Since the last blog post we have had 13 interesting presentations on diverse texts ranging from Beyoncé's latest album to Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing. Despite the stark diversity of the texts that people have been dealing with, we can really see that public texts all center around the same few principles. While I think that Warner gives a more thorough expression of these characteristics of publics and public texts in "Publics and Counterpublics," below is a list of the most prominent themes that I have been seeing in your presentations:

• Being relatable to the audience (in style, vernacular, and content)
• Creating ways for the audience to respond to the text (either through independent actions or feedbacks loops)
• Passion on the part of the speaker
• Using prominent figure heads or styles to promote the message
• having a distinct form of circulation (the internet seems to make this easier.)

 However, we have not only seen presentations dealing with texts, but have seen 3 projects that deal with how symbols function and change in the public sphere, and we will actually see another one like this tomorrow. These texts have shown how racial slurs, the word retard, and the image of La Malinche have been used by various texts for various purposes. For example, when Benjamin Franklin was talking about how the ocean currents retard he was expressing something very different than when Jennifer Aniston referred to herself as a retard.

My question for you today lies at the intersection of these two concepts. I want you to pick a word/phrase from the text you discuss in your paper, and show how it helps to connect the audience to the speaker. Then, I want to you think about if the word/phrase would be received the same way, if it was used in a different context. If you were one of the 4 who are tracing symbols, just use a text that uses your symbol for this response. If your primary text does not have words, use scales, instrumentation, or something like that.

Since the last blog post, we have had four interesting presentations in this class. We learned how Lady Gaga, the movie Forrest Gump, the book Fifty Shades of Grey, and Patrick Henry's famous speech to the Virginian Convention reached their various publics and how they affected those publics.

While these presentations have all focused on different pieces addressed to different publics, and each presenter focused their presentation differently, there are still a lot of similarities between the presentations. One of the common themes between all of these pieces, and one that I consider worth looking at more in depth, is their focus on why these texts have become popular. To an extent, all of these texts were created to be popular. The speakers fashioned their utterances to appeal not only to a specific subpublic but also to the mass public. In this class, in this blog, and in the presentations, we have discussed the various ways by which speaker's try to make their utterances appealing to the public. My question to you is: which of these texts do you believe to be constructed most successfully to appeal to both the speaker's subpublic and mass public? Please explain your opinion using different ideas that we have covered throughout the semester.

For tomorrow we were going to read an article by Dominique Mehl titled, "The Public on the Television Screen: Towards a Public Sphere of Exhibition." However, since I pushed back the due date for the final draft of your paper, I decided not to give you the reading; my hope was that instead of reading you would spend this time doing what Ballenger terms "preparing the final manuscript" (211). Nonetheless, I think that any examination of the public sphere, especially any discussion that attempts to understand the essay's relationship to the public, needs to include the work of Mehl. If you are interested in reading the article you can click here.If you are not interested in reading the article, I summarize it below:

Mehl's thesis is most clearly stated at the end of her piece when she says, "Here [on the twenty-first century television screen] public discussion is sustained by private experience; learned arguments are replaced by the recounting of life histories; expression is as important as formulation; the witness takes the place to the expert; exhibition or display rather than demonstration takes pride" (27). What Mehl means in this quote is that television does not focus on rational arguments made by people like sociologists, historians, judges, or journalists; instead the lives of average people, which are given the status of arguments, are put on display for public consumption (22). The public empathizes with these "average people," who Mehl refers to as "witnesses," because they are either representative of the mass public (the average person) or representative of a group (couples in a sexless marriage, alcoholics, teenage mothers). If the audience is able to identify with the witness (perhaps they think that their marriage might be in trouble, were close to becoming a teenage mother, or have issues with addiction in a different form) then the rhetoric jumps from "me" to "us." The audience sees themselves as a part of the same public as the witness.

Mehl explores four interesting effects of this type of public discussion:

1. The loss of the expert: Since we are getting our information from the personal narratives of private individuals, we have little need for those who "devote their time to making presentation of their knowledge, involving their expertise, defending their ideas and making the case for their positions" (24). Mehl argues that these people take secondary roles to the witness. Further, she argues that since we are so focused on the internal, personal aspects of these arguments that the only experts who are really able to thrive in this environment are psychologists and pseudo-psychologists (think about Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, and Maury). 
2. It is nearly impossible to argue against the witness: In the classical understanding of the public sphere, ideas, opinions, arguments, and ideologies confronted each other constantly. However, since the public sphere of personal experiences is based on (supposedly) genuine accounts, then it becomes difficult to refute these stories. Mehl shows that we lose rational argument to personalized stories; "'This is what I live' takes the place of 'This is what I think...'" (25).
3. These programs lead to the emergence of a particularly active public: Though there is little discussion about these personal experiences on the shows, the audience has a tendency to discuss the issues on their own after they turn off the television screen. In the workplace, the home, the playground, the nail salon, the gym, and an indefinite amount of other social spaces, the audience of the witness-based television program argues over the validity what the witness has said. Generally, the audience supports or refutes the values and decisions they have heard on television. Mehl argues that since there is not an absolute social institution forming our identities for us, these discussions of other's personal issues are one of the ways that we form our own identities. 
4. The private/public sphere: Mehl argues that understanding public and private as separate spheres with distinct boarders is inherently flawed. Instead, she says that in the twenty-first century we should see publicness as processes by which people attempt to keep some things open and other things intimate. For Mehl, in the twenty-first century what an individual chooses to keep private and what one wants to keep intimate are completely up to his/her discretion.

