Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner

by Michael Warner

Publics and Counterpublics revolves around a central What is a public? The idea of a public is a cultural form, a kind of practical fiction, present in the modern world in a way that is very different from other or earlier societies. Like the idea of rights, or nations, or markets, it can now seem universal. But it has not always been so. Publics exist only by virtue of their imagining. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that.Publics have some regular properties as a form, with powerful implications for the way our social world takes shape; but much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelation. There are ambiguities, even contradictions in the idea of a public. As it is extended to new contexts and media, new polities and rhetorics, its meaning can be seen to change, in ways that we have scarcely begun to appreciate.By combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extended case studies, Publics and Counterpublics shows how the idea of a public works as a formal device in modern culture and traces its implications for contemporary life. Michael Warner offers a revisionist account at the junction of two intellectual traditions with which he has been public-sphere theory and queer theory. To public-sphere theory, this book brings a new emphasis on cultural forms, and a new focus on the dynamics of counterpublics. To queer theory, it brings a new way of seeing how queer culture (among other examples) is shaped by the counterpublic environment.

Genres: Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Queer, Cultural Studies, Academic, Sociology

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies at Yale, and chair of the department of English. His books include Publics and Counterpublics (2002); The Trouble with Normal (1999); and The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). With Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, he has edited Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin, 2003); American Sermons (New York: Library of America, 1999); The English Literatures of America (with Myra Jehlen); and Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993).

Reviews

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an important book. I should probably have given it 4 stars considering its content...but, well...I just didn't really enjoy reading it. It's not because it's of bad quality or anything, it's just that I have a fairly voracious longing to read about actual people at actual points in history doing and making things, so this book was a little too theoretical for my tastes. It also consistently avoided engaging in the two aspects I find most interesting about "publics," but I'll get back to that later...

Warner's collection of essays about publics and counterpublics takes on the question: what are they? For Warner (and Habermas), publics "are a kind of fiction that has taken on a life," existing "only by virtue of their imagining." Warner wants to wrestle with the real problem that publics should be plural, that is, there isn't just ONE totalizing public. Similarly, publics don't all share the same features because the social and cultural contexts that give rise to them are different. In this way, we shouldn't view the concept of a public as necessarily imperialistic. On the other hand, agues Warner, we shouldn't put ourselves in a hopelessly un-generalizable historicist bind, which would entail a "nominalist skepticism." That seems right to me, if only because the contexts of information exchange and circulation often operate with the same mechanisms.

The notion of a "public" clearly requires the notion of a "private." Warner's first chapter/essay deals with the history of this binary, paying special attention to the feminist critique of Habermas, as well as the development of "identity politics" rooted in the "felt gap between public selves and private ones" that has "given rise to the romantic longing for unity (26)." Warner's discourse on the second wave rejection of "privacy" was especially helpful. Essentially, feminists saw the sacred protection bestowed upon the realm of the private as a means to facilitate secret or state-protected abuse and subjugation. This conversation is important for Warner because the public/private dichotomy is fundamentally gendered, so if we want to think about publics we HAVE to think about gender. I think that's true. Also, Warner uses the feminist and gay rights movements as examples of how counterpublics can force the re-evaluation of the very terms of public demarcation.

The second essay contains the real intellectual meat of Warner's argument. Here he defines a public as 1) something that self-organizes, 2) constituted by a relation among strangers, 3) entailing public speech that in simultaneously personal and impersonal, 4) created through mere attention, 5) a social space created by reflexive circulation of discourse (discourse must be circulated, not just emitted in one direction), 6) something that acts historically according to the temporality of its circulation, and 7) something engaged in poetic world-making.

I don't really disagree with Warner on any of these points, but I became frustrated by 1) his lack of engagement with the necessity for communication technology and 2) his seeming agreement with Habermas (and the Frankfurt School more generally) that mass culture constitutes a "re-feudalization" of the public sphere (which is to say, the extreme asymmetry involved in mass culture between producers and consumers prevents real discourse). These complaints are linked, since establishing technologies requires capital. No capital, no tech use. In this way, I just don't understand how a public can be created "through mere attention." It seems like available technologies play important constraining roles in who/what can be discoursed about. Because of this, it's hard for me to imagine non-capitalist publics...I know they are possible, but commerce and discourse are tightly intertwined, and I wished Warner had taken this problem on more fully.

