A. “The People” and “the Public”

When Allen asks “where and what is this thing, the people?” and “how can one even hold an idea of this strange body in one’s heads?” we can hear these questions as asking: What mode of mentality can a person use to build or sustain a person’s own subjective sense of being in political society? How does an idea of a specific “People” come to life in the minds of individuals who identify themselves with it? Heard in this way, Allen’s questions concern the psychological means a person might use to locate herself as part of a People.⁸ They concern a phenomenal public: the subjective sense of being located in a specific mass-political society.

There are significant obstacles to forming any such living idea of a phenomenal public. Absorbed continually in one’s own affairs, the “private citizen” in the United States, wrote Walter Lippmann, is consigned to the role of a spectator “who knows that his sovereignty is a fiction.”⁹ One’s basic epistemic condition in American society was bewilderment and passivity in the face of civic matters, he argued, likening us to spectators in the back row of a theater who can’t really hear the performance and keep falling asleep. Like Dewey, Lippmann observed that a subjective sense of being part of self-governing public is hard to come by. Unlike Dewey, Lippmann thought democratic governance would have to proceed without relying on any such sense. But they agree that when the ordinary person is left psychologically to their own devices, public affairs tend to be inscrutable.

Although Allen and Dewey are both concerned with how a person can make psychological contact with a mass-political grouping, Allen focuses on “the People,” calling it “democracy’s basic term,” whereas Dewey, who is equally concerned with building democratic political culture, frames his discussion in terms of a “public.” Taking note of the differences between these terms will help clarify the central question at issue here.

As the familiar phrase “the will of the People” suggests, “the People” denotes a locus of political agency, both in political theory and in political rhetoric. Rousseau relied on a concept of “the People” as a locus of political will. Experts in fascist rhetoric, such as Adolf Hitler, rely on it to identify themselves so closely with “the People” that their own personal will appears as the perfect stand-in for any kind of popular political participation, beyond being an audience of spectators.¹⁰ And the idea that “the People” would denote a locus of political agency operates even for pluralist skeptics who would replace the idea of a single locus of political agency with a set of competing groups vying for power. In these ways, proponents of democracy, detractors from it, and manipulators all operate with a concept of “the People” tied to agency.

The agential connotations of “the People” could help phrases like “We, the people” energize a population, leaving it poised to act – or at least to endorse the political acts of others. What about “the public”? While mass-political publics are said to have interests, hold opinions, or face dangers to its security (“threats to the public,” “public enemy number one,” “public opinion,” “public interest”), none of these common phrases suggest any tie to sovereignty. “We, the public” is far less stirring than “We, the People.”¹¹ A mass-political public is subject to governance, but whether it is also a locus of sovereignty or self-governance is left open.¹² If a “body-politic” makes up a public, that fact is simply neutral on whether it also constitutes a People.

From now on I’ll use “the public” as shorthand for “the mass-political public,” where this kind of public is made of the people that any mass-political governing structure purports to govern. At any given time, many such publics co-exist. Some of them overlap: two people can be part of the same public defined by the state of California even if only one of them is part of the public defined by the city of Los Angeles. What will matter here are phenomenal publics, defined by the subjective sense of being located in a specific mass-political society.

Even skeptics about the existence of “the People” as a locus of political agency, and even analysts who find the category decidedly unhelpful in understanding political phenomena, can acknowledge a subjective sense of being part of a “People.” It does not matter whether “the People” is a useful analytic category for empirical study. “The People” can exist, or not. Analogous points apply to “the public.” “The public” can be nebulous, or even ill-defined, or not. Regardless of any ontological status, we can ask what mode of mentality a person may rely on to connect her to these things, psychologically.

Once we focus on subjective identifications with specific political society, we can see an important relationship within this subjective realm: feeling that one is located in a mass-political public is something more general than a subjective sense of being part of a “People.” An upshot of this fact is that one way to come to feel located in a mass-political public is by feeling part of a “People.” Alternatively, to identify oneself as part of a public, one need not feel any strong positive sense of “belonging” to a People. For instance, one need not have any affectionate feeling comparable to what some people express toward their hometown when they say “I belong here,” and list wistfully all the things to love about the place. Similarly, one need not feel oneself to be a part of any locus of political agency. As Thomas Nagel and others have observed, shame at one’s country’s actions, such as many U.S. citizens felt during the Vietnam or Iraq war, does not depend on viewing oneself as responsible for the actions of which one is ashamed, but it does assume a more basic level of political identification.¹³

For each of these subjectively different ways of experiencing oneself in political society – as part of a politically empowered or disempowered “People,” or merely as part of a mass-political public – we can pose a question like Allen’s: what modes of mentality could most effectively bring that political society into a person’s consciousness? I focus here on the most general version of this question, and the role of perception in answering it. This role for perception is well captured in the first-person: “I can think of the public I’m in by perceiving it.” Regardless of the specific type of political society, and regardless of any emotional relationship a person feels to it, can a person’s perceiving the public yield a subjective sense of being in it? As a shorthand, I’ll formulate the question more simply: Is it possible to perceive the public?¹⁴

B. The Standard View

Though the question whether it is possible to perceive the public isn’t often asked, it has a presumed answer: No. The standard view is that you can’t perceive the public, but instead you have to imagine it. Two claims make up the standard view, one negative and one positive.

