This essay both explores and enacts what I want to call the romance of public space. This is one of the primary ideas of what historians came to call the Age of Revolutions, and finds its origins in ancient Greece, particularly Athens. Before I delve into that, however, I want to distinguish public space from the many large spaces in which, as long as human societies have existed, people have been assembled. In these spaces, rulers have assembled their subordinates and given them orders about how they should act. We get a glimpse of one of these assemblies in Book Two of The Iliad, in a passage entitled “The Great Gathering of Armies.” Thersites, “a common soldier,” challenges Agamemnon: “What are you panting after now?” Haven’t these warlords accumulated enough treasure, bounties, and young women to bring back with them? Odysseus responds: “Who are you to wrangle with kings … You and your ranting slander—you’re the outrage.” The climax of his tirade is to “crack the scepter across his back and shoulders.” Thersites “doubled over, tears streaking his face,” his blood flowing. The soldiers’ “morale is low, but the men laughed now, good hearty laughter breaking over Thersites’s head.” Other generals now speak: “Not until you … raze the rugged walls of Troy” will there be even the thought of going home; any soldier who repeats Thersites’ complaint” will be instantly killed. The threats, violence, and the soldiers’ “hearty laughter” combine to end the assembly—and to silence the Greek common people for the next five hundred years or so. But then, from the sixth century BC till the fourth, the Athenian common people gained more and more power, established a political form they called democracy—“power to the people”—and asserted themselves, above all in a giant outdoor space called the agora. Thersites is a textbook case of the people intended as objects, defined by what is done to them. “Public space” is something else: a stage for the people as subjects.
The “Old Oligarch” is a pamphlet written sometime in the fifth century BC.1 No one knows who the author was, but he was the first writer to describe the Athenian agora, a space completely different from the ones in his own city. (Which city? Some say Thebes, but we really don’t know.) The Old Oligarch is fascinated by the Athenian agora’s sloppiness. Here people dress down, social distance is minimized, one cannot even tell masters from slaves; Athens is the only city with a law forbidding masters to beat their slaves. The Old Oligarch is amazed that any city can hold together without a strictly visible social hierarchy. He concludes that informally defined spaces like Athens’s agora, and peaceable practices like shopping and related cultural activities, can make people feel comfortable with each other and nourish peaceable bonds between them, so that everybody learns both how to rule and how to obey. To have the ability both to rule and to obey: Sophocles, Pericles, the Old Oligarch, and various orators and philosophers, all came to see this as the formula for democratic citizenship. Athens’s agora appears as an ideal place to learn this contradictory behavior. It makes sense for us to call this gigantic mess the world’s first democratic space.
Not everybody liked it. Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone, first put on in 441 BC, features Creon, a politician and “man of the moment” who transforms the agora into an anti-democratic political theatre. Sophocles sets his story in Thebes; many of its characters are descendants of Oedipus and could be said to share his complex. One of Antigone’s brothers tries to overthrow the city government; her other brother fights him, and the twin brothers end up killing each other. Creon saves the city, only to destroy it inwardly. He decrees that only the “good” brother can be buried; the “bad” brother’s corpse must lie outdoors, till his corpse is picked apart and eaten up by wild animals. Creon creates an agora for terror, using public space against not only a guilty man, but also his whole family. Creon’s agora is one of the earliest examples of a totally political space, a stage where families are collectively punished for individuals’ bad acts. He imagines political power as the capacity to define protest as treason and to publicly destroy the traitors. Before Antigone dies, she and the chorus (and the prophet Tiresias) proclaim that stage directions like Creon’s are toxic to urban democracy.
One more crucial thing we need to remember about Antigone is that she is a woman. It was a nineteenth-century cliché that women were excluded from the agora. Any reader of Greek comedy, or of Plato, should be able to see that women were banned from many things in Greece, but never from shopping. (In the twentieth century, archeology made it clear that Athens’s agora was a giant shopping mall.) Antigone stakes out a claim to it. She says, in effect, that a totalitarian agora is a travesty of public space. She gets the point of a democratic agora better than the man who has her killed. Creon’s agora is not like the one in Athens, messy but overflowing. It resembles more the design created by Hippodamus of Miletus, the first known city planner. Hippodamus’ model (described at length in Aristotle’s Politics) was grid like and functionally zoned; it seems to have existed in various forms from city to city, but they all shared the presence of rigid boundaries for people in different ethnic, economic, sexual, and political groups. There was a strong (and apparently successful) attempt to put clamps on the ultraagaric activity of hanging out. Hippodamus lived long, and shopped his model around the Greek world for years. The planner didn’t say this, but anybody who (like Aristotle) saw his model in operation over the years saw the catch: It couldn’t work unless democracy was overthrown and the army took total control of everyday life. The Athenians seem to have said, no thanks. For a couple of hundred years, they preferred their chaotic model to a rigidly clean one. Athenians fought a great deal with each other, but they were at home in democratic space. They didn’t want to become a militarized Miletus. They preferred a mess.
