Thinking the Public Sphere in the Contemporary Socio-Political landscape | Chetan Anand 

Privatization holds within itself a great source of anxiety and trepidation for some and hope and excitement for others. Privatization for some is opposed to state, its hope stems from the fact that capital can get some separation from the state, there is an unsaid acceptance that private capital is more efficient, accountable and responsible and direct investment in the public sphere leads to leakage and wastage. Some of us think of this movement towards private capital as part of a practical logic where efficiency of the private capital is contrasted with the inefficiency, bureaucratization and corruption of the state. While still others who accept the unsustainability of this movement towards private still only see the public in terms of the state and want to directly make the state accountable through the judiciary and the parliament.

This anxiety around the public sphere has a long history and is generally referred to by the word neoliberalism. In the literature covering the history of capitalism, neoliberalism is that point where the welfare state recedes back, and the social sphere is given over to the market logic. It has also been stated repeatedly that state made this move not because state willingly submitted its power but rather because state only stood to gain from this spread of the market logic. Sometimes this is referred to as state-market nexus. There is no doubt that many countries of the global south were on the verge of collapse and it was the market logic and not the state that was trusted by the global capital to save them and this includes India. This article is not to demonize private capital, and I remain open to how public and the private functions of the state and society must be discharged. I also realize that critical areas such as health and education need the presence of welfare state at least to some extent, but that remains an open and practical discussion that we will address through dialogue. In this article I wish to locate the position of public sphere in the contemporary world through this space for dialogue itself.

In contrast to Karl Marx who thought of the contemporary world only in terms of movement of capital, Hannah Arendt recognized the existence of the public sphere as that part of human communities through which politics gains its consistency and legitimacy. Public sphere thus is the place in which human communities affirm speech and stands in contrast to violence for political negotiations. Public sphere is acceptance of the fact that while violence may be necessary to negotiate with an ‘other’ with whom common grounds for speech does not exist, human communities cannot exist if they don’t nurture and protect a sphere within their own communal life which is protected from violence to the extent that speech reigns supreme and decisions are reached within this sphere through different opinions finding a fertile ground to struggle with each other without the threat of violence.

This is not a search for utopia where violence stands meaningless but a minimum claim that only violence cannot guarantee the communal life to human beings. Private sphere absorbs the violence that is pushed out of the public sphere, Arendt rightly recognized without the safety and protection of the private sphere—that is a space away from the public gaze—public sphere would stand lifeless. She had argued that modern world is that point in the history of human civilization where public sphere was getting privatized and private sphere brought into the public gaze, a process she argued produced the idea of social from which modern urban life becomes possible.

Eventually it is only language that can adequately resist violence and overcome its temptations. When we see rise of authoritarian leaders across the world what we sometimes miss is the slow movement of violence into our domains that should have been for language, a movement where speech had started to become a vehicle of violence rather than being an anchoring for truth. Rise of authoritarianism in all domains of life today is only an end point of a long process where separation between speech and violence that has been necessary to give form to public spheres in human communitises had been collapsing for a long time. One can of course go back to Marx to understand the role capital, labor and market has been playing in this process and one can also add new categories that we need to study this process, these might be technology, consumerism, changing forms of law, desire and sovereignty etc.

In modern liberal democracies public sphere is articulated through civil society on one side and public institutions on the other. These institutions always had the burden of constructing the public sphere in the imagination of democratic framework. The crisis and the tragedy of today is that many think that this is no longer possible. When state itself stands synonymous with public institutions and where the only identity public institutions are left with is that they represent the executive arm of the state and they have no independent identity left what we have lost are not just the public institutions and their public roles, perhaps the argument that the roles of public institutions can be adequately compensated by the private institutions even in the critical areas such as health and education can have some validity, but rather what we are fast losing are realms where violence does not dictate human decisions, where power does not get reduced to another mode of functioning of violence rather than being an expression of humans ability for collective action mediated through a form of consensus that only speech and its ability hold disagreements and contradictions can give us.

(Author: Chetan Anand, Assistant Professor in the Azim Premji University, Bhopal)