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QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH
83 (1997): 351-399
Book Reviews
John Louis Lucaites, Editor
Studies in the Public Sphere

G. Thomas Goodnight and David B. Hingstman
S INCE the end of the Cold War, the public sphere has been at the center of lively
discussions crossing academic disciplines, local communities, social institutions and
Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 10:44 26 January 2010
international borders. As riots of new, influential publics flower, these discussions grow
in importance. Citizen groups—assemblies of artists, intellectuals, journalists, laborers
and others-have demolished long-lingering Cold War horizons, unleashed accelerating
changes across public cultures and civil societies, and altered the practices of democratic
struggle and deliberation. But the directions of innovation have been neither uniform
nor certain. The last decade has witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, peaceful
revolutions in Eastern Europe, renewed ethnic rivalries, the rise of democratic move-
ments in Central America, Africa and Asia, accelerating circulation of global populations
linked with the explosion of mediated technologies, the development of new social
movements to the right and left questioning state power and institutional authority, the
unsettling of the University's place in the development and preservation of knowledge
bases, and the growth and dissolution of civil societies in a world increasingly split
among cosmopolitan and fundamentalist orders of living. The formation of (and
contestation among) publics on such a vast scale and of such broad variety, we believe,
has coalesced an important line of inquiry: studies in the public sphere. The studies
address historical and contemporary controversies in the interests of reexamining
traditional strategies of influence and exposing theories and practices of communication
to fresh argument.1
The purpose of this essay is to introduce the post-war debate over a contemporary
public sphere. The works gathered for our review speak to a broad section of the
communication norms and practices that comprise the great variety of public life. Like
much contemporary scholarship, these inquiries move within and beyond disciplinary
concerns to conjoin experience, critique, and advocacy into orientations that enact
opposition (and/or fashion consensus) on questions such as those of race, gender, class,
and democratic practice. Studies in the public sphere engage episodes of controversy
where, arguably, communication norms need be revised, social histories rewritten,
political boundaries redrawn, representations contested, and enactments of public
identity (re)invented. In so doing, inquiry makes accessible critical learning from the
discourses of civil society, performances of public culture, actions of citizen groups, and
the struggles of opposition and practices of deliberation inside and outside of actually
existing democracies.
The essay begins by briefly setting out a nexus of disagreement between two defining
works preceding the end of the Cold War, The Structural Transformation of the Public
352
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997
1
Sphere by Jiirgen Habermas and The Public Sphere and Experience by Oskar Negt and
Alexander Kluge. These public studies play a key role in the Offentlichkeit controversy
whose contemporary version unfolds in Craig Calhoun's Habermas and the Public
Sphere—a. book that features philosophers, historians, linguists, and media critics discuss-
ing whether Habermas's idea of public transformation should be developed, repaired, or
scrapped. Bruce Robbins's Phantom Public Sphere is introduced, in contrast, as a collection
of authors who playfully resist and reorient principles of publicity along lines responsive
to postmodern sensitivities. From these largely contending orientations, we turn to two
extended studies in analyzing the excellent works The Black Public Sphere, an offshoot of
the Public Culture project, and Beyond Feminist Aesthetics by Rita Felski. The review
rounds out the discussion by presenting approaches to consensus formation that work
against and within the American pragmatist tradition: Susan Herbst's Numbered Voices
and Charles Willard's Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern
Democracy.
The Bourgeois and the Proletarian Public Spheres

Arguably, few writings on publics have achieved as much sustained attention asJiirgen
Habermas's 1962 Habilitationschrift on the norms and history of the bourgeois public
sphere.3 The controversial work, written under the influence of Theodor Adorno, traces
the development of European democratic politics from the late seventeenth through the
early twentieth centuries. According to Habermas, communication within early publics
occurred in a relatively safe space where discussion flourished among people bound by
common interests. In such a setting, norms of social deference could be set aside in the
interest of reaching common agreements informed by practical reason. Literary conver-
sation aside, the business of discussion was weighing the consequences of news upon
commerce.
Habermas believes that such communicative activity carried a promissory note of
emancipation: no one could be ruled out from discussion tout court—if a better argument
could be furnished. This principle, he holds, animated the rise of political debate and
constitutional protections necessary for democratic communication practices. The eman-
cipatory potential began to decline, however, when the state and the mass media
combined to provide legitimation rituals, rather than public debate, for the purposes of
passing over interest conflicts among social groups and of sustaining bureaucratic power.
In the early 1980s, Habermas modified the declinist thesis. In his Theory of Communica-
tion Action, he places hope for democratic renewal in New Social Movements—groups
advocating change that emerge outside the power of state-influenced institutions.4
Concerned with "meaning" and "forms of life," these new movements use the principles
of publicity to bring attention from "the periphery to the center." In this more
contemporary rendering, the public has not so much disappeared as become noninstitu-
tionalized, fragmented, and threatened by institutions ruled by money and power.
Nevertheless, the spontaneous and voluntary associations of New Social Movements
exhibit the capacity to question conventional authorities whose legitimacy is ultimately
underwritten by the public realm.
The structural transformation thesis was opposed in Germany during the latter phases
of the student protest movement of the 1960s by Oskar Negt, a sociologist and former
assistant to Habermas, and Alexander Kluge, a lawyer and film-maker who studied with
Adorno. Their 1972 book, The Public Sphere and Experience, reflected a widespread
353
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH GOODNIGHT AND HINGSTMAN
countercultural belief that the bourgeois public sphere was a fatally flawed project at the
outset; so, alternative sites unifying those who would oppose class oppression had to be
constructed. They described a proletarian public sphere which is, most simply, "a site
where struggles are decided by other means than war."5 This space for achieving real
social change and solidarity is "an oppositional public sphere that ignores the dichotomy
between public and private, which is grounded in material relations of production and
. . . in human experience."6 As Miriam Hansen points out in her fine introduction to the
1993 English language translation, "[w]hile Habermas's notion of public life is predi-
cated on formal conditions of communication (free association, equal participation,
deliberation, polite argument) Negt and Kluge emphasize questions of constituency,
concrete needs, interests, conflicts, protest, and power" (xxx).
The history of the proletarian public sphere, for Negt and Kluge, is one marked by
erasures, gaps, deceptions, exclusions, and false consciousness. For them, the bourgeois
public sphere spans only the perspectives of an organizational elite and lies "without a
doubt, far outside the proletarian context of living" (6). Whereas Habermas pictured
plebeian protest as a transitional moment to a fully-fashioned critical rationality and
constitutionally protected freedoms, Negt and Kluge treat such social arrangements as
mere "blockage" which obstructs proletarian self-realization and solidarity. What passes
for public discourse now flows from a nearly exclusive bourgeois "public sphere of
production." Disconnected from the actual experiences of the working class, the
commercial media provide frameworks of diversion, threats of division, and shows of
authority.
While the intellectual vanguard of the Left generally appreciates this condition, the
authors acknowledge that a gap exists between revolutionary leaders and potential
followers. Nevertheless, for Negt and Kluge revolution is only a matter of time and then
bourgeois institutions will "fall away" into anachronistic meaninglessness because they
cannot contain the "surplus of experience" associated with oppression. Even when the
revolution comes, however, the question of party organization, with its inevitable
inclusions and exclusions, still arises-a question which is acknowledged to have no solid
answer within an oppositional context.
Negt and Kluge invest their hope in learning from the history of public struggles—with
each partial success, huge failure, or enclaved social experiment, historical struggles will
reveal aspects of a genuine public sphere. While The Public Sphere and Experience opens up
a space for consideration of "counterpublics" emergent from "contexts for living"
outside of representations of bourgeois experience, it accords scant attention to the
possibilities of identity formation, politics of difference, and opposition outside of
struggles constituted by the labor movement. Nevertheless, the notion of a multiplicity of
publics in opposition to singularity, uniformity, rationality, neutralization and traditional
norms and practices of communication posits a vital, critical nexus of argument. From
this place of exchange branches of controversy materialize.
On Modern and Postmodern Publics

