Journal articles on the topic 'Habermas, Jürgen – Criticism and interpretation'

This article responds to several liberal bioethicists’ criticisms of Jürgen Habermas’s The Future of Human Nature by placing it in the context of his intellectual influences and career-spanning theorization of communicative rationality. In particular, I argue that Habermas’s critics have not grasped his interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality. Far from merely ventriloquizing his friend and teacher, Habermas distinguishes his construal of that concept from Arendt’s, which he presents as a naturalistic foil to his concerns about the potential ethical impact of preimplantation genetic interventions. Whereas, according to Habermas, Arendt reasons directly from the biological fact of birth to the capacity for political action, he himself construes natality as implying a “divide between nature and culture” at the level of the “lifeworld.” Identifying Habermas’s interpretation of Arendt in this way explains why Habermas claims not to be a biological determinist and why the bioethicists’ criticism, according to which he is, fails.

Bioethicists criticize Jürgen Habermas’s argument against “liberal eugenics” for many reasons. This essay examines one particular critique, according to which Habermas misunderstands the implications of human evolution. In adopting Hannah Arendt’s concept of “natality,” Habermas seems to fear that genetically modified children will lose the contingency of their births, which would impair their capacity for political action; but according to evolutionary theory, bioethicists argue, this fear is unfounded. I explore this objection by entertaining the hypothesis that Habermas’s argument assumes Arendt’s interpretation of Darwinian evolution in addition to her conception of natality, and then I answer it by contrasting the conceptions of evolution held by Habermas, by Arendt, and by Habermas’s critics. Les bioéthiciens critiquent l’argument de Jürgen Habermas contre « l’eugénisme libéral » pour de nombreuses raisons. Cet essai examine une critique en particulier, selon laquelle Habermas comprend mal les implications de l’évolution humaine : en adoptant le concept de la « natalité » de Hannah Arendt, Habermas semble craindre que les enfants soumis à une modification génétique ne perdent la contingence propre à leur naissance, une perte qui diminuerait leur capacité pour l’action politique, mais selon la théorie de l’évolution, les bioéthiciens soutiennent que cette peur est sans fondement. J’explore cette objection à Habermas en considérant l’hypothèse que, en plus du concept de la natalité, Habermas suppose aussi l’interprétation arendtienne de l’évolution biologique de Darwin, et j’y répond en confrontant cette conception de l’évolution avec la conception propre à Habermas et avec celle des bioéthiciens qui lui ont répondu.

<p><em>The wrong understanding about role and function of religion will make religion just function as instruments of legitimating those who use it irresponsibly. Therefore, it is important to take a certain paradigm to see and analyze the role and function of religion. That paradigm in its turn will restore religion in its essential role and function as a system of orientation and interpretation of the meaning of human life, as well as its relationship with God and others. The Theory of Religious Criticism and Communicative Practical Theory of Jürgen Habermas offers evaluative, reflective, and corrective critics of the role and function of religion. The fired criticism will, in turn, help religion restore its role and function as a bridge communicative and relational between human and God and the others. At the same time, religion is expected to return to its role and function in contributing to the realization of a receptive society in rational discursive rooms which in turn will enable the process of human emancipation. The further process of human emancipation is the formation of an increasingly strong personal and social identity, rooted in values </em><em></em><em>or virtues derived from religion itself as the bridge that leads people to the real truth.</em></p>

[No abstract] First paragraph: Habermas turned ninety on June 18th 2019. Over the last six decades he’s been Germany’s foremost social theorist, philosopher, public intellectual, and journalist. His political writings currently stretch to twelve volumes. Cue a host of different public events across Germany celebrating his life and work. Cue also the usual paeans and panegyrics, and, as anyone who has followed the on-line discussion will know, some remarkably harsh criticism.

My project is to assess recent objections directed at Jürgen Habermas by Nancy Fraser, Iris Young and Seyla Benhabib. This dispute is significant because it concerns the value of the Enlightenment style, detached criticism promoted by Habermas as compared to new proposals about dissent from a stance connected to social movements. I argue that these feminist criticisms of Habermas's critical theory are compelling and that they require substantial changes in Habermas's thinking.

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) has for decades been recognized as a leading European philosopher and public intellectual. But his global visibility has obscured his rootedness in German political culture and debate. The most successful historical accounts of the transformation of political culture in West Germany have turned on the concept of German statism and its decline. Viewing Habermas through this lens, I treat Habermas as a radical critic of German statism and an innovative theorist of democratic constitutionalism. Based on personal interviews with Habermas and his German colleagues, and by setting the major work alongside his occasion-specific political writings from 1984 to 1996, I interpret Habermas's political thought as an evolving response to two distinct moments in German history: first, the mid-1980s, and second, the revolutions of 1989 and German reunification in 1990. This essay challenges the dominant interpretations of Habermas's mature statement of his political theory. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Democracy (1992), which have described it as marking a distinct break with, and reversal of, the commitments of his earlier work. By contrast, I describe the work as an intellectual summa, consistent with Habermas's previous thought and career, and containing remarkable historical interpretations of two intertwined phenomena: the intellectual and institutional dimensions of the Bonn Republic and Habermas's own biography.

Este artículo se apoya en la literatura sobre el papel de las emociones en la filosofía de Edmund Burke para caracterizar su concepción del patriotismo, y para entender cómo se relaciona con otras dimensiones de su pensamiento político y estético. Más importante aún, el artículo rechaza la idea de que el patriotismo Burkeano (y su anclaje en una teoría particular de las emociones) sirva como base para articular una visión cosmopolita de la política. El trabajo hace una crítica de la concepción Burkeana del patriotismo a partir de una comparación de éste con algunas concepciones más recientes sobre el fenómeno. Primero, el artículo pone de relieve la afinidad del patriotismo Burkeano con la versión moralmente inaceptable de Alasdair MacIntyre. Después muestra su incompatibilidad con versiones menos objetables como la de Jürgen Habermas.

Το κείμενο επιδιώκει την ανακατασκευή της προβληματικής της θέσης του θρησκευτικού επιχειρήματος στη δημόσια σφαίρα στο πλαίσιο της μετακοσμικής κοινωνίας. Ανατρέχοντας στη σκέψη των John Rawls, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas και William Connolly, θα επιδιώξω την ανασυγκρότηση των πολλαπλών και πολυσύνθετων διαστάσεων της θέσης του θρησκευτικού επιχειρήματος στη μετακοσμική δημόσια σφαίρα με άξονα τη συνθήκη του πλουραλισμού από την οποία χαρακτηρίζονται οι νεωτερικές κοσμικές κοινωνίες. Το κείμενο κλείνει με την κριτική ανασύνθεση της προβληματικής στη σκέψη των Taylor και Connolly αναδεικνύοντας παράλληλα τη σημασία που έχει η διάσταση της διυποκειμενικής εγκυρότητας των διαβουλεύσεων στη δημόσια σφαίρα μέσα από μια κριτική προσέγγιση της θεώρησης του Habermas. Λέξεις κλειδιά: Δημόσια σφαίρα, θρησκευτικό επιχείρημα, μετακοσμική κοινωνία, πλουραλισμός. Abstract This paper addresses the question of the role of religious argument in the post-secular public sphere in the thought of John Rawls, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas and William Connolly. In order to highlight the complex and multiple dimensions of this subject, I will focus on the importance of pluralism as the mediating concept between religious argumentation and the public sphere. In the concluding section of the paper I will provide a constructive criticism of Taylor’s and Connolly’s arguments and I will defend Habermas’s reconstruction of the intersubjective validity of deliberations in the post-secular public sphere through a critical account of his thought. Keywords: Public sphere, religious argument, post-secular society, pluralism.

Radical democratic political theorists have used the concept of constituent power to sketch ambitious models of radical democracy, while many legal scholars deploy it to make sense of the political and legal dynamics of constitutional politics. Its growing popularity notwithstanding, I argue that the concept tends to impede a proper interpretation of civil disobedience, conceived as nonviolent, politically motivated lawbreaking evincing basic respect for law. Contemporary theorists who employ it cannot distinguish between civil disobedience and other related, yet ultimately different, modes of political illegality (e.g. conscientious objection, resistance, revolution). The essay also examines Jürgen Habermas’ recent contributions to a theory of mixed or dualistic (postnational) constituent power, conceding that Habermas avoids many theoretical and political ills plaguing competing radical democratic theoretical retrievals. Nonetheless, Habermas’ attempt to salvage the idea of constituent power as part of his reformist agenda for the European Union not only breaks with his earlier understandable skepticism about the idea but also risks trimming the admirably ambitious sails of his radical democratic interpretation of civil disobedience.

Preuss' paper significantly advances the critical theory of law. As a side benefit, he provides English-speakers with an excellent introduction to the work of two leading West German participants in the debate, Jürgen Habermas and Gunther Teubner. Preuss' paper reveals considerable common ground between critical legal theorists in Germany and the United States, but also important differences of perspective and concern. I suspect that many American legal critics will think that Preuss' criticisms of Habermas and Teubner do not go far enough, that his criticisms raise a fundamental challenge to the current emphasis on structure and system in the German debate. In any event, Preuss' paper suggests the usefulness of a greater German “reception” of the American emphasis on agency and social construction. No doubt American legal criticism would likewise be enriched by entering into a more sustained dialogue with structuralist and systems theory.

Judging by the proliferation of a new body of theological works that have encouraged a deliberate rethinking of the intellectual premises of Christian theology, scholarly discussion appears to have come to the juncture of an exciting though unpredictable stage in theology. Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than in the realm of the ongoing dialogue on the theological relevance of communication theory associated with the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. Contrary to what has become an article of faith in recent theological forays into social theory, I contend: (a) that Habermasian theory has little to contribute to theological thought and is more valuable as an indirect aid in critiquing various deficient theological discourses; (b) that the current Habermas-sympathetic attempts at a communicative theology are, by and large, open to criticism for the same shortcomings and problems found in Habermas's own works; and (c) that the need to address these problems necessarily points us toward an alternative postcommunication theology.

This article analyses how recent critiques of secularism in political philosophy and cultural anthropology might productively be combined and contrasted with each other. I will show that Jürgen Habermas' postsecularism takes insufficient account of elementary criticisms of secularism on the part of anthropologists such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. However, I shall also criticize Saba Mahmood’s reading of secularism by arguing that, in the end, she replaces the secular–religious divide with a secularity–piety divide; for example, in her reading of Nasr Abu Zayd’s secular Islamic hermeneutics. This inhibits the use of her framework of analysis for a criticism of a problem central to Habermas' postsecularism, namely that it remains focused on specific intensities of belief. I shall then argue that, combined with the anthropological critiques of the secular, the political-historical nature of the fanaticism–piety–violence nexus should be integrated into political philosophical debates on secularism and postsecularism.

This paper offers an interpretation of the activity of the Russian ngo ‘Soldiers’ Mothers’ which provides legal assistance to soldiers and their families. This ngo attracts significant attention in Russia and some authors have already suggested explanations of its work from anthropological and sociological perspectives. This paper interprets the ‘Mothers’ through the concept of human dignity as understood by the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. As argued by Habermas, dignity is a communicative structure that makes the passage from morality to law and, therefore, the social dialogue possible. It is shown that dignity occupies a crucial place in the work of the activists of the organization, which forms a link between private and public spheres. This paper is based on interviews with the activists of the ‘Soldiers’ mothers’ of St. Petersburg.

AbstractThis paper aims to investigate the dialogue between some postmodern thinkers (mostly Lyotard, Rorty and Vattimo) and Habermas’ criticism in light of a different conception of dialogue itself. Therefore, we shall first give an account of how Habermas establishes his neomodern discourse (1985) in a very close dialogue with the key concepts of postmodernism: the subject and its social role, language and the concept of philosophical truth and the postmodernist view of history (Lyotard, 1979, Vattimo, 1974, 1985, 2009; Rorty, 1989; Bauman, 1993). Secondly, dialogue will be addressed as a structural difference between Habermas’ universal normative ethic of discourse (together with Karl-Otto Apel, 1983) and the postmodern local and linguistic pluralism, emancipated from any metaphysical ratio. In the end, it will be argued that philosophy ought to be dialogical in line with Habermas’ view, within the foundation and normativity of dialogue. Postmodernist dialogue in philosophy and in society displays instead many shortcomings if understood as a pluralist linguistic game of interpretation.

Von 1937 bis 1943 war Otto Kirchheimer Mitarbeiter am exilierten Institut für Sozialforschung in New York. Doch zu keinem Zeitpunkt seiner Mitarbeit am Institut kam es zu einer echten interdisziplinären Kollaboration. Kirchheimers Arbeiten bilden eine Art Kontrastprogramm zu Max Horkheimers Interpretation moderner Massendemokratien als Regime der politischen Integration. Der nähere Blick auf die institutsinterne Debatte Kirchheimers mit Horkheimer lässt erkennen, wie sehr er stattdessen die Konflikte zwischen sozialen Gruppen und die unterschiedlichen institutionellen Möglichkeiten, diese Konflikte politisch zu regulieren, herausgestellt hat. Dies machte seine Arbeiten für spätere Autoren wie Jürgen Habermas und Claus Offe besonders anschlussfähig und bildet heute einen wichtigen Ausgangspunkt für einen Kritischen Institutionalismus.

