ABSTRACT
So far, with regard to the public, what it means to us today is little more than a catalogue of names – a list, merely, of those who, according to their various backgrounds, sensibilities, etc., may come to form more or less ephemeral aggregates around some shared focus of concern. These can be of many kinds, communal as well as more or less political. It seems to be a feature of modern society indeed to develop communal activities, locally or in groups, that for their participants have far greater significance for their lives than any political engagement. These projects exist at all levels from local fan clubs to organized pilgrimages,1 from Gardener of the Year to World Idol contests. The concerns they aggregate around can have a political flavour when politically sensitive events are conveyed to a sizeable enough audience. The church, in all its forms, represents another concerted communal activity that partly protects itself from political engagement, but addresses politics on certain salient issues, and can in some countries, as for instance in South America, be enduringly engaged in political struggle. The thought was also that popular attention is something governments employ the considerable means at their disposal in order, as the case may be, either to exploit or foreclose. But beyond this propensity to be roused from its private preoccupations when touched at sore points by the
media, we have found little positive to say of the public itself. The most said is that it is composed of citizens exploiting their legally protected private rights to build and furnish their privacy.
