ABSTRACT
The public as audience is remarked on by Jürgen Habermas in his classic study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. He observes that in ‘seventeenth-century France le public meant the lecteurs, spectateurs, and auditeurs as the addressees and consumers, and the critics of art and literature . . .’.1 This is exactly the notion discussed in the previous chapter. Publics form themselves around visible and audible focuses of attention, whether these are particular objects, persons, projects or political programmes – topics, in other words, that groups with a certain background find worth looking at, listening to and at times even, where appropriate, find themselves stimulated to act upon. The background is important in two ways: on the one hand critical audiences are formed by those select parts of the populace with the education and resources required to appreciate and consume cultural artefacts, while on the other, where the topics are of public concern, many more than those with that background may be stimulated to action.
