By Katharina Gerstenberger · Monday, July 23, 2012 Katharina Gerstenberger’s “The Public Intellectual as Survivor: The Cases of Josef Haslinger and Kathrin Röggla” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 The article contrasts recent works by the Austrian writers Josef Haslinger and Kathrin Röggla, both of whom have made names for themselves as political and cultural commentators, about their respective experiences of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Titled Phi Phi Island (2007), Haslinger’s narrative is a personal yet highly self-reflective account of his survival. His overarching concern is the coincidence of survival and the challenge this poses to his self-identity as an engaged author who believes his work to be politically meaningful. Röggla, whose life, unlike Haslinger’s, was not in immediate danger, chronicles the unfolding public response to the attacks through comments she collected from a variety of interlocutors in New York City as well as from television. The division between the public and the private, which for Haslinger remains central, becomes obsolete in Röggla’s really ground zero (2001). Her expressed inability to transform her experience into a coherent narrative is symptomatic of her fragmented text. In the end, both authors must acknowledge that surviving a catastrophe is an assault on private as well as public subject positions, forcing them to rethink from where and how cultural critique can be launched.
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By Wes Tirey · Friday, July 13, 2012 Brad Prager’s article “Offending the Public: Handke, Herzog, Hypnosis” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Wes Tirey: Can you tell us about how your article explores the question of the “public sphere”?
Brad Prager: My essay was intended as an indirect engagement with questions concerning the public sphere. It offers a perspective on the work of author-artists Werner Herzog and Peter Handke, and I’ve chosen the term “author-artist” despite the fact that Herzog is, of course, best known as a film director. I’d like, at least in this contribution to Telos, to view this early part of Herzog’s career a little bit differently and see him as also a product of German art and literature of the 1970s, a time and place in which authors tended to be politically engaged, but also simultaneously influenced by German Modernism and discourses of aesthetic autonomy. Those two elements interact in an interesting way in the 1970s, and something like Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small, which deals with revolution, is quite Modernist and can almost be described as avant-garde. It is a good example of how those tendencies come together. In the background of the essay is Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, which was an influential and provocative book. Central to the piece is the question: how can an artist critique the public’s engagement with art, or how do you turn art into something critical and politically incisive, when it is immediately subject to appropriation, and may already have a cynical position built into it? Handke was trying to reshape the stage with his innovative plays, Kaspar and Offending the Audience. The latter of the two gives the essay its title; I’m toying with the sound of the term “Offensive Aesthetics,” advocated here, and Öffentlichkeit, the German term meaning “public sphere.”
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By Daniel Purdy · Monday, July 9, 2012 Daniel Purdy’s “Media and Architecture at the Birth of the Public Sphere” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article examines the policy discussion surrounding the concept of “the European city.” This innocuous phrase has become a source of considerable concern among urban planners, architects, and sociologists because “the European city” is consistently described as under siege by the economics of globalization and new media technology. At stake is an idealized experience of urbanity that is closely associated with the history of European civilization, the emergence of liberal democracy, personal freedoms, and the market economy as a localized exchange that could be regulated by the state. Despite these modern connotations, the ideal type of this European city is medieval, wherein well-preserved historic buildings are aligned along irregular streets open only to pedestrians. The type of building that today is considered typical of the European city predates the Enlightenment and most certainly has little in common with industrialization.
The notion of the “European city” has a two-faced relation to globalization: on the one hand, the many economic, political and cultural relations that join cities together into the European market system constitute one of the large-scale networks of the global economy that historians can trace back to the height of the Middle Ages; on the other, the term is invoked today in order to draw a boundary and insist on a distinction so as to preserve a quality that is considered fundamentally European. This distinctly urban character is associated with public spaces that foster democratic institutions. Since the Middle Ages, the argument runs, European cities have been designed to preserve openly accessible forums for democratic politics and capitalist exchange. The preservation of European democracy is therefore often correlated with the maintenance of these urban places. I argue that the successful use of urban centers for politics and exchanges always also depends on the existence of small isolated spaces cut off from the general population. For urban public spaces to accomplish their political and economic ends, they have always required their antithesis, the exclusive private room. Nowhere is this juxtaposition more important than in the Enlightenment institution of the public sphere.
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By Loren Kruger · Thursday, July 5, 2012 Loren Kruger’s “Literary? Public? Proletarian: Öffentlichkeit and Erfahrung among the Haymarket Martyrs” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article uses Negt and Kluge’s conception of proletarian Öffentlichkeit or public spheres and practices as a point of departure for analysis the writing and speeches of the social activists who were tried and executed for anarchism and other crimes against law and order after the Haymarket incident in Chicago in 1886. This analysis includes contextual commentary on the Great Chicago Fire, the contribution of Germans and other immigrants to socialist agitation in the United States and thus to the practice of tactical cosmopolitan and transnational culture, and the legacy of the Haymarket for current critics of capitalism from the Industrial Workers of the World to the Occupy Movement.
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By Jaimey Fisher · Monday, July 2, 2012 Jaimey Fisher’s “Citizen Soldiers and Militarized Nostalgia: Genres of War and Place in the 1950s Public Sphere” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
One of the most celebrated postwar German films, Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge (Die Brücke, 1959), has garnered remarkably little scholarly attention, but the film both reflects and engages fundamental changes in the German public sphere in the 1950s and 1960s. It has traditionally been assumed (right through the present) that the 1950s was an era driven by an emphatic forgetting of Germany’s criminal wartime past, but recent work reflects a turn in our understanding of the 1950s thinking about this past. It is now increasingly acknowledged that 1950s society and culture did engage the past, but in often highly refracted ways. One of these ways comes into focus with the cinema, particularly in the dominant genre cinemas of the 1950s. While the so-called Heimatfilm has dominated scholarly thinking about film in this era, the war film (as the second most popular genre of the decade) was also a crucial means to represent, but also distort, memories of the Nazi period. The essay considers the role of the war film in the public sphere as well as the representation of the public sphere, and its politics, within the war film genre. The small-town counter public sphere detailed in The Bridge, in fact, shows the film’s engagement not only with the recent war and 1950s memory culture, but also with that other most popular genre of the time, the Heimatfilm.
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By Michael Bray · Monday, June 25, 2012 Michael Bray’s “Openness as a Form of Closure: Public Sphere, Social Class and Alexander Kluge’s Counterproducts” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This essay analyzes the seductions and impasses of the “openness” of public sphere theory in class society. It does so by sidestepping the more obvious limits of formal-discursive models of publicity and critically engaging with the theory and practice of Alexander Kluge, whose foundational work with Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience, continues to ground experiential and affective models. For Kluge, this experiential turn was necessitated by the classist exclusions rationalist forms of publicity enact and it also made clear the need for “counterproducts” (rather than theoretical accounts) to combat audiovisual pseudo-publicity and construct a “proletariat public sphere.” Drawing together Kluge and Negt’s compelling account of exclusion and the specific character of Kluge’s own film and television counterproducts, shows how the latter fail to answer to the concerns the former, and helps explain the peculiar substitution, in Kluge’s films, of “feminine labor” and protagonists for the proletariat. This substitution, I suggest, is paradigmatic for the continuing shift of the “new left” away from issues of class. In closing, I propose the potential of a “populist public sphere” to more adequately address both the exclusions diagnosed by Kluge and Negt and the issues of gender “ciphered” in Kluge’s films.
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