Dancing Toward Democracy— Appropriation

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Lefevbre's¹ notion of the appropriation of space can be used in a critique of those urban places that acquire the label “public.” A common definition of a public space is something like the following: “a space devoid of private interests and controlled by the state for common use.” But this is hardly sufficient to define a space as “public.”

What we find using this notion is that a public space tends to be a place where surveillance and police control delimit, from among the various possible common uses, those uses that are supported by the state and/or by the marketplace. And so the public street of a city under modern totalitarian regime resembles—and often exemplifies—the bourgeois ideal of a modern public space: safe, sanitary, orderly. Clearly, we need to rethink our notion of the public street. And the sudden appearance of a festival in this space puts a new contour into the street and for theories that would describe this.

The question here is this: what legitimates the right of a crowd, particularly a noisy subaltern counterpublic crowd, appropriate a public place for its own interests? By arguing that the notion of the public sphere must be opened up to multiple publics, including subaltern counter-publics, Nancy Fraser calls for a new perspective on the public sphere.

Fraser notes, against Habermas's argument, that the “question of open access cannot be reduced without remainder to the presence or absence of formal exclusions. It requires us to look also at the process of discursive interaction...” (1992, 118). Even today, discursive interaction occurs mostly in specific places². “Open access,” taken geographically, means the creation of public spaces, i.e., of physically available, inclusive discursive arenas, in and out of the government.

Such access is accomplished within a city by the creation and maintenance of public places: but only where a public place is a place that is freely appropriatable by a multiplicity of groups. And so a more useful definition of a public place would be a place where all groups can negotiate access: where they contest for inclusion in a definition of the public. The ongoing civic “festival” of democracy is this self-expression of inclusion.

each moment has its own public space

In practice, as Fraser notes, public spaces and the groups that vie to appropriate these, have multiple moments of articulation: “...subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides...” (1992, 124).

This “dual character” of counterpublics requires that there be two necessary moments for the practice of achieving inclusion within the public sphere, and each moment has its own public space. The first public spaces are those made for the internal use of the subaltern group—as a part of the community-building process that redefines the group as having shared interests. The second space occurs when this internal public space is then opened up tactically within the public sphere of the nation-state.

The tactic here is one of decoding and recoding, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 244-245) have noted, in order to break the unmarked flow of the memory of traditions of exclusion and insert a new memory, start a new chain, and begin the history of a new future for the space. Demonstrations of identity, of protest, of solidarity and complaint, festivals of cultural politics—this multiple re-coding opens up the street as “public” space. These moments accumulate in a fashion that relativizes dominance: spectacles of the state are thereby forced to march the same route as the annual madang crowd. The more times, and more groups that take (to) the streets in this fashion, the less room there is for the everyday articulation of a dominant narrative for the street. Because the state has a long-term³ interest in supplying its own story, counter-articulation can not be a one-time action.

In Higashi-kujo, the Madang community continues to work toward an annual event that builds on its own history of articulation to wedge itself deeper into the local imagination. Its Madang makes an annual tactical foray into the heart of the factory of mono-cultural Japanese identity—into its public schools. Taking control of the schoolyard where they were disciplined as children by a government that disowned them at birth, and where their outsider status as Koreans and buraku-dwellers was forged into bitter memories and anger, the community has created its own cultural plaza: a space that not only announces their presence within the ancient capital of the Empire, but also makes their claim as legitimate citizens in the city that shuns them daily.

The Madang has challenged the City of Kyoto to incorporate “a respect for heterogeneity” within its announced plans to champion the call for “world human rights” as a part of its 1200th Anniversary program.

It it through this festival that they mark their arrival as local city-zens. They are, by this, no longer simply disenfranchised foreigners, but the producers of a variety of local culture, a culture that is done within and for themselves and their neighbors. But this is not the moment where the Madang stops.

The Madang has challenged the City of Kyoto to incorporate “a respect for heterogeneity” within its announced plans to champion the call for “world human rights” as a part of its 1200th Anniversary program. Heterogeneity here applies to persons with a wide range of “otherness,” most specifically other ethnicities (Koreans, etc.), other bodies (the physically disadvantaged), and other residences (persons assigned to live in buraku areas). Certainly, sexuality, gender, and age concerns would also fit within this call. But what is also interesting is the tactical nature of this counter-proclamation.

The tactics of subaltern groups, both to marshal their members, and then to agitate for inclusion within the public sphere, are fundamental to the continuance of a truly public public sphere. In many states today, diasporic communities are at the front of a new wave of democratization. And their methods must, by a necessary logic, by different than those that are used to deny them access.

¹See Henri Lefevbre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1991).

²Of course, from the perspective of subaltern groups, inclusion in the bourgeois public sphere is a self-defeating tactic as long as the logic of this sphere remains bourgeois. Demanding inclusion in this sphere represents the de facto desire to become bourgeois: a tactic that feeds the hegemony of the bourgeois camp.

³One long-term counter-strategy is for the state to re-appropriate celebrations of resistance to the state, transforming revolutionary memories into worker holidays, and filling these with its own displays.