The public more brilliant more skeptical more disobedient more dangerous

“If there is a task, it might be to participate in making “the public” more brilliant, more skeptical, more disobedient, more capable of self-defense, and more dangerous again—dangerous to elites, and dangerous to stability; when it comes to education, dangerous to the idea that universities should be for the rich, rather than the public, and hostile to the creeping sense that American universities should be for the global rich rather than the local or nationally bounded polity. It is not up to the public intellectual alone to remake “the public” as a citizenry of equals, superior and dominant—that will take efforts from all sides. But it is perhaps up to the intellectual, if anyone, to face off against the pseudo-public culture of insipid media and dumbed-down “big ideas,” and call that world what it is: stupid.”

Mark Greif. “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?“In The Chronicle of Higher Education. Web. February 13, 2015.

Found via social media.

The idea of the public intellectual

“The idea of the public intellectual in the 21st century should be less about the intellectuals and how, or where, they ought to come from vocationally, than about restoring the highest estimation of the public. Public intellect is most valuable if you don’t accept the construction of the public handed to us by current media. Intellectuals: You—we—are the public. It’s us now, us when we were children, before the orgy of learning, or us when we will be retired; you can choose the exemplary moment you like. But the public must not be anyone less smart and striving than you are, right now. It’s probably best that the imagined public even resemble the person you would like to be rather than who you are.”

Mark Greif. “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?“In The Chronicle of Higher Education. Web. February 13, 2015.

Found via social media.

Two hours of public time

“Two hours is a short time and an eternity: to use two hours of public time is a fine art.”

(page 35)

Peter Brook, The Empty Space. London: Penguin, 1968.

From my own library, bought from the Emily Carr University Library booksale, used, for 50 cents.

To destabilize an already obsolete opposition

“This situation creates new conditions for performance as well. To destabilize an already obsolete opposition between public and private today hardly creates possibilities for new experiences. Nowadays, when actors and spectators touch each other in performances, they are aware that the binary between public and private belongs to the past. What, then, does such physical contact achieve today?”

(page 65)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Etiquette regarding tactful inattention

“We often find that when interaction must proceed in the presence of outsiders, outsiders tactfully act in an uninterested, uninvolved, unperceiving fashion, so that if physical isolation is not obtained by walls or distance, effective isolation can at least be obtained by convention. Thus when two sets of persons find themselves in neighboring booths in a restaurant, it is expected that neither group will avail itself of the opportunities that actually exist for overhearing the other.

Etiquette regarding tactful inattention, and the effective privacy it provides, varies, of course, from one society and subculture to another. In middle-class Anglo-American society, when in a public place, one is supposed to keep one’s nose out of other people’s activity and go about one’s own business. It is only when a woman drops a package, or when a fellow motorist gets stalled in the middle of the road, or when a baby left alone in a carriage begins to scream, that middle-class people feel it is all right to break down momentarily the walls which effectively insulate them.”

(page 230)

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

Seen referenced in multiple texts on performance theory, and purchased used from Powell’s Books in Portland, OR.

A great blurring of the boundaries between public and private

“We still use the word public of course, but we have seen a great blurring of the boundaries between public and private, the continuing erosion of privacy but also a loss of the expectation that dress, behavior, and communication ought to be different when we are in a public place, and that there are rules and obligations that go along with being a part of a public.  And we have experienced a loss of our longstanding sense of individualism, replaced by an emphasis on personalization; a loss of citizenship based on equality, replaced by group identity based on grievance and all manner of neo-tribalism; a loss of traditional notions of character and personal integrity, replaced by various forms of identity construction via online profiles, avatars, and the like; the loss of separate public and private selves, replaced by affiliations with different lifestyles and media preferences.”

Found in “Death and the Public Realm” by Lance Strate on the Hannah Arendt Centre website.

A joyful immersion in a collective spirit

“One of the first of these ideas [which we could use to mend some of the endemic fractures of the modern world] relates to the benefit of taking people into a distinct venue which ought itself to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favour of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit – an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern community centres, whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

Secondly, the Mass embodies a lesson about the importance of putting forward rules to direct people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a missal – the directive way in which this book of instructions for the celebration of a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points – speaks to an essential aspect of human nature which benefits from being guided in how to behave with others. To ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.”

(page 20-21)

Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists.

Borrowed as an ebook from the Vancouver Public Library while living in Berlin.

Rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger

“All buildings give their owners opportunities to recondition visitors’ expectations and to lay down rules of conduct specific to them. The art gallery legitimates the practice of peering silently at a canvas, the nightclub of swaying one’s hands to a musical score. And a church, with its massive timber doors and 300 stone angels carved around its porch, gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.”

(page 17)

Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists.

Borrowed as an ebook from the Vancouver Public Library while living in Berlin.

Our sense of loneliness comes down to sheer numbers

“If we examine in detail the causes of modern alienation in more detail, some of our sense of loneliness comes down to sheer numbers. The billions of people who live on the planet make the idea of talking to a stranger more threatening than it was in sparser days, because sociability seems to bear an inverse relationship to the density of population. We generally talk gladly to people only once we also have the option of avoiding them altogether. Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must – in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity – give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans who are eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them on all sides.”

(page 14)

Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists.

Borrowed as an ebook from the Vancouver Public Library while living in Berlin.

Our failure to say hello to one another in the street

“One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighbourliness which has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, a state where people pursue contact with one another primarily for restricted, individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.

Some of our nostalgia centres around our reluctance to give charitably to others in distress, but we are as likely to be concerned with pettier symptoms of social separation, our failure to say hello to one another in the street, for instance, or to help elderly neighbours with the shopping. Living in gargantuan cities, we tend to be imprisoned within tribal ghettos based on education, class and profession and may come to view the rest of humanity as an enemy rather than as a sympathetic collective we would aspire to join. It can be extraordinary and odd to start an impromptu conversation with an unknown person in a public space. Once we are past the age of thirty, it is even somewhat surprising to make a new friend.”

(page 14)

Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists.

Borrowed as an ebook from the Vancouver Public Library while living in Berlin.