The public sphere

Contemporary German thinker Alexander Kluge writes :

The public sphere is ... what one might call the factory of politics - its site of production. When this site of production - the space in which politics is first made possible at all and communicable - is caught in a scissors-grip between private appropriation and the self-eliminating classical public sphere; when this public sphere threatens to disappear, its loss would be as grave today as the loss of the common land was for the farmer in the Middle Ages ... The loss of land also means a loss of community because, if there is no land on which the farmer may assemble, it is no longer possible to develop a community. The same thing is happening again, on a historically higher plane, in people’s heads, when they are deprived of the public sphere.

For these reasons, this use value, this product, which is the ‘public sphere’, is the most fundamental product that exists. In terms of community, of what I have in common with other people, it is the basis for processes of social change.

From the presentation "The Child in the City".

Photo: Achinto