In short, the public sphere in contemporary democracies of the West requires broader and more complicated views, which presuppose cultural diversities, ethnic minorities, linguistic multiplicities, and social inequalities always already at work in spaces between people. Fraser subsequently argues for a “subaltern counterpublic” to act as “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” as well as “training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics.”
Counterpublics and subaltern counterpublics move us toward a public sphere in which “speech and action” must contend not only with the matters of the common world, but equally and brutally with the mechanisms that often complicate or undermine such a world. In short, political life is directed not only at particular issues or topics, but at the increasingly tensed structures and infrastructures by which people are able to gather, to be seen and heard, and which always contain hidden agendas, secret techniques of capture, forces of prejudice, strangers and agents of policing.
In short, what forms might being political take today when the power of people is contorted by operations and systems that are mostly never apparent or exposed, that are safeguarded behind racist and sexist mechanisms, that rely upon vague and volatile market forces, and that actively withdraw into secret arrangements and fluid networks, except in those instances when individuals make transparent, through acts of insurrection, the troubling work of governmental, militaristic or corporate agencies?
LaBelle, B. (2018) Sonic agency: Sound and emergent forms of resistance. 1st edn. Cambridge: Goldsmiths, University of London.