Abstract
In many ways, Public Things is a book about fantasies. In Bonnie Honig’s reading, our political lives are often shaped, determined and ordered by shifting and ephemeral elements such as our belief in collective forms of authority, our experience of one another as political subjects, and our sense of ourselves in relationship to larger political entities. Normally, we think of such fantasies as a bad thing (and one of the key interlocutors that Honig treats in this book, Hannah Arendt, is definitely in that camp), something that distorts or fetishizes politics. The surprising and fascinating thing that Honig has to tell us in this book is that there are some fantasies that are not only not bad but actually good, even vital for the sake of democratic politics. This involves the question of the relationship between human beings and objects in general and public things—that is, things that we all “own” and relate to in common—more specifically. Insofar as public things produce a sense of collectivity and common purpose, this is a fantasy that we cannot afford to do without.
Public Things is composed of an introduction, three lectures and an epilogue. In the first lecture, Honig discusses the nature of public things and its relationship to democracy. Crucially she tells us that “democratic sovereignty is an effect . . . public things are its condition, necessary if not sufficient” (25). Public things are therefore what allows political communities to cohere; they extend a kind of magical envelope around us (what Honig, citing the English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, calls a “holding environment”) that forms us as a collectivity even as they do not in any way determine what that collectivity means or does (that part is entirely up to us).
These public things take many forms for Honig ranging from highways to public phones, from Big Bird to the Lincoln Memorial. Crucially, they don’t all mean the same thing to everyone. For example, Honig cites the Mercier bridge in Quebec that was blocked by members of the Mohawk nation to protest land grabs by the state. For the Mohawks, this bridge offers one kind of holding environment, a testament to their own history as workers and craftsmen, and a bridge to their rights to land and sovereignty. To the non-Mohawks, this bridge offers something else, a way to get in and out of Montreal. Honig is very clear that public things do not magically instill a collective harmony on us; theirs is not that kind of magic. Instead, it is just the opposite—we require public things as sites of contestation (indeed, there is no “we” at all without them; they are the only things that “we” all have in common). They hold us together but also offer us room for maneuvering for separate and competing positions.
For Honig, the rapid privatization of neoliberalism has radically reduced both the presence and salutary effect of public things. Increasingly, we are losing those objects that we hold in common and people are turning to gated communities (for the privileged rich and white anyway), private pools, schools, hospitals, and the like. The neoliberal stance is to “opt out” of the public and to leave only the poorest, the sickest, and the most vulnerable with the remnants of public things (which thereby begin to lose their public character). Neoliberals see the right to buy and own their own private things as the epitome of freedom but Honig shows why this is wrong; freedom, in her view, is lost when we are returned to those bad fantasies of private power that leave us (at least some of us) unchecked, unrelated, and opted out.
In the second lecture, Honig offers an unexpected but deeply compelling reading of Arendt in conjunction with Winnicott, in order to show why the “magic” of public things is one fantasy that we cannot afford to do without. The key insight here comes in an unresolvable paradox that Winnicott discusses, namely, that even as we create the objects with which we surround ourselves, they in turn create and “hold” us in their own magical authority. This is perhaps most clear with infants who love a particular (usually very dirty) blanket or other beloved object. This object is invested with magical powers stemming from its ability to survive the infant’s desire or attempts to destroy it. By showing itself to be independent of the child’s will, the blanket helps the infant realize that she is not an absolute master of the universe and must therefore individuate herself. What emerges from this is an “object relation,” an investiture of objects with magical powers, that is to say with fantasies, that are necessary to create an environment in which subjects can become not only individuals but members of a polity.
All of this tracks extremely well with Arendt’s own concept of Work. One of the many extraordinary things that Honig does in Public Things is to offer a critical new reading of The Human Condition where Work—usually the part of the book people skim over when reading or teaching the book—gets its due. Although Arendt tends to be thoroughly hostile to psychoanalytical theory and does not speak in terms of object relations per se, Honig convincingly shows that reading Arendt in tandem with Winnicott helps to bring out the critical value of Work, and human relationships with objects more generally. Honig shows that Work bridges the gap between Labor and Action and is critical to both. In effect, both Labor and Action are temporary without the intervention of Work. Work relieves Labor of its eternal repetitions by creating concrete and lasting products (thus another version of object permanence). It also serves as the necessary basis for Action because without the art and poetry that commemorate Action, there would be no way for it to survive its particular moment. In this way Work offers the aforementioned “holding environment,” a context that is necessary for human politics.
Arendt’s hostility to psychoanalysis may stem from the fact that she considers the human being, left to her own devices, as a potential lunatic. On our own, for Arendt, we are gripped by fantasies of infinite power; we require other people to check that untrammeled fantasy so that we can recognize that we are born into an already plural world, one that both precedes and survives our individual life. In this way, the public itself can be seen as a “holding environment,” an object that curtails and shapes our collective lives.
The brilliance of Public Things is that it recognizes that for all of Arendt’s distaste for psychoanalysis and fantasy, we do need the fantasies of object relations in order to flourish as a democratic polity. Arendt is rightfully afraid that devoid of the checking power of other subjects, untrammeled egotism will seek to dominate and shape the external world according to its own whim. This is her explanation for tyrannies of all kinds. When politics becomes a situation in which one person’s will gets to project their own fantasies onto everyone else’s, rather than being an agonic place of competing, mutually checking selves, we have the death of any meaningful polity for Arendt (not to mention the rest of us).
