Transnational Counterpublic: An Owner's Manual more

Transnational Counterpublic™ An owner’s manual Tim MacNeill Please send any comments to him at timac@yorku.ca. Currently he is a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, York University. Introduction Imagine for a moment you have just come home from an impromptu shopping expedition to the local mega-super mall. During your trip, you had been inexplicably drawn to a small, secluded, yet hip little shop near the corridor that leads to the public washrooms. Upon entering, a strange little salesman accosted you immediately – as strange little salesmen are oft to do. But this strange little salesman was… well… strange. Instead of the usual shirt/tie, or trendy ‘metro-sexual’ garb, he wore a simple t-shirt which had nothing but a curious picture of a handsome bearded fellow silk-screened on it, a pair of military pants, and a baseball cap on which the letters “EZLN” were displayed proudly and prominently. The next moments were a blur. A flourish of beautiful and powerful words erupted from the salesman – a few of them strategically in Spanish, which only seemed to amplify their splendour: “Justicia!”, “Libertad!”, “Nunca Mas!” The next moment you can remember, you were sitting in your car in the mall parking lot, looking out of the corner of your eye at this mysterious package that you seemed to have purchased from the vendor – you found yourself wondering what was inside the silly shrink-wrapped box that was simply labelled “Transnational Counterpublic™.” Almost desperately you seize the box, fumble stupidly at the shrink wrapping yet finally gain control of an elusive loose corner. You tear frantically, clumsily – and finally, you gain entrance. Inside: nothing, or nearly so. No shiny plastic something. No enticing electronic whatever. No attractive yet imperfect indigenously crafted anything. Just a plain pamphlet labelled as simply as the box that had 1 encapsulated it: “Transnational Counterpublic™: An Owners Manual.” confused, a lot disappointed, you read on: A little Congratulations! You have just brought home your brand-new Transnational Counterpublic™. Fantastic! You must be very excited – feeling ‘radical’ and perhaps even a little-bit ‘revolutionary’. I’m sure you have many questions nonetheless: What exactly is a transnational counterpublic anyway? What does it do? Do you have to feed it and water it? Do you have to build a special room for it to live? Can you just ignore it, and allow it to go about doing whatever it does on its own, or do you have to somehow nurture it, guide it? These are important questions, and this manual is specifically designed to help you to realize a long and meaningful relationship with your Transnational Counterpublic™. In the following sections, we will outline what a public is, how it works, where it belongs, what to feed it, what makes a particular public a counterpublic, what makes a counterpublic transnational, and finally what you can do to help your Transnational Counterpublic™ to be as healthy as possible. What is a Public? Before we jump straight into ‘counterpublics’, it is prudent to slow down, and discuss the good, old fashioned ‘public’. What is a public? What is it for? These are important questions, but luckily, many people have asked them before. Particularly important in this respect is the work of John Dewey (1923) and Michael Warner (2002). 2 Dewey (1923) explains that individual acts between friends, co-workers, or community members, for example, often have effects that “extend beyond the two [parties] directly concerned, that they effect the welfare of many others” (13). In these circumstances, “the act acquires a public capacity” (ibid). Here, we see that a group of people may be impacted by what are often thought to be “individual” actions – the result might be called a public interest. Dewey does not claim that individuals lose their agency when a sense of a public is embraced. To the contrary he asserts, not unlike Adam Smith, that “all deliberate choices and plans are finally the work of single human beings” (21). Dewey holds, however, that such an observation has often lead to dangerously false conclusions. The tendency of this line of thinking has been toward a simplistic version of a Smithian world, where all things social are conceived as simple aggregates of individual wants and actions. Nothing, in short, exists beyond individuals, their interests, and their various private negotiations. For Dewey, this line of thought represents a thorough misunderstanding of human relations. With it, the logical conclusion is too easily drawn that “the state, the public, is a fiction, a mask for private desires for power and position” (ibid). For Dewey, any conversation of ‘the public’ must begin from the realization that there is a ‘public interest’ which, as explained above, takes form when the impacts of private action ‘spill-over’ beyond the individual interactions on which they are based. From this arises a need to control such interactions “so as to secure some consequences and avoid others” (12). In this, we can perceive Dewey’s understanding of the private/public divide, the necessity of the later to restrict the former, and perhaps a 3 tendency for tension to develop between individuals and publics. Given this, some mediating entity must exist. A simple market mechanism cannot be expected to function properly in such conditions – since the existence of a ‘public interest’ presumes an ‘externality’ which tends to incapacitate market functions. For Dewey, the logical outcome of the need to provide for a public interest is the formation of a state authority. This will remain an important theme throughout this manual, so it bears repeating: The institution that is presumed to efficiently synthesize individual action with aggregated social need is the market. When private action has impacts beyond those immediately concerned parties, however, an ‘external’ or ‘public’ interest exists. These, however, are precisely the conditions in which markets cease to function (since markets are simply aggregates of atomized human behaviour, and atomized humans do not exist when there are such ‘spillovers’). From this emerges a need for a regulating institution – a state. A public, then, is a thing that has an interest beyond the private, and must make its needs known to a state, which is presumed to act in its interest. In Dewey’s words, “the public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (15-16), and government officials “are those who look out for and take care of the interests thus affected” (ibid). In the discussion thus far, I have characterized a public as a group of people whose actions and interactions impact each other in a way that culminates in a sense of common interest. This is an extremely useful idea of what it is to be a public, but it is not the only one. Michael Warner (2002), for example, describes three different approaches to conceiving a public, and all of them differ from the depiction above. First the public 4 exists simply because it does – it is a simple totality of people in a particular realm. For example, it “might be the people organized as a nation, commonwealth, the city, the state, or some other community” (49). The main purpose of designating a particular public is to distinguish it from an Other. To address one public assumes that others are peripheral, or do not matter. Second, a public may simply imply a group of people that witness a performance or event. Such a public “knows itself by knowing where and when it is assembled in common visibility and common action” (50). The third type of public that Warner locates is one that “comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (ibid). This concept of the public evokes a recollection of Benidict Anderson’s (1991) “imagined communities” that come to understand themselves through the mediation of texts such as newspapers and maps which may be circulated widely. In practice, however, the lines between these different publics are difficult to locate. A nation may be addressed by a politician on a national broadcast, for example, mixing the three conceptions. These publics, for Warner, also have common traits which clarify their role and form. First, “a public is self-organized” in that it is “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself… It exists by virtue of being addressed” (50). Warner claims that a state cannot bring a public into being, since a public must first organize and recognize itself, and in the event that a state did conjure itself a public, the latter “could not be sovereign with respect to the state” (51). Therefore, in a democracy, the public must precede the state – this is consistent with Dewey’s perspective. Conflicting with Dewey, however, Warner claims that since a public only comes into being by virtue of being addressed, it cannot have a pre-existing common interest. For Warner, a public may only generate an interest after it brings itself 5 into existence – you can not have a public interest without a public. Certainly, the point is well made by Warner that claims of public interest or opinion may be mediated by polling, for example, to manufacture a public interest that does not exist, Warner stretches this a little far to claim that no public interest exists independent of its widespread recognition. This would imply that no private actions are having social spillover effects prior to the designation of a public – an unlikely proposition. Warner’s second element of a public is that it is “a relation among strangers” (55). Since a public is conjured only by virtue of being addressed, and it must be addressed en masse and impersonally, this in necessarily so. Since we recognize ourselves as addressees, but recognize that “the speech was addressed to indefinite others” to be addressed as a public is both a personal and impersonal experience – this is Warner’s third claim (59). Fourth, a public “is constituted through mere attention” (60). By this, Warner means that a public must be listening – an active role: The existence of a public is contingent on its members’ activity, however notational or compromised, and not on its members’ categorical classification, objectively determined position in social structure, or material existence (61). Here we see a transformation from a discussion of what a public is, to what a public does. Essentially, for Warner, a public is something that exists simply by being addressed, but it also must be listening and be aware of itself. Warner presents three additional characteristics of a public, all of which centre on the functionalities of publics. These will be discussed in the following section, which is centrally concerned with describing what a public does. For now, it is important to clarify the two concepts of public that have been presented here. For Dewey, a public comes into being because of the external impacts of private interactions – these external impacts create a public 6 interest. For Warner, however, a public exists by the virtue of being addressed and understanding itself as a public – it cannot have an ‘interest’ preceding this. In the tension between these two conceptions is some ‘truth’. Publics are often imagined into being in a somewhat arbitrary fashion. There cannot be a national public, or a national public interest, without a nation for example. And a nation may exist simply by virtue of being addressed as a public and subsequently imagined as such (Anderson 1991). In this sense, a public interest can only be made ‘real’ through imagination. Conversely, however, a nation may come to imagine itself by virtue of a shared interest. It may have an interest in cooperatively protecting itself from the domination of ‘foreign’ Others for example. A community too may recognize a shared benefit of expenditure on public goods which are inadequately provided by private transaction. Such things may precede a group’s felt identity as a public – but not for long. Similarly, a felt identity as a public may precede a collective interest, but again – not for long. It may be best, then, to characterize the existence of a public and its interest in dialectic terms – with each element an explanatory variable in the other. In any sense, it seems that a public is something that has a shared interest. What Does it Do? To understand what a public does, we must return to Dewey’s idea of what a public is: an interest that appears when individual transactions have external consequences. In such a situation, a choice must be made by all those affected to either intervene in the ‘individual’ transaction, or not. This, Benjamin Barber (1984) claims, is a pre-condition for politics. When a choice to intervene is made, some sort of physical method of 7 coercion may be used, but this is not the only way to instil individual compliance with public interest. A form of “soft power” (Nye 2004) might inspire the same results. Indeed, such means are at the core of Barbers concept of “strong democracy” which is, a distinctively modern form of participatory democracy. It rests on the idea of a self-governing community of citizens who are united less by homogeneous interests than by civic education and who are made capable of common purpose and mutual action by virtue of their civic attitudes and participatory institutions rather than their altruism or their good nature (1984: 117). Clearly then, a public has something to do with democracy, and a “strong democracy” requires individuals who are compelled to act in this interest not by physical coercion but because they have internalized certain norms of mutual duty and civic engagement. For Barber, politics implies a necessity for action in that a reasonable choice must be made in the absence of an independent ground. By “absence of independent ground” Barber means that often there is no rational scientific criterion on which optimality may be based – that there is no truth, or at least, that the truest, best choice may be unknown. Underlying this is the assertion that, not only must there be a public, but that this public must be an end in itself if strong democracy is to function. In Barbers words, “strong democracy” implies, politics not as a way of life but as a way of living – as, namely, the way that human beings with variable but malleable natures and with competing but overlapping interests can contrive to live together communally not only to their mutual advantage but also to the advantage of their mutuality (118). This is a good example of the correct way to use a public – or for a public to use itself. For Barber, a public must make political choices for the good of the collective – even if the choice is simply to nurture the existence of a functioning and deliberative 8 collective. But how does such a public work? How does it deliberate? For this we must return to Warner (2002). Warner’s fifth attribute of a public (remember we discussed the first four in the preceding section) is that “a public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” (62). This implies that one text alone, or one audience address, cannot create a public – a public is better conceived as conversation since “it is not texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time” (62). Texts presented to publics are meant to be circulated and discussed. As Warner argues: The key development in the emergence of modern publics was the appearance of newsletters and other temporarily structured forms oriented to their own circulation: not just controversial pamphlets, but regular and dated papers, magazines, almanacs, annuals, and essay serials. They developed reflexivity about their circulation through reviews, reprintings, citation, controversy (66). A text, then, has a social life. A public is deeply imbedded in its texts and viceversa. This is what Warner means by his sixth assertion; that “publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation” (68). There must be a feeling of reciprocity between public and text. “Even mass media” Warner suggests “which because of their heavy capitalization are conspicuously asymmetrical, take care to fake a reciprocity that they must overcome in order to succeed” (71). For Warner, mass mediated texts and symbols become public in a way that extends beyond mere distribution. They acquire “talk value” as; You don’t just mechanically repeat signature catch phrases. You perform through them your social placement. Different social styles can be created through different levels of reflexivity in this performance (73). The “talk” in “talk value” is a public thing. The “value” is generally not – it is often appropriated by large media conglomerates. Warner explains, however, that such 9 embracing of affectivity, reflexivity, and performativity “helps create the impression of a vital feedback loop despite the immense asymmetry of production and reception that defines mass culture” (ibid). The asymmetry: the bulk of symbolic input into the conversation comes from the ‘top’ ‘down’, and all associated economic values stemming from public creativity and reflexive performance are co-opted by media conglomerates. The media and public have, in such cases, worked together to create something that may be called “public opinion” or simply “fashion,” and have perhaps re-defined a “public interest” – with all associated economic proceeds payable to the copyright holder. We can see here the provocation for Warner’s seventh claim: that “a public is poetic world-making” (82). Through conversation, as imperfect as it may be, publics do not simply deliberate and make choices as Barber and Dewey suggest – they actively build worlds. These worlds might include definitions of what is natural/not natural, right/wrong, acceptable/unacceptable. publics, are by definition those that can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy (88). The result is a “dominant public,” and such Dominant publics actively reconstitute their discourse, and this often serves to exclude those who do not partake. We can see then that publics, because they are performative, reflexive, and world-building have an endogenous agency. Their influence over the type of worlds that are built, and who is included and excluded from these worlds, shows that publics and their discourses possess something else as well – power. 10 But why must there be a dominant public? Why might a dominant consensus form that defines the parameters within which life must be lived? Don’t individuals simply have their own beliefs and opinions, and isn’t the idea of democracy simply to add-up those multiple rational autonomous beliefs in order to make decisions based on majority opinion? When we realize that, especially in absence of an independent ground, social humans seem to rely upon other humans in the formation of their opinions, the answers to these questions become clear. Sunstein (2002) reviews a history of experimental studies that claim to show that “people are extremely vulnerable to the unanimous views of others” (14). In a wellknown experiment by psychologist Muzafer Sherif in the 1930s, for example, consensus of small groups around a dominant opinion of the ‘right’ answer, in a situation where no ‘right’ answer was truly apparent, emerged. When participants were asked to judge a non-judgable distance he found that, Individual judgements converged, and a group norm remained stable within groups across different trials, thus leading to the situation in which different groups made, and were strongly committed to, quite different judgements (15). For Sunstein, an important point emerges here – that “similar groups, indeed similar nations, can converge on very different beliefs and actions simply because of modest and even arbitrary variations in starting points” (ibid). Furthermore, the studies treated by Sunstein also suggest that individuals with strong opinions (whether informed or not) have considerable power in shaping the form of such collective judgements – especially when such individuals are identified as being members of a majority group; having a similar world view and background, for example, as do the bulk of participants. Importantly, in the experiments treated by Sunstein, such leader-provoked group 11 judgements “became thoroughly internalized” by individual members of the group, and these effects were found to be carried across “generations” (16). We have come now to the issue of authority, how it is formed, and how it sustains its impact on dominant publics and their judgements. This brings about an important lesson in the care of your Transnational Counterpublic™: Be careful what you feed it. Feeding your Transnational Counterpublic™ In the previous section, we saw that a public is a complex and active thing. It uses affective links to conjure beliefs about legitimate ways of being and courses of action. We also saw, however, that something called authority can impact this process greatly. “Authority” here refers to a sense of expertise and/or confidence that a particular actor (individual, foundation, government, media, religious authority, educational institution etc.) exudes within a given social group – I will refer to this as authority on. “Authority”, however, may have an alternative meaning – it may refer to the power a particular actor has to make decisions on the behalf of a group/public – I will refer to this as authority to. An entity with authority on can inspire the actions and judgements of a group, and one with authority to has power to make decisions on behalf of that group. In the latter version, “authority” must be underwritten by something called legitimacy. This legitimacy, as we will see, can be related to the belief-system of the public and therefore may be strongly shaped by authority on. The shape of your public, and the authoritative actions it legitimizes, then, are dependent on the authoritative inputs into the social milieu. In short: it matters what you feed your public. In order to clarify these feeding 12 concerns, we must refer to the work of Rosenau (1992; 2003), Foucault (1978), Herman & Chomsky (2002), McChesney (2004), and Drache & Froese 2004). In the following quotation from Rosenau (1992), we can see the public importance of both authority to and authority over: No collectivity could persist for long without having authority… It is through the exercise of authority that decisions are made and implemented and the coherence of collectivities thereby preserved. If a collectivity lacked authority relations… goals could not be framed, and energies could not be concerted; there could be no collective action, and the collectivity would soon lose its identity (259). Rosenau explains further that authority to relations are often “formally incorporated into their interaction patterns through constitutions, bylaws, statutes, and judicial decisions” (ibid), but authority is also legitimized informally. Compliance to authority might be assured through coercion, but most commonly it is simply “a matter of habit: repeated instances of compliance become deeply ingrained” (ibid). This power of authority to is dependent, however, “on the intangible bases on which it is accepted by those toward whom it is directed.” Clearly then, such authority is “enhanced, dissipated, or otherwise altered only by virtue of variations in the responses of those whose compliance is sought” (260). In absence of physical coercion, that is, authority must be legitimated by the collective. Recalling the argument of Sunstein, it follows that those who seek to maintain authority to might benefit from the assistance of those who have authority on. As we learned from Dewey, the main authority which is interested in making decisions on behalf of a public interest is the state. But is there only one public with only one interest? If not, in whose interest is the state to govern? According to Foucault (1978), a state authority must govern toward ‘the common good’, but that this ‘common good’ “refers to a state of affairs where all the subjects without exception obey the laws” 13 (95). In other words, in order to maintain the state – which is the protector of the public interest – individuals must relinquish their own sovereignty to its authority: they must behave properly to assure that the current order of authority to is maintained. For Foucault, this orderly obedience, is a question not of imposing laws on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics –to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved (95). But who has the authority on, that is needed to establish what the ‘common good’ is, and the modes of action through which this good will most properly achieved? Who, to use Foucault’s word, has credible wisdom? With “wisdom” here exuding a specific meaning: “as the knowledge of things, of the objectives that can and should be attained, and the disposition of things required to reach them” (96). Foucault has a ready answer for this question: it is the sovereign. That is to say: that person, group, class, institution that has authority to do things in the name of a common/public good maintains its legitimacy because it also is the authority on what is to be properly done – i.e. what the ‘common good’ is and what are the best ways to achieve it. This slight of hand, which inconspicuously combines those with authority to with those with authority on, is achieved through the use of various tactics that ‘dispose’ men to behave in the preferred way. For Foucault, it should be made clear, the state in modernity is equal to the population it governs. The state is not the governing apparatus, nor a specific territory – it is the people and perhaps the territory they occupy. This ‘state’ (which we might also call the ‘public’) has become ‘governed’ by the “specific albeit complex form of power” (102) that incorporates “a range of multiform tactics” (95) in order to assure that each 14 citizen internalizes behaviours and beliefs that maintain the state as is. Currently, this implies the maintenance of the modern capitalist ‘economy’, along with all of the power relations it maintains and legitimates. How is this “governmentality” formed and maintained, and by whom? From the discussion in this and the preceding section, we have seen that those with perceived authority on are able to subtly influence the internalized opinion of groups. In modern societies those who are felt to have this type of authority are generally those who are in powerful positions – successful businesspeople, politicians, and of course celebrities of all sorts. These are the people who set the styles of life and living that we internalize as publics – and, of course, they internalize these styles themselves. These authorities have a vested interest in maintaining the current order of things, so their ‘wisdom’ (in the Foucaultian sense) is not likely to be subversive. Furthermore, this ‘wisdom’ is overwhelmingly served to publics through a very modern institution: mass media. In consideration of the dynamic process in which the ‘wisdom’ of those with authority on comes to be internalized by individual members of a public, it should be clear that we are actually talking about what is commonly referred to as ‘culture’. It is important at this point to pause and define this term. With Drache and Froese (2004), culture can be formalized as “a set of ideas and practices embedded in the unique historical experience and public memory of a society” (2). Since, a Foucault suggest, the eminence of the family as an important unit of analysis has been usurped by the primacy of the individual in post-modernity (98-100), culture is mainly negotiated through interactions in two realms – those of the market and the public domain. In the latter, individuals and citizens, “exchange ideas and promote creativity” (Drache & Froese: 2). 15 ‘Creativity’ here can be presumed to mean collaboration in the production of both cultural texts (such as music, writing, speeches, and nuanced gestures) and of Culture in its capitalized form: as a set of beliefs and way of life. These two cultures, of course, are intimately related. The former refers to culture as all the various modes of human communication, and the latter refers to both the result and the process of communication. In this, I am agreeing with James Cary (1989) that communication is culture, and concurrently culture is Culture. As Carey explains: This projection of community ideals and their embodiment in material form – dance, plays, architecture, news stories, strings of speech – creates an artificial though nonetheless real symbolic order that operates to provide not information but confirmation, not to alter attitudes or change minds but to represent an underlying order of things, not to perform functions but to manifest an ongoing and fragile process (19). If we accept this, then it need not matter if the ‘c’ in ‘culture’ appears in upper or lower case. When I refer to ‘culture’ in the remainder of this paper, it should be clear that I am referring to cultural texts, their modes of communication, and the resulting temporary and incomplete agreement of various individual communicators regarding a ‘way of living’ that ensues. Further, it should be remembered that this is a spontaneous, yet asymmetrical process, as described above (in both this and the preceding sections). Whereas Carey depicts the dialectic between cultural expressions and symbolic orders in a creative, perhaps benign light, Foucault might point out the opportunity that exists for many ‘multiform tactics’ to be utilized by those who wish to govern to direct this process. One such tactic will be outlined below with regard to the media and Herman and Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model”. Before that can be addressed, one further elaboration remains important. Until this point, I have been speaking of the behaviours of publics and their cultures as they are 16 within a ‘public domain’ – a term that will be more thoroughly explored in the following section. As I mentioned above, however, publics and their constituent individuals interface within two, often competing, realms – the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ (by this I mean ‘the market’). In the public domain, as we have discussed, those with authority on are able to feed a public certain ‘wisdoms’ and provoke, intentionally or not, corresponding public/cultural conventions. We must question at this point weather this relationship is impacted when such complex negotiations are privatized – i.e. commoditized. In other words: what happens when your public and its culture are being fed by a market? This is an important consideration, because it is increasingly the market through which publics must communicate, and from which they are communicated to. As Drache and Froese explain, there has been increasing pressure, largely from the WTO, to commodify culture in all its forms. Such commodified culture, of course, is brought to a public through cultural industries. Since cultural industries are typically unstable and exhibit economies of scale, as Drache and Froese explain, such markets have become increasingly oligoplistic – consisting primarily of a few large media conglomerates. Further, since these media conglomerates that ‘feed’ publics are required within a market to be profitable, the authoritative information they distribute is subject to a ‘filtering’ system (Herman & Chomsky 2002 [1988]). Your public, in order function properly, requires certain nutrients. For lack of a better term, we might call these nutrients ‘the truth about the world’. Here ‘truth’ might refer to an empirically grounded sense of the actual way the world is working. In absence of an independent ground, however, ‘truth’ might be taken to simply mean 17 access to multiple opinions about the workings of the world, multiple knowledges, multiple cultural expressions. These nutrients take concrete form in the ‘raw materials’ of culture – the dances, plays, books, algorithms, draft declarations, laws, strings of speech, news stories, economic theorems, and gossip to name a few of the numerous permutations. They are the ‘cultural inputs’ of Culture. The culture of the public/s is/are formed using these inputs in the reflexive fashion both Carey and Warner describe. According to Herman and Chomsky (2002 [1998]), many essential ‘nutrients’ are lost when a public is ‘fed’ through a market – in other words, when ‘cultural inputs’ are exchanged in commodity form. Five filtering processes within markets assure that this will happen. First, the “size, ownership, and profit orientation of mass media” (281) assure that media content will tend to reinforce the views of wealthy owners who have a stake in the status quo and exclude other views. This is because, The dominant media forms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces; and they are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government (289). A second filter, advertising, conjures a similar effect since advertising revenue is essential to mass media and advertisers themselves have these same common interests in a particular social form (non-redistributive market capitalism) (289-292). Third, due to the expense of information gathering, media have an economic incentive to collect news and ideas directly from government agencies, company spokespeople, and academic think-tanks in lieu of pursuing their own, perhaps less biased representations of the world (292-298). Fourth, media who forward stories and opinions that are critical of the wealthy and powerful are likely to quickly meet their lawyers. Expensive litigation in 18 such cases could rapidly make media unprofitable. As a result, media are reluctant to release information that may inspire such a backlash (298-300). Finally, concepts such as anticommunism or antiterrorism are used to justify the official monitoring and control of media (300-301). As a result of these market-based filters, many theorists suspect that a public that is ‘fed’ via markets may be ‘nutrient’ deficient. In such cases, a public may tend to form its opinions, actions, and cultures in ways that simply reinforce the position of elites – perhaps at the expense of the public itself Figure 1 (McChesney 2004; Drache & Froese 2004; Hoekheimer & Adorno 1995 [1972]; Marx & Engels 1976). Such a position is offered in Nutrients The Market (Featuring the Five Filters) Figure 1. Here, all transmission of ‘nutrients’ occurs through the market, and is filtered as Herman and Chomsky suggest, the public in the end is emaciated – the commandments of Public mediated ‘authority’ are internalized by an unquestioning public. This is an extreme depiction, which will be nuanced later – (note that personal conversation cannot even occur outside a market in this depiction). But it serves well to illustrate the fears often articulated regarding an entirely commodified culture. In sum: your public needs informational signals (nutrients) from those with authority on various elements of human concern, in order to function – especially in absence of a common ground. Those who wish to govern such a collectivity might use 19 various tactics to provoke the internalization of norms and beliefs by a public. This process of cooption of public opinion and culture is greatly aided if a public is ‘fed’ via markets. You may be thinking, “well, that’s terrible. I feel really bad for those poor, duped, subservient publics, and I really see the importance of their proper feeding. But really, is there anything that can be done? I have to get the nutrients for my public somewhere – where if not from the market?” Don’t worry; the situation may not be as dire as you think. It may be possible to keep your public in a special place – a place where it is less likely to be tempted by the sweet, yet un-nutritious offerings of the market. As you will see in the next section, all you need to do is build and maintain a place for your public to live in which it is somewhat protected from the market. This place is often called a ‘public sphere’ or a ‘public domain.’ Where Can I put my Public to keep it Safe? Habermas (1989) was one of the first to deeply explore the significance of a public sphere. During the formative years of modernity, industrialization, and the nation state, he argued, mass-media itself, however imperfectly, created a public. This public would gather in spaces (such as coffee-houses or salons) to rationally debate the information that had been collectively ‘fed’. The results of the arguments were called ‘public opinion’ and were incorporated into further media publications – thus keeping the government “in touch with the needs of society” (31). This is a depiction of a public, which is deliberating in its own sphere, but as you have likely noticed, it is still being ‘fed’ by mass media. It does not seem likely, given 20 the ‘five filters’, that this public is receiving all its ‘nutrients’ – the public is active, but likely under-nourished. Mass media have not always taken the form that Herman and Chomsky are discussing, however. During periods when such media were less concentrated, for example, the five filters did not work quite as well as they might today. Information, particularly in the early years of American media, tended to be more balanced and multidimensional – more nutrients tended to reach the public from multiple opposing sources (McChesney). In England, as well, many independent newspapers and journals appeared which both supported and opposed the actions of the government and other elite groups (Habermas). Unfortunately, many lament, such a competitive market for authoritative cultural inputs has been difficult to maintain. Naomi Klein (2000) has dramatically shown the way in which public space has increasingly become marketized, and common cultural icons privately owned commodities. Robert McChesney (2004) has shown the way that news media concentration has enhanced the functioning of the ‘five filters’ – diminishing their ability to provide publics with a full range of competing information and other cultural inputs. Drache and Froese (2004) outline various attempts by media and international institutions to assure that all culture and information are transformed into commodity form. With the diminishment of the space allotted to publics (whether this be termed as ‘sphere’ or ‘domain’), they may have become emaciated. Here, we are able to nuance the somewhat ‘paranoid’ depiction in Figure 1. Although still a bit of an antiquated nation-centred model, Figure 2 is a more realistic depiction in which culture is dispersed through a mixture of public and private. 21 Here, ‘nutrients’ or ‘cultural inputs’ are received by a public both directly, and through the market. In turn, the public creates more diverse cultural texts which, in turn, act as further public nutrients – the two outside arrows, you will notice, essentially represent deliberation within the public sphere. The nutrients that are channelled through the market, are still ‘filtered’, but media also takes into account public opinion and cultural tastes, from a semi-autonomous public that is informed by ‘truths’ that exist outside the market – requiring cultural industries to react to changes in public opinion/culture that are beyond their control. The depiction in Figure 2 is meant to encapsulate the dialectic and reflexive interrelation between cultural inputs/texts, publics, and markets. The introduction of the state is essential in that states create markets through property laws and other social policies, but they also may be controlled by markets and associated corporate entities (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). Also, as Herman and Chomsky suggest, states may ‘feed’ markets (in this case private media) pre-filtered information. But states may react as well to markets, whether The Market The State Figure 2 Nutrients (cultural inputs) in response to unemployment in the labour market or high impact news-stories in news The Public media. To briefly reiterate: a cultural text, expression, object, or ‘nutrient’, has a social life. There is reciprocity between public and text, which may be faked by mass media in attempt to control publics. Texts 22 acquire ‘talk value’ and are performed and mutated by publics, therefore becoming further nutrients that are fed back to publics and integrated into markets. In the event of an asymmetry of power between the public and market, the conversation may be ‘top’ down and ‘filtered’. The state also acts directly as a filter between ‘cultural inputs’ and publics, but it also exchanges various tangible and intangible cultural inputs with markets. In any empirical treatment (which this manual is not) the crucial question for analytical purposes must be “how large are each of these flows in relation to oneanother?” When the market becomes increasingly powerful, and culture increasingly commodified, this picture might more closely resemble Figure 3. Here, cultural inputs from governments to markets are slight (perhaps confined to the enforcement of property rights). In the opposite direction are the inputs of corporate lobbies, media-generated anti-government (internalized by sentiment government Figure 3 officials), bribes and other ‘nutrients’. There remain small amounts of direct public interaction, (activity in the public sphere), but much of the content of such interaction is fed to the publics via markets (which are Nutrients (cultural inputs) The Market The State The Public assumed in this depiction to be oligopolistic – but this need not be the case). Little in the way of nutrients comes from the state (due to spending cuts in education and public broadcasting), and the public has little input into the state functioning (i.e. democracy) 23 nor does the market need react much to the public (since top down control via markets implies a strong ‘governmentality’ (Foucault) or production of culture (Horkheimer & Adorno). Figure 3, in short, is remarkably similar to Figure 1 – since the state has essentially come to be under market control. In the opposite case – that of state-planned socialism – the market would simply disappear from figure 2. In a totalitarian regime, flows from the state to the public would increase, state filtering would be strong, public input to the state would be diminished, and personal interaction/exchange within publics would be strictly curtailed through surveillance. In any case, the raw and simplistic abstraction of Figure 2 may be useful in framing various empirical pursuits if adjusted according to the prime phenomena of concern to any particular research. Normative judgements of the ‘quality’ of certain of these flows might be distinguished, since (as you have likely noticed) this currently is a quantitative depiction. Cultural inputs such as Universal Declarations of Human Rights, assortments of commandments, invisible hands, or messages from sundry Prophets and/or forefathers might aid you with these pesky normative questions. Counterpublic “Okay,” you might be thinking, “I can see the necessity of providing a market-free space for a public to live, and I know that it is important to feed a public properly. But I don’t have a public – I have a counterpublic! What the heck is a counterpublic? What does it do?” These are appropriate questions. To begin answering them, we must look at the Habermasian idea of the public sphere more closely. 24 Nancy Fraser (1993) nuances this idea nicely. As she explains, the public sphere was initially conceived in order to “hold the state accountable to society,” and to transmit “the considered “general interest” of “bourgeois society” to the state via forms of legally guaranteed free speech, free press, and free assembly” (112). As we have seen in previous sections, it is entirely possible that a community may tend to congeal around a particular belief or opinion, especially when prompted by some form of authority. But is it reasonable to believe that any one public will tend to inform only one homogenously held opinion? Obviously not. First, it is evident that this ‘public sphere’ was already closely related to the capitalist economy – leading to filtering effects. Second, during the early industrial revolution, society quickly broke into at least two classes, with competing interests. Quickly, “demonstrations and back room, brokered compromises among private interests replaced reasoned public debate about the common good” (113). Further, many were excluded from participation in the public sphere – non-whites, women, and the poor. Nonetheless, the predominant norms generated in this public sphere did manage to become largely hegemonic, as they were “sometimes imposed on, sometimes embraced by, broader segments of society” (115). Indeed, “the official public sphere, then, was, and indeed is, the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new hegemonic mode of domination” (117). A project to build a single public sphere, for Fraser, is misguided. This is obvious since, within a single deliberative sphere, there is no way that actors with differing levels of power and authority can be expected to achieve democratic participatory parity, especially if such a sphere is mediated by a group of media conglomerates. Fraser 25 recommends a programmatic fostering of multiple public spheres which would each serve as deliberative forums for multiple publics to form diverse and contesting opinions. From this discussion we see that it is more likely that there is not one public, but multiple publics. Also, it seems that there is a tendency for certain of these publics to dominate others – often becoming hegemonic. In accordance with Herman and Chomsky, we can see that this dominant public is likely to be the one whose members are economically powerful. As Fraser reminds us, however, although the ideas related to a certain powerful public may be dominant, they need not dominate entirely. Warner (2002) claims that dominated publics have more power to contest hegemony than theorists like Herman & Chomsky and Horkheimer & Adorno might suggest. Subaltern groups have the capacity to actively reinterpret, resignify, and even reintegrate their rearticulations into mainstream media. This process ironically feeds off a dominant ideology of individualism that creates an internalized necessity for personal distinction – as a result, an individual who is in the mainstream is perceived as ordinary, yet one who is a member of a slightly differentiated subculture is often viewed as being ‘hip’. A hegemonic message of individualism ironically creates its own counterhegemony. This, it should be obvious, is a couterhegemony that is limited in scope. Since it counters mainstream ideas and even changes them it might be seen as a countermovement 1 . But such a countermovement clearly does not counter the ubiquity of markets – to the contrary, it seems to reinforce it. In Warner’s explanation, however, we are able to see the workings of (at least one kind) a counterpublic, and even define the term. A counterpublic, according to Warner, 1 I define ‘countermovement’ simply as ‘something that a counterpublic does.’ 26 is a scene in which a dominated group aspires to re-create itself as a [dominant] public and, in doing so, finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant social group, but also with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as a public (80). This is a useful definition of ‘counterpublic. But we must nuance it further, in order to allow for various types of these potentially competing publics. I will argue that there are at least five major types of counterpublic. The first of these appears in Warner’s description above. This type of counterpublic occurs simply because there is a larger public. As explained above, in a culture that is strongly individualistic many individuals will seek to differentiate themselves from the mainstream. This counterpublic, as Warner suggests, is often described as being ‘hip’. Of course, once a counterpublic is thought widely to be ‘hip’, it takes little time for its style and culture to become hegemonic. Because such a counterpublic is rooted in stylistic change and need not counter dominant social norms beyond a superficial level, I will call this a cosmetic counterpublic. In accordance with Warner’s definition, such a counterculture may only be considered a counterpublic when it is perpetuated by, or at least in the name of, a dominated group. The explosion of hip-hop music from the poor inner-city neighbourhoods of America can, then, be considered a form of cosmetic counterculture. Conversely, the profusion of ‘alternative’ music that was led by middle-class white males in the late 1980s and early 1990s might have been more aptly called a cosmetic ‘sub-culture’ as opposed to ‘counterpublic’. We must be careful when labelling these counterpublics as merely ‘cosmetic’ however, because, although they may have a cosmetic element, they may exist in combination with another type of counterpublic which is less so. A type of counterpublic which might exist in combination with a cosmetic counterpublic is a cultural counterpublic. Although hippy fashion may be ‘co-opted’ by 27 the mass market as Thomas Frank (1997) has suggested, discourses of antiwar, environmental protection, and equality may emanate from the counterculture in a meaningful way nonetheless – challenging and potentially changing mainstream culture. A cultural counterpublic need not always exist in combination with a cosmetic counterculture. Huntington’s (1996) “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis pits cultural counterpublics represented by numerous civilizations (primarily Islamic) against a highly powerful Western market-democratic hegemon. Benjamin Barber’s (2001 [1995]) thesis in Jihad vs. McWorld nuances this concept and introduces a dialectic that, once again, pairs a cultural counterpublic with a cosmetic one. Jihad, for Barber, is a term which represents “a retribalizing politics of particularist identities” and McWorld – “the market’s universal church” (7). The former is a response to the latter, yet, it is also facilitated by it as “religion and culture alike need McWorld’s technologies and McWorlds markets”. Indeed, McWorld allows Jihad to be imagined, but also, Human beings are so psychologically needy, so dependent on community, so full of yearning for a blood brotherhood commercial consumption disallows, so inclined to a sisterhood that the requisites of [individualistic] personhood cannot tolerate, that McWorld has no choice but to service, even to package and market Jihad (155). The Jihad counterpublic, then, exists in dialectic with the dominant public of McWorld. Who benefits or loses most in this relationship is not of immediate concern here. The points are that both the public and the counterpublic impact one another, and that they are based in cultural articulations, beliefs, norms, and practices. Drache (2004) also underlines the importance of cultural counterpublics, in that “culture has become an explicitly fierce battleground against US cultural industries and American trade policies that attempt to commodify cultural production” (1). As a result 28 of (and a part of) this surge of cultural power, UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity contains measures which attempt, at least rhetorically, “to protect global cultural diversity, Typology of Counterpublics Type Cosmetic Cultural Anti-state Anti-social What it ‘Counters’ Related Author Mainstream style Dominant Culture State power Social Obligation Frank (1997) Barber (2001) Hayek (1944) Lasch (1995) Polanyi (1944) language rights, local cultural production, media ownership and intellectual property from prejudicial trade practices” (2). When we speak of culture in such a way, Anti-Market The Market it should be clear that the concept of ‘identity’ is intimately wrapped-up in the discourse. Indeed, cultural counterpublics are inseparable from identity politics. Forms of such, from Zapatista uprisings, to pan-Mayanisms, to Black and Queer activisms are also quite often interwoven with other types of counterpublic – from the ‘cosmetic’ as discussed above, to other forms related to economy, state, and society that are addressed below. In identity politics, to be succinct, we may be the convergence of the first four of the five counterpublics in the typology presented in this section. A third type of dominated, oppositional public might be called an anti-state counterpublic. At times when a state apparatus has become extremely large, powerful, and controlling, a counterpublic might emerge to contest the hegemony of the state and the cultural norms that maintain it’s pre-eminence. The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas Mexico is an obvious example – although this was combined with cultural, cosmetic, and 29 anti-market counterpublic traits. A less obvious, yet more pervasive example of such a counterpublic stems from the writing of Friedrich A. von Hayek (1944). In a time when large state bureaucracies administered many facets of life throughout the world, and this indeed was supported by the mainstream public, Hayek warned that such control would only lead to economic ruin, the destruction of individual freedom, and totalitarianism. Indeed, for Hayek, the largest public works project of the Keynesian welfare state was to pave the “road to serfdom.” Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of this particular anti-state counterpublic is that it eventually managed to become a dominant public. The ascendance of this counterpublic to publicness could be traced through history. This history might revolve about key figures like Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. The fall of the Soviet Union might be described as a ‘tipping point’ which resulted in neoliberal hegemony ultimately replacing the dominance of the Keynesian welfare state. With the success of this counterpublic, however, another counterpublic was automatically created – one which has been seen before, and seems to be gaining strength. Fourth is the anti-market counterpublic. This type of counterpublic, again, is defined by what it counters – the market. To be sure, cultural counterpublics were described as countering the market as well. But there are distinctions. First, the cultural counterpublics discussed were not necessarily countering the economic ‘ravages’ of the market – rather they were countering a market-consumerist culture. Second, cultural counterpublics do not necessarily have to counter market culture – one could imagine a counterpublic that stands against Islamic hegemony in Iran for example. 30 A work that exemplifies the concept of anti-market counterpublic is Karl Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) classic The Great Transformation. Polanyi noted that a combination of “economic superstitions” and the political power of the merchant class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in the programmatic marketization of society. With the purposeful conversion of land and labour into ‘unnatural’ commodities, society became subservient to the market as opposed to the opposite. This required the conversion of humans from social beings – embedded in protective and reciprocal social networks – into homo economici – atomized economic actors. This Polanyi explains, could not come to a good end: Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled; rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed (73). This marketization and its vices did not, however, go unchecked. Polanyi claims that “[s]ocial history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement” as, While on the one hand markets spread all over the face of the globe and the amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable proportions, on the other hand a network of measures and policies was integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labour, land, and money… Society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating market system” (76). Again, we can see the automatic response of a counterpublic to a dominant movement. Such a vast movement against environmental, economic, and social ills wrought by markets has a more current corollary as well. The justification for the current anti-market movement is represented thoroughly in Naiomi Klein’s (2000) counterpublic 31 manifesto No Logo, and some of its manifestations are shown by Drache and Froese (2004) and Drache (2004). Drache, for example, claims that we may be currently in the midst of a “turning point” as: The growth in influence of ‘nixers’ and ‘fixers’ has contributed to a tectonic shift in the international economy that has immediate and far-reaching consequences for destabilizing globalization and its narrow economic agenda (1). Drache holds that this particular anti-market counterpublic differs from its Polanyian predecessors in that it is global in reach, and marks the failure of the 2003 WTO trade negotiations in Cancun as a powerful marker of its ascendance. This increasing prominence is evident in the fact that, “[i]t is now almost conventional wisdom to believe that free markets are pernicious and destructive to other important values” (12). In Polanyi’s account of the systematic erosion of cultural and social institutions which precipitated crisis during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, we can see a kernel of our fifth type of counterpublic. counterpublic 2 . I will call this an anti-social Polanyi explains the way that individually wealthy merchants spearheaded the movement to strip humans of their social obligation to one-another, and replace this with a market society inhabited by self-interested homo economici. We might describe this as the actions of a small, yet powerful group of people who see themselves as being subjugated by their socially and culturally expected obligation to support others in their community. As a result, they ‘revolt’ against the mainstream public to which they are socially obligated. In this case, they were only partially successful. Again, there is a more current corollary available for examination – this is presented by Christopher Lasch (1995) in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of 2 This might be thought of as short-form for ‘anti-social-obligation counterpublic’. 32 Democracy. Lasch describes a new global cosmopolitan elite which is able to pressure governments into relieving them of their social obligations, most notably in the form of taxes, and use their power of mobility to disconnect themselves from any sense of ‘duty’ toward any particular society. So, now you see that a counterpublic is one of multiple publics, and that it is somehow dominated by a more mainstream public. Your counterpublic can be one of five types: cosmetic, cultural, anti-market, anti-state, or anti-social. It works automatically as well – in fact, it seems that every public has, and perhaps even needs, its own active counterpublic. But you must be careful! Your counterpublic, if too successful, might reach a “tipping point” Rosenau (2003) and become mainstream! In that case, you could find that you have a ‘public’ – and those can be a lot of work to take care of, as Foucault insists. Further, as suggested by Warner, once you have a public instead of a counterpublic, you may not be ‘hip’ anymore! This has been known to result in anything from impulsive sandal-buying to all-out mid-life crises. On the other hand: if you find that your counterpublic is not working as well as you had expected, you can help your counterpublic to work better. As most of the theorists above have suggested, creating a space, or spaces, away from markets and media in which your counterpublic can live will usually help it to function. But where? That depends on the particular model of Counterpublic you have. Before the 1980s, most counterpublics were thought to be National, so you could pretty much keep them at home. But due to diminished demand, we don’t produce that model anymore. Especially if your counterpublic was made after 1980 – it is likely that it is Transnational. 