The Television Will Be Revolutionized: Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall on Media, Technology, and Politics

Jürgen Habermas and others have shown that, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, new questions appeared in people’s daily lives. Questions of religious practice, commodity purchases, and political possibilities helped to produce private and public spheres (Habermas; Benjamin, 32). People’s opinions became important to the coordination of social life, motivating research in what’s sometimes called “public opinion.” (Habermas) In the 19th century, growing urbanization increased interest in public opinion. New communication technology permitted greater dissemination of messages and images, furthering interest in public opinion and media effects. Early-20th century fascist leaders’ novel uses of mass media to effect political outcomes elicited dramatic growth of research in public opinion and media effects.

To be clear, communication research was political from the outset. The effects of massification; democratization of politics, economy, and media; and new technologies were unpredictable. No one could guess what political paradigms could emerge from never-before-seen social conditions. The aesthetic processes by which media helped to shape people’s perceptions rendered great concerns over media effects and new technologies.

In this essay, I’ll compare and contrast Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall’s views on aesthetics and politics. While they share a good deal, Benjamin’s concerns, expressed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” more clearly reflect early-20th century thoughts on media effects and new technologies. Stuart Hall’s writings advance some of the kinds of arguments Benjamin made, complexifying the role of the masses in producing and receiving media and politics. I’ll begin by explaining Benjamin’s understanding of media effects and technology, before comparing it with Hall’s. Then, I’ll show how they expound on these in order to show the political role of aesthetic processes. I’ll end by synthesizing these thoughts and gesturing toward a kind of political media program suggested in the works of Benjamin and Hall.

Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” shows how the development, and use, of communication technologies led to social effects. For instance, Benjamin says, film helped to lead to a kind of presentism (27). Film’s “tactile” “shock effects”—constituted by its perpetual movement—distracted film viewers, keeping them from contemplating on-screen events (32-3). Distractedness enabled viewers’ thorough absorption of filmic messages. This didn’t prevent potential for criticality, though. The film viewer’s position is distanced from the acts by which films are made, leading them to a critical posture (25-6). However, Benjamin observed that the film-film viewer relationship failed to fulfill its political promise (27). Rather than being directed at social conditions, criticism was primarily aimed at suddenly supposedly archaic traditions.

Parallel to Marx’s commodity fetishism, Benjamin said that art’s disconnection from traditions and material processes—what he calls art’s “ritual value”—coincided with the abstraction of art’s purpose into its “exhibition value” (21-3, 29-30). The destruction of art’s ritual value brought about the loss of art’s “aura”—its history, uniqueness, and unbreachable distance (21). Rather than represent everyday understandings of the world and social life, art became increasingly abstract, reproducible, and exchangeable, no longer tethered to referents (19-22). In this way, the loss of traditional connections to material practices inverted art’s purpose: instead of reflecting existing politics embodied in shared understanding and shared practices, art shaped understandings and politics (23, 28-9). For Benjamin (and as we’ll see, for Hall, too), this meant that public opinion came from the material conditions of people’s lives, but also from media effects. I will now show how Hall’s work relates to many of these themes.

Hall added the use of semiotic theory and took further some of Benjamin’s observations about the role that media play in shaping social outcomes. Hall said that all of reality entails discursive elements (“Encoding/Decoding,” 163-4). People receive (beginning in childhood and throughout life) symbolic systems—constituted by codes that associate symbols with referents—that they use to “decode” messages (“E/D,” 163-6). As people receive more messages, and are exposed to more kinds of associations between symbols and referents, their understandings of these associations and, more generally, of the nature of their particular symbolic system, shift. In this way, received messages help to perpetually refigure particular associations and remake symbolic systems. People decode messages in different ways, depending on their political dispositions and on their understanding of their symbolic system (“E/D,” 171-3). The power to make and remake symbolic associations is important for determining material outcomes. At least since the onset of modernity, ownership of media is a primary constituent of this power (“E/D,” 163, 169-72). This power might be more salient in recent times because the development of the private sphere (Habermas), the propagation of daily choices (Habermas), the proliferation of mediated images and messages (Benjamin), and the dissociation of symbols from referents (Benjamin, 19-20) have increased signifiers’ flexibility and ambiguity. As Benjamin and Hall show, this increased flexibility and ambiguity make more likely the incoherence typical of fascist and neoliberal media.

Benjamin said that fascists exploited the increased political role dictated by the conversion of art’s ritual value to its exhibition value (23). Images and messages in films have been crafted, cobbled together, and disseminated to masses from central locations (22, 25-6, 38n19). The ways by which film arrests attention, reshaping habitual feelings, thoughts, and actions make it an ideal tool for ideology and subject formation, or for propaganda (32-3). Instead of solutions, fascism offers the representation of grievances; Benjamin calls this the aestheticization of politics (33-4). In a way parallel to the way by which signs are divorced from referents and art’s role becomes more abstract (in the conversion to exhibition value), people increasingly succumb to the Malthusian impulse to convert populations into statistics and faceless caricatures (22). These increasingly abstract ways of perceiving the world helped to breed brutal impulses.

The aestheticization of politics must end in war—only war maintains property relations while mobilizing capital, the full labor capacity, and people’s feverish grievances (34). The war that fascism necessitates also produces its own aesthetics—metallized people, clouds of deadly chemicals, giant tanks, synchronized planes, and so on (34). Finally, the filmstar is a resource for fascist leadership style. Movie studios and ancillary institutions compensate for art’s loss of aura by building cult film personalities, not unlike the fetishist cult of the commodity or fascist cults of personality (27, 38n19). Through fascism’s cultishness, ritual value is refreshed but as pastiche: refracted, distorted, fragmented, disembedded symbols are haphazardly glued together (21, 34). Use of media effects to form incoherent ideologies isn’t unique to fascism.

