Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere

Epilogue

{ 141 Epilogue In late November 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld boasted —with a staccato inarticulacy commonplace in the Bush Administration —about U.S. success in building a democratic Iraq: The country is—has a free media, and they can—it’s a relief valve. They could have hundred-plus papers. There’s 72 radio stations. There’s 44 television stations. And they’re debating things and talking and arguing and discussing. The following day the Los Angeles Times reported that Rumsfeld wasn’t exactly providing the whole picture.¹ He had failed to mention that the Pentagon had hired the Lincoln Group, a Washington, D.C., publicrelations firm, to write U.S.-friendly stories about Iraq, which would then be translated into Arabic by U.S. intelligence and funneled through an organization established by the Pentagon called the Baghdad Press Club, which would then pay Iraqi reporters to place the pieces in Iraqi newspapers under the Iraqi reporters’ bylines. Beyond a duplicity which, by that moment in 2005, had long since ceased to surprise anyone, Rumsfeld’s remarks reveal just how important the idea of a public sphere—a media arena where participants develop their political authority through open criticism, through “debating things and talking and arguing and discussing”—is to the idea of a functioning democracy. The Bush administration knew on some level that if you purport to have a democracy and you don’t have a public sphere of argument 142 } f e v e r r e a d i n g and debate, you better fake one. Yet, even in faking it Rumsfeld reveals some of the central problematics of the classic idea of a public sphere. For one, he seems to believe that a public sphere is simply analogous to free media and freedom of argument, and that out of such freedoms will precipitate the critical discussion and action necessary for democracy. But one of the important contributions of public-sphere theorists—from Jürgen Habermas to Alexander Kluge to Michael Warner—has been to outline the complex assumptions and habits of thinking required for formation of such a public sphere. They extend far beyond the idea of a free media and freedom of argument. The coming-into-being of the kind of public sphere which enables critical discussion and debate (and perhaps gives rise to democracy) is interwoven with the way we understand ourselves as subjects, with our relations to capitalism and the state, with our practices of reading and criticism, with our understanding of the very meaning of public and private, and much more. Such deeply embedded habits of thinking and modes of self-understandings are not put in place overnight, and they are not easily exported to other cultures, which may already have in place very different habits and modes. But perhaps most interesting in Rumsfeld’s remarks is his characterization of the public sphere. He describes the “free media” of newspapers and tv and radio as “a relief valve.” But what exactly is being relieved? Violence? Passions? Pain? Passions and pain that might lead to violence? It’s hard to pin down, but clearly is something that is conceived as the opposite of argument and debating. The rhetoric of relief does not fit well with argument, which we don’t speak of as being relieved. One can only be relieved from those things one feels in one way or another— anger, an ache, a weight. This lack of clarity aside, Rumsfeld’s relief metaphor captures a central, if unsurprising, opposition which appears repeatedly in our understanding of the public sphere—an opposition between feeling and argument, between the emotional and the critical. Rumsfeld here is simply repeating the commonplace view of the public sphere: if it is to be in the service of democracy, it should be based in reason, not emotion. In this view, a well-functioning public sphere dissipates emotion as it boils things down to reason. A similar set of concerns is apparent in a very different contemporary realm, one involving American adolescents more often than Iraqis. “Like so many other teenagers Nadia, 15, is addicted,” the New York Times announces in the lede of a recent article.² Nadia suffers, we learn, from a “wreck[ed] attention span” and “hours spent prowling” about. She is, epilogue { 143 as my reader will already have guessed, “addicted to the internet” and, specifically, to reading online. Nadia is...