Imagining in the Public Sphere

Imagining in the Public Sphere Robert Asen Contemporary public sphere scholarship has been motivated significantly by a concem to overcome historical and conceptual exclusions in public spheres. Recent theory and criticism has investigated direct and indirect exclusions. Direct exclusions expressly prevent the participation of particular individuals and groups in public discussions and debates. Prohibitions against women speaking in public, for example, have served historically to inhibit women's participation in various forums (see, e.g., Landes 1998). Indirect exclusions function tacitly through discursive norms and practices that prescribe particular ways of interacting in public forums. Indirect exclusions compel participants to conform to established modes of discourse that effectively negate the perspectives and contributions of previously directly excluded individuals and groups. Calls for "objective" and "dispassionate" debate, for instance, sometimes have restricted public agendas by portraying culturally specific forms of address as universally practiced (see, e.g., Wamer 1993). Indirect exclusions may regulate discourse in various forums even when direct exclusions have been counteracted. Scholarship seeking to overcome these exclusions has proceeded on two levels. On one level, scholars have recounted the efforts of excluded persons to participate in public life despite restrictions by developing altemative modes of publicity (see, e.g., Ryan 1990; Zaeske 2002). On a second level, theorists have proposed more inclusive conceptual models ofthe public sphere that may overcome historical exclusions ofthe bourgeois public sphere while retaining a commitment to critical publicity (see, e.g., Asen 1999; Benhabib 1996; Hauser 1999; Mouffe 2000). Practicing democratic discourse fairly and justly depends indispensably on enabling inclusion. Proponents of deliberative democracy argue that political legitimacy arises from processes of inclusive public debate. Seyla Benhabib asserts that "legitimacy in complex societies must be Philosophy and Rlietoric, Vol. 35, No. 4,2002. Copyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State University. University Park, PA. 345 346 ROBERT ASEN thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern" (1996, 68). Others regard inclusive public discourse as crucial for the formation of affirmative individual and collective identities. Craig Calhoun faults bourgeois notions of publicity for treating "identity formation as essentially private and prior to participation in the idealized public sphere of rational-critical discourse" (1993, 274). Identity formation entails mutual recognition among members of diverse cultures, yet theorists have observed that truncated discursive processes may inhibit mutual recognition. Charles Taylor writes that practicing a politics of recognition requires an openness toward other cultures—a presumption of value tested through sustained engagement so that "what we have formerly taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the background of the formerly unfamiliar culture" (1994, 67). Inclusiveness is also important for individuals and groups seeking to advance self-fashioned interpretations of their interests and needs against interpretations imposed by others. Nancy Fraser explains that self-fashioning is necessary because in public debates and controversies "vt7io gets to establish authoritative thick definitions of people's needs is itself a political stake" (1989, 164). Although inclusion is indispensable, exclusion is never total. Sometimes, people force their way into public forums and agendas. For example, participation by activists in discussions of AIDS research and treatment often has been limited by researchers' assertions of expert privilege in investigating scientific matters. Valeria Fabj and Matthew J. Sobnosky (1995) detail how .A.IDS activists have responded by engaging in discursive acts of redefinition and translation to gain entry into previously circumscribed forums. At other times, people surreptitiously access public arenas. Prison writing is one way that those officially banished from public view nevertheless continue to participate in oppositional discourses and movements. Gerard A. Hauser (2001) considers how dissident Adam Michnik remained a vibrant voice in Polish civil society through his writings even after his imprisonment in the 1980.S by an authoritarian regime. At still other times, typically excluded people may be invited to participate in public discussions. Members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP occasionally have testified in the traditional setting of the congressional committee hearing as invited witnesses. Daniel C. Brouwer (2001) maintains that politically sympathetic committee chairs facilitated ACT UP's "official" appearances before members of Congress. Whether invited or insisted, participation in wider publics by previously excluded individuals and groups runs the risk IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 347 of co-optation—wider publics may attempt to recuperate dissident appeals by creating an institutionally sanctioned and politically innocuous space for the expression of opposition. Still, advocates and theorists alike regard inclusion as crucial for reasons of political legitimacy, identity formation, cultural diversity, and needs interpretation. Exclusion also is never total because the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion operate on multiple levels. Participation in public discussions does not proceed only through voice and body; inclusions and exclusions also occur in the perceptions of others—the imagining of others. Sometimes, individual and groups "appear" in debates from which they are physically absent as images (linguistic and/or visual representations) circulate in public discourse. For instance, as members of Congress debated various welfare reform proposals throughout the 1980s and 1990s, fewer than 4 percent of the witnesses testifying before participating House and Senate committees identified themselves as current or former welfare recipients (Asen 2002). Yet poor people were by no means absent from the debates; vivid, disabling images of current and potential public assistance recipients elicited intense scrutiny from most debate participants. In the early 1980s, policymakers told tales of deceitful "welfare queens" who lived lavishly on govemment benefits. Images of prodigality receded as the debates proceeded, but in their place arose images of recipients as unwed teenage mothers who engaged in promiscuous sexual activity knowing that the federal government would support their liaisons. This essay seeks to draw critical attention to processes of imagining as important aspects of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in public spheres. I argue that imagining affects participants in public discussions differently, often disadvantaging socially and historically marginalized people and groups while tacitly