The Public Sphere
‘The public sphere can be defined as a discursive space in which individuals and groups can associate to discus matters of mutual interest and where possible, to reach a common judgement about them. It is the locus of emergence for rhetorically salient meanings’. The public sphere was coined and defined by theorist Jurgen Habermas in his text ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). The text defined the public sphere as a group of imaginary/private people in the same space discussing society. Thus these discussions from the people create opinions that are to challenge/guide figures in government.
This public sphere began to grow within coffee houses, press, literary establishments, the more people participating, the more opinions gathered into the ‘debate’. The success of these debates depended on the debates being open topics, the people being equal with one and another and the quality of talks.
The pubic sphere in relation to the Rotor exhibition/talk has much significance. The exhibition titled ‘Discursive Documents’ has a mixture of themes raging from Refugees, photographic representation of the urban space and the female body. The reason for these chosen themes was to challenge debate amongst the public and that was certainly the intention from the events during the exhibition run. Three events in total, all in relation within the themes and featuring the artists who had created the work. The events were to get the artists to talk about their work and then gather feedback from an audience. Dr Devlin chaired the events and had originally set the first talk to be like a typical Q&A. With the artists in front of the audience, that was the first seating arrangements. However after much deliberation the seating arrangements were arrangements so that they formed a circle, so that the debate would have more of a flow around it, rather than question and answer. With the range of participants from university lecturers, students, age, gender, everybody participating in these events were on a level playing field/equal and could give their opinion if they wanted.