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QUARTERLY JOURNA L OF SPEECH83 (1997): 351 -399

Book ReviewsJohn Louis Lucaites, Editor

Studies in the Public SphereG. Tho mas Good night and David B. Hingstman

S INCE the end of the Cold War, the public sphere has been at the center of livelydiscussions crossing academic disciplines, local communities, social institutions andinternational borders. As riots of new, influential publics flower, these discussions growin importance. Citizen groupsassemblies of artists, intellectuals, journalists, laborersand o thers-have demolished long-lingering Cold War horizons, unleashed acceleratingchanges across public cultures and civil societies, and altered the practices of democraticstruggle and deliberation. But the directions of innovation have been neither uniformnor certain. The last decade has witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, peacefulrevolutions in Eastern Europe, renewed ethnic rivalries, the rise of democratic move-ments in Central America, Africa and Asia, accelerating circulation of global populationslinked with the explosion of mediated technologies, the development of new socialmovements to the right and left questioning state power and institutional authority, theunsettling of the University's place in the development and preservation of knowledgebases, and the growth and dissolution of civil societies in a world increasingly splitamong cosmopolitan and fundamentalist orders of living. The formation of (andcontestation 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 studiesaddress historical and contemporary controversies in the interests of reexaminingtraditional strategies of influence and exposing theories and practices of communicationto fresh argument.1The purpose of this essay is to introduce the post-war debate over a contemporarypublic sphere. The works gathered for our review speak to a broad section of thecommunication norms and practices that comprise the great variety of public life. Likemuch contemporary scholarship, these inquiries move within and beyond disciplinaryconcerns to conjoin experience, critique, and advocacy into orientations that enactopposition (and/or fashion consensus) on questions such as those of race, gender, class,and democratic practice. Studies in the public sphere engage episodes of controversywhere, arguably, communication norms need be revised, social histories rewritten,political boundaries redrawn, representations contested, and enactments of publicidentity (re)invented. In so doing, inquiry makes accessible critical learning from thediscourses of civil society, performances of public culture, actions of citizen groups, andthe struggles of opposition and practices of deliberation inside and outside of actuallyexisting democracies.The essay begins by briefly setting out a nexus of disagreement between two definingworks preceding the end of the Cold War, The Structural Transform ation of the Public


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352QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997Sphere1 by Jiirgen Habermas and The Public Sphere and Experience by Oskar Negt aAlexander Kluge. These public studies play a key role in the Offentlichkeit controversywhose contemporary version unfolds in Craig Calhoun's Habermas and the PubliSpherea. book that features philosophers, historians, linguists, and media critics discuss-ing whether Haberm as's idea of public transformation should be developed, repaired, orscrapped. Bruce Robbins's Phantom Public Sphere is introduced, in contrast, as a collectioof authors who playfully resist and reorient principles of publicity along lines responsiveto postmodern sensitivities. From these largely contending orientations, we turn to twoextended studies in analyzing the excellent works The Black Public Sphere, an offshoot othe Public Culture project, and Beyond Feminist Aesthetics by Rita Felski. The revierounds out the discussion by presenting approaches to consensus formation that workagainst and within the American pragmatist tradition: Susan Herbst's Numbered Voiceand Charles Willard's Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for ModernDemocracy.

The Bourgeois and the Proletarian Public SpheresArguably, few writings on publics have achieved as much sustained attention as JiirgenHabermas's 1962 Habilitationschrift on the norms and history of the bourgeois publicsphere.3 The controversial work, written under the influence of Theodor Adorno, tracesthe development of European democratic politics from the late seventeenth through the

early twentieth centuries. According to Habermas, communication within early publicsoccurred in a relatively safe space where discussion flourished among people bound bycommon interests. In such a setting, norms of social deference could be set aside in theinterest of reaching common agreements informed by practical reason. Literary conver-sation aside, the business of discussion was weighing the consequences of news uponcommerce.Habermas believes that such communicative activity carried a promissory note ofemancipation: no one could be ruled out from discussion toutcourtif a better argumentcould be furnished. This principle, he holds, animated the rise of political debate andconstitutional protections necessary for democratic comm unication practices. Th e eman-cipatory potential began to decline, however, when the state and the mass mediacombined to provide legitimation rituals, rather than public debate, for the purposes ofpassing over interest conflicts among social groups and of sustaining bureaucratic power.In the early 1980s, Haberm as modified the declinist thesis. In his Theory of Com munication Action, he places hope for democratic renewal in New Social Movementsgroupsadvocating change that emerge outside the power of state-influenced institutions.4Concerned with "meaning" and "forms of life," these new movements use the principlesof publicity to bring attention from "the periphery to the center." In this morecontemporary 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 Movementsexhibit the capacity to question conventional authorities whose legitimacy is ultimatelyunderwritten by the public realm.The structural transformation thesis was opposed in Germany during the latter phasesof the student protest movement of the 1960s by Oskar Negt, a sociologist and formerassistant to Haberm as, and Alexander Kluge, a lawyer and film-maker who studied withAdorno. Their 1972 book, The Public Sphere and Experience, reflected a widespread


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35 3QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH GO ODN IGHT AND HINGSTMANcountercultural belief that the bourgeois public sphere was a fatally flawed project at theoutset; so, alternative sites unifying those who would oppose class oppression had to beconstructed. They described a proletarian public sphere which is, most simply, "a sitewhere struggles are decided by other means than war."5 This space for achieving realsocial change and solidarity is "an oppositional public sphere that ignores the dichotomybetween 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 the1993 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 byerasures, gaps, deceptions, exclusions, and false consciousness. For them, the bourgeoispublic sphere spans only the perspectives of an organizational elite and lies "without adoubt, far outside the proletarian context of living" (6). Whereas Habermas picturedplebeian protest as a transitional mom ent to a fully-fashioned critical rationality andconstitutionally protected freedoms, Negt and Kluge treat such social arrangements asmere "blockage" which obstructs proletarian self-realization and solidarity. What passesfor public discourse now flows from a nearly exclusive bourgeois "public sphere ofproduction." Disconnected from the actual experiences of the working class, thecommercial media provide frameworks of diversion, threats of division, and shows ofauthority.While the intellectual vanguard of the Left generally appreciates this condition, theauthors acknowledge that a gap exists between revolutionary leaders and potentialfollowers. Nevertheless, for Negt and Kluge revolution is only a matter of time and thenbourgeois institutions will "fall away" into anachronistic meaninglessness because theycannot contain the "surplus of experience" associated with oppression. Even when therevolution comes, however, the question of party organization, with its inevitableinclusions and exclusions, still arises-a question which is acknowledged to have no solidanswer within an oppositional context.

