I’ve heard enough people cite this book that I thought I had a general sense of what publics and counterpublics are and are about. I was kind of right, but in reading this book, I realized I was also kind of wrong. “Publics” can be anything that someone means when they refer to “the public.” Because every time we say we’re writing for “the public” or “for general audiences,” we don’t actually mean literally anyone. There’s always some additional shape to the audience we imagine, and the audience we imagine is always going to be at least a little bit different than the actual audience. As Warner says, I — as one of his readers — might join, leave, or re-join the public he is speaking to at any time, and he won’t even know it.
Quotes I Marked
(p.9) “A public is inevitably one thing in London, quite another in Hong Kong. This is more than the truism it might appear, since the form must be embedded in the background and self-understanding of its participants in order to work. Only by approaching it historically can one understand these preconditions of its intelligibility.”
(p.10) “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”
(p.11) Discussion of the tension between how a public isn’t an objective, quantifiable thing, but it also isn’t just something totally subjective and infinitely mutable.
(p.12) “One of the central claims of this book is that when people address publics, they engage in struggles—at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise— over the conditions that bring them together as a public. The making of publics is the metapragmatic work newly taken up by every text in every reading.”
(p.18) note about how two of the essays in this book were “written against what at the time felt like huge blockages in the sayable”
(p.18) “As I began speculating on the close relation between sexual cultures and their publics in the modern context, I came to the conclusion that one of the underlying flaws of the gay and lesbian movement was the way it obscured and normalized the most compelling challenges of queer counterpublics.”
(p.50) “[The unequal distribution of power in mass culture and the increasing involvement of the state in civil society] produce a public that is appealed to not for criticism but for benign acclamation. Public opinion comes less to generate ideas and hold power accountable and more simply to register approval or disapproval in the form of opinion polls and occasional elections.”
(p.52) Stuff about Sedgwick and “the closet” and how “the closet” is a stand-in phrase for a whole lot of rules about what can be said when and where and by whom (and who must say what when, etc.)
(p.67) “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed….Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how can this public exist before being addressed? What would a public be if no one was addressing it? Can a public really exist apart from the rhetoric through which it is imagined? If you were to put down this essay and turn on the television, would my public be different? How can the existence of a public depend, from one point of view, on the rhetorical address and, from another point of view, on the real context of reception?”
(p.70) “The result [of not feeling like you’re able to address a meaningful public with a capacity for listening, understanding, and acting] can be a kind of political depressiveness, a blockage in activity and optimism, a disintegration of politics toward isolation, frustration, anomie, forgetfulness….This is why any distortion or blockage in access to a public can be so grave, leading people to feel powerless and frustrated. Externally organized frameworks of activity, such as voting, are and are perceived to be poor substitutes.”
(p.71) “What determines whether one belongs to a public or not? Space and physical presence do not make much difference; a public is understood to be different from a crowd, an audience, or any other group that requires co-presence. Personal identity does not in itself make one part of a public…Belonging to a public seems to require at least minimal participation, even if it is patient or notional, rather than a permanent state of being. Merely paying attention can be enough to make you a member. How, then, could a public be quantified?”
(p.77) “Public speech must be taken in two ways: as addressed to us and as addressed to strangers. The benefit in this practice is that it gives a general social relevance to private thought and life. Our subjectivity is understood as having resonance with others, and immediately so. But this is only true to the extent that the trace of our strangerhood remains present in our understanding of ourselves as the addressee.”
(p.113) “It might even be claimed that, like dominant publics, [counterpublics] are ideological in that they provide a sense of active belonging that masks or compensates for the real powerlessness of human agents in capitalist society”
(p.114) “There is no speech or performance addressed to a public that does not try to specify in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation: not just through its discursive claims…but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scene, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on….Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.”
(p.145) “As conversations get closer to public topics, where opinions would have a general relevance and others’ views would have to be taken into account, people tend to shut up, deflecting currents of conversation. Even active volunteers in civic groups construct their volunteering so as to avoid risky discussion. They choose topics that allow them to avoid dissent. They frame their motives as prepolitical. Journalists and officials actively conspire to limit public discussion, diverting it into testimony that can be viewed as private passion rather than opinion or argument.”
(p.148) Discussion of different norms in academic discourse vs. journalistic discourse (propensity toward infinite complication/nuance) and how there’s very little infrastructure for discussions between the academy and the masses/between professions/disciplines and journalism
(p.150) More on academic discourse, public intellectuals, seeing academics as politics, etc.
(p.157) Some criticism of Marxism that I think is Marxists and poststructuralists strawmanning each other again. Or at least both sides being wrong about their compatibilities. You can believe in discursive/cultural hegemonies and also believe in bourgeois rule via the state.
(p.167) About tolerance and publicness and ethos and minoritization
(p.189) Immigrantphobia as “supplying a concrete phobia to organize its public so that a more substantial discussion of exploitation in the United States can be avoided and then remaindered to the part of collective memory sanctified not by nostalgia but by mass aversion. Let’s call this the amnesia archive. The motto above the door is: ‘Memory is the amnesia you like.’”
(p.194) Observation that in the ancient world, sex is just a personal activity— it’s a verb that doesn’t need a direct object, like laughing, pooping, crying, dying, etc.” You just fuck, and sometimes another person is involved, basically. Who they are doesn’t have big stakes for your identity or the social meaning of the activity.
(p.195) list of activities that don’t seem like they’re related to sex/sexual culture, but they are: paying taxes, celebrating a holiday, investing in the future, teaching, carrying wallet photos, buying in bulk, etc.
Sources To Look Up
The Trouble With Normal, Michael Warner