Along with several other texts in this volume (for example, Chapters Two, Eight and Nine), this chapter1 explores the processual character of publicness. More specifically, it is concerned with the question of heterogeneity and how potentials for change can unfold through interactions of heterogeneous actors and kinds of engagement. My focus is on the dynamics of becoming that unfold underneath and within the antagonistic oppositions and contradictions making up perceivable positions of difference. Such becomings, I argue, are capable of assembling positions of difference in new ways, thereby creating ever-new paradoxical surfaces on which antagonisms, contradictions and new worldings take shape. It is, then, precisely the emergence of paradoxes and paradoxical constellations that may indicate intensely generative dynamics underpinning what Gabay (in Chapter Nine) calls ‘public becoming’.

In developing this argument around paradoxical publicness, the chapter picks up discussions by writers such as Brouwer (2001), Fraser (1992, 1997), Warner (2002) and Young (1990, 2001) that have developed further, and moved beyond, Jürgen Habermas's (1989) conception of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. These authors are concerned with the possibilities of political world making, in particular that of marginalised actors. They ask how it is possible to think publics and their potential for social change beyond the limited notion of an exclusive bourgeois sphere governed by the ideal of rational deliberation alone, which renders masculinist, heteronormative and class-related domination transparent. Nancy Fraser (1997), for example, argues that Habermas fails to consider the functionality the bourgeois public sphere has had in establishing gender- and class-related hierarchies (see also Young, 1990). Furthermore, she calls attention to ‘other, nonliberal, nonbourgeois, competing public spheres’, suggesting a notion of ‘counterpublics’ (Fraser, 1997, p 74). In a similar vein, Michael Warner (2002) contends that dominant publics that gain agency in relation to the state by means of rational deliberative discourse have been contested by counterpublics that mobilise a range of disobedient, affective and queer forms of engagement.

In these discussions around publics, the question of heterogeneity has been raised in novel ways.