individualisation

nat muller <[email protected]>wrote:
After the age of individualisation, now the 'public' seems to be the
focus of attention. In the first weekend of September (2006), De Balie,
centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam, will explore the new
forms of public culture, which we think we see emerging in all kinds of
unlikely places around us - primarily by asking questions such as:
Where are the new forms of public discourse and debate? Is a new shape
of the 'public' without movements emerging? How does such a thing work?
How important are the new forms of knowledge sharing such as Wikipedia
and the various digital commons? How sustainable are they? How to
handle public fear and the obsession for public safety and
hyper-surveillance? How can we utilise public space in novel ways as a
space of encounter and surprise, rather than an extended shopping mall
(beyond 'reclaim the streets')?
The challenge is to go beyond the eternal lamentations of the decline
and fall of the 'public" (public space / public man / public culture).
Merely offering a critique is not enough. The critique needs to be
updated and nuanced, public culture needs to be reinvented!

There is such a thing as society!

The 1990s are sometimes described as the era without social movements.
In-between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crash of Nasdaq many
residents of Western countries lived in a happy illusion that
liberalism and democracy had achieved their final victory (the illusion
of the 'End of History'). With this triumph public culture seemed a
redundant anachronistic notion henceforth. However, recent events have
shown that public culture is remarkably alive - from the World Social
Fora, to the mass mobilisation against the CPE-labour laws in France
and the on-going precarity debate, to the cultures of information and
knowledge sharing of the digital commons in their various guises. The
era without (the necessity) of social movements appears to be over, but
the new social formations are unfamiliar, heterogeneous, puzzling,
contradictory, in need of clarification…

The Public Desire is a kaleidoscopic weekend program full of debates,
conversations, performances, interventions, public cinema, art projects
and discussions about old and new forms of public culture.
MANIK wrote:
This form of 'social' re-investigation and re-questioning serve for their '=
moderators'and 'curators'
to get some money and good reference in their CV.Otherwise all those elepha=
nt shit 'Projects' are boring,put on wrong and exceed premise,lost in space=
between personal ignorance and hypocrisy…We wonder how this people manag=
e to be folly in every segment of their text?