According to Habermas, the modern bourgeois public sphere came into existence when private persons joined together to exercise their reason in a public fashion. Public opinion is the end product of all the dialogues between discoursing individuals, each one of whom is capable of reflexive self-questioning and successful at internalizing the rules of rational discourse. In contrast, Hannah Arendt conceives of the political realm of the polis as rising directly out of acting together, the “sharing of words and deeds” that in turn
generates a “space of appearances.”28 Both Habermas and Arendt agree on the potential of words or discourse to generate power, and they set this potential of the public sphere apart from violence or force. But, Arendt locates power not merely in the associational space, but also in the competition for excellence that occurs among actors who are by definition moral and political equals.29 She deems action to be the only sphere in which individuals may distinguish themselves, even to the point of “greatness;” they do so through word and deed when they narrate the distinctive story of their own lives.30 Through story telling, then, men “create their own remembrance.”31 Indeed, the polis is “a kind of organized remembrance.”32
Now, Habermas has distanced himself justifiably from Arendt’s antimod — ernistic perspective; her seeming indifference to the emancipation of women, workers, and minorities; her uncritical attitude toward property relations in the polis; and her agonistic view of the public sphere. He grasps that Arendt’s individuals are a rather narrow slice of the human population: in Athens, the propertied, free, slave-holding men who inhabited the world of the polis, in contrast to women and slaves who belonged to the oikos, the sphere of biological reproduction and property. Still, Habermas has learned a great deal from Arendt’s discussion of the public sphere, and the two theorists share a strong appreciation for the political implications of speech and language.33 But Habermas’s individuals participate in the public sphere as speakers and readers (of novels and the press). In contrast, in Arendt’s public sphere individuals perform deeds and narrate stories; they are not just talking heads but embodied, suffering subjects who move in the world in relation to others. Such a world is a “web of relationships” constituted by “enacted stories.” Neither labor (the metabolic interaction with nature) nor work (the making of products), but action produces relationships that bind people together. Action discloses the agent in the act; otherwise it loses its specific character. So, Arendt believes, it is in performing rather than writing the story that each actor reveals his individuality. She even submits that actors are not the authors of their own stories:
Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author.34
Thus, Arendt appreciates several dimensions of the public sphere absent from Habermas’s discursive model. Although she is nowhere concerned either with women or with the gendered construction of subjectivity, certain aspects of her discussion are worthy of feminist’s attention. Arendt addresses
the performative dimension of human action and human speech. She implies that insofar as persons display themselves in public, they do so as storytellers, revealing aspects of their selves by acting in and through their bodies. Perhaps most radically, Arendt suggests that the subject is displaced within a wider communication network. Still, let us not confuse her metaphors of the stage with a poststructuralist abandonment of the subject. Her foremost objective is to describe and exalt exemplary moral actions. In that respect, she sees the theater as the political art par excellence, the site where the political sphere of human life is transposed into art. And, she holds out a privileged role for historians who reconstitute stories already told and for political theorists who narrate exemplary stories about the political.35
A radically different perspective on the intimate relationship between theater and politics—and, politics as theater—is offered in Marie-Helene Huet’s Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793- 1797. In a sense, Huet picks up where both Arendt and Habermas leave off. In place of “the message,” on the one hand, or the endless circuit of opinion, on the other, Huet investigates the spectatorial function of the always already theatricalized public sphere. Drawing on Diderot’s remarks in Jacques le fataliste, she discovers some striking parallels between the spectator of a judicial action and of an aesthetic work. First, Huet asserts it is not the message that interests the spectator: “What interests the spectator is the spectacle per se. His position as a receiver is established, constituted, made use of, independently of the significance of the message received. There is not one public thirsting for blood and tortures and another public eager for entertainments and pleasures; a public is formed the moment there is a spectacle.” Second, like Diderot, Huet appreciates the possibility of a transmutation from the role of spectator-receiver to that of actor; for in retelling every spectator has the potential to act. As she observes, “Diderot is… describing the formation of a mise en scene, a ‘rehearsal’ properly speaking, in which the spectator ultimately finds his justification: to have become an actor.”36
In place of a retrospective ideological analysis of public participation, Huet pursues a semiotic approach. She underscores the implicit reversibility, as well as the incompleteness and alienation that constitutes the role of the spectator/receiver:
Inherent in the notion of the spectator is that of the future actor; part of the pleasure of the spectacle lies in anticipation of another spectacle in which the spectator will finally be actor. To appeal to an audience is to appeal to this possibility of a spectator-actor exchange, and an audience that does not achieve this exchange, this cycle, this transformation, is a mutilated audience.37
