Publicity's secret

Political Theory

Volumn 29, Issue 5, 2001, Pages 624-650

  Dean, Jodi ^a  

^a HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0035537727     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591701029005002     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. In this essay, I use "publicity" to designate the norms and practices associated with the "public." These norms and practices, as well as the collectivity to which they refer, are not fixed but embedded in specific contexts. For an account of the emergence of notions of the public and public opinion in early modern Europe, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
2. Slavoj Žižek makes clear that the "ruling ideas are never directly the ideas of the ruling class." Instead, they incorporate the "motifs and aspirations of the oppressed . . . rearticulating them in such a way that they [become] compatible with the existing relations of domination"; The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 186. So, of course, there are good, democratic things about publicity.
3. Sisela Bok takes "concealment, or hiding, to be the defining trait of secrecy." She explains that secrecy "presupposes separation, a setting apart of the secret from the non-secret, and of keepers of a secret from those excluded.... The separation between insider and outsider is inherent in secrecy; and to think something secret is already to envisage potential conflict between what insiders conceal and outsiders want to inspect or lay bare." Bok, Secrets (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 6.
4. My ideas here are not original but are drawn from a talk given by Judith Butler, "What Is Critique?" at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, July 14, 2000.
5. See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 87-88.
6. Slavoj Žižek, "The Spectre of Ideology," in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1994), 1. See also Michèle Barrett's excellent study, The Politics of Truth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
7. Slavoj Žižek, "The Spectre of Ideology," in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1994), 1. See also Michèle Barrett's excellent study, The Politics of Truth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
8. See Žižek, Sublime Object, chap. 1, and "The Spectre of Ideology." My discussion of Žižek's theory of ideology synthesizes the arguments in these two texts.
9. Michael Wolff, Burn Rate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 54.
10. This indicates the difference between Žižek's account of ideology and that developed by Laclau and Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe attempt to demonstrate the way a given field of disparate elements is sutured together via the totalizing intervention of a hegemonic nodal point. Žižek argues that this point needs to be supplemented by an analysis of enjoyment, that is, by an articulation of the way "an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a preideological enjoyment structured in fantasy"; Sublime Object, 125. I should also note that insofar as Žižek does not see ideology as a problem of knowledge but instead views it in terms of the fantasies materialized through our practices, he does not position the critic as somehow "outside" of ideology but as fully within it.
11. Žižek, Sublime Object, 34.
12. See also Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Both historians, in demonstrating the rise of a notion of the rational, universal public, nevertheless underestimate the continued influence of the earlier notion of the inconstant and uncertain public. This notion is never simply trumped. Rather, it continues to haunt and disrupt unitary accounts of the public.
13. See also Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Both historians, in demonstrating the rise of a notion of the rational, universal public, nevertheless underestimate the continued influence of the earlier notion of the inconstant and uncertain public. This notion is never simply trumped. Rather, it continues to haunt and disrupt unitary accounts of the public.
14. Jeremy Bentham, "Essay on Political Tactics," chap. 2 "Of Publicity" (1821), in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2, ed. John Bowring (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 310.
15. I'm drawing here from Žižek's discussion of the subject supposed to know in The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 106.
16. Bentham, "Essay on Political Tactics," 313.
17. See Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 110.
18. Bentham, "Essay on Political Tactics," 312.
19. Ibid., 311.
20. Ibid., 310.
21. Ibid., 314.
22. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis (Cambridge: MIT Press), 74.
23. Ibid., 55.
24. Ibid., 77.
25. Ibid., 79.
26. Ibid., 82.
27. Ibid., 83.
28. Ibid., 83.
29. Ibid., 115.
30. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 53.
31. Ibid., 35.
32. Ibid., 46.
33. Ibid., 51.
34. For a nuanced account of the Kantian will, see William Connolly, Why I'm Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
35. Quoted in Koselleck, 121.
36. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and William A. Owens, "America's Information Edge," Foreign Affairs (March/April 1996), 20.
37. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1997), 70.
38. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
39. For a discussion of Habermas's use of Fraser, see William E. Scheuerman, "Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas's Between Facts and Norms," in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews (London: Blackwell, 1999). Scheuerman provides a persuasive account of the tensions that accompany Habermas's attempt to combine Fraser's radical democratic socialism with the "realist" model of Berhard Peters.
40. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 232. Habermas has since reevaluated his pessimistic assessment of consumer-oriented publicity, finding the continued democratic potential of the public sphere more promising than he had first thought. See his "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," trans. Thomas Berger, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 421-61.
41. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 232. Habermas has since reevaluated his pessimistic assessment of consumer-oriented publicity, finding the continued democratic potential of the public sphere more promising than he had first thought. See his "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," trans. Thomas Berger, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 421-61.
42. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 201.
43. Ibid., 209.
44. Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 21.
45. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1992), 39.
46. Ibid., 40.
47. Ibid., 39-41.
48. Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 76.
49. Lisa Disch, "Civic Virtue and the Uncertain Promise of Electoral Fusion" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Seattle, WA, March 25-27, 1999), 14.