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Reading Notes: Landes, "The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration"
This is based on a reasing of Jürgen Habermas, who I had not heard of until this essay, and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. What is this author trying to do? "In place of a language-centered model of representation, I will emphasize the multiplicity of representation in human communication." OK! Habermas may have been too restricted in his conception of what was normative, but he still isolated the concept of the "public sphere" and "invited concrete investigations of specific forms of political and cultural life, the benefits of which continue to be realized." The introduction here sort of reminds me of Stoler on Foucault.
Habermas has a "dark outlook on modern public culture" --- sees the construction of the public sphere as "a sorrowful voyage from reason to mediatized consumption."
Medievally, publicness of representation was a status attribute. Bourgeois public sphere came into being "as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority." Urban centers played an important role (page 94 has a list of reasons why). Mediation of civil society, family, and state. "critical public debate to protect a commercialized economy." "from the outset both private and polemical."
"Class and its accoutrements ... were major barriers to full participation in the public sphere." Women were largely limited to salons and literary conversations, and Habermas says this may have been good because it encouraged serious conversation? Hrmgh. Anyway, HERE COMES THE GENDER
Landes says: "Habermas's formulation effaces the way in which the bourgeois public sphere from the outset worked to rule out all interests that would not or could not lay claim to their own universality." Women are seen as particular while men are objective; male particular hides behind universality. (Seen this before.) This exclusion was "constitutive... [and] not accidental."
Arendt sees the polis as "a kind of organized rememberance." Arendt sees performance and action, rather than words or discourse, as what makes people into individuals. She is not a "poststructuralist abandonment of the subject" and has no concern for women or feminism but Landes sees in her work a useful lens. OK.
Huet draws on Diderot and talks about the spectatorial function of the public sphere. "Inherent in the notion of the spectator is that of the future actor" --- this is an idea I'm surprised I haven't had before that seems to have a lot of use. See page 101 for full quote.
"the political culture of the [French] Revolution aimed 'to redistribute various attributes of the king's body throughout the new body politic."
"Outram unequivocally links the production of new public spaces to a new gender division in bourgeois public culture." ...This paper is very much citing other people, basically one argument by someone else per one to three paragraphs. That's not bad, but it's different from most of what we've been reading. What discipline is this author coming from?
Texuality as dominant form of representation, shift from "visuality or theatricality," Landes says "a shift from icon to text" but also that we're missing something here. (Brings me back to McLuhan although he's not directly cited here.) Talking about mechanically reproduced images, "creative intermixing of media."
Whoah, Michael Warner wrote on the French Revolution? *boggle*
Author seems to believe (with Benhabib and Fraser) that "feminization" of discourse, a move away from the universal and an unquestioned assumption about the participant in the body politic, requires "intersecting and multiple media of representation." ... "Our task is surely not to resort to texts in place of images, but instead to comprehend and deploy all means of representation in a counterhegemonic strategy against established power wherever it resides."
Word.
Habermas has a "dark outlook on modern public culture" --- sees the construction of the public sphere as "a sorrowful voyage from reason to mediatized consumption."
Medievally, publicness of representation was a status attribute. Bourgeois public sphere came into being "as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority." Urban centers played an important role (page 94 has a list of reasons why). Mediation of civil society, family, and state. "critical public debate to protect a commercialized economy." "from the outset both private and polemical."
"Class and its accoutrements ... were major barriers to full participation in the public sphere." Women were largely limited to salons and literary conversations, and Habermas says this may have been good because it encouraged serious conversation? Hrmgh. Anyway, HERE COMES THE GENDER
Landes says: "Habermas's formulation effaces the way in which the bourgeois public sphere from the outset worked to rule out all interests that would not or could not lay claim to their own universality." Women are seen as particular while men are objective; male particular hides behind universality. (Seen this before.) This exclusion was "constitutive... [and] not accidental."
Arendt sees the polis as "a kind of organized rememberance." Arendt sees performance and action, rather than words or discourse, as what makes people into individuals. She is not a "poststructuralist abandonment of the subject" and has no concern for women or feminism but Landes sees in her work a useful lens. OK.
Huet draws on Diderot and talks about the spectatorial function of the public sphere. "Inherent in the notion of the spectator is that of the future actor" --- this is an idea I'm surprised I haven't had before that seems to have a lot of use. See page 101 for full quote.
"the political culture of the [French] Revolution aimed 'to redistribute various attributes of the king's body throughout the new body politic."
"Outram unequivocally links the production of new public spaces to a new gender division in bourgeois public culture." ...This paper is very much citing other people, basically one argument by someone else per one to three paragraphs. That's not bad, but it's different from most of what we've been reading. What discipline is this author coming from?
Texuality as dominant form of representation, shift from "visuality or theatricality," Landes says "a shift from icon to text" but also that we're missing something here. (Brings me back to McLuhan although he's not directly cited here.) Talking about mechanically reproduced images, "creative intermixing of media."
Whoah, Michael Warner wrote on the French Revolution? *boggle*
Author seems to believe (with Benhabib and Fraser) that "feminization" of discourse, a move away from the universal and an unquestioned assumption about the participant in the body politic, requires "intersecting and multiple media of representation." ... "Our task is surely not to resort to texts in place of images, but instead to comprehend and deploy all means of representation in a counterhegemonic strategy against established power wherever it resides."
Word.
no subject