Paixão mundial seja nas pistas de corrida, seja nos carros de luxo ou mesmo em pequenos acessórios de consumo, a Scuderia Ferrari é uma das empresas mais tradicionais do esporte automotor e da indústria de carros com o seu vermelho vibrante de corrida (rosso corsa) e sua logomarca inconfundível de um cavalo rampante negro em um escudo de amarelo vibrante (cavallino rampante). O presente artigo deseja identificar a lógica de ação social que permite a empresa italiana, sediada em Maranello, tanto lucrar dentro do mecanismo econômico do capitalismo, bem como criar um fandom expressivo, cuja paixão não distingue classe social. Utilizando a lógica de racionalidade social posta por Jürgen Habermas, dividida em Mundo da Vida (ação comunicativa) e Sistema (ação instrumental), vamos esquematizar a ação ferrarista em quatro posições típica-ideais, mostrando a importância da gestão e do marketing esportivo e de bens de luxo para as empresas vinculadas ao automobilismo.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Automobilismo, Marketing Esportivo, Mundo da Vida, Sistema, Scuderia Ferrari. ABSTRACTWorld passion whether on track, in luxury cars or even small accessories consumption, Scuderia Ferrari is one of the traditional businesses of motor sport and car industry with its vibrant red race (rosso corsa) and his unmistakable imprint of a black prancing horse on a vibrant yellow shield (cavallino rampant). This article want to identify social action logic that allows the Italian company, based in Maranello, both profit within the capitalist economic mechanism, as well as create a significant fandom, whose passion does not distinguish social class. Using social rationality logic brought by Jürgen Habermas, divided into World of Life (communicative action) and System (instrumental action), we lay out the Ferrari action in four typical-ideal positions, showing the importance of management and sports marketing and luxury goods for businesses linked to motoring.KEYWORDS: Auto Racing, Sports Marketing, World of Life System, Scuderia Ferrari. RESUMEN Pasión Mundial sea en automovilismo, en coches de lujo o en pequeño consumo de los accesorios, la Scuderia Ferrari es uno de los negocios tradicionales del deporte del motor y la industria del automóvil con su vibrante raza roja (rosso corsa) y su huella inconfundible de un caballo encabritado negro en un vibrante escudo amarillo (cavallino rampante). En este artículo se quiere identificar la lógica de la acción social que permite a la empresa italiana, con sede en Maranello, tanto el beneficio en el mecanismo económico capitalista, así como crear un fandom significativa, cuya pasión no distingue clases sociales. Utilizando la lógica racionalidad social presentada por Jürgen Habermas, dividido en Mundial de la Vida (acción comunicativa) y Sistema (acción instrumental), ponemos a cabo la acción de Ferrari en cuatro posiciones típicas ideales, que muestra la importancia de la gestión y el marketing deportivo y artículos de lujo para las empresas vinculadas al automovilismo.PALABRAS CLAVE: Automovilismo, marketing deportivo, Mundial de vida del sistema, la Scuderia Ferrari. ReferênciasADORNO, Theodor W. & HORKHEIMER, Max. Dialética do Esclarecimento (trad. Guido Antonio de Almeida). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1985.AUSTIN, J. L. How to do Things with Words. Cambridge: HUP, 1975.BUCCI, Eugênio & VENANCIO, Rafael. D. O. "OValor de Gozo: um conceito para a crítica da indústria do imaginário". Matrizes. Ano 8. Nº 1. São Paulo: PPGCOM-ECA-USP, 2014.HABERMAS, Jürgen. Mudança Estrutural da Esfera Pública (trad. Flávio R. Kothe). Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1984.HABERMAS, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action (dois vol.). Boston: Beacon, 1989.HABERMAS, Jürgen. "Progresso técnico e mundo social da vida". In: HABERMAS, Jürgen. Técnica e ciência como "ideologia" (trad. Artur Morão). Lisboa: Ed. 70, 2001a.HABERMAS, Jürgen. "Técnica e ciência como ‘ideologia'". In: HABERMAS, Jürgen. Técnica e ciência como "ideologia" (trad. Artur Morão). Lisboa: Ed. 70, 2001b.HABERMAS, Jürgen. A Ética da Discussão e a Questão da Verdade (trad. Marcelo B. Cipolla). São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2004.HORKHEIMER, Max. "Teoria Tradicional e Teoria Crítica". In: HORKHEIMER, Max et alli. Os pensadores. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1980.KINGSTON, Lewis. "Ferrari is ‘world's most powerful brand'". Autocar.co.uk., 2013. Disponível em: http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/ferrari-world-s-most-powerful-brand.LOVEJOY, Arthur O. A Grande Cadeia do Ser. São Paulo: Palíndromo, 2005.MAINGUENEAU, Dominique. Termos-chave da Análise do Discurso. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2006.MANTON, David. Enzo Ferrari's Secret War. Bridgehampton: BPL, 2011.MORIN, Edgar. Cultura de Massas no Século XX - O Espírito do Tempo. R. J.: Forense, 1967.MORIN, Edgar. Cultura de Massas no Século XX - O Espírito do Tempo: volume II (Necrose). Rio de Janeiro: Forense, 1977.NOBRE, Marcos. Lukács e os limites da reificação. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2001.NOBRE, Marcos. A Teoria Crítica. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2004.SANTOS, Francisco (ed.) Grand Prix. Lisboa: Público, 2003.SKINNER, Quentin. "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas". History and Theory. Vol. 8, nº 1. Middleton: Wesleyan University, 1969.SKINNER, Quentin. "Conventions and the Undestanding of Speech Acts". The Philosophical Quaterly. Vol. 20, nº79. Saint Andrews: St. Andrews, 1970.SKINNER, Quentin. "On Performing and Explaing Linguistic Actions". The Philosophical Quaterly. Vol. 21, nº82. Saint Andrews: St. Andrews, 1971.SKINNER, Quentin. "Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts". New Literary History. Vol. 3, nº 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1972.SKINNER, Quentin."Hermeneutics and the Role of History". New Literary History. Vol. 7, nº 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1975.SKINNER, Quentin. Razão e Retórica na Filosofia de Hobbes. São Paulo: Unesp, 1999.SKINNER, Quentin. Visions of Politics: Regarding Method. Cambridge: CUP, 2002.VENANCIO, Rafael D. O. "Radiojornalismo ativista: um modelo de ação para o jornalismo alternativo". Revista Alterjor. Vol. 2, nº 6. São Paulo: ALTERJOR-ECA-USP, 2012.WRIGHT MILLS, C. A Elite do Poder. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1981. Disponível em:Url: http://opendepot.org/2707/ Abrir em (para melhor visualização em dispositivos móveis - Formato Flipbooks):Issuu / Calameo

Frank in this article treats the disagreement between François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas over whether there are arguments that cannot be decided rationally. Lyotard identifies rational undecidability as the “postmodern condition.” Habermas objects that reasonable procedures do exist that are adequate for the resolution of any argument among reasonable participants. Frank judges Lyotard’s argument as unpersuasive yet blames Habermas for dismissing altogether the idea of rationally undecidable disagreements. Frank then turns from contemporary philosophy to early German Romantic hermeneutics and literary theory to substantiate a claim that unresolvable disagreement exists even amid consensus. “Every consensus,” Frank writes in explication of Friedrich Schleiermacher, “contains a residual misunderstanding that will never entirely go away, and this is why no consensus as to either the meaning or the interpretation of the world can ever be final or universally valid.” Frank moreover cites the even more radical position of Friedrich Schlegel: “All truth is relative—but together with that proposition another must be coordinated: there is essentially no such thing as error.” Frank’s own conclusion, reached after comparing these Romantic notions with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, is that “the shaping of consensus will never lead us to a universal symbolism that everyone must make use of in the same way.”

In the public space of the theoretical renewed discourses, the geographic knowledge expands itself from the university world for the school world, with criticism as a key word of the teacher education. Thus, the objective of this paper is to discuss the challenges of teacher education, particularly the one of the teacher of Geography, based on the concepts of communicative competence and universal ethical principles, from the theory of communicative action of Jürgen Habermas. It started from our experience as a professor in Geography College, when questioning the reason for the low participation of undergraduates in establishing a dialogue or an argumentative discourse in the classroom. From the literature review, we identified the current predominant themes in geographic education on the education of teachers in Geography. It was observed the domain of the themes: researcher teacher and citizenship. An understanding of professional and human formal education is defended, associated to the action, around universal ethical principles of geographic base.

Abstract This article describes debates among members of the Frankfurt School during their years in exile in the United States about the status of political institutions within their analytic frameworks. The cited unpublished material in this article sheds new light on the complicated relationship between Otto Kirchheimer and the core of the Frankfurt School group on this issue. Kirchheimer’s biographical episode with the group exemplifies both the failure of interdisciplinary collaboration at the Institute of Social Research and the inability of its members to develop a joint theoretical perspective on political phenomena. In the context of the Frankfurt School, Kirchheimer’s works present a countermodel to the interpretation of modern mass democracy as an integrative regime of instrumental reason. He refused to accept such a global interpretation. In his work at the Institute of Social Research he accentuated the unequal power recourses of conflicting social groups and different institutional mechanisms to deal with these conflicts politically. This approach made his work interesting for authors of a later generation of Critical Theory like Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe.

Abstract: This paper discusses the thoughts of a modern philosopher named Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher. Philosophy itself has developed in such a way. This development cannot be separated from the criticism of thought and theory offered by previous philosophers. As a result, it cannot be denied that with these criticisms, scientific development seems to be more extensive and comprehensive. Habermas himself, who is one of the leading philosophers of this century, cannot be separated from the intellectual world of criticism. One of his criticisms is that aimed at modern positivism in social science, which he calls knowledge and human interest (the relationship between science and interests). From the theory he offered, it can then be relevant to the study of the Qur'an today. The relevance of Habermas's theory of the relationship between science and interests and the study of the Qur'an is that the Qur'an (mushaf and text) is positioned in an objective world that has technical importance. Meanwhile, the study of the Al-Qur'an which is in the subjective world is the study of one's interpretation. As for the study of Al-Qur'an in the intersubjective world, it is the product of the mazab as a result of the istidlal of the Qur'anic verse which is then followed by its followers. Keywords: Knowledge and Human Interest, Jurgen Habermas, Al-Qur’an. Abstrak Tulisan ini membahas pemikiran salah seorang filosof modern yang bernama Jurgen Habermas, seorang filosof Jerman. Filsafat sendiri mengalami perkembangan yang sedemikian rupa. Perkembangan tersebut tidak lepas dari kritik pemikiran maupun teori yang ditawarkan oleh para filosof terdahulu. Alhasil, tidak dapat dipungkiri dengan adanya kritik-kritik tersebut perkembangan keilmuan dapat dikatakan semakin luas dan komprehensif. Habermas sendiri yang merupakan salah satu tokoh filosof terkemuka pada abad ini, tidak lepas dari dunia intelektual kritik-mengkritik. Salah satu kritikannya adalah yang ditujukan pada positivisme modern dalam ilmu sosial, yang ia sebut sebagai knowledge and human interest (hubungan ilmu dan kepentingan). Dari teori yang ditawarkannya, kemudian dapat direlevansikan dengan kajian Al-Qur’an masa kini. Adapun relevansi antara teori Habermas tentang hubungan ilmu dan kepentingan dengan kajian Al-Qur’an adalah bahwasanya Al-Qur’an (mushaf dan teks) diposisikan pada dunia objektif yang memiliki kepentingan teknis. Sedangkan kajian Al-Qur’an yang berada di dunia subjektif adalah kajian tafsir atau penafsiran seseorang. Adapun kajian Al-Qur’an di dunia intersubjektif adalah produk mazhab hasil dari istidlal ayat Al-Qur’an yang kemudian diikuti oleh pengikutnya. Kata Kunci: Ilmu dan Kepentingan, Jurgen Habermas, Al-Qur’an.

While this article salutes attempts to use Donald Davidson’s principles of radical interpretation in the study of religion in order to avoid the pitfalls of correspondence theory of truth, on the one hand, and cultural relativism, on the other, it suggests that an adequate understanding of religion may also take other pragmatic aspects of meaning into account. Buying into Jürgen Habermas’ critique of Davidson, the more specific argument is that a differentiation of validity criteria serves to disclose the restricted role “truth” plays in speech acts. It is also argued that although Richard Rorty’s skepticism towards universal criteria of rationality borders on relativism, he is justified in focusing more radically—along with Robert Brandom—on pragmatic and situational criteria of meaning. Finally, drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of “perspicuous representation” I suggest an alternate way of coming to grips with meaning potentials in religious ways of life.

This article proposes to refine the concept civil society by discerning three distinct forms of civil society in the past. This refined conceptual framework counters the criticism that civil society suffers from its growing popularity and its broad definition. The usefulness of these three forms of civil society—which are based on the later work of Jürgen Habermas—are applied in this article on the seventeenth-century Low Countries. The central question is how these forms of civil society acted as schools of democracy in the seventeenth-century Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Republic. The three types of civil society are identified that developed through time and built a cumulative tradition of civil society. These are the medieval craft guilds (liberal civil society), the early modern civic militia (republican civil society), and the modern Enlightenment sociability (deliberative civil society). Data about the associational life in two cities in the Low Countries, Mechelen and Rotterdam, show that different forms of civil societies had different functions according to the societal context. Furthermore, the data show that societies with civil societies characterized by social inclusive boards and high mutation ratios had less political impact when they lacked links with existing political institutions. This implies that civil societies did not as a rule serve as schools of democracy.