One of Athens’s first self-celebrations can be found in what we call “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” delivered in 431 BC at the start of the long war with Sparta, and contained in Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian Wars. This speech is, among other things, a hymn to Athens’s public space. Pericles talks about the city’s openness: Its lack of walls, he says, enables anybody to see and enjoy all there is, it brings in tourists who are thrilled by the city’s openness, and helps attract original people who were kicked out of the cities they grew up in. People can explore and expand their identities and fulfill themselves as a whole.
The paradox of public space in Athens was that the city couldn’t seem to live with the radiance that its public space generated and bestowed on mankind. The Old Oligarch, delighted with the phenomenology of democracy, can’t understand why so many Athenian citizens get so mad at each other. After they killed Socrates, many Athenians and many other Greeks kept asking, how could this smart, sophisticated city—Pericles had called it “the school of Greece”—kill its most devoted citizen? Of course, Athens was used to killing its own. It killed Pericles’s son and his fellow admirals, after they won a spectacular battle against Sparta but failed to destroy the navy and kill all the enemies. In the postwar decade, it would very likely have killed Euripides, along with Socrates, if the playwright hadn’t got out of town fast.
Socrates refused to go, and so provoked his enemies. He warned the city (Apology, 39c-d) that if they killed him, they would be afflicted with a generation of critics who, unlike him, felt no love for them. If we read Plato long enough to pick up the emotional tones, we can see what he meant. In many early dialogues, we find a sensibility that is radically critical of Athens but dearly loves it. We find similar contradictions in Socrates’s arguments with Thrasymachus in the Republic’s first two books. But as the Republic unfolds, it offers us a very different mix. By the middle of the book, we find the most vicious criticism ever written against public space, and we find a critical tone devoid of love:
Whenever the populace crowds together, at any public gathering … and sits there clamoring its approval or disapproval, both excessive, of whatever is being said or done; booing and clapping till the rocks ring, and the whole place redoubles the noise of their applause and outcries … In such a scene, what will become of a young man’s mind? What … will give him the strength to hold out against the force of such a torrent, or save him from being swept downstream, until he accepts all their notions of right and wrong, does as they do, and becomes just such a man as they are?
Most of what we know about the lower-class Socrates comes from dialogues written by the upper-class Plato. We can’t say for sure where one ends and the other begins. But if we focus on these two views of the agora—a place that is defined as lethal poison, and a place that Socrates refuses to leave, despite its risks—we see the difference between being at home in public space and being radically alienated from it. Fifth-century Athens is often seen as a city that defined public space as a place where people could feel (like Socrates) “at home.” This is true, but if we see it in depth, we will also see a place that could kill the man who was most at home in it; a place that could force the rest of us to feel (like Plato) radically alien. Athens’s creativity is ambiguous, paradoxical; it lays out vocabularies for both.
Socrates’s execution seems to have put Athens on the defensive about itself. In the 390s BC, Athens passed a series of laws that recognized its capacity to create talk. From now on, the city would not kill anybody was not guilty of a violent crime; it grew willing to listen to people who talked and who made others talk. The idea of “atonement” was not a part of the Hellenic vocabulary; but some of the post-Socratic laws do sound like an attempt to atone for what Athens had done to its public space and to itself, and to give that space a new life, to nourish it again by creating the beginnings of what modern citizens and thinkers, especially in England, America, Holland, and France, would come to call a Bill of Rights.
BEYOND ATHENS
After Athens and all other Greek cities were conquered by Alexander the Great in the 330s and the 320s BC, the very idea of democratic space faded away and didn’t come back into Western (or any other) culture till modern times: the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution. Many of the thrills and human difficulties first seen in Athens’s agora have reappeared in modern times; but in the more than 2,000 years in between, Western culture has gone through plenty and become a lot more. The rest of this essay will be brief, too brief to explore this complex history. But it will open up diverse possibilities.
