_re:publics – medial re-assemblies of ‚the public‘
Oliver Lerone Schultz (bereits angelegt)
Englisch, re:unite
Currently we see the re-emergence of a vibrant discourse on ‚the public’, induced by the ongoing impact of networked mediascapes chipping away from the standing idea of ‚the public‘ as it was conceived in pre-Internet times – and challenging old understandings of ownership, production, representation all alike. Most of all they challenge ‚the nation‘ as master-frame for the political. Inscribed in the discourse about the ‚fragmentation‘ of (old) institutions there is a – mostly implicit – assumption of the re-formation of ‚the public‘ on new conceptual and institutional footings. Different actors and project in different corners of global society are re-assembling and re-grouping ‚the public‘ on different levels – always with their own conceptual understandings and commitments, launching their own programmatic interventions. While as a society we need an understanding of ‚our public‘, this understanding cannot to be gained in abstract in a situation, where we are all situated in the ‚medial maelstrom‘ that is reshaping the very notion itself, affecting also the very tools and spaces of understanding and negotiation themselves.
My talk will sketch parts of this landscape-in-transformation, introduce some positions and propose a broader take on public/publicity as ‚communicative conduct of grouped matters in respect to a diffused generality of acteurs‘. It will argue that we need ‚methodological publics‘ in which the actors themselves co-define the essence of what is – or could be – ‚public‘ and how ‚publics‘ are to be built, given the new circumstances. In the end, the talk is an invitation to take part in this reflective assembly…