Max Weber famously diagnosed both an excess and a subordination of meaning in modernity when he coined the term disenchantment next to the fragmentation and irreconcilability of value spheres. Unlike Weber, however, who sought to keep the ideological and the rationalist sides of the modern divide together, his immediate followers capitalized either on his decisionism (i.e. Carl Schmitt) or on his universalism (i.e. Jürgen Habermas). In an attempt to develop a constructive perspective on the question of how we can conceive of irreconcilable values within a larger normative horizon, this article introduces Karl Jaspers’s interpretation and refinement of Weber’s work. Most fundamentally, Jaspers’s existentialist philosophy of communication sought to turn Weber’s warring gods into a source of solidarity rather than divisiveness. I argue that Jaspers did so in rooting human freedom not in the decision or the law but in an experiential uncertainty and the knowledge not to know. The article closes with a discussion of some practical and theoretical implications of Jaspers’s thought for our understanding of diversity in unity in post-truth times.

In this paper, I consider not only the crisis in conservative neoliberalism and free market economics, but a crisis of representation and plausibility in progressive new liberalism; a situation which leads to deadlock for progressivism in which things cannot progress. In order to address this state of crisis in the global perception of the “white left,” Critical Theory, as a mode of Western liberal thought, needs to rethink the direction of its own criticism. Additionally, Critical Theory needs to adjust its focus to respond to the deadlock presented by the rise of right-wing populism and the derogation of liberal values in these regressive times (I refer antonymically, here, to Jürgen Habermas’s use of the term “progressive”). The radical democratic ideal advocated by Habermas, comprising universal equality and emancipation, should still be the goal for liberalism, and for Critical Theory, but first of all, the achievements and advances liberal progressivism has already made need to be secured to prevent society from regressing. This does not mean making a choice between neoliberalism and authoritarianism, but that a new paradigm of thinking is due. I argue that universality is anterior to cultural pluralism, as are social topics to cultural issues, and justice of distribution to justice of identity. In the complex world of modernity, good things do not come together if there is conflict between desirable values, so choices need to be made: a ranking of real, material conditions is necessary, to ensure cohesion and progression.

Beginning with the Jürgen Habermas’ reconstruction of a normative model of European cultural modernity as basis to a contemporary notion of epistemological-moral universalism as condition to critic, to integration and to intervention, which leads to the affirmation that democracy and human rights represent the modernity’s fundamental legacy, I will discuss that such theoretical reconstruction only can be possible from a historical-sociological blindness which is based on the separation between a normative notion of European cultural modernity and the Realpolitik of colonialism – just from this theoretical-political standpoint it is possible to sustain a universalistic normative paradigm which is capable to ground the criticism, the integration and the intervention of all social-cultural contexts, which means that modern culture and normativism can serve as medium and guide of all particular cultures, at least in a strong way. Against that optimistic role of the Habermasian normative model of European cultural modernity, I will argue that democracy and human rights as modernity’s legacy have basically two tasks in the contemporary Realpolitik: first, to restrain the modernity’s totalizing tendency to rationalization and to globalization, i.e. its movement of assimilation of all cultures and societies in a model of epistemological, cultural and economic universalism; and to ground an international institutional politics based on the social-economic reparation for the colonialism, which implies in a universalistic extension of the social rights to all people in the world (for example, the Philippe van Parijs’ idea of basic income).

The article studies the main lines of criticism of the theory of reflexive modernism. It is proved that in modern political science it unfolds around certain provisions of the theory of reflexive modernism. It is substantiated that Eurocentrism of the definition and interpretation of reflexive Art Nouveau, characteristic of the studies of U. Beck, A. Giddens, and J. Habermas, is criticized. A critical attitude towards eurocentrism of reflexive modernism provoked the formation of the idea of the probability and reality of the multiplicity of modernities (for example, Asian concepts of compressed modernity and enhanced modernization). It is proved that the most important vectors of criticism of the theory of reflexive modernism are: (1) the role and functions of political time and chronopolitics in different cultures and political systems; (2) the functional characteristics of political actors, primarily the state and citizen; (3) the scientific position according to which political and politics in the framework of the realities of reflexive modernism cannot remain in a stable form, therefore it is inevitable to identify new institutional characteristics of modernity that significantly expand the concept of radical modernism; (4) the need to clarify such a characteristic feature of reflective modernity as changing the system of control over the means of violence; (5) the search for the limits of application of the theory of reflexive modernism in the study of political processes in the modern world.

This article analyses Michel Foucault’s and Jürgen Habermas’ debate, it examines in more detail the interpretation of the theory of communicative action and genealogy methods and their applicability. Although this debate has already been widely analyzed and discussed in the public academic community, the uniqueness of this paper is in going deep into the motifs of the deconstruction and reconstruction, revealed from the transgression perspective. It is important to find out, whether the destabilization of social forms has some influence on the occurrence of deconstruction, if reconstruction does not constitute the hierarchy of causative relationship, leading to the one – way (one – sidedness) granted claims to universality. Basing on the notion of the transgression concept which indicates the precondition of the motif of the irreversibility of events and the motif of the possibility of the repeatedness of similar events, it can be stated that reconstruction and deconstruction play an important role in the originating of emergentisms in social sciences. The aims of the article are to enrich the standard overlying classification requirements, raised by the classical social methodology, with the new opportunities of style recognition, providing the artistic style with equal alignment pretensions to the priorities of social research theory requirements.

Artists interrupting or intervening in art museum displays with food as a medium or theme is a distinct strand of contemporary art practice. In this article, we travel through fragments of the history of food-art with a few examples of different genres and forms, demonstrating that art history can be explained in other ways than through the already recognized art genres. Based on my experience in-person with Untitled (Lunch Box), an interpretation of Tiravanija’s ephemeral work is provided using the model of communicative action theorized by Habermas, which was first applied to contemporary art by art scholar Grant Kester (2004). Tiravanija’s practice uses food to create situations for communicative actions to happen and is an approach to institutional critique. The last section provides a critical account against Bishop’s criticism of Tiravanija, arguing that Bishop’s understanding of art is based on instrumental rationality. On the other hand, Tiravanija’s approach is based on value rationality and is a more timely approach in the contemporary context of late-stage capitalism.

AbstrakPerlawanan intelektual pribumi yang dilakukan oleh organisasi berideologi komunis menggunakan beberapa media, diantaranya surat kabar Soerapati. Metode yang digunakan adalah metode sejarah yang terdiri atas empat tahapan kerja: heuristik, kritik, interpretasi dan historiografi. Konsep dan teori yang digunakan adalah konsep ruang publik Habermas dan teori konflik Dahrendorf. Hasil penelitian ini menyimpulkan bahwa surat kabar Soerapati pertama terbit setelah kongres PKI dan SR di Sukabumi pada tahun 1923. Hal ini diawali dengan perpecahan SI saat kongres di Madiun yang menghasilkan disiplin partai. PKI dan SR menggunakan media surat kabar Soerapati untuk melakukan perlawanan terhadap pemerintah kolonial dan pemerintah lokal, selain itu surat kabar Soerapati menjadi media perdebatan ideologi di internal organisasi pergerakan. Simpulan dari penelitian ini adalah perlawanan yang dilakukan oleh PKI dan SR berakhir dengan penangkapan dan pembuangan yang diberitakan di surat kabar Soerapati. Hal ini menjadi salah satu faktor surat kabar Soerapati harus disita dan dilarang terbit pada tahun 1925. AbstractThe Indigenous intellectual resistance carried out by communist ideology organizations using multiple media, including Soerapati newspapers. By used the historical method consists of four stages of work: heuristics, criticism, interpretation and historiography. Concepts and theories used is the public sphere concept of Habermas and conflict theory of Dahrendorf. The results concluded that newspapers first published after the congress Soerapati PKI and SR in Sukabumi in 1923. It was preceded by a split time SI congress in Madiun who produce a discipline party. PKI and SR Soerapati using the press to fight against the colonial and local governments, in addition to the Soerapati newspaper became the ideological debates media movement organizations internally. The conclusions is carried out by the resistance of the PKI and SR ended with the capture and disposal by newspapers Soerapati. This is one factor newspaper Soerapati be confiscated and banned in 1925.

Abstract The obvious debt that Strauss's operas owe to Wagner often led early critics to view their conspicuous lack of spiritual depth as an unintentional failure. Recent commentators such as Charles Youmans, Leon Botstein, and Michael Walter have rightly characterized this feature as a conscious Nietzschean strategy calculated to avoid or ironize metaphysical tropes. Following the critique of the concept of “secularization” by Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, however, I wish to complicate this newer interpretation by arguing that Strauss's operas do not represent the point in music history when German music threw off its pretentions to Kunstreligion, but mark yet another point of “re-sacralization”—a term I borrow from Simon Critchley's Faith of the Faithless (2012). The Wagner-indebted music in Arabella (1933)—an opera given much less critical attention than it deserves—certainly never gestures toward any transcendent truth beyond the physical confines of what is presented. Nevertheless, I argue, a sacred economy still operates in the opera whereby certain aspects of the immanent stage-world are figured as “sacred” and others as “profane.” It is possible to trace the influence of the operas Tannhäuser and Parsifal on Arabella, specifically in the harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral techniques Wagner used to mark certain suprahuman forces as possessing a transcendent aura. The music of Arabella uses moderated versions of these techniques to redistribute the same sacred status onto different aspects of material and psychological reality.

Agoraphobia, or hidden curriculum: Academic field and dilemmas of critical intellectualismThe key topic of this volume is the critical attitude in cultural studies. In the article, this topic is understood in a specific way. The ability to conduct critical cultural studies depends on the recog­nition of the attitude that we can call “public intelectualism” and its opportunities and limitations. According to a well-known concept of Jürgen Habermas, the position of public intellectuals is con­ditioned by the forms of human interests related to knowledge. However, today the forms of knowl­edge work, practical and emancipatory need to be rethought, as Pierre Bordieu has shown. Dif­ferent forms of human interests can be combined in one scientific venture. Futhermore, there is no way to achive the full autonomy of the academic field from the metafield of power and other social fields because of the internal conditions of the academic world. The recognition of these internal properties is the prerequisite of “public intellectualism.” According to the conceptual view of cur­riculum studies, some of these conditions belong to the so-called explicit curriculum, but the others create a hidden curriculum — the uconscious components of habitus or unarticulated circumstances of the academic form of life. The argument presented in this article is inspired by two sources: firstly by the very important biographical episode in the academic life of Bourdieu who at the end of his career became strongly involved in public criticism of neoliberalism. Secondly, I refer to several public statements of Polish intellectuals who criticised the neoliberalisation of the academy in the context of the present reforms of the public higher education and science. As I try to show, ignor­ing the hidden curriculum may lead to a specific and risky attitude — agoraphobia — which means the fear of involvement in the public sphere and helplesness in the defence of critical research and emancipatory forms of academic knowledge.

Karl Barth’s hermeneutic legacy prolonged Western Christian tradition, especially influenced by Hegelian philosophy of history. This led to Barth’s “theological exegesis” instead of a historic-critical exegesis. In a preceding article Barth’s understanding of the notion “hermeneutic circle” is discussed against the background of the Enlightenment and its counter-movement in Romanticism. In this article Barth’s attitude to the place and role of historical criticism is explained in light of his dialectic distinction between “scientific” and “practical” interpretation. The article aims to show that Barth, with his dialectics, continues Schleiermacher’s realism. In conclusion, the positivistic traits in the Barth legacy are raised once again, in order to open the door to Jürgen Habermas and other deconstructionist thinkers of the postmodern era in hermeneutics.

ZusammenfassungIm Aufsatz wird die Frage untersucht, wie die Bedeutung von Sätzen und die mit ihnen vollzogenen Handlungen verbunden sind. Dabei konzentrieren sich die vorgetragenen Überlegungen auf die Konzeptionen von Jürgen Habermas und Donald Davidson. Trotz einer Reihe von Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen beiden Autoren, besteht zwischen ihren Ansätzen ein deutlicher Kontrast hinsichtlich der Frage, wie Bedeutung und Handlung verbunden sind. Nach Habermas ist das kommunikative Handeln semantisch selbstidentifizierend, d. h. die Bedeutung des geäußerten Satzes legt zugleich fest, welche Absicht der Sprecher verfolgt und welche Handlung er vollzieht. Diese Konzeption geht zurück auf die These von Searle, dass Bedeutung und Handlung durch konstitutive Regeln verbunden seien. Im Artikel kritisiere ich die Analysen von Habermas und Searle. Zum Teil können die Einwände gegen diese Analysen aus Davidsons Kritik an konventionalistischen Ansätzen gewonnen werden. Nach Davidson bestehen zwischen Satzbedeutung, Handlungsvollzug und Sprecherabsichten keine notwendigen Beziehungen. Gleichwohl beruht für Davidson Kommunikation darauf, dass Interpreten diese drei Elemente berücksichtigen. Davidsons Ansatz widerspricht nicht nur regelbasierten, sondern auch post-strukturalistischen Ansätzen sowie Luhmanns Auffassung, da das Verstehen von Bedeutungen und Handlungen auf den Absichten von Sprechern basiert sowie auf der Fähigkeit von Interpreten, diese zu erkennen.