(SV-negative) It is not possible for people to perceive the publics they are in.

(SV-positive) People can only grasp the publics they are in by using imagination.

Both kinds of grasping of the public in these claims (perception and imagination) are first-personal, in the sense that a subject would perceive or imagine a public as a public she is in.

Allen is not the only proponent of the standard view. Walter Lippmann, writing a century earlier in The Phantom Public, argued that the inscrutability of public affairs leaves us susceptible to manipulation by experts in political communication who seek to define for their own political purposes what will count as ‘the public interest’. If we extrapolate from our own interests – or from the manipulators’ – to a view of the public interest, the process will have to involve envisioning situations we can never observe. Given these considerations, Lippman would certainly endorse at least the negative part of the standard view, and arguably the positive part as well.¹⁵

These two thinkers, then, seem to take for granted that people rely on imagination to grasp the publics they are in, whether they do so as earnest citizens trying actively to politically engage, or as passive targets of propaganda or other political operations.

Allen and Lippmann are writing specifically about American democracy. But even writers who are not focused on democracy, or on the United States, arrive at the same idea that the public can only be thought about using imagination. Writing in 1983, the political theorist Benedict Anderson proposed a definition of the nation, according to which “it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” The nation is imagined, Anderson wrote, in the sense that “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members or even hear of them, yet in the[ir] minds lives the image of their communion.”¹⁶ The nation, like any mass-political public, has an intermediate scope between everybody, and everybody you know. On Anderson’s view of how it is possible to get your mind around such a body cross-cuts all sorts of polities, democratic and otherwise.

As we saw in section 1, typical prompts for this kind of imagination include symbols, such as flags, mascots, or the seal of a city, and rituals, such as parades or spending Sundays in the park. Another type of prompt, discussed at length by Anderson and Habermas, is widely-circulated print newspapers, with their mix of stability in format and variation in content as “the news” unfolds.¹⁷ Because newspaper readers know that many other people whom they will never meet are reading the same newspaper, Anderson reasons, they can take themselves to belong to a broader reading public.

C. Why Does It Matter Whether the Public Can Be Perceived?

If it is possible to perceive the public, then such perceptions could be leveraged for mass-political purposes. To see why cultivators of political feeling in mass society might want to orchestrate perceptual experiences, let’s first consider a much older role for visualization in politics.

In the introduction to her novel Paradise, Toni Morrison describes a political role for representations of a place – Hell – that cannot be filled merely by having a concept of that special realm. She observes that if you wanted to make an argument for avoiding Hell, you might try to represent it in a way that does more than just describe it as a place where things are certain to go badly. Even if the prospect of going to Hell has long been part of common knowledge, a person whose conception of it was shaped only by written descriptions from long ago might regard the place and warnings about it as not entirely real or believable. A visceral representation of Hell might be more effective at conveying what inhabiting it would actually be like. A whole class of paintings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Morrison observes, were visual depictions designed to make people avoid going to Hell, by showing the kinds of scenarios it would surely be best to avoid, lest one end up immersed in them for eternity.¹⁸

Imagery of Hell is an ingredient in religious rhetoric, designed to influence people en masse by making vivid a type of scenario defined by domination and misery. Anyone who wants to shape the character of a mass-political polity faces the inverse problem: what would be needed to make the existence and importance of a living public felt and attractive?

A first stance from which this question matters is the stance of a cultivator of subjective feeling of being in political society. Powerful leaders of a party, a country, or a movement can create long-lasting political forces in part by repeating claims like “We the People won the election” or “No one has set me above the people. I have grown with the people, have remained with the people, to the people I shall return.”¹⁹ This kind of propaganda has proven effective at cultivating visceral identifications. A perception of the public that contributed to this subjective sense would be an important tool for such cultivators to use.

Another set of political cultivators includes democratic theorists or practitioners who think there can be no democracy without a public that considers itself empowered to influence policies on the basis of claims about what would be best for the whole polity, all things considered. It is understandably hard to feel empowered in this specific way, if one can’t even get one’s mind around the locus of empowerment. And if one can, doing so could consolidate in one’s mind the terms and the value of political association.

