Available Means of Persuasion, The. David M. Sheridan
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public sphere must include provisions for “the problem raised by all forms of mediated communication, namely, how are the material resources necessary for that communication made available and to whom?” (361).
Habermas’s “symmetry condition” is premised on the idea that social status and cultural difference can be bracketed or ignored and that participants can enter into rational-critical exchanges as equals. Fraser famously argues that it is impossible to achieve this form of equal access because “even after everyone is formally and legally licensed to participate,” there will continue to be “informal impediments to participatory parity” (63). As an example of these impediments, Fraser cites Jane Mansbridge’s finding that “[s]ubordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover they are not heard. [They] are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say ‘yes’ when what they have said is ‘no’” (qtd. in Fraser 64). Fraser concludes that “[w]e should question whether it is possible even in principle for interlocutors to deliberate as if they were social peers in specially designated discursive arenas, when these discursive arenas are situated in a larger societal context that is pervaded by structural relations of dominance and subordination” (65). Rather than ignoring differences, it would be better to “explicitly thematiz[e]” them (64; see also, Sanders 360-2; Young, “Activist”; Young, “Communication” 122–3).
Combining Gayatri Spivak’s “subaltern” with Rita Felski’s “counterpublic,” Fraser proposes the term “subaltern counterpublics” to denote the “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (67, 79). Rather than a model that emphasizes a single, all-inclusive public, Fraser proposes a model comprised of multiple, oppositional publics. This proposal is not intended to signify the desirability of a hopelessly fractured society in which groups only talk amongst themselves; instead, “the concept of a counterpublic militates in the long run against separatism because it assumes an orientation that is publicist. Insofar as these arenas are publics they are by definition not enclaves” (67). Therefore, “subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (68; see also, Felski 167; Asen and Brouwer 7).
In this book, we have no interest in reinscribing a naïve liberal ideal of equal access for all participants. Our pedagogy is kairotic, aimed at creating the conditions within which students—as members of various and overlapping publics and counterpublics—can theorize their own situated decisions about public participation. In the approach we propose, students read public contexts and make decisions about if, when, and how to participate. These forms of participation will be various and, to a certain extent, unpredictable. At times participation might take the form of tactical planning and value formation within small, highly focused groups, while other moments might be opportune for addressing wider publics.
Critique #3: The product of public-sphere participation. Habermas suggests that rational-critical debate leads to the formation of public opinion (54). Fraser, however, broadens this goal, emphasizing that public-sphere activity leads to “decision-making” on the one hand and “identity formation” on the other (75, 68). For Fraser, productive entrance into the public sphere “means being able to speak ‘in one’s own voice,’ thereby simultaneously constructing and expressing one’s cultural identity through idiom and style” (69). This function of the public sphere is not merely incidental, but an important political opportunity. “It seems to me,” Fraser writes, “that public discursive arenas are among the most important and under-recognized sites in which social identities are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed” (79).
For Warner, identity is both the occasion for the public sphere and a product of it. Warner writes that “conditions of gender and sexuality can be treated not simply as the given necessities of the laboring body but as the occasion for forming publics, elaborating common worlds, making the transposition from shame to honor, from hiddenness to the exchange of viewpoints with generalized others, in such a way that the disclosure of self partakes of freedom” (61). Furthermore, a
public, or counterpublic, can do more than represent the interests of gendered or sexualized persons in a public sphere. It can mediate the most private and intimate worlds of gender and sexuality. It can work to elaborate new worlds of culture and social relations in which gender and sexuality can be lived, including forms of intimate association, vocabularies of affect, styles of embodiment, erotic practices, and relations of care and pedagogy. It can therefore make new forms of gendered or sexual citizenship—meaning active participation in collective world making through publics of sex and gender. (57)
Indeed, for Warner, the proper business of the public sphere is “poetic world making” (114). Warner contrasts his model of the public sphere with Habermas and those who view public-sphere practice as limited to “conversation.” In the liberal bourgeois model, publics “exist to deliberate and then to decide” and “require persuasion rather than poesis” (115). For Warner, however, “the perception of public discourse as conversation obscures the importance of the poetic functions of both language and corporeal expressivity in giving a particular shape to publics” (115).
Critique #4: The nature of public-sphere discourse. If diversity and difference demand that we speak of multiple publics and if these publics engender not just public opinion, but identity, consciousness, and culture, then the kind of discursive practices we should expect to find in the public sphere are themselves diverse, extending well beyond rational-critical deliberation. For Fraser, it is crucial that subordinated groups participate on their own terms, using their own “idiom and style” (69). To insist that groups adopt a single set of norms dictated by the dominant culture would amount to “discursive assimilation,” which would lead to “the demise of multi-culturalism” (69). Late twentieth-century feminism, for instance, was not limited to a narrow understanding of rational-critical deliberation, but included such things as “festivals” and “film and video distribution networks” (67). Fraser’s insistence on valuing participants native “idiom and style” is reminiscent of conversations in composition and rhetoric that led to and were fueled by CCCC’s “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language.”
In “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians,” John L. Brooke usefully reviews a range of historical research that explores the role of expressive practices that go far beyond the coffeehouse conversations Habermas examines. As summarized by Brooke, David Waldstreicher locates public-sphere practices of post-Revolution U.S. in such things as “celebrations, parades, toasts, songs” (50). Similarly, David Shields “finds the sociability of the eighteenth-century [colonial American] public sphere defined by wit, humor, theatricality, and satire” (53). Shields reveals a sociality formed out of “the pursuit of pleasure” that includes social, affective, and aesthetic dimensions (qtd. in Brooke 53).
For Warner, the radical potential of publics is linked precisely to the ability of groups to introduce their own forms of expressivity: their own styles, forms, and practices of semiotic exchange. Warner writes that counterpublics “might not be organized by the hierarchy of faculties that elevates rational-critical reflection as the self-image of humanity; they might depend more heavily on performance spaces than on print” (123). “A queer public,” writes Warner, “might be one that throws shade, prances, disses, acts up, carries on, longs, fantasizes, throws fits, mourns, ‘reads’” (124). One of the most striking examples Warner explores is a performance of “erotic vomiting” at a leather bar (206–08).
For Warner, identity is maintained through particular forms and styles of discourse. Therefore, embracing the terms of rational-critical discourse required by a mainstream public sphere amounts to sacrificing identity; as counterpublics seek political agency, they “adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse. For many counterpublics, to do so is to cede the original hope of transforming not just policy but the space of public life itself” (124). In contrast to “deliberation” or “conversation” Warner uses “poesis” to