Habermas and the Public Sphere is a strong collection. It contains a series of essays and
exchanges that were initially part of a seminar held at the University of North Carolina, a
meeting occasioned by the English language publication of The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere in 1989-the date now attributed to the end of the Cold War. The
historians, philosophers, linguists, and democratic theorists assembled worked to widen,
354
amend or reverse Habermas's explanatory contexts for the structural transformation of

the public sphere.
The first set of articles reveal the strength and weakness of the discussion. Essays by
Thomas McCarthy, Seyla Benhabib, Peter Hohendahl, and Nancy Fraser work to revise
Habermas's narrative of structural transformation in the interest of developing critical
theories of the public sphere adequate to explain and appraise actually existing demo-
cratic practices. Essays by Michael Schudson and Moishe Postone sound a more
skeptical note.
McCarthy theorizes the conditions of reflective agreement in pluralistic societies
where people do enter the public sphere with good reasons, but with different understand-
ings of needs. So, McCarthy confronts Habermas's judgment that the ideal goal of public
argument is to reach unanimity of opinion in a rationally informed consensus. The
reflective public spokesperson need not seek an elusive identical understanding to
inform action, but should engage in "conciliation, consent, accommodation, and the
like" in the interests of avoiding violence, coercion and manipulation (67). Thus,
McCarthy softens Habermas's distinction between "a strategically motivated compro-
mise of interests and an argumentatively achieved consensus on validity" (66) and so
opens a space for members of New Social Movements to work together for common
cause, even if practical reasoning cannot produce identical renderings of the common
good.
Benhabib joins in common cause. "As feminists," she writes, "we should not only
criticize Habermas's social theory but also enter into a dialectcial [sic] alliance with it"
(94). The alliance is a choice of communicative action as the lesser evils among ways to
construct public space, denned as "sites of power, of common action coordinated
through speech and persuasion" (78). This definition is offered in partial critique of
Hannah Arendt's antimodem version of a classical public sphere, a space limited to
certain groups agonistically engaged in debating a set of well-defined issues.7 To
Benhabib it is clear that technical matters and fora can be made into sites of public
concern and address, and that private matters frequently evolve through public transfor-
mation into issues of justice and the common good. "All struggles against oppression in
the modern world begin by redefining what had previously been considered private,
nonpublic, and nonpolitical issues as matters of public concern," she writes (84).
If public matters are not phenomenologically given or circumscribed by social
formation, neither are they subject to neutral, law-like conventions. Benhabib critiques
Bruce Ackerman's notion of public space as public dialogue.8 Ackerman's liberal version
of the public sphere would set aside disagreements where matters are held to be
personal, unresolvable, and therefore nonpublic. Yet, this requirement for "neutrality"
takes off the table expressed concerns of disempowered groups who struggle to get on the
public agenda. As she writes, "In effect, there may be as many publics as there are
controversial general debates about the validity of norms" (87). Of the available theories,
only Habermas's model of communicative action (which in principle submits every
boundary to mutual discussion) is capable of offering the "egalitarian reciprocity"
necessary for critiquing the practices of social norms where private needs, even when
successfully made public, often become subject to "a patriarchal-capitalist-disciplinary
bureaucracy." Yet Habermas does not go far enough in specifying a "critical model of
public space and public discourse" specific to feminist needs (94), hence her call for a
strategic alliance with and critique of the model.
355
Fraser, too, is ambivalent. At the outset she says that "something like Habermas's idea
of the public sphere is indispensable to critical theory and democratic political practice"
(111). Whereas Habermas theorizes the public from the point of view of unrealized
potential, Fraser reads history through oppositional lenses in order to problematize
bourgeois conceptions. In line with Ryan and Eley's later essays in the volume, she
concludes first, that the ideology of accessibility, rationality, and suspension of status
hierarchies within the nineteenth-century official bourgeois male political sphere masked
the inability of many women and members of the lower social strata in actuality to
achieve access to that sphere. Second, the gendered and class-based exclusions rein-
forced the classification of women's issues and class interests as partial, private or
domestic, not suitable for public discussion. Third, nineteenth-century women, peasants,
working-class laborers, and nationalists, among other groups, contested the privileging of
the official bourgeois public sphere and built counterpublic spheres of voluntary
associations, labor coalitions, and street protests deploying alternative political and
speaking styles. Fourth, the bourgeois public sphere suppressed dissenting practices and
blocked further interference of these counterpublics with the ideology of openness,
aiding the substitution of elite domination through presumed consent for authoritarian
rule.
For Fraser, as for Negt and Kluge, any existing bourgeois conception of the public
sphere is always already undermined by several assumptions that reproduce the condi-
tions of this historical experience. First, the public sphere can bracket status differentials
and simulate conditions of social equality. Second, the public sphere should exclude
discussion of private issues or interests in favor of deliberation about the common good.
Third, public spheres should be unitary rather than multiple, competition among
spheres leading to anarchy rather than democracy. Fourth, the public sphere cannot
tolerate participation of strong citizen publics in deliberation whose role would include
making political decisions in addition to forming opinion, even if such publics permit
citizens to manage their own social welfare networks, coordinate institutional activities,
and hold officials accountable for their actions. Unlike Benhabib, Fraser finds opposi-
tional work powerfully underway, put into play by subaltern counterpublics or "parallel
discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate
counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests,
and needs" (123).9 Fraser predicates her concept on Felski's development of a feminist
counterpublic sphere which will be addressed later in this essay.
Hohendahl finds neither McCarthy nor Benhabib's efforts to press understanding of
the public into the exclusive realm of "moral theory" convincing: McCarthy because his
commitment to reflection requires some kind of unequivocal grounding of practical
reason to avoid irrationalism; Benhabib because a discursive egalitarianism which is
based upon procedural conversational guarantees itself has to be situated in a local
tradition. Hohendahl reminds us that history enters into any moral critique through the
entry points of culture, and indeed "what Habermas used to call 'the literary public
sphere' is precisely the locus where problems of identity and difference have been
articulated" (108). Hohendahl's observations were not extended to Fraser's paper,
unfortunately, since she argues explicitly that the social-historical practices of counterpub-
lics have sustained opposition, influenced identity formation, and provided resources for
contestation over time. One might extend Hohendahl's concerns, however: with a
relativized and pluralistic understanding of publics, how can norms be developed and
356
secured so as to critique publics and counterpublics that are "explicitly antidemocratic