To these kinds of political cultivators, it should matter whether it is possible to perceive the public, because they need to build a subjective sense of political society.

The question should also matter to a different kind of political cultivator: theorists or practitioners who think it’s important to avoid building any strong, emotionally powerful subjective sense of belonging to a People. On this view, if any kind of civic regard should be cultivated, it should promote the privacy and informational insulation of co-politizens from one another, lest the existence of substantive feelings of connection of the sort Nussbaum describes be taken as a suitable purview of the state. Wary of republican over-reach into the mental lives of ordinary citizens, these cultivators would oppose any efforts to build civic regard in the form of a subjective feeling of belonging to a People. Such feelings can’t be a locus of intrusion if they aren’t an acknowledged part of political life in the first place.

To this mildly libertarian set of cultivators, it should matter either way whether it’s possible to perceive the public. Since perceiving the People would be a way to perceive the public, if it turned out to be impossible to perceive the public, these cultivators should welcome that result. And if it is possible to perceive the public, they should discourage any such perception that takes the form of perceiving the People.

Finally, there is a last perspective from which it should matter whether it’s possible to perceive the public. It should matter to students of perception and imagination. Typically, we can use either mode of mentality to relate our minds, in different ways, to the same thing. We can see a red square, or we can imagine one. We can see people interacting happily, or we imagine them doing so. These two modes of mentality do not generally bias the type of contents that can occur within that mode.

But when it comes to perceiving versus imagining the public, this generalization may not hold. In the rest of this article, I argue that as a means of building a subjective sense of political society, perception seems to have a bias toward subjectively presenting polities that involve domination. Using perception, it is evidently difficult to build a subjective sense of political society without relying on domination, whereas imagination seems free of any parallel constraint. If this conclusion is right, then polities are not like red squares or happy people, when considered as potential contents of perception. Walter Benjamin was onto something, if he meant that “the aestheticization of politics” involved a kind of perception especially well-suited to fascism, maybe even specific to it.

To make this case, we need to look more closely at the differences between perception and imagination. Because each of these things are such broad categories, we will need to zero in on the difference that matters here.

D. Perception and Imagination

Some varieties of perception and imagination work together in a single mental process or episode. When you see a skunk, only some of its surfaces are visible at a time. We form all sorts of expectations about how those facing surfaces continue out of view. Philosophers and psychologists have used different labels for the capacities involved in forming such expectations, but Immanuel Kant called them “imagination.”²⁰ Drawing on such expectations is a kind of imagination, integral to perception, that informs how one could interact with the skunk, how big it is, where it is in relation to the oneself, how one would have to move to see the rest of it, and so on.

By contrast, the kinds of imagination and perception at issue here cannot be practically coordinated in any analogous way. Instead, the key contrast is between two fundamentally different modes of consciousness. Perceptual experiences present things as currently occupying the same immediate surroundings as the perceiver. Imaginative experiences present things as not currently in the same immediate surroundings as the imaginer.

These two modes of mentality present things to consciousness in different ways. Perceptual experiences feel like perception. One feels oneself to share immediate surroundings with things one perceives – with the potential for immediate action and interaction that sharing such surroundings affords. By contrast, imaginative experiences feel like imagination. One feels oneself to be merely imagining something, and, to that extent, at one remove from any interactions that might be possible if one were actually in the same place at the same time. Any such interactions have to be imagined.

Construed as a phenomenal difference between modes of consciousness, the difference between experiences of perception versus experiences of imagination lies in the structure of experience, not in merely scalar differences in how detailed, precise, shadowy, or vivid things appear to be.²¹ Virtuosos of imagination can see scenes in their minds eye with loads of detail, or hear complicated musical pieces in acoustic imagination, without such episodes “tricking” them into thinking that music is actually playing and can be heard by anyone walking by, or that they are actually in the scene imagined.²² If they are so tricked, the experience becomes phenomenally perceptual – a perceptual experience in the sense at issue here.²³ Feelings of perceived reality versus imagined unreality are found at the level of phenomenal structure, not in qualitative differences of degree.

When we use this distinction to probe which modes of the mentality may be used to grasp the public, we can ask whether it is possible for someone to perceptually experience a public, or whether instead it is only possible to imagine the public as a thing that is not currently part of one’s immediate perceptible surroundings, with which one cannot directly interact.²⁴

Why focus on this phenomenal version of the distinction between perception and imagination, as opposed to categories defined by psychological mechanisms? We are interested in how to build a subjective sense of political society – a phenomenal public. To find how a specific form of consciousness is built, it is most straightforward to focus directly on ingredients of consciousness. And that’s what experiences of imagination and experience of perception are. The forms of consciousness prompted by “imaginative forms” mentioned by Allen, or by reading newspapers on Anderson and Habermas’s accounts are imaginative experiences in the sense operative here – not perceptual ones.