33 Why is my Counterpublic “Transnational”? In the earlier works regarding counterpublics that were discussed in the last section, publics and counterpublics tended to be framed within a nation. Polanyi was primarily concerned about national economies and reactions to them by national publics. Hayek was primarily concerned about the excessive power of national state bodies. Certainly, Habermas’ description of an early public sphere concerned a national public that conversed dialectically with a national state authority through a national media. In fact, as Benedict Anderson (1991) has argued, it was the national media and its resulting public that provoked the creation of the nation state as we understand it today. The later writings that we have discussed seem to have a different scope. Benjamin Barber (1995) is concerned with cultural clashes within a global space created by an expanding international market system. Naomi Klein (2000) describes a global production system which is having an impact on environments and human populations around the world. Christopher Lasch (1996) is concerned with a global elite class which has relinquished itself of responsibility to local, national, and international publics. Thomas Friedman (1999) paints a rosier picture of an international economy which is working to bring prosperity throughout the globe. To be sure, as finance, physical capital, cultural and people flows circulate the globe at and increasing rate, it no longer makes sense to think of citizenship, culture, or economy as being limited to a national sphere (Bohman 1998; Sassen 2002; Appadurai 2001). As Drache argues, “The success of free trade and widespread access to new information technologies have built a global public of viewers and the demand for a global market of ideas and news” (9). Global governance, however, remains lacking as 34 “international sovereign frameworks remain underdeveloped and inadequate to address to make public space and public policy a palpable reality” (10). Expanded connectivity and the amplification of economic, human, and cultural flows in absence of effective global governance have created the impetus for a counterpublic that is equally transnational. As Drache suggests, “What distinguishes the counterpublic today from that of four decades ago is its organizational decentralization and its global reach” (2). Indeed, “the lack of accountability and transparency in global governance now feeds a [global] cycle of dissent” (16). Since mainstream public in the current millennium is global, its counterpublic/s is/are necessarily transnational as well. One who wishes to care properly for their counterpublic must keep this in mind, since the transnationality of counterpublics poses serious problems. The most pressing problem is not to provide the space for such a public to exist (although this remains important as has been suggested by Bohman (1998), Drache, and Klein), it is the provision of a meaningful transnational authority, or a number of them, with which a transnational counterculture can interact. To understand this, we must come full circle to the writing of Dewey. As explained in the beginning of this manual, a public is formed out of an interest that emerged when individual transactions had social externalities. The state, for Dewey, was the authoritative structure that formed in order to assert the needs of the public. Although we have complicated this conception a great deal, Dewey’s concept remains useful in pointing toward a programmatic response to current problems of transnationality. Like Bohman, Fraser (2005) explains that the public sphere was originally construed within a national framework. A national public was to engage in discourse 35 within a public sphere and interact with a national state. As Dewey suggests, the purpose of this was to instruct a powerful national state to enact policy which restricts particular private transactions for the benefit of the public. In the current era (often referred to as an era of ‘globalization’) we have a clear transnational public interest (or rather a number of them) as global capitalism brings individual transactions to a transnational scope. What is lacking is a transnational state-like authority which has the power to mediate such global private transactions in the interest of global publics. This is a tragic lack since, as Fraser explains, “failing major institutional renovation, neither transnational social movements nor transnational public spheres can assume the emancipatory demacratizing functions that are the whole point of public-sphere theory” (7). Conclusion I hope we have a clearer picture of what a Transnational Counterpublic™ is, what one does, and how one works. Succinctly: it is a group which perceives itself to have a collective interest that transcends the private. It is a world-making entity which often creates a culturally validated sense of what it is, what problems affect it, and what should be done about them. It is usually automatic – as any mainstream public seems to create its own counterpublic/s. This process can be affected greatly by those who are perceived to be authoritative, by the state and by media. As with any public, A Transnational Counterpublic™ works better when existing in a realm in which it is protected from the market. A National Counterpublic traditionally interacts with a national state in order to accomplish its goals, but a Transnational Counterpublic has no parallel authority with which to interact in a global sphere. 36 In such an Figure 4 absence, the only choice left to a Transnational Counterpublic™ is to interact with actors as Your Transnational Counterpublic™ is Here Nutrients (cultural inputs) Market/s National States and various International Institutions directly private such multinational Various National and Transnational Publics and Counterpublics corporations and their associate institutions (such as the WTO), or to continue to pressure increasingly irrelevant national governments (see Klein, Drache, Barber). This is likely to have limited (yet, as Drache has argued, not-unsubstantial) effect. This is because private compliance to the wishes of the public is voluntary, and government power in the transnational sphere is greatly diminished. A graphical depiction of the world around your counterpublic might look like Figure 4. The exact placement and form of your Transnational Counterpublic™ depends largely on the power and form of markets and state-like institutions. Powerful national governments will likely create either strong, differentiated national markets or command economies. In such cases your counterpublic is likely to be more national in nature, although it need not be entirely. National unions or indigenous movements, for example, 37 might have strong international linkages with other similar counterpublics. Ubiquitous international markets, or One Big Market to use Polanyi’s term, might necessitate a strong transnationality. The case would be similar with strong international governing institutions. Global communications technologies might facilitate transnationality, but are likely to be utilized as such by counterpublics only in the case that there is a strong international governing body to interact with, or when the individual interactions within One Big Transnational Market create transnational public interest/s. There are two main methods that might be employed to improve the affectivity of your Transnational Counterpublic™. The first is to invest actively in increasing its access to the physical (largely communication-related) and spacial resources that are necessary for its function in a global sphere – many of these are discussed in Drache, Morra, and Froese (2004) and Klein. Second, as suggested by both Drache and Fraser, is to work to create a powerful international governing structure which has the designated purpose of protecting various publics from the numerous negative spill-overs associated with private transactions, and of mediating disagreements between opposing publics. Coda You put down the manual, and look one more time in the box for something tangible – fooling yourself into actually seeing something in its most shadowy corner. As your hand moves to snatch what is sure to be your Transnational Counterpublic™, it disappears. You realize that your new purchase is ephemeral, abstract, nothing more than an idea – some sort of perverse collusion between your own mind and the overly complex, yet somehow hopelessly simplistic, owners manual you have just read. Even so, 38 you hold on to the idea of a Transnational Counterpublic™ – an illusion though it may be – just in case there may be something useful in the thought itself. You do not return to the shop and demand a refund, and you have a peculiar desire for a simple t-shirt which has nothing but a curious picture of a handsome bearded fellow silk-screened on it – just like the one the odd little salesman wore. 39 Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed., London and New York: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 2001. Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination, in Globalization, Arjun Appadurai ed., Duke University Press. Barber, Benjamin R. 1995. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, New York: Ballantine Books. Bohman, James. 1998. The Globalization of the Public Sphere, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 24(2/3): 199-216. Dewey, John. 1923. The Public and its Problem, New York. Drache, Daniel. 2004. The Political Economy of Dissent: Global Publics after Cancun, Toronto: Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University. 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