Public Things

Abstract

What if democracy postulates not just a demos and the other things on which democratic theory these days focuses (constitutions, clear territorial boundaries, proper procedures, commitment to formal or substantive equality) but also public things, shared common things, over which to argue, around which to gather? Such things require communal attention, public commitment, and collective maintenance. And they return the favor by lending to us some of their objectivity: that is to say, interacting with public things grants to democratic subjects some of those things’ durability and resilience. This insight is drawn from D. W. Winnicott’s object-relations theory in which the idea of a “holding environment” is key. This essay, develops new readings of Lear’s Radical Hope and von Trier’s Melancholia from a “public things” perspective and argues that new narrations of democratic maturation are needed to counter recent efforts to infantilize the democratic need for public things. Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt are drawn upon as well in this analysis of the complex politics of collaboration and privatization in the context of the theft of native lands and the catastrophe of climate change.