The subject of this article is a confrontation between the thought of Jürgen Habermas and the perspectivistic epistemology of Friedrich Nietzsche. It is held that for a post-ontological philosophy, Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge his programmatic view that every “truth” it just an “interpretation” is in a certain sense invincible. Habermas does not fundamentally overcome this situation. Nevertheless Habermas has been able to develop a linguistic theory of rationality, which combining inspiration from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the speech-act-philosophy of John L. Austin and John R. Searle makes the nihilistic consequences, which Nietzsche draws from his “theory of interpretations”, pointless. At the same time the theory of Habermas overcomes the paradoxical self-destructing position, in which the old “School of Frankfurt” ended. Following some crucial stages in the philosophical development of Habermas, it is shown how he has come to his present point of view.

In recent years, a series of key social, political and economic events has placed the critique of capitalism very much on the theoretical agenda. Responding to these developments, many have begun to express the need for a rapprochement between social criticism and the critique of political economy. The present essay represents a contribution to the recovery of the project that was once synonymous with critical theory itself via a critical engagement with the early writings of Jürgen Habermas. Not only is Habermas’ explicit engagement with the critique of political economy among the most substantial to be found within the mainstream tradition of critical theory, his early social-theoretical insights into the emergent ‘primacy of the political’ in late capitalism can be taken as representative of a number of broader trends in late-20th-century thought which sought to go beyond the premises and categories of Marx’s economic works. Simply put, no reappraisal of the relationship between critical theory and the critique of political economy can succeed, I submit, without taking seriously Habermas’s path-breaking and wide-ranging innovations.

This article discusses the recent debate between Jürgen Habermas and Wolfgang Streeck on the relationship between capitalism and democracy in Europe. The article recounts Streeck’s analysis of the financial crisis, the transformation of the tax state into the debt state, and the development of the EU towards an international consolidation state, which informs Streeck’s call for a retreat from Europe to the nation-state as the last line of defense against neoliberal capitalism. The article proceeds to sketch Habermas’s criticism of Streeck’s argument, and it illustrates how Habermas’ proposal for a reconstitution of the EU as a supranational democracy is motivated by foundational concerns in his critical theory of society. Finally, the article argues that the debate results in an unresolved dilemma: while only a democratized EU can reestablish the supremacy of politics over globalized markets, the EU is more likely to become further entrenched as an international consolidation state.

This article explains the disjuncture between formal parliamentary laws and norms of informal economic activities on the basis of a contextual and layered idea of legitimacy. This explanation clarifies a misunderstanding in certain scholarly and policy circles characterising informal economic activities as extra-legal or illegal. The idea of legal legitimacy helps explain divergent normative logics of formal and informal spaces while indicating that informal activities are not performed in a regulatory void. In addition to helping redefine the informal space, the idea also helps clarify the interaction between formal and informal regulation. By employing Jürgen Habermas’ analytical characterisation of society as constitutive of lifeworld(s) and system, and drawing on the empirical literature, the article argues that a cautious interpretation of Habermas’ analytical categorization helps explain the legality of the informal space. If formal laws need to become legitimate for the informal context, they must integrate the contextual standards of legitimacy recognized in the informal space.

Este artigo utiliza referências bibliográficas para refletir sobre o papel da autocrítica jornalística, em especial do ombudsman, na Teoria da Crítica de Imprensa - uma teoria normativa que tem como principal inspiração a teoria discursiva de Jürgen Habermas, desenvolvida pela autora americana Wendy Wyatt. O objetivo é tomar a teoria de Wyatt como base e discuti-la frente ao trabalho do ombudsman de imprensa. Propõe-se uma análise teórica do ombudsman pela luz desta teoria, uma vez que a autora faz suas críticas em relação ao papel do ombudsman e da autocrítica de imprensa em seu estudo. Apresenta-se a importância da atribuição do defensor do leitor dentro do jornal, do jornalismo e do seu papel normativo para a democracia, tendo uma função positiva dentro da teoria da crítica de imprensa.Palavras-chave: Jornalismo. Ombudsman de imprensa. Democracia. Press Criticism.

Judging by the immense global academic interaction with his work, Jürgen Habermas’s social theory, with particular reference to structural transformation of the public sphere and democracy, is one of the most constructive models for understanding the role and function of citizens in forming healthy societies. This article investigates the recent 2014 Tshwane State of the City Address in light of Habermas’s theory. Is Habermas’s theory relevant to the South African urban context? Do African cities like Tshwane subscribe to the Habermasean social formula or does it understand the public sphere in ways that require an amended interpretation of what Habermas conveys? This article provides a theological-ethical perspective on this Habermasean investigation of the 2014 Tshwane ‘State of the Capital City Address’.

Resumo: O presente artigo busca promover a reflexão e a problematização da proposta educacional que move os Institutos Federais de Educação, criados em 2008. Para isso, realizamos a leitura, interpretação e discussão de obras do filósofo Jürgen Habermas, que reconstrói o conceito moderno de emancipação, bem como analisamos a legislação de criação dos IFETs e elementos evidenciados no processo de implantação dessas instituições. A pesquisa indica a diferenciação entre educação tecnicista, pautada exclusivamente em uma racionalidade instrumental, e educação emancipatória, pautada por uma racionalidade comunicativa, dialógica. A efetivação da emancipação na educação profissional e tecnológica supõe que a técnica e a ciência mantenham o mundo da vida como seu horizonte de validação e que haja a integração da capacitação técnica com uma formação que envolva também política, ética e estética. Palavras-chave: Educação profissional e tecnológica. Técnica. Educação emancipatória. EDUCATION, TECHNIQUE, SCIENCE AND EMANCIPATION Abstract: This article aims to promote reflection and questioning about the educational proposal that moves the Federal Education Institutes created in 2008. So, we performed reading, interpretation and discussion of works by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who rebuilds the modern concept of emancipation, as well as we analyzed the legislation creating the IFETs and elements highlighted in the process of implementing these institutions. This research indicates differentiation between technicist education, guided exclusively in an instrumental rationality, and emancipatory education, guided by a dialogical, communicative rationality. Effectuation of emancipation in professional and technological education supposes that technique and science remain the lifeworld as their horizon of validation and, that integration of technical training happens with a formation involving politics, ethics and esthetic too. Keywords: Professional and technological education. Technique. Emancipatory education.

Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth while overlooking the contingency, participatory nature and complicated internal logics of social and political practice. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but simultaneously also allows philosophers to participate in politics as public intellectuals.

IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth of Australia. 1997.Carter, David. Introduction. The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. 1–11.Clendinnen, Inga. True Stories. Sydney: ABC Books, 1999.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1–82. Foucault, Michel, and Giles Deleuze. Intellectuals and Power Language, Counter Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. and trans. David Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. 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The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/john-howard-standard-bearer-in-liberal-culture/story-e6frg6zo-1111112306534›.Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: The Noonday Press, 1987.Keating, Paul. “Keating’s History Wars.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549021882.html›.Macdonald, S. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. S. Macdonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 1–12. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clarke. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003. ———. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 77–83.———. “Who Plays Stalin in Our History Wars? Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030438.html›.Manne, Robert. “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right.” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).———. WhiteWash: On Keith Windshuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne. Black Ink, 2003.Mark, David. “PM Calls for End to the History Wars.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2009.McGuigan, Jim. “The Cultural Public Sphere.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8.4 (2005): 427–43.Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Melleuish, Gregory. The Power of Ideas: Essays on Australian Politics and History. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009.Rudd, Kevin. “Full Transcript of PM’s Apology Speech.” The Australian 13 Feb. 2008. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/full-transcript-of-pms-speech/story-e6frg6nf-1111115543192›.Said, Edward. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” ABC Alfred Deakin Lectures, Melbourne Town Hall, 19 May 2001. Schaffer, Kay. “Manne’s Generation: White Nation Responses to the Stolen Generation Report.” Australian Humanities Review (June 2001). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/schaffer.html›. Shanahan, Dennis. “Howard Rallies the Right in Cultural War Assault.” The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/howard-rallies-right-in-culture-war-assault/story-e6frg6nf-1111112308221›.Wark, Mackenzie. “Lip Service.” The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2004. 259–69.White, Richard. Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. 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Anyone contemplating the role of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in literary and cultural studies must concede that the phrase is rarely used—even by its most devout practitioners, who usually think of themselves engaged in something called “critique.” What, then, are the terminological differences between “critique” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? What intellectual worlds do these specific terms conjure up, and how do these worlds converge or diverge? And what is the rationale for preferring one term over the other?The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness;” they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields, yet it never really took hold in literary studies. Why has a field that has devoted so much of its intellectual energy to interrogating, subverting, and defamiliarising found so little use for Ricoeur’s phrase?In general, we can note that hermeneutics remains a path not taken in Anglo-American literary theory. The tradition of hermeneutical thinking is rarely acknowledged (how often do you see Gadamer or Ricoeur taught in a theory survey?), let alone addressed, assimilated, or argued over. Thanks to a lingering aura of teutonic stodginess, not to mention its long-standing links with a tradition of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics was never able to muster the intellectual edginess and high-wattage excitement generated by various forms of poststructuralism. Even the work of Gianni Vattimo, one of the most innovative and prolific of contemporary hermeneutical thinkers, has barely registered in the mainstream of literary and cultural studies. On occasion, to be sure, hermeneutics crops up as a synonym for a discredited model of “depth” interpretation—the dogged pursuit of a hidden true meaning—that has supposedly been superseded by more sophisticated forms of thinking. Thus the ascent of poststructuralism, it is sometimes claimed, signaled a turn away from hermeneutics to deconstruction and genealogy—leading to a focus on surface rather than depth, on structure rather than meaning, on analysis rather than interpretation. The idea of suspicion has fared little better. While Ricoeur’s account of a hermeneutics of suspicion is respectful, even admiring, critics are understandably leery of having their lines of argument reduced to their putative state of mind. The idea of a suspicious hermeneutics can look like an unwarranted personalisation of scholarly work, one that veers uncomfortably close to Harold Bloom’s tirades against the “School of Resentment” and other conservative complaints about literary studies as a hot-bed of paranoia, kill-joy puritanism, petty-minded pique, and defensive scorn. Moreover, the anti-humanist rhetoric of much literary theory—its resolute focus on transpersonal and usually linguistic structures of determination—proved inhospitable to any serious reflections on attitude, disposition, or affective stance.The concept of critique, by contrast, turns out to be marred by none of these disadvantages. An unusually powerful, flexible and charismatic idea, it has rendered itself ubiquitous and indispensable in literary and cultural studies. Critique is widely seen as synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo. Drawing a sense of intellectual weightiness from its connections to the canonical tradition of Kant and Marx, it has managed, nonetheless, to retain a cutting-edge sensibility, retooling itself to fit the needs of new fields ranging from postcolonial theory to disability studies. Critique is contagious and charismatic, drawing everything around it into its field of force, marking the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. For many scholars in the humanities, it is not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing. Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical? There are five facets of critique (enumerated and briefly discussed below) that characterise its current role in literary and cultural studies and that have rendered critique an exceptionally successful rhetorical-cultural actor. Critique, that is to say, inspires intense attachments, serves as a mediator in numerous networks, permeates disciplines and institutional structures, spawns conferences, essays, courses, and book proposals, and triggers countless imitations, translations, reflections, revisions, and rebuttals (including the present essay). While nurturing a sense of its own marginality, iconoclasm, and outsiderdom, it is also exceptionally effective at attracting disciples, forging alliances, inspiring mimicry, and ensuring its own survival. In “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour remarks that critique has been so successful because it assures us that we are always right—unlike those naïve believers whose fetishes we strive to expose (225–48). At the same time, thanks to its self-reflexivity, the rhetoric of critique is more tormented and self-divided than such a description would suggest; it broods constantly over the shame of its own success, striving to detect signs of its own complicity and to root out all possible evidence of collusion with the status quo.Critique is negative. Critique retains the adversarial force of a suspicious hermeneutics, while purifying it of affective associations by treating negativity as an essentially philosophical or political matter. To engage in critique is to grapple with the oversights, omissions, contradictions, insufficiencies, or evasions in the object one is analysing. Robert Koch writes that “critical discourse, as critical discourse, must never formulate positive statements: it is always ‘negative’ in relation to its object” (531). Critique is characterised by its “againstness,” by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others. Faith is to be countered with vigilant skepticism, illusion yields to a sobering disenchantment, the fetish must be defetishised, the dream world stripped of its befuddling powers. However, the negativity of critique is not just a matter of fault-finding, scolding, and censuring. The nay-saying critic all too easily calls to mind the Victorian patriarch, the thin-lipped schoolmarm, the glaring policeman. Negating is tangled up with a long history of legislation, prohibition and interdiction—it can come across as punitive, arrogant, authoritarian, or vitriolic. In consequence, defenders of critique often downplay its associations with outright condemnation. It is less a matter of refuting particular truths than of scrutinising the presumptions and procedures through which truths are established. A preferred idiom is that of “problematising,” of demonstrating the ungroundedness of beliefs rather than denouncing errors. The role of critique is not to castigate, but to complicate, not to engage in ideas’ destruction but to expose their cultural construction. Barbara Johnson, for example, contends that a critique of a theoretical system “is not an examination of its flaws and imperfections” (xv). Rather, “the critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history” and to show that the “start point is not a (natural) given, but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself” (Johnson xv–xvi). Yet it seems a tad disingenuous to describe such critique as free of negative judgment and the examination of flaws. Isn’t an implicit criticism being transmitted in Johnson’s claim that a cultural construct is “usually blind to itself”? And the adjectival chain “natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal” strings together some of the most negatively weighted words in contemporary criticism. A posture of detachment, in other words, can readily convey a tacit or implicit judgment, especially when it is used to probe the deep-seated convictions, primordial passions, and heart-felt attachments of others. In this respect, the ongoing skirmishes between ideology critique and poststructuralist critique do not over-ride their commitment to a common ethos: a sharply honed suspicion that goes behind the backs of its interlocutors to retrieve counter-intuitive and uncomplimentary meanings. “You do not know that you are ideologically-driven, historically determined, or culturally constructed,” declares the subject of critique to the object of critique, “but I do!” As Marcelo Dascal points out, the supposedly non-evaluative stance of historical or genealogical argument nevertheless retains a negative or demystifying force in tracing ideas back to causes invisible to the actors themselves (39–62).Critique is secondary. A critique is always a critique of something, a commentary on another argument, idea, or object. Critique does not vaunt its self-sufficiency, independence, and autotelic splendor; it makes no pretense of standing alone. It could not function without something to critique, without another entity to which it reacts. Critique is symbiotic; it does its thinking by responding to the thinking of others. But while secondary, critique is far from subservient. It seeks to wrest from a text a different account than it gives of itself. In doing so, it assumes that it will meet with, and overcome, a resistance. If there were no resistance, if the truth were self-evident and available for all to see, the act of critique would be superfluous. Its goal is not the slavish reconstruction of an original or true meaning but a counter-reading that brings previously unfathomed insights to light. The secondariness of critique is not just a logical matter—critique presumes the existence of a prior object—but also a temporal one. Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing. Critique, then, looks backward and, in doing so, it presumes to understand the past better than the past understands itself. Hindsight becomes insight; from our later vantage point, we feel ourselves primed to see better, deeper, further. The belatedness of critique is transformed into a source of iconoclastic strength. Scholars of Greek tragedy or Romantic poetry may mourn their inability to inhabit a vanished world, yet this historical distance is also felt as a productive estrangement that allows critical knowledge to unfold. Whatever the limitations of our perspective, how can we not know more than those who have come before? We moderns leave behind us a trail of errors, finally corrected, like a cloud of ink from a squid, remarks Michel Serres (48). There is, in short, a quality of historical chauvinism built into critique, making it difficult to relinquish a sense of in-built advantage over those lost souls stranded in the past. Critique likes to have the last word. Critique is intellectual. Critique often insists on its difference from everyday practices of criticism and judgment. While criticism evaluates a specific object, according to one definition, “critique is concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (Butler 109). Critique is interested in big pictures, cultural frameworks, underlying schema. It is a mode of thought well matched to the library and seminar room, to a rhythm of painstaking inquiry rather than short-term problem-solving. It “slows matters down, requires analysis and reflection, and often raises questions rather than providing answers” (Ruitenberg 348). Critique is thus irresistibly drawn toward self-reflexive thinking. Its domain is that of second-level observation, in which we reflect on the frames, paradigms, and perspectives that form and inform our understanding. Even if objectivity is an illusion, how can critical self-consciousness not trump the available alternatives? This questioning of common sense is also a questioning of common language: self-reflexivity is a matter of form as well as content, requiring the deployment of what Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb call “difficult language” that can undermine or “un-write” the discourses that make up our world (1–14). Along similar lines, Paul Bove allies himself with a “tradition that insists upon difficulty, slowness, complex, often dialectical and highly ironic styles,” as an essential antidote to the “prejudices of the current regime of truth: speed, slogans, transparency, and reproducibility” (167). Critique, in short, demands an arduous working over of language, a stoic refusal of the facile phrase and ready-made formula. Yet such programmatic divisions between critique and common sense have the effect of relegating ordinary language to a state of automatic servitude, while condescending to those unschooled in the patois of literary and critical theory. Perhaps it is time to reassess the dog-in-the-manger attitude of a certain style of academic argument—one that assigns to scholars the vantage point of the lucid and vigilant thinker, while refusing to extend this same capacity to those naïve and unreflecting souls of whom they speak.Critique comes from below. Politics and critique are often equated and conflated in literary studies and elsewhere. Critique is iconoclastic in spirit; it rails against authority; it seeks to lay bare the injustices of the law. It is, writes Foucault, the “art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (194). This vision of critique can be traced back to Marx and is cemented in the tradition of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. Critique conceives of itself as coming from below, or being situated at the margins; it is the natural ally of excluded groups and subjugated knowledges; it is not just a form of knowledge but a call to action. But who gets to claim the mantle of opposition, and on what grounds? In a well-known essay, Nancy Fraser remarks that critical theory possesses a “partisan though not uncritical identification” with oppositional social movements (97). As underscored by Fraser’s judicious insertion of the phrase “not uncritical,” critique guards its independence and reserves the right to query the actions and attitudes of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. Thus the intellectual’s affiliation with a larger community may collide with a commitment to the ethos of critique, as the object of a more heartfelt attachment. A separation occurs, as Francois Cusset puts it, “between academics questioning the very methods of questioning” and the more immediate concerns of the minority groups with which they are allied (157). One possible strategy for negotiating this tension is to flag one’s solidarity with a general principle of otherness or alterity—often identified with the utopian or disruptive energies of the literary text. This strategy gives critique a shot in the arm, infusing it with a dose of positive energy and ethical substance, yet without being pinned down to the ordinariness of a real-world referent. This deliberate vagueness permits critique to nurture its mistrust of the routines and practices through which the everyday business of the world is conducted, while remaining open to the possibility of a radically different future. Critique in its positive aspects thus remains effectively without content, gesturing toward a horizon that must remain unspecified if it is not to lapse into the same fallen state as the modes of thought that surround it (Fish 446).Critique does not tolerate rivals. Declaring itself uniquely equipped to diagnose the perils and pitfalls of representation, critique often chafes at the presence of other forms of thought. Ruling out the possibility of peaceful co-existence or even mutual indifference, it insists that those who do not embrace its tenets must be denying or disavowing them. In this manner, whatever is different from critique is turned into the photographic negative of critique—evidence of an irrefutable lack or culpable absence. To refuse to be critical is to be uncritical; a judgment whose overtones of naiveté, apathy, complacency, submissiveness, and sheer stupidity seem impossible to shrug off. In short, critique thinks of itself as exceptional. It is not one path, but the only conceivable path. Drew Milne pulls no punches in his programmatic riff on Kant: “to be postcritical is to be uncritical: the critical path alone remains open” (18).The exceptionalist aura of critique often thwarts attempts to get outside its orbit. Sociologist Michael Billig, for example, notes that critique thinks of itself as battling orthodoxy, yet is now the reigning orthodoxy—no longer oppositional, but obligatory, not defamiliarising, but oppressively familiar: “For an increasing number of younger academics,” he remarks, “the critical paradigm is the major paradigm in their academic world” (Billig 292). And in a hard-hitting argument, Talal Asad points out that critique is now a quasi-automatic stance for Western intellectuals, promoting a smugness of tone that can be cruelly dismissive of the deeply felt beliefs and attachments of others. Yet both scholars conclude their arguments by calling for a critique of critique, reinstating the very concept they have so meticulously dismantled. Critique, it seems, is not to be abandoned but intensified; critique is to be replaced by critique squared. The problem with critique, it turns out, is that it is not yet critical enough. The objections to critique are still very much part and parcel of the critique-world; the value of the critical is questioned only to be emphatically reinstated.Why do these protestations against critique end up worshipping at the altar of critique? Why does it seem so exceptionally difficult to conceive of other ways of arguing, reading, and thinking? We may be reminded of Eve Sedgwick’s comments on the mimetic aspect of critical interpretation: its remarkable ability to encourage imitation, repetition, and mimicry, thereby ensuring its own reproduction. It is an efficiently running form of intellectual machinery, modeling a style of