and antiegalitarian," and those episodes when counterpublics practice "their own modes
of informal exclusion and marginalization" (124)?
Unfortunately, at this point the collection falters as Michael Schudson sets out to
debunk the myth that there was a democratic public sphere in the United States that at all
resembled Habermas's notion of "rational-critical discussion" (146). The story of a
"golden age" cannot be true, Schudson reasons, because public discourse here was
always "hoopla," not debate. To prove the point, he sets out a few pieces of evidence in
an effort to reduce the entire scope of American rhetorical history to his own gloss on the
speech-making of Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and the Lincoln-Douglas
debate, some casual observations on political parades, and suspect inferences from
literacy rates and publishing statistics as indices of public discourse. To the collection's
credit, Moishe Postone follows and observes that Schudson's observations are mostly
beside the point in discussing the normative make-up and potential of the public realm
(167). Outside of Ryan's discussion of the history of feminism, however, the volume
offers no genuine discussion of the history of the public sphere in the Americas.
The volume includes much better studies of historical publics in its subsequent section.
Keith Michael Baker takes issue with Joan B. Landes's reading of the inception of the
public sphere during the French Revolution as an "essentially" masculinist enterprise.10
A close reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, he concludes,
reveals "a daring appeal for realization of women's rights within the contrary discourse
of the progress of modern society through the cultivation of individual reason," an
emancipatory view not reducible to the rhetoric of "republican motherhood" (207).n
Baker defends Habermas's historical reading of the emancipatory potential of the public
sphere as projecting the possibility of "a rationalist discourse of the social." But David
Zaret finds the roots of critical-rational debate to lie beyond the cycle of bourgeois
consumption and production, the controlling focus of Habermas's Marxist framework.
Zaret would broaden critical inquiry to include religious and scientific controversies
(together with printing practices) and have us appreciate the "habits of thought"
cultivated by early public discussions. Lloyd Wright pushes Baker and Zaret to go
beyond the "empirical question" of the emergence of publics and move toward a critical
engagement sufficient "to provoke reflection and action" in our own times (238). He
cautions that "in every case the consequences of historical interpretation pass directly
into the political public sphere" (255). Wright's reminder of the importance of critical
memory is useful, but his essay only drops us off at the threshold of discussing norms for
assessing historical argument over public practices.
Mary P. Ryan takes up Wright's injunction to write a different history of the public
sphere, one from "a women's perspective" that begins at a different place, observes a
different and "more problematic relationship" to public life, and has an alternative future
trajectory. Lake Schudson, Ryan finds that "American citizens enacted publicness in an
active, raucous, contentious, and unbounded style of debate that defied literary standards
of rational and critical discourse" (264). Democratic, urban and populist, the American
standard of publicness appears historically as porous, variegated, and decentered.
Nevertheless, Ryan is compelled to find that the "Western public was founded on
exclusion of the female sex and elision of gender difference" (265). What follows is a taut
rendering of nineteenth-century women's struggles to engage access to the public sphere.
The essay concludes with a brief reference to the women citizens in the New York Draft
357
Riots of 1863: "However we draw the normative or procedural boundaries of the public
sphere, they must be permeable to even distorted voices of people like these, many of
whom still remain outside its reach" (286). Ryan frames the public sphere, in a way
similar to Negt and Kluge, as a site of episodic struggles whose critical history is essential
for social learning and normative transformation.
Geoff Eley takes up the theme of the public as a site of contestation "always constituted
by conflict" (306). Citing evidence from eighteenth-century social movements in Britain,
he concludes that popular opposition co-opted bourgeois practices while developing
styles distinctive enough to constitute an alternative public sphere. These publics were
involved in "questions of interest, prestige, and power, as well as those of rational
communication" (307). like Ryan, Eley re-narrativizes the history of the public sphere to
define its unrealized potential from an insurgent viewpoint.
What are the limits to theorizing the public sphere as a site of contestation, opposition,
and struggle? Harry Boyte addresses this question by pointing out that both Habermas's
narrative of unrealized bourgeois potential and Eley's class and Ryan's gender orienta-
tions still leave the disenfranchised on the outside looking in: "citizens remain in the role
of spectators, whether reflective and judicious or aggrieved and enraged" (341). Alterna-
tively, Boyte invests democratic hopes in the recognition of public life as a "craft" that
cultivates a common "phronesis." "Protesting publics" should be recognized as "prods to
social change" but self-rule now requires that "widespread sensibility and experience of
citizen agency and authority" also be developed (353). Citizen groups engaged in
"citizen action" spark public renewals by revitalizing the scenes of local politics.
What may be required to bootstrap local politics into an understanding of the
fragmented publics characteristic of a world of globalizing communications is taken up
briefly in the next section. Nicholas Garner, Michael Warner, and Benjamin Lee focus
on issues of representation, identity politics, and the mass media. Lee believes these are
issues that cannot be addressed adequately starting from a model of communication built
from "face-to-face" interaction and speech act theory. Of the three, Warner's dialectical
encounter is the most interesting insofar as he concedes that the bourgeois sphere
introduced critical rationality, but pace Habermas, claims that the neutralization of
identity required for such debate was the linchpin for the "logic of abstraction" now
oppressing the lifeworld in the form of technical reasoning. Mass mediated display is
reconstructed by Warner as public places where identities find expression, thereby
spreading pleasures and making available cultural performances that subvert institution-
alized authority. While this offers a telling critique of The Structural Transformation, it is not
clear what impact Warner's position has on Habermas's theory of media and New Social
Movements.
The final section of the collection includes responses by Habermas, who graciously
acknowledges many of the critiques even while pointing out that the participants have
begged for him the crucial question: "How could you critically assess the inconspicuous
repression of ethnic, cultural, national, gender, and indentity [sic] differences if not in the
light of this one basic standard, however interpreted, of procedures that all parties
presume will provide the most rational solution at hand, at a given time, in a given
context" (467)? In particular, when the public sphere is relativized, fragmented, and
flattened, how can the use of violence be critiqued? This question signals Habermas's
own subsequent turn to questions of deliberation and the law.12
Bruce Robbins and his colleagues, writing in The Phantom Public Sphere, answer
358
Habermas's question in a different way. If flattened and relativized public spheres are
powerless to stop social violence, then they should be abandoned in favor of other social
sites and practices of discursive struggle that have more potential as spaces of democratic
interaction. Thus, in this volume, Habermas's liberal bourgeois public of responsible,
informed and participating citizens-if it ever was more than a phantom-has died, a
victim of the increasing scope and complexity of interests and social organization. That
women and African-Americans exercise power through their consumptive choices
shows that the market could be as "public," as democratic or empowering, as the state.
That the working class and children can participate in alternative public spheres and
counterpublics within postmodern identity politics shows that their interaction and
self-formation with other classes and cultures need not come at the price of surrendering
bodily particularity to the cultivation of a general interest. That "heterogeneous publics
of passion, play, and aesthetic interest" can fashion alternative lifestyles and public
displays dirough discursive consumption of, and production for, the mass media shows
that desire need not be bracketed in favor of reason in the process of self-formation and
diat the mass media need not be implicated mostly in a declinist model of publicity.13
Finally, that social groups can establish connections within and without social institutions
and across national boundaries shows that cultural indifference and appeals to autonomy
and unity need not constitute public self-fashioning for collective empowerment.
The essays in Robbins's edited collection suggest tantalizing possibilities for those
interested in analyzing and performing acts of collective cultural self-fashioning. Robbins
and his colleagues allow the public sphere's promises of inclusivity to be taken up and
provide a horizon against which problems of identity formation in homogenizing
democratic civic structures can be reexamined. They address the responsibility that the
classical liberal public sphere bears to its other in culture, but mostly stop short of
describing the terms of engagement.
The reprinted Warner and Fraser essays read differently from their appearances in
Calhoun. Fraser's call to repair the principles of bourgeois publicity voiced in the
Calhoun collection is drowned out by Robbins's introduction. Here, her argument
distinguishing strong and weak publics is heard only to problematize the relationship of
publics to power. By contrast, Warner's essay gathers strength and support in its
placement among others that critique the subjects constructed by the liberal bourgeois
public sphere.
Dana Polan traces the movement of desire and fantasy through the construction and
reception of mass mediated discourse. The desires and fantasies of receptive interpreters
both enable and resist the mediated renegotiation of experience, and the unconscious
complicates the work of hegemony and counterhegemony through its contradictory
roles. A Lacanian discursive analysis of the process by which contemporary American
televisual "subjects" produce knowledge through a talk show's "provocation not of the
truth, but of a truth" might be a useful supplement to Polan's Freudian reading (40).u
Viewer identification with or distancing from the talk show narratives (or both) are all
possible mediations as an effect of a viewer's desire, which implicates the subject in a
system of identification and deferral. Is it possible that media owners and advertisers are
able to shrink the sites of viewer appropriation and resistance through their rhetorics of
production?
This question should be asked of another essay in the volume that champions the talk
show as a site of plebeian resistance. Using the interpretive resources of cultural studies,
359
Carpignano, Andersen, Aronowitz, and DiFazio perform a rereading of two chapters

