This review surveys the literature on publics: political subjects that know themselves and act by means of mass-mediated communication. It examines classic accounts of how publics form through interlocking modes of social interaction, as well as the forms of social interaction that publics have been defined against. It also addresses recent work that has sought to account for contradictions within theories of the public sphere and to develop alternative understandings of public culture. Historical and ethnographic research on this topic reveals that some concept of publicity is foundational for a number of theories of self-determination, but that the subject of publicity is irrevocably enmeshed in the very technological, linguistic, and conceptual means of its own self-production. Research on publics is valuable because it has focused on this paradox of mediation at the center of modern political life.

This essay examines how activists in rural southern India have sought to reshape the field of political communication by encouraging lower‐caste women to submit written, signed petitions to district‐level government offices, and so represent themselves to the state. I argue that contradictions between democratic recognition and the will to development that inhere to the political structure of contemporary governance in rural India correspond to tensions within the semiotic structure of signature itself, between constative representation and performative creation. Governmentality and the forms of communication that it requires often rest on the notion that written self‐representation constitutes an act of political agency. But the limits of a governmental communicative reason that would conflate written subject and agent become especially clear in postcolonial contexts where the construction of those citizens that would be represented is in fact a product of the very act of representation. It is the narrative of development‐as‐pedagogy that holds out the promise of a future alignment of communicative frameworks, technologies, and participant roles, allowing for the transparent self‐representation of an already‐constituted citizen. By tracking the ambivalent experience of one group of women in particular, this account focuses on how the logic of signature as self‐representation has served to recontextualize the marginality of petitioners as something within the state's broader field of power.

Two of Tamil India's most popular newspapers both claim to be using “spoken” as opposed to “written” varieties of Tamil, despite appealing to different class and gender sensibilities. Developing a method that can take into account the relations among (1) explicit metadiscourses on journalistic language, (2) variegated reading practices, and (3) the formal qualities of newspapers as text artifacts, I argue that what is at stake in the difference between the two papers in my comparison is in fact a difference in regimes of circulation—cultivated habits of animating artifactually mediated texts, enabling the movement of discourse along predictable social trajectories. Claims to using the language of speech in the press refer to two very different phenomena: a Tamil written to be spoken aloud at the point of reading in one paper, and a “spoken Tamil” made to be read silently in the other.[media, publics, reading, textuality, circulation, India]

Some concept of mass publicity is foundational for a number of theories of democratic self-determination, but the subject of publicity is radically dependent on technologies of representation for its own self-identity. Research on newspapers and the public sphere is valuable because it has focused on this paradox of mediation at the center of modern political life. Whereas liberal theories of the public sphere sought to distinguish a rational reading public forged through a dialectic self-abstraction from what Habermas once termed “pressure from the street,” recent work on the politics of the crowd and that of the reading public reveals a closer relationship. Drawing on research about the history of print capitalism in southern India, Cody’s essay seeks to come to theoretical terms with a democratic public sphere where physical force is deeply intertwined with the printed word.

With the arrival of the satellite television news channel Puthiya Thalaimurai (New Generation) in 2011 and the contemporaneous proliferation of smartphone-enabled social media, a democratic politics long dominated by the world of popular cinema has found it difficult to reproduce itself in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Focusing on digitally targeted caste violence and mass protests in the name of the Tamil nation, this article argues that the networked publicity of satellite television and new media have layered themselves over existing infrastructures of mass-mediated populism. Many of the political challenges to existing structures fueled by newer media forms appear as shorter-term events, consisting of tighter, sometimes explosive temporal loops intersecting with longer-term formations. New media have thus taken advantage of the affective and narrative potentials within cinematic populism, all the while reflexively marking themselves as “new” in relation to the forms they have become parasitic upon.