Counterpublics and the State.

• Author: Ono, Kent A.
• Position: Book Review

By Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2001; pp. vii + 279. $71.50; paper $23.95.

Given the rapid publication of scholarship on "counterpublics" within the past decade or so, one wonders how scholarly history might have been different had the theorization of counterpublics actually preceded the theorization of the public sphere itself.

Robert Asen and Daniel C Brouwer's edited anthology is a timely collection of tightly-crafted essays concerning contemporary scholarship on counterpublics, which they define as oppositional groups that were historically excluded from the dominant modes of discourse and power. The articles use case studies of counterpublic discourse as fulcrums for theorizing the counterpublic sphere. Case studies work well to demonstrate the need for and to justify theoretical innovation within counterpublic sphere theory; moreover, such an approach draws together scholarship from both rhetorical studies and argumentation studies.

The book is organized into two sections, the first providing case studies about counter-publics formed in response to tension and conflict and the second focusing on contemporary cyberculture as an example of counter-publics and on globalization.

Besides introducing the essays that appear in the book, Asen and Brouwer's chapter reviews the history of public sphere scholarship as it relates to scholarship on counterpublics and provides a critical assessment of counterpublic studies, while retaining a conceptual commitment to the importance and usefulness of theorizing counterpublics in relation to the public sphere.

Gerard Hauser's chapter begins the section of essays on tension and conflict by theorizing the relationship between public sphere as a site for healthy public debate and the counterpublic sphere as a site for resistance. Through a detailed case study of Adam Michnik's letter from prison in Poland during the early 1980s, Hauser demonstrates how Michnik's address is exemplary of counterpublic sphere discourse. In particular, he argues that Michnik's discourse provided an alternative to that of the public sphere and called for the transfer of power from the state to the broader society.

Eric Doxtader studies counterpublic theory through a careful review of Nancy Fraser's work. He suggests that Fraser's conceptualization of counterpublics remains within a liberal humanist vein and that subaltern counterpublics sometimes replicate certain...