Margaret Kohn

Homo spectator
Public space in the age of the
spectacle

Abstract This article develops a novel approach to the relationship between

public space and democracy. It employs the concept of the spectacle to show
how public space can serve to destroy or weaken solidarity just as easily as
it can foster a democratic ethos of equality. A close reading of Rousseau’s
Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre helps illuminate the political impli-
cations of modern public life, which increasingly takes the form of passive
individuals assembling in order to view a spectacle. According to Rousseau,
spectacles like the theater are depoliticizing because they undermine the
opportunity for active participation and interaction with other citizens. By
habituating the audience to theatrical modes of self-presentation, they also
weaken the capacity for empathy. This article concludes by showing how
contemporary theorists including Sennett, Debord and Habermas also
contribute to our understanding of the concept of the spectacle.
Key words citizenship · democracy · festival · public space · Jean-Jacques
Rousseau · Richard Sennett · spectacle · theater

In Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, Rousseau argues: ‘People

think they come together in the theatre, and it is there that they are most
isolated.’1 This statement is suggestive because it captures the paradoxi-
cal nature of public space. Strangers come together in theaters, amuse-
ment parks and shopping malls, but they seldom interact with one
another. They do not necessarily form a public, at least not in the way
that Habermas invoked the term to mean a collectivity constituted
through discussion, debate and intersubjectivity.2 Proximity – the sharing
of space with diverse others – opens up the possibility of encounter, but
frequently this opportunity is not realized. This article considers how
public space can be alienating or isolating and explores the political

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 34 no 5 • pp. 467–486

PSC
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and David Rasmussen
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453708089194
468
Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
consequences of this possibility. It is motivated by sympathy for theories
that suggest that the exposure to difference in public places can foster
recognition, solicitude and solidarity;3 but it is simultaneously driven
by a certain skepticism regarding overly optimistic assumptions about
democracy and public space.4 Given this ambivalence, Rousseau is a
useful guide, for his political theory is particularly attentive to the ways
in which public space can serve to destroy or weaken sympathy and soli-
darity just as easily as it can foster a democratic ethos of equality. Contem-
porary theorists such as Habermas, Sennett, Benjamin and Debord can
also help illuminate the way that the spectacle structures public life.

