. Twitter handle @ClarissaHayward.

2. Although ‘lifestyle center’ is the more commonly used term, ‘leisure-time destination’ is the label preferred by Easton’s developer, Yaromir Steiner (2005), according to whom it highlights Easton’s mixed uses and ‘neo-traditional town planning principles.’

3. Private ownership does not rule out public use. Consider the case of privately owned public spaces (POPS), like Zuccotti Park, the original site of Occupy Wall Street: spaces that, by contractual agreement, the owners must make open for public use.

4. Raymond Geuss (2001) argues persuasively that the relationship among the values that comprise the ideal of publicity is contingent, rather than necessary. However, as James Bohman (1999) underscores, in contemporary democratic politics, they tend to hang together.

5. As Geuss (2001, p. 41) notes, public things can be ‘of common concern,’ even if there is no common good, in the sense that there is no way of regulating them that serves the good of the public as a whole, let alone the good of all of the individuals who comprise the public.

6. To imagine ‘the public’ as a harmonious whole, the claim is, is to enable the experiences and the perspectives of the dominant to masquerade as universal, and hence to justify the exclusion and silencing of the marginalized (Young 1990, 2000, Fraser 1992).

7. Jodi Dean (2002) advances a provocative argument along these lines. Dean urges democrats to reject what she characterizes as the anti-democratic ideology of publicity, which she says legitimizes the exercise of power in the name of ‘what the public wants.’

8. Although ‘[t]here is no sharp and clear line which draws itself … just where a public comes into existence which has interests so significant that they must be looked after and administered by special agencies,’ Dewey’s general claim was that indirect consequences generate publics when they are ‘lasting, extensive and serious’ (Dewey 1954, pp. 64, 67).

9. See, for example, (Hildreth 2009, Rogers 2009). For earlier work criticizing Dewey for insufficient attention to power, see (Mills 1969, Wolin 2004).

10. For background and a discussion, see (Westbrook. 1991, ch., p. 9).

11. As contemporary social movement scholars emphasize, outrage that is directed against a powerful agent – one who is understood to the be cause of some injustice – is mobilizing, while a diffuse sense of suffering, which people cannot pin on a clearly identifiable causal agent, is not. It is for this reason that organizers often ‘exaggerate the role of human actors,’ rather than ‘broader structural constraints,’ and sometimes ‘misdirect their anger at easy and inappropriate targets’ (Gamson 1992, p. 33).

12. Although Dewey characterized this second change as a product of the first, the claim that they are analytically distinct is not inconsonant with his view, and in particular with his critiques of, first, what he characterized as the American failure to change institutions of democratic governance, to reign in trans-national powers, and second, capital’s control of communication via advertising and propaganda. See (Dewey 1954, chs. 4 and 6).

13. ‘Others who formerly had been excluded’ includes people who were racially barred from naturalized citizenship prior to the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which ended the exclusion of Japanese and Korean immigrants. See (Ngai 2004, especially chapter 7).

14. For a discussion of commonalities and differences between the two views, see (Honneth 1998).

15. ‘Our modern state-unity,’ he wrote, ‘is due to the consequences of technology employed so as to facilitate the rapid and easy circulation of opinions and information, and so as to generate constant and intricate interaction far beyond the limits of face-to-face communities. Political and legal forms have only piecemeal and haltingly, with great lag, accommodated themselves to the industrial transformation’ (Dewey 1954, p. 114).

16. In a TIF district, taxes can be paid into a fund which is used to finance – and hence to subsidize – development. Much of Easton’s infrastructure development was funded this way. Parking garages for the mall’s customers, for instance, were paid for with TIF funds.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clarissa Rile Hayward

Clarissa Rile Hayward is a Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Defacing Power (Cambridge University Press, 2000). She is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled This is What Democracy Looks Like!