Farmer, Frank. After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur

Citation	Farmer, Frank. After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, Utah State University Press, 2013.
Questions & Rebuttals	Employing Warner's definitions and criteria for counterpublics gives me pause since Warner argues that being involved in discourse creation helps form counterpublic identities but also asserts that circulating texts call people together. They are, then, both pre-text a member of the ensuing counterpublic and post-text as someone who creates a counterpublic identity. This paradox is widely noted by Warner (and Farmer), but it seems to have important implications for Farmer's argument about the role of making, crafting, DIY, and bricolage. How would Farmer square his bringing together cultural identity and publics considering Asen's argument that publics distilled to identities risks essentializing certain identities? (Asen also pushes back against counterpublic places and topics, which also fit into culture perhaps). There seem to be overlaps between the activist WPA (Adler-Kassner) and the composition counterpublic. Both seek to engage the public to improve the reputation of the discipline. He answers this question in part on page 138, wherein he argues that activist models of public advocacy must comport themselves to "public discourses [that] limit and manage that expertise" (138).  Farmer holds that public intellectuals are waning, but he sees an opportunity for citizen bricoleurs to engage in public discussions about disciplinarity. Contrary to public intellectuals, Farmer believes bricoleurs should not present themselves as experts. However, this contention runs contrary to public intellectual definitions as outlined by Edward Said. This is a small critique, but perhaps an important one in how we conceive of public intellectuals. Farmer sees them as celebrity-like.
Big Takeaways & Theses	Exploring the zine culture of the 1970-90s, Farmer argues for a citizen bricoleur who can operate in counterpublics to fashion a more democratic world. Farmer also argues for disciplinary counterpublics who can orient themselves publicly when needed.
Keywords	counterpublic public theory public turn cultural public culture disciplinary counterpublics
Glossary	counterpublic: Farmer draws heavily from Warner and Fraser: "To qualify as a counterpublic, the minimal requiremerits are generally acknowledged to be the following: an oppositional relationship to other, more dominant publics; a marginal, subaltern, or excluded status within the larger public; and an identity wrought by, and refined through, the reflexive circulation of texts" (21). expands discursive possibilities. Its members recognize themselves "as part of a potentially wider public" (Fraser 67). bricoleur: a person who constructs something from a diverse range of things. citizen-handyman or citizen bricoleur: "an intellectual activist of the unsung sort, thoroughly committed to, and implicated in, the task of understanding how publics are made, unmade, remade, and made better, often from little more than the discarded scraps of earlier attempts-constructions that, for whatever reason, are no longer legitimate or serviceable" (36). cultural public:"any social formation, established primarily through texts, whose constructed identity functions, in some measure, to oppose and critique the accepted norms of the society in which it emerges" (56). "one where publicness assumes a far greater emphasis than it ordinarily does in investigations into cultures and subcultures, where publicness becomes not only an interesting aspect or occasional focus but rather a constituent element of specific cultures" (67). disciplinary counterpublic: Farmer's intervention into going public in a way that doesn't require controversy. Disciplines that engage in counterpublic discourse.
