Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Warner- Publics and Counterpublics
Warner makes three different distinctions for the definition of "public" in his introduction. There is the public, or all of the people that have the cognitive ability to receive a particular message, as well as two distinctions of a public. One category is comprised of publics that arise around an idea- these are large, amorphous spheres that create their own discourse that is continuously being created and evolving. The other "a public" category refers to all of the receptors of a particular piece of discourse. It is important to be able to distinguish between these three types of public before attempting to dive into Warner's work; he doesn't always make the distinction for you.
"A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than the discourse itself.... It exists by virtue of being addressed."-50
Here, Warner places a great deal of emphasis on the discourse that gives birth to a public. He uses a series of questions to illustrate his meaning, one of which I would like to take up- "What would a public be if no one were addressing it?"-50 This opens up a whole bag of discourse options. Can a public exist without discourse? What would it look like? I think one way to think of a public that exists without being concretely addressed is a geographical community in which the members, should a topic of discourse arise, would be engaged in discussion as a public. Before the discourse arises, however, are the community members still considered a public? There is a sphere, but the members are not actively engaged in discourse, and so, there is organization without discourse. This is contrary to Warner's claim which I quoted above- this public (and I would consider it a public) is not organized by discourse but by geographic reality.
While Warner makes the claim that the discourse itself is the key to the organization of the public, he also acknowledges the converse idea, stating, "... a public is never just a congeries of people, never just the sum of persons who happen to exist. It must first of all have some way of organizing itself as a body and of being addressed in discourse."-51 This suggests that there is no concrete way to organize a public, that there is no real distinction of what bodies merit the term "public" and which don't.
"In the context of a public, however, strangers can be treated as already belonging to our world." -56
Warner explains that public discourse is among strangers, rather people that we do not personally know, but that are somewhat similar to us in demographic. This is essential to the notion that a public is accessible by anyone with the means to access it. They are not constrained by matters of connection.
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I have a hard time of thinking of a public as a public simply by virtue of geographic proximity, or, actually, of the concept of “organization without discourse.” What kind of organization would that be? In part, even the act of calling the place where every one lives a name starts to define publics discursively. So that confuses me a little bit.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it’s difficult to pin down a sense of what counts as a “public” or not given Warner’s terms, and that perhaps even trying to “name” publics is a problem (i.e. Warner would claim that you are in fact part of a public when you read the Book of Mormon, even if that public you are part of can’t be named “members of the LDS church”).
Yes, he would name me part of that public simply by virtue of reading the same discourse, but I have to admit that I disagree with what Warner is saying. To suggest that one joins a public by merely seeing a message, I believe, is a glorification of the term "audience" and that to constitute a public, some sort of value must be held in common with the other members of the public..
DeleteWhen I speak of a geographical public, I'm considering my hometown. I'm from Manhattan, and while it's not a large place, there are too many residents to say that we all know each other. However, every few years, there is a topic that ends up causing a lot of discourse in the local cafe and the grocery store because it uniquely affects Manhattan. Because these topics are variable, and because we are still a community when we have nothing in common to talk about, I think of the force that pulls us all together as more location related than discourse related...