Page 58 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 53

In earlier varieties of the public sphere, it was important that images of
the body not figure importantly in public discourse. The anonymity of the
discourse was a way of certifying the citizen’s disinterested concern for the
public good. But now public body images are everywhere on display, in
virtually all media contexts. Where printed discourse formerly relied on a
rhetoric of abstract disembodiment, visual media … now display bodies for
a range of purposes: admiration, identification, appropriation, scandal and
so forth. To be public in the West means to have an iconicity. 60
Warner questions the wisdom of reading this ‘mass publicity’ and
iconicity as a pathological deviation from the rationalist ideal of self-
abstraction. He goes further than Fraser, then, by arguing that such an
ideal not only worked against ‘minoritised subjects’ but also against
‘privileged subjects’ as it ‘abstracted from the very body features that
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gave them the privilege of that abstraction’. Self-abstraction is a
denial, a form of ‘bad faith’. At the same time, however, a ‘longing’
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to ‘abstract [oneself] into the privilege of public disembodiment’,
a longing to rise above our bodily characteristics and limitations,
remains heavily ingrained in our culture (consider, for example, the
excitement around ‘identity play’ stimulated by Internet chat rooms,
or the explosion of ‘vanity publishing’ through web logs and home
pages). There is a resultant tension between self-realisation and self-
denial. This, says Warner, is where consumer capitalism, the mediator
of contemporary iconicity, plays its part:

Part of the bad faith of the res publica of letters was that it required a denial of
the bodies that gave access to it. The public sphere is still oriented enough to
its liberal logic that its citizens long to abstract themselves into the privilege
of public disembodiment. And when that fails, they can turn to another kind
of longing, which … is not so much to cancel out their bodies as to trade in
for a better model. The mass public sphere tries to minimise the difference
between the two, surrounding citizens with trademarks through which they
can trade marks, offering both positivity and self-abstraction. 63

Consumer capitalism provides a kaleidoscopic array of images and
brands (attached to commodities and icons) which, through positive
or negative appropriation ‘make available an endlessly differentiable
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subject’. Positivity is articulated through strategies for the defi nition
of the self; self-abstraction is addressed not through the anonymity
of print but through the anonymous (market) entry into the public
exchange of symbols. Against Habermas, then, Warner suggests that

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