aiding the appeals of others. I develop this argument in three sections. The first section elucidates a concept of imagining as a collective, constitutive, and active force that forms part of our shared social world. The second section unpacks connections between imagining and representation. Imagining enacts a politics of representation and deploys multiple modes—linguistic and visual—of representation. The third section amplifies the varying advantage that imagining affords to individuals and groups by linking imagining with recent scholarship in public sphere studies that has developed under the heading of "counterpublic." I maintain that critical attention to imagining may complement existing counterpublic theory and criticism, which explicitly considers questions of inclusion and exclusion and alternative publicities. The examples to 348 ROBERT ASEN which I refer to illustrate my conceptual argument address a common topic: U.S. welfare policy. This is an area of public discourse with an extensive history of marginalization of and negative imagining about its putative beneficiaries: poor people. Public debates over U.S. welfare policy offer a dramatic example of how actual processes of imagining create advantages for some and disadvantages for others. A conception of imagining In this section. I develop a preliminary concept of imagining as a constitutive social force. My discussion is preliminary because imagining as a social force draws its power from a capacity to represent people, objects, and ideas—a power that, for analytic purposes. 1 address subsequently. However. I do not wish to advance an ontological or phenomenological argument. My goal is not to situate imagining as an originative social process, nor do 1 aim to develop an account of imagining that describes objective social phenomena. Rather, my conception is a critical one. I offer my conception of imagining as a tool that may inform critical investigations of the ways in which included and excluded people appear in public spheres.' Imagining may be conceived individually or collectively. As an individual concept, imagining typically has been defined as a mental faculty capable of forming images and impressions, combining disparate ideas, or perceiving phenomena. Yet the imagination in this view traditionally has been regarded as subordinate to reason. According to Wolfgang Iser, "from Aristotle through the beginnings of the modem age. imagination has been regarded as an inferior faculty" (1993, 176). Writers .such as John Locke described and denounced the imagination as pleasurable, mysterious, and uncontrollable, even as they implicitly appealed to its manifold powers. Jean-Paul Sartre departed famously from a faculty view in describing the imagination as a constitutive act of consciousness. Sartre developed a relational view of the imagination as connecting consciousness to objects through mental images: "The word image can therefore only indicate the relation of consciousness to the object; in other words, it means a certain manner in which the object makes its appearance to consciousness, or. if one prefers, a certain way in which consciousness presents an object to itself (1948, 8). While attributing a constitutive power to imagining, Sartre maintained an individual conception. IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 349 An individual conception also has appeared in ostensibly unlikely sources. In a widely cited study. Benedict Anderson examines how imagining inculcates and promotes ideas of nationhood. Anderson defines the nation as an imagined community: "II is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (1991, 6). Anderson situates imagining within sociopolitical processes of nationalism, and he writes of the ways in which interactions among colonial subjects engendered notions of mutuality, yet his definition of the nation as imagined locates this community in individual cognition. The nation resides in the "minds of each" inhabitant. As constitutive of selves and nations, individual acts of imagination demand critical attention. An individual conception of the imagination offers a compelling retort to deterministic theories of human thought and perception that elevate rationality at the expense of other processes. .\n individual conception also may elucidate, as Anderson demonstrates with nationalism, how seemingly disparate societal developments cohere in the perspectives of panicular people and attain a symbolic significance. My focus in this article, however, is on the collective dimension of imagining. Collective imagining does nol emerge through the aggregation of individual thoughts and perceptions. Rather, collective imagining takes shape through discursive engagement among interlocutors in contexts of varying structure, scope, and formality. Discourse functions in this process not as a vehicle for transmitting information and beliefs bul as a constitutive force. Reducing discourse to the role of transmitter would presume that individuals enter into processes of social dialogue wiih their opinions already formed and ordered. Sometimes this may be the case, but people also may develop opinions only after discussing issues with others, or they may change previously held views, or they may reorder their priorities. Moreover, the "collective" modifying collective imagining suggests that social dialogue enables the formation of opinions that did not exist prior to discursive engagement. The images produced by processes of collective imagining emerge in specific moments of interaction; they cannot be ascertained in advance. Collective imagining thus retains the relational quality of the imagination explicated by Sartre, but iis relation shifts. Rather than describing a relationship between objects and consciousness, collective imagining refers to those images that emerge in intersubjective relations. In this way, collective imagining indicates a public process: interlocutors engage in processes of imagining about people they regard as 350 ROBERT ASEN similar to and different from themselves, and the processes and products of the collective imagination are accessible to others. In conceptualizing imagining as collective and constitutive, I do not wish to make this process synonymous with what some theorists have termed the '"social construction of reality." Kenneth J. Gergen defmes this latter perspective as holding that '"what we take to be real is an outcome of social relationships'" sustained through discourse (1999, 237). Imagining may panicipate in constructing our shared social world, but it is not the only participant. To be sure, some theorists have ascribed an apparently all-encompassing role to the imagination. A prominent theorist in this vein is Cornelius Castoriadis, who attributes an originative role to the imagination in constituting self and society. He holds that the imagination constitutes the self as "a condition for all thought" (1987, 336). On the level of society, Castoriadis develops a notion of "social imaginary significations" to