The public multiple: community organizing and fractal politics in East London

Abstract

Politics requires collective deliberation, but what happens when people cannot agree on how to deliberate? Anthropologists and other social scientists have urged us to look beyond the hegemonic liberal ideal of public reason, in order to recognize a plurality of publics, each held together by distinctive forms of reason. Yet, the more this plurality comes to the fore, the more we are confronted with questions of how publics might connect and deliberate across their differences. This article draws on work with community organizers in East London, who work with a diverse range of local institutions – from churches to schools to mosques. It traces how organizers respond to the ‘constitutive exclusions’ that delimit different publics. In dialogue with the work of Hannah Arendt – which enables us to recognize the possibilities and limits of different sorts of publics – it explores how community organizers draw together different, incommensurable publics without collapsing these into one another. Working across different communities and collectives, community organizers weave a wider ‘fractal public’, by positioning different publics as emerging out of and dependent on one another. In doing so, they offer a different model for how we might address political and intellectual dilemmas that implicate diverse worlds, publics, and forms of reason, but nonetheless require collective answers.