Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Thinking Out Loud)

This powerfully argued texts asks us to consider the role of things in political theory and political life. Imaginatively bringing together Winnicott and Arendt, Honig offers a different kind of hope. I am still thinking through all that this work has taught me.

To speak of democracy, so the story goes, is to speak of the 'demos' - the people - for whom and by which politics takes place. But what of the people’s Things? The ‘things’ of the public around which we coalesce, and through which our worlds are constructed? Monuments, roads, rivers and light - shared things, public things. Do these have a life simply incidental to democracy, or do they stand instead among it's necessary conditions, a landscape through which it’s vital powers are channeled, challenged, and cherished? To just this second alternative is what, in a beautiful triptych of essays, is affirmed here by Bonnie Honig, who with this book rightly cements her place as one of the most important democratic thinkers of the present day. Reflecting less on the bright-light topics of freedom, equality, subjectivity, or biopolitics, it’s instead to the unsung dignity of infrastructure, land, food and space that Honig turns her attention, bringing out, in a way few others can or have, the tangible stakes of what it would mean to live in a democratic world.Indeed the question of Things and the 'world' which they inaugurate and sustain lies at the heart of this lovely tract, precisely to the extent that their power seems ever waning under the drive - now everywhere present - to privatization and economic 'efficiency'. Drawing on the unlikely pairing of Hannah Arendt and D. W. Winnicott (political philosopher and psychoanalytic writer respectively), Honig wields them both to analyse a range of cases, from the public dimensions of Marian Anderson's legendary 1939 Lincoln Memorial performance, to present day efforts of the Unist'ot'en Camp in Canada to fend off intrusions from commercial oil interests, as well as the travails of the Crow Nation in sustaining their future in the face of massive social and cultural upheaval. In its astute blend of both philosophy and concrete analysis, Public Things makes for not only cutting edge political theorizing, but just great reading as well. As part of the 'Thinking Out Loud' Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society, Honig's conversational and, well, 'public' tone carries over too, making this an exemplary and relevant instance of just that 'public thing' so celebrated within.