From John Locke to John Rawls, theories of liberal democracy have
long questioned the role of public opinion in the securing of individual
liberties. Such theories have depended upon the concept of a monolithic
democratic public, supposedly united under a singular national culture
committed to individual rights. This belief, however, has attracted more recent
critical scrutiny in the cultural turn towards diversity and identity politics
and emergent proposals of alternative publics. If cultural identifications have
generated new forms of collective solidarity, the triumph of what Theodore Lowi
called “interest group liberalism” has also led to accusations of political
lethargy and inaction. Theories of liberalism have also suffered from the
emergence and mobilization of aggressively privatized models of governance,
such as political libertarianism and economic neoliberalism. These movements,
which champion the importance of the individual, have commandeered political
action for private use rather than public good. The initial weeks of our Mellon
workshop will foreground these political theories of liberalism to situate
questions surrounding the relationship between public identification, political
action and cultural audiences.
Our workshop is prompted by a series of questions emerging from
tensions between private and public personas, individuals and collectives: how
do private individuals present themselves publicly? What constitutes a public
action? What constitutes a political action? We seek to engage with the critical
suggestion that as public action has transformed into nonparticipatory
identification, we have morphed from a political society into a society of consumers
and spectators. Our workshop will foreground a current and ongoing debate
between the belief that culture is a politics in itself, and the belief that a
politics of culture can only distract from real political action and activism. We
will consider how we might negotiate the sides of this debate, and how “culture,”
as cultural works, might animate a politics that is not only personal and
individual, but also public.
Since the general turn to identity politics in the twentieth
century, critics seem increasingly to respond to this debate by converting
consumption into political action. In fact, today, criticism motivated
by a political desire to render identitarian communities visible appears the most susceptible to a discourse that
expands and privileges the public sphere at the expense of identifiably active social movement. Given the often
invisible and “private” nature of sexual desire, queer theory offers one logical starting point for
a critique of identitarian politics that proclaim the personal to as a blanket
source for social recognition and political agency.
In recent decades, the rise of queer theory, and the subsequent
“affective turns” within the humanities and social sciences have highlighted
the emotional impact of cultural productions and invested texts and artworks
with the potential to shape political communities by appealing to “knowing”
audiences. The exemplary works of Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant describe,
respectively, “counterpublics” and “intimate publics” comprised of readers
whose individual engagements with cultural texts are politicized as a means of
identification with a community marked by difference. These theories, however,
rely upon a tautological framework in which readers come to identify with an
intimate community only by knowing how to read appropriately, that is, by
having the knowledge that comes from membership in the community. Such intimate
communities can have significant social effects, as when the “queer eye” that
converts culture into camp and kitsch comes into contact with the “straight
guy” who stands for a more general television audience. Yet this reliance on
knowledge, vision, and contact inevitably supplants social action with
proximity and social presence, as when Sara Ahmed identifies a queer politics
inherent in the discomfort and disorientation that emerge when queers
occupy hostile environments. How must we redefine the “political” when faced
with theoretical parameters that identify public visibility as political action
and private readers as communally bound? How might the conflation of visibility
with social action enable us to unearth unseen divisions within expansive
identity-based communities, when we consider the impacts on racial and ethnic,
gendered, and diasporic communities and counterpublics?
In the latter portion of our Mellon workshop, we
expect to approach the “public” formally, as a concept that enables certain
recognizable types of appeal to individuated audiences. If such appeals
manifest through “presence” and “visibility,” turning our attention toward
emergent theories of cosmopolitanism, globalism, and virtual networking will
allow us to complicate what it means to be “visible,” and politically readable,
beyond the limits of a national or spatial context. Alternately, thinking
locally by examining graffiti, architecture, public art and performance art, we
might reinvest the public sphere with political value in encounters between
cultural works and the unknowing, accidental “readers” that pass by.
