ABSTRACT
It has become clear for some time now that liberal theories of the public sphere are both utopian and disembodied. They engage adequately neither with the spatiality of discourse circulation despite the metaphor of a sphere that has grounded English translations of öffentlichkeit, nor with the materiality of the body in the production of a mass-mediated subject of politics. Of those authors writing on the public sphere, Michael Warner argues most persuasively that what he terms the 'utopias of self-abstraction' animating liberal understandings of democratic publicity are not merely contingent; rather they lie at the very core of a minoritizing logic of exclusion. 2 This distinctively modern form of power has relied on an ideology that privileges silent, replicable, private acts of reading, enabling the unrestricted circulation of texts among strangers. Indeterminacy of address in this vision of democracy is misrecognized as universality, and everyone who cannot imagine themselves as unmarked by race, gender, or sexuality those who are excessively embodied, as it where - is relegated to inhabit particular identities. In the liberal model, according to Warner, only unmarked publics can transpose their agency to the generality of the state through the logic of self-abstraction. 3 By means of this analysis, he argues against the default liberalism in earlier descriptions of subaltern counterpublics, like Nancy Fraser's, in so far as minoritized groups appear in these accounts to work through a disembodied rational deliberation that resembles the very dominant publics they are contesting. 4
