Making+a+Fragile+Public+A+Talk-Centered+Study+of+Citizenship+and+Power

Summary by Namalie
 * Nina Eliasoph: Making a Fragile Public: A Talk Centered Study of Citizenship and Power (1996) **

The focus of this paper is to understand “how citizens create contexts for open-ended political conversation in everyday life” (262). In order to do so, Eliasoph believes that it is important to study interaction, which will help us to fully comprehend the intersubjective nature of politics.

Eliasoph develops the concept of __civic practices__ – “the fundamentally social processes by which citizens create contexts for political conversation in the potential public sphere, by jointly creating a relationship to speech itself. In creating these contexts, citizens develop meaning-making powers together” (263).

In particular, Eliasoph finds that what “matters for democracy are also the ways that citizens mingle and interact-civic practices that enable citizens to engage in freewheeling political conversation in everyday contexts” (266).

For her empirics, Eliasoph was a participant-observer for over two years with recreational, volunteer and activist groups, stating that “[by] examining practices in the potential contexts of the public sphere, we can understand how citizens relentlessly make fine, implicit, but firm distinctions between one situation and another, thus sculpting the public sphere itself” (269).

“Examining both the ‘language’ and the practice together would mean listening for meaning not just in discourses like the language of self-interest but also in the ways people create a footing together and the ways that footings themselves express a relation to politics” (269)

Using Goffman’s concept of the frontstage and backstage, Eliasoph analyzes frontstage/backstage interactions of the groups she observed. For example, the activist group she observed used the public forum (the front stage) to speak about their concerns regarding toxic waste as it related solely to their individual families. While within the group (the backstage), the activists professed that their concerns went just beyond their families. However, they felt constrained by the public forum and the media to be more “selfish” in their approach, which leads to Eliasoph’s point that “the more public the context, the more the public’s meaning-making powers shrank” (275). Eliasoph notes that it “matters less that institutions propagated a particular political platform than that they deemed public spirited speech dangerous and a waste of time” (280)

Eliasoph finds with her three cases, the groups’ “meaning-making powers grew weak also because the groups themselves considered private //talk// and the private //context// to be real, important, trustworthy; and public talk and public context unreal, irrelevant” (281).

Paying attention to civic practices means keeping //three// intertwined elements in play at once: political languages, groups and contextual footings (285).

We need more studies on contextual footing, as “[by] paying attention to contexts, we can understand what citizens take for granted about their own political participation” (285).

** Discussion **

Do you agree with Eliasoph’s finding that institutions encourage groups to avoid public conversations? Considering that she studied relatively small activist and volunteer groups, what role do you think social movements and civil society play in shifting the context?

**Suzanne's notes:**Some notes and quotes I took on this piece while preparing to write my exam question --SG: · Finding: “the more public the context, the less public-spirited the talk” · Need to study “civic practices” to better understand apathy and engagement. (263)  · “Civic practices have the potential to unleash a creative, meaning-making, magical source of power” – “power to create the public itself” (263). (So: publics are something created by participants through civic practice.) · Interaction, intersubjectivity link the “inner” (world of feelings, meanings) to the “outer” (structures) (the two groups of theories explaining why people are apathetic—e.g., they don’t care, have accepted dominant ideology, etc., versus they’re structurally powerless). (Reminds me of John Mayer lyrics: “It’s not that we don’t care/we just know that the fight ain’t fair/So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change). · People contextualize their opinions and understandings based on what “hat” they’re wearing at the time. · Interests don’t come on a platter—they emerge interactively: “Is it in a nuclear battleship worker's ‘self-interest’ to have a healthy workplace? a future planet? a job? social support from day care and schools? low taxes? military power that ‘keeps America first’? If the answer is not obvious, that is because there is no bottom-line interest that trumps all [page break] others. Public discussion helps us negotiate or transform these overlapping, contradictory, fluid ‘interests’” (266-67). · “people create, in practice, a sense of what are appropriately political questions and what is out of bounds…. Being able to create the public is itself a kind of power” (267). · Re: powerless peasants as studied by Scott: “They want more than just satisfaction of ‘interests’: They desperately need to speak and be heard…. to create meaning, a public transcript” (268). Also, their rebellious talk is kept private: “’When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts’”—Ethiopian proverb (268). It’s very different in a democracy but there are still differences between what people will say “front stage” versus “backstage.” · People learn implicit rules about how to conduct themselves in different contexts. · “Appealing to common ground would force speakers to create common ground, ‘making the path by walking it’” (269)—so public good, interests, etc. are created through interaction in a process. · Illustration: anti-pollution activists spoke to reporters as if they were concerned for their own (or their neighbors’ children) and their property values, but “backstage” they were concerned about all communities and future generations, and part of a national network seeking to change gov’t policies & corporate practices. In similar examples, talk of concerns of general public good or “politics” was contrary to norms, but it came out privately. The “groups’ meaning-making powers grew frail” (281). Talk on public concerns (“public-spirited talk) was seen as suspect. · However, groups did seem to have the power to foster settings for public-spirited talk: “The culture of political avoidance comes not only from above, but also from citizens themselves: A group can solidify a footing that encourages explicitly public-spirited talk when it notices, and thereby helps empower, organizations that act as receptive audiences.” · Why the widespread taboos on talking politics or in the public spirit? Not to avoid unpleasant disagreement; not in a rational-instrumental attempt to meet particular goals (they hungered for just the opposite—a chance to discuss things broadly in a non-instrumental way) · Concluding paragraph: “The act of carving out space for open-ended public conversation could itself implicitly call into question seemingly natural and automatic relations of power and powerlessness; when citizens attribute meaning-making power to public life, public life becomes a potential source of power. But if groups assume that public speech itself is frivolous, dangerous, or useless, the public grows frail; the typical civic practices portrayed here impaired citizens groups' own meaning-making powers, leaving only cramped spaces for developing and circulating political ideas. The power this paper describes is the power to define what public life is, to give meaning to the very act of voluntarily gathering together. This is not only the power to make a particular political program public, but the power to make the public” (286).