Atmosphere as Spatial Dialectics: A Phenomenological Reconstruction of the Public and Private Realms in Modern Urban Writing

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Hannah Arendt, renowned for her insights into political philosophy, particularly in "The Human Condition" and "On Revolution", delineates the dichotomy between the public and private realms. In her analysis, the public sphere represents a space of political agency and rational discourse, crucial for the realization of human freedom and equality. Conversely, the private realm, characterized by necessity and domesticity, traditionally excludes women from active participation in public affairs. This study explores Arendt's theories to analyze gender exclusion in Nigeria's public realm. Historically, Nigerian women have faced systemic marginalization, confined to the private sphere, hindering their political participation. This research aims to evaluate women's representation in Nigerian politics, the impact of colonial and post-colonial policies, and the role of patriarchal structures. Integrating Arendt's framework with gender theory and social exclusion, the study underscores the need for constitutional amendments and cultural shifts to enhance women's political agency. This research proposes multifaceted solutions. These include legislative reforms to promote gender equality, educational initiatives to empower women politically, and cultural shifts to challenge stereotypes and biases against women in leadership roles. Such interventions are crucial for dismantling existing barriers and fostering a more inclusive public sphere where women's voices are heard and their contributions are valued. This research uniquely applies Arendt’s political theory to the contemporary issue of gender exclusion in Nigerian politics, providing a comprehensive analysis that links historical, cultural, and structural factors. It offers actionable recommendations to improve women's political representation and participation, fostering women's education, political advocacy, and cultural change to achieve a more egalitarian society.

This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is often imposed upon our historical understanding of the Old Regime in France. An analysis of the work of Jurgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Aries, and Roger Chartier shows that the authentic public articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm, and the of private life identified by Aries was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the common ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenthcentury France. Having superimposed the maps of public and private spheres drawn by Habermas and Aries upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution. Public sphere and private life these domains are now the focus of considerable interest among historians of the Old Regime on both sides of the Atlantic. 1989 saw the publication of English translations of the two works most closely associated with public sphere theory and the history of private life: Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and volume three of A History of Private Life, edited by Roger Chartier.' Each domain, private and public, has its own historiographical tradition and, in a sense, its own partisans. This division of historical labor, however, has contributed to a misunderstanding of the relationship between these two spheres of activity in eighteenth-century France, a misunderstanding that has led to the creation of a false opposition between public and private spheres. My aim here is to show that the two visions of the Old Regime represented by these two historiographical schools are fundamentally complementary. By focusing on the simple real1. Jfrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Habermas's work was originally published in German in 1962, and then translated into French in 1978. Chartier's De la Renaissance aux Lumieres, volume 3 of Histoire de la vie privie, edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, was published in France in 1986. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:06:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

