Bowling Together?: Resurrecting the "Public" in Modern America

How sustainable is public culture in a society as pluralistic as the United States? Can diversity and collective values be reconciled? What insights can academics contribute to understanding the structure of culture? A great variety of scholars in many different disciplines have sought to provide answers to these questions, but they often appear walled off from one another, bound by separate methodologies, theories, and other discipline-specific boundaries that unwittingly reflect the postmodern society that appears to define America today. Practitioners in newer fields of study often seek to bridge these intellectual divides, and perhaps none are better equipped to do so than scholars of American Studies. It was in this spirit that Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States was conceived as a book project, explains its editor, Marguerite Shaffer. The essays in this book, which were originally presented as conference papers at an American Studies symposium hosted by the University of Miami-Ohio, where Shaffer teaches, examine the myriad ways Americans come together in the "complicated and conflicted process of negotiating new forms of belonging in a diverse society" (p. xiv). Most of the essay authors are historians, but others include sociologists, cultural theorists, and political scientists. Collectively, they seek to not only study public culture but to redefine it in light of modern American history. Prudently divided into four sections that examine broad variations of the "public"—action, image, space, and identity—the essays largely succeed; in its totality, this book is an excellent dissection of the tension between common experience and societal plurality.

Mary Kupiec Cayton's introductory essay usefully reviews disparate theories of how public culture is framed in the United States. She correctly argues that, since American public discourse ostensibly values "freedom," "justice" and "equality," those values are often assumed to be predominant (but do not necessarily coalesce) in the public sphere. In fact, because American political rhetoric is rooted in classical liberal notions of property rights and individual liberties, the very notion of shared public values is fraught with limitations. Classical liberalism also assumes active citizens engaging in the public sphere on relatively equal terms; in such a world, a wall between "private" and "public" exists to shield citizens and guarantee individual rights. Marxist theory, obviously, holds the opposite—that since class relations are primary and inequality is embedded in any system, such a wall between public and private is an illusion. As many neo-Marxists have observed, culture is thus merely another way of legitimizing economic power. Postmodernists, however, observe multiple "publics" that have, at varying times, opened up political space for marginalized groups. Cayton's lucid narration of cultural theory in the public realm ends with an interesting observation: that many subcultures that exist are not at all political, but can be catalyzed into public action by a specific event. Explaining the worlds we live in is important, Cayton notes, but knowing "when and how to intervene, and when necessary, to change" the worlds we live in is equally important (p. 25). By these standards, theoretical models are insufficient.

Generally, the essays that follow are not directly driven by the models Cayton outlines, but they engage them subtly. Physical spaces engage the public in a myriad of ways over time, as the next two essays remind us. Mary Ryan's examination of the evolution of Los Angeles Plaza over several hundred years provides valuable insights into how physical objects symbolize different "publics" over time. Los Angeles Plaza originated as a central market for the Spanish settlement there. In the city's early days, it served as an outpost of the Spanish Empire; later in the early Mexican nation-state, it served as a "centering public landscape" of economic activity. Even after California became an American state, Los Angeles Plaza was the commercial center of a city that was, throughout the mid-nineteenth century, at its "zenith of diversity." As Los Angles grew and Anglos...