Quotes	Chapter 1 "I argue for a way of seeing publics as not merely formations that sometimes intersect with already established cultures but instead as formations that can be said to be cultures in their own right. Put differently* I want to posit the importance of cultural publics to the work of composition, an idea I wish to introduce in this chapter and elaborate in the next" (31). "1 offer that we might find something of value in linking our received understandings of bricolage conceived in terms of myths, subcultures, and everyday practices to publics, counterpublics, and alternative publics, and rather more generally toward what I call cultural publics. If we should make this move, the bricoleur would then become a figure we might properly entitle the citizen-handyman or citizen bricoleur, an intellectual activist of the unsung sort, thoroughly committed to, and implicated in, the task of understanding how publics are made, unmade, remade, and made better, often from little more than the discarded scraps of earlier attempts-constructions that, for whatever reason, are no longer legitimate or serviceable" (36). "Idealistic? Quixotic? Utopian? Unrealistic? It would be hard argue otherwise. But this is precisely why zines tend to stress lived, personal experience (however messy that may be) over immaculately reasoned arguments about propositions or the minutiae of anarchist theory (though neither of these are entirely absent from zines). Given the emphasis in zines on authenticity, on individuality, on a do-it-yourself ethos, anarchism must not merely be thought about, discussed, and championed-^ must be lived. This suggests why, on the whole, anarchist zines reject the cold comforts of formal debate and dispassionate reason-not because they embrace irrationality (though some do) but because» for most zine writers, to argue about matters that matter as if they did not, as if nothing really important was at stake, is simply unconscionable. Better to live your beliefs, your culture, your politics, your identity rather than engage in disputes that require nothing from you and that change nothing in the world" (51). "In sum, by introducing zines into our writing classrooms, we create an opportunity to introduce students to an alternate vision of democratic participation, a different understanding of publicness that they are unlikely to find in our institutions, our textbooks, and, for the most part, our pedagogies" (88). "for by bringing zines into our classrooms, we introduce our students to those mostly anonymous citizens, the ones I refer to as citizen bricoleurs-those who understand that the most challenging do-it-yourself project facing us is the ongoing, unfinished project of democracy; those who perform a brand of citizenship that aspires to be neither safe nor respectable, believing that a domesticated citizenry is, figuratively speaking, a housebound one, a dominated one; and, not least, those who make and belong to certain kinds of publics-cultural publics-that resist, critique, and seek to transform the prevailing social arrangements of our time" (90). Chapter 3 "I construct a provisional description of what a disciplinary counterpublic might look like, and I argue that once enacted, disciplinary counterpublics provide an optional form of democratic participation for academics...Since all counterpublics are, by definition, oppositional, then going public this way means crossing the line without apology since whatever transgressions might be committed are more likely to be embraced than denied" (99). "The sort of experts we need are those who understand that knowledge is always implicated in values and interests, and that if expert knowledge is to influence public culture, it must not disparage rhetorical facility but embrace it. In other words, rhetorical facility must be a constituent aspect of what any redefinition of the terra expert means, or ought to mean, in our moment" (103). "In this light, it may be illuminating to think about composition studies as a counterpublic-a strategic and rhetorically motivated counterpublic, a liminal counterpublic, as I will explain. While it is no doubt true that occasionally counter formations have emerged within composition...it can be reasonably argued that composition studies more vexing disputes are with the larger public, and especially with the matter of how composition studies gets represented in public discourses" (126-27).  "• Although we are often rep' resented in public discourses, it seems reasonably clear that we are not addressed by those same discourses. The question that emerges, then is whether the arts of bricolage can assist us in the project of enacting coir own version of audience agency, of insinuating ourselves as an audience for discourses thai were never meant for us. I think the answer to this question is yes" (148). "The bricoleur is, instead, someone interested in fulfilling these roles on an as-needed basis. The bricoleur is someone able to find new uses not for public intellectuals but for the important critical functions they perform; not for experts but for situational uses of their expertise; not for activists but the public spaces they make in the course of their activism, however it may be directed. The bricoleur resists the compartmentalized roles by which public participation is typically authorized and will use all available tools at hand, even if this means (as it does) transforming received, identifiable roles into uses, methods, and tactics. For the bricoleur, the point is to get the job done, to accomplish a task. And if the task is to craft a more significant public presence for composition studies, the bricoleur, in my view, is the most likely figure to accomplish this task" (152). Epilogue If, as I claim, the citizen bricoleur is the one figure most responsible for making counterpublics, the reverse is also true: counterpublics make possible the figure of the citizen bricoleur" (156).
