from public sphere to public screen: democracy, …from public sphere to public screen: democracy,...

From Public Sphere to Public Screen:Democracy, Activism, and the “Violence”

of Seattle

Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples

�—The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens’movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, theinternet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activismadapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the “public screen”as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today’spolitical scene. While a public sphere orientation inevitably finds contemporary discoursewanting, viewing such discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes aconsideration of new forms of participatory democracy. In comparison to the public sphere’sprivileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility, the public screenhighlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent. Usingthe Seattle WTO protests as a case study and focusing on the dynamic of violence and themedia, we argue that the public screen accounts for technological and cultural changeswhile enabling a charting of the new conditions for rhetoric, politics, and activism.

FROM November 30 to December3, Seattle, high-tech capital of the

present future, became the site of acontested New World Order as theforces of global capital, meeting undercover of the anonymous acronymWTO (World Trade Organization),were surprised by a cacophonous cadreof international grassroots activists in a

pitched battle over visions of the future.Images flashed worldwide—crowds ofthousands clogging the commercialcenter of Seattle and stranding WTOdelegates in the mass of humanity; seaturtles and hard hats linking arms andmarching together; black-clad anar-chists trashing the material manifesta-tions of corporate global dominance:Starbucks, Nike Town, McDonald’s;shaken government officials decryingthe outbreak of participatory citizen-ship; black-booted sci-fi stormtroopersmarching in goose step and restoringorder via tear gas, rubber bullets, andconcussion grenades.

Seattle and subsequent fair trade anddemocratic globalization protests1

around the world are striking crystalli-zations of a complex confluence of so-cial, economic, technological, environ-

Kevin Michael DeLuca is Assistant Professor inthe Department of Speech Communication atthe University of Georgia. Jennifer Peoples isAssistant Professor in Languages and Philoso-phy at Utah State University. DeLuca thanksJohn Lucaites of Indiana University, FernandoDelgado of Arizona State University West, andtheir colleagues for the opportunity to presentand discuss earlier versions of this essay. Bothauthors thank the editors and anonymous review-ers for their helpful advice.

Critical Studies in Media CommunicationVol. 19, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 125–151

Copyright 2002, National Communication Association

mental, and political processes. Theseprotests illustrate contemporary publicacts of global citizenry that suggest newconditions for the possibility of partici-patory democracy in a corporate-con-trolled mass-mediated world. Chiefamong these new conditions are trans-formed economic/political and techno-logical realities.

First, the activists recognize transna-tional corporations as the dominantpowers of the new millennium. Seattleprotesters pointedly smashed the win-dows of “Nike Town.” Although corpo-rations have been important playersfor some time, they are now clearly thedominant political, social, economic,and environmental forces on the planet,eclipsing the nation-state (Hardt andNegri, 2000; Friedman, 1999; and Grei-der, 1997). There are numerous indica-tors of this change in sovereignty. Thewealth of a number of companies ex-ceeds that of many nations. For ex-ample, as of 1999 Microsoft’s marketvalue was equivalent to the gross do-mestic product of Spain, GE’s to Thai-land, Wal-Mart’s to Argentina, andHewlett-Packard’s to Greece (Morgen-son, 2000). The laws of countries arestruck down if they impede free trade(“Behind the Hubbub in Seattle,” 1999;“Messages for the W.T.O.,” 1999). Inthe United States the defense industryde facto sets budget priorities and mili-tary policy, so that the collapse of theSoviet Union hardly impacts defensespending and citizens are left to won-der whatever happened to the “peacedividend” (Center for Defense Informa-tion, www.cdi.org).

