Counter-public Sphere Research Articles

Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics ed. by Laura Cull and Will Daddario

Reviewed by: Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics ed. by Laura Cull and Will Daddario Matthew Moore Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics. Edited by Laura Cull and Will Daddario. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and University of Chicago Press, 2013. Cloth $57.00. 243 pages. An innovative and timely collection, Manifesto Now! queries the ongoing value of a potentially outdated literary form, the manifesto, by juxtaposing contemporary examples, critical responses, and theories of time and embodiment. The volume’s greatest strength lies in its desire to consider a wide range of performative acts (protests, performance art, artistic processes, and critical analyses) as manifestations of the possible futures they project. Although it does not quite add up to a set of “instructions,” Manifesto Now! does provide a rich panorama of the ways philosophy might be enacted in the politically charged present that performance calls into being, and is itself a kind of performative manifestation. Moving beyond the rhetorical tropes of their avant-garde predecessors, Cull, Daddario, and their contributors wager that “in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the manifesto functions as a performance score through which philosophical concepts express themselves through embodied participation in a field of political conditions” (3). Pursuing such conditions and our active involvement, each two-essay “Analogue” creates an architecture of experience whose defining feature is a requirement “that we take time to embody the subject positions conjured through its performativity and, through so doing, that we participate in a political discussion” (3). As such, the structure of the book, which ‘takes time’ to reveal its compelling logic, actively participates in its own aesthetic-philosophical project. Vacillating between so-called theory and practice, it performs the disintegration of binary logics that many of the contributors address. It also effectively develops associations across highly varied political terrain to suggest an emergent and inclusive community of activists whose work challenges hegemonic ways of knowing through a variety of embodied, con-textual encounters. The remarkable effect is that we, as readers, are included in a discussion that takes shape through our invited acts of associative meaning making. Ferrying meaning between ports, we supply the imaginative connections that give the work its alluring power. While such connections accumulate in hindsight, they also emerge organically in several of the astutely paired essays. For example, analyzing Freee Art Collective’s recent work, Ken Wilder proclaims a sphere of performance that incorporates spectators into a structured process of inscribing illocutionary force onto art events, specifically through reading and evaluating scripted political speech. He argues persuasively that the fictional/real “counter-public spheres” that such performances manifest lead to the critical activation of the subject, empowering individuals as both producers and consumers of political speech. Freee responds with their own manifesto for the gradual democratization of art based on the immediate creation of “a million [End Page 132] [such] temporary public spheres” (82). The generous reader will recognize the current volume as one of these polyvocal and inclusive sites for active dialogue. Elsewhere, contributors discuss how specific protest performances activate audiences inured to the utopian polemics of a bankrupt mode of political speech. Michael Shane Boyle theorizes UCMeP’s protests at UC Berkeley, including one in which prominent landmarks were auctioned off in support of the move to privatize (29), as “ironic manifesto[s]” whose inverted rhetoric erodes the impenetrable logic of late capitalism and neoliberalism through embodied disidentification (25). While Boyle posits persuasively the critical activation of the subject as the result of such “purposefully disingenuous” performances, Maurya Wickstrom and Stephanie Vella explore a different, but equally compelling kind of activation in part two. In their perspicacious view, OWS’s “embodied manifesto”/encampment in Zucotti Park “shattered the temporal narratives of neoliberalism” by performing the arrival and duration of a present that did not serve the intended future (39, 45). Dispensing with future-oriented linguistic truth claims (which they see as hopelessly attenuated by neoliberalism’s colonization of all possible future narratives) they describe a radical presenting (manifesting?) through performances of collective time. Departing entirely from the impediments of progressive temporal logic, and similarly moving beyond neoliberalist reform, Stuart McLean paints a vivid and convincing “dreamtime” picture of a...

Dis-ing the Main Drag and Walking toward the Public Good in Here Be Dragons: Mapping Queer, AsianCanadian Identity in Kitchener, Ontario

