The Problem of the Missing Public

• In Event: Knowing Democracy

Abstract

Often the Public is conceived as always already existing. But what happens when it is missing? Immediately we resort to accusations of apathy or disinterestedness on the part of the people, or of deception and cynicism on the part of politicians. This distrust has been characterised as a crisis of representation. While in Science and Technology Studies (STS), this has been framed as an issue of public involvement around scientific and technological controversies, the form of the Public itself is left unquestioned. Building on accounts of politics in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Gomart and Hajer 2003; Mol 2002; Latour 2004; Marres 2012; Yaneva 2017), in this paper the problem of the Public will be addressed empirically. In order to do so, we will follow the making of a building called Factory in Manchester, UK, through its planning and design development stages as it is made public and yet lacks a visible Public.This search for the missing Public will take us through a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry into city council committees, several Reports, public presentations, and workshops with artists where we can detect particular public formations through the mediations, set-ups, objects, and concerns that interest them and enable them to become visible. In this paper, we will move from a general Public to particular publics, from a Public that is immediately accessible to publics detected through their mediations, and from a Public that is transcendent to its problems to publics that are immanently constituted through their problems.

Author

• Brett Mommersteeg, Architecture, The University of Manchester