'Match nous a raconté une histoire': Thinking with Roland Barthes about Photography, Publics and the Exercise of Power in Post-war France

In its classic formulation by Jürgen Habermas, the central function of the public sphere in liberal democracies is to be a space of debate and contestation. As Habermas puts it, the public sphere is where citizens ‘confer in an unrestricted fashion’; and, we might add, participation in the public sphere constitutes private individuals as citizens. Moreover, as citizens, their role is to hold the state to account by performing ‘the tasks of criticism and control which a public body of citizens informally … practices vis-à-vis the ruling structure organized in the form of a state’. Michel Foucault pursued the relationship between civil society and the state in his lectures at the Collège de France in the mid-1970s. Foucault argued that the emergence of civil society is an effect, or more strongly, a necessary product, of the practice of power by the state.