Corporate control of our democraticgovernment’s policies is evident onmany other issues. With respect to en-vironmental issues, strong pro-environ-mental sentiments among the generalpopulace (Dunlap, 2000) are trumped

by corporate prerogatives, with the lob-byists of industry dictating environmen-tal legislation. In a recent example,Enron founder Kenneth Lay had pri-vate meetings with the Bush Adminis-tration to help formulate an energypolicy with extensive environmentalimplications (Slocum, 2001; Milbankand Kessler, 2002; Rich, 2002). Evenscience, reputedly the last redoubt ofobjectivity and pure knowledge, isfunded and circumscribed by corpo-rate desire. Swiss pharmaceutical giantand biotech pioneer Novartis literallyunderwrites the University of Califor-nia, Berkeley Department of Plant andMicrobial Biology. UCal, Berkeley alsohas the BankAmerica Dean of the HaasSchool of Business. The controversialmining company Freeport McMoranfunds a chair in environmental studiesat Tulane University. Conservative me-dia mogul Walter Annenberg bank-rolls the Annenberg Schools of Com-munication at the University ofPennsylvania and University of South-ern California. University of Pennsylva-nia’s Center for Bioethics is sponsoredby Monsanto, de Code Genetics, Mil-lennium Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, andGeron Corporation (Press and Wash-burn, 2000; Gelbspan, 1997; Elliott,2001). In short, from environmentalregulation on the local and global levelto university research agendas, corpo-rate interests are inextricably entwinedin “public” activities, a process thatsociologist Boggs terms “corporatecolonization”—the “increased corpo-rate penetration into virtually everycorner of modern American life” (2000,p. 9).

Second, global democratization andfair trade activists recognize the TVscreen as the contemporary shape ofthe public sphere and the image eventdesigned for mass media dissemina-

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tion as an important contemporaryform of citizen participation. Asidefrom writing letters to political repre-sentatives, attending public forums, andvoting, the activists acknowledge theimperative to appear on the televisionscreen alongside the staged imageevents of governments and corpora-tions. In the case of Seattle, the protest-ers realized the need to contest theWTO meeting as a crowning imageevent for President Clinton and freetrade. In staging a competing imageevent, the activists enacted what hasbecome a fact among media scholars:“A media culture has emerged in whichimages, sounds, and spectacles helpproduce the fabric of everyday life,dominating leisure time, shaping politi-cal views and social behavior, and pro-viding the materials out of whichpeople forge their very identities” (Kell-ner, 1995, p. 1).

In recognizing the dominance of cor-porations and new technologies, theactivists acknowledge the change insovereignty on the world stage andenact a transformation of citizen partici-pation. The purpose of this essay willbe to discuss and delineate thosechanges and their consequences forthe public sphere and participatory de-mocracy. More specifically, this essaywill introduce the “public screen” as anecessary supplement to the metaphorof the public sphere for understandingtoday’s political scene. The concept ofthe public screen enables scholars toaccount for the technological and cul-tural changes of the 20th Century,changes that have transformed the rulesand roles of participatory democracy.Our introduction of the public screenis an act infused with hope. The writ-ings of many critics of public discourseare wracked with despair over the stateof contemporary politics and culture.

Boggs’s judgment is typical: “As thetwenty-first century dawns, Americanpolitics is in an increasingly patheticcondition. . . . Measured by virtuallyany set of criteria, the political systemis in a (potentially terminal) state ofentropy. . . . the deterioration of thepublic sphere has potentially devastat-ing consequences for citizen empower-ment and social change, not to men-tion the more general health of thepolitical domain itself” (2000, pp. 1,vii). Decline is not the only possiblenarrative. Viewing contemporary pub-lic discourse through the prism of thepublic screen provokes a considerationof the emergence of new forms of par-ticipatory democracy. In what follows,we present an overview and criticismof the public sphere, introduce the char-acteristics of the public screen, andthen treat the “violent” Seattle protestsas a case study of participatory politicson the public screen.

