Making Society Public

Dutch society is moving on many different fronts. Politically speaking, there is disunity; the latest election result reflects a fragmented electorate which, one can presume, suggests a population that is socio-culturally divided in as far as the pros and cons of the multicultural society are perceived. The attempts to find a national unity (again), seem to founder on a majority of people who see disadvantages and on the generally low tolerance standards of modern society. The attempts result only in a call for more homogeneity. Judicially speaking, tolerance is decreasing and repression of behaviour which deviates from the norm is increasing. Economically speaking we’ve seen the unruliness of a financial crisis, but also the tendency to take the means of production into one’s own hand on a smaller scale. This implies there are differences in the way that people appreciate their society and these seem to follow the differences in scale by which people value themselves and therefore experience feelings of powerlessness or decisiveness.

It looks as if the treatment of people like mere consumers has ignored an important characteristic of many, namely a desire and capacity to produce and, therefore, be meaningful. Market and government have taken away society’s production by promoting the advantages of expansion of scale. In doing so, they assumed an outsider’s perspective and turned the population literally into – preferably mouldable – masses, but they also presumed that these masses are like a black box that converts stimuli into predictable responses. However, Baudrillard’s warning related to these managerial ambitions and the social sciences that serve as support, consists in that masses only absorb and do not respond; that the masses expand like a black hole as more stimuli are fired at them. Continuing to treat society as masses means that we can bury ‘the social’: if it is all masses, then nothing matters. There is, therefore, a need for a different perspective, one that allows to speak with the people and not on behalf of them and that offers perspectives for action to produce the society according to one’s own capacities.

When we enter the supposed masses we do not just see a homogeneous social matter, but a mix of utopian and dystopian meanings. We see a predilection for the Netherlands as it used to be and this longing is experienced in different ways. On the one hand there is an emphasis on the advantages of the clear organisation and controllability of the olden times; this romantic desire is linked to a culture-pessimistic view on the present and the future. It goes hand in hand with feelings of powerlessness and the shift of responsibility on others. On the other hand there is the emphasis on entrepreneurship, the power of initiative and self-organisation; this activist desire is linked to an optimistic view on the present and the future and it manifests itself in decisiveness and solidarity. The differences in how people put meaning on their society and their role in it are considerable. How to represent an ontologically deeply divided society in a democratic way? We can search for the answer by looking at what the perspectives have in common, which is a different, smaller scale than the nation state to position and manifest oneself in. Recently there has been a renewed increase in attention for what Dewey called the public. A public is a collection of people who have in common that they have all been affected in some way or another by an experience to which existing structures and institutions do not yet have a proper answer (this experience can be the creation of a new public). The public unites to prepare the decision-making process relating to new structures and institutions.

The public deserves a further study of its managerial and researching capacity. That is why in the period from September 2010 until September 2012 attention will be focused on making society public. As shown by the Venn diagram on the left, the research programme Making society public is made up of a number of interlinked activities which we will set out on this website. There are three key definitions that form the basis of these programme lines, namely narrativity, transdisciplinarity and democracy. These definitions share a common concept of the public. The development of the key definitions will be the point of departure for the further implementation of activities in the programme, which naturally does not preclude a change of its actual implementation on the basis of a better understanding.

Under the headers to find, to govern and to mean the outlines of the different programme lines will be sketched for the period from September 2010 to August 2012. A number of principles apply for these programme lines.