In the coffee houses of London in the 18th century anyone, from any social background, could speak to anyone else, from any social background, and be heard! The discourses were ones of business and philosophy.
Richard Sennett in his "you must read" Fall of Public Man, says of this phenomenon:
Haggling and its attendant rituals are the most ordinary instances of everyday theatre in a city, and of the public man as actor. (pp 141, 142)
Man as actor was to be supplanted by the new modern individual!
Speech is a sign.
In echoland we might say to a stranger, “speak! That I may see you!”
Silence in the gallery, silence during the performance, is an aspect of the way the arts have been moved from diverse kinds of public space to “inside” the body of the audience, a private experience, bound to the spectacle and its duration through a passive but intense observation, the outward hidden by appearances, invisible and unshareable to the rest of the group. The climax of the modern drama, according to Brecht, may indeed take place among the individuals making up an audience, as opposed to on the stage with the actors, but in the early 18th century privileges for audience included occupying seating on the stage, at an extra cost, and provide such audience members with the proximity and opportunity to spontaneously require actors to make their “point”, and sometimes repeatedly, as an “encore”!
Thinking about spaces and the publicness we are seeking to instigate, one of the significant aspects of the public dimension of the activities we are consciously fostering are the kinds of place we have ended up choosing, or the opportunities and logistics that determine where they have taken place.
These include the Out of the Bluecoat retail premises functioning as temporary venues, side rooms of museums, a conference room, gallery spaces with or without exhibition, lobby spaces, street café, street kiosk, and expo pavilion.
Using the available technology is part of the determinate context, but there is also a sense in which these places are locations that have a quality of being on the street, in-between the street and some other connected space, at least in our thinking and conversation, that is more formally identified as a place of cultural meaning, for instance a performance space, a cinema, a gallery, a theatre or concert hall.
Where WIFI operates creates a pool of communication potentials, in some ways reminiscent of the 18th century coffeehouses in London and Paris.
In Sennett’s Fall of Public Man he discusses examples of speech as a sign in a section of a chapter called ‘Public Roles’. His view of the London coffeehouse is that they were part of the bridge that this system of speech allowed between stage and street:
In and out? Private and public?
The social networking sites play on the narcissism of in-crowd dynamics, so, in the contrasting scope of other possibilities, operating in real places, actual and virtual geographies, opens up into the dynamics of a “maybe” out-crowd.
Speech is a sign.
In echoland we might say to a stranger, “speak! That I may see you!”
Silence in the gallery, silence during the performance, is an aspect of the way the arts have been moved from diverse kinds of public space to “inside” the body of the audience, a private experience, bound to the spectacle and its duration through a passive but intense observation, the outward hidden by appearances, invisible and unshareable to the rest of the group. The climax of the modern drama, according to Brecht, may indeed take place among the individuals making up an audience, as opposed to on the stage with the actors, but in the early 18th century privileges for audience included occupying seating on the stage, at an extra cost, and provide such audience members with the proximity and opportunity to spontaneously require actors to make their “point”, and sometimes repeatedly, as an “encore”!
Thinking about spaces and the publicness we are seeking to instigate, one of the significant aspects of the public dimension of the activities we are consciously fostering are the kinds of place we have ended up choosing, or the opportunities and logistics that determine where they have taken place.
These include the Out of the Bluecoat retail premises functioning as temporary venues, side rooms of museums, a conference room, gallery spaces with or without exhibition, lobby spaces, street café, street kiosk, and expo pavilion.
Using the available technology is part of the determinate context, but there is also a sense in which these places are locations that have a quality of being on the street, in-between the street and some other connected space, at least in our thinking and conversation, that is more formally identified as a place of cultural meaning, for instance a performance space, a cinema, a gallery, a theatre or concert hall.
Where WIFI operates creates a pool of communication potentials, in some ways reminiscent of the 18th century coffeehouses in London and Paris.
In Sennett’s Fall of Public Man he discusses examples of speech as a sign in a section of a chapter called ‘Public Roles’. His view of the London coffeehouse is that they were part of the bridge that this system of speech allowed between stage and street:
The urban institution in which this system of spoken signs ruled was the coffeehouse of the early 18th Century. (Sennett 1986 p 80)This was essentially fictional space, a place where it was possible to pretend that social divisions were surmountable, in order that information could flow freely. The clubs of the later 18th century, where like minds associated, were closed cliques that eroded this open source environment, and where conversation became dull in comparison.
They were, he says “the prime information centres in both cities at this time.” Not only were these places used for reading the newspapers, they published newspapers, became centres of information sensitive business activities, as in Lloyds of London insurance, and as such “were places in which speech flourished”.
“and the talk was governed by a cardinal rule in order for information to be as full as possible, distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the coffeehouse had a right to talk to anyone else, to enter into any conversation, whether he knew the other people or not, whether he was bidden to speak or not.” (Sennett 1986 p 81)
In and out? Private and public?
The social networking sites play on the narcissism of in-crowd dynamics, so, in the contrasting scope of other possibilities, operating in real places, actual and virtual geographies, opens up into the dynamics of a “maybe” out-crowd.