From Public Sphere toPublic Screen

The public sphere is ubiquitous incontemporary social theory. The mostcursory of searches turns up a plethoraof titles trumpeting its presence: TheBlack Public Sphere; Masses, Classes, andthe Public Sphere; America’s Congress: Ac-tions in the Public Sphere, James Madisonthrough Newt Gingrich; Uncivil Rites:American Fiction, Religion, and the PublicSphere; The Public Sphere in Muslim Soci-eties; Hindu Public Sphere; Spaces of theirOwn: Women’s Public Sphere in Transna-tional China; From Handel to Hendrix:The Composer in the Public Sphere, andNecro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, andthe Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Cen-tury United States. Despite this bewilder-ing array of permutations, the initialconceptualization of the public sphere

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had a certain focused coherence. Inau-gurated by Jurgen Habermas’s Struc-tural Transformation of the Public Sphere,ideally the public sphere denotes asocial space wherein private citizensgather as a public body with the rightsof assembly, association, and expres-sion in order to form public opinion.2

The public sphere mediates betweencivil society and the state, with theexpression of public opinion workingto both legitimate and check the powerof the state. This public opinion is de-cidedly rational: “the critical judgmentof a public making use of its reason”(Habermas, 1989, p. 24). The publicsphere assumes open access, the brack-eting of social inequalities, rational dis-cussion, focus on common issues, face-to-face conversation as the privilegedmedium, and the ability to achieveconsensus. It is important to rememberthat Habermas’s book was an histori-cal study of the rise of the bourgeoispublic sphere and its decline in latecapitalist society. Habermas lamentsthe passing of the bourgeoisie publicsphere and the rise of mass media spec-tacles, a turn of events he sees as thedisintegration or refeudalization of thepublic sphere—a return to the spectacleof the Middle Ages. He argues that theactivity of the public sphere has beenreplaced with consumerism: “Rational-critical debate had a tendency to bereplaced by consumption, and the webof public communication unraveledinto acts of individuated reception,however uniform in mode” (1989, p.163).

Despite its unfortunate historical fate,the public sphere has become a vitalconcept for social theory, with two takespredominating: uncritical acceptanceand critical acceptance. The formerposition involves the taking-for-grantedof an unexamined public sphere and

importing it uncritically for contempo-rary social theory (as is suggested by itspromiscuous use in the above list oftitles). The latter position is of moreinterest to us. It involves the curiousdynamic of subjecting the public sphereto scathing criticisms, but then declar-ing it to be absolutely necessary. Mi-chael Schudson, for example, who sug-gests that at least in America there hasnever been a public sphere, neverthe-less concludes, “I find the concept of apublic sphere indispensable as a modelof what a good society should achieve.It seems to me a central notion forsocial or political theory” (1992, p. 160).The position, then, is that Habermas’sconceptualization and history of thepublic sphere has many flaws, fore-most among them his privileging ofdialogue and fetishization of a proce-dural rationality at the heart of thepublic sphere. These flaws produce anexclusionary and impoverished norma-tive ideal that shuns much of the rich-ness and turbulence of the sense-mak-ing process; still, the concept of thepublic sphere remains essential. AsNancy Fraser argues in a 33-page essaydetailing the flaws of the public sphere,“something like Habermas’s idea ofthe public sphere is indispensable tocritical social theory and democraticpolitical practice” (1992, p. 111). Ken-dall Phillips reenacts this dynamic,making a compelling argument thatthe public sphere’s privileging of con-sensus silences dissent and condemnsresistance, yet insisting that “a whole-sale rejection of the public sphere orconsensus seems little better than blindfaith in the exemplar and its founda-tion” (1996, p. 233; for useful criticismsof the public sphere, see Curran, 1991;Eley, 1992; McLaughlin, 1993; Pate-man, 1988; Peters, 1993; and Ryan,1992).

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Still, is it wise to retain the conceptof the public sphere for a televisualworld characterized by image and spec-tacle? Habermas suggests not, finding“the world fashioned by the mass me-dia is a public sphere in appearanceonly” (1989, p. 171). Although not ad-vocating wholesale rejection, we thinkthe public sphere needs a supplement.Before introducing the public screen,we want to elaborate on our reasonsfor supplementing the concept of thepublic sphere.

