Traveling Counterpublics

Abstract

A great deal of alarm about globalization results from the perception that privatization and deregulation, the watchwords of the neoliberal economy, are drastically curtailing the conditions under which a critical public discourse can be produced. Naomi Klein, for instance, remarks on the vanishing of “unbranded space” and of people’s ability to talk back to corporations and the images and ideas they disseminate. In her book No Logo: No Space No Choice No Jobs, she tracks the invasion of corporate interests into both the intimate and the public sphere and the attendant reconstruction of citizens into consumers. The juxtaposition of citizen versus consumer is, of course, a polemic one insofar as it implies an unquestioning valorization of civic rationality and intellectual exchange among educated equals over the authoritarian mentality, passivity, and gullibility attributed to the consuming masses. After all, both sides of this equation have been challenged: On the one hand, numerous scholars have offered trenchant criticisms of Jürgen Habermas’s idealized fiction of the bourgeois public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (see Calhoun 1992). On the other, British cultural studies has proposed a far-reaching reconsideration of consuming practices and rejected the totalizing notion of mass-cultural interpellation proposed by the Frankfurt School.