Es ist kein Zufall, dass die These von der Überwindung der Dichotomien“von Kultur und Politik,

Stefan Nowotny Clandestine Publics [03_2005] I. The notion of "clandestine publics", with which the following reflections will be concerned, involves such an obvious contradiction that there hardly seems to be any necessity for actually describing this contradiction: Is not the public precisely characterized by its distinctiveness from the clandestine, the secret, from what is concealed? It indeed seems that the public is, in the first place, determined through a general visibility or audibility, which constitutes the precondition for the possibility that it, the public, can be witnessed, contested, or negotiated. Only thus can it become the object of an exchange, or establish the possibility of an open argument ideally accessible to "all", whether, in the concrete case, it is about a public trial at court, a parliamentary debate, an article in the newspaper, or a discussion event. The constitutive demarcation of the public from the secret that becomes evident in such a determination is moreover of historical importance: The repulsion of a "public representation of power" of a feudalistic 1or absolutistic type, exercised through the exhibition of the insignia of power , through modern publicity in the sense of a characteristic sphere of bourgeois forms of societal organisation is linked with the 2rejection of the secret as a "clearly acknowledged and necessary dimension of political agency" , personified by the secretaries and privy ...