Summary	Introduction Farmer begins by exploring what we mean by the "public turn" in composition and why it was made. Rhetoric has long been associated with public discourse (he cites as an example Cicero vs Quintilian), but our earlier social turn didn't explore those excluded from public discourse and how multiple publics construct one another and use rhetoric differently. He also places its exigence at the vanishing sense of common or public spaces in American life. Farmer explores varying exigencies for the public turn emanating from the mid-1990s. Farmer's own exigence has to do with expanding publics theory in composition to COUNTERpublics theory, which hasn't been explored. This is because the term has so frequently changed, invokes exploration into counter-identities, and it seems to go outside our disciplinary bounds in the literature. Farmer then turns to critiques of Habermas and the emergence of counterpublic theory whose origins date to Negt and Kluge's critique of a singular public sphere and adds to it a possibility to be oppositional and still public.  Negt and Kluge-1962--oppositional and public Felski 1989--feminist counterpublic Fraser 1990--subaltern counterpublics; parallel discursive arenas Warner 2005--"poetic world making"; counterpublics as circulating texts Farmer wants to draw more compositionists into counterpublic theory so students know all the variations of democratic public involvement.  Chapter 1 Farmer turns to the punk subculture, Levi-Strauss, de Certeau, and Hebdige to build his idea of counterpublic bricolage--how subcultures take existing cultural materials and make something new (resistant) from them (32).  Levi-Strauss's bricoleur is a handy, jack-of-all-trades type who takes materials not intended (leftover) for a certain purpose and reuses them for something new. Levi-Strauss is mostly concerned with mythmaking, fashioning of new myths from antiquated ones. It is "both resistant and constructive" (34).  Reading de Certeau, Farmer points out that Bricolage negotiates production and consumption. People consume what the powers that be present them, but they in turn produce something new from it.  Farmer is ultimately unsatisfied with the implications for the bricoleur as defined by de Certeau and Levi-Strauss. That is, he is unsatisfied about it being a temporary tactic or just particular and random. Instead Farmer wants to join publics theory and the cultural bricoleur of de Certeau and Levi-Strauss: the citizen handyman. Punk--as a community and identity built around resistance, negation, and chaos--didn't find its way into composition because the punk movement came about at a time when composition privileged expertise, objectivity, and order (1970s).  Farmer spends some time explaining the origins and variations of punk culture. His main purpose, however, is to extend the culture of punk to that of text circulation, primarily that of anarchist zine culture and its DIY projects. Farmer carefully distinguishes punk-anarchist DIY as always a "critique of consumer capitalism" and a "making of something else" (48). Zines parodied copyrights and encouraged stealing. They stood against the ownership of ideas and their distribution. Doing and making becomes a kind of critique and a creation of a new culture (read as public perhaps?)--farmer employs Gramsci and calls it a counter-hegemonic culture.  Farmer's explanation of punk subculture--one that purposefully blends consumer and producer--is reminiscent of Hardt and Negri's idea of production and consumption. It is an imagining of an anti-consumerist way of being. Farmer ends the chapter pointing away from the seemingly micropolitics of zine culture toward larger implications for publics who assume a zine-type bricolage and DIY ethos in forming "an identity, a politics, an ethic, a culture, and a way of being in the world" (53).  Chapter 2 Farmer wants to distinguish between cultures and publics and he wants to argue that we should treat zines as a kind of cultural public rather than just a culture.  Farmer invokes Warner's definition and criteria for publics and counterpublics: poetic (making), based in texts, composed of strangers, not limited to rational critical debate or consensus, not always related to a "general public," (59-61). Counterpublics must relate to DOMINANT publics (Warner). Dominance could be contingent on the texts themselves as something abhorrent to the wider public. That is, certain publics aren't a priori counter, but could become so based on their discourse. Counterpublics lack a telos for their group but still desire a transformed public. Farmer argues that democracies need citizen-bricoleurs who attempt to change a system from without and work counter to popular notions of responsible citizen. Farmer remains hopeful for zine counterpublics in the Internet age as their purpose as an outside means of critiquing the ownership and control of mediation and communication will allow them to resist the homogenizing effect of internet communication.  