describe how imagining institutes society. He maintains that some imagined concepts—he references terms such as "citizen," "justice," "money," and others—sers'e a central role in structuring societies. Collective understandings of these intertwined central concepts order relationships among the persons and objects through which they are represented. Yet he does not regard this as a relationship between signs and their referents: "Central significations are not significations "of something—nor are they, except in a second-order sense, significations "attached' or "related' to something. They constitute that which, for a given society, brings into being the cobelonging of objects, acts and individuals which, in appearance, are most heterogeneous. They have no "referent'; they institute a mode of being of things and individuals which relate to them" (364). From one vantage point, Castoriadis's notion of the instituting force of the imagination stands as a provocative statement against referential views of language. However, in locating the symbolic action of discourse exclusively in the imagination, Castoriadis presents a deterministic view of representation that undermines his commitment to overdetermined signification. Moreover, his all-encompassing conception of the imaginary secures a prominent role for imagining by sacrificing its critical purchase. So long as it stands for everything, Castoriadis's concept of imagining does not critically illuminate anything in particular. A more modest situation appears in the theorizing of Charles Taylor, who locates the collective imagination between a realm of social habit and a realm of explicit doctrine. Both distinctions, in varying degrees, are useful. Imagining should not be equated with routine behaviors or customs IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 351 even as imaginative processes sometimes may induce people to act unreflectively. Imagining also resists the systematization connoted in doctrines. As systems of belief or articulated positions and principles, doctrines suggest a propositional structure and a susceptibility to tests of propositional logic that do not characterize imagining. However, Taylor's distinction becomes problematic in implying that processes of imagining themselves may not be explicit. He describes the collective imagination as "a level of images as yet unformulated in doctrine" (1993, 219). Insofar as it restricts imagining to the background of public discourse, this description understates the power of imagining and neglects how imagining may be employed to achieve specific ends. Collective imagining may function as a background process or it may be engaged actively. As a background process, the collective imagination constitutes a constellation of shared assumptions, values, perceptions, and beliefs for matters identified explicitly as topics of discussion. For instance, present-day beliefs regarding private enterprise as more innovative and efficient than government institutions condition debates about the future of public programs such as social security retirement benefits. Likewise, commitments to ""family values" tacitly inform debates over appropriate public policy remedies for teen pregnancy (see Cloud 1998). Nancy Fraser invokes the background functioning of the collective imagination when she sets out to analyze the "political imaginary of social welfare" by considering "various taken-for-granted assumptions about people's needs and entitlements" (1993, 9). Active engagement of the collective imagination occurs in situations where advocates explicitly call upon their audiences to rethink relations to one another. At these moments, participants in public discussions explicitly reflect on the rights, responsibilities, and obligations granted, entitled, and owed to one another. Active engagement proceeds, for example, when policymakers heed the frequent calls of their colleagues to reevaluate and to reorient the demands that govemment agencies place on adult welfare recipients. Processes of collective imagining may be most active in public debates and controversies. Controversy unsettles taken-for-granted values and beliefs and raises the stakes of public discourse for participants and excluded others who nevertheless may be affected by the outcomes of particular debates (Olson and Goodnight 1994). Controversial issues often are highly visible issues that rally widespread support and opposition and stir strong feelings. Contestation accompanies controversy: advocates have to advance particular images against competing constructions as they engage 352 ROBERT ASEN interlocutors in the public sphere. Understood this way, controversy resists traditional scholarly treatments that view controversy as something to be avoided because it putatively departs from or perverts formal rules of disputation or reason. Instead, as G. Thomas Goodnight contends, controversy may be seen as a practice that pushes and expands the available limits of communication. Goodnight characterizes controversy as a "site where the taken-for-granted relationships between communication and reasoning are open to change, reevaluation, and development by argumentative engagement" (1991, 5). This view of controversy broaches the fluid and unstable quality of collective imagining. Collective imagining does not proceed ihrougb fixed, teleoJogical processes of discursive engagement; its images are not constant and eternal. Imaginings change. Controversy engenders moments especially amenable to changes in imagining by unsettling background understandings and engaging imagining as an active force. A comparative example may serve to illustrate the conception of imagining I have developed thus far. A number of scholars have held that the bifurcation of the U.S. welfare state into social insurance and public assistance programs sustains a two-tiered, gendered structure (see, e.g.. Fraser 1989; Gordon 1994; Mink 1995; Orloff 1991). Social insurance programs that tie participation to paid labor, distribute generous and geographically uniform grants, and require no further actions from recipients historically have served men and their dependents. Such programs have been celebrated in political discourse and their benefits have been characterized as "money owed." Images of elderly recipients circulate in public discourse as honored senior citizens to whom politicians have binding obligations. By contrast, public assistance programs such as, until its 1996 repeal. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) historically have occupied an inferior position in the U.S. welfare state. These programs generally serve mothers with young children, tie participation to household income, disperse meager grants that vary geographically, and require the satisfaction of various corollary conditions by recipients. Public assistance programs have been vilified in political discourse and their benefits often denounced as wasteful govemment spending. Adult recipients of public assistance have been portrayed as clients benefiting from public charity. These contrasting images of recipients have circulated despite the operational similarities of social insurance and public assistance programs. Although the structural inequities of social insurance and public assistance date back to the 1935 Social Security Act, the contrasting images of recipients have transformed over time. Policymakers initially portrayed IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 353 adult female welfare recipients as valued and virtuous nurturers and caregivers forced by circumstances beyond their control to assume the role of breadwinner for their families. Policymakers believed Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), as AFDC was then called, would allow poor mothers to resume their important domestic responsibilities; they did not disparage ADC recipients. In its report to the president, the U.S. Committee on Economic Security, the chief architectural body of the Social Security Act, asserted that "we are strongly of the opinion that these families should be differentiated from the permanent dependents and unemployables" (1935, 6). Similarly, images of social insurance recipients have changed. When the Social Security Act was enacted, social insurance for the elderly was a smaller and decidedly less popular program than Old Age Assistance, which distributed more generous and more widespread benefits. Wishing to attract public suppon for its newly created social insurance program, the Social Security Board began a public relations campaign to promote social insurance as an honored entitlement for citizens (Gordon 1994, 282-83). This campaign proceeded in part by denigrating all forms of public assistance—whether or not such assistance served an elderly population (Cates 1983, 104-35). Imagining and representation Imagining engages a particular power of discourse: a power of representation. In this section, I consider the relationship between imagining and representation by addressing the politics and modalities of representation. Representing is not a disinterested process, but one that implicates social judgments and relations of power, ln this way, representing enacts a politics of representation. Representing does not proceed exclusively through one mode of communication, but may employ linguistic and visual symbols simultaneously and complementarily. In doing so, representing functions as a multimodal process. To say that representation enacts a politics is to say that all representation is tendentious. When participants in public discourse describe themselves and others, they do not engage in a value-neutral and transparent process. Rather, representational processes implicate participants in (often unacknowledged) choices regarding how people should be portrayed. As Linda Hutcheon explains, these processes do not "reflect society as much 354 ROBERT ASEN as grant meaning and value within a particular society'" (1989, 24-25). Representing does not occur outside of history and society, but works with the symbolic materials of specific cultures. In this way, representing invokes social values and beliefs as well as the interests of panicipants in public discourse. Representing engages relations of power and social hierarchies. Further, the politics of representation produces consequences— both for those representing and those represented. Our attitude toward and treatment of others depends crucially on how we imagine others, and representations express our collective imagination (see Dyer 1993; Scarry 1996). The intimate connection between representations and social values, beliefs, and interests indicates that representational processes may frame public debates, identify proper objectives for collective action, and suggest appropriate remedies. One can note unobjectionably that the percentage of eligible people receiving AFDC increased nearly three-fold from the early 1960s through the early 1970s (Patterson 1994, 179). Disagreements arise, however, as soon as one offers an interpretation of this trend. Some commentators view this rise in AFDC receipt as evidence of a misguided federal policy subsidizing pathological behavior and thus encouraging family break-up and the dissolution of the work ethic among poor people. Conservative social critic Charles Murray characterizes this trend as a "generous revolution." He argues that the federal government changed the system of punishments and rewards facing poor people "to make it more profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term" (1994, 9). Others see this same development as the successful outcome of efforts by community activists and poverty lawyers seeking to transform a situation in which a minority of eligible poor people participated in programs ostensibly designed for them to one in which the vast majority did. The scholar/activists Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward describe the rise in welfare roles as an act of resistance. They insist that "the great rise in relief insurgency can be understood as a rebellion by the poor against the circumstances that deprived them of both jobs and income" (1979, 265). Both interpretations offer images that link up with larger political programs. From one perspective, the poor person appears as a naive subject led astray by arrogant government officials. From another perspective, the poor person appears as a triumphant agent holding state officials to their word. Despite their political power (or, perhaps, as an augmentation of their political power), representations purport to be natural, universal, and es- IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 355 sential renderings of objective phenomena. Frank Lentricchia refers to the tendency of representations to hide their constructed character as the "coercive power" of representations. He explains that representations assert "an ontological claim, used like a hanuner, that some part of the whole really does stand in for the whole" (1983, 153). Created in particular sociopolitical contexts, representations may draw attention away from these contexts. In these cases, their persuasive power arises in important respects from their ability to appear detached from political struggles. Representing thus becomes a "cover-up" by concealing itself as "an agency of specific political power" and by obscuring "social and cultural difference and conflict" (153). Representations are at their most political when they appear to be non-political. A fundamental tension in representation between absence and presence, between standing for something and embodying that something, bolsters this political power. Representation historically has meant both standing for something absent and making something present (see Williams 1983). Representation as absence informs theories of representative democracy whereby elected officials in parliamentary or legislative bodies speak on behalf of their constituents. Representation as presence orients theories of aesthetic realism that judge artworks by their ability to portray the