Rousseau’s Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre

One of the most influential discussions of the relationship between space

and democracy is Rousseau’s Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre.
Rousseau was a remarkably prescient observer of modern life. Although
he wrote before the advent of mass society and consumerism, his analysis
of the theater drew attention to the way certain collective experiences
can undermine political capacities. He argued that there is a danger that
individuals who frequent the theater will continue to act like audience
members even when they leave the theater. Habituated to viewing the
suffering of others as pleasure or entertainment, the audience becomes
unable to empathize with others.
For Rousseau, the theater was a paradigmatic example of a certain
type of collective experience, one that functioned as an ersatz for public
life. It simulated something akin to public life by bringing strangers into
contact with one another, but this commonality was based on an
illusion. An emotive feeling of togetherness masked the absence of any
real interaction that could overcome the distinctive isolation of modern,
urban life. For Rousseau, the simple fact of citizens coming together
tells us very little about what types of political identities and practices
will emerge from the experience of co-presence. Rousseau also argues
that the commercial nature of the theater exacerbates inequalities and
encourages invidious comparisons. He contrasts commercial theater
with public festivals that bring citizens together as equals and foster
civic spirit.5 For Rousseau public space is not merely a matter of people
coming together but of the type of interactions and identifications that
such space facilitates.6
Rousseau’s thoughts on the relationship between citizenship, empathy
and space are most prominent in the Letter to M. d’Alembert on the
Theatre. Initially Rousseau’s Letter to M. d’Alembert appears to be a
polemic against the theater, very much indebted to Plato’s argument in
The Republic. Like Plato, Rousseau worries that the theater appeals to
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Kohn: Homo spectator
the emotions rather than reason, and glorifies morally dubious modes
of conduct. Rather than elevating, instructing, or challenging the spec-
tator, the theater must appeal to the tastes of masses in order to maintain
its commercial viability. Rousseau also stresses the negative consequences
of the theater for Geneva, a city not yet corrupted by the moeurs of city
life. Introducing the theater to Geneva would distract the citizens from
more wholesome pursuits and set in motion a dynamic of consumerism
and competition that would undermine the solidaristic basis of the
republic. While the theater might actually prevent the corrupt Parisians
from engaging in even more insidious pleasures, it would lead to Geneva’s
decline.
Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre has received much less schol-
arly attention than Rousseau’s other works, at least in the discipline of
political theory. Allan Bloom’s claim that Rousseau was ‘one of the last
great voices raised in favor of censorship’,7 however, has been modified
by a handful of subsequent commentators who emphasize that the politi-
cal effects of theater vary in different social contexts.8 By focusing on
the explicit argument against opening a theater in Geneva, it is easy to
overlook Rousseau’s fascinating reflection on the relationship between
democracy and forms of public life.9 For Rousseau, the theater incul-
cated a kind of inertia and passivity that had consequences in the politi-
cal as well as the cultural domain. He feared that elites could use the
theater to depoliticize citizens rendering them acquiescent to their role
as spectators and unfit for political participation.10 For Rousseau the
theater is emblematic of a general characteristic of modernity: the growth
of the society of the spectacle and the decline of participatory public life.
As David Marshall points out, the actual title of the text is Lettre
à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles.11 Translating the last term literally
as ‘spectacle’, makes it apparent that Rousseau’s argument is not only
a commentary on a particular form of entertainment but also a serious
indictment of the spectacle as a principle of modern society. This alterna-
tive translation also makes sense of a tension in the text. Rousseau
forcefully condemns the theater that he clearly loved dearly. His detailed
discussion of the plays of Molière, Voltaire, Crébillon and Corneille
indicates more than passing familiarity with the theater. In fact, he admits
that he loves ‘the drama passionately’ and confesses that he has ‘never
willingly missed a performance of Molière’.12 Even though he enjoys
and appreciates going to plays, the theater reflects a dynamic of modern
life that he fears: the spectacle. Individual plays may have artistic and
even moral value, but theatricalization as a way of life represents a
danger to a republic like Geneva.
Rousseau criticizes the theater for encouraging people to look at
others from the position of an audience.13 Through the frame of the
theater, other people become objects of admiration or derision rather
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
than co-creators of a shared world. Whereas other forms of public life
such as the cercles (quasi-political social clubs) foster intersubjectivity,
the theater exacerbates a subject–object dualism. Rousseau notes that
when spectators gather in a theater they do not focus on one another
but on the stage. They are linked together only indirectly through the
same experience of viewing a play. According to Rousseau, attending
the theater creates the illusion of community while actually fostering
isolation. People go to the theater to ‘forget their friends, neighbors, and
relations’.14
If the effect of the theater were only a few hours’ diversion, it would
not be such a cause for concern. The problem is that spectatorship and
theatricality become modes of social experience. This transformation
starts with the actors themselves but extends throughout society. While
Rousseau grants that the actor who plays a scoundrel ‘does not really
intend’ to cheat,15 the actor becomes adept at falsifying emotions and
intentions. It becomes second nature. Once habituated to deception, he
or she will easily apply those skills outside the theater. This in turn
creates a kind of vogue in which people begin to place a premium on
mastering conventions of self-presentation and flattery. Enamored with
viewing others, they want to be viewed themselves.16
Nevertheless, Rousseau emphasized that the theater could have
salutary effects on Parisians. Since Parisian life already was profoundly
formed by the logic of the spectacle, the formal institution of the theater
could actually mitigate the more extreme forms of self-display, invidious
comparison, shame, vanity and envy. For Rousseau, the level of social
moeurs or the social context plays an important role in determining
whether the spectacle is likely to cause corruption.17 If vice is rampant,
the theater can distract potential evil-doers from worse pursuits: ‘Two
hours a day stolen from the activity of vice prevents the twelfth part of
the crimes that would be committed.’18 In a republican city like Geneva,
however, the reverse is true. The theater distracts the citizens from more
wholesome pleasures such as domestic crafts and political activity. The
form of leisure and sociability most threatened by the theater in Geneva
was the cercle.19
The circles that Rousseau admired emerged out of dining clubs. These
dining clubs were made up of men who ate together when they went
to the country for military drills and hunting. Initially these informal
meetings took place in taverns but political crisis transformed these sites
of sociability into permanent associations called cercles.20 The members
began to rent ‘comfortable quarters’ and supply furniture at the common
expense, providing a place where they could discuss politics and ‘gamble,
chat, read, drink, and smoke’.21
Rousseau draws a contrast between the society of the spectacle,
which is made up of exclusive salons and commercial theaters, and the
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Kohn: Homo spectator
society of the fête, which is composed of cercles, winter balls and civic
festivals. Both involve at least some elements of pageantry and display
but they differ in several key respects. First, the commercial theater is a
profit-making, commercial enterprise. Since it must charge admission,
it will necessarily exclude citizens of modest means, thereby reinforcing
invidious distinctions. The society of the fête, Rousseau repeatedly insists,
is neither ‘mercenary’ nor an ‘exclusive entertainment’.22 Second, the
society of the spectacle encourages individuals to ‘forget their friends,
neighbors, and relations’.23 In essence, Rousseau is saying that the theater
is a form of alienation that separates individuals from one another while
inciting their identification with an illusory, external object. The society
of the fête, on the other hand, encourages the citizens to identify with
one another. They are performers and spectators at once, ensuring that
‘all will be united’.24 Whereas the spectacle intensifies the opposition
between subject and object, the fête fosters intersubjectivity.
The contrast between the salon and the cercle is intriguing in part
but it is also the most problematic element of his theory. In fact, the
two forms of voluntary association initially appear quite similar; indeed,
Habermas uses both as examples of the bourgeois public sphere. One
difference, according to Rousseau, is that the salon is exclusive. More
importantly, the characteristic modes of interaction in the salon are
jokes, compliments and fine phrases.25 The salon is oriented toward
pleasure, amusement and seduction. Another key characteristic is the
presence of women.26 The salon is held in a private home, usually the
residence of a wealthy woman who gathers nobles, intellectuals and
artists for the purpose of conversation. Rousseau, however, prefers the
circles where men are ‘exempted from having to lower their ideas to the
range of women and to clothe reason in gallantry’.27 By themselves men
‘can devote themselves to grave and serious discourse without fear of
ridicule . . . If the turn of conversation becomes less polished, reasons
take on more weight; they are not satisfied by jokes or compliments.’
The cercles are oriented toward political talk, recreation and civic duty
(especially military service). Rousseau’s opposition between ‘feminine-
private-superficial’ and ‘masculine-rational-public’ employs the threat
of feminization as a way to dismiss the salon and valorize his highly
idealized rendering of an earlier form of republican social life.28 Never-
theless, he does draw attention to an important dimension of the concept
of ‘publicness’. When an association facilitates political talk and partici-
pation, it is more public than one that does not.29 If salons fostered an
elite culture that dismissed civic obligations and ridiculed political reflec-
tion, then they were more akin to private places and differed from cercles
in important ways. Even if Rousseau’s description of actual cercles is
romanticized, it could still serve as an ideal from which to criticize actual
practices.
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
Near the end of the Letter Rousseau asks, ‘What! Ought there to be
no entertainments [spectacles] in a republic?’ He answers emphatically:
‘On the contrary there ought to be many. It is in republics that they were
born’.30 Rousseau contrasts the isolation, passivity and luxury of the
commercial theater with the egalitarian and solidaristic simplicity of the
republican festival. In Geneva festivals involved ‘reviews, public prizes,
kings of the harquebus, the cannon, and sailing’.31 But for Rousseau the
specific content of the festival is secondary to its social function. In fact,
he rejects the idea that these festivals should be organized around an
object. Rousseau queries:
But what then will be the objects of these entertainments? What will be
shown in them? Nothing, if you please . . . Plant a stake crowned with
flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you
will have a festival.32