Because perceptual experiences characterize what things are like for the person having the experiences, they are susceptible to all sorts of distortions. A perceptual experience need not succeed in making perceptual contact with anything (it may be a hallucination), and it may not be an accurate perception of the way things are (it may be an illusion). It may seem natural to classify illusions and hallucinations as products of the imagination. But in the sense operative here, because of their phenomenology, these states belong to perception, not imagination.

Below I’ll develop examples of perceiving the public that are riddled with illusions and are deeply misleading. For all that, though, they remain perceptual experiences, with distinctive powers that perceptual experiences have to motivate and convince perceivers, and to direct their minds to their immediate surroundings, instead of to merely imagined spaces.

In case it seems dubious that illusions or hallucinations could play such powerful roles, consider a hallucinogen that causes someone anxious and downtrodden to picture vividly a joyful scene, in which people are happy and at ease with one another. Even if there is no such scene before them – it’s a drug-induced hallucination that makes no contact with reality – the perceptual experience may give the hallucinator a crucial glimpse of what kinds of interactions, interpersonal feeling, and relationship are possible, by bestowing a feeling of reality on those moments in which (so far as the unwitting hallucinator can tell) the happy scene is already realized. What a boost! The status of perceptual experiences as illusory is compatible with providing significant roles in shaping belief and action. Perceptual illusions of public would be no exception.

As many theorists have discussed, all sorts of imagination can play key “boosting” roles in politics, as well. Envisioning futures that differ from the status quo can help clarify political aims and values, and some think it should be used to help prefigure the desired political arrangements by enacting them here and now on a current scale.²⁵ In those roles, imagination is a guide to building the observable environment, in something like the way an architect might picture a building’s layout before building it.

But in the debate about how to grasp the public, the role for imagination cannot be a stepping stone to perceiving at a future time what one currently merely imagines. If the public can be grasped only in imagination, that means it could not be experienced as part of the currently observable environment. Even more strongly, it could not be experienced as part of any real, observable environment. To provide any sense of actually exercising political agency as part of a public, the coordination and connectedness to a public would always have to be imagined as well.

In making my case against the standard view, I’ll argue that due to their status as perceptual, even illusion-ridden perceptions of the public can present a feeling of political efficacy missing from imaginative experiences of a public. Ultimately, it’s this difference in felt political efficacy that makes it worth asking what modes of mentality we can use to get our minds around a public, and toward what ends their political efficacy can most readily be marshalled.

E. The Fragility of Relying on Imagination to Grasp the Public

Symbols, rituals, and newspapers can all prompt individuals who make up a public to imagine it, by imagining themselves as part of it. But due to the need for such prompts, the standard view can easily generate a sense of unease. The unease can arise because prompts do not ensure their own uptake. Whether they resonate to a person at all is highly contingent. Such uptake is susceptible to all sorts of obstacles and countervailing factors that can blunt or even cancel the force of the prompt.

For instance, merely recognizing a symbol does not ensure that one is imagining the public associated with it, let alone that one locates oneself as part of it. A flag expert need not feel any tinge of political emotion, let alone an emotion of belonging to a public, when recognizing a flag. Rituals can ring hollow, lack spirit, or be met with distrust or indifference. One can read a newspaper without having any image of communion with other newspaper readers.

Consider the building at the site of the twin towers felled by the attacks on September 11, 2001, called One World Trade Center. It stands 1,776 feet high to symbolize the year of the Declaration of Independence. As political theorist Jan-Werner Müller notes, “to an innocent observer, it needs to be explained that this building is 1,776 feet high.”²⁶ Even once it is explained, the symbolic status may do little to cultivate feeling of belonging to a public. As Müller also observes, symbols are so loosely linked to the practices they symbolize that they can easily call attention to the disconnect between symbolic gesture and action, inviting accusations of hypocrisy. In this regard, he highlights the use of glass to symbolize transparency and accountability, noting wryly that glass buildings do exactly nothing to stop the officials within them from abuses of power.

Symbols, rituals, and newspapers all create interfaces that are meant to mediate between individuals and a public to which they belong. The interfaces are contingent on the right kind of uptake, and such links can be tightened or loosened. There is always the possibility of refusal by responding “that does not apply to me.” The intended prompts to imagination can be treated by their addressees as failures, cordoned off and irrelevant – much in the way that the paintings depicting Hell might be met with a shrug by a dismissive, un-intimidated free-spirit who thinks: “That’s just a painting, it’s not real life” or “Religious warnings? They’re not from my religion. I don’t even have a religion.”