Agreeing with Benjamin (23, 28-9), Hall said that discourse is the domain of politics (“E/D,” 168-9, 171-3). Politics is “produced” ( “Gramsci,” 169): it’s by controlling the field on which politics is played—by producing hegemony—that broad, long-term political victories manifest (“Gramsci,” 163, 168). Hall said that the British right understood the need to create hegemony better than did the left; rather than waiting for conditions to degrade until public opinion magically responded with a proper analysis (as Hall accused the left of having done), the right embarked to shape public opinion (“Gramsci,” 169). Thatcher and her advocates constructed the interests of the working class through what might’ve appeared to have been incoherent aesthetic processes (“Gramsci,” 167-8). Thatcher evoked what Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics”: waving the flag, she sold austerity under the auspices of long-term improvement—“Make Britain Great Again,” she seemed to say (“Gramsci,” 167). Thatcherism seemed to represent everyone, but crucially, it represented the interests of the elites at the same time that it recruited members of the working class (“Gramsci,” 165-6, 167). Employing a panoply of ahistorical, referentless images and hollow slogans, she evaded the promise of leftists’ mostly Keynesian, welfare state policies that the populace no longer believed in (“Gramsci,” 167, 172).

Hall agreed with Benjamin: it’s crucial to find means to achieve victories and to eventually install, invigorate, and even refigure leftist hegemonies (“Gramsci,” 170-1). As Thatcherites aimed to dismantle the Welfare State, they erected something else; this exchange provided an opportunity for the left (“Gramsci,” 165). Social change entails, on one hand, appealing to people’s already-existing attitudes and concerns and, on the other hand, building new kinds of coalitions (“Gramsci,” 170). These must coincide with pressure on attitudes and on coalitions toward more liberatory leftist agendas and greater participation in various kinds of political activities (“Gramsci,” 171). All of this is required to form a leftist hegemony by which political debates would be over choices between leftist agendas (“Gramsci,” 173).

For Benjamin, revolutionary film would’ve fulfilled Dadaism’s failed project to weaponize art (32); it would’ve entailed the marriage between criticism and entertainment (29) while having depicted new possibilities for social life (31-2). Instead of only having represented people’s grievances (as fascist film did), communist film would’ve helped to shape public opinion, having formed a hegemony by which grievances would’ve been relieved (33-4). If pointless, brutal, warmongering rush to death is the necessary aesthetic end of fascism, communists must respond by producing subversive art (34).

While Benjamin said, “Works of art are received and valued on different planes” (23), Hall emphasized this point more greatly. People sometimes subversively decode messages in order to better understand social phenomena and their effects (“E/D,” 171-3). Public opinion isn’t only shaped in an intentional, power-inflected, unilateral way. People’s subversive decodings of texts (including radio, television, film, architecture, etc.) can help them to change symbolic associations. Hall showed that connotation and denotation lie on a spectrum, so people can alter widely-accepted meanings by first influencing connotations (168-9). By this logic, people can begin to re-encode aspects of the social system both from below, through shared social practices, and from above, by making revolutionary art. Especially today, it’s important for the left to decode workings of power, especially as they relate to social conditions. Doing so can help them to exploit media effects and represent new possibilities. As contemporary social life entails the ever-increasing profusion of images and messages, the power to reshape symbolic associations is more important than ever. Using this power, people can redetermine public opinion and form a new leftist hegemony.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Media and Cultural Studies Keywords, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, 18-40.

Habermas, Jürgen; Lennox, Sara; and Frank Lennox. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique, 3, pp. 49-55.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies Keywords, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, 18-40.

Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci and Us.” The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, New York: Verso, 1988, 161-73.

The Exhausting Effort to Breathe Life into a Fire

I spoke with Bernadette today, a little over an hour. She’d gotten a haircut. Her curly, messy hair hung just above her shoulders, and I thought she looked a little like Marion Cotillard, but maybe I was just romanticizing a bit. I didn’t tell her, anyway. I think people often don’t like being compared to others. She ended up telling me about how the nuns who’d taught her as a child, in Nice, were really sadistic—especially the headmistress. We cried.

We cried because of Minneapolis and because of covid. I didn’t sleep much last night. I’d watched a bunch of YouTube videos of white people proudly calling the police, unable to reckon with their mistaken, biased association, and too entitled and proud to keep from invoking the threat of murder in order to win an argument. She said that the reason she was so depressed wasn’t because she was hopeless, but because she was hopeful. She told me that hope is what you need to have in order to be disappointed, and I didn’t know what she meant at first.

I said that, finally, people wouldn’t have the excuse that the cop was afraid, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the guy was dangerous, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the film was unclear, they wouldn’t have the excuse that it was an in-the-moment decision, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters started the looting, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters were being violent. After the stimulus package and the calls to get people back to work, there’s no confusion about where the government’s, the bankers’, the police’s, and the media’s loyalties lie. Minneapolis and covid show that the reaction to Minneapolis and to covid have been meant to protect the stock market at the expense of the lives of the most vulnerable people. There’s no confusion. In relation to race, for instance, George Bush doesn’t care about black people, but Trump has real animosity toward them.

So, there’s no possible neutrality here anymore. There’s no equivocating. No more excuses. You’re either on the side of caring about black people’s lives or you’re on the side of white comfort. Then, Bernadette repeated what she’d said before: “You can’t be disappointed if you don’t have hope.”

I started to realize what she meant. I have all these friends who insulate themselves in the warm blanket of cynicism. If there’s nothing to do, then there’s nothing to really do about it. There’s nothing to risk. Any attempt would be foolish. They can complain from the sideline, but trying to help would only make matters worse. Why give up their own chance at some limited happiness in order to fight a losing battle? But, that’s why it’s so frustrating, right? If it’s hopeless, it’s because we make it hopeless. If it’s hopeless, it’s because peace-loving white liberals aren’t willing to march, aren’t willing to give up the brass bars at the entrance to their subdivision, aren’t willing to say, “I was wrong. I had a racist moment, and I judged you unfairly. I shouldn’t have accused you, and I’m sorry”—especially without expecting some undeserved gracefulness and forgiveness.