Rousseau challenges the subject–object dualism that the spectacle is based

on. For Rousseau the festival is the moment when the chasm between
individual and society is temporarily breached.33
Jean Starobinski has argued that ‘the theater is to the festival as
opacity is to transparency’.34 The dark, enclosed theater is a physical
embodiment of deception whereas the open-air festival is the para-
digmatic example of openness and authenticity. Initially this reading
seems plausible since it closely follows Rousseau’s own contrast between
the festival and the theater. Rousseau writes: ‘let us not adopt these
exclusive entertainments which close up a small number of people in
melancholy fashion in a gloomy cavern, which keep them fearful and
immobile in silence and inaction . . . No, happy peoples, these are not
your festivals. It is in the open air, under the sky, that you ought to
gather yourselves.’35 A few pages later, however, the simple opposition
between ‘indoor/opacity/spectacle’ and ‘outdoor/transparency/festival’
breaks down. Rousseau writes that the winter time, while less appro-
priate for outdoor festivals, is the ideal period for indoor balls. These
balls would allow potential marriage partners to dance and talk under
the close supervision of the community. These would be ‘solemn’
occasions, open to all without distinction.36 Earlier Rousseau rejected
self-display as socially destructive vanity; in a social context where ‘the
spectator’ (the community) imposes ‘gravity’, however, he accepts the
natural pleasure young people take in ‘presenting themselves to one
another with grace and seemliness’.37
Rousseau’s discussion of the ball indicates that he is not simply
opposed to self-display/spectatorship.38 He recognizes and even encour-
ages a certain mode of self-presentation on the part of the young when
combined with appropriate oversight on the part of the old.
I wish that fathers and mothers would attend (the ball) to watch over their
children, as witnesses of their grace and their address, of the applause they
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Kohn: Homo spectator
may have merited, and thus to enjoy the sweetest spectacle that can move
a paternal heart.39
Like Plato’s pharmakon, Rousseau’s spectacle can serve as both a poison
and a cure.40 Rousseau himself formulated this argument in response to
critics who claimed that there was a contradiction between his harsh
denunciation of the arts in the first Discourse and his own practice as
a playwright. In the Preface to Rousseau’s popular play Narcisse, he
argued that the theater could serve as a palliative in a corrupt society.41
Whereas previous commentators have drawn attention to Rousseau’s
explicit argument that the theater can corrupt in some cities and prevent
further corruption in others,42 few have noted the way that spectacle
serves as both poison and medicine in Geneva.
The social context of the festival ensures that spectatorship does not
turn into a habit of viewing others in the stylized, remote mode of
theatricality. According to Rousseau, the salon is made up of people
who have become accustomed to viewing others through the alienating
lenses of the theater. Theatricality infused through social life achieves a
‘seduction away from humanness’.43 In the salon, individuals see one
another as sources of pleasure or objects of derision. Both orientations
make it more difficult to recognize the other as human. This way of
seeing others becomes deeply engrained in socialized man. In Emile, the
tutor worries that his pupil will become a ‘scornful spectator of the
suffering of the lower class’.44 The danger is that the patterns of spec-
tatorship characteristic of the theater undermine the natural empathy
that allows human beings to identify with one another and be moved
by their suffering. Habituated to seeing even the suffering of others as
a source of pleasure, modern man’s empathic capacities are deadened.45

