Publicness as problematic

There are three terms in English – publicness, the public and the public sphere – that correspond to different dimensions of the semantic field of the German term ‘Öffentlichkeit’ employed in Habermas’s influential volume (1962) Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. In schematic and simplified terms, rather than the spatial and communicative emphases that tend to be foregrounded in talk of ‘the public sphere’, or the identitarian and social–cultural positioning themes that tend to be foregrounded in talk of ‘the public’, this text draws out a particular reading of some faultlines in the discourse on publicness in the contemporary art field, and proposes to reconstruct publicness as a ‘problematic’ as a way to open up speculative possibilities. Approaching publicness as a problematic, rather than as a settled concept is a way to take account of the contradictory layers in various constructions of public whether spatial, discursive, technical, social, political, economic or juridical (e.g., public space, public opinion, public property, public life, public relations and so forth). Importantly, ‘publicness’ is not the name for any proposed generic quality that everything called ‘public’ – public art, public discourse, public culture, etc. – might share. Approaching ‘public’ as a ‘problematic’ is not therefore to posit an essence of ‘public’ but rather to inquire into the contexts, usages and genealogies within which the term ‘public’ does important semantic, rhetorical and organizational work. This is only the first tentative step towards recasting publicness as a problematic that is apprehended in the register of the imaginary. This move also enables a critical engagement with recent proposals to abandon the term public as integral to irredeemably ‘colonial (juridic, economic, symbolic) architectures’ (: 169; : 193).