from John Fiske's Reading the Popular on television news. Fiske's text portrays viewers as
makers of their own social meanings and knowledges out of the discursive resources of
television. If television does not engage popular taste and participation in its news
programming, it will fail.15
Carpignano and colleagues convert Fiske's normative stance to a critique of the
declinist thesis by resituating our view of the media. Media spectacles and politics are
inextricably interconnected through the communicative practices of post-Elizabethan
representative politics. The growing popularity of television talk shows is a sign that
media representations of political issues are a contested site for public participation.16
The strength of this essay is its ability to include unexpected sites and groups (working-
class white men) in its horizon of discursive practice. But its weakness, as collaborator
Robin Andersen noted two years later, is that the horizon of inclusion can be flattened by
ratings decisions.17
Two essays take up questions of the significance of the absence of the public sphere in
the declinist literature. In "Windows: Of Vulnerability," Thomas Keenan deploys a
Heideggerian strategy of "proof by etymology"; windows both illuminate and tear open
the distinction between the individual subject and the public other. What makes the
concept of the public sphere critically interesting is not its absence in modern society but
its disclosure of the prefiguring work of language, which ruptures the presence of the
individual subject to itself and implicates the public in the private. The public sphere
cannot be lost or recovered if it is never present, but always interfering with self-
possession.
Keenan's tracing of discursive violence may depend on a creative (mis)reading of
language structure as determining language use, denying space for a conception of
communication as an always unfinished project. like the residents who inhabit the
all-windowed house on Mulholland Drive (whose structure Keenan describes at the
beginning of his essay), potential communicators often are willing to assumes the risk of
mutual engagement for the prospects of an extraordinary view that reshapes taken-for-
granted conventions.18
Fredric Jameson's project is to find in Negt and Kluge's more recent work Geschichte
und Eigensinn a specification of the previously absent proletarian production public
sphere. He argues that the new work foregrounds production as the constitutive force of
proletarian life experience. Production is not just the exchange of labor power, as in
capitalism, but the development of labor capacities or powers themselves, encompassing
a broad range of social practices in the self-formation of the proletariat. Separation of
workers from the means of production unnecessarily fragments, divides, and reifies these
capacities against each other. But these separations also generate a process of establishing
"new relationships and connections" among labor capacities, a process Negt and Kluge
call "relationality" (54). Negt and Kluge read this contradictory process against the
history of German feudalism and the transition to primitive capitalism, finding evidence
of the effects of separation and relationality in the narrative structure of German fairy
tales.
Relationality cannot ignore desire and fantasy as discursive practices, ways of reading
and intervening in public situations, Negt and Kluge argue. Social consciousness has
bodily and sensuous requirements that are always articulated within irrational, imagi-
nary, and revolutionary coordinates. The divided proletarian self explains the historical
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ambivalence of mass political commitments while leaving open possibilities for Utopian
transformation. Aesthetic experimentation may ignite movement from individual expe-
riences to self-production and social revolution.
Jameson concludes with a return to the concept of learning process from The Public
Sphere and Experience to explain how relationality has effects on discourse. Learning is
now a matter of "detecting the powers and habits, the capacities (arbeits vermbgen) that
have already been accumulated, in the body, in the unconscious, in the collectivity," and
bringing those capacities into the open (71). But the learner must also grasp the way
existing institutions block the process of relationality from enabling oppositional dis-
course.
For Negt and Kluge, the possibility of new political and ethical practices assume the
willingness of cpunterpublics to risk new learning processes. But Kluge's filmic and
written stories of life trajectories, such as a German woman hiding from Allied bombers
and a retired teacher writing about Charlemagne in the rubble of 1945 Germany, are
curiously bloodless as illustrations of learning processes because they do not engage
controversy. We may be put off by the much rawer talk and even physical violence of the
working-class participants in American television and radio talk shows, but where else in
the state or in the market will citizen consumers witness proletarian opinions and
testimonials? Yet it is not clear whether such expression is preliminary to relational
development of a sphere of production or a cathartic release disciplining aesthetic taste
and consumer habit.
Stanley Aronowitz's essay blames bourgeois standards of taste for the absence of a
proletarian public sphere. He regards subaltern speech as a sufficient site for the
self-articulation of revolutionary needs and desires and for education in administrative
skills, while he abhors competency-based educational practices that merely replicate
elite codes and subaltern exclusions. Aronowitz's essay is helpful in reminding us that
requirements for literacy and standards of aesthetic taste produce effects of exclusion and
in providing us with a conception of subaltern publics as groups who sometime speak
without formal education. But more local studies are needed to help us understand what
these publics are saying.
The next few essays in the Robbins collection discuss and perform the complications
that decentered subjects introduce for cultural politics. Since language both enables and
constrains subjects, the modernist autonomous, integrated self is held to be a misrecogni-
tion that masks domination and social inequality. These authors ask whether the concept
of public spheres, unitary or pluralistic, can avoid being implicated in the reproduction
of oppressive patriarchal and heterosexist discourses.
Linda Zerilli contests heterosexist discursive practices in a review of the theoretical
and literary strategies of Monique Wittig. To disclose that gender divisions are politically
contingent rather than structural elements of language, Wittig's literary efforts pursue a
narrative strategy of defamiliarization dirough a critical development of universal
nongendered simulations of literary subjects. If the strategy succeeds, the parody of
heterosexist norms in ordinary literary practice should resist the marginalization that
existing forms and conventions impose upon committed minority literature. Zerilli
argues that Wittig's practices add to the range of subversive acts that feminists can deploy
in counterpublic spheres by shaking loose participation in a general public sphere while
occupying and mobilizing the resources of nonheterosexual equality. Whether writing
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alone, however disruptive, carries with it the capacity to sustain a politics is a question
addressed in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, reviewed later in this essay.
In Lauren Berlant's "National Brands/National Body," the American public sphere is
painted as political, unitary, nationalist, and capitalist, and participation in public
discourse constitutes its subjects as abstract, legally-protected persons. But women and
African-Americans, among many others, possess surplus gendered and racial embodi-
ments that cannot be suppressed. These corporealities become an obstacle to achieve-
ment of public pleasure and power because persons must appear disembodied to protect
their political privileges. In their struggles to fashion identities outside this dialectic of
embodiment and abstraction, overembodied citizens can pursue alternative discursive
strategies. Berlant is interested in the textual expressions of a desire for public invisibility
and disembodiment. Her reading of three versions of Imitation ofLife, the novel and two
films, imagines struggles of white and black women for corporeal dignity and pleasure by
reframing their bodies into trademarks, logos, and icons of American consumer and
corporate cultures.
George Yudice and Andrew Ross challenge the assumption that aesthetic autonomy
can shelter challenges to religiously conservative dominance in American political
discourse. The National Endowment for the Arts struggle shows that artistic institutions
will not support a gay and lesbian politics of lifestyle representation. Yudice advocates a
"practical aesthetics" in which gay and lesbian artists aim for direct confrontation of
stigmatizing representations and organize resistance in their own communities. Ross
traces relations between stimulation of mass desires in a post-Fordist global economy and
the invocation of the "public interest" in censorship of popular works of black and gay
artists as a discursive exercise in market discipline. Effective opposition must break the
discursive conventions of morality that support this disciplining procedure.
Arjun Appadurai concludes the collection with a reading of international cultural
transactions as flows in a new international public sphere, fluid channels of exchange
where international corporations and diasporic peoples circulate across state borders.
Post-industrial cultural commodities like John Wayne and the Rolling Stones are now
just one "node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes" (273).
This social imaginary constitutes a "complex, overlapping, and disjunctive" (275) order
that is best described in flows of ethnic, media, technological, and ideological discourses
Appadurai calls "scapes." Disconnected from history, time or place, public identities are
believed to float in completely relativized positions where "one man's imagined commu-
nity is another man's political prison" (275). Habermas's "forms of life" are transmuted
into gadgets of control and the norms of communication are suspended. Other critics,
however, are unwilling to reduce either civil society or aesthetic performance to
perspectives of circulation alone. The next works we consider take up the relation of
publics to communities.
Addressing Questions of Race and Gender

