Sawney’s seat: the social imaginary of the London bog-house c.1660–c.1800

2018 ◽  
pp. 101-127
Author(s):  
Mark Jenner
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Training Model ◽  
Toilet Training ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere

Contemporary culture often works with a toilet-training model of history. This popular version of the past dismisses the pre-modern privy as an epitome and symbol of the era’s supposed hygienic backwardness. Surveying court depositions, medical texts and scatological satires, this chapter challenges these assumptions. It reconstructs the ways in which access to such toilet facilities in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London shaped the use of public space in classed and gendered ways, analyses the ambiguous and provisional forms of privacy afforded by the house of office, and examines how the image of the privy offered satirists ways to discuss the transience of print culture and the public sphere.

scholarly journals PRAGMATICS OF LANGUAGE AND VALUES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: TOWARDS AN EXPANSIVE PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO THE USED DISCOURSE

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (04) ◽  
pp. 221-231
Author(s):  
Youness HABBACH
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Sphere

This research aims at analysing the pragmatic prominent discourse in the public sphere, the digital sphere in particular, that reflects special changes in the society. The meant discourse has not been investigated adequately and sufficiently namely the social, the political and the digital virtual discourses which bear an effective semantic and pragmatic power on the public space and at the same time incorporate strong transformations in the values patterns. This study utilizes a pragmatic approach, since the pragmatics is a study of using language in communication, and works on analysing daily discourses using a journalistic editorial. So, what are the changes reflected by this discourse? And what are the values represented and expressed by the prevailing discourses in the public sphere?

scholarly journals THE FALL OF THE 'PURIFIED' COMMUNITY: CRISIS, TRANSFORMATION & COLLECTIVE ACTION IN GREECE

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yannis Kallianos
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Economic Collapse

The article explores the recent social and political transformations in Greece through events of collective action in the public space of Athens. Drawing on Richard Sennet’s notion of the ‘myth of the purified community’ it is argued that these events demonstrate a gradual disintegration of the social imaginary of the idea of community in various scales (national, local, etc). This argument builds on the indistinction between public and private as reflected in these events in Athens. By providing ethnographic examples from both before and after the economic collapse, the article explains crisis as a long process of contesting the sovereignty of the state and institutions in Greece and how these previously downplayed contestations were rendered visible in the Greek public sphere. This visibility shakes the foundations of the notion of a homogeneous community as it is established by the ‘social contract’.

Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald N. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Literary Public Sphere

This article introduces the concept of the “aesthetic public sphere” as a way for cultural sociologists to understand the civic impact of entertainment media. The idea of the aesthetic public sphere draws on Jürgen Habermas’s discussion of the literary public sphere from a more cultural and historically even-handed perspective. In his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas noted the important connection between entertainment media and the development of democratic communication norms. This article examines three components of the aesthetic public sphere. First, aesthetic publics work at the level of the social imaginary. Second, aesthetic publics provide a space for commentary about important matters of common concern. Third, aesthetic publics encourage debates about cultural policy in a way that increases the importance of cultural citizenship within civil society. The article concludes by considering how cultural globalization reinforces the importance of the aesthetic public sphere.

scholarly journals Digital Technologies and the Public Sphere in Spain: Spatial Metaphors, Viewers’ Perceptions and Demands in Light of the Democratic Challenge (2014–2017)

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-107
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Broullón-Lozano ◽  
María Lamuedra Graván
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spatial Metaphors ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere

During the 2010s, there was a “utopian moment” as regards the structure of media, owing to the social space created by digital culture, transmediality, and the different ways of participating in public debate. What is expected from digital information transmitted via the Web and social media is action and interaction with subjects in the public space or square. Accordingly, this paper analyses the descriptive assertions and proposals of the viewers of newscasts of Spanish television between 2014 and 2017, as regards how they perceived and represented the public space, mediatised by information through spatial metaphors. Specifically, it is based on the analysis of the transcriptions of five discussion groups and four interviews, whose aim is to examine two polarised spatial metaphors—the traffic labyrinth and the open square—and a series of demands relating to the role of journalists, media ownership, viewers’ access, and the quality of democratic society.

A Truant Proximity: Presence and Absence in the Space of Modernity

1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Shields
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Community Membership ◽  
The Public ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
Presence And Absence ◽  
The Public Sphere

Jameson described postmodernism as a change in Western urban populations' ‘cognitive maps' of the world. But this seemed to suggest a totalising change in our space-time regimes or ‘social spatialisations’ which does not fit with everyday experiences of contemporary life. There is a continuity of most aspects of social spatialisation (which, denying locality and regionalism, once unified the empire of Western modernity). Yet, even small shifts may have notable impacts. If “space makes a difference” (Sayer), it is more important than ever to go on to specify what is different about space and spatiality today. Only changes in the spatialisation of presence and absence (a dialectic which was at the heart of modernity) can be empirically demonstrated. The distinction between modernity and postmodernity must be argued on this basis. After a survey of ‘what remains the same’, postmodern spatial differences, and why they matter are approached via a meditation on our relation to Others who bring the far-off and exotic into the cosy, local world of our everyday lives. The collapse of presence and absence, correlated with an everyday synthesis of proximity and remoteness; near and far; past, future, and present suggest the erasure of a set of cultural oppositions which structured the social imaginary, representations, and practices. Modernist, spatialised oppositions such as public-private, insider-outsider, and subject-object are changed, affecting the nature of the public sphere, forcing new ethical perspectives on community membership, and new understanding of our relationship to Others and to the environment.

scholarly journals Is Hatred a Major Factor Determining the Contemporary Social Imaginary? / Ist der Hass ein bestimmender Faktor des gegenwärtigen sozialen Imaginären?