We talked about how sad we are. I told her that I wanted pizza delivered, so I could watch YouTube videos in my bed in peace. We agreed that we were depressed right now. We joked about it. I told her I have therapy on Monday. She encouraged me to go down to the beach. She told me about how, in Nice, she would go to the coast in the winter and the waves would crash wildly into the rocks on the shore. She told me how it made her felt connected to the world, and that the world was maybe reflecting her frustration back at her. Maybe, in that moment, nature felt what she felt, and she didn’t feel as alone. She would sometimes then go into MAMAC and stare at some particular impressionist painting that she’d sat in front of a hundred times, getting absorbed into the incomprehensible array of painted dots of various colors, making up a whole that all the people and parts of the environment made up.

Acceleration, Deceleration, Temporalization, and Spatialization

Plato warned us. Technologies are media that help us to accomplish tasks. Increased efficiency has a way of accelerating aspects of social life. But, the accelerations that technological advances enable also hinder our ability to think through problems. In particular, what Plato notes is that the ability to write would degrade our ability to remember, but memory is important for all problems. Without historical thoughtfulness, the repetition of action deepens the paths made by more efficient actions. We forego possibilities as we become more entrenched in particular ways of thinking and acting. There is no way out of this problem. Heidegger tells us that every showing is at the same time a hiding. To become more efficient in some particular way is to forget and to ignore. The more we do any particular thing, the less we do any other thing, including contemplating history and contemplating possibilities—or, contemplating time itself.

Acceleration, then, entails the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time. Through modern acceleration, spaces become distances become time-commitments. At the same time, the repetition of whatever motion renders efficiency into particular motions enacted by particular bodies in particular ways across particular spaces. Increased efficiency produces spaces as it produces temporalities. As Hartmut Rosa says, it’s a lot of frenetic running in place. However, this showing is also a hiding: while it’s true that there’s a loss of shared historical (and, therefore, utopian) cognizing, real effects are wrought on the environment and elsewhere. It’s perhaps a bit too simple to reduce the situation to energetic stagnation.

Revisiting the Deathcult: Arbeit Macht Frei

Today is May Day, a day of international celebration of labor, the international labor movement, and all that they have brought us. Today, May Day, 2020, a woman carried a sign in the “Re-open Illinois” event. This event is meant as a social demonstration, asking political leaders to allow people to work and to allow businesses to re-open. Her sign reads, Arbeit Macht Frei: “Work makes one free.” Following the ideological belief in the moral value of work, this phrase appeared at least as far back as the 19th century. The phrase rose to popular consciousness when it was borrowed by the Nazi Party and eventually hung over entrances to concentration camps. The implication of this sign being used during the coronavirus epidemic seems to be that (fascistic?) governments impose unfair restrictions. Local and state governments that restrict work make us un-free, or so it goes. This drips with irony.

It was the Nazis—whose incoherent symbols, signs, narratives, and logics worked in mystifying ways—who chose the phrase as a political and culturo-economic slogan. If governments in the US today are preventing work, in the Nazi case, it was the government that was ostensibly calling on people to work. It’s more complicated than this; these kinds of Nazi slogans rarely served to make clear mandates intended toward any logical end. That said, it’s important that this phrase is recognizable due to its association with concentration camps.

German concentration camps were work camps. Nazis brought Jews to them with the intention of making Jews work until they died or were killed. This sign then served two functions. First, it really did serve some vague Nazi ideological purpose. Nazi propaganda and symbolism always reflected some barely-expressible feeling among the German population that tied them to retrograde ideas of nationalism and strength. Working implied action and it implied strength, and freedom was the kind of empty moral value that German nationalists valued. For Nazis, the phrase—Arbeit macht frei—basically means almost nothing other than Germans are strong. On the other hand, the idea of work making one free served as a kind of sinister promise of redemption for Jews who were brought to work until they no longer could. It wasn’t necessarily that work would set them free in this world, but perhaps, if Jews worked hard enough, then they could at least embody some of the ostensibly superior German spirit (or Geist, if one prefers) in order to gain some redemption in the eyes of God or whomever. At the very least, in the eyes of the Nazi Party, the hardworking Jew might prove themselves more acceptable than the Jew who didn’t work as hard.

The irony ought to be clear. The woman in the protest claims that the government denies her work—imprisoning her in a world of Netflix and Cheetos, while the stock market continues to sag (or is it up today?). On May Day, the international day for workers, the real labor organizers orchestrate strikes in order to get material benefits for those who are at greatest risk of contracting coronavirus before they possibly spread the virus and/or perish. The prison that the protester imagines is more likely a prison of ideology, of uncritical enthusiasm, of self-exploitation, and of a world of fake threats, conspiracy theories, and deep state boogeypeople (oh, she really wants me to say “boogeymen” here, doesn’t she?). In our time of coronavirus, it’s the demand for the kind of work by essential the most exploited workers that appears more like our prison. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic, these conspiracy theorists and cruel ideologues parrot billionaires and millionaires who sweat over stock prices. These shallow pseudo-activists conceive of freedom as the right to give the majority of their labor for someone else’s profit and the right to rush to their impending death. Only in a world of such deep contradictory capitalist ideology could anyone imagine value in claiming that deadly work would make them free.

San Carlos

Two Yaqui gods got into a row—
one from the huya ania (wilderness world) and one from the vawe ania (ocean world).
The wilderness god threw a chunk of mountain
into the San Carlos bay—
the sedimentary register lodged in the ocean
at a 45-degree angle.

Then, rosebushes gathered along the ocean floor,
at the big rock’s feet. Cacti sprouted
from the top—hairs with tales to tell.
Gringos built big, gauche adobe houses
along the shore: “pueblos.”

Now, they sunbathe on wood decks,
avoiding the discomfort they would feel if
the bottoms of their feet touched rocky beach below.
The old white people watch tanned teens and local fishers until
reggueton and ranchera grate too much on distinguished ears.

I looked down, noticing blood
trickling from a cut across the top of my foot.
I always feel invincible when I swim.
Small chalk rings surrounded my ankle, Like a leopard,
where salt remained from sun-dried seawater.
I heard the opening crunch of a can of cerveza.
Reflexively, my head twisted:
two obreros chatting, meandering toward a half-finished building.

