“Rethinking” 4; Edbauer Rice, “Unframing” 9–12; Mah). It will become clear in subsequent chapters that the metaphor of the network or web has a special resonance for us. As Brouwer and Asen observe, “Network and web metaphors invite greater consideration of relationality and temporality” (7). Network is consonant with our understanding of kairos as involving a complex configuration of relationships between rhetors, audiences, places, and contextual resources and constraints at a particular moment in time. We are also attracted to Brouwer and Asen’s use of modality, which “foregrounds productive arts of crafting publicity,” though we avoid this term because of possible confusion with “multimodality” as it is used in this book (17).
A danger of metaphors like “sphere” and “network” call to mind entities that exist (like a geophysical places) independently of the performances that occur “in” them, in the same way a theater exists even when there is no performance occurring there. But several theorists take issue with the implication that the public sphere exists independently of rhetorical performances. Warner, for instance, emphasizes the way a public is coaxed into existence via the operation of multiple texts circulating in relationship with each other over time:
It’s the way texts circulate, and become the basis for further representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and duration. A text, to have a public, must continue to circulate through time, and because this can only be confirmed through an intertextual environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual, even intergeneric. (97)
Audience and attention, in this model, become crucial: “Because a public exists only by virtue of address, it must predicate some degree of attention, however notional, from its members” (87). In Warner’s conception, the public sphere has a fragile quality. It is always in danger of evaporating. Should channels of textual circulation become blocked or attention be diverted, the public will fade away. In this sense, a public is different from other forms of sociality, such as a “nation,” which “includes its members whether they are awake or asleep, sober or drunk, sane or deranged, alert or comatose” (87). This emphasis on circulation and attention drives much of the subsequent discussion in our book. In chapters 3–5, we offer a revised model of rhetorical invention based on links between the composing process and considerations of circulation, of what happens when the composition is done.
Critique #2: The nature of access to the public sphere. The second critique concerns how publics are accessed. The liberal bourgeois public sphere is founded on the idea that participation is not reliant on social status. One did not need to be a duke to enter the coffeehouse and introduce arguments. But as many have pointed out, and as Habermas himself concedes, the allegedly egalitarian nature of this public had severe limitations: It only applied to white male property owners. The ideal model of the public sphere described by Habermas insists on what Seyla Benhabib calls a “symmetry condition,” which includes the related tenets that “each participant must have an equal chance to initiate and to continue communication” and “each must have an equal chance to make assertions, recommendations, explanations, and to challenge justifications” (87). Likewise, Craig J. Calhoun writes that “[i]n a nutshell, a public sphere adequate to a democratic polity depends upon both quality of discourse and quantity of participation” (“Introduction” 2). Access is partly a function of material resources. As Nicholas Garnham observes, contemporary models of the public sphere must include provisions for “the problem raised by all forms of mediated communication, namely, how are the material resources necessary for that communication made available and to whom?” (361).
Habermas’s “symmetry condition” is premised on the idea that social status and cultural difference can be bracketed or ignored and that participants can enter into rational-critical exchanges as equals. Fraser famously argues that it is impossible to achieve this form of equal access because “even after everyone is formally and legally licensed to participate,” there will continue to be “informal impediments to participatory parity” (63). As an example of these impediments, Fraser cites Jane Mansbridge’s finding that “[s]ubordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover they are not heard. [They] are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say ‘yes’ when what they have said is ‘no’” (qtd. in Fraser 64). Fraser concludes that “[w]e should question whether it is possible even in principle for interlocutors to deliberate as if they were social peers in specially designated discursive arenas, when these discursive arenas are situated in a larger societal context that is pervaded by structural relations of dominance and subordination” (65). Rather than ignoring differences, it would be better to “explicitly thematiz[e]” them (64; see also, Sanders 360-2; Young, “Activist”; Young, “Communication” 122–3).
Combining Gayatri Spivak’s “subaltern” with Rita Felski’s “counterpublic,” Fraser proposes the term “subaltern counterpublics” to denote the “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (67, 79). Rather than a model that emphasizes a single, all-inclusive public, Fraser proposes a model comprised of multiple, oppositional publics. This proposal is not intended to signify the desirability of a hopelessly fractured society in which groups only talk amongst themselves; instead, “the concept of a counterpublic militates in the long run against separatism because it assumes an orientation that is publicist. Insofar as these arenas are publics they are by definition not enclaves” (67). Therefore, “subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (68; see also, Felski 167; Asen and Brouwer 7).
In this book, we have no interest in reinscribing a naïve liberal ideal of equal access for all participants. Our pedagogy is kairotic, aimed at creating the conditions within which students—as members of various and overlapping publics and counterpublics—can theorize their own situated decisions about public participation. In the approach we propose, students read public contexts and make decisions about if, when, and how to participate. These forms of participation will be various and, to a certain extent, unpredictable. At times participation might take the form of tactical planning and value formation within small, highly focused groups, while other moments might be opportune for addressing wider publics.
Critique #3: The product of public-sphere participation. Habermas suggests that rational-critical debate leads to the formation of public opinion (54). Fraser, however, broadens this goal, emphasizing that public-sphere activity leads to “decision-making” on the one hand and “identity formation” on the other (75, 68). For Fraser, productive entrance into the public sphere “means being able to speak ‘in one’s own voice,’ thereby simultaneously constructing and expressing one’s cultural identity through idiom and style” (69). This function of the public sphere is not merely incidental, but an important political opportunity. “It seems to me,” Fraser writes, “that public discursive arenas are among the most important and under-recognized sites in which social identities are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed” (79).
For Warner, identity is both the occasion for the public sphere and a product of it. Warner writes that “conditions of gender and sexuality can be treated not simply as the given necessities of the laboring body but as the occasion for forming publics, elaborating common worlds, making the transposition from shame to honor, from hiddenness to the exchange of viewpoints with generalized others, in such a way that the disclosure of self partakes of freedom” (61). Furthermore, a
public, or counterpublic, can do more than represent the interests of gendered or sexualized persons in a public sphere. It can mediate the most private and intimate worlds of gender and sexuality. It can work to elaborate new worlds of culture and social relations in which gender and sexuality can be lived, including forms of intimate association, vocabularies of affect, styles of embodiment, erotic practices, and relations of care and pedagogy. It can
