Publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version)

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 88, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 413-425

  Warner, Michael ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039484854     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630209384388     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. An instructive review of the methodological problems can be found in Communications and Public Opinion: A Public Opinion Quarterly Reader, ed. Robert O. Carlson (New York: Praeger, 1975); see especially Floyd D. Allport, "Toward a Science of Public Opinion," 11-26; and Harwood Childs, "By Public Opinion I Mean-", 28-37.
2. An instructive review of the methodological problems can be found in Communications and Public Opinion: A Public Opinion Quarterly Reader, ed. Robert O. Carlson (New York: Praeger, 1975); see especially Floyd D. Allport, "Toward a Science of Public Opinion," 11-26; and Harwood Childs, "By Public Opinion I Mean-", 28-37.
3. An instructive review of the methodological problems can be found in Communications and Public Opinion: A Public Opinion Quarterly Reader, ed. Robert O. Carlson (New York: Praeger, 1975); see especially Floyd D. Allport, "Toward a Science of Public Opinion," 11-26; and Harwood Childs, "By Public Opinion I Mean-", 28-37.
4. The critique of polling appears in a number of contexts in Bourdieu's work; see especially "Opinion Polls: A 'Science' without a Scientist," in Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 168-76.
5. This ancient exotic is the kind of stranger that Georg Simmel has in mind in his much-cited 1908 essay "The Stranger," in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971). Simmel fails to distinguish between the stranger as represented by the trader or the Wandering Jew and the stranger whose presence in modernity is unremarkable, even necessary to the nature of modern polities. One of the defining elements of modernity, in my view, is normative stranger sociability, of a kind that seems to arise only when the social imaginary is defined not by kinship (as in nonstate societies), nor by place (as in state societies until modernity) but by discourse.
6. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-86.
7. For an example of a promising and rich analysis marred by this misapprehension, see Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). Eliasoph's stated but unexamined ideal is that of a continuity of discussion from small-scale interaction to the highest organizing levels of politics.
8. Eyal Amiran discusses the temporality of electronic media, in a way that differs substantially from mine, in his "Electronic Time and the Serials Revolution," Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997): 445-454.
9. It is difficult to assess this change not simply because the effects of change in the medium have yet to become visible, but because the infrastructure of the medium is itself changing. On this the best account I know is Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Lessig's book, although focused on the legal regulation of cyberspace, also raises important topics for the more general discussion of new media and their social implications.
10. Even if the address is indirect. The most insightful study I know of the tight relation between a public form and a mode of life is an example of indirect implication of a reception context by a form that refuses to address it outright: I am thinking of D. A. Miller's Place for Us: An Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000).
11. In all the literature on the history of reading, the development of this ideology remains an understudied phenomenon. Adrian Johns makes a significant contribution in The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), especially pp. 380-443. Johns's study suggests that the idea of reading as a private act with replicable meaning for strangers dispersed through space emerged in the very period that gave rise to publics in the modern form analyzed here; support for this conjecture can also be found in Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1999);
12. In all the literature on the history of reading, the development of this ideology remains an understudied phenomenon. Adrian Johns makes a significant contribution in The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), especially pp. 380-443. Johns's study suggests that the idea of reading as a private act with replicable meaning for strangers dispersed through space emerged in the very period that gave rise to publics in the modern form analyzed here; support for this conjecture can also be found in Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1999);
13. In all the literature on the history of reading, the development of this ideology remains an understudied phenomenon. Adrian Johns makes a significant contribution in The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), especially pp. 380-443. Johns's study suggests that the idea of reading as a private act with replicable meaning for strangers dispersed through space emerged in the very period that gave rise to publics in the modern form analyzed here; support for this conjecture can also be found in Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1999);
14. and James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmore, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
15. For an interesting limit case, see Charles Hirschkind, "Civic Virtue within Egypt's Islamic Counter-Public," Cultural Anthropology 16.1 (2001). Hirschkind analyzes complex modes of commentary and circulation in contemporary Egypt; what remains unclear is the degree to which this emergent and reactive discourse culture can still be called a public.