elements of our physical world in a lifelike manner (Derrida 1982; Pitkin 1967). Yet each notion of representation implicates the other: standing for something absent may create a sense of presence, and making something present may overcome its absence. Employing the terms "speaking for" and "speaking about," Linda Alcoff situates this mutual implication of absence and presence in the context of participants and non-participants in public discourse. She observes that "when one is speaking for others one may be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them." Similarly, "when one is speaking about others, or simply trying to describe their situation or some aspect of it, one may also be speaking in place of them, that is, speaking for them" (1991-92,9). As Alcoff notes, neatly separating these two senses may be possible only analytically. Absence and presence create an irreducible tension in representing: the representation is and is not the person, object, or idea represented. This tension between absence and presence in representation critically influences collective imagining by interacting with dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in public spheres to operate on participants and excluded others. Imagining can make those present absent and those absent present. Negative circulating images may lead some people to self- 356 ROBERT ASEN censor their contributions to public debates, and negative images may prompt other participants to disregard their contributions. People affiliated with historically marginalized groups seem especially susceptible to both outcomes, since they often are subjected to negative imagining. Iris Marion Young notes that participatory norms of discourse "are powerful silencers or evaluators of speech in many actual speaking situations where culturally differentiated and socially unequal groups live together" (1996, 124; see also Young 2000, 53-55). Imagining may effectively silence and make absent some debate participants. The reverse process of making present those absent typifies the relation of poor people to welfare policy debates. Negative images of poor people as members of a dangerous "underclass," for example, have often attained an ominous presence in media and policy forums. In his popular 1982 book The Underclass, journalist Ken Auietta grouped long-term welfare recipients with street thugs, hustlers, drifters, mental patients, and others as comprising the underclass. Tying these figures together through a singular focus on deviance, he asserted that the "underclass usually operates outside the generally accepted boundaries of society. They are often set a p a r t . . . by their deviant or antisocial behavior, by their bad habits, not just by their poverty" (28). The image of a fearsome underclass spurred subsequent reform efforts. In a 1987 U.S. House Education and Labor Committee hearing. Representative Harris Fawell expressed his desire for welfare reform legislation in starkly pragmatic terms: "We are scared, too. I mean the whole problem is terrible. . , . We have communities sitting by watching [their] own community go to hell, so to speak" (339). As Fawell's apprehension reveals, the "underclass" did not need to participate directly in the debates to attain a presence. Representing may enact a politics through multiple communicative modes. Thus far I have focused on imagining as a linguistic process. When witnesses appear before congressional committees to tell stories of increased illegitimacy, unemployment, or crime among poor people, they do so principally through written and oral testimony. When editorialists, opinion columnists, and talk show hosts censure poor people for perpetuating a deleterious "underclass," they do so chiefly through the printed or spoken word. The same can be said for less formal and more prevalent forms of vernacular exchange that constitute the public sphere as a multiplicity of diverse and partially overlapping discursive venues: When suburbanites gathered at a neighborhood picnic decry the expenditure of tax dollars on "undeserving" poor people, the primary medium they employ is talk. And, when poor people join together to confront negative images about them IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 357 circulating in politics, media, and middle-class society, they sometimes invent and disseminate alternative vocabularies to express their interests, identities, and needs. But imagining should not be limited to its linguistic manifestations. Processes of collective imagining may employ both linguistic and visual modes of representation. The polysemic character of "image"—which denotes a physical likeness, optical reflection, mental representation, figure of speech, and public perception—suggests the multimodality of imagining. Visual artifacts and linguistic texts may work together to produce compelling circulating images. Along these lines, Cara A. Finnegan cautions critics against viewing visual and linguistic elements of a rhetorical artifact as self-contained and binary. She argues instead that "the goal of analyzing the imagetext [a synthetic combination of visual image and linguistic text] is not simply to compare images to texts, but rather to recognize the inherent tensions in the marriage of image and texts and investigate how those tensions make or negotiate meaning" (2000, 340; see also Mitchell 1994). Similarly, Catherine Helen Palczewski (2002) considers how public debates may proceed through the mutual invocation of visual and verbal elements.- In a revealing study, Martin Gilens considers how visual images have appeared in print media to project racial images of poor people. Analyzing pictures of poor people that appeared in the national newsweeklies Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report between the years 1950 and 1992, Gilens (1999, 122-25) reaches two troubling conclusions. First, blacks were overrepresented among pictures of poor people. They appeared in 53.4 percent of the pictures though their proportion among the poor during this period was 29.3 percent. Second, as the negative tone of the coverage of poverty increased, so too did the percentage of blacks pictured, and as the negative tone of the coverage decreased, so too did the percentage of blacks among pictures of the poor. So, for example, in the years 1972-73, as public concerns about rising welfare costs and caseloads waxed and as the optimism of the 1960s waned, the percentage of blacks pictured topped 70 percent. However, as an economic downturn developed in the 1970s and a focus on unemployment increasingly occupied magazine articles, the percentage of blacks pictured dropped to 49 percent. In the objects investigated by Gilens, linguistic and visual elements worked together to engender processes of imagining. In the periods when the articles primarily portrayed poverty as a result of behavioral deficiencies, presaging contemporary concerns about an urban "underclass," pictures of blacks helped construct a racially coded image of poor people. Yet 