Open AccessBook
Publics and Counterpublics
TLDR
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.read more
Citations
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The Aesthetics of Public Visibility: Alevi Semah and the Paradoxes of Pluralism in Turkey
TL;DR: The authors examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest, revealing what they call a paradox of pluralism.
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Secular iconoclasm: purifying, privatizing, and profaning public faith
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on legal conflicts over state-sponsored religious speech and analyze the notion of "secular normativity" by analyzing some of the issues involved in these conflicts.
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Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere
TL;DR: It is argued that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension.
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What Can Queer Theory Do for Intersex
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore how queer theory might account for postsurgical intersex bodies of diminished genital tactility, arguing that the desensitized postsurgical body cannot be accounted for by a queer discourse in which sexual pleasure is a form of hedonistic activism.
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Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere
TL;DR: In this article, the authors report on a research program that has developed new methodologies for mapping the Australian blogosphere and tracking how information is disseminated across it by scraping new blog posts through Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.
References
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Journal Article
The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society
Jürgen Habermas,Thomas Burgerm +1 more
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.
Book
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
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.
Book
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
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.