So, finally, what is a counterpublic? For Warner, a counterpublic is defined by the sense of alienation of its members, conscious or not, from the dominant public. Some counterpublics even eschew the critical-rational discourse characterized by Habermas' public. This has the impact of preventing the counterpublic from engaging in conversation with the state. Warner thinks that counterpublics that acquire agency in relation to the state become social movements. However, in turning to this type of discourse, the counterpublic risks alienating its constituents. This is what happened in the gay rights movement. Most recently, the Human Rights Campaign is leading the social movement, while other more radical gender critics no longer feel that they have a place within the movement that has, in some respects, given up on its founding critical principles. I'm a bit more optimistic, as I think the more conservative gay rights movement will pave the way for more radical social change, even if we acknowledge that for the time being, it was far less than was hoped for. Obviously, my ability to connect this book to a very current political issue speaks to its pressing relevance.

[spoon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got tired by the end reading this (read it in 3 days). The parts where Warner goes back to his first book (letters of the republic) are great, the publics stuff.... well. I don't love. I mean that is what the book is about. The point about texts being different / having diff public when they are in material diff formats is amazing (text as book, same text in newspaper, etc) but like.... this idea that there is one public per text and then it is created by text... hate to report that multiple people read same texts in diff ways. I wrote a longer review of first essay in notes -- but well that's my vibe here. I'm done I think. Also he's just like so no self-aware (this is in ref to s*x in public w berlant) -- there and in the whitman essay - like talk about sex or don't talk about s*x; stop with this half-ass bs where like talking about s*x is "ooooo wowwwww no way." I just read Kathrine Angel's Unmastered and read Delany's Time Square Red/Blue before that one (writing this review after reading those too but I read this book before reading those two) and like.... ok I don't want to write this review anymore.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm embarrassed to admit (being a graduate student of English) that I'm almost as far from being a theory head as its possible to be. While I don't mind reading it in small doses, if it's associated with my research, I just can't plunk myself down and track the value of one school of critical thought as opposed to another. Maybe that's why I've always liked New Historicism. It's like theory light.

Anyway, Publics and Counterpublics is a derivative work, built on the foundations of Jurgen Habermas's work. It makes some interesting arguments about how we have to look at distinct groups of people as they encounter media, but I got bogged down in all the queer/feminist/Marxist theory. But I'm sure my boredom is a theory geek's joy!

[Daniel Hammer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I took a long time to finish this one. Warner has a lot of really interesting thoughts, but also a lot of ideas that seem too esoteric. The book is a collection of essays that really do not hold together well as a whole--so read it for the ones you like, and skip the ones you do not. Although his ideas about publics and counterpublics seem like they should be more interesting and useful to me when looking at social life, I am never clear if Warner sees publics as 'actual' social groupings and identities, or only as groupings called forth through written language. It does not help that he uses very few examples to illustrate his ideas. Ultimate verdict--a good thought piece that can spark ideas, but not much of a usable framework for analysis.

[Humphrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the titular essay and that which precedes it, Warner elaborates a conception of publics that productively sits at the juncture of literary study and sociology. It's a very useful formulation. Other essays include prehistories of this formulation, seminal pieces that are somewhat adjacent-ish to it in various inexplicit ways, and a nifty reading of Whitman. As such, the collection very much feels like an unsynthesized combination of Warner's late-80s/early-90s work on early American literature and his mid-90s work in queer theory (and activism). Readers coming for one of these interests will may find lessened interest in the other.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent read: expands you mind about normativities; what is considered a 'public' and how we practice sexuality in these places.

Simply, you will not be as 'normal' afterwards, but you won't want to be: normal is freakish and, oftentimes, committs incredible wrongs in its namesake.

Thank you, Warner.

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started reading this book for a project that was shifted to a back burner, thus Warner also slipped down the list of things I was attending closely to. But some of my slowness in finishing the text had to do with the necessity of getting into the proper frame of mind to read. If one isn't, the prose can quickly numb one's attention. Which is not to say Warner is the worst of the jargon offenders (despite what some of his detractors might claim); if you can attend closely to his premises, the theoretical language deployed is often the most succinct way of naming an issue. Even so, this was a challenging read any time the attention slipped—requiring several restarts. It is not a coherent text with a through argument but a collection of essays (some repurposed and refashioned) designed to take up the title issues from a variety of perspectives. Oddly, I got more mileage out of the more overtly theoretical essays in the first half of the text; when Warner hits the road particularly in the last two essays, doing something like queer readings of a pair of dead fascinating texts, the payoffs seemed less. This is a complaint I tend to have with much highly theoretical literary scholarship—the application of theory, where ideology and text come together, often feels like a less than thrilling payoff for the work required. The long-canonized "Mass Public and Mass Subject" and "Publics and Counterpublics" were the highlights for this reader, in part because they felt like charged and important engagements with public sphere discourse. I still couldn't help wondering at times if some of the work here has already become dated in some respects because of more recent developments (the last 20 years say) in digital culture. There was a lot of food for thought here and the notes and bibliography are of course essential.

