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Book

Publics and Counterpublics

01 Jan 2002-
TL;DR: The idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life as mentioned in this paper, and it has powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern lives involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations.
Abstract: Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors map out the division of sociological labor and discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public.
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.

1,515 citations

Book ChapterDOI
10 Sep 2010
TL;DR: Ito et al. as discussed by the authors argue that publics can be reactors, re-makers and re-distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception.
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.

1,276 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, publics and counter-publics are compared in the context of counterpublics and publics. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol 88, No. 4, pp. 410-412.
Abstract: (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 88, No. 4, pp. 410-412.

1,122 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Ash Amin1
TL;DR: In this paper, a non-territorial reading of a politics of place is proposed, focusing on the politics of contemporary regionalism, arguing 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.
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.

900 citations


Cites background from "Publics and Counterpublics"

  • ...It is a mobile, circulating and ubiquitous space (Warner, 2002), one that can generate associations and discursive engagements at a variety of spatial scales and a variety of spatial forms (from transnational ethical networks and global news audiences to school playgrounds and chat rooms)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media.
Abstract: As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.”

754 citations

References
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Journal Article
TL;DR: A preliminary demarcation of a type of Bourgeois public sphere can be found in this article, where the authors remark on the type representative publicness on the genesis of the Bourgois Public Sphere.
Abstract: Part 1 Introduction - preliminary demarcation of a type of Bourgeois Public Sphere: the initial question remarks on the type representative publicness on the genesis of the Bourgois Public Sphere. Part 2 Social structures of the Public Sphere: the basic blueprint institutions of the public sphere the Bourgois family and the institutionalization of a privateness oriented to an audience the public sphere in the world of letters in relation to the public sphere in the political realm. Part 3 Political functions of the public sphere: the model case of British development the continental variants civil society as the sphere of private autonomy: private law and a liberalized market the contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere in the Bourgeois constitutional state. Part 4 The bourgeois public sphere - idea and ideology: publicity as the bridging principle between politics and morality, Kant on the dialectic of the public sphere, Hegel and Marx the ambivalent view of the public sphere in the theory of liberalism, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. Part 5 The social-structural transformation of the public sphere: the tendency toward a mutual infiltration of public and private spheres the polarization of the social sphere and the intimate sphere from a culture-debating (kulturrasonierend) public to a culture-consuming public the blurred blueprint - developmental pathways in the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere. Part 6 the transformation of the public sphere's political function: from the journalism of private men of letters to the public consumer services of the mass media - the public sphere as a platform for advertising the transmitted function of the principle of publicity manufactured publicity and nonpublic opinions - the voting behaviour of the population the political public sphere and the transformation of the liberal constitutional state into a social-welfare state. Part 7 On the concept of public opinion: public opinion as a fiction of constitutional law-and the social-psychological liquidation of the concept a sociological attempt at clarification.

6,328 citations

Book
01 Jan 1971
TL;DR: Althusser's "For Marx" (1965) and "Reading Capital" (1968) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in "For Marx" (1965), and "Reading Capital" (1968). These works, along with "Lenin and Philosophy "(1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist." Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history."

3,547 citations

Book
01 Jan 1999
TL;DR: Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig shows how code can make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how technological architectures influence people's behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code can have damaging consequences for individual freedoms.
Abstract: From the Publisher: Should cyberspace be regulated? How can it be done? It's a cherished belief of techies and net denizens everywhere that cyberspace is fundamentally impossible to regulate. Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig warns that, if we're not careful we'll wake up one day to discover that the character of cyberspace has changed from under us. Cyberspace will no longer be a world of relative freedom; instead it will be a world of perfect control where our identities, actions, and desires are monitored, tracked, and analyzed for the latest market research report. Commercial forces will dictate the change, and architecture—the very structure of cyberspace itself—will dictate the form our interactions can and cannot take. Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace is an exciting examination of how the core values of cyberspace as we know it—intellectual property, free speech, and privacy-—are being threatened and what we can do to protect them. Lessig shows how code—the architecture and law of cyberspace—can make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how technological architectures influence people's behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code can have damaging consequences for individual freedoms. Code is not just for lawyers and policymakers; it is a must-read for everyone concerned with survival of democratic values in the Information Age.

2,706 citations