Between Recall

Like white and cobalt foam,
slapping a speckled gold bed in slow motion,
descending with a splash—
white noise, reflections of light.
Soft and warm, like burnt sugar and milk,
cascading over me.
An arc that splits a fruit,
gently exposing columns of ivory.

But it’s crackling friction in the air
between two earthly bodies,
the fragility and mysticism in the space
between two hearts beating,
the ineffable comfort, the corporeal knowledge
of safety and care. Pervasive impulsion,
unwitting gravity, the crash
when the ocean meets its honey shore,
the golden light reflecting off the pines.

Discourse and the Onto-Political: On “Encoding/Decoding” as a Guide to Social Change

 

Here the “politics of signification”—the struggle in discourse—is joined. — Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”^[1]

 

It’s certainly not wrong to say that Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” was largely about how people relate to media. Indeed, he tells us a great deal that’s useful about how people can, and do, produce and consume media. Yet, I think that his essay is far more radical than a simple (or even complex) description of media production and consumption. Instead, I claim that Hall presents us with an ontological proposition that implicates a form (or perhaps, as Hall sees it, the only form!) of politics.

Describing how the media circulate messages, Hall says, “[D]iscourse must […] be translated […] into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective.”^[2] Here, he describes how a producer values the production end of a discourse circuit (in terms of how it manifests in reception). Yet, “social practice” has an important, specific meaning for Hall. Hall defines a social practice as the way by which “a structure is actively reproduced.”^[3] This adds significance to Hall’s determination of how a circuit of discourse is valued. Any discourse operates in a significatory system. A discourse is effective insofar as it is “actively reproduced”—or, manifest in embodied practices. Therefore, one criterion to judge the effectiveness of a discourse lies in the degree to which the discourse is enacted, or embodied. A discourse is more effective when it is more embodied. The other criterion Hall gives us is the degree to which it is social, or reproduced—the degree to which it is reproduced in multiple people. Therefore, the most effective discourse is that which is embodied in the most people’s active practices whereas the least effective discourse is that which is least repeated in whatever way.

The implication here is even more radical than this, though. Production is always at least partly-discursive. Hall says, “[T]he production process is not without its ‘discursive’ aspect: it […] is framed throughout by meanings and ideas.”^[4] Hall has no way to guarantee what any production process might or might not entail. If it were possible that an aspect of some media process could be exempt from significatory framing^[5], then he could not say that the process is “framed throughout.” If all production is framed by “meanings and ideas,” then every embodied act in any chain of production is subject to any informing, or to any significatory act.^[6] A significatory act may entail a constraint—do not pass—or it may help to inform a decision—in X situation, pull Y lever. At the very least, any materiality discursively imposes a constraint on what is near—do not be here; I am already here. At the same time that any materiality is already a kind of signification, all signification is most effective when it is most embodied. To be clear, all significations are mediated through some materiality. There is no clear distinction between materiality and symbol; instead, there is a spectrum. For any subject interacting with (or observing) an object, the object may appear more as material object or more as symbolic object, but neither is ever fully extricated from the other. All is content and all is form.

For Hall, the subject, then, performs two functions.^[7] In the production, or “encoding,” moment, the subject articulates a set of material objects together to form a message. In the reception, or “decoding,” moment, the subject articulates the message to a materially-stored system (in one’s mind, perhaps) of symbols. What these share—and perhaps that to which the slash (in “encoding/decoding”) is owed—is the articulation of the message to a symbolic system. In message production, one draws significatory objects from a system and arranges them to try to convey an intended message. This entails reflection on how the message might be received—decoding the message from the position of the assumed receiver. The reception of a message entails consideration of how the ordered significatory objects—the message—might articulate to a system of symbols. The receiver might consider from what system the message-producer drew significatory objects. The receiver chooses a message interpretation. What these two share are two steps: consideration of the message’s various articulations to a symbolic system and consideration of the other’s interested position in relation to the message. Where they differ, on one hand, is that the producer chooses the message’s symbolic objects, and the objects’ order, while the receiver can only consider why these objects and order were chosen. On the other hand, the receiver chooses an interpretation among many while the producer can only consider what interpretive options may be available to the receiver in an effort to constrain the variety of possible interpretations. Each has incomplete information, but each also has limited agency in the determination of the ultimate interpretation of the message. No particular interpretation of a communication could ever be guaranteed in advance.

Flexibility of interpretation ensures that meanings change over space (between people) and time (from moment to moment). Hall addresses this through his explanation of connotation and denotation.^[8] Connotation, Hall tells us, is any signifier’s flexible set of associated meanings, whereas denotation is the signifier’s more rigid set of associations. If the effectiveness of a discourse lies in its social reproduction, then the denotation is both the product of, and productive of, a more effective discourse than is the connotation. The more denotative the association, the more it is taken-for-granted, or ideological; more obviously contested associations are more connotative. Taken-for-granted associations are important for communication.

No one could reconstruct the totality of associations and meanings every time anyone uttered anything. Instead, some associations are necessarily taken for granted. Hall says, “The connotative levels of signifiers, Barthes remarked, ‘have a close communication with culture, knowledge, history, and it is through them, so to speak, that the environmental world invades the linguistic and semantic system. They are, if you like, the fragments of ideology.’”^[9] While Barthes refers to the connotation as ideological, we might say that the denotative is even more ideological in the sense that it is more taken for granted. Through the taken-for-grantedness of the denotative, people do not always notice ways by which associations grant advantage and disadvantage.

To the degree that any association empowers, denotation grants more power than does connotation because empowerment is more automatic and entrenched in the denotative case. The degree to which a significatory association is taken for granted is the degree to which it is denotative. For example, we can consider a society that normalizes and values equal distribution of their resources. If in such a society, it’s said that someone lacks water, then a likely assumption would be that the one who lacks water is someone who got less water than everyone else did. The denotation is that unequal distribution constitutes a lack for someone. If—in a society in which only some people value equal distribution of resources—it’s said that someone lacks water, the assumption would not necessarily be the same. For some people, the lack might connote the need for more equal distribution of water. What is at stake between the connotative and denotative case is the degree to which unequal distribution implies lack. In the connotative case, this association would find more resistance, and require more struggle to make. In the denotative case, the assumption of the association would be more likely.