The Black Public Sphere Collective edited volume, The Black Public Sphere, bears
witness to a recognition that public culture is comprised of more varied expressions of
community affiliation than those afforded by white bourgeois social practices. Like The
Phantom Public Sphere this volume explores problematic relationships between dominant
civil societies and social institutions and oppositional communities. Unlike Robbins's
postmodern phantoms, the Black Public Sphere Collective reaches into historic social
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events, institutions, and moments of engagement to contextualize contemporary contro-

versies across Black communities. The Black Public Sphere articulates both opposition and
norms of engagement thereby avoiding the temptation of pursuing an infinite regress of
self-fragmenting, self-fracturing, oppositional communities.
Although Thomas Holt's text appears as an "afterword," his statement of purpose for
the Chicago conference, one of two that spawned the edited volume, strikes a tone that
can be heard in the remainder of the collection. If historicity, materiality, plurality, and
political relevance are accounted for, Black counterpublic spheres can engage the
interrelatedness of "economics, politics, cultural politics, racial identity, gender, popular
music, religion, and reading . . . in creating speech communities, 'publicity,' and the
material and power relations in which these are grounded" (326). The measure of
contemporary forms of Black publicity is whether they open space for oppositional
speech and action that can critique and transform the political economy of an advanced
capitalist order.
Houston Baker's essay opens space for the recovery of Black majority culture through
critical memory, which reconnects the history of an enclaved public sphere by remem-
bering its principles of publicity and major moments of enactment. In this essay, critical
memory's task is to rescue Martin Luther Ring's radical credentials from Black conserva-
tive nostalgia. Baker reads in King's rhetorical style an ability to use the linguistic
resources of Black majority culture to give thoughts immanence and imaginatively
combine different orders of existence. Baker's recognition of the role of the Black
churches in giving voice to Black spiritual and political aspirations is a useful propaedeu-
tic to Habermas's general neglect of religious institutions in his work on the bourgeois
public sphere.
In "Malcolm X and the Black Public Sphere," Manthia Diawara opposes efforts by
narrow, conversionist definitions of Black culture to co-opt The Autobiography ofMalcolm
X. These definitions neglect historical changes in Black publicity that reverse the
significations of repressive capitalist institutions. "Malcolm's popularity today resides as
much in the specification of Black culture through his personal transformation and his
description of the economics of Harlem high life in the 1940s, as in his conversionist
discourse in favor of Black self-determination" (46). But the disagreement that Diawara
identifies seems to mark a rift in the Black public sphere rather than to mark overlapping
spaces for dialogue.
In a similar spirit of opposition to Black conservatives, Paul Gilroy gives a complicated
reading, within the rubrics of "bio-politics" and "etho-poetics," of the commodification
of hip hop music. Gilroy hopes that the "talk about sex" that Snoop Doggy Dogg's
"questioning of humanity and moral proximity" encourages will suggest modes of
intimacy that reconnect ethical issues, such as intersubjective responsibility and account-
ability, with popular metaphors of worldly love (78).
Elizabeth Alexander's comparative reading of the Rodney King video against the
stories of nineteenth-century slave beatings and of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till
suggests other possibilities for the exercise of critical memory to revitalize public
discourse. It discloses that pictures, cameras, surveillance, and the media carry images of
violence that both reveal injustice and have unpredictable effects, such as incitement to
action. Moreover, the courage to violate social propriety-such as the decision of Emmett
Till's mother to allow the world to see his injuries through photographs of an open
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casket-can have ripple effects on the books, plays, poems, and lives of oppositional
communities.
Two historical essays follow, one by Elsa Barkley Brown on changing political
understandings of Black women in Richmond, Virginia during the 1880s and 1890s and
the other by Steven Gregory on the cooption of the Black counterpublic by the welfare
bureaucratization of neighborhood activism in Corona, New York during the 1960s.
These texts examine local institutions and show that publics emerge not only at sites of
struggle but also in places that embody community life. They remind us as well that
broad critical generalizations about the absence or decline of public discursive practices
require periodic reassessment in light of fine-grained, contextually-specific archival and
ethnomethodological work.
Michael Hanchard's essay on "Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil," and Rosemary
Coombe and Paul Stoller's study of competition between diasporic and national vendors
of Malcolm X-branded products in Harlem, answer Appadurai's call in the Robbins

