Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition

Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli

This is an accidental special issue. The collective shape and orientation of the essays presented here did not originate in response to a formal call for contributions. It simply happened. Our title, Technologies of Public Persuasion, was imposed somewhat arbitrarily on essays that came together, as it were, on their own, in ways unimagined by the authors and the editors alike. One of the rarer pleasures of editing a journal is when unsolicited submissions begin to signal, assert, and gravitate toward a new problematic of which the editors and their committee of readers are not fully cognizant.

Such an emerging problematic cannot be grasped in terms of a thematic unity, although this special issue does have a common theme. On the surface, each of the essays is concerned with the communicative dimension of public-making and peoplehood, an enduring theme in critical political theories and the allied democratic social imaginaries. More specifically, the essays focus on material technologies of public speaking and communication—ranging from how the transparency of a national language in Indonesia can create a space for national formation (Webb Keane) to how gramophone reproductions can rupture and supplement traditional pedagogy in south Indian music (Amanda Weidman) to how cell phone texting can generate a populist movement to dethrone a government in the Philippines (Vicente L. Rafael)—that simultaneously energize and innervate new forms of social life and action. Most of the essays also map, by way of thickly descriptive case studies or depiction of transfigured space (Christopher Schneider), the circulatory matrix, both national and global, through which new discursive forms, practices, and artifacts carry out their routine ideological labor of constituting subjects who can be summoned in the name of a public or a people. But these strands of thematic confluence by themselves are not distinctive or decisive enough to warrant a special issue. At any given moment, Public Culture, a journal dedicated to, among other things, mapping the career of the public sphere across different national-cultural sites under the regime of global modernity, has under review a dozen submissions on that general topic. We could cobble together a special issue on, say, publics and counterpublics at a short notice, with its well-trod themes and tropes and its recalcitrant Eurocentric conceptual focus, despite every effort at transcultural contextualization. But that wouldn’t be an accidental special issue. It wouldn’t surprise or provoke anyone, least of all the readers of Public Culture. An accidental special issue, much like the purloined letter, had to be found suddenly in a moment of panic and recognition as it lay scattered, but in full view, as an assembly of manuscripts on our virtual editorial table.

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Notes

This accidental issue magically brings together so many of the concerns and aspirations of Public Culture into a happy conflux that it seems only appropriate that it be dedicated to the founding and longtime editor, Carol A. Breckenridge. We do so with affectionate respect.