Hall says of the power enabled through codes of discursive production and interpretation, “These codes are the means by which power and ideology are made to signify in particular discourses.”^[10] It is harder to change denotative meanings; denotation is the signification of the most consistently observed associations between aspects of the material world. On the spectrum of materiality and discourse, denotation lies closer to the side of materiality, and connotation lies closer to the side of discourse. Again, the flexibility of the connotation reflects the instability of any signification.

At the same time that language requires the ideological taking for granted of associations, there is no guarantee of any particular formulation of a message or any particular interpretation of a received message. Hall says that the code most tied to language’s power-producing function is the “dominant” code: “We say dominant, not ‘determined’, because it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one ‘mapping’. But we say ‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings.’.”^[11] The more widely held an association—the more it is socially preferred—the more the association becomes automatic, i.e. ideological. This automation is powerful for producing outcomes that might be resisted if the outcome was given greater consideration. The power-producing function of language bears on relations between people. In other words, significatory associations are always already political. Here, we take politics to signify the ways by which communities and societies negotiate and coordinate between their constituents. These negotiations and coordinations occur through discourses and through embodied practices, but to the degree that an embodied practice is political, it must entail effective communication—it must engender a socially reproducible response. Politics, then, entails the social reproduction of power-laden behaviors^[12]—including behaviors meant to challenge the status quo.^[13]

Because information, or discourses, bear on the continual reproduction of reality, the nature of any discourse is important for determining which reality is reproduced, and how. Hall says, “Discursive ‘knowledge’ is the product not of the transparent representation of the ‘real’ in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions.”^[14] Knowledge and the real are always contingent both on the relations that determine each and that determine the shifting relations between forms of knowledge and instances of the real. The real of now includes its significations, and the real of tomorrow will entail the information that comes from what is the real of now. What will be known tomorrow depends on what now is, including what the real will have made legible for tomorrow’s understanding. For example, a run on the bank today could not have been surely predicted yesterday, but the run will have implications on the reality of tomorrow. This is because the run has  widely understood symbolic meanings. Its meanings help to determine people’s embodied acts.

What all of this shows is that politics occurs through the production of messages—either embodied or discursive acts that appear meaningful and that evoke response. We can rework Hall’s statement from earlier^[15]: The political message must be translated into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. The production of an effective political message is easier said than done. In the context of significatory struggles, one of the challenges to producing effective political messages lies in the fact that all significations entail use of the prevailing, dominant ideology.^[16] For any signification to be legible, the mutually-held code—by which a signifier is encoded on one end and effectively decoded at the other end—must be at least partly constituted by dominant, taken-for-granted associations related to any effective signification. In other words, there can be no communication without some ideology. Hall says, “[T]he vast range [of readings] must contain some degree of reciprocity between encoding and decoding moments, otherwise we could not speak of an effective communicative exchange at all. Nevertheless, this ‘correspondence’ is not given but constructed.”^[17] At the same time that shared ideological underpinnings are necessary, there’s no guarantee that the producer of the message acts on the same set of ideological meanings as does the message’s receiver. Some meanings are more pervasive than are others.

Hall, describing the ways that pervasive meanings can shift, says, “In speaking of dominant meanings, then, we are not talking about a one-sided process which governs how all events will be signified. It consists of the ‘work’ required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a decoding of the event within the limit of dominant definitions in which it has been connotatively signified.”^[18] The struggle over significatory associations requires work. To employ our schema, an embodied need could be brought to light through an embodied or discursive act. If that act engenders a response, that response could change a connotative meaning for a group of people. If the political message is absolutely effective, it will eventually transform denotative associations until the taken-for-granted aspect of the significatory act reflects the original embodied concern that began the series of significatory changes. For example, if I felt that resources should be equally distributed, then I might walk around with a poster saying that all resources should be equally distributed. If people agreed with me, they might make signs and walk with me. If that led to the whole society deciding that all resources should be equally distributed, then a lack might come to ideologically (automatically, thoughtlessly, frictionlessly) signify an unequal distribution of resources.

What we’ve seen is that politics is always a matter of being able to communicate a vision of social life that engenders an embodied response to the communication. Arjun Appadurai relates subaltern politics to what is sometimes called “globalization.” He says, “[T]he imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work […] and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.”^[19] Appadurai here sees the social imagination as the socially constructed product of various forces. Whatever the political possibilities are, they come from a commonly held set of imagined possibilities. The global must be negotiated at the level of the local in order for political possibilities to be realized. In other words, at the same time that dominant forces bear on any local situation, the reproducibility of any meaningful symbol or act depends on how subordinate actors receive the symbol or act.

Appadurai gives the example of gender and violence. He says, “A central link between the fragilities of cultural reproduction and the role of the mass media in today’s world is the politics of gender and violence.”^[20] There is never a guarantee that any aspect of culture will be reproduced; any reproduction is vulnerable to misinterpretations, distortions, and intentionally subversive interpretation. He continues, “As fantasies of gendered violence dominate the B-grade film industries […] they both reflect and refine gendered violence at home and in the streets, as young men (in particular) are swayed by the macho politics of self-assertion in contexts where they are frequently denied real agency, and women are forced to enter the labor force in new ways on the one hand, and continue the maintenance of familial heritage on the other.”^[21] Here, imagined relations meet local contexts. Representations of aspects of life can alter existing relations, but a number of forces help to determine the reception of these images. In the case above, gender relations, economic constraints and pressures, and cultural traditions ultimately help to determine interpretations.

Marwan Kraidy succinctly makes the point: “The local, that always already hybrid realm, is where relations between political, social, cultural, and economic forces take concrete forms in people’s lives.”^[22] All localities lie at the nexus of an ever-changing multiplicity of forces, and each force bears differently on the locality at any point in time. The locality in any moment is produced through a variety of negotiations, making outcomes highly unpredictable. These forces are especially complicated as localities and super-localities interact.