thought that is immediately recognisable, widely applicable, and easily teachable. Casting the work of the scholar as a never-ending labour of distancing, deflating, and diagnosing, it rules out the possibility of a different relationship to one’s object. It seems to grow, as Sedgwick puts it, “like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131).In this context, a change in vocabulary—a redescription, if you will—may turn out to be therapeutic. It will come as no great surprise if I urge a second look at the hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur’s phrase, I suggest, can help guide us through the interpretative tangle of contemporary literary studies. It seizes on two crucial parts of critical argument—its sensibility and its interpretative method—that deserve more careful scrutiny. At the same time, it offers a much-needed antidote to the charisma of critique: the aura of ethical and political exemplarity that burnishes its negativity with a normative glow. Thanks to this halo effect, I’ve suggested, we are encouraged to assume that the only alternative to critique is a full-scale surrender to complacency, quietism, and—in literary studies—the intellectual fluff of aesthetic appreciation. Critique, moreover, presents itself as an essentially disembodied intellectual exercise, an austere, even abstemious practice of unsettling, unmaking, and undermining. Yet contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object. As Amanda Anderson has pointed out in The Way We Argue Now, literary and cultural theory is saturated with what rhetoricians call ethos—that is to say, imputations of motive, character, or attitude. We need only think of the insouciance associated with Rortyan pragmatism, the bad-boy iconoclasm embraced by some queer theorists, or the fastidious aestheticism that characterises a certain kind of deconstructive reading. Critical languages, in other words, are also orientations, encouraging readers to adopt an affectively tinged stance toward their object. Acknowledging the role of such orientations in critical debate does not invalidate its intellectual components, nor does it presume to peer into, or diagnose, an individual scholar’s state of mind.In a related essay, I scrutinise some of the qualities of a suspicious or critical reading practice: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact (215–34). Suspicion, in this sense, constitutes a muted affective state—a curiously non-emotional emotion of morally inflected mistrust—that overlaps with, and builds upon, the stance of detachment that characterises the stance of the professional or expert. That this style of reading proves so alluring has much to do with the gratifications and satisfactions that it offers. Beyond the usual political or philosophical justifications of critique, it also promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players. In this context, the claim that contemporary criticism has moved “beyond” hermeneutics should be treated with a grain of salt, given that, as Stanley Fish points out, “interpretation is the only game in town” (446). To be sure, some critics have backed away from the model of what they call “depth interpretation” associated with Marx and Freud, in which reading is conceived as an act of digging and the critic, like a valiant archaeologist, excavates a resistant terrain in order to retrieve the treasure of hidden meaning. In this model, the text is envisaged as possessing qualities of interiority, concealment, penetrability, and depth; it is an object to be plundered, a puzzle to be solved, a secret message to be deciphered. Instead, poststructuralist critics are drawn to the language of defamiliarising rather than discovery. The text is no longer composed of strata and the critic does not burrow down but stands back. Instead of brushing past surface meanings in pursuit of hidden truth, she dwells in ironic wonder on these surface meanings, seeking to “denaturalise” them through the mercilessness of her gaze. Insight, we might say, is achieved by distancing rather than by digging. Recent surveys of criticism often highlight the rift between these camps, underscoring the differences between the diligent seeker after buried truth and the surface-dwelling ironist. From a Ricoeur-inflected point of view, however, it is their shared investment in a particular ethos—a stance of knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance—that turns out to be more salient and more striking. Moreover, these approaches are variously engaged in the dance of interpretation, seeking to go beyond the backs of texts or fellow-actors in order to articulate non-obvious and often counter-intuitive truths. In the case of poststructuralism, we can speak of a second-order hermeneutics that is less interested in probing the individual object than the larger frameworks and conditions in which it is embedded. What the critic interprets is no longer a self-contained poem or novel, but a broader logic of discursive structures, reading formations, or power relations. Ricoeur’s phrase, moreover, has the singular advantage of allowing us to by-pass the exceptionalist tendencies of critique: its presumption that whatever is not critique can only be assigned to the ignominious state of the uncritical. As a less prejudicial term, it opens up a larger history of suspicious reading, including traditions of religious questioning and self-scrutiny that bear on current forms of interpretation, but that are occluded by the aggressively secular connotations of critique (Hunter). In this context, Ricoeur’s own account needs to be supplemented and modified to acknowledge this larger cultural history; the hermeneutics of suspicion is not just the brain-child of a few exceptional thinkers, as his argument implies, but a widespread practice of interpretation embedded in more mundane, diffuse and variegated forms of life (Felski 220).Finally, the idea of a suspicious hermeneutics does not invalidate or rule out other interpretative possibilities—ranging from Ricoeur’s own notion of a hermeneutics of trust to more recent coinages such as Sedgwick’s “restorative reading,” Sharon Marcus’s “just reading” or Timothy Bewes’s “generous reading.” Literary studies in France, for example, is currently experiencing a new surge of interest in hermeneutics (redefined as a practice of reinvention rather than exhumation) as well as a reinvigorated phenomenology of reading that elucidates, in rich and fascinating detail, its immersive and affective dimensions (see Citton; Macé). This growing interest in the ethos, aesthetics, and ethics of reading is long overdue. Such an orientation by no means rules out attention to the sociopolitical resonances of texts and their interpretations. It is, however, no longer willing to subordinate such attention to the seductive but sterile dichotomy of the critical versus the uncritical.ReferencesAnderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 20–63. Bewes, Timothy. “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Studies.” Differences 21.3 (2010): 1–33.Billig, Michael. “Towards a Critique of the Critical.” Discourse and Society 11.3 (2000): 291–92. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.Bove, Paul. Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Butler, Judith. “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 101–136.Citton, Yves. Lire, interpréter, actualiser: pourqoi les études littéraires? Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007. Culler, Jonathan and Kevin Lamb, “Introduction.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 1–14. Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.Dascal, Marcelo. “Critique without Critics?” Science in Context 10.1 (1997): 39–62.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” The Political. Ed. David Ingram. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 191–211. Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. London: Continuum, 2004. vii–xxxv. Koch, Robert. “The Critical Gesture in Philosophy.” Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. 524–36. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.Macé, Marielle. Facons de lire, manières d’être. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Milne, Drew. “Introduction: Criticism and/or Critique.” Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 1–22. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Ruitenberg, Claudia. “Don’t Fence Me In: The Liberation of Undomesticated Critique.” Journal of the Philosophy of Education 38.3 (2004): 314–50. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 123–52. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Trans. David Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Perhaps the supreme quality of print is one that is lost on us, since it has so casual and obvious an existence (McLuhan 160). Print Machine (Thad Donovan, 1995) In the introduction to his book on 9/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek uses an analogy of letter writing to emphasize the contingency of post-9/11 reality. In the example, Zizek discusses the efforts of writers to escape the eyes of governmental censors and a system that used blue ink to indicate a message was true, red ink to indicate it was false. The story ends with an individual receiving a letter from the censored country stating that the writer could not find any red ink. The ambiguity and the duplicity of writing, suggested in Zizek’s tale of colored inks, is a condition of the contemporary world, even if we are unaware of it. We exist in an age in which print—the economization of writing—has an increasingly significant and precarious role in our lives. We turn to the Internet chat room for textual interventions in our sexual, political and aesthetic lives. We burn satanic Harry Potter books and issue fatwas against writers like Salman Rushdie. We narrate our lives using pictures, fonts of varying typeface and color, and sound on our personalized homepages. We throw out our printed books and buy audio ones so we can listen to our favorite authors in the car. We place trust of our life savings, personal numbers, and digital identity in the hands of unseen individuals behind computer screens. Decisively, we are a print people, but our very nature of being dependent on the technologies of print in our public and private lives leads to our inability to consider the epistemological, social and existential effects of print on us. In this article, I focus on the current manifestations of print—what I call “newprint”—including their relationships to consumerism, identity formation and the politics of the state. I will then consider the democratic possibilities of print, suggested by the personalization of print through the Internet and home publishing, and conclude with the implications of the end of print that include the possibility of a post-print language and the middle voice. In order to understand the significance of our current print culture, it is important to situate print in the context of the history of communication. In earlier times, writing had magical associations (Harris 10), and commonly these underpinnings led to the stratification of communities. Writing functioned as a type of black box, “the mysterious technology by which any message [could] be concealed from its illiterate bearer” (Harris 16). Plato and Socrates warned against the negative effects of writing on the mind, including the erosion of memory (Ong 81). Though it once supplemented the communicational bases of orality, the written word soon supplanted it and created a dramatic existential shift in people—a separation of “the knower from the known” (Ong 43-44). As writing moved from the inconvenience of illuminated manuscripts and hand-copied texts, it became systemized in Gutenberg print, and writing then took on the signature of the state—messages between people were codified in the technology of print. With the advent of computer technologies in the 1990s, including personal computers, word processing programs, printers, and the Internet, the age of newprint begins. Newprint includes the electronic language of the Internet and other examples of the public alphabet, including billboards, signage and the language of advertising. As much as members of consumer society are led to believe that newprint is the harbinger of positive identity construction and individualism, closer analysis of the mechanisms of newprint leads to a different conclusion. An important context of new print is found in the space of the home computer. The home computer is the workstation of the contemporary discursive culture—people send and receive emails, do their shopping on the Internet, meet friends and even spouses through dating services, conceal their identity on MUDs and MOOs, and produce state-of-the-art publishing projects, even books. The ubiquity of print in the space of the personal computer leads to the vital illusion that this newprint is emancipatory. Some theorists have argued that the Internet exhibits the spirit of communicative action addressed by Juergen Habermas, but such thinkers have neglected the fact that the foundations of newprint, just like those of Gutenberg print, are the state and the corporation. Recent advertising of Hewlett-Packard and other computer companies illustrates this point. One advertisement suggested that consumers could “invent themselves” through HP computer and printer technology: by using the varied media available to them, consumers can make everything from personalized greeting cards to full-fledged books. As Friedrich Kittler illustrates, we should resist the urge to separate the practices of writing from the technologies of their production, what Jay David Bolter (41) denotes as the “writing space”. For as much as we long for new means of democratic and individualistic expression, we should not succumb to the urge to accept newprint because of its immediacy, novelty or efficiency. Doing so will relegate us to a mechanistic existence, what is referenced metaphorically in Thad Donovan’s “print machine.” In multiple contexts, newprint extends the corporate state’s propaganda industry by turning the written word into artifice. Even before newprint, the individual was confronted with the hegemony of writing. Writing creates “context-free language” or “autonomous discourse,” which means an individual cannot directly confront the language or speaker as one could in oral cultures (Ong 78). This further division of the individual from the communicational world is emphasized in newprint’s focus on the aesthetics of the typeface. In word processing programs like Microsoft Word, and specialized ones like TwistType, the consumer can take a word or a sentence and transform it into an aesthetic formation. On the word processing program that is producing this text, I can choose from Blinking Background, Las Vegas Lights, Marching Red or Black Ants, Shimmer, and Sparkle Text. On my campus email system I am confronted with pictorial backgrounds, font selection and animation as an intimate aspect of the communicational system of my college. On my cell phone I can receive text messages, and I can choose to use emoticons (iconic characters and messages) on the Internet. As Walter Ong wrote, “print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did … control of position is everything in print” (Ong 121). In the case of the new culture of print, the control over more functions of the printed page, specifically its presentation, leads some consumers to believe that choice and individuality are the outcomes. Newprint does not free the writer from the constraints imposed by the means of traditional print—the printing press—rather, it furthers them as the individual operates by the logos of a predetermined and programmed electronic print. The capacity to spell and write grammatically correct sentences is abated by the availability of spell- and grammar-checking functions in word processing software. In many ways, the aura of writing is lost in newprint in the same way in which art lost its organic nature as it moved into the age of reproducibility (Benjamin). Just as filters in imaging programs like Photoshop reduce the aesthetic functions of the user to the determinations of the software programmer, the use of automated print technologies—whether spell-checking or fanciful page layout software like QuarkXpress or Page Maker—will further dilute the voice of the writer. Additionally, the new forms of print can lead to a fracturing of community, the opposite intent of Habermas’ communicative action. An example is the recent growth of specialized languages on the Internet. Some of the newer forms of such languages use combinations of alphanumeric characters to create a language that can only be read by those with the code. As Internet print becomes more specialized, a tribal effect may be felt within our communities. Since email began a few years ago, I have noticed that the nature of the emails I receive has been dramatically altered. Today’s emails tend to be short and commonly include short hands (“LOL” = “laugh out loud”), including the elimination of capitalization and punctuation. In surveying students on the reasons behind such alterations of language in email, I am told that these short hands allow for more efficient forms of communication. In my mind, this is the key issue that is at stake in both print and newprint culture—for as long as we rely on print and other communicational systems as a form of efficiency, we are doomed to send and receive inaccurate and potentially dangerous messages. Benedict Anderson and Hannah Arendt addressed the connections of print to nationalistic and fascist urges (Anderson; Arendt), and such tendencies are seen in the post-9/11 discursive formations within the United States. Bumper stickers and Presidential addresses conveyed the same simplistic printed messages: “Either You are with Us or You are with the Terrorists.” Whether dropping leaflets from airplanes or in scrolling text messages on the bottom of the television news screen, the state is dependent on the efficiency of print to maintain control of the citizen. A feature of this efficiency is that newprint be rhetorically immediate in its results, widely available in different forms of technology, and dominated by the notion of individuality and democracy that is envisioned in HP’s “invent yourself” advertsiements. As Marshall McLuhan’s epigram suggests, we have an ambiguous relationship to print. We depend on printed language in our daily lives, for education and for the economic transactions that underpin our consumer world, yet we are unable to confront the rhetoric of the state and mass media that are consequences of the immediacy and magic of both print and new print. Print extends the domination of our consciousness by forms of discourse that privilege representation over experience and the subject over the object. As we look to new means of communicating with one another and of expressing our intimate lives, we must consider altering the discursive foundations of our communication, such as looking to the middle voice. The middle voice erases the distinctions between subjects and objects and instead emphasizes the writer being in the midst of things, as a part of the world as opposed to dominating it (Barthes; Tyler). A few months prior to writing this article, I spent the fall quarter teaching in London. One day I received an email that changed my life. My partner of nearly six years announced that she was leaving me. I was gripped with the fact of my being unable to discuss the situation with her as we were thousands of miles apart and I struggled to understand how such a significant and personal circumstance could be communicated with the printed word of email. Welcome to new print! References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1976. Barthes, Roland. “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. 134-56. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2002. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Harris, Roy. The Origin of Writing. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1991. Tyler, Stephen A. “The Middle Voice: The Influence of Post-Modernism on Empirical Research in Anthropology.” Post-modernism and Anthropology. Eds. K. Geuijen, D. Raven, and J. de Wolf. Assen, The Neatherlands: Van Gorcum, 1995. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lukas, Scott A. "Nevermoreprint." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>. APA Style Lukas, S. (Jun. 2005) "Nevermoreprint," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>.

