Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar

Bio: Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar is an academic researcher from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The author has contributed to research in topics: Rhetorical criticism & Democracy. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 29 publications receiving 2355 citations. Previous affiliations of Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar include Northwestern University.

Publics and counterpublics

Abstract: (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 88, No. 4, pp. 410-412.

On alternative modernities

Abstract: To think in terms of “alternative modernities” is to admit that modernity is inescapable and to desist from speculations about the end of modernity. Born in and of the West some centuries ago under relatively specific sociohistorical conditions, modernity is now everywhere. It has arrived not suddenly but slowly, bit by bit, over the longue durée—awakened by contact; transported through commerce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscriptions; propelled by nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration, and capital. And it continues to “arrive and emerge,” as always in opportunistic fragments accompanied by utopic rhetorics, but no longer from the West alone, although the West remains the major clearinghouse of global modernity. To think in terms of alternative modernities is to recognize the need to revise the distinction between societal modernization and cultural modernity. That distinction is implicated in the irresistible but somewhat misleading narrative about the two types of modernities, the good and the bad, a judgment that is reversible depending on one’s stance and sensibility.

Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction

Abstract: The idea of a social imaginary as an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents has received its fullest contemporary elaboration in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, especially in his influential book The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987).1 Castoriadis was drawn to the idea of the social imaginary in the late 1960s as he became progressively disillusioned with Marxism. Reacting against the deterministic strands within Marxism, which he regarded as both dominant and unavoidable, Castoriadis sought to identify the creative force in the making of social-historical worlds. The authors of essays in this issue, while familiar with the work of Castoriadis, are drawn to the idea of the social imaginary for a different set of reasons. Writing more than a quarter century after the publication of The Imaginary Institution of Society, they are responding to a radically different intellectual and political milieu signaled by the cataclysmic events of 1989 and their aftermath. A majority of these authors were brought together in a working group nearly two decades ago by the Center for Transcultural Studies (CTS), a Chicago-based notfor-profit research network with close links to the Public Culture editorial collec-

Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition

Abstract: This is an accidental special issue. The collective shape and orientation of the essays presented here did not originate in response to a formal call for contributions. It simply happened. Our title, Technologies of Public Persuasion, was imposed somewhat arbitrarily on essays that came together, as it were, on their own, in ways unimagined by the authors and the editors alike. One of the rarer pleasures of editing a journal is when unsolicited submissions begin to signal, assert, and gravitate toward a new problematic of which the editors and their committee of readers are not fully cognizant. Such an emerging problematic cannot be grasped in terms of a thematic unity, although this special issue does have a common theme. On the surface, each of the essays is concerned with the communicative dimension of public-making and peoplehood, an enduring theme in critical political theories and the allied democratic social imaginaries. More specifically, the essays focus on material technologies of public speaking and communication—ranging from how the transparency of a national language in Indonesia can create a space for national formation (Webb Keane) to how gramophone reproductions can rupture and supplement traditional pedagogy in south Indian music (Amanda Weidman) to how

The idea of rhetoric in the rhetoric of science

Abstract: A striking but insufficiently examined feature of the current revival of interest in rhetoric is its positioning primarily as a hermeneutic metadiscourse rather than as a substantive discourse practice. When one invokes metadiscourse to account for a discursive practice, what one hopes to achieve is minimally a “redescription” of the latter. Rhetoric has entered the orbit of general hermeneutics. This essay, divided into three parts, examines the cultural identity of rhetoric, the interpretive turn and rhetorical criticism, the politics of repression and recognition, the rhetoric of science as a discursive formation, communitarian and epistemic strategies, and the inventional strategy and humanist paradigm. The works of Michael Leff Allan G. Gross, John Angus Campbell, and Lawrence J. Prelli are critiqued.

For Public Sociology

Abstract: Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology’s particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.

Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications

Abstract: Networked publics must be understood in terms of “publics,” a contested and messy term with multiple meanings that is used across different disciplines to signal different concepts. One approach is to construct “public” as a collection of people who share “a common understanding of the world, a shared identity, a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest” (Livingstone, 2005, p. 9). In this sense, a public may refer to a local collection of people (e.g., one’s peers) or a much broader collection of people (e.g., members of a nation-state). Those invested in the civic functioning of publics often concern themselves with the potential accessibility of spaces and information to wide audiences-“the public”—and the creation of a shared “public sphere” (Habermas, 1991). Yet, as Benedict Anderson (2006) argues, the notion of a public is in many ways an “imagined community.” Some scholars contend that there is no single public, but many publics to which some people are included and others excluded (Warner, 2002). Cultural and media studies offer a different perspective on the notion of what constitutes a public. In locating the term “public” as synonymous with “audience,” Sonia Livingstone (2005) uses the term to refer to a group bounded by a shared text, whether a worldview or a performance. The audience produced by media is often by its very nature a public, but not necessarily a passive one. For example, Michel de Certeau (2002) argues that consumption and production of cultural objects are intimately connected, and Henry Jenkins (2006) applies these ideas to the creation and dissemination of media. Mizuko Ito extends this line of thinking to argue that “publics can bereactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception” (Ito, 2008, p. 3). It is precisely this use of public that upsets political theorists like Jurgen Habermas, who challenge the legitimacy of any depoliticized public preoccupied “with consumption of culture” (Habermas, 1991, p. 177). Of course, not all political scholars agree with Habermas’ objection to the cultural significance of publics. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser argues that publics are not only a site of discourse and opinion but “arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities” (Fraser, 1992), while Craig Calhoun argues that one of Habermas’ weaknesses is his naive view that “identities and interests [are] settled within the private world and then brought fully formed into the public sphere” (Calhoun, 1992, p. 35). Networked publics exist against this backdrop. Mizuko Ito introduces the notion of networked publics to “reference a linked set of social, cultural, and technological developments that have accompanied the growing engagement with digitally networked media” (Ito, 2008, p. 2). Ito emphasizes the networked media, but I believe we must also focus on the ways in which this shapes publics-both in terms of space and collectives. In short, I contend that networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies; they are simultaneously a space and a collection of people. In bringing forth the notion of networked publics, I am not seeking to resolve the different discursive threads around the notion of publics. My approach accepts the messiness and, instead, focuses on the ways in which networked technologies extend and complicate publics in all of their forms. What distinguishes networked publics from other types of publics is their underlying structure. Networked technologies reorganize how information flows and how people interact with information and each other. In essence, the architecture of networked publics differentiates them from more traditional notions of publics.

Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place

Abstract: This paper proposes a non-territorial reading of a politics of place. Focusing on the politics of contemporary regionalism, it argues that globalisation and the general rise of a society of transnational flows and networks no longer allow a conceptualisation of place politics in terms of spatially bound processes and institutions. The second part of the paper outlines an alternative politics of place that works with the varied distanciated geographies that cut across a given region.

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Abstract: In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a recursive publica public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.