Prior to the eighteenth century, "writers had typically seen the context of print as a means of personal extension--they understood themselves in print to essentially be speaking in their own persons" -- but the rise of "public print discourse" creates a layer of "authoritative mediation" (164-5)
the "public, prosthetic body" is separate, to some degree, from "the private person," to the degree that it can even take "abuse for the private person" (164)
see Lauren Berlant's concept of the "prosthetic person," an apparatus that does not "reduce to or express [a] given body"
in short, "public discourse [could be] a routine form of self-abstraction": "the validity of what you say in public bears a negative relation to your person. What you say will carry force not because of who you are but despite who you are." (165)
"Implicit in this principle is a utopian universality that would allow people to transcend the given realities of their bodies and their status"--but "the ability to abstract oneself in public discussion has always been an unequally available resource"
"The subject who could master this rhetoric in the bourgeois public sphere was implicitly, even explicitly, white, male, literate, and propertied. These traits could go unmarked, even grammatically, while other features of bodies could only be acknowledged in discourse as the humiliating positivity of the particular" (165-6) while "the white male qua public person was only abstract rather than white and male"