ABSTRACT
There is a growing sense in the popular imagination that citizen involvement, social planning, and civic engagement are becoming irrelevant in a society where the welfare state is being aggressively dismantled (Bauman 1998). Those traditional, if not imagined, public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly appear to have little relevance or political significance, particularly as important social and economic issues are trivialized in mainstream media. Emptied of any substantial content, democracy appears imperilled as individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery into public concerns and collective action. The prevailing modes of domination have been reversed. As Bauman (2001a) points out, the public no longer dominates the private: ‘The opposite is the case: it is the private that colonizes the public space, squeezing out and chasing away everything which cannot be fully, without residue, translated into the vocabulary of private interests and pursuits’ (Bauman 2001a: 107). As the idea of the public is dissolved into constituencies and the concept of public interest disintegrates into talk about privatization and personal scandals of public figures, the language of commonality, shared values, a just society, and public goods are severed from the imperatives of a critical and substantive democracy (Wolin 2000: 10). Civic engagement and political agency now appear impotent, and public values are rendered invisible in light of the growing power of multinational corporations to privatize public space and disconnect power from issues of equity, social justice, and civic responsibility (McChesney 1999). As democratic public spheres are either eliminated or commercialized, agency is no longer linked to challenging and producing a crisis in established power. As the vast majority of citizens become detached from public
forums that nourish social critique, agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, but also is replaced by market-based choices in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and biographic solutions become a substitute for systemic change (Beck 1992: 137). As the global space of criticism is undercut by the absence of public spheres that encourage the exchange of information, opinion, and criticism, the horizons of a substantive democracy disappear against the growing isolation and depoliticization that marks the loss of a politically guaranteed public realm in which autonomy, political participation, and engaged citizenship make their appearance (Brenkman 2000: 124-5). As Kohn (2001) points out, ‘[p]ublic sidewalks and streets are practically the only remaining available sites for unscripted political activity’ (Kohn 2001: 71). Few sites now exist ‘that allow people to talk back, to ask a question, to tell a story, to question a premise’ (Kohn 2001: 71). Rapidly disappearing are those public spaces in which people meet faceto-face, removed from the ravages of a market logic that undermines the ability to communicate through a language capable of defending vital institutions as a public good. One consequence is that political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the increasingly popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs (Jacoby 1999; Boggs 2000; Bauman 2001a). Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values replace social values and people appear more and more willing to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of the family, religion, and consumption. At the same time, power is removed from politics to the degree that it has become global and exterritorial; power now flows, escaping from and defying the reach of traditional centers of politics that are nation-based and local. The space of power now appears beyond the reach of governments and as a result nations and citizens are increasingly removed as political agents with regard to the impact that multinational corporations have on their daily lives (Bauman 2001a: 203). Once again, the result is not only silence and indifference, but also the elimination of those public spaces that reveal the rough edges of social order, disrupt consensus, and point to the need for modes of education that link learning to the conditions necessary for developing democratic forms of political agency and civic struggle (Giroux 2001).