If one wanted to prompt people to regard masses of others they will never meet as proudly belonging to the same polity, it might make sense to try for something more than just solemn descriptions of a fundamental principle of political association – democratic or otherwise. Visceral, specific depictions of the polity that cast it in a favorable light could provide such depictions, just as pictures of Hell can cast it in an unfavorable light. But those media have frames around them, separating off the worlds they depict from the worlds where they are located, much like a theatrical stage marks the limits of the fictional world brought to life dramaturgically. For political purposes, to leverage feelings of political belonging, wouldn’t it be more powerful to orchestrate perceptual experiences to clarify the terms and the value of political association? Since it would be perception, not depiction, no one could dismiss it as just someone else’s drawing. The suggestions of imagination always lie on shakier ground, as by definition, phenomenal imagination presents things at one remove from reality.

F. How Can We Probe the Standard View?

Can the public be perceived? A first version of this question asks whether it is possible to perceive the whole that is the public, from within it. The whole is a kind of multitude, and this version of the question asks whether that multitude can be perceived by someone who takes themselves to belong to it.

I will argue that it is possible to perceive the public as a multitude, but that the most powerful examples of such perceptions facilitate domination and disrespect among co-politizens. This result motivates us to consider a second version of the question: whether it is possible to perceive a person (or group of people) under the mode of presentation “member(s) of the same public as me.” Here, one would be perceiving a perfectly ordinary thing – a person or group – under a specific mode of presentation.

Because they focus on interpersonal relationships, interpersonal perception might seem to provide a chance for co-politizens to perceive one another as political equals, and in doing so make the shared public perceptually salient. But I argue that no such way of grasping the public seems available. As with perceiving the public as a whole, the clearest examples of interpersonally perceiving the public facilitate domination and disrespect among co-politizens.

A. Dewey on Perceiving the Whole

Let’s begin with how John Dewey might answer the first version of the question: whether it is possible to perceive the public as a whole.

In The Public and its Problems, Dewey asks what makes a group of people a public in mass society.²⁷ His answer is that the public is an aggregate of individuals. Then he asks: what aggregates individuals into a public? What is the unity relation that constitutively connects members of a public? And here his answer is that a certain type of causal relation helps to aggregate people into a public. When we bear the indirect consequences of one another’s actions, then we belong to the same public. The public we form becomes more visible as we come to know what those indirect consequences are.²⁸

Suppose we think about the public the way Dewey does, and then ask whether it’s possible to perceive a public, construed in Dewey’s way. A natural thought is that if you could perceive the public-making unity relations that make a group of people into a public, then that would be a way to perceive the public.

But Dewey is at pains to argue that those unity relations are not perceivable. A public’s “visibility,” for Dewey, is not in our sense a mark of its perceptibility. The public has to be made visible, he says, exactly because the indirect consequences are not automatically or easily manifest to us. For instance, market transactions and decisions about how goods will be produced very often have consequences that are unknown to the agents of those actions and to others who participate in their effects. Changes in an irrigation system can lower the tomato yield, increasing the price of a sandwich hundreds of miles away. And that is one of the public’s “problems” that has to be solved: indirect consequences have to be made visible, so that a public can become “aware of itself.” On their own, the indirect consequences that bind people together into a public are not perceivable.²⁹

We can extract from these ideas a Dewey-esque argument:

P1. If the public is perceivable, then its public-making features are perceivable.

P2. Public-making features are not perceivable.

Conclusion: this route to perceiving the public is blocked.

If this argument were sound, it would not decisively establish the standard view, since there could be other routes to perceiving the public, distinct from the route described by premise P1. But the argument would still favor the standard view.

Is the Dewey-esque argument sound?

Schematically, Dewey thought of the public as building up the big from the small. Publics are built up out of individuals who are related to one another in the right way. Here we might ask: what if Dewey’s picture has things backwards, and in fact, the big inheres in the small from the start? That was the approach of the neo-Kantian social theorist Georg Simmel, who thought that the mind was structured by preconditions for society, which he called “social apriorities.” In introducing the idea of social apriorities, Simmel writes:

Societal unification needs no factors outside its own component elements, the individuals….[T]he consciousness of constituting with others a unity is all there is to this unity. This does not mean that each member of a society is conscious of an abstract unity. It means he is absorbed in the innumerable, specific relations and in the feeling and the knowledge of determining others and being determined by them.³⁰

We can think of Simmel’s picture on analogy with what A. D. Smith calls the “Anstoss” in his book The Problem of Perception. Smith is interested in giving sufficient conditions for perceptual consciousness.³¹ One of the conditions he proposes is illustrated simply by pressing your finger down on a table. When you do this, you feel both your finger and the table, simultaneously in the same experience. You experience at once your body, and a limit beyond which lies a solidity independent of your body.

