The Dancer from the Dance: Images and Imaginaries

Public space is not a metaphor. The long history of writing about it has always had a strikingly material dimension. This is obviously true when it comes to the ancient Greeks. For Socrates and then for Aristotle, the agora was not merely a metaphor for public life but the very moment and condition of its exercise. The same is true of the Roman forum. For Hannah Arendt, public space maintains this crucial connection to the embodied presence of public life. One might even say that the space itself summons and gathers a public as much as publics demand and institute spaces.2 When Arendt emphasises the political importance of “the space of appearance” she means a real space and the actual corporeal appearance of human beings in it.3