THE concept of informal public is used here to designate the diversity of state-independent activities and interactions in late Soviet society. Segments of this informal sphere—which is different from the official public sphere—had begun to develop at the end of the 1950s. Unlike previous periods of Soviet history, when communication had been officially controlled or had taken place in the private “kitchen” setting, the Brezhnev era of stagnation provided public places for communication that escaped total control. The recent debates on the transformations in East Europe and Russia have made wide use of the concepts of public/private, civic culture, and civil society. These ideas have been major conceptual tools for sociological thinking on modernity in general. Since F. Toennis distinguished between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft and Durkheim claimed organic and mechanical solidarities, these concepts have shown how modernizing society differentiates into public and private realms, the boundaries of which are constantly shifting through the efforts of social actors. This means that each modern society, independent of its political regime and particular cultural patterns, develops its own public and private spheres with correspondingly different rules of the game. Researchers have identified two versions of the public realm in late Soviet society: the official public and the informal public. SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2002) The Informal Public in Soviet Society: Double Morality at Work BY ELENA ZDRAVOMYSLOVA AND VIKTOR VORONKOV Official public life and its relevant practices were controlled by party-state ideological norms and regulated by the relevant rules of communication and social integration as established by the state. Informal public life was regulated by the diversity of rules that will be referred to by the term unwritten or common law (which will be discussed later in the paper). The Official Public Realm and Kollektivist Practices The official public realm was the sphere of Soviet life regulated by official rules and controlled by the party-state bureaucracy. At the level of everyday life these were the rules of conduct and interaction in the Soviet kollektives (collectives). As the concentration camp was the model for totalitarianism for H. Arendt, so for us is the Soviet kollektive a model—an ideal type—of the Soviet official public. Oleg Kharkhordin provides an incisive analysis of the Soviet kollektive in its discursive representation. In his book, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices, Kharkhordin specifies the following rules of the game in the Soviet kollektives: mutual surveillance, collective correction, and selfrevelation . These techniques were invented to produce the true kollektive as a unit of Soviet society and the relevant type of “Soviet individual.” Through the use of mutual surveillance and admonition, social control in the communist kollektive aimed at the development of the Soviet individual. Reports on comrades’ everyday life and discussions of personal lives at the assembly of comrades were core kollektivist activities and were considered important procedures in the construction of the Soviet individual . The individual in Soviet society was integrated into kollektives . It should be noted that the kollektive was the name given only to the specific type of social integration that intentionally followed ideologically approved goals. The practically oriented theories of the Soviet kollektive were developed by Soviet pedagogical science beginning in the 1920s 50 SOCIAL RESEARCH (one of the main proponents was A. Makarenko), as well as in Soviet psychology and social psychology throughout all of Soviet history (see, for example, Etkind, 1997). The official organizational principle of the Soviet kollektive was democratic centralism , which presumed the following rules of subordination: subordination of the minority to the majority, subordination of lower organizational bodies to higher bodies, election from bottom to top, accountability from top to bottom. Along with the working unit, the family was another version of the kollektive, since it could be penetrated by party-state regulations . Illustrative of the kollektivist character of the Soviet family was the dependence of one’s career on family status (Tchouikina, forthcoming 2002) and the appeals of spouses (mainly women) to the enterprise party committees to restore and repair family relationships. Both working life and family life were subjected to state-inspired observation and control. Thus we see work and family kollektives as...

With the rapid development of network technology, cyberspace has become a new territory for citizens to freely discuss public affairs and participate in political activities. At the same time, private space has gradually penetrated into the public domain, forming a unique landscape with blurred boundaries between public and private domains. This article focuses on the integration of the public sphere and the private sphere in cyberspace from the perspective of women, and takes the Red Book platform as a specific case for in-depth discussion. This paper explores traditional definitions of the public and private spheres and their evolution in cyberspace, emphasizing the characteristics of a virtual, interactive, and accessible public domain. As online media advances, private spaces increasingly adopt public traits. The analysis is framed through three dimensions: the rise of social media platforms, the fluidity of user engagement, and the anonymity of online interactions, which together clarify the factors driving the convergence of public and private realms. Additionally, the paper assesses the implications of this integration, considering both its positive and negative effects on openness, diversity of perspectives, recognition of positive values, and the realization of individual value.

