Paper short abstract:

The public sphere is a utopia of homogeneity. Its universality was always an illusion based upon limited social networks. Our myths of an ever-expanding public sphere mask how such networks are increasingly limited via increasing governmentality and ever more consolidated communication networks.

Paper long abstract:

Modernity is an illusion, some say. Our founding myths of political modernity, for instance, celebrated the principle of universal human rights at the very moment of excluding the vast majority of the human race as rights-bearing beings. A similar case can be made for such modern social imaginaries as the public sphere. The bourgeois public sphere was produced through the production and circulation of text artifacts among a limited social network of men who represented themselves as the universal human subject. It was a utopia of homogeneity, a homogeneity of time, space and social order that was built upon a series of exclusions based on gender, race, and class. The notion of the universalization of the public sphere was never more than the universalization of a normative model based upon particularistic positions within the society represented as neutral. All of these productions, however, were effects of new communicative modalities entering into and transforming fields of social praxis. Taking examples mostly from the production of vernacular oratorical models and their roles in the production of regional modernities in India, this paper will constitute a meditation on the communicative forms that produced the illusion of political modernity and the communicative forms that appear to be dismantling it again.