Appadurai makes clear that, while these complications always persist, transcultural communication between global hegemons and local subalterns can be especially challenged. First off, any transcultural translation can entail tricky linguistic difficulties.^[23] Additionally, Appadurai tells us, “the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public politics.”^[24] The social, cultural, and political distance between the elite and the relatively powerless can be as great as the physical distance sometimes is. In these cases, difficulty in translation is not always merely technical. Instead, differences in lived experiences and social and economic pressures can lead to subaltern political acts that the elites could never have predicted.

Kraidy notes the variety of means by which people can act. He says, “[A]gency must be grasped in terms of people’s ability to accomplish things in the world they inhabit.”^[25] It is never simply that power operates as an absolute determinant from above. Because of the various aspects of people’s lives, people can coordinate their lives—whether according to the wishes of the elite or against those wishes—through creative, and unexpected, uses of whatever means are at their disposal.

While people can, and sometimes do, act unpredictably, what counts in political, or social, life is the degree to which an act is reproduced through society—the degree to which it becomes ideological. Stuart Hall saw politics as the struggle over what gets taken for granted—the hegemonic, or the ideological—and what aspects of social life ought yet to be negotiated. He defines “articulation” as “a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together in a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects.”^[26] Articulation, then, describes language’s ideological content as the product of discursive negotiations. At the same time, articulation attends to the ways that people’s lives are partly-shaped by ideologies. People have agency in the production of material reality, but only insofar as they interact with the world. When they can coordinate by agreeing on particular representations of reality—both real and imagined—they can go much further in their pursuit of mutually valued realities.

^[1] Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, p. 173.

^[2] Ibid., p. 164.

^[3] Kraidy, Marwan. Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 151.

^[4] Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” p. 164.

^[5] “Frame,” here, might mean anything from a context to a whole readymade system of reality, as in Heidegger’s Gestell [this German term for framing tends to go untranslated because it is a specific, technical term], but in any case, I take Hall to be signifying the commonly-held conditions necessary for existence.

^[6] To take “inform” very literally, its original meaning is “to give form to something.” Its contemporary meaning tends more toward the formation of a mind or a depository of knowledge of some sort. For our purposes, it’s useful to see how any object is always already embodied knowledge—always informed by various sorts of information.

^[7] Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” p. 165.

^[8] Ibid., pp. 167-8.

^[9] Ibid., p. 169.

^[10] Ibid., p. 169.

^[11] Ibid., p. 169.

^[12] By “power-laden behavior,” I mean any behavior that empowers and/or disempowers. One might note that any behavior grants potential (and/or actual) advantage and disadvantage. The point is taken, but it also lies outside the scope of this paper.

^[13]  Also among the kinds of political acts are the production, and reproduction, of the material conditions necessary for the survival of a person or group of people.

^[14] Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” p. 167.

^[15] “[T]he discourse must […] be translated […] into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective.” (p. 164)

^[16] Ibid., p. 169.

^[17] Ibid., p. 171.

^[18] Ibid., p. 170.

^[19] Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, pp. 584-603.

^[20] Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” p. 598.

^[21] Ibid., p. 598.

^[22] Kraidy, Hybridity, p. 157.

^[23] Some words and phrases—like the German weltschauung, the Arabic safari, the French coup d’etat, and the Sanskrit guru—tend to go untranslated, often because so much is lost in translation that the decision is made to explain the meaning of the untranslated term rather than to distort the term to an unacceptably great degree.

^[24] Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference, p. 591.

^[25] Kraidy, Hybridity, p. 151.

^[26] Ibid., p. 156.

The Port

Yellow, blue, red paint,
with holes torn in different sizes,
revealing hard brown flesh—
or perhaps bones, more accurately.

Slow and smooth,
stiff necks and arms flow above
dark blue water with its opalescent skin.

Little men flail in tiny cages
—brains for brawny monsters—
monsters deaf to their own shrinking importance,
humbled in the soft hum of smaller machines.
People in plastic hats pace and peer,
tracing paths over rough, mossy concrete.

Mountains in the background tower over the horizon—
mountains from long before such strong robots—
and mountains that will last
long after the metals grind to sediments,
passing through bellies of squishy pink worms.

The Non-Global Global, or, The Actor’s Own Achievement is the Actor’s Own Achievement: On Latour’s Down to Earth

Bruno Latour is well-known for having said, “Scale is the actor’s own achievement.” As exasperatingly preposterous as the simplicity of this claim appears, he reverses course in Down to Earth. In Down to Earth, the hyper-wealthy act in perfect lockstep, a few steps ahead of all these poor dupes in the “Global South,” as well as the poor dupes at home. I will here focus on two major problems in Latour’s argument. At once, I want to not repeat Latour’s tendency to parrot something like Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “There is no such thing as society.” By all means, any body of people might produce coordinating, or scalar, effects that are beyond the reach of agents at a “lower” or “higher” scale. Latour is right to suggest that the hyper-wealthy could act in a coordinated way that would leave persons somewhat helpless to individually fight these kinds of acts. Instead, I merely want to point out that one of Latour’s premises—that deregulation can properly be viewed as a phenomenon that merely began in the 1980s—is as dangerous as it is misleading, and that the conspiratorial argument that follows seems at least as dubious. However, I will begin by demonstrating what I see as the tension in a tendency to misstate aspects of scale.

Latour says, “Shifting from a local to a global viewpoint ought to mean multiplying viewpoints, registering a number of varieties, taking into account a larger number of beings, cultures, phenomena, organisms, and people.” (pp. 12-3) This misses what is significant in the “global viewpoint.” The global viewpoint cannot merely be a multiplication of the local viewpoint. Latour here starts from the position that repetition of a phenomenon doesn’t produce a new effect. No one could really accept this. A piranha won’t kill you, but a school of piranhas will. Why is that? No matter how a piranha tries, they can only have the murderous effect in concert with more piranhas. There is some multiplicative threshold over which a number of piranhas becomes lethal. That is, the repetition of the piranha eventually leads to a school of piranhas-effect—a scalar effect. A single white blood cell has no hope of saving you from whatever virus. I cannot on my own do anything effective to fight deregulation or capitalism. To talk about scale is to talk about an effect that comes about through reproduction or through action coordinated by a guiding logic that appears on some scale. “Shifting from a local to a global viewpoint” only ought to multiply phenomena under observation if one wishes to approach from the level of the local. The global viewpoint, really, coincides with the effects of what happens at a “global” scale (I confess that I do not exactly know what effects the globe produces).

