Realism in Social Representation and the Fate of the Public

Abstract

Medieval Europe did not know institutional spheres of public and private as the Greeks and Romans did, but it did contribute one crucial dimension to the enduring repertoire of options of conceiving public life. The king’s body served as the first of many devices of symbolic condensation for social affairs. The idea of a public realm of citizens or a sociological aggregate — “the public” — did not exist until the eighteenth century. In medieval political thought, only one person was public, in the sense of being estimable and worthy of visibility: the feudal lord. Likewise, the trappings of office and “symbols of sovereignty, for instance the princely seal, were deemed ‘public’” (Habermas 1962/1974, 50). Habermas calls this form of publicity “representative,” an initially confusing term that uses the connotations of prestige, ceremony, and imposingness in the German word Repräsentation. Such publicity makes no reference to an open social site where citizens (a notion arguably quite lost from Augustine till perhaps Rousseau) participate in politics through discussion. It is rather the glory of power created by the personal presence of the feudal lord and estates (Habermas 1962/1974, 51; Habermas 1962/1989, 12-14). In contrast to the bourgeois public sphere, the medieval public sphere involved the display of prestige, not criticism, spectacle, not debate, and appearance before the people, not on their behalf (Habermas 1962/1989, 8). Its logic is succinctly stated by Prospero at the beginning of a performance within Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “No tongue! all eyes! be silent” (IV.i.59). A similar sense of the potency of the person informs the doctrine of the king’s two bodies (Kantorowicz 1957; cf. Hariman 1995, ch. 3). The king, as stated by Queen Elizabeth’s lawyers, has both a “body natural” and a JOHN DURHAM PETERS