Michael Warner

Publics and counterpublics

Michael Warner writes a very thoughtful piece about the meaning and connotations of the word ‘public’ in our lives. Unpacking the term, he suggests that the ‘public’ has its power just because of the anonymity implied in the term, the ‘strangerhood’, and our inability to point to any specific people and name them as a ‘member of the public.’ It is true that the second a person knows somebody else by name, by face, even as an acquaintance- they bring to the conversation an element of camaraderie, familiarity, community, the ‘vast nameless ocean of faces’ dissolves.

He suggests that the concreteness of the ‘public’ and our ability to imagine it as a ‘real’ entity- is due in large part to the mechanics and punctual rhythms of print and media circulation. This idea is extremely suggestive. It is true that when a person is out of touch with the news, or has no access to television or newspapers, they can describe themselves as being ‘cut off’. It is worth asking here: cut off from what, from their membership of a public? Even when people disagree with the news or see themselves as simply watching CNN coverage, say, with the intention of mocking it, it is the imaginary public they are mocking, not the newscaster. They show contempt for the imaginary ocean of faces that believe the news, and define themselves in relation to this ocean. “A public may be real and efficacious but its reality lies just in this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (Warner, 51).

The public itself, in ‘real life’ as it were, is changeable and extremely fuzzy around the edges. The concreteness, its illusion as a ‘social base’ arises from the discourse that exists to give it existence. His project of analyzing issues of the ‘Spectator’ magazine to speculate on the kind of public it conjures is very interesting. He would suggest then that it is not a ‘readership’ that a magazine caters to, rather, it prints what it wants and thereby creates the illusion of a particular type of readership: “The idea of a common interest, like that of a market demand, appears to identify the social base of public discourse, but the base is in fact projected from the public discourse itself rather than being external to it” (Warner, 53). This raises a couple of problems though: how does one explain the way certain publications or goods fail, or are widely disliked, if there is no public opinion independent of the unpopular piece of print? Why do advertising agencies perform market research on focus groups if they are not trying their best to measure some coagulating, shared ‘public opinion’? When a nation goes through an upheaval of some kind, doesn’t the historical circumstance create a particular common cultural feeling that is at least partly independent of the media? That the media is dependent on? For instance, if films about aliens invading America were popular during the Cold War: were the films creating public anxiety, or was existing public anxiety the reason for their popularity? He uses the word reflexivity repeatedly in relation the public, and reflexivity connoted just this kind of circularity. According to wikipedia: “In sociology, reflexivity is an act of self-reference where examination or action 'bends back on', refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. In brief, reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting each another in a situation that renders both functions causes and effects. Reflexivity is related to the concept of feedback and positive feedback in particular.”


Anyway, these questions recall Tomlinson’s emphasis on how necessary it is to more closely study the process of mediation and the ways in which media weaves in and out of people’s lives, their ‘world-making’ capacities and their images of themselves.

‘Public’ then, for warner, is constituted by its impersonal, nebulous, vague, imaginary, self-organized, stranger-oriented character. It is a projection of discourse and therefore can only exists in this form, so that it can reflect immediately whatever the discourse requires it to. This is why: “A public is a social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.” In any case, discourse is independent of the public but the public is dependent on discourse. Yet both exist together. I am confused about which is the essential one and which is the follower.

Back to the question of how publics can behave historically if they are just an imaginary: “Publics act historically depending on the temporality of their circulation”. Is this what it means when someone says “The invention of the printing press and its introduction in India, along with the widespread network of railways, contributed to building the nationalist movement in the early 1900s”? Maybe. Did people revolt because of the media? Or was the media a catalyst that worked because some kind of discontented feeling was present already?

Discourse bridges the gap between strangers by including particular stylistic affinities. A key way to be a counter-public then, is to mess with stylistic affinities, as in satire, farce, comedy, and so on. I am reminded of an ad campaign by activist group “Think again” which mimicked levis campaigns but in place of the Levi’s slogan, in exactly the same style and font, had slogans about the sweatshop manufacture of jeans.

It is exactly in the presentation of stylistic affinity that the connection between impersonal publics and my personal relationship to a style come into play. Take, for instance, the ‘wasaaaaap’ Budweiser ad. If a white male from say, Switzerland saw it and thought it was funny, can he say ‘wasssuuuup’ in America and be accepted as someone who has the right to use the term? Maybe. The superfriends commercial was funny because of the tension of not knowing whether or not superwoman fro example, was allowed to say ‘wasssuuuup’ in the same way as the black man in the ad. I am reminded of a friend who explained to me once why he thought it was okay for black men to address each other as ‘nigger’ under particular circumstances, but when he had a friend from Korea do the same it made him very angry. The style of public discourse orients itself towards a particular public, but because of its impersonal, indefinite nature, it can be picked up, related to, by anyone. Here the slippages begin to occur and the fictional projective public has to organize itself as a real, addressable community of flesh and blood people. Then the question of who gets included and who doesn’t becomes a sensitive issue.

Another interesting question is: if the discourse can effectively form publics, where does the discourse get its power from? I’m reminded of Foucault here, and a paper of his I recently read, about ‘author-function’. In brief, he writes that when an author produces a work, the dominant discourse categorizes him as a particular kind of author with a particular history, and leanings, and so on, and uses this classification of him to explain and reconcile contradictions in his work. So when I read a book by J.M. Coetzee, I think “Oh, as a South African colored writer in the 1990s etc, of course he would write about this topic, etc etc.” My imagined familiarity with him, me presumption that I can understand his affinities, community orientation and motivations to write, stem from a power loaned to me by the dominant discourse that contains within it particular ideas of what a South African colored male in the 1990s should be concerned about. Or is it the other way round: am I constituting the discourse? I return repeatedly to the circular question of how the power circulates between individual and discourse, personal thought and shared, power-laden language.