[Serkan Kasapoglu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: The book is about Warner’s definition of the public-sphere and its various sexual, racial, etc. counter-publics. With a specific focus on the queer as a counter-public, Warner discusses with several essays main descriptors and elements of the “public”—such as the intellectual, the minority, the context, the state, the individual—as well as the relationship between each of these.
Relevance: The essays in this book, especially “Sex in Public” and “Something Queer About the Nation-State,” provided rich perspectives upon my main research questions. For example, whether increased media visibility contributes to social acceptance of minority identities is a very central question of my research and Warner points out in several essays within different contexts that sexual minorities’ “success,” “way of living,” “political rights, and their very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public sexual culture” (204). With public sexual culture, Warner means publicized minority sexualities; I can quote him as an affirmative perspective to the aforementioned question. Also, in another essay, drawing connection with Habermas, he says, “public persons derived their power in part from being on display” (172).
Another question that may get valuable insights is whether the publicized/broadcasted queer artist/figure actually builds counter publics on the street. Warner argues that when counter publics are represented in the mass culture, “new privacies, new individuals, new bodies, new intimacies, and new citizenships” (62) proliferate. Therefore, if the counter publics are censored, it is to prevent new selfhoods and relationalities as well as the very recognition of “how privacy is publicly constructed."

[M. Altuğ Yayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Warner’ın Publics and Counterpublics adlı kitabı, “karşı kamu” kavramı etrafında şekillenen güçlü bir çerçeve sunuyor. Warner, kamunun tek, yekpare bir yapı olmadığını; buna karşıt olarak gelişen, dışlanmış ya da norm dışı grupların kendi ifade alanlarını oluşturarak karşı kamular kurduğunu belirtiyor. Bu tespitlerin, özellikle edebiyat araştırmaları açısından oldukça ilham verici diye düşünüyorum. Çünkü edebi metinlerim çoğu zaman sadece egemen söylemleri yansıtmadığı; aynı zamanda onlara karşı çıkan, kenarda kalmış, bastırılmış seslere de yer verdiği malumdur. Warner’ın karşı kamu kavramı, bu türden metinleri anlamak ve yorumlamak için bize çok yönlü bir düşünme imkanı sunduğunu düşünüyorum. Özellikle alternatif anlatılarla ya da merkez dışında kalan toplumsal deneyimlerle ilgilenenler için kitabın sunduğu perspektif son derece ufuk açıcı.

[Britney Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warner focuses on the need to be against the norm while trying to have readers understand why there are those who want to be oppressed even though they have no reason to be (I.E. Radical Evangelicalism). He compares different sized communities, and that no matter the size there will always be someone who will disagree with that narrative. To be honest, the writing style is dry; which is to be expected as the novel started as a graduate thesis.

[Micha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t even know how to review this but it was my introduction to public sphere theory and this era of queer theory also. I didn’t understand everything but I had a great time trying to figure it out, and many parts resonated a lot with things I had experienced but couldn’t put to words. Hurray.

[Lotus (Yang Yu) · Rating 2 out of 5]

是的，这本书所有人都说重要。可是这些人真的读懂了作者的梦话吗？这本书代表了我最不看好的一种写作方式：用所谓的“高深”理论让普通读者“畏难”、“既媚又惧”。反正我是不要变成这种写作者的。都快2020年了！

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.7

[Nate Meshau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This guy loves Habermas

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 but I'll round up. Had to speed read for my exams, and the last few chapters felt very disconnected from the beginning argument. Otherwise very helpful to defining the crowd.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Publics and Counterpublics (2002), Michael Warner explains that the public/private distinction is a complex set of dichotomies (15 separate senses of opposition, he claims, with 3 senses of private with no corresponding sense of public) (29-30). Liberal thought, he explains, claimed the private as positive, no longer a sense of privation, as Arendt sees it, but as a sense common to all people who have rights as private beings (39).

