A struggle with conditions

In his article called “Publics and Counterpublics,” Michael Warner states that membership in a public “is constituted by mere attention” (60). My first reaction was to discount the claim; this membership criterion appears too broad, and it doesn’t seem to reflect the reality that we often assign names to particular publics. In other words, names indicate identity, and group identity usually revolves around a shared commonality, such as goals, interests, or values. So if publics are constituted through mere attention, does that mean I can be suckered into a public whether or not I agree with the majority of that public’s members? But really, how can a public have “majority consensus” if there’s no sort of filter for who becomes part of that public?

Warner anticipates my first question with this response: “Our willingness to process a passing appeal determines which publics we belong to and performs their extension” (Warner 62). Rather than being involuntarily “suckered” into a public, Warner argues that at some level, all members are “voluntary.”

Last week on the blog posts, Anjeli brought up the idea of voluntary and involuntary publics; she pointed to the public of this classroom as an example of an involuntary public. She added, “I mean, we *chose* to attend MSU for English, and that choice most likely (depending on where we're all at in our degree requirements) made taking WRIT 376 mandatory.” Warner would probably suggest that one’s choice to major in English suggests his or her willingness to be in the WRIT 376 public, at some level. If someone was absolutely not willing, they wouldn’t be in the class, right?

In that same thread of comments, Kristie said, “So, could belonging to certain kinds of counterpublics be considered involuntary? The Civil Rights Movement (or any racially formed publics) are an interesting example. We don't get to choose our ethnicity, so we are automatically assigned to racial groups.” I can just imagine Warner’s response: “Most social classes and groups are understood to encompass their members all the time, no matter what” (60). We don’t have a choice in which (racial) groups we were born to, but, as per Warner’s conception, “groups” and “publics” are different; publics are voluntary. Those people who participated in the Civil Rights Movement comprised a public because they demonstrated willingness through attention. People who refused to see or hear anything pertaining to the Civil Rights Movement discourse (which admittedly, would have been very difficult) were not part of that public, even if they belonged to the “group” which was the focus of the Civil Rights Movement. 

Now what about my second question posed at the beginning of this post? How can certain publics have identity markers if they are theoretically open to anyone (which seems to be a low threshold indeed)?

Warner observes that his theoretical definition does not always match the description of publics in practice. He says that a public “appears to be open to indefinite strangers, but in fact selects participants by criteria of shared social space (though not necessarily territorial space), habitus, topical concerns, intergeneric references, and circulating intelligible forms (including idiolects or speech genres)” (75).

In other words, a public is sort of pre-determined just based on the language of its discourse, area or medium of its circulation, etc. We have reached the chicken and egg conundrum Warner mentions earlier (check out Anjeli’s post on this). Perhaps when I presupposed publics guided by values, I was really misidentifying the chicken and egg concept; on a superficial level, the two appear the same.

“Public discourse circulates, but it does so in struggle with its own conditions” (Warner 76).