Negt and Kluge invest their hope in learning from the history of public struggleswitheach partial success, huge failure, or enclaved social experiment, historical struggles willreveal aspects of a genuine public sphere. While The Public Sphere and Experience opens upa space for consideration of "counterpublics" emergent from "contexts for living"outside of representations of bourgeois experience, it accords scant attention to thepossibilities of identity formation, politics of difference, and opposition outside ofstruggles constituted by the labor movem ent. Nevertheless, the notion of a multiplicity ofpublics in opposition to singularity, uniformity, rationality, neutralization and traditionalnorms and practices of communication posits a vital, critical nexus of argument. Fromthis place of exchange branches of controversy materialize.

On Modern and Postmodern Publ icsHabermas and the Public Sphere is a strong collection. It contains a series of essays andexchanges that were initially part of a seminar held at the University of North Carolina, ameeting occasioned by the English language publication of The Structural Transformationof the Public Sphere in 1989-the date now attributed to the end of the Cold War. Thehistorians, philosophers, linguists, and democratic theorists assembled worked to widen,


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354QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997amend or reverse Habermas's explanatory contexts for the structural transformation ofthe public sphere.The first set of articles reveal the strength and weakness of the discussion. Essays byThom as McCarthy, Seyla Benhabib, Peter Hohendahl, and Nancy Fraser work to reviseHabermas's narrative of structural transformation in the interest of developing criticaltheories of the public sphere adequate to explain and appraise actually existing demo-cratic practices. Essays by Michael Schudson and Moishe Postone sound a moreskeptical note.

McCarthy theorizes the conditions of reflective agreement in pluralistic societieswhere people do enter the public sphere with good reasons, but with different understand-ings of needs. So, McCarthy confronts Haberm as's judgm ent tha t the ideal goal of publicargument is to reach unanimity of opinion in a rationally informed consensus. Thereflective public spokesperson need not seek an elusive identical understanding toinform action, but should engage in "conciliation, consent, accommodation, and thelike" 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 soopens a space for members of New Social Movements to work together for commoncause, even if practical reasoning cannot produce identical renderings of the commongood.

Benhabib joins in common cause. "As feminists," she writes, "we should not onlycriticize Habermas's social theory but also enter into a dialectcial [sic] alliance with it"(94). The alliance is a choice of com municative action as the lesser evils among ways toconstruct public space, denned as "sites of power, of common action coordinatedthrough speech and persuasion" (78). This definition is offered in partial critique ofHannah Arendt's antimodem version of a classical public sphere, a space limited tocertain groups agonistically engaged in debating a set of well-defined issues.7 ToBenhabib it is clear that technical matters and fora can be made into sites of publicconcern and address, and that private matters frequently evolve through public transfor-mation into issues of justice and the com mon good. "All struggles against oppression inthe 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 socialformation, neither are they subject to neutral, law-like conventions. Benhabib critiquesBruce Ackerman's notion of public space as public dialogue.8 Ackerman's liberal versionof the public sphere would set aside disagreements where matters are held to bepersonal, unresolvable, and therefore nonpublic. Yet, this requirement for "neutrality"takes off the table expressed concerns of disempowered groups who struggle to get on thepublic agenda. As she writes, "In effect, there may be as many publics as there arecontroversial general debates about the validity of no rm s" (87). Of the available theories,only Habermas's model of communicative action (which in principle submits everyboundary to mutual discussion) is capable of offering the "egalitarian reciprocity"necessary for critiquing the practices of social norms where private needs, even whensuccessfully made public, often become subject to "a patriarchal-capitalist-disciplinarybureaucracy." Yet Habermas does not go far enough in specifying a "critical model ofpublic space and public discourse" specific to feminist needs (94), hence her call for astrategic alliance with and critique of the mode l.


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355QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH GOO DNIGH T AND HINGSTMAN

Fraser, too, is ambivalent. At the outset she says that "something like Habermas's ideaof the public sphere is indispensable to critical theory and democratic political practice"(111). Whereas Habermas theorizes the public from the point of view of unrealizedpotential, Fraser reads history through oppositional lenses in order to problematizebourgeois conceptions. In line with Ryan and Eley's later essays in the volume, sheconcludes first, that the ideology of accessibility, rationality, and suspension of statushierarchies within the nineteenth-century official bourgeois male political sphere m askedthe inability of many women and members of the lower social strata in actuality toachieve 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 ordomestic, not suitable for public discussion. Third, nineteenth-century women, peasants,working-class laborers, and nationalists, among other groups, contested the privileging ofthe official bourgeois public sphere and built counterpublic spheres of voluntaryassociations, labor coalitions, and street protests deploying alternative political andspeaking styles. Fourth, the bourgeois public sphere suppressed dissenting practices andblocked further interference of these counterpublics with the ideology of openness,aiding the substitution of elite domination through presumed consent for authoritarianrule.For Fraser, as for Negt and Kluge, any existing bourgeois conception of the publicsphere 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 excludediscussion of private issues or interests in favor of deliberation about the com mon good.Third, public spheres should be unitary rather than multiple, competition amongspheres leading to anarchy rather than democracy. Fourth, the public sphere cannottolerate participation of strong citizen publics in deliberation whose role would includemaking political decisions in addition to forming opinion, even if such publics permitcitizens 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 "paralleldiscursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulatecounterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests,and needs" (123).9 Fraser predicates her concept on Felski's development of a feministcounterpublic sphere which will be addressed later in this essay.Hohendahl finds neither McCarthy nor Benhabib's efforts to press understanding ofthe public into the exclusive realm of "m oral theory" convincing: McCarthy because hiscommitment to reflection requires some kind of unequivocal grounding of practicalreason to avoid irrationalism; Benhabib because a discursive egalitarianism which is

based upon procedural conversational guarantees itself has to be situated in a localtradition. Hohendahl reminds us that history enters into any moral critique through theentry points of culture, and indeed "what Habermas used to call 'the literary publicsphere' is precisely the locus where problems of identity and difference have beenarticulated" (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 forcontestation over time. One might extend Hohendahl's concerns, however: with arelativized and pluralistic understanding of publics, how can norms be developed and


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356QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997secured so as to critique publics and counterpublics that are "explicitly antidemocraticand antiegalitarian," and those episodes when counterpublics practice "their own modesof informal exclusion and m arginalization" (124)?

Unfortunately, at this point the collection falters as Michael Schudson sets out todebunk the myth that there was a democratic public sphere in the United States that at allresembled Habermas's notion of "rational-critical discussion" (146). The story of a"golden age" cannot be true, Schudson reasons, because public discourse here wasalways "hoopla ," not debate. To prove the point, he sets out a few pieces of evidence inan effort to reduce the entire scope of Am erican rhetorical history to his own gloss on thespeech-making of Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and the Lincoln-Douglasdebate, some casual observations on political parades, and suspect inferences fromliteracy rates and publishing statistics as indices of public discourse. To the collection'scredit, Moishe Postone follows and observes that Schudson's observations are mostlybeside 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 volumeoffers no genuine discussion of the history of the public sphere in the A mericas.

The volume includes much better studies of historical publics in its subsequent section.Keith Michael Baker takes issue with Jo an B. Landes's reading of the inception of thepublic sphere during the French Revolution as an "essentially" masculinist enterprise.10A close reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, he concludesreveals "a daring appeal for realization of women's rights within the contrary discourseof the progress of modern society through the cultivation of individual reason," anemancipatory view not reducible to the rhetoric of "republican motherhood" (207).nBaker defends Haberm as's historical reading of the emancipatory potential of the publicsphere as projecting the possibility of "a rationalist discourse of the social." But DavidZaret finds the roots of critical-rational debate to lie beyond the cycle of bourgeoisconsumption 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 gobeyond the "empirical question" of the em ergence of publics and m ove toward a criticalengagement sufficient "to provoke reflection and action" in our own times (238). Hecautions that "in every case the consequences of historical interpretation pass directlyinto the political public sphere" (255). Wright's reminder of the importance of criticalmemory is useful, but his essay only drops us off at the threshold of discussing norms forassessing historical argum ent over public practices.Mary P. Ryan takes up Wright's injunction to write a different history of the publicsphere, one from "a women's perspective" that begins at a different place, observes a

different and "more problem atic relationship" to public life, and has an alternative futuretrajectory. Lake Schudson, Ryan finds that "Am erican citizens enacted publicness in anactive, raucous, contentious, and unbounded style of debate that defied literary standardsof rational and critical discourse" (264). Democratic, urban and populist, the Americanstandard of publicness appears historically as porous, variegated, and decentered.Nevertheless, Ryan is compelled to find that the "Western public was founded onexclusion of the female sex and elision of gender difference" (265). What follows is a tautrendering 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


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357QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH GOOD NIGHT AND HINGSTMANRiots of 1863: "However we draw the normative or procedural boundaries of the publicsphere, they must be perm eable to even distorted voices of people like these, many ofwhom still remain outside its reach" (286). Ryan frames the public sphere, in a waysimilar to Negt and Kluge, as a site of episodic struggles whose critical history is essentialfor social learning and norm ative transformation.Geoff Eley takes up the theme of the public as a site of contestation "always constitutedby conflict" (306). Citing evidence from eighteenth-century social movements in Britain,he concludes that popular opposition co-opted bourgeois practices while developingstyles distinctive enough to constitute an alternative public sphere. These publics wereinvolved in "questions of interest, prestige, and power, as well as those of rationalcommunication" (307). li ke Ryan, Eley re-narrativizes the history of the public sphere todefine its unrealized potential from an insurgent viewpoint.

W hat 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'snarrative 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 roleof 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" thatcultivates a comm on "phronesis." "Protesting publics" should be recognized as "prods tosocial change" but self-rule now requires that "w idespread sensibility and experience ofcitizen 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 thefragmented publics characteristic of a world of globalizing com munications is taken upbriefly in the next section. Nicholas Garner, Michael Warner, and Benjamin Lee focuson issues of representation, identity politics, and the mass media. Lee believes these areissues that cannot be addressed adequately starting from a model of communication builtfrom "face-to-face" interaction and speech act theory. Of the three, Warner's dialecticalencounter is the most interesting insofar as he concedes that the bourgeois sphereintroduced critical rationality, but pace Habermas, claims that the neutralization ofidentity required for such debate was the linchpin for the "logic of abstraction" nowoppressing the lifeworld in the form of technical reasoning. Mass mediated display isreconstructed by Warner as public places where identities find expression, therebyspreading pleasures and making available cultural performances that subvert institution-alized authority. While this offers a telling critique of The Structural Transformation, it is notclear what impact Warner's position has on H aberm as's theory of media and New SocialMovements.

The final section of the collection includes responses by Habermas, who graciouslyacknowledges many of the critiques even while pointing out that the participants havebegged for him the crucial question: "H ow could you critically assess the inconspicuousrepression of ethnic, cultural, national, gender, and indentity [sic] differences if not in thelight of this one basic standard, however interpreted, of procedures that all partiespresume will provide the most rational solution at hand, at a given time, in a givencontext" (467)? In particular, when the public sphere is relativized, fragmented, andflattened, how can the use of violence be critiqued? This question signals Habermas'sown subsequent turn to questions of deliberation and the law.12Bruce Robbins and his colleagues, writing in The Phantom Public Sphere, answer


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35 8QUARTER LY JOU RN AL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997Habermas's question in a different way. If flattened and relativized public spheres arepowerless to stop social violence, then they should be abandoned in favor of other socialsites and practices of discursive struggle that have more po tential as spaces of democraticinteraction. 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, avictim of the increasing scope and complexity of interests and social organization. Thatwomen and African-Americans exercise power through their consumptive choicesshows 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 andcounterpublics within postmodern identity politics shows that their interaction andself-formation with other classes and cultures need not come at the price of surrenderingbodily particularity to the cultivation of a general interest. That "heterogeneous publicsof passion, play, and aesthetic interest" can fashion alternative lifestyles and publicdisplays dirough discursive consumption of, and production for, the mass media showsthat desire need not be bracketed in favor of reason in the process of self-formation anddiat the mass media need not be implicated mostly in a declinist model of publicity.13Finally, that social groups can establish connections within and without social institutionsand across national boundaries shows that cultural indifference and appeals to autonomyand unity need not constitute public self-fashioning for collective empowerment.