collection for critical examination of the experiences of diasporic publics and the
implications of economic globalization. Hanchard's work also is one of a very few that
addresses important questions about publicity in the Americas outside of the United
States. The discussion of Ana Flavia's assault, the 1835 slave revolt, and the marginaliza-
tion of Afro-Brazilian wage laborers between 1880 and 1920 as cultural markers of
negative stereotypes performs a needed deconstruction of racial democracy in Brazil.
Coombe and Stoller's study is similarly evocative of the influence of commercial
exigencies on the public reproduction of the icons of Black culture.
Two essays examine themes of Black publicity within popular culture. Reebee
Garofalo surveys the social history of Black popular music and the music industry in the
late twentieth century to illuminate the poles of the cultural debate in the Black
counterpublic sphere between nationalistic urges to maintain purity and integrationist
efforts to broaden its appeal. The works of prominent rap artists Arrested Development
and Ice Cube are read by Todd Boyd in the terms of a disturbing cultural politics
comprised by voices "that have always had difficulty being heard." Yet these negative
performances leave a critical question: "when can there be a sustained movement that
examines this historical self-hatred, while linking both politics and culture in a way that
truly empowers all who subscribe to a liberated notion of existence in an otherwise
oppressive society?" (315).
The remaining essays in the volume are confident that the answers to the critical
question can be found in the expert reconfiguration of social reading practices. Michael
Dawson makes the case for a political science research agenda that "would help provide
information for assessing the degree of circulation of political debate among African
Americans, its organizational and political base and which factors within contemporary
Black politics have the best potential for revitalizing oppositional counterpublics" (222).
Regina Austin wants to re-narrativize and re-normativize Black consumption and
production patterns so that communities reinvest in their own economies. Elizabeth
Maguire calls upon Black authors to work with publishers to make sure that both
academic and non-academic African-Americans are aware of scholarly texts written by
members of the community. These essays provide direction for post-critical appropria-
tion of Black publicity for oppositional action, but they risk filtering out historical
dimensions and linguistic grounding of the unique social institutions and structures that
364
characterize Black identity. The next work addresses the formation of oppositional
communities from the perspective of gender.
Rita Felski's Beyond Feminist Aesthetics offers a detailed study of a counterpublic sphere.
In so doing, it also calls into question some basic equations between aesthetics and
politics that appear to underwrite Robbins's postmodern sites of resistance. At the same
time, Felski explores a broad range of community resources for a public argument that
would transform identity questions and social concerns into a robust politics. Felski's
counterpublic is articulated by French and American women writers whose "construc-
tion of symbolic fictions constitutes an important moment in the self-definition of an
oppositional feminist community" (154). Felski wishes to expand more fully the potential
of self-definition as a political space. To do this, her work strives to couple the
emancipatory potential of Habermas's understanding of a non-institutionalized, discur-
sively self-regulated public discourse with the capacities of Negt and Kluge's counterpub-
lic spaces of opposition opened by aesthetic experimentation. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics
exhibits the promise and difficulties of dialectically uniting French and American
feminisms under this strategy.
The heart of the work takes up several women's novels of confession and self-
exploration. For instance, Felski shows how women writers appropriated and altered the
genre of Bildungsroman, thereby challenging conventions governing women's place in
fiction and turning the genre from serving conservative to progressive interests. Alterna-
tively, novels of "awakening" are explored as they recover women's identity not figured
in terms of social progress, but essayed within the orbits of Romanticism, separatism, and
the recovery of an "edenic" self. Neither freshly articulated identity is equivalent to the
other, but the feminist public sphere advances common interests by enacting "a series of
cultural strategies . . . effective across a range of levels both outside and inside existing
institutional structures" (171).
By situating cultural strategies within contexts of aesthetic production and reception,
Felski harnesses avant garde to popular art in the service of social change. The effort
broadens critical attention accorded genuine, though diverse, expressions of women's
interests. So, Felski argues against the frozen "theoretical" equivalences of realism and
conservatism, experimental aesthetics and liberation, by showing that realism may be
reappropriated in new social contexts by oppositional groups. Additionally, she holds
that the force of even thoroughly transgressive "experimental" or "avant garde" fiction
may be blunted by ritualized repetition and organizational co-optation. "The celebration
of a fragmented, pleasure oriented textuality may . . . merely reiterate rather than
challenge the logic of hedonistic, consumption-oriented late capitalist society," the work
concludes (160).
The counterpublic sphere within which Felski situates her varied strategies of opposi-
tion is rooted in "gender identity." Its alternative, yet common, interest resides in
resisting patriarchy and so it "simultaneously affirms and problematizes the very ideal of
a gendered identity that defines it" (169). The feminist public sphere is not united by
claims to universality but by "coalitions of overlapping subcommunities, which share a
common interest in combating gender oppression" (171). Such coalitions may exhibit
differences by class, race, institutional locations, and professional allegiances. Neverthe-
less this, and perhaps all, counterpublic sites serve a dual function: "internally, it
generates a gender-specific identity grounded in a consciousness of community and
solidarity among women; externally, it seeks to convince society as a whole of the validity
365
of feminist claims, challenging existing structures of authority through political activity

and theoretical critique" (168). Felski recognizes that oppression may come from
multiple directions; however, she invests her hopes in the fact that even if women
discover other dimensions of oppression outside of gender, the feminist counterpublic
sphere will at least serve as a model by which one learns to recognize exploitation.
However, it might well be the case that such a double-disappointment risks apathy,
cynicism, or despair.
A counterpublic based on identity interest does not appear to escape all of the
dilemmas of bourgeois emancipatory promises. The double-function of solidarity and
publicity always chances the exclusion of identity issues not subordinated to gender
interests, on the one hand, and co-optation by capitalist control and conditioning of
production and reception on the other. Felski is well aware of these hazards but
nevertheless reflectively embraces a counterpublic because she is skeptical that gestures
of difference alone make for viable politics. "Some form of appeal to collective identity
and solidarity is a necessary precondition for the emergence and effectiveness of an

oppositional movement" (168). While not denying the importance of poststructuralist
work, she nevertheless concludes "multiplicity, indeterminacy, or negativity are not in
themselves specifically feminist, or indeed specifically anything" (7). So, it must remain a
question to be resolved through inquiry into formations of local publics as to whether all
or any counterpublics share similar strengths, problems, and risks in the enunciation of
difference.
The Publics and Their Problems

Contemporary studies in the public sphere are informed not only by questions posed
by the Offentlichkeit controversy, but also by those raised early on in the twentieth century
by American pragmatists concerning the development of a democratic consensus out of
conflict and change among institutional interests, civil society, and political discourses.
In this tradition, Numbered Voices, winner of the SCA Diamond Anniversary Book Award,
offers another dimension of public studies by moving from the aesthetic to the political,
from oppositional practices to constructions of electoral discourses. The work features a
critical-historical inquiry into contested communication practices integral to the strategic
formation of modem politics, public opinion measurements. "The modern public
opinion poll or 'sample survey' is now an essential part of politics," Susan Herbst
observes, and the book sets out to explore how it got that way (especially in America),
where opinion measurement is going, and what its practices portend for democracy (1).
A work of unusual scope and concision, Numbered Voices moves across several
landscapes at once. Initial analysis develops Weberian and Foucauldian premises: the
poll is to be viewed both as an instrument for rationalizing discourse and as a tool of
surveillance. Historical analysis is focused on the cultural, social, and political conditions
within which measurement of opinion formation developed from the Enlightenment
onward in relation to new scientific techniques and democratic ends. The scientific side
of measurement appeals to the elegance and legitimacy of science. The democratic side
emerges from a poll's promise to provide everyone a chance for everyone to have an
equal say. Nevertheless, the power of polls has not been deployed only to generate
consensus, Herbst believes. These apparently efficient instruments of politics themselves
have spurred struggle and contestation.
The major content chapters are devoted to case studies of the concept of public
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opinion in the United States. Herbst shows how nineteenth-century newspapers, like the
New York Times and Chicago Tribune, used prescientific polls to serve partisan ends. The
strategies are said to prefigure efforts by contemporary politicians to "convince the mass
public that their constituencies are large and that their support runs deeper than is
apparent on the surface" (86). For the second historical chapter, Herbst interviewed
politicians and journalists who dealt in public opinion from 1930 to 1950. She finds a
variety of sources of input and a certain ecology of practice that linked opinion formation
to social relationships—as in a priest exploring the views of parishioners, or a journalist
interviewing patrons of a local watering hole. Additional chapters are written on the
widespread uses of contemporary polling research and controversies over crowd counts.
If polling technique has grown in sophistication, it is not clear that public discourse is
more rational or democratic politics more successful. Correlating recent growth in the
use of polls with diminished respect for public institutions, Herbst notes that "campaign
consultants are now viewed as critical by candidates wishing to mobilize a seemingly