Farmer explores how zine methods, mentalities, ethics, genre, and orientations toward writing could be incorporated into writing classrooms. For example, rational critical debate/argumentation wouldn't fit into a zine mentality because the purpose of a zine is not consensus or determining truth via better argument. Rather, the zine author wants to deconstruct the producer-consumer binary and persuade consumers to become producers, to steal their ideas, to not accept what someone says.  In his call to incorporate a zine maker ethos, or at least allow for counterpublic authorship in our comp classes, Farmer resists the rationale for creating better citizens as the phrase is pretty much empty and outside of critique. Instead of producing citizen texts or consuming them, Farmer wants comp students to be more like citizen bricoleurs, makers who "transform consumption into alternate forms of production, even if such production goes unrecognized by the culture at large" (89). In doing so, we can reshape what we mean by citizenship, democracy, and publicness. Chapter 3 To go public one must leave a private sphere. If there are multiple publics, can there also be multiple privates? Farmer problematizes the phrase "go public" because it invokes a litany of negative associations about private affairs becoming public knowledge. Academics, too, hesitate about going public and must do so when they go public they do so in a ways that "lend legitimacy to the act of going public itself" (102). Farmer wants to offer an alternative way for scholars to go public, one that doesn't require the inevitable controversies of being an activist public scholar.  Farmer looks at three examples of how disciplines accommodate counterpublic stances: architecture zines: push back on disciplinary boundaries and urge questions about materiality, design, construction. teacher education as counterpublic sphere (Giroux and McLaren)--Farmer spends much of his time in explicating this article on what the authors mean by counterpublic and its apparent associations with counter-hegemony in the article.  Science and Technology Studies: moves counterpublics away from text-based (Warner) and identities. In addition, counterpublics in STS underscore personal experience as expertise. Scientific counterpublics aren't based in disagreements about knowledge, but rather autonomy and access to power--for example, the relative import of social science research vs. mathematics. Disciplinary counterpublics can be: internal: emanating from disagreements within a discipline that have "public bearings" and "public implications" (123).  autonomous: disciplines that don't evoke or emanate counterpublics, but are counterpublics in and of themselves. Farmer believes this concept cannot be squared with the reality of disciplines or publics. Rhetorical: this emphasis moves toward rhetoric and away from delineating definitional boundaries of what is/isn't counterpublic (invoking Asen and Doxtader). If counterpublics are verbs, disciplines can be counterpublic at times, which means composition can be a counterpublic Composition as a counterpublic would seek a better image, a non-essentialized public image. Chapter 4 Farmer's exigence for a disciplinary composition rhetorical counterpublic has to do with the way non-experts (literature folk) present and lambaste composition in academic and wider publics. The difference between Farmer's disciplinary counterpublic and the activist WPA argument is subtle. Essentially, Adler-Kassner would seek usual channels and invites whereas Farmer asks compositionists "to insinuate ourselves into discourses that were never meant to include us to begin with" (138). Farmer expands on the composition counterpublic argument by first outlining the theoretical grounding for it in publics theory. He mostly sides here with Warner and creates a space for audiences to appear from exclusions, not necessarily as always hailed into existence. That is, compositionists, when they're being represented by someone who is not a compositionist must enter into the conversation as if they are being addressed by that person. This is a gambit to get admitted into public discourse. Put more clearly, Farmer is suggesting that we insert ourselves into dialogues that misrepresent us even though we don't see ourselves as part of the group supposedly being represented.  Once recognized as being part of the audience, Farmer argues that we construct identities or a public from the pieces of material currently in circulation (excorporation/bricolage).  Citizen bricoleur compositionists shouldn't present themselves as experts because expertise in most of the time an in-crowd conversation, non-public.  Epilogue Farmer spends time discussing Fraser's work in transnational public spheres and the implications of our contemporary moment. Whereas the older notion of public sphere envisioned a Westphalian state and citizenship, the world is much more linked and unbounded by national borders. Therefore, public opinion informing the state is out of place, and as such so, too, is citizenship conceived through the nation-state. Farmer posits the citizen bricoleur as the kind of non-state citizen capable of creating a more democratic world.
Synthesis Texts	de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life Habermas Fraser Asen Brouwer Doxtader