I could fill this post with videos from news shows titled "Inside a Sexless Marriage," "Mom Left Job and Fell Into Alcoholism,"  or promotional clips for Teen Mom 2; however, I think that you are all familiar with these types of programs.

My questions to you are these: Do you believe that "exhibition" is the new form of public discourse? Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or a mute point? Finally, if Mehl's model is how the public now communicates should experts/academics/intellectuals embrace this mode of discussion, push against it, or is there another option?

Students,

I do not want to distract you too much from working on your paper. So, please respond to this post with your favorite color, and get back to working on that final draft.

-Mr. Harley

NOTE: THIS IS THE BLOG POST FOR THE WEEK TO BE RESPONDED TO BEFORE CLASS ON MONDAY. THE DAILY CLASSES WILL BE POSTED ABOVE BEFORE THEIR RESPECTIVE CLASS TIMES.

The essay we read for this week is particularly complex; Warner jumps from a discussion of stylistics (common language, defamiliarization, precision, and opacity), to a problematizing of the public intellectual (is the public intellectual actually a part of the public? ),to a description of three different types of discussions by which publics exchange ideas and ideals (polemics, problematization, and journalistic style), and finally ends by saying that changing how publics function is difficult because "it is a way of imagining a speech for which there is yet no scene, and a scene for which their is no speech."

While the entire essay is fascinating, I am realizing that I cannot, in one blog post, discuss all of the issue that he tackles in this chapter. Instead, I need to focus my efforts to one of the above sections, and since you are all burgeoning scholars (at the very least being doused into the academy for the next four years), I figured that a discussion of the function of the public intellectual might be the most beneficial to you.

Warner's discussion of public intellectuals begins with by showing the traditional understanding of the term, which he defines as a group of experts who reach a mass audience and guide their audience towards the right/just/prudent political path. For Warner, this conception is flawed. Warner argues that by virtue of their "expert status" (if they are in fact experts on the particular topic being discussed) intellectuals cannot be a part of the public.

Warner states that "expert knowledge is in an important way nonpublic: its authority is external to the discussion. It can be challenged only by other experts, not within the discourse of the public itself" (145). For Warner, experts work in a type of meta-public that is not really a part of the public (think about how in class we discussed scholarly secondary sources as existing in a meta-discourse, in which they write about what is being discussed in the public of which our primary sources are a part.) Finally, Warner asserts that even if public intellectuals could enter into public discussion, there is no reason to believe that they would be more effective than anyone else (147).

Of course, for intellectuals this is a scary proposition. First, in the type of publics that Warner describes the intellectual seems impotent. The intellectual has the ability to discuss political issues, but she is unable to influence the public discussion. Even if she could enter the discussion, there is no guarantee that her voice would be any more important than any other voice, since publics aren't based on rational critical debate but are instead based on "uptake, citation, and recharacterization" (145).

In class recently, we discussed the absence of intellectuals in the public sphere. However, we did talk about the diffusion of intellectual ideas through others in the public, which (when viewed from a certain light, while squinting) looks like intellectuals are actually influencing the public.

Of course, this entire argument really hinges on how the word intellectual is defined; a definition that Warner does not provide us with. Despite the unclear definition of intellectual, it seems that Warner uses the term primarily to talk about academics and those who work in think tanks--what he calls the "professional class of intellectuals" (147). I think it could be argued that there are other intellectuals who are reaching the public. As usual,  lets explore this idea by looking at some music videos.

I would first like to look at "Prison Song" by System of a Down from their 2001 album Toxicity in which they criticize the war on drugs and the prison industrial complex:

Lyrics

Of course we can't just look at this utterance on its own, but should see this as a part of a public conversation, let's look at "Get By" by Talib Kweli from his 2002 album Quality. This song seems to deal with the same issue as System, but in a way that seems a bit more holistic:

Lyrics 

Still, this does not exhaust the amount songs about the prison industrial complex and what many believe are the social problems that it attempts to sweep under the rug. The song "Money" by the band Choking Victim on their 1999 album No Gods No Managers. Is an interesting take on the issue being discussed. This song is particularly interesting because of the introduction by the famous public intellectual Michael Parenti:

Lyrics 

So here we have three artists who, in the early 2000s, were discussing political issues in a very public manner, the question is: are these artists intellectuals? As an aside, I am also curious if you believe that the American academic still has a place in the public sphere.