Hybrid logics of public space


The new spatial logics interfere with a crisis of the public sphere. These crisis is manifested by the extraterritorial detention camps, by the sweat shops fragmented from the information streams, by the transfer of political decisions of parliaments into the zones of economic interests of transnational organisations and by the systematic out-fadings and distortions of the contexts of migrant workers.

Boris Buden:
Public space as translation process
excerpt:

Within this crisis of public sphere the idea of a public space has also been transformed. Public space no longer occupies a central position within society. Within the global economic and cultural translation of public sphere and the missing of social movements on a transnational level, public space loses its autonomous political status. It disappears as an independent political factor being swallowed by an enlarged sphere of media and culture, which has become the site of political change. It is now the so-called third space, which plays the political and social role of public space in a completely different way. The third space is the space of hybridity, the space of - as Homi Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture - subversion, transgression, blasphemy, heresy etc. He believes that hybridity - and cultural translation, which he regards as a synonym for hybridity - is in itself politically subversive.