Publics and Counterpublics Quotes

“Women’s networks — of gossip, kinship, affect, and countereconomies — have had important public aspects even at the height of Victorian ideology.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“Perhaps rhetorically, Joan Wallach Scott claimed in Gender and the Politics of History (1988) that the politics of gender “dissolves the distinction between public and private.”16”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“Either way, the scale of the problem was enormous. Carol Pateman was able to claim that “the dichotomy between the private and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle; it is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“To fight such arguments, it was necessary to advance a strong vision of the public relevance of private life, a vision expressed in the phrase “civil rights.” Even more, though, the women’s and gay movements represented groups who were by definition linked to a conventional understanding of private life — gender roles, sexuality, the home and family. They were public movements contesting the most private and intimate matters. Their very entry into public politics seemed scandalous or inappropriate. An understanding of public and private was implied not just in their theories and policy platforms but in their very existence as movements.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“It will be seen below that the public sphere in Habermas’s influential account is private in several crucial senses. And much work on gender and sexuality in cultural studies has shown that publics in various ways enable privacy, providing resources for interiority and contexts for self-elaboration.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“But in the modern period, this has changed, and privacy has taken on a distinctive value of its own, in several different registers: as freedom, individuality, inwardness, authenticity, and so on. Public and private sometimes compete, sometimes complement each other, and sometimes are merely parts of a larger series of classifications that includes, say, local, domestic, personal, political, economic, or intimate. Almost every major cultural change — from Christianity to printing to psychoanalysis — has left a new sedimentary layer in the meaning of the public and the private.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“In medieval thought (which inherited a notion of the res publica from Roman law), the public was almost solely a spatial concept, meaning anything open, such as the outside wall of a house. Modern culture has redrawn the spatial distinction, adding new layers of meaning to the term “public” but preserving the idea of physical boundaries.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The problem in this case is that the preconditions of rhetorical engagement with publics are the object of an analysis that is motivated in large part by a rhetorical engagement with a public. Conceptually, this is like trying to face backward while walking.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The movement had embraced, as the definition of its own constituency, a privatized notion of identity based in the homo/hetero language of sexual orientation. Along with many other academics who were developing the field of queer theory in the 1990s, I thought this language distorted sexuality and its politics. Queer theory, meanwhile, got to be very good at redescribing nonnormative sexualities and the flaws of identitarian thinking.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“Publics are among the conditions of textuality, specifying that certain stretches of language are understood to be “texts” with certain properties. This metapragmatic background — itself of infinite complexity — must be held up for analysis if we are to understand the mutually defining interplay between texts and publics.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“On some points I do think the method is consistent. It is essentially interpretive and form sensitive. I urge an understanding of the phenomenon of publics that is historical in orientation and always alert to the dynamics of textuality.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“It tries to model, through a range of case studies, the sort of multileveled analysis that, I think, is always demanded by public texts.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“Much of the art of writing, or of performing in other media, lies in the practical knowledge that there are always many different ways of addressing a public, that each decision of form, style, and procedure carries hazards and costs in the kind of public it can define. The temptation is to think of publics as something we make, through individual heroism and creative inspiration or through common goodwill. Much of the process, however, necessarily remains invisible to consciousness and to reflective agency. The making of a public requires conditions that range from the very general — such as the organization of media, ideologies of reading, institutions of circulation, text genres — to the particular rhetorics of texts.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The ladies of Casa Susanna are doing glamour, which for them is both a public idiom and an intimate feeling. Its thrill allows them to experience their bodies in a way that would not have been possible without this mutual witnessing and display.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The suburban, domestic scene in which we find them — panelled and centrally heated — is being put to an unusual use. It is a space of collective improvisation, transformative in a way that depends on its connection to several publics — including a dominant and alien mass public.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The idea of a public is motivating, not simply instrumental. It is constitutive of a social imaginary. The manner in which it is understood by participants is therefore not merely epiphenomenal, not mere variation on a form whose essence can be grasped independently.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The paradox is that although the idea of a public can only work if it is rooted in the self-understanding of the participants, participants could not possibly understand themselves in the terms I have stated.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The idea of a public does have some consistency, despite the wide variety of its instances. The social worlds constructed by it are by no means uniform or uncontested, but they are nevertheless marked by the form in common ways.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The argument, as developed in the title essay, is that the notion of a public enables a reflexivity in the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“I suggest below, in fact, that the idea of a public has a metacultural dimension; it gives form to a tension between general and particular that makes it difficult to analyze from either perspective alone. It might even be said to be a kind of engine of translatability, putting down new roots wherever it goes.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“The question “What is a public?” requires, to begin with, an explanation of two apparently contradictory facts. The first is that the category seems to presuppose a contingent history, varying in subtle but significant ways from one context to another, from one set of institutions to another, from one rhetoric to another. The second is that the form seems to have a functional intelligibility across a wide range of contexts. How can both be true at once? How could readers in eighteenth-century London and filmgoers in twenty-first-century Hong Kong belong to publics in the same way? Does it make sense to speak of a form common to both? Can it be described in a way that still does justice to the differences of setting and medium?”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“Properly understood, it can reframe the way we understand literary texts, contemporary politics, and the modern social world in general. Perhaps because contemporary life without the idea of a public is so unthinkable, the idea itself tends to be taken for granted, and thus little understood. What discipline or method has a claim to say much about it? How would one go about studying it?”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“Yet 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.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“(There is no such thing as a pop song, for example, unless you hear it as addressing itself to the audience that can make it “pop.”) Your”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

“Publics are queer creatures. You cannot point to them, count them, or look them in the eye. You also cannot easily avoid them. They have become an almost natural feature of the social landscape, like pavement. In the media-saturated forms of life that now dominate the world, how many activities are not in some way oriented to publics? Texts cross one’s path in their endless search for a public of one kind or another: the morning paper, the radio, the television, movies, billboards, books, official postings.”
― Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics