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Publics and Counterpublics, by Michael Warner. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: Distributed by MIT Press, 2002. 334 pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN: 1-890951-28-5.
DAVID BELL
Staffordshire University, UK
Publics and Counterpublics attempts to corral more than a decade of Michael Warner's writings around a central question: what is a public? We can read it archaeologically and thereby get a map of Warner's key themes and concerns: The book traces the author's development as a public intellectual as well as the development of his theory of publics. In the introduction, Warner admits to being a bit embarrassed by some of the early essays reprinted here: They are included, he says, as illustrations of the kind of analyses of publics that can be made.
The two big essays at the start of the book provide, in part, an overview of the key themes, while some of the remaining (mainly reprinted) essays appear more like relics, untouched and unmodified and occasionally of historical interest as reflections of particular moments in the author's development. "Something Queer About the Nation-State," for example, written in a punchy, at times angry style, recalls a bygone age of queer radicalism. Its subject, the Anglo-Americanness of queer theory and politics, still has some resonance, but overall the essay seems somewhat dated. Other well-known pieces, such as "Sex in Public" (with Lauren Berlant) and "Styles of Intellectual Publics," reappear here as ways of exemplifying Warner's argument about what constitutes a public, and these essays work precisely because their...