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2 Ot h e r P u b l i c s , Ot h e r C i t i z e n s , Ot h e r W r i t i n g C l ass r o o m s Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution; It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared. —Voltaire, in a letter to d’Alembert, 1766 Thus far, I have spoken of anarchist zines in terms of culture, and I doubt if any reader would be particularly startled by my frequent use of the phrase “anarchist zine culture” in the previous chapter or this one. In the wake of cultural studies (and its enormous influence in the contemporary academy), we are habituated to thinking of culture as a term that encompasses alternative communities, identities, and movements. More problematic, though, is the suggestion I offer here: namely, that the culture of zines (in general) and anarchist zines (in particular) is a public as well—to be sure, a particular kind of public but a public nonetheless . This idea chafes with a commonsense rendering of “the public” as a broad, inclusive social formation concerned with matters of policy that affect all citizens. That matter-of-fact understanding, however, has been found to be incomplete and misleading. In the pages that follow, I will make the case that zine culture also functions as a public or, more precisely, a counterpublic. Neither wanting to relinquish the many valuable insights gained by understanding zines as a culture nor wanting to limit zines only to that understanding, I argue instead that zines ought to be regarded as exemplary cultural publics. I define a cultural public as any social formation, established primarily through texts, whose constructed identity functions, in some measure, to oppose and critique the accepted norms of the society in which it emerges.1 In Heisenbergian fashion, cultural publics may be seen exclusively as cultures or as publics. The challenge is to see them as both and, ideally, to see them as both at once. As mentioned, I have thus far directed most of my attention to zines as culture. I now turn to the task of understanding zines as publics. To this end, I trace the contours of modern public sphere theory, especially as it relates to my argument. Other Publics, Other Citizens, Other Writing Classrooms   57 Publ ics, Coun terpu bli c s, an d Zines The familiar idea of what constitutes a public (or a public sphere) has been usefully—and brilliantly—critiqued by Jürgen Habermas (1991), who, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, details the historical emergence and subsequent decline of the “bourgeois public sphere.” In the process of historicizing our understanding of the public sphere, Habermas demonstrates that the public sphere is identical neither to a governing state apparatus nor to existing market arrangements, even though it is inescapably implicated in both. Rather, a public sphere, in its perfected form, is a rational, discursive arena, a freely accessible space of unfettered, communicative interaction wherein participants debate and deliberate on matters of common concern. While it never attained its idealized form, the bourgeois public sphere, as Habermas describes it, still retains considerable normative value because it offers a model of rational discussion not available to actually existing democracies. In its requirement that differences in social status and privilege be “bracketed”—left at the door, so to speak—it tries to guarantee that rational-critical debate will not be constrained, managed, or distorted by private interests. Since its original publication a half-century ago, Habermas’s Structural Transformation has spawned a vigorous line of scholarship, work that has been simultaneously inspired by, and critical of, his notions of what a public sphere is and ought to be. Foremost among recent critics is Nancy Fraser, who forcefully challenges the assumed desirability of a universal, general public, freely accessible to all, even if that notion is meant only to serve as an ideal to which we ought to aspire. In her widely acknowledged critique of Habermas’s normative model of the bourgeois public sphere, Fraser points out that “declaring a deliberative arena to be a space where extant status distinctions are bracketed and neutralized is not sufficient to make it so” (Fraser 1990, 60). Indeed, according to Fraser, in order for Habermas to construct an idealized bourgeois public sphere in the first place, he must disregard (or if one prefers an ironic perspective, bracket) the long existence...

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