The fall of public man

Not all commentators, however, have taken such a dim view of theatri-
cality. Richard Sennett’s influential book The Fall of Public Man is a
spirited defense of the theatrical mode of public life characteristic of
the old regime. Sennett’s defense of theatricality and publicity differs
markedly from Rousseau’s treatment of the same topics. Sennett juxta-
poses modern, narcissistic private man with urbane public man, a type
that flourished in 18th-century Paris and London. Public man, whom
Sennett admired and Rousseau disdained, was a persona adopted by
individuals who took part in a highly ritualized public life. Sennett
draws a contrast between two different attitudes towards public life. In
the contemporary world, the public is replaced by the intimate sphere
of narcissisism, atomization and alienation. Sennett mourns the fact that
contemporary public life has become an unpleasant obligation rather
than a source of meaning and pleasure. The world of the old regime,
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
on the other hand, with its highly ritualized forms of interaction, provided
a way of ordering public encounters. This order was a source of legi-
bility, which encouraged participation in public life.46
In The Fall of Public Man, Sennett analyzes Rousseau’s critique of
spectatorship in the Letter to M. d’Alembert. Sennett’s reading, however,
does not really capture the distinctiveness of the Letter and treats it as
an extension of Rousseau’s other work, particularly the Discourse on the
Origins of Inequality. Sennett sees Rousseau’s criticism of the theater as
an application of Rousseau’s critique of the vices of civilization and
urban life and concludes that Rousseau criticized the theater for increas-
ing the number of social contacts between people and intensifying the
deleterious processes of comparison and emulation. According to Sennett,
Rousseau saw the theater as a microcosm of the cosmopolitan city, a
breeding ground for false manners, invidious comparison and opaque
social relations.47 The theater was a prime locus of corruption because
it was there that people became more dependent on others for a sense
of self.48
Sennett’s account is plausible, but it only tells one side of the story.
As we saw above, Rousseau does not provide a blanket indictment of
all forms of spectacles; nor does he believe that it is always wrong to
display oneself and to observe others. Even though Rousseau idealized
natural man, individuality and authenticity, and vilified society, he
recognized that a return to nature was impossible. Rousseau’s discussion
of the fête and the ball suggests that he was convinced that social life
could help build a virtuous public order.
This view is particularly prominent in The Government of Poland,
the text where Rousseau is most explicit about the role that spectacles
may play in building a viable nation-state. In one of the first chapters,
‘The Foregoing (The Spirit of Ancient Institutions) Applied to Poland’,
Rousseau emphasizes the political importance of monuments, solemn
ceremonies and public games.49 Festivals can create a feeling of unity
and civic identity and they do so through participation rather than
passive obedience. Rousseau insists that if Poland is to constitute itself
as a viable polity, ‘Life in Poland must be more fun than life in any other
country, but not the same kind of fun’.50 He reiterates the same distinc-
tion that we saw earlier between spectacles (which separate subject from
object) and festivals (which facilitate participation). Rousseau calls for
restrictions on spectacles, e.g. leisure activities that promote invidious
comparison rather than solidarity, amusement rather than edification and
passivity rather than activity. He rules out

. . . the amusements that one ordinarily finds in courts: gambling, the theater,
comedies, operas – everything that makes men unmanly, or distracts them,
or isolates them, or causes them to forget their fatherland and their duties
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Kohn: Homo spectator
or disposes them to feel content anywhere so long as they are being amused
. . . Rather let there be frequent open-air spectacles in which different ranks
would be distinguished, but in which, as in ancient times, all the people
would take equal part.51

This passage is very much in the spirit of the Letter to M. d’Alembert.

It contrasts exclusive, individualistic, selfish pleasures with public amuse-
ments that foster shared identities, practical skills and civic dispositions.
Both Rousseau and Sennett are acute observers of the same period
in the late 18th century but they reach strikingly different conclusions.
One reason may be that Sennett seems to assume that there is no alterna-
tive to the extremes of narcissistic privatism and highly ritualized publi-
city. Rousseau presents the sociability of the circle and festival as just
such an alternative to individual narcissistic withdrawal on the one hand
and theatrum mundi on the other. But there is also a theoretical differ-
ence that separates their respective ideals. Sennett argues that experi-
encing public life as a theatrical performance, replete with costumes and
lines, makes a wider range of emotions and ideas possible. Since public
man did not aspire to intimacy and authenticity, he could rely on conven-
tions to provide the structure and security necessary for public life. For
Sennett, public behavior, or ‘action at a distance from self’, can be creative
and liberating.52 Rousseau, on the other hand, explicitly criticizes action
at a distance from self because it also creates distance from the other.
Whereas Sennett sees the chaos of the nascent capitalist city as the moti-
vation for withdrawal and privacy, Rousseau sees urbanization as the
stimulus to greater emulation and sociability.
Despite these many differences, Sennett ultimately endorses Rousseau’s
critique of the spectacle, without ever acknowledging his debt. Sennett
wrote, ‘Rousseau hoped for a social life in which masks would become
faces, appearances signs of character. In a way, his hopes were realized;
masks did become faces in the 19th century, but the result was the erosion
of interaction.’53 In other words, when public life begins to strive for
authenticity it becomes unbearable and this motivates the retreat into
the private, domestic sphere. In fact, Sennett shows that public life
declines not because masks become faces but because participants become
spectators, a point that Rousseau would endorse. In part III of The Fall
of Public Man Sennett notes a shift in the 19th century from a public life
made up of careful interchanges between strangers to one composed of
one-sided spectacles, such as Nadar’s balloon ride that brought together
crowds of thousands but positioned them as passive spectators, amazed,
silent onlookers, rather than potential participants.54 What Sennett first
notices in the 19th century, Rousseau sees emerging in the theatricality
of the 18th century.
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
The society of the spectacle

