Publics and Counterpublics

Because the positive identity of a public always remains partly covert — given the premises of self-organization through discourse, address to strangers, and membership through mere attention - the limitations imposed by its speech genres, medium, and presupposed social base are always in conflict with its own enabling postulates. When any public is taken to be the public, those limitations invisibly order the political world.

The experience of social reality in modernity feels quite unlike that in societies organized by kinship, hereditary status, local affiliation, mediated political access, parochial nativity, or ritual. In those settings, one's place in the common order is what it is regardless of one's inner thoughts, however intense their affective charge might sometimes be. The appellative energy of publics puts a different burden on us: it makes us believe our consciousness to be decisive. The direction of our glance can constitute our social world.

The contrast between lyric and public speech was underscored by John Stuart Mill in a classic 1833 essay. "Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard, according to Mill."Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poets utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude." There is, as Northrop Frye puts it, "no word for the audience of the lyric."9 We could, however, refine this contrast. Poetry is not actually overheard; it

The development of forms that mediate the intimate theater of stranger relationality must surely be one of the most significant dimensions of modern history, though the story of this transformation in the meaning of strangers has been told only in fragments.

Some have tried to define a public in terms of a common inter- est, speaking, for example, of a foreign-policy public or a sports public. But this way of speaking only pretends to escape the conun- drum of the self-creating public. It is like explaining the popularity of films or novels as a response to market demand; the claim is circular, because market demand" is entirely inferred from the popularity of the works themselves. 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 external to it.

.Whether faith is justified or partly ideological, a public can only produce a sense of belonging and activity if it is self-organized through discourse rather than through an external framework. This is why any dis tortion or blockage in access to a public can be so grave, leading people to feel powerless and frustrated. Externally organized frameworks of activity, such as voting, are and are perceived to be poor substitutes.

Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position This is the meaning of public life, compared to which even the rich- est and most satisfying family life can offer only the prolongation or multiplication of one's own position with its attending aspects and perspectives. The subjectivity of privacy can be prolonged and mul- tiplied in a family, it can even become so strong that its weight is felt in the public realm; but this family "world" can never replace the reality rising out of the sum total of aspects presented by one object to a multitude of spectators. 67 from 60

Finally, there is some tension between the publics of gender or sexuality and the public sphere as an ideal. On this point, there bas been some confusion; critics commonly accuse Habermas of having adopted a false ideal of a unitary public. S But Habermas does not imagine a public unified in reality, as a constituency or a single media context. "Nonpublic opinions are at work in great numbers," he writes, "and 'the' public opinion is indeed a fiction."59 From the beginning, his account stressed many different kinds of public discourse, from tavern conversation to art criticism. The ideal unity of the public sphere is best understood as an imaginary convergence point that is the backdrop of critical discourse in each of these contexts and publics – an implied but abstract point that is often referred to as "the public" or "public opinion" and by virtue of that fact endowed with legitimacy and the ability to dissolve power. A "public" in this context is a special kind of virtual social object, enabling a special mode of address. AS we saw in Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?" it is modeled on a reading public. In modern societies, a public is by definition an Indefinite audience rather than a social constituency…

In the ideals of ethnic identity, or sisterhood, or gay pride, to také the most common examples, an assertive and affirmative con- cept of identity seems to achieve a correspondence between pub- lic existence and private self. Identity politics in this sense seems to many people a way of overcoming both the denial of public existence that is so often the form of domination and the incoher- ence of the experience that domination creates, an experience that often feels more like invisibility than like the kind of privacy you value.)

Inevitably, identity politics itself magnetizes such longings, affirming private identity through public politics and promising to heal divisions of the political world by anchoring them in the authentically personal realm and its solidarity.