Publics, Memory, Affect (or, Rethinking Publicness with Peter Watkins and Hannah Arendt)

Arendtian public sphere theory has become increasingly attentive to the role of cultural memory and affects in fostering a sense of publicness—a sense of what Arendt called a “common public world.” This chapter builds on and extends this development. It starts by considering some recent contributions to Arendtian scholarship. It then turns for a case study to the collaborative method of film-maker Peter Watkins, exploring the potential of creative, participatory forms of engagement with the past to reorient us to public life including the dominant media. It closes by proposing the concept of “imaginaries of publicness” to highlight the democratic benefits of keeping the idea of publics imaginatively available as both a cultural and a political form, characterized by openness, plurality, and “contingent belonging.”