The nature and quality of public life in the contemporary West has been the subject of numerous, controversial studies. Whether bemoaning the fate of the modern public or celebrating its potential openness and solidarity,¹ many authors define and theorize public life in terms of shared rational consensus or a common culture, regardless of their political orientation.² In contrast, I argue that the public realm must be understood in large part as an arena of play and performance alongside its other dimensions. Publics are volatile combinations of aesthetic and political imagination and experimentation rather than simply realms for rational debate and...

Aesthetic imagery and practices are now widespread in social movements. In first-world societies, aesthetic themes became commonplace among many of the new social movements, such as gay and lesbian movements in the 1970s and 1980s. These movements are as much about imaginatively reconstructing identities displayed through style and speech as about developing rational programs to implement their political and economic demands. They appear to have more in common with the peasant tradition of carnival, with its revelry of festivals and pilgrimages, than with the ordered demonstrations of reformist politics.¹

Yet even before the rise of the new social movements, many...

The various perspectives that I explored in the previous two chapters have not adequately explained the relationship of aesthetic politics to either public life or social movements. In this chapter, I develop the approach to aesthetic politics that informs my analysis of public life and social movements. I consider the philosophical and conceptual basis of aesthetic politics through an examination of the issues of identity, knowledge, and solidarity. With the rise of a differentiated aesthetic sphere, a consciously aesthetic version of the subject and knowledge could be elaborated by artists and philosophers. I move beyond the contours of the aesthetic...

The idea that social life consists of actors playing parts has a famous lineage from Homer to Shakespeare to, more ingloriously, the sociologist Talcott Parsons. Sociology historically has been fascinated by such issues, centered on the idea of role. While functionalists like Parsons assume that role playing stabilizes a social order, Erving Goffman constructs a dramaturgical approach to understanding social action around this acting metaphor that criticizes the functionalist assumption of the stability of the self and of social meanings. For Goffman, public life is an arena where players make particular moves to save face and augment their status. Society...

In 1906, the maverick intellectual and French revolutionary syndicalism sympathizer Georges Sorel publishedReflections on Violence. He praised the cleansing and regenerative act of proletarian violence in opposition to the mundane and passive parliamentary politics of the bourgeoisie, justifying such violence in a mythology beyond reason. In his words, “lofty moral convictions … never depend on reason or on any education of the individual will, but on a state of war in which men voluntarily participate and which finds expression in well-defined myths.”¹ On May 1 of that year, workers took over the streets of Paris, engaging in combative demonstrations...

By the 1960s, the proletarian public sphere was breaking down, as deindustrialization, the rise of mass culture, the suburbanization of metropolitan areas, and globalization gained full force. As the economy moved in a post-Fordist direction and working-class institutions from unions to neighborhoods throughout the world faced the onslaught of a neoliberal state, the site for resistance to capitalism moved to civil society and the “new social movements.” An emerging “society of control” based on mobility, the quick movement of capital and people, and a media-saturated postmodern culture of fragmentation and fantasy created a new context for social movements. Beginning with...