358 ROBERT ASEN when the main focus of the articles shifted from behavior to environment, partially absolving poor people of blame for their economic woes, more racially diverse pictures invited connections between the subjects of the articles and the magazines' mostly white readership. Gilen's study contains two implications for considering the relationship between linguistic and visual modes of representation. First, whether linguistic, visual, or both modes of representation are functioning and, in the latter case, whether one mode predominates depends crucially on context. In certain forums in the public sphere, such as the formal site of the congressional committee hearing room and the vernacular sites of neighborhood gatherings, linguistic modes may function primarily. In other forums, such as the mass mediated site of television campaign advertising or news coverage of political demonstrations, visual modes may function primarily. And still in other forums, neither mode may predominate and instead create irresolvable tensions. Second, the point is not to assert the primacy of either mode but, in those moments when processes of imagining engage both linguistic and visual representation, to explore their interaction. Imagining and counterpublics I have touched on the theme of the advantages and disadvantages afforded to participants in multiple public spheres through processes of imagining by discussing how the politics of representation engages dynamics of inclusion and exclusion to make those present absent and those absent present. In this section. 1 connect these dynamics to counterpublic theory and criticism. I suggest through examples some specific ways in which imagining creates varj'ing degrees of advantage: by impugning the credibility of counterpublic agents, by concentrating historical animosities in negative images, and by creating a cumulative imaginary field that constrains the choices of successive participants. Counterpublic theory explicitly addresses acts of inclusion and exclusion in multiple public spheres (see, e.g., Dawson 1995; Doxtader 2001; Fraser 1992; Squires 2001). As a critical term, "counterpublic" refers to those publics that form through mutual recognition of exclusions in wider publics, set themselves against exclusionary wider publics, and resolve to overcome these exclusions. Recognition of exclusion is crucial for the formation and investigation of counterpublics. Counterpublic loses its criti- IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 359 cally illuminating force if it refers to excluded people per se. Individuals do not necessarily recognize exclusions and resolve to overcome them by virtue of their location in a social order. Invoking counterpublic in this manner would reduce the term to the identity of particular participants and presume a shared set of interests among people who may not see themselves as allies. One does not participate in a counterpublic formed around issues of poverty simply through receipt of public assistance. For example, former AFDC recipient Nancy Peterson appeared before the Human Resources Subcommittee in 1996 to support the punitive tone of the debates and to endorse strict time limits and unequivocal work requirements. Evaluating reforms adopted in her home state, she judged that "the changes that Michigan has made have been positive changes. We do not need to be as soft as it has been. I am motivated. But other people are not. There needs to be a little bit of a push to motivate people to work, to get a feel of what that is like, to make them responsible" (U.S. House 1995, 58). In casting doubt on the work habits of other recipients, Peterson did not call into question disabling discursive practices, but reaffirmed larger themes informing the debates. Moreover, critical attention to recognition facilitates exploration of counterpublics constituted not only by persons excluded from wider publics, but by coalitions of people of varied social, economic, and political status dedicated to overcoming exclusions. As explicitly articulated alternatives to wider publics that neglect the interests of their participants, counterpublics contest direct and indirect exclusions. Overcoming direct exclusions enables counterpublic agents to access previously restricted forums. Yet counterpublic agents often must continue their struggle to reconstitute these forums so that contributions from diverse participants may not only be permitted but also appreciated. Contestation draws attention to discursive norms and practices: how exclusions prevent participation by some people, how exclusions defiect attention from certain discussion topics, and how exclusions circumscribe particular ways of speaking. Invoking the absence and presence of representation, imagining may function as a discursive practice that disadvantages counterpublic agents in moments of interaction among multiple publics. Imagining in a multiple public sphere is multidirectional. Wider publics may imagine themselves (as, for example, patriotic and hard-working Americans) and actual or potential counterpublics. Wider public imagining may spur counterpublicity. Regarding wider processes of imagining as a source of grievance, social actors may join together to resist objection- 360 ROBERT ASEN able images circulating in public discourse. For iheir part, counterpublic agents may imagine themselves and others. Imagining appears to function crucially for counterpublicity insofar as recognition of exclusion invokes an image of wider forums unfairly and unjustly closed off to outside participation and populated by ideologically driven and/or mean-spirited people.^ In this imaginary realm, counterpubiic agents stand as indignant social reformers seeking to uphold a greater good. Processes of imagining, then, may be inwardly and outwardly directed both for counterpublics and wider publics. My concem in this section is those interactive moments among publics and counterpublics when some counterpublic agents have gained access to wider forums but have not yet reconstituted the discursive exclusions of wider publics. In such interactive moments, counierpublics suffer from what I call the doubly disabling tendencies of representation. Counterpublics often struggle to gain access to the very forums in which others are imagining them, often in ways objectionable to counterpublic agents. The doubly disabling tendencies of representation arise from this dynamic: Voices and bodies largely absent from public discourses may be made present through disabling images. The various goods that theorists associate with inclusive public deliberation suggest that the consequences of the doubly disabling tendencies of representation implicate issues of political legitimacy, identity formation, cultural diversity, and needs interpretation. Moreover, these consequences affect counterpublic participation even after some agents have entered particular forums. Negative imagining constitutes a symbolic hurdle that counterpublic agents—but not other participants—have