Although Rousseau’s work is seldom recognized, a number of 20th-

century theorists have also identified the society of the spectacle as one
of the distinctive characteristics of modernity. In ‘Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century’, Walter Benjamin described the world exhibitions
– which he took to be one of the distinctive architectural manifestations
of modern life – as a phantasmagoria, a place that people enter into in
order to be distracted.55 A phantasmagoria is a magic-lantern show that
merges lights to create optical illusions. Benjamin takes the term phan-
tasmagoria from Marx, who used it to describe commodity fetishism,
a term that points towards the way that the exchange-value of the
commodity functions to obscure the social context of production. For
Benjamin, the phantasmagoric effect is not intrinsic to the commodity
form but instead emerges when consumer goods are celebrated and
displayed in shopping arcades, department stores and exhibitions.56
Citizens become consumers who experience an ersatz equality when they
share the dream, if not the reality, of prosperity and abundance. In these
distinctively modern public spaces, the masses gather in order to experi-
ence a collective illusion.
Benjamin was concerned with the social and political consequences
of the new ‘temples to commodity fetishism’. He noticed that within these
sites devoted to amusement and entertainment, the individual abandons
himself to a mass and takes on an attitude ‘of pure reaction’. Benjamin
suggested that this state of distraction serves a political purpose. It
engenders a ‘state of subjection which propaganda, industrial as well as
political, relies on’.57 According to Susan Buck-Morss, the message of
the world exhibitions was the promise of social progress for the masses
without revolution.58 By turning consumption into a spectacle, it became
accessible, at least vicariously, even to those members of the lower
classes that could not afford to purchase the new technological wonders
that were on display.
According to Benjamin, ‘The world dominated by its phantasmago-
rias . . . is “modernity”’.59 Public life increasingly takes place in spaces
that are devoted to pleasure, image and illusion. Insofar as these spaces
are orchestrated to suggest that consumption is a plausible basis for
equality, made possible by technological progress and abundance, then
they would seem to be based on a kind of false consciousness. But
Benjamin recognized that false consciousness would not be an adequate
category to use in capturing the dynamics of these places. People choose
and enjoy deception. Phantasmagoria, or the logic of the spectacle, is
driven not by oppression or even deception but desire. The exhibition,
amusement park and shopping arcade reflect the proliferation and
expansion of the dynamics that Rousseau identified in their nascent form
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Kohn: Homo spectator
in the theater. The mass is constituted through a collective experience of
isolation that incites desire for an object while isolating one from another.
Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle provides a more detailed and
thorough exposition of the theme, which builds on the suggestive remarks
of Benjamin and Rousseau. Rousseau was writing when the components
of modern society – industrialization, mass politics and consumerism –
were barely visible. He saw the subject–object relationship of the spec-
tacle as something that threatened to penetrate beyond the doors of the
theater but could possibly be contained. According to Debord, the spec-
tacle is not simply a relationship that exists in an isolated domain like
the theater; ‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions
of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles.’60 The spectacle is more than a collection of images; it is a
social relationship that is mediated by images.
What does Debord mean when he says the spectacle is a social
relationship? It is a way of linking together individuals who are sepa-
rated from one another through the atomizing processes of modernity,
particularly the alienating effects of the division of labor. According to
Debord, ‘Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the
very center that maintains their isolation from one another’.61 Modern
individuals are isolated in their office cubicles or assembly line, their
cars and suburban homes and then compensate for this isolation by
the shared experience of mass entertainment. The spectacle achieves a
certain feeling of unity, but it does so by separating individuals from
one another and linking them together through their relationship to a
shared object. For Debord, the consequence is a kind of mystification
that makes it more difficult to recognize one another as human beings.
The spectacle also severs the connection that links emotional response
to action and experience to responsibility.62
Like Rousseau, Debord emphasizes how the spectacle is a vehicle of
both alienation and socialization. The socialization, however, is an ima-
ginary form of being together. According to Debord, the togetherness
fostered through the spectacle is the opposite of the commonality consti-
tuted through dialogue since the latter allows for interaction, response
and change.63 This reference to dialogue is suggestive because it opens
up the possibility of an alternative to what otherwise appears like a very
monolithic characterization of the society of the spectacle. Although
Debord himself concludes that it is only possible to realize dialogue in
the context of ‘the anti-State dictatorship of the proletariat’,64 it is worth
asking whether the intersubjectivity of dialogue might be an alternative
to the alienation of the spectacle.
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
The spectacle and the public sphere
Debord’s reference to dialogue seems to point, unwittingly, in the direc-
tion of Habermas’ seminal study of the public sphere and other theories
of deliberative democracy.65 Although it is beyond the scope of this
article to summarize the copious literature on Habermas’ theory of the
public sphere,66 I would like to draw attention to a few of its crucial
features that are relevant to this analysis of public space as spectacle.
According to Habermas, the public sphere was a realm of rational-
critical debate about the public good. It was a domain distinct from the
state and the family, a realm of social life where public opinion could
be formed. This concept of the bourgeois public sphere was explicitly
presented as an idealized model, but one with roots in actual practices
of sociability that flourished in cafés, salons and clubs in the 18th century.
Habermas’ reconstruction of the bourgeois public sphere with its egali-
tarian political debate in salons and cafés has been a particularly powerful
image for commentators who call for a revitalization of public reason
and public life today.
One of the most important insights in Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere was Habermas’ claim that a distinctive relationship
between privacy and publicity was a necessary precondition of the public
sphere. Rational-critical debate in the public realm became possible
when individuals could develop distinctive views in private. This is one
of the things that distinguished the bourgeois public sphere from earlier,
aristocratic forms of representative publicness. The aristocratic public
was so wholly concerned with external appearances and etiquette that
it provided little space to develop difference; courtiers took their cues
from reigning nobles.67 This was very different from the bourgeoisie,
who consumed literature or political news at home and developed
particular views, which they subsequently shared in public. Habermas
explained:

The bourgeoisie formed the public sphere of rational-critical debate in the

world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority
of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about
itself.68

