Susanna Siegel (Harvard University), "The Phenomenal Public"
Political Philosophy, 2024
"The People", "the public", “the body politic”: these terms each have different meanings, but they can all be used to denote the body that a government purports to govern in mass society. Such mass-political groupings are smaller than all humankind, but bigger than the sum total of everyone that any one person knows.
Mass-political publics figure in arguments and rhetoric presenting the supposed needs, interests, opinions, and powers of the polis. Regardless of the type of regime or political culture, any attempts to govern or lead a mass-political public will end up appealing to this type of body. For instance, in a democracy, the public is supposed to be a ’demos’ – a locus of political agency, to which democratic leaders are supposed to be accountable. In fascist political culture, the mass-political public is presented as a body of spectators who feel a visceral unity with the leader, without any need for accountability from the leaders. "No one has set me above the people,” said Adolf Hitler to cheering a crowd. “I have grown with the People, have remained with the people, to the people I shall return”.
Given its central role in politics, there must be some way for a person to grasp the public. How is it possible to develop a subjective sense of being located in a specific mass-political society?
Danielle Allen raises this question in her 2004 book Talking to Strangers when she writes: “Democracy's basic term is neither 'liberty' nor 'equality', but 'the people'. But where and what is this thing, the people? ...How can one even hold an idea of this strange body in one's head?" (2004:69). She goes on straightaway to answer: “Only with figures, metaphors, and other imaginative forms." Imaginative forms are prompts to imaginative experience, including not just figures and metaphors, but symbols and rituals as well.
Allen, a democratic theorist, is interested specifically in the imaginative forms that can cultivate a sense of belonging to a democratic public. Inspired by Ralph Ellison, she emphasizes the need for rituals that makes "the People" salient as a locus of political concern, welcoming of difference without domination (2021, 2023). But even writers who are not focused on democracy arrive at the same idea that the public can only be thought about using imagination. Writing in 1983, the political theorist Benedict Anderson proposed a definition of the nation, according to which “it is imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. The nation is imagined, Anderson wrote, in the sense that “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members or even hear of them, yet in the[ir] minds lives the image of their communion” (p. 6). The nation, like any mass-political public, has an intermediate scope between everybody, and everybody you know. Anderson’s view of how it is possible to get your mind around such a body cross-cuts all sorts of polities, democratic and otherwise.
Political theorists tend to assume that imagination is the mode of mentality we have to use to grasp the specific mass-political society we are in. There are many kinds of imagination, but the kind at issue here involves the capacity to picture and respond affectively toward what is not in our immediate environment. For instance, Martha Nussbaum describes the operation of these capacities in Political Emotions as crucial to connecting us to “distant people” whom we will never meet, but with whom we share a political society:
If distant people ... are to get a grip on our emotions, these emotions must somehow position them within our circle of concern, creating a sense of “our” life in which these people and events matter as parts of… our own flourishing (2008:11).
Is imagination the only mode of mentality we can use to grasp mass-political publics? What about perception? Is it possible to build a subjective sense of being in a specific political society by perceiving it?
There are all sorts of paths to viewing perceptibility of a mass-political public as something potentially attractive, useful, or otherwise important to understand. At a subjective level, what we perceive seems to be in our immediate environment, belonging to a space in which we can act, and in which many perceivers can witness and interact with the same things at the same time. There's nothing better than perceiving a situation to give it a feeling of reality. And as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey each emphasized, in different ways, mass-political publics could really use a dose of subjective reality. Here’s Dewey:
If a public exists, it is surely as uncertain about its own whereabouts as philosophers since Hume have been about the residence and make-up of the self (1927/2016: 150.)
Lippmann, in his 1920 book The Phantom Public, argued that one’s basic epistemic condition in American society was bewilderment and passivity in the face of civic matters, likening us to spectators in the back row of a theater who can’t really hear the performance and keep falling asleep. This vision lives on in Democracy for Realists, the influential 2016 book by political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels. Like Dewey, Lippmann observed that a subjective sense of being part of self-governing public is hard to come by. Unlike Dewey, Lippmann thought democratic governance would have to proceed without relying on any such sense. But they agree, as do Achen and Bartels, that when the ordinary person is left psychologically to their own devices, public affairs tend to be inscrutable.
If it is possible to perceive the public, such perceptions could be leveraged for mass-political purposes. It could cut through the fog of apathy, bewilderment, or disconnection described by Lippmann or Dewey. It could help build visceral identifications like the ones cultivated by fascist leaders. It could build the kind of emotional connections among people who will never know one another that some mildly libertarian political cultivators may want to prevent, lest they be taken as a suitable purview of the state.
From another angle, it is important to know whether it’s possible to perceive the public for students of perception and imagination. Typically, we can use either mode of mentality to relate our minds, in different ways, to the same thing. We can see a red square, or we can imagine one. We can see people interacting happily, or we imagine them doing so. These two modes of mentality do not generally bias the type of contents that can occur within that mode.
But when it comes to perceiving versus imagining the public, this generalization may not hold. In The Phenomenal Public, I argue that as a means of building a subjective sense of political society, perception seems to have a bias toward subjectively presenting polities that involve domination. Using perception, it is evidently difficult to build a subjective sense of political society without relying on domination, whereas imagination seems free of any parallel constraint.
If this conclusion is right, then polities are not like red squares or happy people, when considered as potential contents of perception. Walter Benjamin was onto something, if he meant that "the aestheticization of politics" involved a kind of perception especially well-suited to fascism, maybe even specific to it. Something about democracy precludes the possibility of perceiving democratic politizenship, either interpersonally or as the defining relationship of a whole public; while something about fascism creates the possibility of perceiving the public, either interpersonally or as a whole, at the cost of cruelty and illusion.
Perhaps imagination is the mode of mentality we must rely on to grasp democratic publics. But we can build a subjective, perceptual experience of a mass-political public by relying on the kinds of illusions propagated by fascist political culture, in which political society is structured around the division of the people sharing a society into a rightful public and an “anti-public” that is in the polity but does not truly belong there.
So, how is it possible to perceive the public? Under what kinds of circumstances can such perceptions be formed? My full answers are in the paper. But here is a hint, courtesy of the artist, Becky Moon. Moon has a knack for painting crowds, and not just any crowds, but crowds that convey both the kind of plurality and visible diversity that I argue can figure in perception of a public, and the interface between individuals and sociality where so much of political importance happens. She made this painting after hearing me give a talk based on this paper. The painting is also called The Phenomenal Public.
References
Achen, C. and Bartels, L. 2016. Democracy for Realists. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Allen, D. 2004 Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Allen, D. 2021. "Ralph Ellison: Democratic Theorist". In: African-American Political Thought: a Collected History. Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner, Eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 460-480.
Allen, D. 2023. Justice by means of democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, B. 1983/1991 Imagined Communities. London: Verso
Benjamin, W. 1935/1969 “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. H. Arendt, ed. and H. Zohn, trans. 217-52.
Dewey. J. 1927 The Public and its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry. Athens: University of Ohio Press.
Lippmann, W. 1925/1993 The Phantom Public. New York: Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. 2008 Political Emotions Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
One can also call this thing the (public/people) the world, and the work and play we do in it as worlding.