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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Photosharing on Flickr: intangible heritage and emergent publics
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that Flickr is more than an online photo album, it is a social and cultural network generated around personal photographic practices, and that such socio-visual practices themselves constitute an in...
Journal ArticleDOI
Playing with publics: Technology, talk and sociability in Indonesia
TL;DR: Interkom as mentioned in this paper is an analog chat network in Bandung, Indonesia known as ‘interkom.’ Interkom is a network that links together the homes, food stalls and farms of a segment of Bandung's urban and peri-urban underclass.
Journal ArticleDOI
Notes toward a Queer History of Naturalization
TL;DR: The authors trace a history of the formal mechanisms that the state uses to produce new citizens by focusing on the earliest federal law on naturalization, passed in 1790, as well as contemporaneous commentaries on immigration and acquired citizenship in the early national period.
Journal ArticleDOI
Psychoactive Substances and the English Language: “Drugs,” Discourses, and Public Policy
TL;DR: The authors explored the philosophical and political nature of modern categories for plants and chemicals that alter consciousness, and argued that the language we use to talk and think about drugs may not be ideal for crafting sound public policy.
MonographDOI
Ever Faithful - Race, Loyalty and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba
TL;DR: Sartorius as mentioned in this paper explores the relationship between political allegiance and race in nineteenth-century Cuba and makes a bold call for fresh perspectives on imperial ideologies of race and on the rich political history of the African diaspora.
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.