to overcome. Negative images circulating in wider forums impugn the character of counterpublic agents participating in these forums." Negative images compel counterpublic agents to engage the statements of others from multiple vantage points: counterpublic agents may wish to assert their interests and identities as they see them, and yet they may need to counteract negative images representing counterpublics. Christine Pratt-Marston confronted this discursive obstacle when she testified before the U.S. House Public Assistance and Unemployment Compensation Subcommittee in 1981 to object to proposed budget cuts in AFDC and other social programs. PrattMarston explained to the subcommittee that low-wage labor required her to receive AFDC benefits. Yet she refused to be seen as an "AFDC recipient" in the pejorative sense of the term—as someone choosing to live comfortably on government aid while avoiding the demands of paid labor. Instead, Pratt-Marston sought to complicate simplistic representations of IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 361 poor people's lives. She introduced herself to the subcommittee as a single parent, a foster parent, a taxpayer, and a disabled person. She shared with committee members the aspirations of many poor people—and the frustrations they experienced in the low-wage labor market. Connecting her own experiences to others, she explained, "when we try to become employed, we find that we cannot make it. We cannot pay for daycare, we do not have health services for our children, and we cannot pay the rent to feed our children. So we find ourselves going back on welfare" (84). As PrattMarston's references to daycare and medical care demonstrate, she sought to advocate a policy agenda capable of ameliorating the lives of poor people. Yet she also had to confront negative images of welfare recipients that may have raised doubts about her credibility among committee members. As Pratt-Marston explained, negative images of welfare recipients often arose from confounding and contradictory social expectations: "When I am home taking care of my four children and two foster children, I am a lazy welfare broad. And when I go across the street and take care of my neighbor's one child, I am employed. And I fail to understand the rationale of that" (84). Pratt-Marston could not ignore negative circulating images if she wished to advance positive interpretations of her identities and interests. Competing societal expectations of child rearing and paid employment intimate another obstacle that imagining creates for counterpublic agents: negative images may invoke historical animosities and concentrate these animosities in conflicts over representation. After completing her testimony, Pratt-Marston responded to questions from various subcommittee members. Representative John Rousselot appeared especially skeptical of her claims regarding the inadequacy of AFDC and its connection to the low-wage labor market. He asked Pratt-Marston: "Now, what do you suppose the problem is in going back to work?" Without waiting for an answer, Rousselot shared his own view: "What we are really saying, then, is that they are not able to get a job to encourage them to go back to work that is [at] a level of pay that can compete with what they are getting" (U.S. House 1981, 95). His answer invoked an image of welfare recipients as comfortable individuals insufficiently motivated to seek paid employment. Pratt-Marston's reply advanced an alternative image: "I would not say it is a matter of competing with what they are getting. 1 would say it is a matter of a level of pay that allows them to survive and feed their children and pay their rent" (95). In her reply, Pratt-Marston imagined welfare recipients— including herself—as valiant but struggling parents desperately attempting to provide for their children. Rousselot retorted that he too wanted 362 ROBERT .AiSEN poor people to survive, but reiterated, "they are not able to get something in the employment field that is competitive with what they are receiving" (95). Pratt-Marston in turn highlighted welfare recipients' lack of training, which prompted a discussion of federal job training programs launched in the 1960s. Rousselot labeled these programs a failure. Pratt-Marston pointed to a lack of jobs for program participants and countered that these programs had provided social ser\'ices and offered an irreplaceable supplement to poor people's incomes. Beginning with the relationship of public assistance and low-wage labor. Rousselot and Pratt-Marston proceeded to an evaluation of Great Society programs. Their differing judgments reflected divergent political outlooks that placed varying emphasis on the proper role of government as an ameliorative social force. In this way, they entered into a long-standing and wide-ranging debate, and their points of entr>' and critical judgment relied significantly on contrasting images of poor people. Informing particular interactions between counterpublic agents and others, circulating images do not disappear when specific discussions conclude. Some images linger in the public imagination. These images constitute a cumulative imaginary field that constrains the choices of successive participants; they shape subsequent rhetorical situations. Calls for budget cuts in social programs in 1981 gained strength from earlier charges of waste and fraud in public assistance programs. In his unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly relayed the alleged exploits of the "Chicago welfare queen." At many campaign appearances, he enraged audiences with the stor\' of a woman in Chicago who "has 80 names, 30 addresses. 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans' benefits on four nonexisting decea.sed husbands. And she's collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000." (quoted in "Welfare Queen" 1976, 51; see also Weiler 1992, 232). By 1981. images of fraud had become so widespread that they elicited parodies from policymakers who supported public assistance programs. Pete Stark, chairperson ofthe Public Assistance and Unemployment Compensation Subcommittee and a longtime advocate of federal anti-poverty programs, solicited one witness's help in locating a particularly notorious welfare cheat who roamed his district. He wanted to track down "this woman, and for some reason it is a woman, who is ahead of each one of my constituents in the checkout line at a supermarket and has bought a tremendous amount of Perrier and chickens. Actually, they are never chickens; IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 363 they are Cornish game hens stuffed with wild rice. A whole carton of these go into the trunk o f . . . a new Cadillac." Fed up with her behavior. Stark announced a plan to stop this woman and others who may have been tempted to follow her example: "I have a bill that I am about to introduce that would make it a felony for a Cadillac salesman to accept food stamps in full or partial payment for the Cadillac" (U.S. House 198L 74). To