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. 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IntroductionAs a visual artist it seems to me that the ideal relationship between government and cultural producers is a coalitional one; an “alliance for combined action of distinct parties, persons or states without permanent incorporation into one body” (Oxford English Dictionary). The word “coalition”, however, is entirely absent from the document that forms the basis of the analysis of this paper, Creating Value: An Arts and Culture Sector Policy Framework 2010-2014, from the Government of Western Australia’s Department of Culture and the Arts. Released in March 2010, Creating Value has been introduced by the DCA’s Deputy Director General Jacqui Allen as the “first arts policy in Australia to adopt a public value approach” (DCA, New Policy Framework) whereby "the Department of Culture and the Arts is charged with delivering public value to the Western Australian community through our partnership with the culture and arts sector." As indicated in Allen’s press release, this document achieves its aim of providing “clarity in [the DCA’s] relationships with the culture and arts sector”. As an artist, cultural worker, or someone generally interested in the cultural wellbeing of Australian communities it would seem timely to consider just how this new and influential policy framework envisages the specific working relationships that make up the “partnerships across the culture and arts sector, government, the public and private sector” (DCA, Creating Value 2).In this brief paper it is my intention to interrogate the idea of “coalition” in relation to the evidence provided in the DCA’s Policy Framework, Creating Value, in order to examine the extent to which this State’s involvement in culture and arts may indeed be considered coalitional. In approaching the notion of the coalitional I take the position that there are two key elements to this idea, the first being the notion of an “alliance for combined action” and the second being that the distinct parties involved are not incorporated into one body. What is difficult, at this intersection between the strategic advances of governance and the more organic development of culture, is to distinguish between levels at which the interests of both parties in a coalition or partnership are served by the alliance. As I will argue later in this paper, there is an important distinction to be made between working under temporary contract to specifications (in which one party’s design is realised through a primarily economic exchange with those providing the requisite goods and services) and the kind of negotiated relationship between means and ends that is required to support the genuine development of culture. The question is whether the artist (or other cultural producer), receiving funding to produce cultural work according to “public value” criteria, is able to develop culture or merely able to reproduce an understanding of culture given by the funding brief and assessment panel? It seems to me that significant cultural development is only possible where the public value of the outcomes of cultural production is subject to continuous negotiation and debate – surely it is in the coalitional outcomes (the alliance of distinct parties for combined action) of such discussion that a meaningful identification with culture occurs?In the following discussion around Creating Value my approach is to focus upon some aspects of the policy framework that provide particular evidence of the kind of “combined action” of government and the culture and arts sector that the DCA is proposing in this document. When seen against a more cultural understanding of the “action” of making art and the dynamic processes of producing and identifying with culture, it becomes clear why it may be considered that the DCA and many Western Australian cultural producers may not be engaged in the same project at all, let alone be in effective partnership or coalition.“Public Value” and the Specifications of Cultural ProductionEliseo Vivas observes that in the process of creatively applying symbolic order and understanding to the physical world, humanity acquires culture and an ability to better exploit the world. He also notes that in this process “of constituting the world, [human-kind’s] merely physiological needs are complicated by new needs” (129); new systems of cultural values that assume no less importance in human activity than our more basic bodily needs. Vivas pertinently states, however, that more often than not in human society within a complex and existing symbolic order these cultural needs simply become an aspect of our practical functioning (an extension of survival), and we tend to inhibit our capacity to constitute the world through creative and symbolic endeavours. This depiction of cultural production as an activity that is constitutive of the world is particularly significant in relation to the DCA’s Creating Value. Despite noting that “it is through creative people that we better understand our world” (DCA, Creating Value 8), which echoes with Vivas’s contention that “the poet is needed to give the practical man his stage” (Vivas 129) the policy framework seems rather to exemplify the inhibiting of culturally constitutive activities (production) in favour of “practical functioning” (reproduction).What can be observed particularly well in the DCA’s policy framework is how effectively ideas associated with creative and cultural production have been co-opted to the cause of “practical functioning”. Looking for instance at the notion of “creativity” within Creating Value we discover that “creativity is the driving force of the arts and culture sector” (DCA, Creating Value 5) and that “creativity” is one of the “priority public value principles” for the policy framework, along with “engagement”. Reading more closely one understands that creativity is seen as producing the “distinctive” and the “unique”, a brand that is recognised as Western Australian and which, through such “recognition” and “significance” and through its “enriching” and “transforming” capacities (7), is seen to “add to a sense of place and belonging” (11) for the WA community. This in turn makes WA a “better place to live, work and visit” and ultimately delivers “economic and social outcomes that encourage and support growth” (2). The DCA’s strategies appear to have little to do with a dynamic conception of culture in which new worlds and systems of values may be constituted, but is focussed upon the optimisation and rationalisation of economic outcomes under the guise of “public value”.My contention is that, as difficult as the notion may be to entertain, a department of culture and the arts ought to understand that creative and cultural production are part of a dynamic system that continually engages in a process of tentatively constituting the world. The arts and culture sector undeniably has an important role to play in the formation of and identification with a national cultural identity, which can manifest in international prestige, tourist dollars and other forms of economic growth (Abbing 246; Chaney 166-67). Western Australian culture is not, however, as the DCA seems to perceive, a static and monumental edifice that acts as a singular landmark for Western Australia in local, national and international contexts. The DCA’s arts and culture policy framework talks of its strategies “reflecting the DCA’s vision, values and strategic objectives” (DCA, Creating Value 13) and in a number of places suggests that it will “respond to changing needs” (2, 5, 8). Surely an approach that was interested in the specific value that creative and cultural production has to offer to the community would recognise that it is not in a singular vision but in the world creatively renegotiated and reconstituted by different people and groups of people that such a value and identification is to be found? Furthermore, if Vivas is right, then the support and promotion of culture ought to be as much about cultural needs not yet anticipated, for cultural products whose significance is not currently recognised, as it is about being responsive and catering to the demands of those whom the DCA identifies as the present consumers and stake-holders in WA arts and culture. What is missing from the partnership, as conceived by the DCA between itself and the culture and arts sector, is an adequate mechanism by which “public value” is recognised as a system of constantly changing values in which the culture and arts sector play an important role in developing, extending and negotiating through their creative and cultural production.As Jürgen Habermas suggests, to approach culture strategically in terms of outcomes and deployment is to compromise the internal development that actually provides arts and cultural work with its meaning and significance (Habermas 71). Culture becomes not a distinctive composite of differing and changing world views linked by the “living” process of their “nature-like” coexistence and development, but a monolithic identity or brand with representative products (no matter how diverse those products may be).This policy framework document would suggest not a coalitional “alliance for combined action” but more accurately a process of putting the various strategic goals and cultural aspirations (with “public value” specifications) of the DCA up for tender in much the same way that another Government department might seek tenders for the construction of a bridge or building. It is perhaps telling that Creating Value is described as a “road map to help the Department achieve its vision” (DCA, Creating Value 2).“Engagement” and the Use Value of FreedomCreating Value states that “there is a complex relationship between creativity and engagement, which are the principles driving the delivery of public value outcomes” (DCA, Creating Value 5). The policy framework goes on to suggest that the conception of “engagement” that informs the document is geared towards notions of participation, access and interaction in response to the demands of society for “more than passive enjoyment of cultural experiences” (5). Ultimately, as the “Framework Measurements” (15) in Creating Value suggest, the public values associated with engagement are about quantifying access and participation in arts and culture, and polling audiences and the public regarding “their satisfaction with their level of engagement” (15). I have been arguing that the public value of creative and cultural production is the result of engagement, but I do not think that it follows that the cultural value of such engagement can be assumed to be the correlative of high attendance numbers or measures that indicate a high level of consumer satisfaction. Nor can one assume that the “impact” or “reach” of a cultural or creative experience can be assessed adequately while the box office is open and the door counter is operational, let alone prior to a project being granted funding.Some of the genuine complexity in the relationship between creativity and engagement and its bearing upon public value can be seen in George Steiner’s writing on the nature of “creation”. Steiner suggests on the one hand that the act of creation is “irresponsible” (Steiner 43); that the work of artists occurs at one remove from world of material consequence. On the other hand Steiner notes that external resistance to artistic production has the effect of reinforcing the necessity and significance of artists’ work, freeing them from “justifying [art’s] vital functions and dignifying its motivations” (189). In this understanding of the value of creativity, it seems to me, there is a delicate balance to be struck between “freedom” and “consequence” in artistic and cultural production. The cultural producer is most able to constitute the world in new or innovative ways when he/she is able to work irresponsibly, however, such culturally constitutive actions are most significant and valuable when access to a freedom sought is denied or challenged and the motivations and mores of our cultural institutions are brought under question.Herbert Marcuse wrote in One Dimensional Man that the high culture of the past, “free from socially necessary labour,” was “the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave” (Marcuse 71) but he also suggests that in advanced technological societies such as our own, the “good life” of administered society “reduces the use-value of freedom” (49). Marcuse claims that the achievements of rational society have transcended those of the “culture heroes and half-gods” (56) and, given that rational society appears to be steadily advancing towards the best of all possible worlds (or at least the best of the existing alternatives), the inclination to “hope” and to look beyond our own world and for other means of advance has been lost. Here again there is a sense in which the creative activities of culturally constituting the world have lost significant ground to the administrative concerns of “practical functioning”. What is interesting, however, is that it is possible to see the residual traces of the importance of the concept of “freedom”, however illusory, to the notion of the public value of creative and cultural production, even in Creating Value.In Creating Value, the valuable conception of “freedom” occurs obliquely in the insistence that the policy framework supports and encourages artistic risk taking (DCA, Creating Value 5, 8). A closer examination of Creating Value and the DCA’s Arts Grants Handbook 2010 reveals that “artistic risk” (DCA, Arts Grants 17) is understood as a strength in a proposal that is indicative of artistic merit and quality, and quality, understood in the public value terms of the policy framework, is measured by “the distinctive, innovative and significant elements of the creative experience” (DCA, Creating Value 15). The value of risk-taking in the pursuit of innovation is a recurring theme of some of the literature concerning the creative industries over the past decade. Concepts such as the “no-collar workplace” (Florida) and the “artscience lab” (Edwards) have the appearance of promoting a relatively unfettered space apart in which creativity is unhindered by practical obstacles and institutional barriers. However, the concept becomes problematic as soon as there is an expectation that such a space apart will be “productive” in an economic or any other existing sense. Steiner’s notion of “irresponsible” creation, importantly suggests a creativity that defines its own productivity, in which the consequences of artistic or cultural production are contained within the context of the creative space apart. The greatest risk in a creative project is at the point of engagement, where it is met by consequence, where the public value of the work becomes available for negotiation and debate. The process required in applying for a DCA grant is actually a process of modelling, anticipating and containing the risks associated with artistic or cultural production. The conspicuous absence of genuine consequence in this schema suggests that the DCA seeks to manage the “engagement” to produce its own series of desired outcomes. Yet active control of the relationship between funding organisation and the funded artists may inhibit the production of arts and culture. What is required instead is a coalition of interests and aspirations that has the potential to produce (rather than merely reproduce) culture. In such a circumstance the coalitional relationship will be one where meaning, significance and identification are established in a negotiation between diverse entities and interests. In a realm of cultural values the capacity for these “combined actions” to be meaningful and significant (to possess genuine public value) seems to be compromised by the dominance of the authoritative vision of the Department. ConclusionThe coalitional premise that underpins this paper is predicated on the notion that the “combined action” that is the motivation for the partnership between the Department of Culture and the Arts and the culture and arts sector is to enrich the Western Australian community through “unique and transforming culture and arts experiences” (DCA, Creating Value 1), as stated in the DCA’s strategic charter. What my brief engagement with the DCA’s 2010 policy framework, Creating Value, suggests, however, is that the DCA’s vision is not conceived in terms of the coalitional development of culture, in which culture is acknowledged as a collective work in progress, but rather as a strategic project with instrumental aims. The concept of “public value” that is at the core of Creating Value is not ultimately the product of, or productive of, an ongoing discourse or debate into which cultural producers contribute their various creative outputs. Instead it is presented as a static set of assessment criteria designed to channel creativity into economic growth and to contain the risks associated with cultural production. The ideal of the “coalitional” should inform the concept of public value, as the ongoing work of “combined action” in which creative and cultural producers (through their production), Government (through venues and funding) and the public (through attendance and participation) are engaged in a dialogue whose outcomes provide an indication of public value in a dynamic cultural sphere.George Walden writes:Democratic peoples must be more creative than non-democratic ones, if only because the idea that the opposite might be the case is intolerable. Whatever the merits of the contention that repressive or authoritarian regimes have produced the finest literature or most brilliant artistic movements, it would be a bold politician who took the next logical step in the argument… Like health care or education, art is a public good, a commodity whose provision must be officially guaranteed and overseen. (Walden qtd. in Timms 68)Artistic and cultural freedom, according to this observation, is not actually a freedom at all, but rather a political imperative for welfare states such as ours, which in turn makes the support for creative and cultural production a “socially necessary labour”, that performs instrumental and political functions (Timms 68; Abbing 239) that are at least as important as the cultural wellbeing that seems to be promoted. In contrast Pierre Bourdieu suggests that ultimately the state is the “official guarantor” of “everything that pertains to the universal – that is, to the general interest” (Bourdieu & Haacke 72). If culture is to maintain a critical perspective, he argues, “we should expect (and even demand) from the state the instruments of freedom from economic and political powers – that is from the state itself” (71). Somewhere between “socially necessary labour” and “critical distance”, Charles Esche posits the idea of an “engaged autonomy” for creative and cultural projects operating unavoidably within the economic hegemony of capitalism, whereby they work in “tolerated cultural enclosure called ‘art’, able to act according to different rules,” but “still totally inside the system” (Esche 11). Or perhaps, as Tony Moore suggests:A new cultural renaissance will not be built by bureaucrats subsidising elitism or “picking winners”… but by entrepreneurs and public institutions bold enough to harness the diverse creative energy in the community from suburban garages to inner city garrets. (Moore 122)Ultimately the issue of state interests, support and patronage for the arts is the same balancing act between creativity and engagement, or freedom and consequence, that I introduced referencing Steiner earlier in the paper. The point is, however, that creative irresponsibility brought into an effective engagement ought to lead to a negotiation that allows for the dynamic processes of culture to develop around a debate on public value. Creative and cultural producers should be amongst the coalitional co-creators of contemporary Western Australian culture rather than the contractors brought in to make the DCA’s vision of culture a reality.References Abbing, Hans. Why Are Artists Poor?: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2008.Bourdieu, Pierre, and Hans Haacke. Free Exchange. Trans. Johnson, Randal and Hans Haacke. Cambridge: Polity P, 1995.Chaney, David. “Cosmopolitan Art and Cultural Citizenship.” Theory, Culture & Society 19.1-2 (2002): 157-74.Department of Culture and the Arts (DCA). Arts Grants Handbook 2010. Government of Western Australia, 2010.———. Creating Value: An Arts and Culture Sector Policy Framework, 2010-2014. Government of Western Australia, 2010.———. New Policy Framework Creates Value for WA Artists. 2010. ‹http://www.dca.wa.gov.au/news/stories/front_page_items/new_policy_framework_creates_value_for_wa_artists>.Edwards, David. Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008.Esche, Charles. “The Possibility Forum – Institutional Change and Modest Proposals.” Artlink 22.4 (2002): 11-13.Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis, Trans. McCarthy, Thomas. Boston: Beacon P, 1975.Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.Moore, Tony. “The Art of Risk in an Age of Anxiety or in Praise of the Long Lunch.” Making Meaning, Making Money: Directions for the Arts and Cultural Industries in the Creative Age. Eds. Lisa Anderson and Kate Oakley. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 111-125.Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.Timms, Peter. What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art? Sydney: UNSWP, 2004.Vivas, Eliseo. “What Is a Poem?” Creation and Discovery: Essays in Criticism and Aesthetics. Gateway Editions, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954. 111-41.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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Introduction Curation-related discourses have become widespread. The growing public profile of curators, the emergence of new curation-related discourses and their proliferation beyond the confines of museums, particularly on social media, have led some to conclude that we now live in an age of curation (Buskirk cited in Synder). Curation is commonly understood in instrumentalist terms as the evaluation, selection and presentation of artefacts around a central theme or motif (see O’Neill; Synder). However, there is a growing academic interest in what underlies the shifting discourses and practices. Many are asking what do these changes mean (Martinon) now that “the curatorial turn” has positioned curation as a legitimate object of academic study (O’Neill). This article locates an exploration of the curatorial turn in journalism studies since 2010 within the shifting meanings of curation from antiquity to the digital age. It argues that the industry is facing a Foucauldian moment where the changing political economy of news and the proliferation of user-generated content on social media have disrupted the monopolies traditional news media held over the circulation of knowledge of current affairs and the power this gave them to shape public debate. The disruptions are profound, prompting a rethinking of journalism (Peters and Broersma; Schudson). However, debates have polarised between those who view news curation as symptomatic of the demise of journalism and others who see it as part of a wider revival of the profession, freed from monopolistic institutions to circulate a wider array of knowledge and viewpoints (see Picard). This article eschews such polarisations and instead draws on Robert Picard’s argument that journalism is in transition and that journalism, as a set of professional practices, is adapting to the age of curation but that those traditional news providers that fail to adapt will most likely decline. However, Picard’s approach does not address the definitional problem as to what distinguishes news curating from other journalistic practices when the commonly used instrumental definition can apply to editing. This article aims to negotiate this problem by addressing some of the conceptual ambiguities that arise from wholly instrumental notions of news curation. From “Cura” to the Curatorial Turn and the Age of Curation Modern instrumentalist definitions are necessary but not sufficient for an exploration of the curatorial turn in journalism. Tracing the meanings of curation over time facilitates an expansion of the instrumental to include metaphoric conceptualisations. The term originated in a Latin allegory about a mythological figure, personified as the “cura”, translated literally as care or concern, and who created human beings from the clay of the earth. Having created the human, the cura was charged by the gods with the lifelong care of the human (Reich) and at the same time became a symbol of curiosity and creativity (see Nowotny). “Curators” first emerged in Imperial Rome to denote a public officer charged with maintaining order and the emperor’s finances (Nowotny) but by the fourteenth century the meaning had shifted to that of religious officer charged with the care of souls (Gaskill). At this point the metaphorical associations of creativity and curiosity subsided. Six hundred years later souls had been replaced by artefacts valorised because of their contribution to human knowledge or as a testament to exceptional human creativity (Nowotny). Objects of curiosity and originality, as well as their creators, were reified and curation became the specialist practice of an expert custodian charged with the care and preservation of artefacts but relegated to the background to collect, evaluate and archive artefacts entrusted to the care of museums and to be preserved for future generations. Instrumentalist meanings thus dominated. From the 1960s discourses shifted again from the privileging of a “producer who actually creates the object in its materiality” to an entire set of actors (Bourdieu 261). These shifts were part of the changing political economy of museums, the growing prevalence of exhibitions and the emergence of mega-exhibitions hosted in global cities and capable of attracting massive audiences (see O’Neill). The curator was no longer seen merely as a custodian but able to add cultural value to artefacts when drawing individual items together into a collection, interpreting their relevance to a theme then re-presenting them through a story or visuals (see O’Neill). The verb “to curate”, which had first entered the English lexicon in the early 1900s but was used sporadically (Synder), proliferated from the 1960s in museum studies (Farquharson cited in O’Neill) as mega-exhibitions attracted publicity and the higher profile of curators attracted the attention of intellectuals prompting a curatorial turn in museum studies. The curatorial turn in museum studies from the 1980s marks the emergence of curation as a legitimate object of academic enquiry. O’Neill identified a “Foucauldian moment” in museum studies where shifting discourses signified challenges to, and disruptions of, traditional forms of knowledge-based power. Curation was no longer seen as a neutral activity of preservation, but one located within a contested political economy and invested with contradictions and complexities. Philosophers such as Martinon and Nowotny have highlighted the impossibility of separating the oversight of valuable artefacts from the processes by which these are selected, valorised and signified and what, at times, has been the controversial appropriation of creative outputs. Thus, a new critical approach emerged. Recently, curating-related discourses have expanded beyond the “rarefied” world of museum studies (Synder). Social media platforms have facilitated the proliferation of user-generated content offering a vast array of new artefacts. Information circulates widely and new discourses can challenge traditional bases of knowledge. Audiences now actively search for new material driven in part by curiosity and a growing distrust of the professions and establishments (see Holmberg). The boundaries between professionals and lay people are blurring and, some argue, knowledge is being democratized (see Ibrahim; Holmberg). However, as new information becomes voluminous, alternative truths, misinformation and false information compete for attention and there is a growing demand for the verification, selection and presentation of artefacts, that is online curation (Picard; Bakker). Thus, the appropriation of social media is disrupting traditional power relations but also offering new opportunities for new information-related practices. Journalism is facing its own Foucauldian moment. A Foucauldian Moment in Journalism Studies Journalism has been traditionally understood as capturing today’s happenings, verifying the facts of an event, then presenting these as a narrative that reporters update as news unfolds. News has been seen as the preserve of professionals trained to interview eyewitnesses or experts, to verify facts and to compile what they found into a compelling narrative (Hallin and Mancini). News-gathering was typically the work of an individual tasked with collecting stand-alone stories then passing them onto editors to evaluate, select, prioritise and collate these into a collection that formed a newspaper or news programme . This understanding of journalism emerged from the 1830s along with a type of news that was accessible, that large numbers of people wanted to read and that, consequently, attracted advertising making news profitable (Park). The idea that presumed trained journalists were best placed to produce news appeared first in the UK and USA then spread worldwide (Hallin and Mancini). At the same time as there was growing demand for news, space constraints restricted how much could be published and the high costs of production served as a barrier to entry first in print then later in broadcast media (Picard; Curran and Seaton). The large news organisations that employed these professionals were thus able to control the circulation of information and knowledge they generated and the editors that selected content were able, in part, to shape public debates (Picard; Habermas). Social media challenge the control traditional media have had over the production and dissemination of news since the mid-1800s. Practically every major global news story in 2010 and 2011 from natural disasters to uprisings was broken by ordinary people on social media (Bruns and Highfield). Twitter facilitates a steady stream of updates at an almost real-time speed that 24-hour news channels cannot match. Facebook, Instagram and blogs add commentary, context, visuals and personal stories to breaking news. Experts and official sources routinely post announcements on social media platforms enabling anyone to access much of the same source material that previously was the preserve of reporters. Investigations by bloggers have exposed abuses of power by companies and governments that journalists on traditional media have failed to (Wischnowski). Audiences and advertisers are migrating away from traditional newspapers to a range of different online platforms. News consumers now actively use search engines to find available information of interest and look for efficient ways of sifting through the proliferation of the useful and the dubious, the revelatory and the misleading or inaccurate (see Picard). That is, news organisations and the professional journalists they employ are increasingly operating in a hyper-competitive (see Picard) and hyper-sceptical environment. This paper posits that cumulatively these are disrupting the control news organisations have and journalism is facing a Foucauldian moment when shifting discourses signify a disturbance of the intellectual rules that shape who and what knowledge of news is produced and hence the power relations they sustain. Social media not only challenge the core news business of reporting, they also present new opportunities. Some traditional organisations have responded by adding new activities to their repertoire of practices. In 2011, the Guardian uploaded its entire database of the expense claims of British MPs onto its Website and invited readers to select, evaluate and comment on entries, a form of crowd-sourced curating. Andy Carvin, while at National Public Radio (NPR) built an international reputation from his curation of breaking news, opinion and commentary on Twitter as Syria became too dangerous for foreign correspondents to enter. New types of press agencies such as Storyful have emerged around a curatorial business model that aggregates information culled from social media and uses journalists to evaluate and repackage them as news stories that are sold onto traditional news media around the world (Guerrini). Research into the growing market for such skills in the Netherlands found more advertisements for “news curators” than for “traditional reporters” (Bakker). At the same time, organic and spontaneous curation can emerge out of Twitter and Facebook communities that is capable of challenging news reporting by traditional media (Lewis and Westlund). Curation has become a common refrain attracting the attention of academics. A Curatorial Turn in Journalism The curatorial turn in journalism studies is manifest in the growing academic attention to curation-related discourses and practices. A review of four academic journals in the field, Journalism, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, and Digital Journalism found the first mention of journalism and curation emerged in 2010 with references in nearly 40 articles by July 2015. The meta-analysis that follows draws on this corpus. The consensus is that traditional business models based on mass circulation and advertising are failing partly because of the proliferation of alternative sources of information and the migration of readers in search of it. While some of this alternative content is credible, much is dubious and the sheer volume of information makes it difficult to discern what to believe. It is unsurprising, then, that there is a growing demand for “new types and practices of curation and information vetting” that attest to “the veracity and accuracy of content” particularly of news (Picard 280). However, academics disagree on whether new information practices such as curation are replacing or supplementing traditional newsgathering. Some look for evidence of displacement in the expansion of job advertisements for news curators relative to those for traditional reporters (Bakker). Others look at how new and traditional practices co-exist in organisations like the BBC, Guardian and NPR, sometimes clashing and sometimes collaborating in the co-creation of content (McQuail cited in Fahy and Nisbet; Hermida and Thurman). The debate has polarised between whether these changes signify the “twilight years of journalism or a new dawn” (Picard). Optimists view the proliferation of alternative sources of information as breaking the control traditional organisations held over news production, exposing their ideological biases and disrupting their traditional knowledge-based power and practices (see Hermida; Siapera, Papadopoulou, and Archontakis; Compton and Benedetti). Others have focused on the loss of “traditional” permanent journalistic jobs (see Schwalbe, Silcock, and Candello; Spaulding) with the implication that traditional forms of professional practice are in demise. Picard rejects this polarisation, counter-arguing that much analysis implicitly conflates journalism as a practice with the news organisations that have traditionally hosted it. Journalists may or may not be located within a traditional media organisation and social media is offering numerous opportunities for them to operate independently and for new types of hybrid practices and organisations such as Storyful to emerge outside of traditional operations. Picard argues that making the most of the opportunities social media presents is revitalising the profession offering a new dawn but that those traditional organisations that fail to adapt to the new media landscape and new practices are in their twilight years and likely to decline. These divergences, he argues, highlight a profession and industry in transition from an old order to a new one (Picard). This notion of journalism in transition usefully negotiates confusion over what curation in the social media age means for news providers but it does not address the uncertainty as to where it sits in relation to journalism. Futuristic accounts predict that journalists will become “managers of content rather than simply sourcing one story next to another” and that roles will shift from reporting to curation (Montgomery cited in Bakker; see Fahy and Nisbet). Others insist curators are not journalists but “information workers” or “gatecheckers” (McQuail 2013 cited in Bakker; Schwalbe, Silcock, and Candello) thereby differentiating the professional from the manual worker and reinforcing the historic elitism of the professions by implying curation is a lesser practice. However, such demarcation is problematic in that arguably both journalist and news curator can be seen as information workers and the instrumental definition outlined at the beginning of this article is as relevant to curation as it is to news editing. It is therefore necessary to revisit commonly used definitions (see Bakker; Guerrini; Synder). The literature broadly defines content creation, including news reporting, as the generation of original content that is distinguishable from aggregation and curation, both of which entail working with existing material. News aggregation is the automated use of computer algorithms to find and collect existing content relevant to a specified subject followed by the generation of a list or image gallery (Bakker; Synder). While aggregators may help with the collection component of news curation, the practices differ in their relation to technology. Apart from the upfront human design of the original algorithm, aggregation is wholly machine-driven while modern news curation adds human intervention to the technological processes of aggregation (Bakker). This intervention is conscious rather than automated, active rather than passive. It brings to bear human knowledge, expertise and interpretation to verify and evaluate content, filter and select artefacts based on their perceived quality and relevance for a particular topic or theme then re-present them in an accessible form as a narrative or infographics or both. While it does not involve the generation of original news content in the way news reporting does, curation is more than the collation of information. It can also involve the re-presenting of it in imaginative ways, the re-formulating of existing content in new configurations. In this sense, curation can constitute a form of creativity increasingly common in the social media age, that of re-mixing and re-imagining of existing material to create something novel (Navas and Gallagher). The distinction, therefore, between content creation and content curation lies primarily in the relation to original material and not the assumed presence or otherwise of creativity. In addition, curation outputs need not stand apart from news reports. They can serve to contextualize news in ways that short reports cannot while the latter provides original content to sit alongside curated materials. Thus the two types of news-related practices can complement rather than compete with each other. While this addresses the relation between reporting and curation, it does not clarify the relation between curating and editing. Bakker eludes to this when he argues curating also involves “editing … enriching or combining content from different sources” (599). But teasing out the distinctions is tricky because editing encompasses a wide range of sub-specialisations and divergent duties. Broadly speaking, editors are “newsrooms professionals … with decision-making authority over content and structure” who evaluate, verify and select information so are “quality controllers” in newsrooms (Stepp). This conceptualization overlaps with the instrumentalist definition of curation and while the broad type of skills and tasks involved are similar, the two are not synonymous. Editors tends to be relatively experienced professionals who have worked up the newsroom ranks whereas news curators are often new entrants ultimately answerable to editors. Furthermore, curation in the social media age involves voluminous material that curators sift through as part of first level content collection and it involves ever more complex verification processes as digital technologies make it increasingly easy to alter and falsify information and images. The quality control role of curators may also involve in-house specialists or junior staff working with external experts in a particular region or specialisation (Fahy and Nisbett). Some of job advertisements suggest a growing demand for specialist curatorial skills and position these alongside other newsroom professionals (Bakker). Whether this means they are journalists is still open to question. Conclusion This article has presented a more expansive conceptualisation of news curation than is commonly used in journalism studies, by including both the instrumental and the symbolic dimensions of a proliferating practice. It also sought to avoid confining this wider conceptualisation within unhelpful polarisations as to whether news curation is symbolic of a wider demise or revival of journalism by distinguishing the profession from the organisation in which it operates. The article was then free to negotiate the conceptual ambiguity surrounding the often taken-for-granted instrumental meanings of curation. It argues that what distinguishes news curation from traditional newsgathering is the relationship to original content. While the reporter generates the journalistic equivalent of original content in the form of news, the imaginative curator re-mixes and re-presents existing content in potentially novel ways. This has faint echoes of the mythological cura creating something new from the existing clay. The other conceptual ambiguity negotiated was in the definitional overlaps between curating and editing. On the one hand, this questions the appropriateness of reducing the news curator to the status of an “information worker”, a manual labourer rather than a professional. On the other hand, it positions news curators as one of many types of newsroom professionals. 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