From publicity to iconicity
 

Warner 169: "[A] vast range range of everyday life [now has] the reference of publicity. The medium of print [see "publication and 'the public'] is now only a small part of our relation to what we understand as the public"
 
"[A]lthough the bourgeois public sphere continues to secure a minoritizing liberal logic of self-abstraction, its rhetoric is increasingly complicated by other forms of publicity. At present, the mass-cultural public sphere continually offers its subject an array of body images. In earlier varieties of the public sphere, it was important that images of the body not figure centrally in public discourse [...] [b]ut now public body images are everywhere on display, in virtually all media contexts."
 
"To be public in the West means to have an iconicity, and this is true equally of Muammar Qaddafi and of Karen Carpenter"

> from Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics (2005)

> tagged with #public_and_private, #body, #visual_culture

> created August 24, 2026 at 10:33:24 AM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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