uninterested populace" (157). In the end, we are left to speculate on which evil is
responsible for measurement's anti-democratic tendencies. Herbst is aware that polling
removes inducements to action once connected with expressions of political opinion
(166). On the other hand, she lays related deformities of contemporary politics on the
doorstep of the symbolic misuse of surveys by unsophisticated reporters, pseudo-
scientific consultants, and victory-hungry politicians. The reader is left with the sense that
the final chapter of the "public mood" will remain ineluctably unwritten. However
powerful the science of measurement becomes, competing views of the cheapest, most
timely, trustworthy, durable, and democratic means of extracting opinions from citizens
will continue to be debated.
While Herbst does not find much hope for an improved democratic discourse, she
does point in a distinctive direction: "Sustained, interpersonal communication enlarges
the public sphere in ways that polling or certain teledemocracy schemes never can:
When people must take responsibility for their opinions, and argue in public, political
discourse becomes interesting and exciting. Communities wishing to augment political
dialogue should implement communications technologies which allow for direct unstruc-
tured participation" (169). Yet, presently Herbst's own call for charged interpersonal
discussion appears to be reinvesting itself in the latest extension of the dialectic of
measurement: focus groups. Are these genuine sites of democratic opinion formation or
simply more refined techniques of surveillance?
Charles Willard is interested in practices of consensus formation, too; but, unlike
Herbst who concentrates on a single line of discursive production, Willard assembles a
broad-ranging argument in order to salvage "liberalism's most important intuitions while
bypassing its most intransigent disputes" (3). Unlike our other critics, Willard clearly
situates his discussion in lessons worth learning from the post-Cold War world. What he
carries forward from 1989 is not the magic of the peaceful revolutions of Eastern Europe,
however, but a cautionary view of the transformation of some of these enthusiastic
counterpublics into ethnic, nationalistic, and chauvinistic movements whose anti-
democratic rhetorics ignite pogroms and genocide. It is these dangers that lead Willard
to conjure a postmodern politics strongly at odds with identity critique and community
formation.
Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge, a witty and imaginatively argued critique, is
divided into two halves. The first challenges an important range of alleged misdiagnoses
367
of "the public and its problems." Willard points out that the "crisis of liberal democracy"
has become a commonplace, and that its latest manifestation is the Clintons' "politics of
meaning" drawn from Bellah et al.'s quest for community.19 Communitarian rhetorics, at
their best, Willard asserts, are well-intentioned but innocuous since there exists no viable
mechanism to forge a "great community" in Dewey's terms.20 At worst, they beckon a
conformity and homogeneity which furnish breeding grounds for dangerous ethnic or
nationalistic movements. The absence of community does not leave only the alternative
of balkanization and subjugation either. A chapter on "Foucault's trap" strives to
dismantle disempowering critical rhetorics that seal off subjects as either inside or outside
closed systems. Circumnavigating the doldrums of the one and the many now requires a
new rhetoric that aims at "communication across differences," the grail pursued by
"epistemics."
The second half of the book unfolds new communication norms that flatten difference
while celebrating it. Like Appadurai, Willard leaches the normative force from publics
which he defines as "a cluster of people with a field of attention" (226), and like Warner
he finds mass mediated cultural flow to be more representative of democratic discourse
than critical deliberation-largely because Willard holds the problems of forming an
educated, self-determining citizenry to be insuperable in an age of expertise. Media
superficiality is embraced as a public paradigm precisely because it recasts identity by
transforming rich symbols of action into a bland logos of consumption. The multiplicity
of consumer signs furnishes the profusion of identities that keeps the churning shallow-
ness of consumerism going. Ideally, such cultural plasticizing leaves individuals with no
selves worth fighting for, or, perhaps, even troubling about. Our own pleasurable
dispersals of self are to be read, not as subversive moments of resistance (in Robbins's
postmodern orientations), but as the bourgeois public sphere's desired pluralization and
logical outcome. Still, there have to be institutions around to do the heavy lifting that
keeps consumer goods in circulation. These are "organizations" based upon knowledge
"fields" negotiated by the boundary spanning practitioners of epistemics.
Professional or expert "fields" are collections of activities whose epistemic claims are
placed on a par with all mediated products. Following the Rhetoric of Inquiry project,
Willard wishes to accomplish a conversion downward by pointing out the explicitly
rhetorical nature of all knowledge production. Differences between, say, TheJournal ofthe
American Medical Association and People Magazine are merely a matter of "density" of code.
Debunking hierarchy, positivism, and expertise, however, is not all there is to the new
rhetoric. Rather, in these postmodern times a powerful change agent emerges: the
cosmopolitan, a rhetorical skeptic who understands that any knowledge problem is
presumptively unsolvable within disciplinary confines, that professional fields are as
likely to handcuff thinking as to provide useful tools, and that knowledge problems
should be studied mainly in terms of organizational set-up and protocol. The norms of
this elite democratic actor require that dissensus be valued absolutely and consensus
accepted only insofar as it is subject to changing, shallow, and continually reformed
agreements. The public sphere proper is to be resituated outside sites of solidarity,
movement, and meaning and thrown into a "pragmatically infinite number of channels,
arenas, and theaters of operation" teaming with dissent.
A latter-day Karl Popper, Willard charmingly recasts the norms of an "open society"
for a media age; still, one must ask whether questions of identity and opposition can be
set aside so easily. From time to time, the reader is assured that the interests of epistemics
368
are in line with "social justice," a cause presumably predicated on growing class inequalities.
Yet Willard cannot link rhetoric to social justice because his commitment to postmodern
skepticism bars affirmation of any and all forms of popular advocacy. The "new rhetoric"
compulsively colors even the Velvet Revolution and its sister movements in the phobic
hues of anxiety, not hope. So epistemics succumbs to "agoraphobia" (325), a fear of the
partisanship necessary to build "strong publics" in Fraser's sense. If Willard's New Rhetoricfor
Modern Democracy leaves the relationship between rhetoric and social justice woefully
weakened, it nonetheless provides a challenge to study critically the communicative make-up
of civil societies within which publics of expert and lay actors circle and interact.
Conclusion
The post-Cold War studies in the public sphere do not point in a single direction. As a
whole, however, they do steer us away from polar disciplinary conceits: either that the
public sphere is nonexistent because no discourse meets the standards of deliberation or
that the public sphere is coextensive with "public relations." To the contrary, the works
addressed in this essay find that contemporary publics are constructed in textured,
mediating practices. Such practices struggle to bridge social formations and normative
promises. It is always difficult to connect discussions among those who are said to have a
timely say in a line of inquiry, interests, or experiences with other publics that could be
included in a different or progressive future. At best, even when there is genuine good
will and workable democratic fora, creating ways to stabilize and expand expectations of
satisfactory address challenge collective capacities of invention. In the wake of a
cynicism, and hunger for a different time, strong enough to collapse historic Cold War
horizons, studies in the public sphere must now renegotiate possibilities of shared life
within contests over deliberative norms, communication practices, cultural perfor-
mances, civic institutions, and citizen actions.
The transparency of deliberative norms and communication practices, as the Offent-
lichkeit discussion has shown, cannot be assumed unproblematically. The Calhoun
collection speaks to how emancipatory guarantees can be seen to function largely as
mechanisms of exclusion. It remains unsettled how much of European narratives of
emancipation are usefully exported, in particular to the Americas where diasporic
populations early on contested a variety of authorities and situated generative social
promises in "public institutions." In any case, the history of a public sphere adequate to
speak to, among other contexts, the diverse experiences of the Americas has yet to make
itself felt fully in the debate. Such a history would need to include expanded studies in
public cultures, civil societies, and citizen action.
From the vantage of contemporary public culture, publics appear at those sites of aesthetic
and critical performances vibrant enough to invite expressions of genuine, albeit divided and
unfinalized, experiences of individual and collective life. Such performances, in the
post-Cold War context, have expressed opposition to heterosexism, bourgeois bodily
abstractions, conservative cultural morality, and First World cultural hegemony. Cri-
tique of such aesthetic efforts help us to understand what identity politics might find
desirable in the concept of a public sphere. While stressing the disruptive capacities of
cultural performance, such a perspective alone may leave underspecified the tasks of
social integration and coordination for those who might "want" a public sphere.
On the key issue of consumption of cultural performance, for example, Robbins's
authors stress mainly the dispersive potential of appropriation. Hansen argues in her
369
introduction to Negt and Kluge, however, that cultural reception as an activity of

