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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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It should feel wrong in that sense... I'm trying to question whether the idea of commonwealth has any real substance, or it's a construct like "god" that (speaking as an atheist) fails to exhibit any consequential agency outside of people's self-fulfilling belief in it
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It is real :-) see Magna Carta book the article refers to. And commonwealth includes the biosphere and the universal systems that got us here tweeting with each other! Gods in contrast are theoretical constructs - being alive is authentic!
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I'm not contesting that there is real stuff there. I'm arguing that if you take out all bits that are accounted for explicitly in institutional realities (for eg, books and documents by publishing institutions and our roles within them as readers/writers) there's nothing left
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And where is your concept of artificial from? Books universities etc are prostheses like otter dams and birds nests and octopi behaviours. All equally real.
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Consider a dead culture/language whose living speakers have disappeared. It's not cryptic, but only dead language scholars can interpret it. Would you call that a public? What if enough scholars emerge and start larping that dead civilization back to zombie life?