Blog #2

One of the central questions in RECIND is whether the public sphere can still be understood primarily through the idea of rational debate. That model has been enormously influential. It continues to shape how we imagine public life, democratic legitimacy, and political participation. In that picture, the public sphere is where citizens exchange reasons about matters of common concern, test claims publicly, and arrive, at least in principle, at better judgments through discussion. This approach places emphasis on accountability, on publicity, and on the possibility that political life should not be reduced to force or private interest.

Yet many injustices are not first recognised through calm argument. Felt before they are formulated, they appear through anger, shame, exhaustion, grief, or the sense that something is intolerable even before one has the language to describe why. In many cases, what enters public space first is not a fully worked-out claim but a testimony, an image, a phrase that gathers force because others recognise something of themselves in it. This matters all the more in digital environments, where communication is often rapid and affective.

That does not mean abandoning reason, nor does it mean celebrating irrationality. It means questioning a narrow understanding of what public life consists in. If the public sphere is only ever recognised in the form of explicit deliberation, then much of what actually drives political transformation is missed. Public life is also shaped by attention, by affect, by forms of witness, and by the conditions under which certain experiences become speakable.

This is especially visible online. Social media is very often criticised for rewarding outrage, simplification, and emotional excess. There is truth in that criticism. But it also risks taking for granted that the alternative would be a more properly rational space, as if the older public sphere had ever really functioned in such a purified way. The reality is more complicated. Public spheres have always depended on rhetoric, style, exclusion, credibility, and unequal access to visibility. The digital does not introduce affect into an otherwise rational world. It changes the scale, speed, and forms through which affect becomes politically operative.

That is why I think we need to treat the public sphere as something broader than an arena of argument. It is also a space in which people appear to one another, interpret shared worlds, and struggle over what counts as intelligible. That struggle is not merely secondary. It is often the condition for debate in the first place. Before there can be disagreement over a policy or principle, there has to be some recognition that an issue is there at all, and that it matters.

This is one reason feminist philosophy is so important to RECIND. A good deal of feminist work has shown that the public sphere is not simply a neutral space waiting to hear claims. It is structured by norms concerning who speaks credibly, whose experiences count, which styles of expression are dismissed, and what kinds of injury are legible as political. If one starts from vulnerability rather than autonomy alone, then the image of public life changes. One becomes more attentive to exposure, dependency, embodiment, and the fact that some experiences only emerge into view through forms of collective articulation that do not look like classical reason-giving.

Online, a post, a thread, or a circulating image can do political work long before anything like consensus is reached. Something starts to become visible. Others gather around it. A vocabulary begins to take shape. People who had assumed themselves isolated discover that an experience is shared. None of that guarantees good politics. Yet it would be a mistake to see these processes as somehow beneath politics proper. They are part of how politics now happens.

What follows from this is not that reason no longer matters, but that it no longer occupies the whole scene. The public sphere has to be understood as a contested field in which feeling, interpretation, testimony, and argument remain entangled. That entanglement is not a defect to be overcome once digital culture matures. It reflects something basic about political life itself: we do not enter public space as detached bearers of reasons alone. We enter as embodied beings whose relation to the world is shaped by many things: histories, norms, wounds, dependencies, and unequal capacities to appear.

For us, then, the task is not to discard the concept of the public sphere, but to revise it. We need an account of public life that can make sense of the recognition of injustice when that recognition begins in dispersed, emotional, unstable, and mediated forms. We need a concept that can account for how a wrong becomes visible before it becomes settled. We need, in other words, a public sphere beyond rationality, though maybe not beyond judgment.

*Please note: this blog has been dictated, with AI-enabled writing technology used in the process. All notes have been reviewed by the author. This part of an effort to try to find productive and responsible ways to use generative AI.