I’m Talking about Jerusalem
If there is one word to convey the romance of public space in both Jewish and Christian culture, that word is Jerusalem. Our earliest vision of Jerusalem as a special place comes in the first Book of Kings’s narrative of the reign of King Solomon. In a dream, God asks Solomon what he wants and is impressed when he asks for “an understanding mind to govern the people” rather than for riches or revenge. God gives him “a wise and discerning mind” and a “largeness of vision.” In the course of his reign, the Bible says, “Judah and Israel were as many as the sand by the sea, they ate and drank and were happy.” The Book of Kings gives an endlessly detailed account of Solomon’s building projects, a temple and a king’s palace standing directly opposite each other. It also describes projects that are likely to seem much more important to us: a tremendous population shift, to be obtained by sending thousands of Jews to Lebanon (“Tyre”) every year and filling Jerusalem with an equal numbers of Lebanese, especially people with construction skills. Solomon’s many marriages, too, must have brought not only “foreign women” (the “pharaoh’s daughter” may have been the biggest scandal), but also great crews of servants, tailors, craftspeople, priests, and—this may have been his central idea—non-Jews. Solomon seems to have worried about Israel’s smallness and lack of resources, and aimed to strengthen it by opening up channels of cooperation with other, better-situated peoples. (Later, when God is preparing to destroy Israel for its unrighteousness, the prophet Amos convinces God to be merciful by saying, “But my Lord, Israel is so small.”) Like Pericles, Solomon grasped the strength of a mixed population, and sought to make Jerusalem as diverse and multicultural as he could. But Solomon’s children and successors lacked his “largeness of mind”; Israel gradually split and then was “taken,” first by Babylon. In post-Solomon incarnations it will be pulled to pieces. Later on, and stretching up to today, Jerusalem became a city specially consecrated as “redeemed”; but we can’t understand the spiritual meanings of “redemption” without simultaneously grasping the meanings of “damnation.” Jerusalem shows us that cities can be embodiments of both.
Talking about Jerusalem puts us on a distinctive wavelength, part of a spiritual drama: we imagine a city in radically contradictory ways, simultaneously as a sinkhole of depravity and a light unto the nations. But most of our accumulated talk about Jerusalem, from the fifth century BC till 1948, has been about a glorious city that has, for whatever reasons, been lost. Psalm 137, one of the first documents of exile, proclaims the duty of thinking about the city we have lost. The vow “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” announces one of the primary forms of urban romance: the romance of nostalgia. Classical Christianity gives a dramatic twist to urban self-criticism. After two thousand years of Christian culture, anybody who thinks about cities inherits the twist, whether we are Christians or not (I am not). In the Gospel of Matthew (6.1–6), just after the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus disparages people who pray “in the synagogue.” Unlike Saint Paul, he does not criticize them on behalf of some other public space (the early Christian church), but rather on behalf of no public space. He says:
Beware of practicing your piety before men, in order to be seen by them. For then you will have no reward from your Father, who is in heaven. Thus, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men … Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret.
What is he saying? That we should be punished for self-knowledge—for our left hand knowing what our right hand is doing—but we get spiritual credit for ignorance of ourselves?
And when you pray … you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand in the synagogues and in the street comers, that they may be seen by men … But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door, and pray to your Father who sees in secret and will reward you.
This is a remarkable passage, which has evoked little commentary. It says that any desire to be seen or praised by other men, “in the synagogue or in the streets,” is poisonous; God will show respect, Jesus says, only to people who lock the door. It appears that the gesture of locking the door is the paradigmatic spiritual act. The desire to be with people, to be loved by them, is vicious, corrupt, inauthentic. The Jewish God required a minyan, a congregation of ten, to make prayer valid. This version of the Christian God demands a congregation of one, and that’s all. He shrinks away from public space. He is open only to those souls who reject community with other men or women.
Now, it is impossible to live this way! Saint Paul prided himself on his celibacy, but accepted the overall legitimacy of people’s need for each other. But Matthew’s Jesus rejects it, at least for a while. What are we supposed to make of this? Is it an early form of nihilism? I don’t think many readers have ever been willing to take Jesus’s implacability as a model of how to live; yet, the idea that only aloneness is authentic has carried a long shadow even in the hearts of people who believe it’s absurd. When we are in public space today, even in the sun, we are still partly in that shadow; the cloud rarely leaves us.2
The Enlightenment and Modernity
If the Platonic and Christian utopias of radical alienation gave us a twist, a great deal of modern thought and culture, starting with the Enlightenment, has been a project to untwist us. Modern Romantic poets on the street like Walt Whitman, and fighters for civil rights who sat down in the midst of traffic like Martin Luther King Jr., believed it was urgent to love, to overcome, and to do it together, openly, in public, and they believed that it could help us lift our own inner shadows.