A young man, who self-identifies as Asian-Canadian and queer, decides to leave the small, socially conservative southwestern Ontario city where he has grown up. He decides to perform the story of this departure, its origins, its process, and its possible outcomes. The performance takes the form of a map, and before long he maps a terrain vastly different from what most who live in the city would recognize as home. As a performative process, mapping is explored as an attempt to apprehend where we are, who we are, and with whom we share the process. Mapping and walking together become an embodied experience carried out from a particular point of view that makes possible both an awareness of multiple perceptions of, and orientations toward, place. Walking and mapping are not just the combined acts of creative-research; they also serve as methodology. José Estaban Muñoz argues that “identities-in-difference” emerge out of a failed interpellation within the public sphere. Disidentifying with the dominant sphere allows for the emergence of a counter-public sphere; the landscape is the same, but the way it is mapped, used, and understood is different. Refuting both identification and counter-identification— or assimilation and anti-assimilation—disidentification allows for a third mode of dealing with dominant, embedded ideology that uses the idea of “working both on and against” as a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within. In this article, Andrew Houston articulates how disidentification was mapped and experienced as a form of dis-orientation in Here Be Dragons, a multi-media, sitespecific performance staged as part of IMPACT ’11, wherein the audience were invited on a journey of displacement; a mytho-geographical mapping of queer, Asian-Canadian identity in downtown Kitchener, Ontario. In Here Be Dragons, identities-in-difference are experienced as the audience—the tourists to this domain—walk within the testimonial terrain of a young man, navigating a landscape of edges and antagonism in their hometown.

Public Spheres in Interaction: Comment Sections of News Websites as Counterpublic Spaces

Research scrutinizing political talk online has been developed largely against the backdrop of deliberative discursive norms and considered political talk without a systematic analysis of surrounding mass-mediated discourses. By contrast, this study operationalizes counterpublic theory as an alternative theoretical perspective and analyzes comments on news websites as a reaction to hegemonic mainstream public spheres. It juxtaposes a qualitative framing analysis of all articles about a new anti-Euro party in devotedly pro-European Germany published on 9 news websites in the week following the 2013 elections (n = 22) with a content analysis of all comments posted below these articles (n = 3,154). It finds counterpublic spheres differently shaped in comment sections of right- and left-leaning, and tabloid and nontabloid, outlets. Consequences for democracy are discussed.

The Frivolous Scene: Cosmopolitan Amusements in Mexico City's 1920s

This article historically excavates the ludic performance scene and transregional leisure culture that significantly shaped Mexico City’s farandula , or entertainment industry. It focuses on theatrical revue, cinema, and the cabaret scene of the 1920s, an overlapping arena of cosmopolitan combustion, frivolous pleasures, and aesthetic experimentation that would play a critical role in revamping public life after the Revolution (1910–1917). Defined by the commercial exchange of music, song, dance, and also sexuality, the city’s theater and dance venues created a key matrix for the emergence of sound media, particularly the radio and musical film industries of the 1930s. More than any other phenomena, including silent cinema and Hollywood, the city’s amusement milieus established the conditions of possibility for show business, as they created a space for emerging social relations, aesthetic formats, and genres of labor and leisure. This article argues that the city’s expanded arena of lowbrow diversions was fundamental, and not merely incidental, to the consolidation of an entertainment industry as a counter-public sphere. The implications of this shift are crucial to writing an account of public amusements and mass culture that challenges existing national and transnational historiographies: grounded in urban history, my exploration of entertainment practices reveals how travelling comediennes and troubadours, regional migrants and itinerant impresarios, congregated in the capital as they moved to the beat of show business. In doing so, I outline an argument for how to think about the ways in which Mexico City’s frivolous, playful, and commercial culture played a pivotal role in the making of the modern.

Challenging the commodification of public spheres: The hacker work ethic in a free media lab

This paper explores the hacker work ethic in a case study of Access Space, a free media lab in Sheffield, United Kingdom, which provides free access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is suggested that the hacker work ethic allows participants at Access Space to become socially and digitally included in an empowering way. This aspect of ICT culture is explored in the context of social and technological changes from a public sphere perspective (Habermas, 1989). Access Space is described as part of a hacker counter-public sphere that challenges the dominant trend towards the commodification of ICTs by engaging the principles of the hacker work ethic in social practice. With a move towards informationalism as the ideology of the techno-capitalist age (Castells, 1996; Kellner, 1989), adopting the hacker work ethic in wider social practice may promote empowerment, social and digital inclusion, and critical engagement with ICTs and wider society.

Freeloading in Hobohemia: The Politics of Free Verse in American World War I Periodical Culture

Freeloading in Hobohemia:The Politics of Free Verse in American World War I Periodical Culture Mark Whalan (bio) What are the politics of free verse? Although the gamut of modernist politics revealed by hindsight makes it problematic to assign a particular politics to a particular aesthetic, this question was addressed with considerable urgency in the 1910s, the foundational decade of American modernist verse. In 1916, a combative discussion on the subject occurred in the New York Times magazine. The poet Josephine Preston Peabody began the exchange by critiquing free verse as undemocratic, claiming that it was “in the worst sense of the word … aristocratic”—exclusionary because its irregular rhythm and lack of rhyme made it impossible to memorize and therefore to share.1 In contrast, regularized poetic meter was “the most democratic thing” in mimicking “the rhythm of the heart-beat,” producing a form that was inherently collective because it ran through all “the great moments of life.” She predicted that World War I would “make poetry democratic again” and would discourage “mere experimenter[s] with words, making intricate verbal patterns for the entertainment of [their] friends.” A week later the poet James Oppenheim gave the modernist reply, decrying Peabody’s equation of democratic art with popular appeal and arguing instead that “democratic” art should not be understood as a formal quality. For Oppenheim, the vitality of art in a democratic society was conditional not on formal choices but on free speech, on tolerating a constellated set of practices and modes of expression that enables each man to “be pre-eminently himself, whether that means being a hod carrier or a philosopher.”2 [End Page 665] Oppenheim’s and Peabody’s argument may now struggle for footnote status, but it exemplifies a broader phenomenon, namely, how questions about literary modernism’s public and political instrumentality became especially acute during World War I and frequently revolved around the issue of free verse. The debate over the civic responsibilities of American modernism—and the formal choices that responsibility entailed—was highly public; not confined to little magazines, it spread to the New Republic, the New York Times, and even the Saturday Evening Post. Modernist “bohemians” were alternately dismissed as esoteric, insincere, pretentious, elitist, and hermetic, and by 1917 this shaded into charges of “slacking,” unpatriotically withholding labor (and money) from the state. In contrast, magazines like Poetry and the Little Review fostered a counterpublic sphere of debate on the war, one that frequently defended the relevance of modernism, as well as free verse, to a moment of collective emergency. This article seeks to recover the contours of that debate by focusing on three publications: the Saturday Evening Post, Poetry, and the Little Review. These periodicals took dramatically divergent positions on modernist instrumentality during wartime and did so in dialogue with one another. Of particular importance to them all was how experimental poetics could engage the rapid expansion of the state, along with the role of poetry in accommodating the new forms of sociability this expansion entailed. A few facts sketch out how fundamentally the American state changed in these years. By 1919 the annual U.S. federal budget was $19 billion, up from $0.75 billion in 1916. During the war the state assumed control of commodity prices, railroads, and labor relations as a way of rationalizing the war economy, thereby delighting Progressives, who had long argued for more dramatic state intervention in these areas; it also asserted control over radio transmission and political speech in unprecedented ways.3 The war transformed the organization of veterans’ health care and pensions; it paved the way for a national airmail system and a federally supported, nationally integrated road network.4 Yet much of this expansion occurred through governmental partnerships with preexisting corporate infrastructures, often reconfirming an already powerful discourse that aligned civic participation and political agency with consumer choice. In this circumstance of dramatic state expansion and the alteration of (or innovation in) how a variety of social services were provided and administered, citizens’ relationship to government and one another underwent substantial changes that both posed challenges to representation and transformed what modern citizenship entailed. As I explain here, in this rapidly transforming situation...

User-Generated Racism: An Analysis of Stereotypes of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians in YouTube Videos

This study examines representations of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians in YouTube videos, exploring whether YouTube serves as a type of alternative media where the status quo is contested. Results show that most videos analyzed perpetuated racial stereotypes. Further, videos that included stereotypes, most of which contained user-produced content, were more popular. The authors argue citizens to a large extent use YouTube to perpetuate the same stereotypes found in the mainstream media, rather than use it as an alternative counter-public sphere.

The concept of brotherhood: beyond Arendt and the Muslim Brotherhood

Hannah Arendt claims the concept of brotherhood presents false notions of political community that elide historic hatreds of others and threaten modern political life. This paper explores Arendt’s critical assessment of the concept of brotherhood in order to reflect on one specific example: the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011. While some observers reject Arendt’s assessment of brotherhood as too narrow, her criticisms raise useful questions about democracy and plurality, which confront any community that exhorts its members to act as ‘brethren’ rather than as ‘citizens.’ The Muslim concept of brotherhood suggests many different possibilities for belonging: a classic universalism of the Abrahamic natural law tradition; a progressive counter-public sphere; and as well the authoritarian private community of believers as represented in the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. Therefore, the politically controversial Muslim Brotherhood has no monopoly over the understanding of the Muslim concept of brotherhood. However, it is the most powerful, most well-organized brotherhood movement. The paper opens and ends with reflections on the Arab Spring of 2011, its one-year anniversary in January 2012, and considers other possibilities for the concept of brotherhood against the backdrop of Arendt’s analysis.

Turning niches into handles: Kanak youth, associations and the construction of an indigenous counter-public sphere

Indigenous peoples articulate and defend their cultures and identities in the ‘niches’ of settler colonial structures. In this way, the structures of the settler state shape – even as they constrain – indigeneity and resistance. In New Caledonia, a settler colony of France, the Republican state configures cultural difference, citizenship and sovereignty in ways that do not map well onto Latin American or Anglo-Saxon settler contexts. This article examines how Kanak youth have used a structure of French governance, the association loi de 1901, to subvert the cultural and political hegemony of French settler society. Though associations are intended to foster normative modes of civic engagement and a unified Republican public sphere, Kanak engagement with associations has led to the emergence of an indigenous counter-public sphere that deeply unsettles settler society in New Caledonia. Drawing on ethnographic examples, this article shows how associations have been transformed into assemblages – cobbled together from indigenous and French cultural forms – through which to assert alternative, Kanak modes of citizenship and make claims on the future of New Caledonia. The conclusion of the article discusses what the use of associations by Kanak youth reveals about articulations of indigeneity across different settler state contexts.

Future Publics: Politics and Space in East Asia’s Cities: Introduction

This special issue of Footprint began life in Shanghai, with the third Annual Delft School of Design (DSD) and International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) workshop, which was organized in conjunction with the Architecture Department of Hong Kong University (HKU) and took place in their Shanghai Study Centre in April 2011. The seven papers presented here look at issues of public space in East-Asian cities, beginning with an overview since 1945 and thereafter concentrating on cities in China, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Nanjing, as well as a realm that is not often considered public space: urban rivers. The issue also considers the city of Bangkok, where urban design is examined as a counter public sphere.

Future Publics: Politics and Space in East Asia’s Cities: Introduction

This special issue of Footprint began life in Shanghai, with the third Annual Delft School of Design (DSD) and International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) workshop, which was organized in conjunction with the Architecture Department of Hong Kong University (HKU) and took place in their Shanghai Study Centre in April 2011. The seven papers presented here look at issues of public space in East-Asian cities, beginning with an overview since 1945 and thereafter concentrating on cities in China, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Nanjing, as well as a realm that is not often considered public space: urban rivers. The issue also considers the city of Bangkok, where urban design is examined as a counter public sphere.

War, Trade and Desire: Urban Design and the Counter Public Spheres of Bangkok

This paper analyses an emergent public sphere in Bangkok in order to reveal the gap between ideals of public space as representation of power, nationhood, and modernity, versus its social production in everyday political struggles. The setting for political demonstrations recently shifted from royalist-nationalist Ratchadamnoen Avenue to the Ratchaprasong intersection, the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district. Ratchadamnoen, formerly a stage-set for royalist and nationalist pomp, has been continuously occupied for political uprisings. In contrast, as the political base of protest in Thailand widened, the glittering shopping malls at Ratchaprasong became a new site of protest, fuelled by urban and rural working poor who sensed they could not afford to partake in Bangkok’s phantasmagorical splendours. The paper argues that in following Bangkok’s historical cycles of blood and massacre in the street lies the possibility of finding new forms of urban design and a public sphere not yet imagined in the West.

War, Trade and Desire: Urban Design and the Counter Public Spheres of Bangkok

This paper analyses an emergent public sphere in Bangkok in order to reveal the gap between ideals of public space as representation of power, nationhood, and modernity, versus its social production in everyday political struggles. The setting for political demonstrations recently shifted from royalist-nationalist Ratchadamnoen Avenue to the Ratchaprasong intersection, the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district. Ratchadamnoen, formerly a stage-set for royalist and nationalist pomp, has been continuously occupied for political uprisings. In contrast, as the political base of protest in Thailand widened, the glittering shopping malls at Ratchaprasong became a new site of protest, fuelled by urban and rural working poor who sensed they could not afford to partake in Bangkok’s phantasmagorical splendours. The paper argues that in following Bangkok’s historical cycles of blood and massacre in the street lies the possibility of finding new forms of urban design and a public sphere not yet imagined in the West.

Transnational Justice, Counterpublic Spheres and Alter-Globalization

Uneven distribution of resources and unequal access to power in the current phase of postcolonial late capitalism has spurred a range of critical discourses globally that has led to the formation of “transnational counterpublic spheres”. These counterpublics facilitate interests of disenfranchised groups to become visible and audible. However, counterpublics are also spheres of power that replicate mechanisms of exclusion. My paper aims to explore, on the one hand, to what extent transnational counterpublic spheres succeed in facilitating resistance and agency, enabling marginalized collectives to find a “voice” in international politics. On the other hand the mechanisms of exclusion will be investigated that obstruct the inclusion of subaltern groups.

Väter der Gerüchte. Angst und Massenkommunikation in Halle und Magdeburg im Herbst 1989

Mothers of Rumours. Fear and Mass-communication in Halle and Magdeburg in Autumn 1989 Prior to and at the height of the peaceful revolution in the GDR, rumours fulfilled the following function: they made it possible for local communities to coordinate their collective protest behaviour in a communicative process. In the hermetically structured public space of the GDR, oppositional groups seized the opportunity for mass mobilisation: they generated a counter-public sphere by countering state intimidation with continuous politicisation. Comparing the protest in both of the provincial centres of Halle and Magdeburg in the autumn of 1989, we are able to outline the influence of state-made fear scenarios and the impact of counter-rumours spread by those active in the East German citizens’ movement. Since September 1989, the citizens’ movement showed solidarity with the protest in Leipzig. Rather unexpectedly, the new instrument of mobilisation became more and more important in October: repetitive demonstrations even conquered the inner cities of Halle and Magdeburg. Following the same ideal of freedom, the revolutionists rallied in a kind of American civil rights movement. Mass mobilisation, which was influenced by the translocal flow of information was moreover caused more by confidence in intangible collective types of communication than by strategic planning, particularly because it led to unusual forms of protest in familiar places like city centres.

Mobile Communication, Popular Protests and Citizenship in China

AbstractDigital telecommunication technology has expanded the potential of the mobile phone to be used increasingly as a weapon against authoritarian rule and censorship. Since the content of mobile communication is unpredictable and unregulated, mobile phones have the capability to breach state-sponsored blockage of information. This in turn helps the Chinese people to maintain contact with each other, receive information from outside the country, and make political waves in an aggressive battle for control over information. This paper examines spontaneous mobilization via mobile phones, with a focus on two concrete popular protests in rural and urban areas, demonstrating how Chinese citizens have expanded the political uses of mobile phones in their struggle for freedom of information flow, social justice, and the rule of law, while seeking to build an inexpensive counter-public sphere. These processes destabilize China's conventional national public sphere by shaping political identities on an individual level as well as the notion of citizenship within the evolving counter-public sphere. The political significance of mobile phones in the context of contemporary China's political environment can be observed by various social forces that communicate their struggles with the aid of this technology, pose challenges in governance, and force the authorities to engage in new kinds of media practices.

Social Value of Counter Public Sphere

Social Value of Counter Public Sphere

The times they are a-changin': The digital transformation of 'classic' counter-public spheres

Through digitalization the operating conditions of activists have radically changed. Against this background, a theoretical framework is provided to serve as a basis for a deeper understanding and empirical analysis of this structural change of counter-public spheres: On the social macro-level alternative media with a broader and in principle disperse audience, on the organizational meso-level collective mobilizations, which can grasped as participatory public spheres, and on a individual micro-level myriad forms and manifestations of media activism. In an over-saturated media environment (net) campaigning constitutes more and more the essential communicative connection between counter-public spheres and their internal as well as external audiences, thus establishing a successful issue-orientated network. A synopsis of literature shows, that the process of digitalization and emergence of campaigning has not only amplifying but also unintended negative effects for the production, representation and appropriation of counter-publicity.

Online Activism and Counter-Public Spheres

China’s state-controlled and commercialised media and Internet ecology has inherent limitations in representing the interests of workers as industrial citizens. Drawing upon Western scholars’ theoretical critiques of “the public sphere” and historical literature on workers’ struggle for autonomous communication in post-revolutionary China, this paper uses an extended case study to establish a two-pronged analysis that demonstrates the progressively exclusionary and pro-capitalist nature of China’s existing public sphere on the one hand and workers’ appropriation of available technological means for autonomous communicative practice on the other. It points to the potential constitution of Chinese labour as counter-publics in China’s deeply divided class society.

‘‘A Public sense of ourselves’’: communication and community-building in Canada’s LesbiaNews/LNews, 1989–98

LesbiaNews, later known as LNews, was an alternative media monthly, written and produced in Victoria, British Columbia by a dedicated group of women who devoted themselves to raising the public profile of the lesbian community through its pages. It was an outstanding example of a counter-public sphere publication, produced by and for a female minority group. Using critical feminist analysis of its contents and oral history interviews with its key editors, this article explores how LesbiaNews/LNews’ shifting editorial mandate reflected the conflicts among its contributors and readers over lesbian feminism and sexual identity politics. The editors, who all held their own strong beliefs, found that promoting both solidarity and diversity was difficult in a lesbian community that was increasingly apolitical, fragmented and elusive, and losing its few social supports.