Again, this seems to produce a contradiction. Throughout the book, Latour proposes that the wealthy have made the decision that the world will not be survivable for everyone, so the thing to do is to concentrate their wealth and let the earth combust under the feet of some poor people. They deny climate change as part of a great scheme. He says, “For a clarifying episode that is not metaphoric in the least: Exxon-Mobil, in the early 1990s, knowing full well what it was doing, after publishing excellent scientific articles on the dangers of climate change, chose to invest massively in an equally frenetic campaign to proclaim the non-existence of the threat.” (p. 19) Here, Latour produces evidence of what he sees as “the elites” abandoning some of the people on Earth. They support deregulation, support inequalities, and deny climate change. The wealthy will be fine in their gated communities on the mountaintops, or something like that. However, doesn’t this require coordination among the wealthy? Doesn’t it require an effect that would be impossible to produce at the level of a single person? Further, the evidence Latour here uses is easily explained. Exxon-Mobil is a company that makes its money by selling fossil fuels that contribute greatly to climate change. Whether they know themselves to contribute to climate change, Exxon-Mobil’s incentive to sell its goods explains its investments in climate change denial. What is this conspiracy?

Part of Latour’s apparent confusion seems to come from a misunderstanding of history. Repeatedly, he refers to the deregulation that he says began in the 1980s. The fact that people often refer to deregulation as a neoliberal phenomenon that went underway beginning in the 1980s is really a reflection of two possible facts. First, most people probably do not have a strong understanding of economic history. Second, the ravenous efforts to define what’s clearly been new about neoliberalism might have led some people to focus on deregulation as an old thing in a new context and deregulation is then the neoliberal version of something that came from earlier. It’s funny to see that Latour cites Thomas Piketty’s work—work that shows that the fundamental tendency of capitalism is to extract rent, especially through a close relationship between business and state. In Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century^[1], he shows that the mid-20th century was an exceptional time in the history of capitalism. The regulations and high taxes that followed from the Bretton Woods agreement—eventually having led to rapid globalization, the end of the gold standard, deregulation, and increased speculation^[2]—created an opportunity for business owners to exploit new consumption markets, and some always saw the system as destined to fail. In any case, the push for deregulation continued throughout this period. In fact, the most basic idea of capitalism could be described as essentially pertaining to deregulation. “The Invisible Hand” and laissez-faire economics are both other ways by which people have sometimes thought of deregulation. In order to describe what happens today in relation to deregulation, it seems important to recall that capitalism was founded on the notion that intrusion from government was oppressive and that business owners could run the economy better than politicians and bureaucrats could. Sound familiar? The danger here is that Latour’s ahistorical portrayal of the current crisis shifts attention from the neverending tendencies of corporatiers to seek their own profit above all else.

We could set aside that Latour’s premises are faulty. This is probably the truth of every argument that doesn’t define its premises in a circular way. By now, we might recognize that what’s important about an argument isn’t necessarily its fidelity to some supposed natural world. If Latour helps us to see something, it might be that every perspective is perspectival. So, perhaps there’s something useful in Latour’s argument. Perhaps there’s some redeeming quality in the solution he gives us. But, there isn’t.

If the problems of today are, as Latour tells us, that broad coordination is a dead end, then the solution must be something that isn’t about broad coordination—it must be something more specified, more local. There’s a problem here, isn’t there? For all Latour’s alarm-ringing, the powerbrokers believe in scale, they believe in power, they believe in the global, and so on. If they didn’t, we might not face the ecological crisis that we do. But, even if they didn’t (or even if their belief were impotent), there’s another threat. Latour wants to present us with a nuanced view of people’s relation to the earth, and perhaps that’s needed. However, one can almost hear the far right, Latour says no blood and soil—only soil! So, who belongs to this soil, and where’d we put all those ‘30s tapes about the heimat?[3] There’s no friction between the onto-ethical position of poststructuralist affirmation-of-difference and the onto-ethical position of the new (far) right (or even the old right, really) because at the bottom, they’re the same.[4] They both say that people are different, and we have to respect people’s differences. Without an explicit metaethics (a universal normative category), on what basis ought we to prevent anyone from doing whatever they do? Consider how harrowing is the very ending of Latour’s book: “[T]ell us a little about where you would like to land and with whom you agree to share a dwelling place.” (p. 106) Who can be where appears up for negotiation, but in this, or any such, imagined conversation, identification with a specific instance has to be arbitrated by some social body. Perhaps we do need to get “down to earth,” but it seems that if we want to avoid the calamities implicated by the well-organized, well-resourced elites, we’ll also have to either get up to the globe or somehow dismantle the globalist.

^[1] Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017.

^[2] See Yannis Varoufakis’s The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, Chicago: Zed Books, 2013.

[3] Heimat is the German for “home.” In the 1930s, it often signified the homeland—romanticizing an idea of the earth that belonged to “the Germans.”

[4] Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher and long-time advocate of Eurasianism (essentially, forceful [deadly] Russian expansion into non-Russian territory) is as clear as one could be on this. He says that we live in a “postmodern world” and the “West” lack the necessary epistemological and cultural understanding to impeach the “Russian truth.” See, for instance, Millerman, Michael. “Theory Talk #66: Alexander Dugin on Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of Multipolarity.” Theory Talks, 2014, http://www.theory-talks.org/2014/12/theory-talk-66.html.

 

Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Malden, MA: Polity, 2018.

Unequal and Vulnerable: Ideology, Discretization, and Discourse in Discussions on the Public Sphere

In this paper, I will draw on discussions of the public sphere in order to show how discretization and representation relate to an ideological, problematic model of politics. Reason as a precondition for politics assumes equality between objects as well as between interlocutors. Because of this, the public sphere reproduces particular ideologies and particular violences. We will begin by unpacking rationalism and discretization as they relate to equality.