Drawing on my recent experience of working in collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I want to explore the potential of an active and resistant - rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice. The article examines how stillness and other forms of non-productive or non-teleological activity might contribute towards the production of a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of contemporary subjectivity. It will investigate how the performance of stillness within an artistic practice could offer a pragmatic model through which to approach certain philosophical concepts in relation to the construction of subjectivity, by proposing a practical application of the various ideas explored therein. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and supposed freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. In one sense, stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace at which we are required to perform. The intent, however, is not to focus on the transcendent possibilities – or even nostalgic dimension – of stillness, where it could be seen as a form of escape from the accelerated temporalities of contemporary capitalism, a move towards a slower, more spiritual or meditative existence by the removal of or self-imposed isolation from contemporary societal pressures. Instead, this article attempts to explore the potential within those forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited – or appropriated through an artistic practice – as sites of critical action. The article will suggest ways in which habitually resented, oppressive or otherwise tedious forms of stillness, inaction or immobility can be turned into active or resistant strategies for producing the self differently to dominant ideological expectations or pressures. With reference to selected theoretical ideas primarily within the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the collective performance of stillness in the public realm produces an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of events, illuminating temporal gaps and fissures in which alternative or unexpected possibilities – for life – might be encountered and encouraged. The act of collective stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to, or refusal of, societal norms, a wilful and collaborative attempt to break or rupture habitual flows. However, collective stillness also has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol; a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City – might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing how the practice of stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual’s capacity to act. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project – led by Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday – that explores how public space is conceptualised and organised by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discreet interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilise habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour, through the use of invitations, propositions, site-specific actions and performative events. The practical and theoretical research phase of the Open City project was initiated in 2006 in collaboration with artist/performer Simone Kenyon. During this phase of research Open City worked with teachers of the Alexander Technique deconstructing the mechanics of walking, and observed patterns of group behaviour and ‘everyday’ movements in public spaces. This speculative phase of research was expanded upon through a pilot project where the artists worked with members of the public, inviting them to attempt to get lost in the city, to consider codes of conduct through observation and mimicry, to explore behavioural patterns in the public realm as a form of choreography, and to approach the spaces of the city as an amphitheatre or stage upon which to perform. This culminated in a series of public performances and propositional/instructive works as part of the nottdance festival in Nottingham (2007) where audiences were invited to participate in choreographed events, creating a number of fleeting and partially visible performances throughout the city. Members of the public were issued specific time-based invitations for collective and individual actions such as ‘Day or night – take a walk in which you notice and deliberately avoid CCTV cameras’ or ‘On the high street during rush hour … suddenly and without warning, stop and remain still for five minutes … then carry on walking as before.’ Image 1: Open City, documentation of publicly-sited postcards. As part of this phase of activity, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work – to be serialised over a number of publicly distributed postcards – which would attempt to critically contextualise the various issues and concerns emerging from the investigation-led research that the project had been developing in the public realm. The postcards included an instruction written by Open City on one side, and my serialised text on the other. I have since worked more collaboratively with Open City on new research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively; how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. My involvement with the project has specifically been in exploring the use of text-based elements, instructions and propositions and has included further publicly-sited postcard texts and the development of sound-based works using iPod technology to create synchronised actions. In 2008, I successfully secured Arts Council of England funding for a practice-based research trip to Japan with Open City in which we initiated our specific investigations around stillness, slowness, obstruction, and blockage. During this phase of research we became interested in how speed and slowness can be utilised within a performance practice to create points of anchor and location within the urban environment, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood. Image 2: Open City, research investigations, Japan, 2008.On one level, Open City can be located within a tradition of publicly-sited performance practices. This genealogy of politically – and more often playfully – resistant actions, interventions and models of spatial occupation or navigation can be traced back to the ludic practice of Surrealist errance or aimless wandering into and through the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive and conceptualisation of “psychogeography” during the 1950s and 60s. In its focus on collective action and inhabitation of the everyday as a site of practice, Open City is also part of a trajectory of artistic activity – epitomised perhaps by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings – intent on blurring the line between art and life, or in drawing attention to those aspects of reality marginalised by dominant discourses and ideologies. Performed as part of an artistic practice, non-habitual or even habitually discouraged actions such as aimless wandering, standing still, even the (non)event of 'doing nothing' operate as subtle methods through which to protest against increasingly legislated conditions of existence, by proposing alternative modes of behaviour or suggesting flexibility therein. Artistic practice can be seen as a site of investigation for questioning and dismantling the dominant order – or “major” language – through acts of minor rebellion that – whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective – might still remind us that we have some agency and do not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce. Life itself becomes the material for a work of art, and it is through such an encounter that we might be encouraged to conceive other possibilities for life. Through art, life is rendered plastic and capable of being actively shaped or made into something different to how it might habitually be. However the notion of ‘life as a work of art’ is not exclusive to artistic practice. Various theorists and philosophers – including Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari – have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s “style of life” or way of existing might be produced or constructed differently. They urge us to consider how we might actively and consciously attend to the full possibilities of life in order to become more human, by increasing our “affective capacity,” that is, our capacity to affect and be affected in affirming or “augmentative terms” (Deleuze, Spinoza and Us 124). In one sense, Spinoza’s Ethics offers a pragmatic model – or guide to living – through which to attempt to increase one’s potential capacity for being, by maximising the possibility of augmentative experiences or joyful encounters. Here, Spinoza