Exactly analogously, Simmel thinks we experience ourselves always as a nexus between individuality and sociality. Neither strand has priority, and neither is independent of the other. We live within the structure of the social Anstoss. From the first-person perspective, we feel ourselves to be both integrated into society but also independent of it. From the second and third person perspectives, when we apprehend other people in general social terms, such as their roles as barista, bureaucrat or bus driver, we also apprehend them as a nexus of an individual and those social definitions. This apriority equips us with an idea of society, built into our experience of ourselves and other people. It’s built in, in the sense that it is part of our social perception.

Would this structure of our mind give us what we need to perceive a public? It is, after all, a type of social perception. Does it allow us to experience a public, automatically, alongside our perceptions of other people?

It doesn’t, though it almost does. But it doesn’t, ultimately, because it is too general. What’s immanent in the mind is society as such – not this or that politically defined society, specific to a time and place. Even if the social “as such” at issue for Simmel is a placeholder for political society, for all Simmel says, you might have to supplement the preconditions he describes with “imaginative forms” to get an idea of a specific public – just as the standard view suggests.

The face-off between Dewey and Simmel leaves the standard view looking pretty good. Simmel doesn’t weaken the standard view. Dewey doesn’t weaken the standard view, either. He may have been wrong to think the public is fundamentally an aggregate. (And about that, he is wrong, if Simmel is right). But Dewey is correct that in many cases, you can’t perceive the direct consequences our actions have on one another that make a public “visible.”

Are there other routes to perceiving the public, besides the Dewey-esque one? Or other reasons to think it can’t be perceived? Let’s consider some more arguments.

B. Is the Public Too Big to Be Perceived?

A simple argument for why it isn’t possible to perceive the public is that no sensory field is big enough to accommodate it. In mass society, the body politic is too big for any perceiver to see, hear, or otherwise perceptually sense everybody at once.

This line of thought focuses on the spatial extent of the public. A parallel line of thought addresses its temporal extent. Some members of the public aren’t quite born yet, while others have passed, yet those absent persons can still belong to a public. They show that the public has a temporal extent that reaches beyond the lifetime of any politizen.

Taken together, these observations suggest that the public cannot be perceived, because its spatial and temporal boundaries are so much bigger than any perceptual experience could present to a subject.

These lines of thought about spatial and temporal extent face the same objection. In general, one does not have to see all the parts to see the whole. I can see that a basketball is on a trajectory upward, even if I don’t see its whole path. So perhaps it is possible to perceptually experience the public by perceiving only some of it at a time.

An important figure in European history had exactly this idea about perceiving the public: Robespierre. Like many others at the end of the 18^th century, Robespierre was deeply concerned with the tension, arising from the democratic ideal of self-governance, between sovereignty and representation. The tension is simple: if leaders rule, what political role is left for the People – that supposed locus of self-governance? But if the People rule, then what political role is left for any leaders?

Robespierre thought this tension could be resolved, at least in part, by a form of popular surveillance of legislators that would take place while they legislate. Legislators should make laws before a big crowd, Robespierre proposed, so that they could palpably sense the presence of those people they are supposed to govern. The effect he sought was moral constraint on the legislators, to hold their temptation to corruption and deceit in check, and encourage their sense of responsibility: “before the eye of the multitude, corruption, intrigue, and deceitfulness would be quashed, responsibility would flourish.”³²

Robespierre had a specific opinion about exactly how many people had to comprise such a crowd, for it to play this role. The Salle du Manége in the Tuileries, where legislators then held their sessions, could seat only three or four hundred people, but Robespierre thought there had to be twelve thousand people for the perceptual presence to have its intended effect. As part of his model of governance, Robespierre seemed to think that popular surveillance would allow legislators to perceive the public, by perceiving a sufficiently large part of it.

Robespierre’s model raises some basic questions. Even if we grant him that the mere presence of people would have the morally purifying effect he describes, why is twelve thousand the number of people needed to have this effect? Why wouldn’t a more effective disincentive to corruption involve just a few dozen journalists, skilled at revealing any transgressions and abuses that powerful people may be trying to hide?

But no matter how these questions are answered, even if Robespierre’s scenario would yield a perceptual experience of the public in this scenario, it’s only a perceptual experience on the part of the legislators. The legislators would experience the whole public by experiencing part of it, because they are in the midst of performing proprietary political roles. Their legislative activity gives the crowd before them the power to symbolize the public. For all Robespierre says, without performing that activity, no such perception of the public would occur. Would the spectators perceptually experience the public, by forming the crowd that the legislators see? What about other members of the public who aren’t in the crowd, but who are observing legislators being watched by the crowd: would they experience themselves as part of the public?