The essays in Robbins's edited collection suggest tantalizing possibilities for thoseinterested in analyzing and performing acts of collective cultural self-fashioning. Robbinsand his colleagues allow the public sphere's promises of inclusivity to be taken up andprovide a horizon against which problems of identity formation in homogenizingdemocratic civic structures can be reexamined. They address the responsibility that theclassical liberal public sphere bears to its other in culture, but mostly stop short ofdescribing the terms of engagement.The reprinted Warner and Fraser essays read differently from their appearances inCalhoun. Fraser's call to repair the principles of bourgeois publicity voiced in theCalhoun collection is drowned out by Robbins's introduction. Here, her argumentdistinguishing strong and weak publics is heard only to problematize the relationship ofpublics to power. By contrast, Warner's essay gathers strength and support in itsplacement among others that critique the subjects constructed by the liberal bourgeoispublic sphere.Dana Polan traces the movement of desire and fantasy through the construction andreception of mass mediated discourse. The desires and fantasies of receptive interpretersboth enable and resist the mediated renegotiation of experience, and the unconsciouscomplicates the work of hegemony and counterhegemony through its contradictoryroles. A Lacanian discursive analysis of the process by which contemporary Americantelevisual "subjects" produce knowledge through a talk show's "provocation not of thetruth, but of a truth" might be a useful supplement to Polan's Freudian reading (40).uViewer identification with or distancing from the talk show narratives (or both) are allpossible mediations as an effect of a viewer's desire, which implicates the subject in asystem of identification and deferral. Is it possible that media owners and advertisers areable to shrink the sites of viewer appropriation and resistance through their rhetorics ofproduction?This question should be asked of another essay in the volume that champions the talkshow as a site of plebeian resistance. Using the interpretive resources of cultural studies,


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359QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH GOO DNIG HT AND HINGSTMANCarpignano, Andersen, Aronowitz, and DiFazio perform a rereading of two chaptersfrom Jo hn Fiske's Reading the Popular on television news. Fiske's text portrays viewers asmakers of their own social meanings and knowledges out of the discursive resources oftelevision. If television does not engage popular taste and participation in its newsprogram ming, it will fail.15Carpignano and colleagues convert Fiske's normative stance to a critique of thedeclinist thesis by resituating our view of the media. Media spectacles and politics areinextricably interconnected through the communicative practices of post-Elizabethanrepresentative politics. The growing popularity of television talk shows is a sign thatmedia representations of political issues are a contested site for public participation.16The 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 collaboratorRobin Andersen noted two years later, is that the horizon of inclusion can be flattened byratings decisions.17

Two essays take up questions of the significance of the absence of the public sphere inthe declinist literature. In "Windows: Of Vulnerability," Thomas Keenan deploys aHeideggerian strategy of "proof by etymology"; windows both illuminate and tear openthe distinction between the individual subject and the public other. What makes theconcept of the public sphere critically interesting is not its absence in modern society butits disclosure of the prefiguring work of language, which ruptures the presence of theindividual subject to itself and implicates the public in the private. The public spherecannot 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 oflanguage structure as determining language use, denying space for a conception ofcommunication as an always unfinished project. like the residents who inhabit theall-windowed house on Mulholland Drive (whose structure Keenan describes at thebeginning of his essay), potential communicators often are willing to assumes the risk ofmutual engagement for the prospects of an extraordinary view that reshapes taken-for-granted conventions.18Fredric Jameson 's project is to find in Negt and Kluge's m ore recent work Geschichteund Eigensinn a specification of the previously absent proletarian production publicsphere. He argues that the new work foregrounds production as the constitutive force ofproletarian life experience. Production is not just the exchange of labor power, as incapitalism, but the development of labor capacities or powers themselves, encom passinga broad range of social practices in the self-formation of the proletariat. Separation ofworkers from the means of production unnecessarily fragments, divides, and reifies thesecapacities against each other. But these separations also generate a process of establishing"new relationships and connections" among labor capacities, a process Negt and Klugecall "relationality" (54). Negt and Kluge read this contradictory process against thehistory of German feudalism and the transition to primitive capitalism, finding evidenceof the effects of separation and relationality in the narrative structure of German fairytales.Relationality cannot ignore desire and fantasy as discursive practices, ways of readingand intervening in public situations, Negt and Kluge argue. Social consciousness hasbodily 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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360QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997ambivalence of mass political comm itments while leaving open possibilities for Utopiantransformation. 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 PublicSphere and Experience to explain how relationality has effects on discourse. Learning inow a matter of "detecting the powers and habits, the capacities (arbeits vermbgen) thhave already been accumulated, in the body, in the unconscious, in the collectivity," andbringing those capacities into the open (71). But the learner must also grasp the wayexisting institutions block the process of relationality from enabling oppositional dis-course.For Negt and Kluge, the possibility of new political and ethical practices assume thewillingness of cpunterpublics to risk new learning processes. But Kluge's filmic andwritten stories of life trajectories, such as a German wom an hiding from Allied bom bersand a retired teacher writing about Charlemagne in the rubble of 1945 Germany, arecuriously bloodless as illustrations of learning processes because they do not engagecontroversy. We may be put off by the much rawer talk and even physical violence of theworking-class participants in Am erican television and radio talk shows, bu t where else inthe state or in the market will citizen consumers witness proletarian opinions andtestimonials? Yet it is not clear whether such expression is preliminary to relationaldevelopment of a sphere of production or a cathartic release disciplining aesthetic tasteand consumer habit.Stanley Aronowitz's essay blames bourgeois standards of taste for the absence of aproletarian public sphere. He regards subaltern speech as a sufficient site for theself-articulation of revolutionary needs and desires and for education in administrativeskills, while he abhors competency-based educational practices that merely replicateelite codes and subaltern exclusions. Aronowitz's essay is helpful in reminding us thatrequirem ents for literacy and standards of aesthetic taste produce effects of exclusion andin providing us with a conception of subaltern publics as groups who sometime speakwithout formal education. But more local studies are needed to help us understand whatthese publics are saying.The next few essays in the Robbins collection discuss and perform the complicationsthat decentered subjects introduce for cultural politics. Since language both enables andconstrains subjects, the modernist autonom ous, integrated self is held to be a misrecogni-tion that masks domination and social inequality. These authors ask whether the conceptof public spheres, unitary or pluralistic, can avoid being implicated in the reproductionof oppressive patriarchal and heterosexist discourses.Linda Zerilli contests heterosexist discursive practices in a review of the theoreticaland literary strategies of Monique Wittig. To disclose that gender divisions are politicallycontingent rather than structural elements of language, Wittig's literary efforts pursue anarrative strategy of defamiliarization dirough a critical development of universalnongendered simulations of literary subjects. If the strategy succeeds, the parody ofheterosexist norms in ordinary literary practice should resist the marginalization thatexisting forms and conventions impose upon committed minority literature. Zerilliargues that Wittig's practices add to the range of subversive acts that feminists can deployin counterpublic spheres by shaking loose participation in a general public sphere whileoccupying and mobilizing the resources of nonheterosexual equality. Whether writing