In search of a private realm: a social perspective on Internet diffusion

Ecofeminism and Structural Violence

Arendt-inspired philosophy of education has been a lively field of research in recent years. This research is mostly based on Arendt's essay ‘The Crisis in Education’. In the same historical context, Arendt wrote her initial essay on education, the controversial ‘Reflections on Llittle Rock’, and her political-theoretical work The Human Condition. All three texts show Arendt's concern about the public realm and its capture by ‘society’, which she understands as discarding the distinction between private and public. This raises the question of where education should be located in Arendt's thought: in the private realm, in society or in the public realm? In her ‘Reflections’ Arendt places education in the societal realm, but this approach fails to convince. The answer consistent with Arendt's use of the category of the ‘in-between’ in her educational thought is that it is in none of the above. Instead, education takes place in an ambiguous zone in between private and public, where both make their influence felt, but neither dominates the other. This has implications not only for how we should understand Arendt's educational philosophy but also for her notions of private and public spheres as well as for other political-theoretical concepts in her work. This answers the question about the location of education in a second way: education in Arendt's thought is not simply derivativeof her political works but can itself serve as an interesting perspective from which to view her writings.

<p>Last century saw significant changes in the way we occupy land for living. Technological advances in individual and mass transportation has both extended city peripheries and effectively claimed the suburban public realm for the automobile. Analysis of historical residential development models reveals that our traditional neighbourhood characteristics and qualities have deteriorated as a direct result of this shift. The urban expansion and resultant neglected street environments are two imperatives for change which lead to the core focus of this research; the reconciliation of the public and private realms within suburbia. A holistic approach to design recognises the benefits of considering community and individual needs simultaneously. This is reflected in the design of a residential subdivision seeking alternative street patterns and use hierarchies, both aimed at stimulating the public realm. Under this premise a robust place-based perception of ‘community’ is important to the idealised functional operation of the public suburban street requiring an effort from the entirely private domain of the suburban house. A graduated transition from public to private is the means used to mediate the pre-existing tension. Through the acquisition of a series of strategies a gradient between public and private is achieved to successfully facilitate and manage the connection to the street from within the house. Thus, the urban responsibility of housing is realised and addressed allowing the private house dweller to participate in the activation of the suburban street.</p>

<p>Last century saw significant changes in the way we occupy land for living. Technological advances in individual and mass transportation has both extended city peripheries and effectively claimed the suburban public realm for the automobile. Analysis of historical residential development models reveals that our traditional neighbourhood characteristics and qualities have deteriorated as a direct result of this shift. The urban expansion and resultant neglected street environments are two imperatives for change which lead to the core focus of this research; the reconciliation of the public and private realms within suburbia. A holistic approach to design recognises the benefits of considering community and individual needs simultaneously. This is reflected in the design of a residential subdivision seeking alternative street patterns and use hierarchies, both aimed at stimulating the public realm. Under this premise a robust place-based perception of ‘community’ is important to the idealised functional operation of the public suburban street requiring an effort from the entirely private domain of the suburban house. A graduated transition from public to private is the means used to mediate the pre-existing tension. Through the acquisition of a series of strategies a gradient between public and private is achieved to successfully facilitate and manage the connection to the street from within the house. Thus, the urban responsibility of housing is realised and addressed allowing the private house dweller to participate in the activation of the suburban street.</p>

The paper discusses the relationship between patriarchy and formation of the Brazilian nation from a feminist perspective. From the works “Populacoes Meridionais do Brasil”, by Oliveira Vianna e “Raizes do Brasil”, by Sergio Buarque de Holanda, I question the reference to the concept of patriarchy, bringing to the debate on the formation of Brazil the underlying asymmetric relations between men and women brought by such a concept. This approach allows for further discussion on the relationship between public and private spheres and the nation's formation, going beyond the criticism of the overlapping of public and private realms, present on Brazilian social thought patriarchal domination analysis.