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 303-312
Author(s):  
Andrzej Leder
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World

Summary In my paper, I analyze hate as one of the important factors that influence and structuralize the symbolic sphere. In the first step, I define the notion of “symbolic sphere”. Then, I analyze hate from the phenomenological and psychoanalytical points of view. My next step is a historical digression, concerning the place of hate in the social order. Next, I describe some important phenomena of the contemporary societies conditioned by the influence of hatred. Finally, I investigate which notions of the social theory are adequate to describe this kind of phenomena. Hate has been most frequently apprehended as a sudden eruption of bare violence. It was supposed to transform the symbolic sphere through sharp, directly aggressive, and often unexpected actions. Nevertheless, in societies wherein the symbolic legitimization of the political and social order was established as the consequence of the Second World War, a deep change in the attitude toward the bare and direct expression of violence took place. Acts of hate in the public sphere became morally delegitimized and symbolically repressed. We should ask then: if the bare violence and the hate determining this violence disappeared from the sphere of social praxis, although they still shape the social imaginary, how are they really founded? Thus, to answer these questions, I will have to ask not about the direct impact of hatred, but about its hidden influence.

scholarly journals Choreographies of Dissent and the Politics of Public Space in State-of-Emergency Turkey

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Sevi Bayraktar
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
State Agencies ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Recent Period ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article investigates a recent period in which dissenting activism has been shifted in Istanbul under the state of emergency (2016-2018). Based on an ethnography conducted with activists in feminist and LGBTQI+ demonstrations, anti-emergency decree vigils, and the Presidential Referendum protests, the study discusses how activists resist and undermine mobilization of violence through using the hegemonic tools of repression tactically, and choreographically. By employing Hannah Arendt’s concepts of “politics” and “isolation,” I examine that state agencies like the police forcefully disperse protesters and display authority, oppression, and occupation of public spaces by constantly creating an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. In opposition, dissenters practice and rehearse dispersal as a resilient choreography to once again relate each other against the forces of isolation. I suggest the term “tactics of dispersal” to define and analyze how activists depart from the central assembly of the social movement to create smaller, mobile, and ephemeral assemblies. In the city-scale, by scattering themselves in the city of Istanbul and mobilizing peripheries of the urban space, dissenters re-choreograph and subvert a thanatopolitical strategy of dispersal in favor of pluralism under political hardship. In the bodily-scale, activists claim the public sphere through the transience of folk dance. Whenever protesters depart from folk dance collectives to create new ones, they perpetually re-configure the area and initiate novel actions contingent upon their temporal and positional assessments during the dance. Such tactical applications of dispersal characterized by the smaller scale and transitory gatherings with ever-changing combinations of bodies at the peripheral space of urban activism manifest its great potential for collective agency and plural politics. 

Habermas, Cultural Hegemony, and the Educational Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Arabic Speaking

This study explores Habermas’s work in terms of the relevance of his theory of the public sphere to the politics and poetics of the Arab oral tradition and its pedagogical practices. In what ways and forms does Arab heritage inform a public sphere of resistance or dissent? How does Habermas’s notion of the public space help or hinder a better understanding of the Arab oral tradition within the sociopolitical and educational landscape of the Arabic-speaking world? This study also explores the pedagogical implications of teaching Arab orality within the context of the public sphere as a contested site that informs a mode of resistance against social inequality and sociopolitical exclusions.

The public and the private: reconfiguring the interrelationship during a civil act

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Natalia Kostenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Physical Interaction ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

The subject matter of research interest here is the movement of sociological reflection concerning the interplay of public and private realms in social, political and individual life. The focus is on the boundary constructs embodying publicity, which are, first of all, classical models of the space of appearance for free citizens of the polis (H. Arendt) and the public sphere organised by communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas). Alternative patterns are present in modern ideas pertaining to the significance of biological component in public space in the context of biopolitics (M. Foucault), “inclusive exclusion of bare life” (G. Agamben), as well as performativity of corporeal and linguistic experience related to the right to participate in civil acts such as popular assembly (J. Butler), where the established distinctions between the public and the private are levelled, and the interrelationship of these two realms becomes reconfigured. Once the new media have come into play, both the structure and nature of the public sphere becomes modified. What assumes a decisive role is people’s physical interaction with online communication gadgets, which instantly connect information networks along various trajectories. However, the rapid development of information technology produces particular risks related to the control of communications industry, leaving both public and private realms unprotected and deforming them. This also urges us to rethink the issue of congruence of the two ideas such as transparency of societies and security.

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