A little while ago I talked about how Athens experienced its killing of Socrates as a trauma and passed a series of laws to ensure that nobody else would get killed for talking. This was a great expansion of public space, in the city that already had the most developed public space in the world, and it was an important moment in the history of human rights. But in its earliest incarnation, its scope was limited. For the most part, Athenians didn’t see these as rights for all human beings, but only for Athenians. They didn’t oppose them for other cities, they just couldn’t imagine that other cities would care about them.
The concept of universal human rights couldn’t emerge until centuries of Stoicism and Christianity had passed, and until the beginnings of modern science. The great leap forward that we call the Enlightenment featured the idea of a world public, and a demand for human rights for everybody everywhere. This is not to say that this idea has been fulfilled anywhere. But today, in the twenty-first century, we may have reached the point where it is imagined everywhere.
Montesquieu’s novel The Persian Letters (1721), maybe the first great book of the Enlightenment, shows the connection between the idea of human rights and the forms of public space that have emerged in the modern city.3 Montesquieu sees immigration as a central feature of Paris, which thanks to immigrant diversity becomes a microcosm of the whole world. A world city takes some getting used to. Compared with the spaces the Persians have grown up in, it is a grotesque mess. But they come to feel the immense human vitality that is overflowing and creating this mess. They walk and talk through the streets, amazed at the variety of the crowd; after a while they see that they themselves are part of the crowd, and they are glad. Women come over to talk to them. At first they think these women must be whores selling themselves, but the women tell them they just want to talk, and there is this new thing, invented by women but bringing both sexes together, called conversation.4 Later on they learn about salons and have some terrific conversations there. By and by they are received at Versailles, and they discover that not everybody loves Paris. They learn that the French monarchy, since Louis XIV, has felt degraded and threatened by this city that is so enchanting to them. The kings are happier in their royal theme park, Versailles, and at home in their gardens full of statues, rather than in a city full of live people. Political conflict in France, both before and after the Revolution, was often imagined as “Paris versus Versailles.” One of the distinctive ironies of modern times in France is that so many grand buildings and outdoor spaces, especially in Paris, were built by the monarchy to sanctify the grandeur of the state. But the monarchy was terrified by its own creations, and ordinary people found ways to make themselves more at home in those grand spaces than their kings had ever been. In what turned out to be the French Revolution, the image of the people taking over the Bastille Prison established itself immediately as a canonical vision.
The Enlightenment, however, thought big: It wasn’t only about France, or about any particular place, but about the whole world. It showed a world public and a dream of world citizenship coming into being. In the years between the early Enlightenment and now, it has become clear that Paris is winning. (This is why, even if we have never been to Paris—as I had never been at age fourteen, when I saw the movie Casablanca—we know instinctively what Humphrey Bogart means when he tells Ingrid Bergman, “We’ll always have Paris.”) But it will always be a struggle, even in Paris—maybe especially in Paris. Modern city life has rarely been serene. Indeed, since the middle of the eighteenth century, modern cities have been explosive and revolutionary. But the people who meet on modern streets, or who just look at each other on the streets and in the parks and on the metro, and feel they recognize total strangers, are increasingly citizens of the world, with the capacity to imagine the world, to wear blue, and to imagine themselves with an identity as big as the sky.
A century of electronic mass media has expanded and deepened this world identity. When I was a kid, there was a vast literature explaining why electronics had killed people’s desire to travel. I thought, it sure hasn’t killed my desire, and it’s easy to see now how silly this was. Electronics hasn’t killed anybody’s desire to move. Tourism is the world’s greatest industry, its bottom lines eclipsing even armaments. Photographs, movies, televisions, computers, and Skype give people at least a chance to see what other people’s public spaces look like, and it makes them want to go. Even if we can’t go, we can read and see and feel in some crucial way these distant cities as ours.
Here, then, is the romance of public space. Pericles, in ancient Athens, argued that Athens had got there first. Most of the world can imagine it now—if only we can survive to enact it! But we have moved beyond Athens in crucial ways. We have an idea of universal humanity; we can see now that the desire to live in public space is a central part of being human. We can also thank the Enlightenment for helping us imagine we can organize to make the sun rise. When we read about and see pictures of the women of Cairo, fighting to be and to stay in the streets, and shouting, “I exist! We exist!” we know they are talking to us, as well as to the priests and police holding them back and trying to push them back into their houses. We know their need: to have a place in the street, to be recognized as the people they are. We share a conversation, struggling for a public space we all can inhabit.
This chapter was first published in Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space, edited by Ron Shiffman, Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, and Lynne Elizabeth, New York: New Village Press, 2012.