Bonds, emotions and public space
There are reasons to affirm that our social space is going through a period of transformation. Rather than as a neutral and homogeneous space, it appears to us to be increasingly made up of a plurality of heterogeneous spaces, articulated around a wide variety of professional, political and cultural practices, with a growing weight of leisure and artistic practices. The latter are particularly significant for their potential to generate languages that have been penetrating other levels of social life, configuring a dense network of social relations and links, relatively foreign to the categories and discourses that still monopolize the political discussion .
Simultaneously, we note a progressive emotionalization of the public space, which in part responds to the proliferation of identity demands for recognition, but which can also be interpreted as a symptom of a generalized desire to expand the forms of public rationality beyond the positive and instrumental rationality that dominates in the sphere of the structure. According to this, such emotionalization would be expressive of the demands for meaning that emerge from social subjectivity, disrupting the modern emotional regime, i.e., the modern configuration of the public, the private and the intimate.
Assuming the differentiation between the public, the private and the intimate, as a feature derived from human existence as marked by sociality, susceptible of adopting diverse cultural forms, this project raises the relevance of attending to the transformations operated in professional, leisure and artistic practices, which evidence intersections between the private and the public, particularly significant of a change of paradigm in our understanding of public space.
The general goal of this project consists of identifying and developing the concepts from which to think about contemporary public space, in a context marked by its progressive diversification and emotionalisation.
1. To examine the intersections between the public, the private and the intimate sphere, as dimensions of human existence marked by sociality - and to that extent, open to cultural variation -, starting from the transformations we observe in professional and leisure/artistic practices, which we observe in late-modern societies.
2. To delve into the dynamics that have led from the modern public sphere, presumably homogeneous, to the multiple spaces of late-modernity, trying to find out why the vindication of social subjectivity in the face of the objectivity of the techno-structure has preferentially adopted the language of emotion and identity, and examining the assumptions, virtualities and limitations of this approach when it comes to shaping contemporary public space.
3. To consider whether the growing emotionalisation of public sphere not only responds to the desire to materialise identity projects of subject individual but also to the need to broaden the uses of public reason, beyond the limits set by instrumental and positive reason, towards a practical and relational reason.
4. To analyse the capacity of new professional, leisure and artistic practices to articulate consensuses other than those generated by the rationalising discourses of science or economics, examining, in particular, to what extent these articulations could be potentially universalisable as well as subjectively significant.
Main researcher
Ana Marta González González
agonzale z@unav.es
group Emotional culture and identity ,
CVN
Team