The rational is that which reason supports. “Reasonable” often substitutes for “rational.” “Rational” comes from Latin for “reckoning” or “calculating.” This reckoning must be done on the basis of discretization—for instance, the ratio literally entails a bar that separates one from another. The rational entails the shaving away of difference in order to form a sameness that then reasserts difference. Habermas and Fraser each bump into the problem of discretization-as-equalization, but they do so differently.

Habermas’s public sphere is a “realm of our social life” wherein “something approaching public opinion can be formed.” (p. 49) The public sphere is constituted by “every conversation,” as part of a “public body”—“neither […] business […] nor state.” (p. 49) The public sphere “mediates between society and state.” (p. 50) And, the public sphere and the state “confront one another as opponents.” (p. 49) The public sphere is where “public opinion” is formed, and “public opinion can by definition only come into existence when a reasoning public is presupposed.” (p. 50) Here, the reasoning public would meet as apparent equals, separating this  from that, discretizing different political problems in order to judge the various issues at stake. Of course, none of these political problems are equal to one another or, as time goes on, equal to themselves, so we already see a problem with representation of political objects. However, Fraser alerts us to another problem of presumed equality.

Whereas for Habermas, the public sphere inaugurated a liberatory freedom, for Fraser, the public sphere itself can be problematic. Habermas, speaking of medievality, says, “As long as the prince and the estates of the realm still ‘are’ the land, instead of merely functioning as deputies for it, they are able to ‘re-present’; they represent their power ‘before’ the people, instead of for the people.” (p. 51) The ability for people to represent themselves and their interests departed from the unilateral, overt form of medieval sovereign power. The people could now offer their own concerns—through the medium of the public sphere—to the domain of policy. For Fraser, the public sphere is more insidious.

The public sphere is the space that privileges a particular kind of discourse. Fraser says, “[D]eliberation serves as a mask for domination.” (p. 64) Deliberation through the public sphere, rather than being purely liberatory, is a means for (re)producing power relations. Quoting Jane Mansbridge, she tells us that this domination occurs because “the transformation of ‘I’ into ‘we’ brought about through political deliberation can easily mask subtle forms of control. Even the language people use as they reason together usually favors one way of seeing things and discourages others.” (p. 64) The structure of the public sphere privileges particular kinds of participants and particular forms of participation. The public sphere creates hierarchies on the basis of assumed credibility, forms of knowledge, and ways of speaking. The inequality between participants in the public sphere means that people participate not necessarily as opponents to the state—forming the optimal public opinion to liberate people—but as participants in a formalized means by which the interests of the most advantaged are often those that get represented in and through the public sphere. The question confronts us: Does the public sphere necessarily help to liberate needy and disadvantaged people?

Because the public sphere is a particular kind of “realm,” as Habermas says, the public sphere qua public sphere follows particular rules. For instance, the public sphere is that place wherein “a reasoning public” deliberates. This is definitional to the public sphere. Who counts as reasoning and what counts as reasoning are here taken as givens, as are other aspects of the public sphere. Because advantages are afforded to certain kinds of participants, there is no guarantee that the public sphere always represents the interests of those most in need.

This issue is especially clear in Dean’s discussion of technology and the public sphere. The online public sphere has long been quite active, proliferating messages of all sorts, giving equal access to various people with all manner of concerns, and yet, people’s needs aren’t always met and state violences are perhaps as routine as ever. Part of the problem, as Fraser says, is in the function ideologically assumed to motivate the public sphere:

In the process of their deliberations, participants are transformed from a collection of self-seeking, private individuals into a public-spirited collectivity. […] This view conflates the ideas of deliberation and the common good by assuming that deliberation must be deliberation about the common good. Consequently, it limits deliberation to talk framed from the standpoint of a single, all-encompassing ‘we,’ thereby ruling claims of self-interest and group interest out of order. (p. 72)

Habermas’s conception of the public sphere presupposes that deliberation necessarily helps to set the conditions by which people’s needs get met, but this isn’t necessarily so. There is no magic in deliberation by which people’s utterances—through a highly curated and ideology-laden process—result in a better situation for the most disadvantaged or for anyone else, necessarily. As Fraser here points out, “common good” but common to whom? Who is this “we” to which we are to be common?

For Fraser, the discretization between “public” and “private” concerns is one way by which issues appropriate to the public sphere get divided. The ways by which the public sphere grants advantages to some and disadvantages to others dampens the supposed usefulness of the public sphere. Fraser points out how the division of the public and private is problematic: “[T]his works against one of the principal aims of deliberation, namely, helping participants clarify their interests.” (p. 72) People’s interests are largely determined by their private lives.  The rejection of “private” concerns from the public sphere means that people’s material needs often cannot be addressed through the public sphere.

What we see here is the norm in play. That which advantages some people in the public sphere is also that which is normalized in and through the public sphere. Speaking of the normalization of the public-private distinction, Fraser says, “This usually works to the advantage of dominant groups and individuals and to the disadvantage of their subordinates.” (p. 73) While dominant groups’ private needs are often met through the systems that they dominate, private interests of subordinate groups are especially vulnerable because they have no place in the public sphere. If the public sphere were to accommodate “private” concerns, it would be easier for subordinated groups to have their needs met. One of the important functions of the public sphere is the “rendering visible” of social issues in and out of the public sphere (p. 65).

While Fraser helps us to problematize Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, she does not go far enough. What is the outside to the disadvantage experienced by subordinate publics? Is it not always that someone has the upper hand? Fraser focuses on the potential for egalitarian societies to produce better outcomes, using stronger relationships between different kinds of public spheres, but this seems to miss part of her point, actually. Some people will always be vulnerable. Representation happens according to particular rules that grant advantages at the same time that representation is always necessarily distorted and/or incomplete. There is no actual equality on the ground, and there is no guarantee that attempts to include people in decision-making will lead to justice. While communication of people’s needs is important, the onus cannot only be on the disadvantaged to sufficiently represent themselves. More is needed lest we reproduce the invisibilizations and violences against the most vulnerable.

 

Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: pp. 56-80.

Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.” New German Critique 3: pp. 49-55.