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36 1QUARTERLY JOU RNA L OF SPEECH GOO DNIG HT AND HINGSTMANalone, however disruptive, carries with it the capacity to sustain a politics is a questionaddressed in Beyond FeministAesthetics, reviewed later in this essay.In Lauren Berlant's "National Brands/National Body," the American public sphere ispainted as political, unitary, nationalist, and capitalist, and participation in publicdiscourse constitutes its subjects as abstract, legally-protected persons. But women andAfrican-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 protecttheir political privileges. In their struggles to fashion identities outside this dialectic ofembodiment and abstraction, overembodied citizens can pursue alternative discursivestrategies. Berlant is interested in the textual expressions of a desire for public invisibilityand disembodiment. Her reading of three versions of Imitation of Life,the novel and twofilms, imagines struggles of white and black women for corporeal dignity and pleasure byreframing their bodies into trademarks, logos, and icons of American consumer andcorporate cultures.

George Yudice and Andrew Ross challenge the assumption that aesthetic autonomycan shelter challenges to religiously conservative dominance in American politicaldiscourse. The National Endow ment for the Arts struggle shows that artistic institutionswill 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 ofstigmatizing representations and organize resistance in their own communities. Rosstraces relations between stimulation of mass desires in a post-Fordist global economy andthe invocation of the "public interest" in censorship of popular works of black and gayartists as a discursive exercise in market discipline. Effective opposition must break thediscursive conventions of morality that support this disciplining procedure.

Arjun Appadurai concludes the collection with a reading of international culturaltransactions as flows in a new international public sphere, fluid channels of exchangewhere international corporations and diasporic peoples circulate across state borders.Post-industrial cultural commodities like Jo hn Wayne and the Rolling Stones are nowjust one "node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes" (273).This social imaginary constitutes a "com plex, overlapping, and disjunctive" (275) orderthat is best described in flows of ethnic, media, technological, and ideological discoursesAppadurai calls "scapes." Disconnected from history, time or place, public identities arebelieved to float in completely relativized positions where "one man's imagined commu-nity is another m an's political prison" (275). Haberm as's "forms of life" are transmutedinto gadgets of control and the norms of communication are suspended. Other critics,however, are unwilling to reduce either civil society or aesthetic performance toperspectives of circulation alone. The next works we consider take up the relation ofpublics to com munities.Addressing Questions of Race and Gender

The Black Public Sphere Collective edited volume, The Black Public Sphere, bearswitness to a recognition that public culture is comprised of more varied expressions ofcommunity affiliation than those afforded by white bourgeois social practices. Like ThePhantom Public Sphere this volume explores problematic relationships between dominantcivil societies and social institutions and oppositional communities. Unlike Robbins'spostmodern phantoms, the Black Public Sphere Collective reaches into historic social


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362QUARTERLY JOU RN AL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997events, institutions, and moments of engagement to contextualize contemporary contro-versies across Black communities. The Black Public Sphere articulates both opposition annorm s of engagement thereby avoiding the temptation of pursuing an infinite regress ofself-fragmenting, self-fracturing, oppositional communities.Although Thom as Holt's text appears as an "afterword," his statement of purpose forthe Chicago conference, one of two that spawned the edited volume, strikes a tone thatcan be heard in the remainder of the collection. If historicity, materiality, plurality, andpolitical relevance are accounted for, Black counterpublic spheres can engage theinterrelatedness of "economics, politics, cultural politics, racial identity, gender, popularmusic, religion, and reading ... in creating speech communities, 'publicity,' and thematerial and power relations in which these are grounded" (326). The measure ofcontemporary forms of Black publicity is whether they open space for oppositionalspeech and action that can critique and transform the political economy of an advancedcapitalist order.

Houston Baker's essay opens space for the recovery of Black majority culture throughcritical 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, criticalmemory'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 linguisticresources of Black majority culture to give thoughts immanence and imaginativelycombine different orders of existence. Baker's recognition of the role of the Blackchurches 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 bourgeoispublic sphere.

In "Malcolm X and the Black Public Sphere," Manthia Diawara opposes efforts bynarrow, conversionist definitions of Black culture to co-opt The Autobiography of MalcoX. These definitions neglect historical changes in Black publicity that reverse thesignifications of repressive capitalist institutions. "Malcolm 's popularity today resides asmuch in the specification of Black culture through his personal transformation and hisdescription of the economics of Harlem high life in the 1940s, as in his conversionistdiscourse in favor of Black self-determination" (46). But the disagreement that Diawaraidentifies seems to mark a rift in the Black public sphere rather than to mark overlappingspaces for dialogue.In a similar spirit of opposition to Black conservatives, Paul Gilroy gives a complicatedreading, within the rubrics of "bio-politics" and "etho-poetics," of the commodificationof 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 thestories of nineteenth-century slave beatings and of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Tillsuggests other possibilities for the exercise of critical memory to revitalize publicdiscourse. It discloses that pictures, cameras, surveillance, and the media carry images ofviolence that both reveal injustice and have unpredictable effects, such as incitement toaction. Moreover, the courage to violate social propriety-such as the decision of Emm ettTill's mother to allow the world to see his injuries through photographs of an open


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36 3QUARTERLY JOU RN AL OF SPEECH GOO DN IGHT AND HINGSTMANcasket-can have ripple effects on the books, plays, poems, and lives of oppositionalcommunities.Two historical essays follow, one by Elsa Barkley Brown on changing politicalunderstandings of Black women in Richm ond, Virginia during the 1880s and 1890s andthe other by Steven Gregory on the cooption of the Black counterpublic by the welfarebureaucratization of neighborhood activism in Corona, New York during the 1960s.These texts examine local institutions and show that publics emerge not only at sites ofstruggle but also in places that embody community life. They remind us as well thatbroad critical generalizations about the absence or decline of public discursive practicesrequire periodic reassessment in light of fine-grained, contextually-specific archival andethnomethodological work.

