Unexpress the Expressible

<p>Art cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that we know in advance. Art is thinking but is not theory. The world’s reality resides in art, and it is inseparable from art’s investigative procedure, which seeks to expose how the forces, the different compounds of elements—material and conceptual—interact in order to produce a certain effect.</p> <p><strong>I. The Realm of the Public</strong></p> <p>The nineteenth-century invention of the constitutional State was an attempt to link the public sphere to an idea of law. It guarantees its citizens certain basic rights—something that amounts to establishing the public sphere by way of identifying the public character of every act of reason. By linking law to rational debate in this way, the idea of the State as a top-down dominating force is abolished.</p> <p>The bourgeois public sphere depends on particular social and economic factors that are unique to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jürgen Habermas borrows the term “civil society” from Hegel to denote the sphere of production and exchange of goods that forms part of the private realm and is distinct from the State. Hence, civil society is essentially the economy: it operates according to its own laws but is able to represent its interests to the State through the public sphere, whose lifeblood it purports to be. Actions that were part of the private, of the <em>oikos</em>—the house— started to be part of the public domain as activities formerly confined to the household framework emerged into the public sphere; the economic activity of the civil society was oriented toward the public commodity market, and hence both internal and external to the State…</p>