Project Description

Since the financial crisis of 2008, we have watched a resurgence of political demonstrations and occupations in the Middle East, North Africa, China, Greece, Spain, the United Kingdom, and North America that have reanimated the concept of public space. In each case, citizens gathered in squares and streets, in opposition to today’s political economy of austerity and inequality. For over thirty years neoliberalism has effected a two-pronged assault on public space: on the one hand it has been transformed almost entirely into a space of capital flow, and on the other it has become more heavily surveilled. These two forms of enclosure—one by the market, the other by the state—appear as opposites, but they function as complementary dimensions of neoliberalism, which pursues a relentless opening of markets while intensifying society’s social and economic disparities.

To better understand this contemporary situation it is worth returning to Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere”22Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]). in order to sketch a provisional definition of “public space.” Habermas conceived of the public sphere as a mediating or communicating zone between public authority and the private sphere, emerging in an essentially sympathetic relation to new forms of bourgeois governance in Europe. It was in this sense that the bourgeois public sphere could strive to operate as a locus of rational communication between the two other realms and our conception of “publicness” in both its senses (public authority and the public sphere) is tied to the invention of bourgeois private property.

The emergence of the modern private property regime was a profound event, because it severed the obligations that existed within earlier land-use regimes to create a form of land that is on the one hand open to all and alienable at any time, and on the other, owned absolutely and entirely monopolizable. The construction of this historically specific form of private space was coincident with the production of a repertoire of new spaces of public authority, such as urban avenues, parks, government buildings, libraries, prisons, and hospitals, which were all produced to solidify social control. Capitalism is thus founded on the co-production of two realms: the entirely unequal system of private property, and spaces of public authority whose function is to surveil and normalize capitalist subjects.

If we apply the emergent concepts of private property and public authority to space, we can think of public space as analogous to the public sphere, as a physical space in which private people come together in order to question both the state and the economy. In this conception, we end up with three spaces: private economic space, spaces of public authority, and “public spaces.” Given that all space in democratic capitalist society is legally controlled through the rights of sovereign or private property, public space must always be constructed on top of a space governed either by the private economy or public authority. Public space is always an appropriation, a layering of a political space over legal space. This is clear when we take a quick glance at the physical spaces in which publics have asserted their power and produced new democratic knowledge, from public squares to universities, coffee houses, and private homes. These are spaces built either by public authorities or private economic agents (or some combination of the two); public spaces only appear within them when they are actively constructed.

So what exactly is produced when a public space is made? Insofar as it is a thoroughly capitalist institution, a locus of criticism internal to capitalism, public space always involves the construction of a paradox within physical space. It is not that public space today appears contradictory, rather that spaces of public authority and private economy are themselves contradictory, and public space is the construction of a spatial and material argument that brings their contradictions to light.

Furnishing Positions is a sculpture, a broadsheet, and a set of conversations that will stage the paradox of public space according to six encounters: affinity and disagreement, representation and presentation, people and things, materiality and immateriality, privacy and publicity, and city and urbanization. By thinking of public space in terms of its essential polarities, a field of contestation is opened between extremes, providing a conceptual space for discussion and disagreement.

—Adrian Blackwell