Classical republicanism and the contemporary voter: An empirical cultural sociology of the relationship between the private realm and the public sphere

ABORTION MUST BE THE KEY TO new world for women, wrote the British feminist Stella Browne in 1935. Browne believed that the public emancipation of women in such areas as politics and the economy demanded and was dependent on their emancipation in the private sphere of sexual and reproductive practice: freedom of choice and deliberate intention are necessary for [women] in their sexual relations and their maternity, if they are to make anything of their status and opportunities. Toward this end, she advocated abortion as an absolute right spanning public and private realms.1 Browne evoked modern visions of femininity through abortion and emphasized the issue's liminality between public and private. These are themes also reflected in recent historical studies of abortion in North America and Europe. In work on post-1960 abortion in the United States, for example, Celeste Michelle Condit notes the intersection between changing discursive understandings of abortion and those of femininity, a negotiated transformation of women's own private discourses in public and private spheres, view also adopted by Jane Jenson in her examination of abortion in France.2 Other studies of abortion have emphasized its role in problematizing the private female body in the context of the public sphere after World War 1.3 This is particularly true of work on the controversies surrounding Article 218 in interwar Germany and the 1920 loi sce'Mrate in France, as Cornelie Usborne, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Louise Roberts have shown.4

Susan Dalton. Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003). Pp. 206 + ix. $70.00 cloth. Alessa Johns. Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Pp. 212 + xi. $34.95 cloth. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Pp. 242 + vii. $36.00 cloth. A critical rethinking of the ubiquitous terms "public" and "private" in the eighteenth-century context informs the three books under review here. Susan Dalton, Alessa Johns, and Patricia Meyer Spacks explicitly address the influence of Habermas' 1962 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (translated, in 1989, as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society) on the entire field of eighteenth-century studies. In their nuanced readings of eighteenth-century literary and cultural production, Dalton, Johns, and Spacks question the prevalent interpretation of Habermas as establishing a strict binary opposition between the public and the private and, perhaps even more importantly, an equation of the private with the domestic and the public with the political. While Habermas has coined these terms and injected them into the critical discourse about the eighteenth century, the strict demarcation of supposedly separate spheres is more a product of Strukturwandel's subsequent reception than of Habermas' theory itself, prompted by critics' desire to establish some kind of coherent categorization for the complex nature of eighteenth-century life and letters. Habermas himself discusses the intersections of the public and private spheres and explores the arising ambivalences. He argues that the opposition between the "intimate sphere of the conjugal family" (51) and the "public sphere" was, above all, a discursive construct because the intimate/domestic sphere formed part of the private sphere of the gradually developing market economy. Even though the domestic was imagined as unaffected by the workings of the private realm of the market economy due to the accelerating division of labor and family life in the eighteenth century, both were connected not only to each other, but also to what Habermas calls the "public sphere in the world of letters" and "the public sphere in the political realm" (51). While the ideological construction of these separate spheres affected reality to some extent and women became increasingly equated with the domestic in the discourse of the time, an analysis of this reality also shows how porous and connected these areas were. Habermas' discussion of these intersections serves as the starting point for the studies of eighteenth-century literature and culture by Dalton, Johns, and Spacks. They explore the space which Habermas himself highlights but which has often been overlooked: the third space where public and private aspects meet in complex and ambivalent ways. The authors' well-reasoned and compelling analyses of these intersections [End Page 394] in British, French, German, and Italian writings underline the complexity of eighteenth-century textual production by men and women. In Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Susan Dalton looks with a historian's eye at the correspondence of four French and Italian salon women, Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Giustina Renier Michiel, and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini. Dalton explores the communities formed by social networking and polite sociability in the eighteenth-century republic of letters and investigates salon women's engagement with the political and philosophical debates of their time. Her argument perceptively unravels the ambivalence that characterizes these elite women's theoretical writings and their practical applications. Yet, rather than classifying these ambivalent moments as contradictions, Dalton disentangles these women's strategic negotiation of gender discourses. This mediation allowed them to express their political views at the same time that it enabled them to echo discourses of propriety and...