reappropriation cannot avoid being implicated in "the question of who controls the
means of production or who benefits from the current organization of the pleasures of
consumption" (xxxiv). More local inquiries are needed to trace the place of rhetorics of
consumption in relation to material constraints on discursive practices.
The Black Public Sphere performs this task and adds to the study of production and
reception its concerns for preserving critical memory and for exploring norms of civil
society over time and across communities. In so doing, the project redeems the
possibility of rational critical discourse in an enclaved public. It shows us how reasonable
opposition need not lead to the abandonment of public debate, but finds such discussion
expanded and enriched in different communicative practices. Felski, too, recuperates a
counterpublic space as a community in which aesthetic formulations of experience can
be allied with movement strategies that influence and recomport civic institutions.
Herbst and Willard conclude that "mainstream" political practice is not without
significant contestation and struggle for power as well. Significantly, Herbst's study of
polls, as an integral component of election politics and media rhetoric, moves public
sphere studies into researching the means of production and constraints on reception,
enabling a version of the critique called for by Felski and Hansen. Willard's "new
rhetoric" invites exploration of the actual practices of elite publics that make claims to
employ critical rationality. More case-specific work into the development of influential
public customs and the relationship between or among elite publics and their proletar-
ian, plebeian, feminist, and minority counterparts is needed.
In 1927, John Dewey wrote of the public and its problems. Then, as today, a late
post-war culture was confronting social, political and technological upheavals. Speech
communication was born as a field of inquiry during this era, in part, as a response to the
need to develop new norms of discourse, modes of education, methods of social
interchange, and strategies of democratic influence. The end of the century finds us in an
era moving through another post-war culture. If inquiry does not point unequivocally
this time to pragmatic solutions in the discovery of more efficient means of communica-
tion, studies in the public sphere nevertheless invite critical review of traditions and
thoughtful critiques of practice. Thus far, post-Cold War discussions of the public sphere
have been fitful, leaving gaps and tearing holes, but even so they appear to work in
common cause to renew bonds between communication and democracy. If the spaces
opened up are too large to be held together by any universal phronesis, they are at least
great enough to find within them the possibilities of hope.
Books Reviewed
BEYOND FEMINIST AESTHETICS: FEMINIST LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE. By Rita Felski.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989; pp. 222. $13.50.
THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE: A PUBLIC CULTURE BOOK. Edited by The Black Public Sphere
Collective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; pp. 350. $17.95.
HABERMAS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE. Edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992; pp. x +
498. $19.95.
LIBERALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE: A NEW RHETORIC FOR MODERN DEMOC-
RACY. By Charles Willard. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996; pp. x + 384. $17.95.
NUMBERED VOICES: HOW OPINION POLLING HAS SHAPED AMERICAN POLITICS. By Susan
Herbst. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993; pp. xi-227. $24.95; paper $14.95.
370
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC SPHERE. Edited by Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993; pp. xxvi-310. $21.95.
PUBLIC SPHERE AND EXPERIENCE: TOWARD AN ANALYSIS OF THE BOURGEOIS AND PROLE-
TARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE. By Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie
Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; pp. xli-305. $44.95
Notes
G. Thomas Goodnight is a Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. David B. Hingstman is
an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.
1 Controversies include, for example, cultural, civic, field-related, aesthetic, social, historical, religious and political
contestations over justice, right conduct, resource distribution, equity, meaning, equality, survival, and truth. All public
spheres engage temporal projections, and a pluralistic society ordinarily has available to it multiple time lines in continual
merger and division. Controversies generate publics, drawing together and dispersing temporal experiences and
structures. See G. Thomas Goodnight, "Generational Argument," Arguing Across the Disciplines, ed. Frans Van Eemeren, Rob
Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair, and Charles A. Willard (Dordrecht-Holland: Foris Publications, 1987) 129-44.
2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr
Thomas Berger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MIT, 1989).
3 Arthur Strum, "A Bibliography of the Concept ofÖffentlichkeit,"New German Critique61(1994): 161-202. Strum
claims that "Influential English-speaking theorists and critics of 'the public,' such as John Dewey and Walter Lippman,
have not shaped this debate as Habermas' book has" (161).
4 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987) 374-403.
5 Kluge quoted in Hansen, ix.
6 Suzanne Women, rev. of The Public Sphere and Experience, Contemporary Sociology 24 (1995): 118.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958).
8 Bruce Ackerman, SocialJusticein the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale U P, 1980).
9Theterm is formed from Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988) 271-313; see Felski.
10 Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: NY: Cornell U P, 1988).
11 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Mrs. Henry Fawcett (New York: Scribner, 1890).
12JürgenHabermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William
Rehg (Cambridge: MIT P, 1996).
13 See Iris Marion Young, "Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and
Political Theory, "in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1987) 75. Cited in Robbins, xviii.
14 For a more detailed discussion of the place of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the interpretation of texts, see Susan
Wells, Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996) 1-52.
15 John Fiske, "News, History, and Undisciplined Events" and "Popular News," Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1989) 149-84, 185-99.
16 For an interesting related discussion of the limitations of Gramscian resistance theory as applied to media
representation, see Carol A. Stabile, "Resistance, Recuperation, and Reflexivity: The Limits of a Paradigm," Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 403-22.
17 Robin Andersen, Consumer Culture and TV Programming (Boulder: Westview, 1995) 157,269.
18 For a description of such a conception see G. Thomas Goodnight, "Controversy," Argument in Controversy:
Proceedings of the Seventh SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Donn W. Parson (Annandale, VA: Speech
Communication Association, 1991) 1-13.
19 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985).
20 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems,(n.p.:Henry Holt and Company, 1927) 147.
SCIENCE, REASON, AND RHETORIC. Edited by Henry Krips, J.E. McGuire, and Trevor Melia.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995; pp. vii+322. $49.95
This book would be worth reading solely for its argument that rhetoric "brings insights to the study of science
not captured by history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, or hermeneutical analysis" (vii). In this sense, it
is a "bridge work," offering philosophers of science a glimpse into a complimentary discourse. It is about

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