Michael Hanchard 's essay on "Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil," and RosemaryCoom be and Paul Stoller's study of competition between diasporic and national vendorsof Malcolm X-branded products in Harlem, answer Appadurai's call in the Robbinscollection for critical examination of the experiences of diasporic publics and theimplications of economic globalization. Hanchard's work also is one of a very few thataddresses important questions about publicity in the Americas outside of the UnitedStates. 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 ofnegative stereotypes performs a needed deconstruction of racial democracy in Brazil.Coombe and Stoller's study is similarly evocative of the influence of commercialexigencies on the public reproduction of the icons of Black culture.

Two essays examine themes of Black publicity within popular culture. ReebeeGarofalo surveys the social history of Black popular music and the music industry in thelate twentieth century to illuminate the poles of the cultural debate in the Blackcounterpublic sphere between nationalistic urges to maintain purity and integrationistefforts to broaden its appeal. The works of prominent rap artists Arrested Developm entand Ice Cube are read by Todd Boyd in the terms of a disturbing cultural politicscomprised by voices "that have always had difficulty being heard." Yet these negativeperformances leave a critical question: "when can there be a sustained movement thatexamines this historical self-hatred, while linking both politics and culture in a way thattruly empowers all who subscribe to a liberated notion of existence in an otherwiseoppressive society?" (315).The remaining essays in the volume are confident that the answers to the criticalquestion can be found in the expert reconfiguration of social reading practices. MichaelDawson makes the case for a political science research agenda that "would help provideinformation for assessing the degree of circulation of political debate among African

Am ericans, its organizational and political base and which factors within contem poraryBlack politics have the best potential for revitalizing oppositional counterpublics" (222).Regina Austin wants to re-narrativize and re-normativize Black consumption andproduction patterns so that communities reinvest in their own economies. ElizabethMaguire calls upon Black authors to work with publishers to make sure that bothacademic and non-academ ic African-Americans are aware of scholarly texts written bymembers of the community. These essays provide direction for post-critical appropria-tion of Black publicity for oppositional action, but they risk filtering out historicaldimensions and linguistic grounding of the unique social institutions and structures that


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36 4QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997characterize Black identity. The next work addresses the formation of oppositionalcommunities from the perspective of gender.Rita Felski's Beyond Feminist Aesthetics offers a detailed study of a counterpublic spheIn so doing, it also calls into question some basic equations between aesthetics andpolitics that appear to underwrite Robbins's postmodern sites of resistance. At the sametime, Felski explores a broad range of community resources for a public argument thatwould transform identity questions and social concerns into a robust politics. Felski'scounterpublic is articulated by French and American women writers whose "construc-tion of symbolic fictions constitutes an important moment in the self-definition of anoppositional feminist com munity" (154). Felski wishes to expand more fully the potentialof self-definition as a political space. To do this, her work strives to couple theemancipatory 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 Aesthetiexhibits the promise and difficulties of dialectically uniting French and Americanfeminisms under this strategy.

The heart of the work takes up several women's novels of confession and self-exploration. For instance, Felski shows howwomen writers appropriated and altered thegenre of Bildungsroman, thereby challenging conventions governing women's place infiction and turning the genre from serving conservative to progressive interests. Alterna-tively, novels of "awakening" are explored as they recover women's identity not figuredin terms of social progress, but essayed within the orbits of Romanticism, separatism, andthe recovery of an "edenic" self. Neither freshly articulated identity is equivalent to theother, but the feminist public sphere advances com mon interests by enacting "a series ofcultural strategies . . . effective across a range of levels both outside and inside existinginstitutional 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 effortbroadens critical attention accorded genuine, though diverse, expressions of women'sinterests. So, Felski argues against the frozen "theoretical" equivalences of realism andconservatism, experimental aesthetics and liberation, by showing that realism may bereappropriated in new social contexts by oppositional groups. Additionally, she holdsthat the force of even thoroughly transgressive "experimental" or "avant garde" fictionmay be blunted by ritualized repetition and organizational co-optation. "The celebrationof a fragmented, pleasure oriented textuality may ... merely reiterate rather thanchallenge the logic of hedonistic, consumption-oriented late capitalist society," the workconcludes (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 inresisting patriarchy and so it "simultaneously affirms and problematizes the very ideal ofa gendered identity that defines it" (169). The feminist public sphere is not united byclaims to universality but by "coalitions of overlapping subcommunities, which share acommon interest in combating gender oppression" (171). Such coalitions may exhibitdifferences by class, race, institutional locations, and professional allegiances. Neverthe-less this, and perhaps all, counterpublic sites serve a dual function: "internally, itgenerates a gender-specific identity grounded in a consciousness of community andsolidarity among women; externally, it seeks to convince society as a whole of the validity


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36 5QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH GO ODN IGHT AND HINGSTMANof feminist claims, challenging existing structures of authority through political activityand theoretical critique" (168). Felski recognizes that oppression may come frommultiple directions; however, she invests her hopes in the fact that even if womendiscover other dimensions of oppression outside of gender, the feminist counterpublicsphere 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 thedilemmas of bourgeois emancipatory promises. The double-function of solidarity andpublicity always chances the exclusion of identity issues not subordinated to genderinterests, on the one hand, and co-optation by capitalist control and conditioning ofproduction and reception on the other. Felski is well aware of these hazards butnevertheless reflectively embraces a counterpublic because she is skeptical that gesturesof difference alone make for viable politics. "Some form of appeal to collective identityand solidarity is a necessary precondition for the emergence and effectiveness of anoppositional movement" (168). While not denying the importance of poststructuralistwork, she nevertheless concludes "multiplicity, indeterminacy, or negativity are not inthemselves specifically feminist, or indeed specifically anything" (7). So, it must rem ain aquestion to be resolved through inquiry into formations of local publics as to whether allor any counterpublics share similar strengths, problems, and risks in the enunciation ofdifference.