What Honig adds to this insight is the realization that in order to successfully combat such outcomes, we need not just the “reality” that we afford to one another, but also the equally necessary “reality” that is created by public things. I put the word reality in quotes in both instances because it is not quite real. Recall that for Winnicott, what is essential about these objects is not their thingness per se but rather the object relations that we impart to them (and they in turn impart back to us). Thus, in a nutshell, Honig is arguing that we need certain fantasies to fight other fantasies. The “good” and necessary fantasy is the effect of being held together by our collective relationship to public things. But this is a fantasy that has the backing and the bolstering of public things themselves, which in their “thingness” continually anchor and sustain our sense of reality (and so those fantasies, unlike fantasies of pure domination, are neither entirely real nor completely false but somewhere in-between).
In the face of the loss or diminution of public things, we face a true catastrophe. Our own time is marked, as already noted, by neoliberalism wherein opting out and privatizing undermine and weaken the effects of public things (and hence their democratizing powers). The third and last lecture in Public Things considers this situation by comparing two works, Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Both the book and the film engage with a community that faces the destruction of public things and, therefore a full catastrophe. Radical Hope discusses the situation of the nineteenth-century Crow facing the coming onslaught of white power. In Melancholia, catastrophe comes in the form of a giant planet that is on a direct collision course with Earth.
Both works offer solutions to pending catastrophe. Lear describes how the Crow Indians survived white power by “thinning” their concepts—and objects too, in this case totems and certain customs—allowing them to be utterly transformed by the new context without losing a certain familiarity that was necessary to remain a “public thing” (for the Crow). Von Trier’s film offers a different and opposite strategy, what Honig calls “thickening,” that is doubling down on public things, giving ourselves over to the holding environments that they provide no matter how hopeless that may seem.
Honig readily admits that none of these solutions “work” in the sense that they do not necessarily avoid calamity. But she is far more critical of Lear’s option than von Trier’s. To thin public things at the very time we need them may risk accommodation and even collaboration with the very forces that threaten us. Von Trier’s “holding environment,” on the other hand, reasserts the value and magical power of public things. It suggests that even when all seems lost, public things do not abandon us (even after we have abandoned them); they remain available for us to reanimate and in turn to be reanimated by them (Winnicott’s paradox once again).
In the epilogue to Public Things, where she turns more explicitly to contemporary politics, Honig describes the work of Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer who argues that too much regulation of public spaces deprives people of the chance to work things out for themselves. His concept of “shared space” is not identical with public things but it correlates well. Monderman offers what Honig calls an “agonistic-anarchistic orientation to public things” (95) wherein the public things in question are least subject to fantasies of harmony and social order, ideas often used to overwhelm rather than “hold” a public.
Given her understanding that public things are always there for us and can always be repurposed, Honig argues that the state itself can become a public thing. It too, she claims, can be redeployed and our object relationship to it can be rendered salutary. She offers the example of Anthony Foxx, Obama’s Secretary of Transportation, who sought to use the state to undo many of the ways that state highways and the like have been an instrument of racism and social hierarchy.
The fact that the state has so long pursued such a nefarious agenda shows that public things don’t always have good results but Honig’s point is not that public things are themselves inherently good. Rather, her claim is that they are required as the only possible site where democracy and other practices could emerge. The job of public things is to create a holding environment. Our job as subjects within that environment is to make sure it is one with which we can all live, one that (as with Arendt) reflects rather than suppresses our deep plurality.
In this instance, I find myself less optimistic than Honig about the value of the state as a public thing. She writes that “the state is a public thing worth fighting for” (92) and that may well be the case when the state is a key actor, one that cannot be avoided. Even so, the “agonistic-anarchistic” orientation of public things that Honig appreciates in Monderman may well be permanently threatened by the state, even a state considered as a public thing. In its current form, the state will always be the locus of attempts to privatize and eclipse public things; this is so because archism, the politics of determination and representation, requires an end point for its projections and the state readily fulfills that role. If politics is based on fantasies and fantasies always run the risk of being appropriated and dominated by certain wills over others, then the state is always there as a vehicle for that appropriation and domination.
Or maybe, if the state itself truly became a public thing, not just in name but in practice, if, that is to say, it became the site of the very agonism and anarchism that Honig appreciates as integral to what a public thing is and does, perhaps it becomes something utterly different. Maybe it would be a kind of catch-all for public things more generally. Maybe it would even be that most mysterious thing of all, the “res publica,” that public thing of all public things. In a sense, revealing and entering the deepest fantasy structures of state power might ruin it as a site of domination and archism precisely by acknowledging that it too partakes in magic and further that its magic, like the magic of all public things, comes, not from itself (not from its own thingness per se, which in this case would be reduced to almost nothing at all) but rather from our relationship with it. Taking its psychic centrality away from the state renders it unrecognizable as such, no longer available as a tool for domination, and this may indeed be something worth fighting for.