call attention to the cumulative force of imagining is not to ascribe a determinative force to imagining. Circulating images and other aspects of collective imagining may be only one element informing specific discursive engagements in the public sphere. And discourse may be constrained variously and to varying degrees. Still, prominent images compel an accounting from future participants. As welfare reform debates continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, participants had to address the question of whether the non-needy had been vanquished from the welfare rolls. Conclusion Hoping to redeem a promise of critical publicity, contemporary' public sphere scholarship has drawn critical attention to direct and indirect exclusions in multiple public spheres. I have sought to contribute to this effort by considering the interrelationship of exclusions operating on multiple levels. Specifically, I have considered how dynamics of inclusion and exclusion may be engaged at the level of the imagination. Imagining proceeds importantly in this regard as a collective process that participates in constructing a shared social world. Collective imagining draws its power as a representational process, one that enacts a politics and utilizes linguistic and visual modalities. In interactive moments between counterpublics and wider publics, collective imagining functions as a symbolic hurdle for counterpublic agents insofar as it circulates negative images that undermine their credibility and concentrates historical animosities in conflicts over representation. Moreover, prominent circulating images constitute a cumulative imaginarj' field that constrains the choices of successive participants. Attention to imagining reveals that including more and more voices in multiple public spheres—a form of direct inclusion—is an indispensable but by itself insufficient reformulation of critical models of the public sphere. As with other discursive norms and practices, imagining may inform interactions even in ostensibly accessible forums. The consequences 364 ROBERT ASEN of collective imagining appear in the doubly disabling tendencies of representation that absent some people from public discourse and yet present them through disabling images. Counterpublic agents encounter these negative images as they enter previously foreclosed forums. Yet disabling tendencies of representation should not prompt a scholarly flight from imagining and its representational power. A flight of this sort would retum public sphere scholarship to a reconstructed bourgeois public sphere as a singular public forum in which everyone—at least in principle—is free to participate. Existing scholarship has demonstrated that such a sphere would most likely betray its legitimating discourses at the level of direct exclusions. A flight from representation also would require a renunciation of poiiticai legitimacy, identity formation, cultural diversity, and needs interpretation as appropriate topics of public discourse, for these are social goods. More hopefully, representation ought not to be disavowed because imagining need not be disabling. Counterpublics may interact with wider publics to construct affirmative images of themselves and others that may engender discourses capable of advancing the multiple aims of discourse in the public sphere. Scholars may contribute to this process by elucidating how various forums may exclude potential participants in voice, body, and imagination. Departrr^enl Institution Notes 1. Michael Osbom has developed a notion of "'rhetorical depiction" to explain how rhetors may prompt visualization in their audiences. He observes that 'contemporary rhetoric seems dominated by strategic pictures, verbal or nonverbal visualizations that linger in the collective memory of audiences as representative of their subjects when rhetoric has been successful" (1986. 79). He quotes George Campbell's view of significant metaphor to describe depiction as "an allegory in miniature" (1986. 80). Though "depiction" resonates with "imagining." Osbom's invocation of allegory suggests a more directed symbolic process. Moreover. Osborn does not consider depiction as a collective process, nor does he explore the political dimension of representation. 2. See also Lake and Pickering 1998. Scholarly attention to the communicative qualities of visual images has produced a provocative, growing field of inquiry (see. e.g.. Biesecker 1998; DeLuca 1999; DcLuca and Demo 2000; Lucaites 1997). Sometimes, however, statements asserting the prominence of visual modes of communication extend into the hyperbolic. For instance, although he initially describes political messages as 'complex composites of multiple discourses created in verbal, visual, and acoustic languages" (1995. 219). Bruce Gronbeck stresses the visual as the primary mode of discourse in the contemporary public sphere. He writes: "The telespectacle, for better or worse, is the center of public politics, of the public sphere. . . . We must recognize that the conversation of the culture is centered not in the New York Review of Books but in the television experience" (235). IMAGINING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 365 Gronbeck's characterization of the contemporary public sphere is problematic on several counts. First, his remarks betray a desire to locate a center, while the public sphere may be better appreciated as a multiplicity with no primary focal point. Second, he sets up two overly restrictive options for discourse between the "telespectacle" on the one hand and detached proto-academic discussion on the other. Most di.scourse in the public sphere likely lies between these two poles. Third. Gronbeck privileges mass-mediated discourse over more vernacular forms of political communication. Although thousands of people appear each year on television, many millions more do not—yet they nevertheless engage in '"public politics" that participates in constituting a multiple public sphere. 3. I invoke ideology here in its classical sense as the false representation of the interests ofthe few as the interests ofthe many. On the diverse and sometimes contradictory ways in which theorists have understood ideology, see Eagleton 1991. 4. This potential obstacle appears e.specially harmful in light of the role that character {ethos) plays in adjudicating tensions of dissent and consensus in a multiple public sphere. Erik Doxtader explains that "the ethos of an advocate marks these oppositions [expressions of dissent] with a concession: the merit of the dissident's proposal turns on whether an audience is able to see why and how the speaker is willing to bear the risk of her own transgression" (2000. 360). Ethos functions as a constitution of the self that permits recognition of an other: "Ethos is a figure of accountability (a mean) that offers some insight into the relation between the improvisation of creative reasoning and the procedures of intersubjective dialogue" (360). 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