The Awfulness of "The Public Square"

 I believe it was Num Skole who first debased a perfectly straightforward (if not to everyone's taste) concept, well worked out, called "the public sphere," by calling it "the public square." 

(Num Skole is my anagram of a well known very irritating person.) 

You've lost a dimension there, pal, in more ways than one. 

So when I read this in The Guardian: 

"Skye Perryman and her progressive coalition are preparing to fight in court and in the public square against Project 2025 and other foes"

I don't want to read further. 

The degradation of a philosophical concept to a pseudo-empirical image of a town square is ... really depressing. 

And town squares very much what we don't have, with people yelling insults at one another at light speed without consequence. 

Of course I was never ever so fond of the "public sphere" theory, preferring to use less geometrically hierarchical terms such as milieu. Squares have a front and a back and a center and edges; I guess spheres just have centers and edges so they're up on the deal but whatever. 

One Foucault scholar I remember mistook a translation of "milieu" as "sphere" as a Foucauldian Deep Thing about the geometry of social space, with predictably meaningless results. It was to say the least disillusioning to fact check the original French, live, while they were speaking. 

Suffice it to say, I really hate "public square." It's right up there with "deliverables."