According to Habermas’ somewhat complex analysis, the ‘patriarchal,

conjugal family’ fostered subjectivity, which in turn made individuals
capable of literary and political judgment.
It is important to remember that Habermas’ book is entitled ‘The
Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere’. After devoting
half the book to a sociological, political and theoretical exposition of the
public sphere, in the second half he chronicles its decline and disappear-
ance. He suggests a range of explanations for this decline, but I will
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highlight only those that are most relevant for our topic. His core
argument is that the private sphere shrinks into privatism (‘the quiet
bliss of homeyness’)69 and is therefore no longer able to play its role in
fostering judgment; the private sphere’s critical functions become colon-
ized by the mass media and other forms of mass consumption. For
Habermas, the mutual infiltration of public and private is not a good
thing. When the private realm is simply the location of the reception of
mass media, then it no longer can create individuals who exercise distinc-
tive judgment on literary or political matters. This leads to the trans-
formation ‘from a culture-debating to a culture-consuming public’.70
Although Habermas does not use the term ‘spectacle’, his account
of the disappearance of the public sphere is consistent with the theory of
the spectacle. The point of convergence is Habermas’ argument that
mass media and consumption have undermined the possibility of inter-
subjectivity and substituted the subject–object relationship characteristic
of the mass media. According to Habermas, the debating public sphere
was dependent upon a private realm of interiority that inculcated a
distinctive experience of subjectivity. Intersubjectivity was possible in
public only as long as subjectivity was meaningful in private. Habermas
explains, ‘today, instead of this, the latter (the private realm) has turned
into a conduit for social forces channeled into the conjugal family’s inner
space by way of a public sphere that the mass media have transmogrified
into a sphere of culture consumption’.71 Intersubjectivity is impossible
because meaningful difference disappears in a public realm dominated
by the mass media and passive leisure-time activities like spectator sports.
Citizens are related to each other not through dialogue or debate but
rather indirectly as co-consumers of the same information and enter-
tainment, viewers of the same spectacle. According to Habermas, the
experience of viewing the same spectacle obviates any need for discussion,
therefore the collective nature of mass society undermines sociability, e.g.
the interaction of individuals.
Rousseau’s critiques of the theater in Geneva bear a certain resem-
blance to Habermas’ critique of mass media in the present.72 Both
Rousseau and Habermas worry that public life may be jeopardized by
mass entertainment. Both highlight the way that the spectacle brings
people together but creates a false sense of commonality based on
passively shared experience rather than actively constituted community.
In both cases consumption of leisure replaces a more participatory
public life.
At times both Habermas and especially Rousseau seem to foreclose
the possibility that the theater or modern forms of mass media could
inspire critical dialogue or intersubjectivity. There are at least three
objections to this pessimistic position. First, theater, unlike film and tele-
vision, does provide the opportunity for a certain kind of interaction
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
between the audience and the performers. Improvised theater is particu-
larly interactive but even scripted performances are very responsive to
the signals sent by a live audience. Second, plays and films and even
television may be quite successful at fostering debate and discussion,
either by exploring political themes directly or by using techniques that
unsettle the audience and encourage them to question their passivity and
complicity. Brecht would be a good example of the latter. Finally, the
collective nature of the experience of viewing a play or film provides an
opportunity for discussion because, unlike television viewed at home,
people meet together and have a shared text in common. According to
this perspective, the subject–object relationship in the theater is a precur-
sor to the intersubjectivity that emerges after the performance.
I find all three of these arguments somewhat convincing. Neverthe-
less, I do not believe that these objections undermine the usefulness of
the concept of the spectacle. Instead, they remind us that rather than
treating the spectacle and festival/cercle as a binary opposition, it makes
more sense to treat them as ideal types that structure a continuum. The
term spectacle, then, would not suggest the theater so much as the char-
acteristics that Rousseau associated with it: passivity rather than inter-
subjectivity; hierarchy rather than equality; and commercial rather than
civic orientation. With those characteristics in mind, it becomes possible
to consider whether different collective experiences exhibit these quali-
ties. Some forms of street theater are closer to the ideal type of the
festival, and so-called festival marketplaces – historical sites turned into
outdoor shopping malls with homogeneous décor, private police forces
and chain stores – exhibit the logic of the spectacle. The problem is that
the logic of the spectacle has colonized public space so completely that
it becomes difficult to even imagine an alternative.

Defining public space

The genealogy of the concept of the spectacle is not simply a matter of

intellectual history. Exploring the ambivalent character of the spectacle
helps us better understand the meaning of public space and its relation-
ship to democracy. Public space is what William Connolly has called an
‘essentially contested concept’.73 It is internally complex, enables a variety
of interpretations in different domains, and has both normative as well
as descriptive connotations.
Public spaces are the places where strangers come into contact with
one another. This idea is reflected in the antiquated phrase ‘public house’
that used to refer to a tavern or restaurant, a place that is privately owned
but accessible to the population with few restrictions.74 Accessibility is
part of what usually is understood as public space. Ownership is another
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Kohn: Homo spectator
important component of most definitions of public space. When we speak
of a place that is publicly owned we usually mean that it is owned by the
government. Yet there are government-owned places like military instal-
lations and office buildings that are not accessible to most people. Never-
theless, the principle of ownership enables and constrains accessibility; it
also has specific political consequences, particularly in the United States
where the courts have interpreted key provisions of the Bill of Rights to
apply only to places owned by the government. Although government
ownership does not guarantee accessibility, it does create a legal presump-
tion in favor of allowing political activity, at least when the physical
environment and primary function do not foreclose its use by citizens.75
In order to accommodate these overlapping ideas about the nature
of public space, we need to think about the concept as a continuum that
exists on three axes: ownership, accessibility and intersubjectivity. From
this perspective, publicness is not the status of a place but rather a
characteristic that it can exhibit to different degrees and in different
ways. The paradigmatic public spaces – places like parks and plazas –
meet all three criteria. They are owned by the government, accessible
with few restrictions, and encourage people to interact with others,
perhaps even strangers. Other places such as community centers may be
owned by non-profit organizations, but in so far as they are accessible
to all community members and promote political, social and cultural
activities, they also exhibit a high degree of publicness. Shopping malls,
on the other hand, are privately owned and oriented toward con-
sumption and spectatorship rather than intersubjectivity, making them
much closer to the private end of the spectrum; nevertheless, even
shopping malls may be appropriated by users for unintended activities.
Much of the scholarly work on public space has focused on the issue
of ownership or the practices of exclusion that undermine accessibility.76
This article has explored the third dimension of space: its capacity to
facilitate or inhibit intersubjectivity.

