Public contestation enables GH to develop 2 further dimensions along the social/political axis
By public contestation we mean simply the contestation of the norms which are constitutive of an existing social practice (or regime) in the name of an ideal or principle. … Public contestation can, of course, be seen as just another response to dislocation, which we can add to the repertoire of ethical and ideological responses. This is true, but for us public contestation (qua response) operates at a different analytical level. It is possible in our approach, for exampe, to characterize public contestation as itself ethical or ideological. More importantly, however, the notion of public contestation is relevant to the present discussion because of its privileged status in relation to the radical contingency of social relations, and because of its association with the concept of the political.
[T]he political becomes one of the forms in which one ‘encounters the real‘ so that ‘political reality is the field in which the symbolization of this real is attempted’
(citing Stavrakakis,1999: 73)