The Publics and Their ProblemsContemporary studies in the public sphere are informed not only by questions posedby the Offentlichkeitcontroversy, but also by those raised early on in the twentieth centuryby American pragmatists concerning the development of a democratic consensus out ofconflict 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 acritical-historical inquiry into contested com munication practices integral to the strategicformation of modem politics, public opinion measurements. "The modern publicopinion poll or 'sample survey' is now an essential part of politics," Susan Herbstobserves, 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 severallandscapes at once. Initial analysis develops Weberian and Foucauldian premises: thepoll 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 conditionswithin which measurement of opinion formation developed from the Enlightenmentonward in relation to new scientific techniques and democratic ends. The scientific sideof measurem ent appeals to the elegance and legitimacy of science. The democratic sideemerges from a poll's promise to provide everyone a chance for everyone to have anequal say. Nevertheless, the power of polls has not been deployed only to generateconsensus, Herbst believes. These apparently efficient instrum ents of politics themselveshave spurred struggle and contestation.The major content chapters are devoted to case studies of the concept of public


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36 6QUARTERLY JOU RN AL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997opinion in the United States. Herbst shows how nineteenth-century newspapers, like theNew York Times and Chicago Tribune, used prescientific polls to serve partisan ends. Tstrategies are said to prefigure efforts by contemporary politicians to "convince the masspublic that their constituencies are large and that their support runs deeper than isapparent on the surface" (86). For the second historical chapter, Herbst interviewedpoliticians and journalists who dealt in public opinion from 1930 to 1950. She finds avariety of sources of input and a certain ecology of practice that linked opinion formationto social relationshipsas in a priest exploring the views of parishioners, or a journalistinterviewing patrons of a local watering hole. Additional chapters are written on thewidespread uses of contemporary polling research and controversies over crowd counts.

If polling technique has grown in sophistication, it is not clear that public discourse ismore rational or democratic politics more successful. Correlating recent growth in theuse of polls with diminished respect for public institutions, Herbst notes that "cam paignconsultants are now viewed as critical by candidates wishing to mobilize a seeminglyuninterested populace" (157). In the end, we are left to speculate on which evil isresponsible for measurement's anti-democratic tendencies. Herbst is aware that pollingremoves inducements to action once connected with expressions of political opinion(166). On the other hand, she lays related deformities of contemporary politics on thedoorstep of the symbolic misuse of surveys by unsophisticated reporters, pseudo-scientific consultants, and victory-hungry politicians. The reader is left with the sense thatthe final chapter of the "public mood" will remain ineluctably unwritten. Howeverpowerful the science of measurement becomes, competing views of the cheapest, mosttimely, trustworthy, durable, and democratic means of extracting opinions from citizenswill continue to be debated.While Herbst does not find much hope for an improved democratic discourse, shedoes point in a distinctive direction: "Sustained, interpersonal communication enlargesthe public sphere in ways that polling or certain teledemocracy schemes never can:When people must take responsibility for their opinions, and argue in public, politicaldiscourse 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 interpersonaldiscussion appears to be reinvesting itself in the latest extension of the dialectic ofmeasurem ent: focus groups. Are these genuine sites of democratic opinion formation orsimply more refined techniques of surveillance?Charles Willard is interested in practices of consensus formation, too; but, unlikeHerbst who concentrates on a single line of discursive production, Willard assembles abroad-ranging argument in order to salvage "liberalism's most important intuitions whilebypassing its most intransigent disputes" (3). Unlike our other critics, Willard clearlysituates his discussion in lessons worth learning from the post-Cold War world. What hecarries 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 enthusiasticcounterpublics into ethnic, nationalistic, and chauvinistic movements whose anti-democratic rhetorics ignite pogroms and genocide. It is these dangers that lead Willardto conjure a postmodern politics strongly at odds with identity critique and communityformation.Liberalism and theProblem of Knowledge, a witty and imaginatively argued critiqu

divided into two halves. The first challenges an im portant range of alleged misdiagnoses


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367QUARTERLY JOUR NAL OF SPEECH GOO DNIG HT AND HINGSTMANof "the public and its problem s." Willard points out that the "crisis of liberal democracy"has becom e a commonplace, and that its latest manifestation is the C lintons' "politics ofmeaning" drawn from Bellah et al.'s quest for comm unity.19 Com munitarian rhetorics, attheir best, Willard asserts, are well-intentioned but innocuous since there exists no viablemechanism to forge a "great comm unity" in Dewey's terms.20 At worst, they beckon aconformity and homogeneity which furnish breeding grounds for dangerous ethnic ornationalistic movem ents. The absence of comm unity does not leave only the alternativeof balkanization and subjugation either. A chapter on "Foucault's trap" strives todismantle disempowering critical rhetorics that seal off subjects as either inside or outsideclosed systems. Circumnavigating the doldrums of the one and the many now requires anew rhetoric that aims at "communication across differences," the grail pursued by"epistemics."

The second half of the book unfolds new comm unication norms that flatten differencewhile celebrating it. Like Appadurai, Willard leaches the normative force from publicswhich he defines as "a cluster of people with a field of attention" (226), and like W arnerhe finds mass mediated cultural flow to be more representative of democratic discoursethan critical deliberation-largely because Willard holds the problems of forming aneducated, self-determining citizenry to be insuperable in an age of expertise. Mediasuperficiality is embraced as a public paradigm precisely because it recasts identity bytransforming rich symbols of action into a bland logos of consumption. The multiplicityof consumer signs furnishes the profusion of identities that keeps the churning shallow-ness of consumerism going. Ideally, such cultural plasticizing leaves individuals with noselves worth fighting for, or, perhaps, even troubling about. Our own pleasurabledispersals of self are to be read, not as subversive moments of resistance (in Robbins'spostm odern orientations), but as the bourgeois public sphere 's desired pluralization andlogical outcome. Still, there have to be institutions around to do the heavy lifting thatkeeps 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 explicitlyrhetorical nature of all knowledge production. Differences between, say, TheJournal of heAmerican 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 newrhetoric. Rather, in these postmodern times a powerful change agent emerges: thecosmopolitan, a rhetorical skeptic who understands that any knowledge problem ispresumptively unsolvable within disciplinary confines, that professional fields are aslikely to handcuff thinking as to provide useful tools, and that knowledge problemsshould be studied mainly in terms of organizational set-up and protocol. The norms ofthis elite democratic actor require that dissensus be valued absolutely and consensusaccepted only insofar as it is subject to changing, shallow, and continually reformedagreements. 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 beset aside so easily. From time to time, the reader is assured that the interests of epistemics