Conclusion

The theoretical work of Rousseau and others reminds us that any attempt
to theorize the relationship between public space and democracy must
take into account whether such spaces reproduce, appropriate, or subvert
the logic of the spectacle. In light of Habermas’ account of the way that
mass media, leisure, democracy and consumerism undermined the dialogic
character of the bourgeois public sphere, some might conclude that such
theorizing is useless because there is no alternative to the society of the
spectacle.77 But this conclusion is based on a teleological logic that we
should be very cautious about accepting. Just because public life has
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
become increasingly oriented towards the spectacle does not mean that
it is inevitable. We must remember that some of the most successful
public places – dramatic ones like Central Park and modest ones like
local public libraries – did not emerge automatically from market forces.
Instead, they were self-conscious creations inspired by the recognition
that market forces do not provide for all the things necessary for human
flourishing and for sustaining communities.78
Public space can be a place where people are exposed to others and
learn to recognize them as fellow citizens rather than rendering them
invisible. The work of Rousseau does not provide any easy solutions
but it does introduce some concepts that can complement the dominant
approaches. Rational-critical debate is only one way of overcoming the
subject– object split characteristic of the spectacle. Festival or carnival,
which involves pageantry, games, storytelling and dancing, may be
another alternative.79 It would be a mistake, however, to see these two
alternatives – festival and debate – as opposites. According to Rousseau,
the virtue of the cercles was that they integrated cards, drinking and
sport with political talk and action. Vibrant public spaces should foster
a range of intersubjective practices that is broader than the rationalis-
tic vision that is usually associated with the bourgeois public sphere. We
should think about ways to incorporate the aesthetic and corporal
dimensions of communication as well as the rationalistic elements. This
approach is more akin to Hannah Arendt’s pluralistic vision of public
space as constituted by diverse points of view and characterized by ‘the
simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which
the common world presents itself’.80
The popularity of festival marketplaces and new urbanist malls
reflects the seductiveness of experiencing public space as a spectacle.81
Alternatives such as public libraries, parks, community centers and plazas
are also flourishing, but creating and sustaining them takes more effort.
Reading Rousseau challenges us to think about what kinds of festivals
might encourage citizens to empathize with one another and to engage
in political talk and action. We should not simply call for more public
space but rather consider how to create spaces that promote reciprocity
and intersubjectivity. A plaza may be designed to provide views of
military parades or shopping or it can provide intimate spaces for various
groups and activities. Linguists have identified the ‘phatic aspect of
speech, terms like “hello”, “how are you?” which initiate, maintain, or
interrupt contact’.82 Particular spaces serve a similar function. They
aggregate or exclude; they encourage or inhibit contact between people;
and they determine the form and scope of the contact. These effects may
be achieved through physical properties, such as the accessibility of a
courtyard, the arrangement of benches, or the presence of a stage. Public
places such as parks and plazas and quasi-public common spaces such
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Kohn: Homo spectator
as community centers can encourage a certain kind of civic conversation.
Sometimes this dialogue takes place quite literally; for example, when a
street preacher or petitioner engages the interest of someone passing by.
But this conversation does not necessarily take place with words. Public
space facilitates diverse forms of human flourishing. Often the dialogue
is the internal kind that is motivated by the stimulation of viewing and
reflecting upon a range of people and activities. The problem is not
viewing others but rather viewing others passively and at a distance.
Public space can incite democratic effects when it is structured to encour-
age a mode of spectatorship that positions both subject and object
together in a shared and contestable world.

University of Toronto, Canada

PSC

Notes
1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on
the Theater, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1960), pp. 16–17.
2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1991); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1998).
3 Susan Bickford, ‘Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture
of Citizenship’, Political Theory 28(3) (2000): 355–76; Iris Marion Young
‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference’, in L. Nicholson
(ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990); Richard
Sennett, The Uses of Disorder (New York: Knopf, 1970).
4 Jodi Dean, ‘Publicity’s Secret’, Political Theory 29 (2001): 624–50.
5 Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction,
trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
6 Paul Thomas and David Lloyd, Culture and the State (New York: Routledge,
1998).
7 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. xiii.
8 Christopher Kelly, ‘Rousseau and the Case against (and for) the Arts’, in
The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 20–42; Fonna Forman-Barzilai,
‘The Emergence of Contextualism in Rousseau’s Political Thought: The
Case of Parisian Theater in the Lettre à D’Alembert’, History of Political
Thought 24(3) (2003): 435–63.
9 Thomas and Lloyd, Culture and the State.
10 Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
11 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 84.
12 ibid., p. 131.
13 David Marshall, ‘Rousseau and the State of Theater’, Representations 13
(Winter 1986): 84–114 (86).
14 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 17.
15 ibid., p. 80.

