The public sphere is increasingly organised along fragmentary lines. In the realm of art too a division into partly overlapping and partly diverging partial publics has long taken the place of an all-encompassing public sphere. Frequently involuntary limitations prevent a certain threshold of attention from being crossed, yet frequently too self-selecting circles form and seek their target audience in certain highly specific particular interest groups. The phenomenon of a »secret public« assumes a special status in this context, with a broadly-defined range extending from self-organised participatory fora to forms of clandestine community. »Secret Publics« focuses on the diverse manifestations of these kinds of minority partial and counter-publics, which – of necessity or intentionally – operate beneath the general threshold of perception.
Sharon Daniel took one of these involuntary »secret publics« as the target of her activist approach: female prison inmates in the USA not only constitute an increasingly large group in the population but are stripped of any kind of public platform due to their legal status. This already gives a hint of the more general problem of so-called »subaltern« or minority sections of the population, whose scope for self-articulation is either radically constrained or does not correspond to the prevailing rules of discourse. An interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the main players in the Indian subaltern studies group, reviews the genesis of this research and theory approach and subsequently considers the possibilities of strategic universalism – a theoretical framework not based on Eurocentric foundations. A new form of universalism, which in addition is strikingly »affirmationist«, is represented by French philosopher Alain Badiou, who transposes his most recent ponderings on the topic of Hans-Christian Dany to the revolts of young people in the Paris suburbs. Here too a kind of secret society has taken shape, which politicians across the political spectrum have sworn cannot be accommodated within Western value systems.
Artistic approaches that primarily operate in »secret« are analysed by Cédric Vincent, who considers the implications of fake strategies through the prism of a South African project, and also by Christina Töpfer, who addresses interventions in a shrinking public space – popular in particular in the USA. Further short features are devoted to tactics of self-organization in the art realm, for example the Johannesburg Market Photo Workshop, or user-initiated Internet experiments such as the Department of Reading, which explores modes of dialogue-based discourse production in semi-virtual spaces. An overview of newly created non-mainstream spaces in Vienna maps the real spatial and organisational circumstances governing the creation of an art public »from the bottom up« today.