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369QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH GOODNIGHT AND HINGSTMANintroduction to Negt and Kluge, however, that cultural reception as an activity ofreappropriation cannot avoid being implicated in "the question of who controls themeans of production or who benefits from the current organization of the pleasures ofconsumption" (xxxiv). More local inquiries are needed to trace the place of rhetorics ofconsumption in relation to m aterial constraints on discursive practices.The BlackPublic Sphere performs this task and adds to the study of production andreception its concerns for preserving critical memory and for exploring norms of civilsociety over time and across communities. In so doing, the project redeems thepossibility of rational critical discourse in an enclaved public. It shows us how reasonableopposition need not lead to the abandonment of public debate, but finds such discussionexpanded and enriched in different comm unicative practices. Felski, too, recuperates acounterpublic space as a community in which aesthetic formulations of experience canbe allied with movement strategies that influence and recom port civic institutions.Herbst and Willard conclude that "mainstream" political practice is not withoutsignificant contestation and struggle for power as well. Significantly, Herbst's study ofpolls, as an integral component of election politics and media rhetoric, moves publicsphere 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 "newrhetoric" invites exploration of the actual practices of elite publics that make claims toemploy critical rationality. More case-specific work into the development of influentialpublic customs and the relationship between or among elite publics and their proletar-ian, plebeian, feminist, and m inority counterparts is needed.In 1927, John Dewey wrote of the public and its problems. Then, as today, a latepost-war culture was confronting social, political and technological upheavals. Speechcommunication was born as a field of inquiry during this era, in part, as a response to theneed to develop new norms of discourse, modes of education, methods of socialinterchange, and strategies of democratic influence. The end of the century finds us in anera moving through another post-war culture. If inquiry does not point unequivocallythis 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 andthoughtful critiques of practice. Thus far, post-Cold War discussions of the public spherehave been fitful, leaving gaps and tearing holes, but even so they appear to work incommon cause to renew bonds between communication and democracy. If the spacesopened up are too large to be held together by any universal phronesis, they are at leastgreat 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.TH E 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: M IT Press, 1992; pp. x +498. $19.95.LIBERALISM AND THE PROBLEM O F KNOWLEDGE: A NEW RHETORIC FOR MODERN DEMOC-

RACY. By Charles Willard. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996; pp. x + 384. $17.95.NUMBERED VOICES: H O W OPINION POLLING HAS SHAPED AMERICAN POLITICS. By SusanHerbst. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993; pp . xi-227. $24.95; paper $14.95.


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370QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1997THE 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, JamieOwen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; pp. xli-305. $44.95

NotesG. Thomas Goodnight is a Professor of Comm unication Studies at Northwestern University. David B. Hingstman isan Assistant Professor of Comm unication Studies at the University of Iowa.

1 Controversies include, for example, cultural, civic, field-related, aesthetic, social, historical, religious and politicalcontestations over justice, right con duct, resource distribution, equity, meanin g, equality, survival,and truth. All publicspheres engage temporal projections, and a pluralistic society ordinarily has available to it multiple time lines in continualmerger and division. Controversies generate publics, drawing together and dispersing temporal experiences andstructures. See G.Thom as Goodnight, "Generational Argumen t,"Arguing Across the Disciplines, ed. Frans Van Eem eren,Grooten dorst, J . A nthon y Blair, and Charles A. Willard (Do rdrecht-Holland: Foris Publications, 1987)129-44.

2 Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois So cThomas Berger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MIT, 1989).3 Arthur Strum, "A Bibliography of the Concept offfentlichkeit," New German Critique61 (1994): 161-2 02. Strumclaims that "Influential English-speaking theoristsand critics of the pub lic,' such as Jo hn Dewey and Walter Lippman,have not shaped this debate asHab erm as' book h as" (161).4 Jrgen Habermas, Th e Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987) 3745 Kluge quoted in Hansen, ix.6Suzanne Wom en, rev. of The Public Sphere and Experience, Contemporary Sociology 24 (1995): 118.7 Hann ah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958).8Bruce Ackerm an, SocialJustice n the Liberal State (New H aven: Yale U P, 1980).9The erm is formed from Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak ?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eCary N elson andLarry Grossberg (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988) 2 71-3 13; seeFelski.10 Joa n B . Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: NY: C ornell U P, 1988).11 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed.Mrs. Hen ry Faw cett (New York: Scribner, 1890).12JrgenHabermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to aDiscourse Theory of Law and Demo cracy, trans.Reh g (Camb ridge: M IT P, 1996).13 See Iris Marion Yo ung, "Impa rtiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications ofFeminist C ritiques ofMoralandPolitical Theo ry, "in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1987) 75 . Cited in Rob bins, xviii.14 For a more detailed discussion of the place of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the interpretation of texts, see SusanWells, SweetReason: Rhetoric and the Discourses ofModernity (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996) 1-52.15 John Fiske, "News, History, and Undisciplined E vents" and "Popular News," Reading the Popular (Boston: Unw iHym an, 1989) 149-84, 185-99.16 Fo r an interesting related discussion of the limitations of Gramscian resistance theory as applied to mediarepresentation, see Carol A. Stabile, "Resistance, Recuperation, and Reflexivity: The Limits of a Paradigm,"CriticalStudies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 40 3-2 2.17 Rob in An dersen , Consumer Culture and TV Programming (Boulder: Westview, 1995)157,269.18For a description of such a conception see G. Thomas Goodnight, "Controversy," Argument in ControversyProceedings of the Seventh SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Donn W. Parson (Annandale, VA: Sp eCom mun ication Association, 1991)1-13.19Rob ert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985).20 Joh n Dewey, The Public and Its Problems,(n.p.:He nry 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. $49.95This 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, itis a "bridge work," offering philosophers of science a glimpse into a complimentary discourse. It is about

goodnight hingstman

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