Cybersalons and civil society: Rethinking the public sphere in transnational technoculture

Public Culture

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 243-265

  Dean, Jodi ^a  

^a HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23044527679     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-13-2-243     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx
2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 33-34 (Habermas's emphasis).
3. Although Habermas's concept of the public sphere may well be the most influential, it is, of course, not the only one. For another important theory of the public sphere published in German several years prior to Habermas's, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
4. Rather than emphasizing the constitutive role of salons, Koselleck emphasizes the importance of secret societies such as Freemasonry in challenging absolutist authority by creating a set of moral alternatives with political effects. Margaret C. Jacob has done further work on the impact of secret societies on the rise of a bourgeois public sphere. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
5. See also Hannah Arendt's agonistic conception of the public sphere in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
6. For critical assessments of the Habermasian conception, see the contributions to Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
7. Seyla Benhabib, "The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Biography of Rahel Varnhagen," Political Theory 23, no. 4 (February 1995): 17.
8. In "The Pariah and Her Shadow," 23-24, Benhabib emphasizes (in a footnote) that she is not claiming that the salon can serve as a normative model today, but that it is a precursor to some of the potential of civic society.
9. Hubertus Buchstein, "Bytes that Bite: The Internet and Deliberative Democracy," Constellations 4, no. 2 (October 1997): 250.
10. Buchstein, "Bytes that Bite," 251.
11. I take the term cyberia from Arturo Escobar, "Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture," in Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
12. use cyberia to invoke the processes, flows, connections, and communications that exceed the Internet, extending out into the ether of cell phones, financial transactions, advertising, and media culture more broadly. For an account of some of the problems of territorialization in cyberia, see my essay "Virtually Citizens," Constellations 4, no. 2 (October 1997): 264-82.
13. Dean, "Virtually Citizens," 265-66.
14. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982).
15. As Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato emphasize in their conceptual history of civil society, from the term's earliest appearance as politike koinonia in Aristotle it "presupposed the existence of a plurality of forms of interaction, association, and group life." Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 85.
16. Moreover, Norberto Bobbio makes clear that, even in its competing modern theorizations against the state (as a continuation or perfection of the state of nature, as in John Locke and Immanuel Kant) or within the state (as the institutionalization of the system of needs or the interests of the ruling class, as in G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx), the concept of civil society is a vehicle for concretizing the state, for understanding the forms of production and social relations as they appear historically to repeat and reinforce particular interests within the state. Bobbio's argument is especially interesting as a discussion of the way this dilemma appears as a puzzle in Antonio Gramsci's thought: although Gramsci claims to rely on Hegel's notion of civil society, "civil society in Gramsci does not belong to the structural sphere, but to the superstructural sphere" (Bobbio's emphasis). Bobbio, "Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society," in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (London: Verso, 1988), 82.
17. Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 438.
18. Habermas, "Three Models of Democracy," Constellations 1, no. 1 (April 1994): 8.
19. Benhabib, "Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy," Constellations 1, no. 1 (April 1994): 41, 35.
20. See Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere.
21. Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman raise this point against Nancy Fraser's model of subaltern counterpublics: "Fraser's model does not work for Queer Nation, which neither recognizes a single internal or privatized interest nor certifies one 'mainstream' whose disposition constitutes the terrain for counterpolitics." Berlant and Freeman, "Queer Nationality," in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 199.
22. Benhabib, "Deliberative Rationality," 30-35.
23. Indeed, as Ernesto Laclau intimates, this very partiality is a necessary, albeit temporary and paradoxical, actualization of the universal which of course "does not have any concrete content of its own (which would close in on itself), but is an always receding horizon resulting from the expansion of an indefinite chain of equivalent demands." Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 34.
24. For a longer version of this argument, see Dean, "Civil Society: Beyond the Public Sphere," in The Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. David M. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
25. Judith Butler, "For a Careful Reading," in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), 129.
26. My position here affiliates with Berlant and Freeman when they write: "The multiplicity of social spaces, places where power and desire are enacted and transferred, needs to be disaggregated, specified: the abstract, disembodied networks of electronic visual, aural, and textual communication; the nationalized systems of juridical activity and official public commentary; the state and local political realms that are not at all simply microcosmic of the national; the manifestly pleasuring or money-making embodiments of local, national, and global capitalism; the random or customary interactions of social life," "Queer Nationality," 197. The theoretical shift from public sphere to civil society is part of this disaggregation and specification.
27. William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xxi.
28. Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society," Public Culture 3 (1990): 107.
29. Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society," 112.
30. Cindy Patton, "Tremble, Hetero Swine!" in Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, 173.
31. See also my discussion of civil society in the context of feminist theory in Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
32. See Thomas L. Dumm's compelling analysis of civil society as the location for pervasive practices of policing, practices often enacted by the New Right in the name of a return to civility. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press, 1999), chap. 4.
33. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 145-46.
34. Benhabib, "The Pariah and Her Shadow," 18.
35. Benhabib, "The Pariah and Her Shadow," 17.
36. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 47.
37. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 46.
38. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 56.
39. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 48.
40. For a discussion of "warranting" as the process through which discursive elements become articulated to physical bodies, see Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 39-44, 88-93.
41. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 50 (Habermas's emphasis).
42. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 106-7.
43. Benhabib, "The Pariah and Her Shadow," 20.
44. See humdog, "pandora's vox: on community in cyberspace," in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
45. See, for example, Katie Hafner, "The Epic Saga of the Well," Wired 5.05 (1997), 98-143.
46. Lee Quinby develops this in terms of the idea of programmed perfection in Millennial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 132-39.
47. See the powerful examples provided by Monica J. Caspar, "Fetal Cyborgs and Technomoms on the Reproductive Frontier,"
48. and Linda F. Hogel, "Tales From the Cryptic: Technology Meets Organism in the Living Cadaver," in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Habels Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995).
49. For a more developed version of this argument see my "Virtual Fears," Signs 24 (1999): 1057-66.
50. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, xx.
51. Connolly analyzes a variety of forms of fundamentalism and forces of fundamentalization in The Ethos of Pluralization.