ABSTRACT
The emptiness of public space goes together with the abstractness of the private citizen. They are indeed two sides of the same coin. What makes the individual abstract is lack of a sense of anything out of which it has grown and has its current being; what the space is emptied of are manifestations of allegiance to a nation state. Both absences are easily lost sight of in this pampering of the private citizen. There is so much ‘out there’ that can be done, things to be busy about, possibilities to realize. In order to grasp the abstractness we have to see what has been lost in the way of acquiring possibilities. Technology has brought to our fingertips a range of facile skills each of which we would earlier have had to rely on others to provide. Those who provided it, in order to have secured these skills, would have had to undergo a long and specialized apprenticeship. The abstraction, here, lies in this removal of opportunities to develop professional trade identities. Specialized skills rooted in local traditions were once recognizable niches that people could inhabit as respected servants of the community. Now that the ‘skills’ are universal, easy to acquire and learned from scratch, they come without roots. When we venture out into the world we have no background.