Robespierre doesn’t speak to these questions, as his concern lies with how to stem corruption. But for all he says, the experience of the public he envisions would be limited to the few legislators. Their perceptual situation will not generalize to other people. It therefore does not give us a kind of experience that can play any sort of cultivating or regulating role in the population at large in political society – democratic or otherwise.

Given the limited scope of these perceptions of the public, I don’t want to rest my case against the standard view on Robespierre’s idea that legislators can perceive the public. Instead let’s consider whether other scenes of governance could make it possible for anyone to perceive a whole public, by perceiving a part of it that is exercising political agency.

C. The Town Hall Meeting

Consider a Town Hall meeting, where participants are trying to govern democratically, in accordance with principles of equal liberty and political equality. The fact that such principles are guiding decision-making, let’s suppose, would not be observable to someone lacking the relevant background information about the matters at hand. Could such a Town Hall meeting be perceived by anyone as an episode of democratic governance? And if so, could perceiving such an episode be a way to perceive the public?

To assess whether a meeting could be perceived as an episode of democratic governance, compare friendship. If two people are friends, they can probably perceptually experience one another as friends. Presumably they got to be friends by conversing and sharing projects, interests or activities with one another. They don’t perceive friendship by perceiving any of these friendship-bestowing features. Instead, their perception of friendship draws on prior knowledge that they are friends. In a case where one mistakes a stranger for someone else with whom one is friends, the mere (false) belief helps produce an (illusory) experience of meeting a friend. These considerations suggest that a Town Hall meeting could be perceived as an episode of democratic governance, by someone with adequate background beliefs, thanks to the influence of those beliefs on perceptual experience.

If democratic governance could be perceived in a Town Hall meeting, is it a way of perceiving the public by perceiving its political agency? “This is the public in action,” someone might think, beholding the scene. Can one perceive the whole public, by perceiving the part of it involved in the Town Hall meeting?

There’s reason to think not. As democratic theorists have long observed, political agency in democracy combines formal, centralized, institutionalized procedures of governance, with an informal, open-ended, socially diffuse spaces in which politically relevant opinions are formed and expressed. The centralized procedures are obviously essential, but the socially diffuse component is, too, as it creates the space from which official decisions can be contested. In a democracy, such disagreements with official policy are supposed to be politically relevant. The Town Hall or citizens’ council belongs only to the formal, centralized aspect of democracy.

These observations cast doubt on the proposal that perceiving a Town Hall meeting as an episode of democratic governance could be a way to perceive the whole public. At best, it would be a way to perceive the part of the public involved in the formal aspects of democratic governance.

But here, the basic point about perception re-arises. Since many whole things can be perceived only by perceiving some of the whole at a time, why wouldn’t it be possible to perceive the public, at a moment, by perceiving the part of it engaged in that moment in a formal part of democratic governance – on analogy with seeing a skunk?

In reply, in the case of the skunk, the unseen parts are continuous with the parts that are seen. They are spatially continuous, continuous in color and texture, and part of the same causal unity. By contrast, the formal and the informal parts of democratic governance are discontinuous in all sorts of ways. As Dewey emphasized, democracy can be thought of as both an ethos, and as a type of regime.³³ Whereas political opinions can be formed anywhere and everywhere, and exchanges of political views happen wherever people interact, formal centralized aspects of governance take place in designated places, such as a Town Hall.³⁴

These observations suggest a general challenge to any proposal for perceiving the whole public – the demos – in a democracy. Wholes can be perceived by perceiving parts of them, when and because the parts are continuous with the whole.³⁵ But whereas regimes have dedicated spaces to mark the seat of the formal political power, an ethos is the wrong kind of thing to have a designated space that delimits the scope of its operation. The informal dimensions of the demos are by necessity not linked in any of these ways with the participants in the formal structures of governance. This fundamental discontinuity presents an obstacle to perceiving the demos by perceiving a part of it engaged in formal aspects of governance.

D. The Mob

Like the Dewey-esque argument, our reflections on the Town Hall example leave the standard view looking pretty good. Perceiving the public by perceiving a Town Hall meeting would be a counter-example to the standard view. But on reflection this case turns out not to challenge the standard view at all, since it does not provide a case of perceiving the public.

The most powerful counter-example to the standard view, I’ll argue next, comes from a different type of example: a certain type of large-scale mob. This kind of mob, I’ll argue, gives masses of people in it a perceptual experience of a whole public. The experience is riddled with illusions, but those illusions endow the perceptions with frighteningly powerful political roles. It shows that while there is no metaphysical basis for rejecting the standard view, there is a normative one.