Our reservations revolve around thepower of terms to shape and confinethinking. Certainly, the public sphereevokes echoes of ancient Greece. In somany ways, the small city-state of Ath-ens has stunted the Western imagina-tion, especially with respect to whatconstitutes political activity and citizen-ship. In evoking ancient Athens, thepublic sphere evokes a particular vi-sion of politics. The Athenian agoramodels our metaphoric marketplace ofideas, an open and diverse (though notin terms of class and gender) space ofmultiple activities, including trade,laws, entertainment, and politics. Ascultural historian Richard Sennettnotes, it was a space of “ ‘sword-swal-lowers, jugglers, beggars, parasites, andfishmongers . . . [and] philosophers.. . . The evolution of Athenian democ-racy shaped the surfaces and the vol-ume of the agora, for the movementpossible in simultaneous space servedparticipatory democracy well. By stroll-ing from group to group, a personcould find out what was happening inthe city and discuss it” (1994, pp. 54–55).

The Pynx, Athens’ theater of democ-racy, calls forth our attachments to theNew England town meeting on thevillage square or the public forum. Asloped, bowl-shaped theater, literally

“a place for seeing,” the architecture ofthe Pynx amplified the one voice ad-dressing a seated, captive audience (thestructure functioned as a stone micro-phone, if you will). It was a democraticspace in that any citizen could answerthe herald’s call, “Who wishes tospeak?”, yet unlike in the agora, thetheater amplified the power of the voiceof the speaker. “Yet the Pynx, whoseclear design emphasized the serious-ness of attending to words, put thepeople literally in a vulnerable posi-tion. Rhetoric constituted the tech-niques for generating verbal heat.. . . This body-art deployed ‘tropes,’ orfigures of speech, in such a way that amass of people could become aroused”(Sennett, 1994, pp. 66, 63).

Despite the significant differences inmethods and purposes of the agoraand Pynx, we want to underline thatthey both privilege words in the formof embodied voices. Contemporarytechno-industrial culture shares thatprivileging. When people imagine theideal public sphere as the seat of civiclife, the soul of participatory democ-racy, whether it be the marketplace ofideas wherein multiple knots of privateconversations in coffee houses and sa-lons add up to a public, or town meet-ings wherein anyone can say his or herpiece, the public sphere is imagined asa place of embodied voices, of peopletalking to each other, of conversation.This is a deep impulse and a beautifuldream and it is endemic to our visionof the public sphere, of democracy, ofeven communication itself. This is evi-dent in our televised presidential elec-tion town meetings, wherein the “live”audience in the room makes the eventauthentic, real. John Dewey imaginedthe primordial act of communicationas two people sitting on a log, face-to-face, talking. As Habermas puts it, “A

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portion of the public sphere comesinto being in every conversation inwhich private individuals assemble toform a public body” (1974, p. 49). Eventhe postmodern prophet of simulacra,Jean Baudrillard, falls under the spellof bodily presence. In remarking onthe 1968 protests in France, he cri-tiques the mass media as transmissionsystems at a distance and praises post-ers and notices printed on walls asimmediate and thus the “real revolu-tionary media . . . everything that wasan immediate inscription, given and re-turned, spoken and answered, mobilein the same space and time, reciprocaland antagonistic” (1972/1981, p. 176).Baudrillard’s emphasis on immediacy,the spoken and answered, idealizes theface-to-face encounter and privilegessuch speech as authentic. The Baudril-lard example is compelling in that hediscusses written forms of communica-tion as if they were spoken. Posters andnotices are “spoken and answered.”They are better than mass media be-cause they are not distant but immedi-ate, like speech. Similarly, althoughthe public sphere includes writtenforms of communication, embodiedconversation functions as the idealbaseline. Yet the dream of the publicsphere as the engagement of embodiedvoices, democracy via dialogue, clois-ters us, for perforce its vision compelsus to see the contemporary landscapeof mass communication as a night-mare.