Now, Huet is concerned specifically with the production of the French revolutionary public, which she sees as being “inscribed in a tradition that consists in repressing by means of the spectacle.”38 She observes how the legislation freeing the theaters was accompanied by new regulations, constant surveillance of audiences and plays, a Rousseauian preference for open air festivals and an accompanying suspicion of the closed theatrical chamber—emblem, it was believed, of counter-revolutionary designs. Although Huet cautions against conflating the revolutionary dynamic with political liberalism, her argument adds immeasurably to a general understanding of the performative dimensions of the bourgeois public sphere. Likewise, she challenges us to consider the alienated and mutilating features of the open spaces of public speech which Habermas and Arendt otherwise celebrate. In contrast to the latter, Huet focuses attention not only on the actors but on the shared forms of representation between theater and politics. In very different terms than Habermas, Huet describes the communication network of a theoretical public—that public which acts as both spectator and judge and presumes its judgment will always be right.39 She concludes that during the Revolution this theoretical public was composed of the people who were invited by the legislators to the deliberations of the juries as a guarantor of justice and a protection of the innocent. Yet, she cautions, “they were carefully separated from the spectacle to which they were exposed, they were subjected to a rule of silence, and they were constantly held to the passive role of spectators.”40
In a provocative essay, The Body and the French Revolution, Dorinda Outram adds a heightened concern with physicality and gender to structural accounts of political culture conceived solely in verbal terms. By way of a phenomenology of embodiment, Outram resituates many of the features of Huet’s theatrical politics, Arendt’s public sphere and its public actors, and Habermas’s public opinion.41 She argues that the construction and use of dignified bodies—in Arendt’s terms, their “enacted stories”— became a source of authority in both the private and public realm. However, the other side of this new political culture of the body involved the sanctioning of physical violence in the revolutionary process and the planting of seeds of self-destructiveness in the individual. In place of an abstracted classicism or a celebration of agonistic relations for their own sake, then, Outram discerns that stoicism and other classical motifs were reworked by a new revolutionary class that faced the task of “creating a new political embodiment for the individuals concerned and a new audience for their politics.”42
The Revolution’s most essential feature may not have been the production of a new state, but rather the production of new public spaces dominated by the authoritative public bodies of individuals. Men created models of heroic masculinity through dignity, self-containment, and suicide. Not surprisingly, many historians have observed that the political culture of the Revolution aimed “to redistribute various attributes of the king’s body throughout the new body politic.” As Outram explains,
The public space of France before 1789 had also focused on an image of heroic public dignity almost exclusively applied to monarchy and aristocracy: it was such images that the middle class had to re-create. The new public bodies which they created and filled with attributes of heroic dignity were in turn inconceivable without, and were created for, the audiences that mass politics made possible. They possessed the power, which the competing linguistic discourses obviously did not, to focus dignity and legitimacy in incontestable, because non-verbal, ways on the bodies of known individuals who acted as personifications of value systems.43
For Outram, the body is not an undifferentiated object and behavior is not indifferent. She argues that the victory of homo clausus, “the male type validated by his separation of affect from instinct, by body-separation from other individual human beings,” was achieved over and against traits associated with the feminine and popular behavior encapsulated in the camava — lesque.44 She views the Revolution as a contest between male and female, resulting in the validation of only male political participation, supported by images of heroic masculinity. In social and philosophical terms,
Homo clausus legitimated himself by his superiority to the somatic relations enjoyed by other classes—aristocracy, peasants, and workers—and by the other gender. In other words, what he possessed was a body which was also a non-body, which, rather than projecting itself, retained itself.
In doing so, it became the location of abstract value-systems, such as rationality and objectivity. As Pierre Bourdieu has remarked such a move is integral to the production of middle-class systems of cultural hegemony, which privilege over-arching languages, such as the language of objectivity and rationality, rather than privileging energy or displays of integration between body and personality: display is characterized as aristocratic, emotionality and subjectivity as feminine, physical energy as plebian.45
Unlike Habermas, then, Outram unequivocally links the production of new public spaces to a new gender division in bourgeois public culture. In contrast to Arendt’s vision of the polis as a sphere of organized remembrance and her celebration of agonistic action, Outram underscores the fragility of the poses of heroic dignity: “unlike fully sacralized bodies which exist above time, desacralized ones exist in time. They can only really find validation through death—not through re-creation.”46 She proposes that personal autonomy has been purchased at the price of exclusion (of women and the lower classes); that the subject’s “self image of rationality, reflexiv — ity, universalism, autonomy, individuation, and emancipation always [contain] the potential for transposition into its direct opposite.”47 Thus, to Habermas’s version of the modern subject, Outram holds up the mirror of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “dialectic of Enlightenment;” and it is by no means inconsequential that in that mirror she finds the faces of women and workers.