From his essay "Publics and Counterpublics" (summary from my thesis):

In “Publics and Counterpublics,” Michael Warner makes distinctions between three uses of the word public, concepts that we often conflate when we evoke the term: 1) the public, “a kind of social totality” such as a nation; 2) “a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public”; and 3) the concept that interests Warner the most in his essay, “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (49, 50). This third kind of public, different from the public as a totality and a specific audience bound to an event, is commonly evoked and understood, but its rules are never explained. Warner sets out to explain these “rather odd” rules of publics: a public 1) “is self-organized,” “exist[ing:] by virtue of being addressed”; 2) “is a relation among strangers”; 3) is addressed in both personal and impersonal terms; 4) “is constituted through mere attention”; 5) “is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse”; 6) “act[s:] historically according to the temporality of their [texts’:] circulation”; and 7) “is poetic world-making” (50, 55, 57, 60, 62, 68, 82, emphasis original). Warner believes that counterpublics act in the same way, except, “counterpublic discourse also addresses those strangers as not just anybody. Addresses are socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse; ordinary people are presumed to not want to be mistaken for the kind of person who would participate in this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene” (86). Also, as I have noted in the previous interchapter, Warner insists that a counterpublic does not have to be subaltern, as Fraser describes them, but can be understood as “a scene for developing oppositional nterpretations of its members’ identities, interests, and needs” (86). Counterpublics also have an awareness at some level, whether conscious or not, of their subordinate status to dominant culture (86).

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhat interesting for social theorists and those interested in how societies organize and conceptualize themselves (and their minorities). I read this for my thesis, but it's only tangential to my main focus, so it was't particularly useful to me. Stylistically, I preferred Michael Warner's other book The Trouble with Normal, which was a really engaging read. Normal is more polemical, with less direct interaction with theorists, which really helped the book flow smoothly. This book, on the other hand, was somewhat slower and more studious.

Update: I have now read almost all of the book (I skipped the last two essays because they seem to be focused outside my area of interest at the moment), and I am basically re-thinking my previous review.
Warner does a really excellent job analyzing the ways in which space, publicness (the idea of it and the appearance within it), and presentation are intertwined with the authority of normalcy and power. He also explored the notion of counterpublics, seperate publics that seek to alter prevailing notions of publicness, in much the same way countercultures seek to alter prevailing cultural forms.

[C.E. G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Queer theory about counterpublics? Yes, please! I'd read excerpts from The Trouble With Normal before, and I came upon this one when I was looking up critiques of Habermas's theory of the public sphere for a paper. The essays were written at different points over the past 2+ decades, so sometimes it feels choppy and at times the theory is not as fleshed out as I'd like, but it was very interesting nonetheless.

I only did a close reading of the first two essays, but I read/skimmed the others and particularly liked the co-written piece on "Sex in Public."

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating alternative take on publics and the public sphere, Warner employs queer theory heavily to explain conditions of (post)modernity. The book's structure and organization can probably be jarring to some who are used to a much more organized and methodical approach to scholarship, but I was not particularly bothered by it. The last couple chapters engage in a bit too much textual analysis for my tastes, though (I did appreciate the rigorous search for historical primary sources, though).

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent investigation into what we mean when we say "public" and what the alternatives to that might be. Are there groups circulating that function in other ways, or against the dominant conception of the public? Warner thinks so. It's a very theoretical, very thought-provoking book, but definitely not inaccessible to those of you who are not scholars or academics. It's very accessible and very interesting for those who want to take the time to think about a very strange question - what does it mean to be a public? Who is in the public? And why does that matter?

[Kristin Canfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those great books that keeps circulating in your head likely long after you finish reading. It's also perhaps the best argument for literary study I've read in awhile (or at least it could be mobilized as such). Short on time: the intro and first 2 chapters are enough to make your brain go whirl.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can only claim to have read the introduction.

Describes characteristics of public, and discourses addressed to publics.
- unprecedented stranger-sociability, circulation, poetic world-making

fyi counterpublics are publics.

[micha cardenas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful politics and queer theory!

[Brycedwyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

only read the title chapter (although it is a doozie). sort of torturous to read. don't understand the real stakes yet. guess i gotta read the rest.

[Cheyanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

so wonderful

[Kaia · Rating 4 out of 5]

For publics theories class.

[Mike Rancourt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warner's theory of publics and counterpublics is essential for scholars interested in media and public culture. I might be leaning on this too heavily sometimes, but I was inspired by the text.