Populist Publics

Abstract

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.

The Annotated Donald Trump: Signs of Circulation in a Time of Bubbles

“…Participants in such regimes are trained not only in modes of abstracting, animating, and evaluating discourse as part of more or less routinized engagements with discourse‐in‐circulation; but as we have seen in discussions of the public sphere, participants also operate with a reflexive sense of how signs circulate and their place in this larger communicative imaginary. As Cody (, 62) notes in a discussion of crowd violence in India, “the bodies taking to the street are already oriented as such to the fact of mass mediation as a constitutive part of their very action on the street.” People put signs into circulation with a reflexive model of how signs circulate in mind.…”

Graphic Identity in the Scriptorial Landscape of Lebanon

“…Common in countries characterized by long-term civil conflict, regions within the country both conjure up past conflict and evoke notions of potential conflicts to come (Bou Akar 2012). At the same time, the circulation of mass-mediated language such as advertising allows local, neighborhood scale activity to take on national significance and national politics to color activity at the street level (Cody 2015). In line with work on written language in linguistic anthropology (Collins 1995;Scollon and Wong Scollon 2003), this paper construes writing as a practice to be ethnographically situated within specific socio-historical contexts and geosemiotic zones.…”

“…This public realm is made up of distinctive neighborhood enclaves with their own historicity and demographic specificity that influence the meaning of signs due to their placement in the landscape. At the same time, the circulation of mass-mediated language such as advertising allows local, neighborhood scale activity to take on national significance and national politics to color activity at the street level (Cody 2015).…”

Sounds of Democracy: Performance, Protest, and Political Subjectivity

“…From a broader perspective we might also ask: What does participatory democracy sound like? This question is inspired by a proliferation of critical studies that explore the affective, sensory, and embodied dimensions of political subjectivity (e.g., Athanasiou , ; Stoler ; Manoukian ; Mazzarella , ; Butler ; Cody ). My analysis here contributes to a growing literature on the role of sound and silence in protests and affective publics (e.g., Sterne and Davis ; Gray ; Manabe ; Novak ; Tausig ; Abe ; Sonevytsky ), and I take up Stefan Helmreich's point that “telling signal from noise is no simple matter” (Garcia Molína and Cossette ).…”