E. Can Perception of the Public Play a Non-Dominating Role or Only a Schmittian One?

The counter-example I’ve presented to the standard view is a perception of the public that both cultivates and relies on the distinction between a rightful public and an anti-public. In principle, that same role could be played by any mode of grasping the public, perceptual or otherwise. We can call it the Schmittian role, since it is defined by the distinction between “friend” and “enemy” (rightful public and the anti-public):

Schmittian role: grasp the public first-personally in ways that cultivate a Schmittian vision of the polity.

We can contrast the Schmittian role with the role of cultivating political relationships consistent with democracy in which co-politizens do not dominate one another politically. Such relationships include political equality among co-politizens, without limitation by any category of an anti-public threatening the existence of the rightful public. We can call the role of cultivating such a vision the non-dominating role.

Non-dominating role: grasp the public first-personally in ways that cultivate democratic politizenship without domination among co-politizens.

If a mental mode of grasping the public plays the non-dominating role, its scope is universal: in principle, any politizen could grasp its public in that way – not just legislators, as in Robespierre’s scheme of popular surveillance, and not just members of a self-proclaimed rightful public. If a mode of grasping the public is available only to some politizens, it would not be as good at cultivating pluralistic democracy as modes that are available more widely. The perceptions afforded by the Schmittian mob are not available to anyone deemed part of the anti-public, and that is by design.

I’ve argued that perceptions of the public can play the Schmittian role. Can they ever play the non-dominating role?

Since this question concerns interpersonal relationships, it brings us to the second way of perceiving the public: interpersonally, by perceiving co-politizens under the mode of presentation “same public as me.”

A. Perceiving Persons As Members of the Same Public As Oneself

To probe whether interpersonal perception can provide a way of grasping the public egocentrically, we can use the following strategy: look for a type of relationship X, such that if it is possible to perceive another person as standing in relationship X to oneself, one can perceive the public by perceiving that relationship.

B. Conclusion

Both examples of perceiving the public are ways to make co-politizenship salient in perception. Co-politizenship is the defining relationship of publics. Without any way to make this relationship salient, a perception of another person or a crowd would not be a perception of a public.

If the contents of perception characterize how the immediate environment seems to the perceiver, we can say the co-politizenship relation is included in the contents of these perceptions. In both examples, co-politizenship enters those contents through a Schmittian structure. In the interpersonal case, from within the perception, someone else can be presented either as belonging to the rightful public or to the anti-public. And in the group case, a mob is presented as personifying the rightful public, mobilized against the anti-public. Here, the felt unity of the mob makes co-politizenship within the group salient and adds a positive valence, while its reason for mobilizing makes co-politizenship with the anti-public salient, and adds a negative valence.

Could anything else besides a Schmittian structure put co-politizenship into the contents of perception?

In the Town Hall example, I gave reasons to think that experiencing the formal aspects of democratic governance could not generate an experience of the public as a whole. It could at best be a perception of co-politizenship with the people participating in formal aspects of governance. In the example of neighbors, I borrowed Rosenblum’s reasons to think that experiencing one another as neighbors is not in general a way to experience one another as co-politizens.

The neighbor relation and the practice of formal democratic governance are only two possible routes to perceiving the public. If these routes fail, that faillure does not by itself show that no other routes are possible. But it may leave you, as it leaves me, suspecting that perception of the public may be doomed to be Schmittian, and that this insight was shared by both Benjamin and democratic theorists who defend the standard view.

Benjamin did not address whether such perceptual manifestations of politics can only occur in fascist political culture; he just highlighted the tendency of fascist political culture to tie politics to visceral experience (a point echoed by Arendt’s remark that the mob is a “caricature of the public”). Allen and Lippman don’t explicitly address whether any public can be perceived; they’re focused on why, in American democracy, the public’s role as a political agent has to be imagined. But taken together, perhaps all three thinkers offer a collective insight about the relationships between politics and perception. Something about democracy precludes the possibility of perceiving democratic politizenship, either interpersonally or as the defining relationship of a whole public; while something about fascism creates the possibility of perceiving the public, either interpersonally or as a whole, at the cost of cruelty and illusion.

Assessing this potential insight would require identifying the relevant dimensions of democracy and fascism. Since there isn’t space to do that here, I’ll end with an observation about the interpersonal way of perceiving the public. Just as one can perceive another person as a friend, thanks to the influence of background beliefs on perception, it is presumably also possible to perceive another person merely as a co-politizen, without relying on any structure of rightful public and anti-public, or partisan and anti-partisan. But if that kind of theory-laden perception reflects the perceiver’s vision of the polity as organized around principles of non-domination, there is no need for it to help establish and maintain them. The crucial question is whether there is a way to perceive the public that cultivates such a vision, without relying on it having already shaped the perception.

Absent any such way to perceive the public, polities that hope to be organized around principles of non-domination may need ways for imagination of their public to approximate the power of perception.