Bonnie Honig’s new book takes up an important question: How can spaces and objects bind collective identity, given that they are themselves sites of contestation and disagreement? As Honig points out, one community’s public thing may be experienced as a marker of dispossession and exclusion by another. For example, Stanley Park in Vancouver is celebrated by many Canadians as an exemplary public space, but few park users know that aboriginal inhabitants living on the site were displaced to create the park. It is one of the many virtues of Public Things that Honig places this dilemma at the heart of her analysis. Democratic citizens are bound together by care for common things, but our affective attachment is also a source of division. The author is cautiously optimistic that even the struggles over the meaning of public things can themselves be a binding force, as citizens work together through the painful process of remaking them and creating a shared world.

The book is composed of three talks that were prepared for “The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society.” The first, entitled “Democracy’s Necessary Conditions,” emphasizes that public things have the power to reenchant and, sometimes miraculously, to break the grip of divisive tensions, thereby making it possible to rework them rather than ignore or escape them. The second lecture examines Hannah Arendt’s analysis of homo faber in The Human Condition (1958). This is paired with a discussion of D. W Winnicott’s object relations theory, which highlights the importance of transitional objects and holding environments. The final lecture shifts focus from world building to catastrophe. Pairing Jonathan Lear’s seminal text Radical Hope (2008) with Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Honig juxtaposes two different responses to the threat of the dissolution of the world.

Public Things is, in part, a critique of the logic of neoliberalism and the politics of privatization, but it is an unusually subtle and complex critique. One goal of the work is to highlight the way that material objects can foster stability, attachment, and care of the world. Honig argues that the ethos of democracy requires that we mobilize such attachment as part of a political strategy to combat neoliberalism. What are public things? Honig eschews a definition in favor of an interlinked series of examples, including pay phones in New York City (p. 29), the Ghost Dance of the Sioux (p. 70), Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial (p. 85), and the skeletal tepee constructed by the characters facing annihilation in Melancholia (p. 75). Viewed through the lens of Honig’s text, we see these objects in new ways. In a time of crisis such as Hurricane Sandy, the pay phone is no longer a ruin or relic but, rather, crucial infrastructure that ensures accessible communication to everyone.

This slim book engages the reader in reflection about a series of important questions. The first one is the meaning of “true publicness” (p. 28). At times, Honig treats the publicness of a thing as a formal quality. It is the infrastructure that connects unrelated people. She notes that both an oil pipeline and a river, a school and a prison, are public things, and this reminds us that they can be sources not only of solidarity but also of division, exclusion, and control. At other times, however, publicness takes on a normative connotation connected with inclusivity and equality. Central Park in New York is offered, in passing, as an example of one of the “best” public things because “everyone wants to be a part of it,” but Central Park could also be read as an emblematic neoliberal space (p. 25). Since the 1960s, the portion of the city budget devoted to parks has been cut by two-thirds. Marquee parks such as Central Park were unaffected because their upkeep was funded by large donations to the private park conservancy, while neighborhood parks in the outer boroughs fell into disrepair.

This debate about park equity, however, is entirely consistent with Honig’s approach. It is this combination of words and things that make spaces democratic. She explores the enchanted quality of things, but ultimately it is the making of a shared world, the work of homo faber, that is central to her analysis. The author emphasizes the importance of world building and “the democratic desire to constellate affectively around shared objects.” She draws on Arendt, but also acknowledges that for Arendt, action is unmediated by objects (p. 54).

I read this book in the midst of the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, and these events highlighted the contentious side of public things like the Confederate statutes and flags that are still prominent in the South. It made me wonder whether all contestations over the meaning of public space can be characterized as democratic and, if not, how to respond to those that seem to be antidemocratic. While the book does not directly address this question, it does shed light on another, related one. The discussion of transitional objects in the second lecture helped me understand why a statue could become the object of such passionate attachment. According to Winnicott, children transfer attachment to an object like a “blankie” because it enables them to exercise control that they do not have over their mothers. Imbuing the object with the capacity to comfort is a creative act, but this psychic investment means that the loss of the object causes a loss of self. For Winnicott, objects are supposed to stabilize the world, and therefore it is not surprising that their removal could unleash rage. This account is helpful but must be supplemented by separate arguments about which public things must be removed or replaced, despite—or perhaps because of—the way they stabilize identity. Moreover, transitional objects work because each child decides when the “blankie” is no longer needed, but democratic societies must decide collectively. For the minority who remain attached to these things, this can be a traumatic loss.

The discussion of the connection between objects and fantasy is illuminating, but the second main concept drawn from object-relations theory, “holding environment,” remains somewhat underspecified. For Winnicott, it is a space of loving care provided by the mother that allows for security and healthy attachment. Honig uses this concept in conjunction with Lear’s account of precontact indigenous society and the shelter created by the two sisters and child in Melancholia, but it is up to the reader to consider how these models help us build democratic holding environments. Honig is right when she argues that the collective project of fabrication is more promising than the more individualist “radical hope” (p. 82), celebrated by Lear. Yet it is also more difficult.

Honig alerts us to the difficulty in the intriguing preface to the book. She describes her microresistance to the security apparatus at the airport, and juxtaposes two forms of opting out: the performative refusal to go through the radiative machine and the work-around, which allows privileged people to get preclearance and avoid the more intrusive aspects of airport security. People in this latter category are the “real opt-outs” (p. xii) who demand and benefit from the differential operation of public infrastructure. Why do they opt out and what is to be done? We could ban, discourage, or forgo the separate and unequal alternatives, starting with the most important public things: schools and health care. The harder question is why so many people who are passionate believers in public things are also so quick to opt out. One possibility is that the enchantment of public things comes less from the material objects themselves and more from the psychic reconciliation they secure. They make it possible to enjoy privilege in practice and disavow it in fantasy. Or maybe the answer is simpler. Advancing social justice through democratic politics is hard work and often unsuccessful. Opting out is easier; it secures self-interest and enables a type of control that is impossible in collective action. The psychoanalytic approach adds depth and complexity, allowing us to see how public things may be both desired and destroyed.