16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract and Discourses, trans.

D. A. Cross (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983).
17 Forman-Barzilai, ‘The Emergence of Contextualism in Rousseau’s Political
Thought’.
18 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 59.
19 Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 93–4.
20 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 99.
21 ibid.
22 ibid., p. 125.
23 ibid., p. 17.
24 ibid., p. 126.
25 ibid., p. 105.
26 For an excellent discussion of the way in which Rousseau mobilizes highly
gendered rhetoric in this text, see Elizabeth Wingrove, ‘Sexual Performance
as Political Performance in the Lettre à M. D’Alembert Sur Les Spectacles’,
Political Theory 23(4) (1995): 585–616; Richard Brooks, ‘Rousseau’s Anti-
feminism in the Lettre à d’Alembert and Emile’, in Charles G. S. Williams
(ed.) The Age of Ideas: Essays on the French Enlightenment Presented to
George R. Havens (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1975),
pp. 9–27.
27 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 105.
28 Wingrove, ‘Sexual Performance’.
29 Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in
Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
30 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 125.
31 ibid., p. 126.
32 ibid.
33 For an interesting historical study of attempts to apply Rousseau’s ideas in
the context of the French Revolution, see Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the
French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
34 Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 95.
35 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 125.
36 ibid., p. 129.
37 ibid., p. 128.
38 Timothy Costelloe, ‘The Theater of Morals: Culture and Community in
Rousseau’s Lettre à M. d’Alembert’, Eighteenth-Century Life 27(1) (2003):
52–71.
39 Bloom translates the term ‘spectacle’ here as entertainment, thereby obscuring
the fact that Rousseau uses the same word that is usually translated as theater.
40 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1981).
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Kohn: Homo spectator
41 Benjamin Barber and Janis Forman, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Preface to
Narcisse”’, Political Theory 6(4) (1978): 537–42.
42 Benjamin Barber, ‘Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagin-
ation’, Daedelus 107(3) (1978): 79–92; Kelly, ‘Rousseau and the Case against
(and for) the Arts’; Forman-Barzilai, ‘The Emergence of Contextualism in
Rousseau’s Political Thought’.
43 Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), p. 156.
44 Cited in Shklar, Men and Citizens.
45 In The Figure of Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau and
Mary Shelley (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1988) David Marshall
argues that Lucretius’ description of the pleasure of watching a shipwreck
from safety becomes the paradigmatic aesthetic experience of watching
suffering from a perspective of non-identification.
46 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Random House, 1976).
47 ibid., p. 118.
48 ibid.
49 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Government of Poland, trans. W. Kendall
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1985), p. 13.
50 ibid., p. 14.
51 ibid., p. 15.
52 Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 87.
53 ibid., p. 217.
54 ibid., p. 125.
55 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 18.
56 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 81.
57 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 18.
58 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 86.
59 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 26.
60 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995),
p. 12.
61 ibid., p. 22.
62 Tracy Strong, The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political
Time and Space (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990),
p. 47.
63 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 17.
64 ibid., p. 126.
65 Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the
Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); James
Bohman, Public Deliberation; Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
66 Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1997).
67 Habermas’ subtle reflections on the psycho-social dynamics of the public
sphere also help reveal why Sennett’s ‘action at a distance from self’ is a
problematic model for revitalizing the public realm today. According to
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
Sennett, public man’s body was a mannequin and his speech was treated
as a sign rather than a symbol (Fall of Public Man, p. 64). This meant that
speech signified in and of itself, rather than by reference to outside situ-
ations or the person of the speaker (ibid., p. 65). But, as we know from
linguistics, if signs do not signify then they simply refer to a position in a
system of signs. If speech does not express something distinctive about the
views of the speaker, then it refers to some other position in the system.
According to Habermas, this was precisely the character of representative
publicity under the aristocracy of the ancient regime. Speech was not
oriented toward expressing one’s opinion but was rather a way of asserting
one’s place in a hierarchy of relationships. Speech did not facilitate inter-
subjectivity because meaningful subjectivity failed to emerge in a realm
dominated by public appearances.
68 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 51.
69 ibid., p. 151.
70 ibid., p. 159.
71 ibid., p. 162.
72 I do not want to exaggerate the similarities between Rousseau and Habermas.
In The Social Contract Rousseau notoriously concluded that citizens should
not deliberate in public about their interpretation of the General Will.
Habermas called this a ‘democracy of unpublic opinion’ (Structural Trans-
formation, p. 98).
73 William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: D. C.
Heath, 1974).
74 Hanna Pitkin, ‘Justice: On Relating Private and Public’, Political Theory
9(3) (1991): 327–52.
75 Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public
Space (New York: Routledge, 2004).
76 Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of
Private Residential Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1994); Setha Low and Neil Smith (eds) The Politics of Public Space (New
York: Routledge, 2006).
77 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).
78 Deliberative democrats and other theorists influenced by Habermas have
faced a similar challenge. How is it possible to revitalize the public sphere
when historical development seems to have undermined its preconditions?
Habermas’ own recent work on deliberative democracy takes up this chal-
lenge. It suggests the possibility of communicative rationality re-emerging
in new social and institutional contexts (see Between Facts and Norms,
note 2). Even though certain institutions such as the café disappeared, new
social movements have given birth to alternatives.
79 Young, ‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference’.
80 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1958); Bickford, ‘Constructing Inequality’, p. 257.
81 Michael Sorkin (ed.) Variations on a Theme Park: the New American City
and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992).
82 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 99.