Ontology problem. Can "interinstitutionality" (by analogy to "intersubjectivity") be considered the same as "public"?
Contrast: "Californians believe in climate change and renewables" (intersubjectivity as communal subjectivity) "The average Californian wants renewable power and supports neighbors who do" (avoid reifying the collective "community")
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The ontological question is whether the linguistic reduction of a reified construction to a non-reified one loses something. This is quite hard to analyze. In general, the answer is that it does (apply a Ship of Theseus type replacement of elements argument to the collective).
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Now to the original question, the "public" is generally understood as some sort of aggregated mass of humans outside of a specific institutional context. They are being extra-institutionally human. Not even citizens (that's an institutional role involved in voting for example)
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So to ask if "public" can be reduced to "inter-institutionality" is to ask if so-called public behaviors are in fact reducible to a union of institutional behaviors. Ie explainable by combining all institutional roles (worker, citizen, neighborhood dweller, family person)
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The strongest counterargument I've heard is Corey Robin's idea that publics are created by intellectuals. They are effectively "audiences for specific arguments/narratives/discourses". But this has the weakness of being too partial a characterization
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End of conversation
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