Public Things

Democracy in Disrepair

Bonnie Honig

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780823276424
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be?Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of "pursuing in common the objects of common desires, " Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be "gathered up" refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of "transitional objects"—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott—both theorists of livenesss—underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THINGING OUT LOUD

1. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 5.

2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 141–142.

4. For Winnicott, as for other psychoanalytic thinkers, object relations refers first and primarily to the mother, an object for the infant. I take my bearings in this book, however, from the object relations to transitional objects that, in Winnicott, are things—things like blankets, teddy bears, and so on that become saturated with meaning and affect by the infant’s or child’s relation to them.

5. I focus on their convergences, because that is one of this project’s contributions, but Winnicott’s objects have more agency and recalcitrance (not just resilience) than Arendt’s things, as we shall see.

6. The rhetoric of privatization obscures from view the many partnerships of government and business in our neoliberal context (subsidies, bailouts, incentives, tax breaks, policing, and so on) while advertising other partnerships explicitly—business and government working together in hybrid ventures.

7. That history is proudly reported in precisely these nationalist terms at goo.gl/8lcpn4.

8. In Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Glen Coulthard names problems of “infrastructure” as falsely public.

9. In part for this reason, some are calling for universities to be “undercommoned,” a call noted in the Epilogue.

10. This may have already happened, more or less. A symptom of that reduction of democratic life to repetitive private work and exceptional public emergencies in contemporary neoliberal contexts is the prominence of mourning in recent years in Left political theory and cultural studies. I have written elsewhere about that turn, contrasting its focus on the mortal with a more Arendtian emphasis on the natal. See Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

11. Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). See also Benjamin R. Barber, “The Art of Public Space: Filling the Empty Streets and Turning Pedestrian Piazzas into True Commons,” The Nation, August 12, 2009.

12. There is a growing critical literature on the topic, in which concerns are expressed about the effects of privatization on everything from local political autonomy and accountability to “place attachment” and neighborhood effects. See, for example, Anna Minton, What Kind of World Are We Building? The Privatisation of Public Space (London: Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, 2006), citing Ebenezer Howard’s “inspirational garden city movement” and the “concept of Community Land Trusts” as well as “affordable planning policies” as movements, organizations, and policies to be furthered. Place attachment is arguably a political corollary to Winnicott’s exploration of healthy attachment in infancy. On the hidden costs of privatization, “A new report from the Colorado Center for Policy Studies out of the University of Colorado outlines the true price of outsourcing government functions like sanitation and healthcare: weakened social infrastructure, deepened economic inequity and hollowed-out civic institutions” (goo.gl/ybbMB2). Also of concern are the marketing and policing of new private or hybrid (BID) spaces as clean and safe, where “clean and safe” often means restricting access to public space to those who pass certain racially or economically marked standards: e.g., no hoodies allowed.

13. Efficiency is not democracy’s only value. We miss this when we think only about things like “service delivery” (though a democracy’s effective and fair delivery of services is important, too; the worry here is what happens when efficiency becomes the standard, and not just one among many, for assessing public things). Efficiency may not even be a value at all, at least not for democracies that are, as Winnicott might say, “in health.”

14. As Bruce Robbins points out: “Along with the line separating those who do and don’t have easily affordable access to clean water, the line between those who have and those who don’t have a proper sewage disposal system is arguably the most important political line in the world today.” Robbins, “The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive,” boundary 2 34, no. 1 (2007): 33.

15. Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency (New York: Norton, 2011); and see my discussion of the book in “Three Models of Emergency Politics,” boundary 2 4, no. 2 (2014).

16. Libby Sander and Susan Saulny, “Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis Kills at Least 7,” New York Times, August 2, 2007.

17. Audra Simpson points this out in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), chapter 6. It is a key point in the film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, directed by Alanis Obomsawin (1993), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yP3srFvhKs.

18. On the background issue of the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord, see Larry Kusch, Mia Rabson, Mary Agnes Welch, and Bruce Owen, “25 Years Ago, a Simple ‘No’: Elijah Harper Becomes Indigenous Hero for his Role in Meech Lake,” Winnipeg Free Press, May 6, 2015.

19. In both Volumes I and II he associates this with the first settlers: “at the time of the first immigrations, local government, that fertile germ of free institutions, had already taken deep root in English ways.” Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 1:33. Again, in Volume II, he says that they arrived schooled in jury duty and political deliberation.

20. Might ADD be the symptomatic disorder of neoliberalism?

21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (Cambridge, Mass.: Sever and Francis, 1898), 536.

22. Ibid., 538.

23. Ibid., 435–436, 448. Also quoted in “Trail of Tears,” in The Encyclopedia of Native American Legal Tradition, ed. Bruce Elliott Johansen (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 329.

24. The earth appears as an agent of vengeance in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers:

What can atone for blood

once fallen on the ground?

Alas for the grief-filled hearth

Alas for the buried home! …

The nurturing earth drinks blood,

she drinks her fill. That gore,

which cries out for revenge,

will not disappear or seep away.

Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington, Va.: Richer Resources Publications, 2007), 60–90.

25. The fragility of things is also the title of a recent book by William Connolly on related themes and in which he develops his own compelling reading of von Trier’s Melancholia.

LECTURE ONE. DEMOCRACY’S NECESSARY CONDITIONS

1. One exception is Benjamin Barber: “The ancient agora, or civic marketplace, of democratic Athens and the covered arcades of nineteenth-century European towns exemplify a spirit where public things (literally res publica, the origin of our word ‘republic’) become paramount. Entertainment and commerce are necessary and important, but they ‘work’ because people are drawn into public spaces for other reasons: to play in the company of others, to watch one another and see others with fresh vision … to interact with strangers, to get out of private space and into common space.” Benjamin Barber, “The Art of Public Space: Filling the Empty Streets and Turning Pedestrian Piazzas into True Commons,” The Nation, August 12, 2009. Another is Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013). Myers’s topic is not public things, but rather the broader category “world,” which she draws from Hannah Arendt and which encompasses what Arendt calls “a ‘physical in-between’ and a ‘second subjective in-between’ that is constituted by ‘deeds and words’ ” (Myers, 89–90, citing The Human Condition, 52). For this reason, Myers does not attend especially to the Work chapter of The Human Condition, which I argue here is central to a consideration of public things.

2. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).

3. Ibid., 18, 200.

4. For a critical account of that sad compatibility, suggesting that it is, worse still, a cover for pseudo-democratic order that only ever existed as fantasy, see Jodi Dean’s review of Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Defeat of Democracy,” Critical Inquiry, October 27, 2015. According to Dean, the shell of democracy that now remains is all it ever was.

5. Brown thinks that such sphereism now “understates” the problem, as she says of Timothy Kuhner’s otherwise “analytically astute” analysis of the Citizens United decision, which treated corporate campaign contributions as limitless free speech. Kuhner, she says, “terms the decision ‘neoliberal jurisprudence’ insofar as it applies neoclassical economic theory to the political sphere, analogizes that sphere to the market, and ultimately undoes what he calls the bou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Advisory Board
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Opting Out
• Introduction: Thinging Out Loud
• Lecture One: Democracy’s Necessary Conditions
• Lecture Two: Care and Concern: Arendt with Winnicott
• Lecture Three: Hope and Play: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia
• Epilogue: Public Things, Shared Space, and the Commons
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series Page