Re-Imagining Public Space: The Frankfurt School in the 21st Century [Hardcover]

Public space, both literally and figuratively, is foundationally important to political life. From Socratic lectures in the public forum, to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, public spaces have long played host to political discussion and protest. The book provides a direct assessment of the role that public space plays in political life.Foreword: Stephen Eric Bronner 1. Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy; Douglas Kellner 2. Reflections on the Meaning and Experience of Public Space: A Critical Psychoanalytic Perspective; Michael Diamond 3. The Public Sphere as Site of Emancipation and Enlightenment: A Discourse Theoretic Critique of Digital Communication; David Ingram & Asaf Bar-Tura 4. Walter Benjamin and the Modern Parisian Cityscape; Mary Caputi 5. Critical Spaces: Pubilc Spaces, the Culture Industry, Critical Theory, and Urbanism; Malcolm Miles 6. Idealizing Public Space: Arendt, Wolin, and the Frankfurt School; C. Fred Alford 7. Spatial Form and the Pathologies of Public Reason: Toward a Critical Theory of Space; Michael J. Thompson 8. Adorno and the Global Public Sphere: Rethinking Globalization and the Cosmopolitan Condition of Politics; Lars Rensmann 9. The Carnivalization of the Public Sphere; Lauren Langman 10. #OccupytheEstablishment: The Commodification of a "New Sustainability" for Public Space and Public Life; Diana Boros & Haley Smith

Reclaiming the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, this volume breathes new life into the now familiar debate over the privatization, commodification, and commercialization of democratic public space. The essays vividly capture the late modern predicament of a culture that is being entertained to death while its already greatly attenuated spaces for practices of collective critique vanish. The authors show that there is no easy solution, but that there are still genuinely insightful ways of grasping and addressing the problem. Linda Zerilli, University of Chicago, USl#7