Performing Protest: Occupation, Antagonism and Radical Democracy

Abstract

According to Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere is brought into being every time private individuals gather publicly to 'confer in an unrestricted fashion … about matters of general interest'. 1 The notion of a single uni-versally accessible and power-free zone has been problematised by a great number of scholars. 2 Nancy Fraser, for example, suggests that the concept of a single public sphere should be replaced by the notion of multiple spheres, some of which are large and 'official', some of which are smaller and 'subaltern'. 3 Whilst this model offers a framework within which one can reflect upon the formulation and circulation of a multiplicity of counter-discourses, the relationship between all-encompassing official spaces and alternative spaces becomes correspondingly more complex. There is a frac-turing of interests which, while potentially politically productive, can also contribute to the 'thinness' of democracy under the economic and social constraints created by the dynamics of neo-liberalism. 4 Within this context, the emphasis on the role of the individual within the liberal bourgeois model in achieving consensus can be particularly problematic. For while Habermas refers positively to the ways in which newspapers, magazines, radio and television create a dispersed 'public body' capable of articulating public opinion, he remains ambivalent about the massing together of actual public bodies. This distrust is rooted in the perceived unreasonableness of the mass and the belief that the politically productive enthusiasm of the crowd can easily metamorphose into the physically destructive hysteria of the mob. 5