Paranoid looking: on de-communization

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-233
Author(s):  
Magda Szcześniak ◽  
Łukasz Zaremba
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Shed Light

According to the famous statement by Robert Musil, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as monuments, attention runs down them without stopping for a moment.’ However, the moment when they suddenly become visible as the centre of intense social conflicts, it is difficult to believe they had been invisible for so long. This article analyses practices of contemporary iconoclastic gestures directed at monuments, examining the differences between recent iconoclastic acts in the United States and in Poland. Contrary to progressive anti-racist iconoclastic practices in the United States, the authors argue that the recent wave of attacks against monuments in Poland, connected to the state-sanctioned politics of ‘de-communization’, derives from a conservative vision of history and the public sphere. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of ‘paranoid reading’, the authors show how the ‘de-communization’ project activates a particular ‘way of seeing’: paranoid looking, through which public spaces are turned into environments filled with objects that need to be suspiciously examined and assessed. The paranoid look works against the invisibility of monuments, aiming to extract objects from the landscape in order to further examine them in search of any suspicious elements – formal and stylistic features, more or less intelligible symbols and so on that will shed light on their under-acknowledged capacity for both culpability and criticality.

‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
State Power ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

Take it Outside

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Scheper Hughes ◽  
James Kyung-Jin Lee ◽  
Amanda Lucia ◽  
S.Romi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
The Public Sphere

California is experiencing a proliferation of public religious celebrations like never before. The authors focus on four public celebrations: the throwing of colors during Holi, an annual pilgrimage to Manzanar, the Peruvian celebration of El Señor de Los Milagros, and Noche de Altares. Even as these and many other similar festivals simultaneously represent the irruption and interruption of the sacred in the public sphere, these festivals reflect the multi-religious character of immigration. These public rituals say something about the pursuit of belonging in California and in the United States within an increasingly diverse and multicultural landscape. Those who participate together as intimate strangers are often seeking only a temporary affiliation, perhaps a place for a moment to engage one another beyond the context of the marketplace. In sharing in these religious and cross-cultural experiences, participants become enmeshed in the complicated and vibrant diversity of California, up close and personal, as physical as the bodies encountered there.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
The Public ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Impact

This epilogue comments on the changes within the Polish American community and the Polish-language press during the most recent decades, including the impact of the Internet and social media on the practice of letter-writing. It also poses questions about the legacy and memory of Paryski in Toledo, Ohio, and in Polonia scholarship. Paryski's life and career were based on his intelligence, determination, and energy. He believed that Poles in the United States, as in Poland, must benefit from education, and that education was not necessarily the same as formal schooling. Anybody could embark on the path to self-improvement if they read and wrote. Long before the Internet changed the way we communicate, Paryski and other ethnic editors effectively adopted and practiced the concept of debate within the public sphere in the media. Ameryka-Echo's “Corner for Everybody” was an embodiment of this concept and allowed all to express themselves in their own language and to write what was on their minds.

scholarly journals The evolution of secularization theory: from monopoly to crisis

2008 ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
K.I. Shvalagina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Church

Secularization theory is one of those intellectual products that determine the understanding of religion, its status in society, and the changes that take place between faith and unbelief, between church and state, for quite some time. Constituted in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, this theory has found many followers both in America and in Europe, even in the USSR. Its validity and integrity, evidentiality and obviousness did not cause any doubt either to scholars or to religious and statesmen. It was clear that society is liberated from the influence of religion and the church, is rapidly secularized, which will inevitably lead to the transformation of religion into a marginal phenomenon, and eventually - to its extinction. But the predictions that were made with unqualified certainty did not come true, as the development of the religious environment at the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI century showed. Not only has religion not lost its significance for the modern man, but he is also actively returning to the public sphere. In line with such objective changes, secularization theory undergoes significant transformations, evolving from a monopoly that it has had for almost half a century, to a crisis, and eventually to its antipode, a theory of desecularization.

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