The Western tradition suggests that in order to become public, one has to leave the private behind – the private being gender, race, economic position, or affect. For centuries, we believed in the idea of noble participation in the public sphere. The notion of »becoming public« offers hope and debate, openness and dialogue, perhaps with some slight anxiety concerning the excluded, but nothing more. Our culture has been dominated by the self-love of white, privileged men disguised as »autonomy,« »subject,« or even »community.« Anger, love, and fear were supposed to wait at the door to politics, behind which detached, disembodied judgement would be built. This still happens in some music halls and concerts. Now anger, love, and fear will be here, in your face.

From the perspectives of exclusion and marginalisation, becoming public is a process of combating racism, misogyny, exclusions, and pain. It means fighting for your life and the lives of others, and it often means losing that fight. Think of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stephen Biko – all those who, instead of becoming a part of the public sphere, ended up as »public enemies.« Becoming public also means making certain bodies public – those which for centuries had only strictly limited access to visibility. »[T]he persecution of witches can be interpreted as a war between expert knowledge and the non-professional knowledge of the multitude, a war between white patriarchal power and narcosexual knowledge as it was traditionally practiced by women, colonized peoples, and non-authorised sorcerers,«2 says Paul Preciado, and he wonders about the technobodies beyond such powers and knowledge. Can we have our anger, love, and fear? The sex wars of all times have very much been about that as well – about the embodiment of the multitude and exclusion from the public.

Many have argued that parallel to the history of the European public sphere, there grows a history of counterpublics which combines those who are allowed to recompose the visible and speak, and those who are brutally stopped in their efforts to do so: counterpublics, which – as Kluge and Negt suggested5 – grow in opposition to the bourgeois public sphere and express the dissident politics of the excluded. Anger, love, and fear are all culturally produced. They fuel the experience of the oppressed as they attempt to become public.

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While translating a book by the black feminist and activist bell hooks6 into Polish, I was teaching at the Gender Studies programme in Warsaw and in Krakow. In both cities, my students and all other people I spoke with were excited about her approach to feminism, to race and racism, to class. The ways in which she builds her movement are permeated with hope, which is so absent in many other black feminist theories, and include vital links to film, hip hop, and fashion as they are seen from the margins. So blunt. But here is a funny fact: her theory works. It allows resistance to the neoliberal exclusions and exploitations, and it allows the multitude to speak regardless of their status, colour, gender, or sexuality. It creates a space for solidarity and provides the powerless with power, as the Czech dissident and writer Vaclav Havel would probably say. Openly staging the perspective of the margin in the epistemology, she questions the perspective of the centre while at the same time amplifying its weaknesses. The excluded sees it all; the centre is a partial perspective. Does a practice of solidarity mean the end of anger, love, and fear? No, it only builds space for experience in which the public is always in opposition, like a sparkle surrounded by the dark sky.

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It is crucial to define what it actually means to say no. Is it, like Jean Paul Sartre used to think, the work of imagination that makes the whole world disappear to create something new? Or is it refusing to stop before entering the waters of the Mediterranean Sea to get to Europe? Is it an act of disobedience, like when Rosa Parks refused to stand on a racially segregated bus? Or is it organising and responding with violent fights against white supremacy? Is it having a dream? Or a non-violent movement? Is it what the Polish women just did with their #blackprotest and Women's Strike, forced, by the fundamentalist politicians of Poland’s current government, to fight for our basic rights?

The public sphere supposedly constitutes an opposition to the ruling power. How could its participants possibly say no when they are the same kind of subjects as those in the government – white, privileged men? What would that »no« actually mean? Counterpublics are built on a different principle – that the hegemonic division between the public and private is overturned. They therefore allow all those deprived of autonomy – the precarious, feminists, queers, people of colour, refugees – to speak. With their anger, love, and fear.

The discourse of the subaltern, of the streets, of counterpublics formed of any kind of excluded and neglected groups and populations, can obviously be articulated. Muteness is just one other prejudice, another layer of dissimulation. »Counterpublics« was a concept introduced to speak about those forming political discourse in factories, as an element of their class struggle. How does this practice differ from industrial sound experiments that wade their way into concert halls? The »private« sounds, disorganised noises of the everyday, the voices of affect, have for a long time been excluded from public performances and sound production. After the explosion of jazz, they re-entered the concert halls and the musical canon, despite the outraged voices of most privileged, white authorities. They still do, with some anger, love, and fear. Because little girls still point at their mothers’ scars, as in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye,10 demanding an impossible explanation. Because »the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire« and not much has changed since the first publication of Das Kapital.

The anger, love, and fear are what fuel non-linear narratives – those which bend and break, split and unify again, those that are repeatedly corrected by immigration officers, those that demand a straight story in offices, at borders, at police stations and in the courts. Gloria Anzaldua always responded to those allegations with a mix of anger and laughter: »Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.«11 In many ways this stands for a statement of all those whose life practice is always about metisaje – a hybrid dance of ever-partial identification with the oppressed and the oppressors, the conquering and the conquered, the Autonomous Subject and its Precarised Others. Anger, love, and fear become fury and rage in times of indignation and defence. What happens when colonial heritage is recalled? Anger, love, and fear.

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CTM is a festival, a vital point on the cultural map not only in Germany, but also in Europe and world. In its best moments it builds bridges between independent cultures globally, between centre and peripheries, between the commercial and the non-profit. It has acquired a special place precisely due to a combination of purposes and methods which follow an intuitive script of non-conformity and at the same time try to reshape the public. Becoming public in the context of CTM is a performative struggle for a togetherness, a communality, which in times of the domination of neoliberal orientation towards profit enforces a vigilant position between market forces, cultural canon, and all the expressions of »non« – the refusals, margins, exclusions.

Can a cultural festival become a space for affective counterpublics of the subaltern, with our love, anxiety, and anger? Perhaps it can offer a set of inspirations for such a space and the process needed to create it. Or, more concretely, it could be a tryout space, a zone for the »practice of being many,« as depicted by Sibylle Peters in Truth is Concrete,12 an assemblage of the multitude to explore its own anger, love, and fear. Can the confrontation with artists and the sounds they produce become an element of counterpublics which – while reacting to today’s microfascisms – explore the multiplication of experiences and exchanges provided by the contemporary plethora of images and sounds? I believe it can become not merely a public experience, but a counterpublics of the multitude where the politics of affect and experience overcome subalternity. It definitely has many reasons not to be a detached and alienated public. It is too emotional, too passionate, and too involved for that.