In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated
as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy,
but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and
privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public
Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy
is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and
utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy
merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation
while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public
things, what will the impact be? Following Tocqueville, who
extolled the virtues of "pursuing in common the objects of common
desires," Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of
democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public
things-infrastructure, monuments, libraries-that citizens use, care
for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be "gathered up" refers to
the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who
popularized the idea of "transitional objects"-the toys, teddy
bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to
understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an
outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that
the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously
performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us
into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things
attends also to the historically racial character of public things:
public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods
restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw
how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world,
Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott-both theorists of
livenesss-underline the material and psychological conditions
necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for
a more egalitarian democracy.
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