Rethinking the public sphere: The constitutional state and the ACT group’s political aesthetics of affirmation in Armenia

The notion of the public sphere, as elaborated in western European and Anglo-American academic discourses, has been largely associated with the emergence of liberalism and civil society. Even those theories that critique Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere for its ignorance of the politics of exclusion and inclusion, nevertheless rely on the notion of the public sphere as an arena in which identity finds representation: the public sphere here is constituted as a battleground for recognition and representation of identities within the already established structures of legitimization. Developed in radically different circumstances from those of western Europe and North America, in countries where state socialism prevailed, the notion of the public sphere calls for a different conception and identification with the state. By questioning the notion and its conceptualization in a post-Soviet context, this article discusses the practices of the group ACT in Armenia in 1994–96 and the ways in which these practices construct a public sphere not by transgressive acts of refusal and criticality but through the affirmation of the existing state. ACT’s practice calls for a different mechanism of identification of the public sphere with the state than that applied in western democracies. The article situates the discussion of artistic practices of the conceptual artist’s group ACT within the discourses of the newly instituted state after the independence of 1991, in order to articulate a notion of the public sphere developed outside of the formation of the bourgeois notion of the public sphere in representative democracies in the former West.