If envisioning a public sphere of em-bodied voices makes sense within theWestern imaginary, Jacques Derridaand John Peters gift us with a secondseeing of our situation. Much of Derri-da’s work traces and deconstructs theprivileging of face-to-face speech in thehistory of Western thought, what heterms a “logocentrism which is also a

phonocentrism: absolute proximity ofvoice and being, of voice and the mean-ing of being, of voice and the idealityof meaning” (1976, pp. 11–12). Peters,in his history of communication as “aregistry of modern longings” (1999, p.2), traces and critiques a similar historyof the privileging of presence, of “thedream of communication as the mu-tual communion of souls” (1999, p. 1;see also Schudson, 1997). As Petersnotes, “dialogue has attained some-thing of a holy status. It is held up asthe summit of human encounter, theessence of liberal education, and themedium of participatory democracy”(1999, p. 33). Both Derrida and Petersoffer dissemination as the primordialform of communication, the first turnbefore dialogue. Their point, an insighthighlighted in an age of mass commu-nication, is that communication/trans-mission/reception/meaning/under-standing/ communion may neverhappen, “that a letter can always notarrive at its destination, and thereforeit never arrives. And this is reallyhow it is, it is not a misfortune, that’slife, living life” (Derrida, 1987, p. 33).In counterpoint to a public sphereunderwritten by consensus throughcommunication or communion viaconversation, dissemination remindsus that all forms of communicationare founded on the risk of not commu-nicating.

Taking dissemination rather thandialogue as characteristic of contempo-rary communication practices, then,necessarily alters the trajectory of ourthinking about politics and society. Thepublic screen is an accounting that startsfrom the premise of dissemination, ofbroadcasting. Communication as char-acterized by dissemination is theendless proliferation and scattering ofemissions without the guarantee of pro-

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ductive exchanges. Peters cites theparables of Jesus as the paradigmaticexample of dissemination in order tosuggest that dissemination offers amodel of communication that is moredemocratic, open, public, equitable, re-ceiver-oriented, and in tune with hu-manity’s multiple communication prac-tices (1999, pp. 35, 51–59, 267–68). AsPeters concludes,

Dialogue still reigns supreme in the imagi-nation of many as to what good communi-cation might be, but dissemination repre-sents a saner choice for our fundamentalterm. Dissemination is far friendlier to theweirdly diverse practices we signifying ani-mals engage in and to our bumbling at-tempts to meet others with some fairnessand kindness. Open scatter is more funda-mental than coupled sharing; it is the stufffrom which, on rare, splendid occasions,dialogue may arise. Dissemination is notwreckage; it is our lot. (1999, p. 62)

In short, although an historically andculturally understandable desire, thefondness for bodily presence and face-to-face conversations ignores the socialand technological transformations ofthe 20th century that have constructedan altogether different cultural context,a techno-epistemic break. The preced-ing few pages were meant to suggestthe limitations of the public sphere as aguiding metaphor for social theory be-cause it holds static notions of the pub-lic arena, appropriate political activity,and democratic citizenship, thus ignor-ing current social and technologicalconditions. Further, as a normativeideal, the public sphere promotes asunquestioned universal goods severaldeeply problematic notions: consen-sus, openness, dialogue, rationality, andcivility/decorum. As a supplement, wewant to introduce the public screen asa metaphor for thinking about theplaces of politics and the possibilitiesof citizenship in our present moment.

Remediation, Hypermediacy, and Images

The public screen. Such a concepttakes technology seriously. It recog-nizes that most, and the most impor-tant, public discussions take place via“screens”—television, computer, and thefront page of newspapers. Further, itssuggests that we cannot simply adoptthe term “public sphere” and all itentails, a term indebted to orality andprint, for the current screen age. Thenew term takes seriously the work ofmedia theorists suggesting that newtechnologies introduce new forms ofsocial organization and new modes ofperception.

Our starting premise, then, is thattelevision and the Internet in concerthave fundamentally transformed themedia matrix that constitutes our so-cial milieu, producing new forms ofsocial organization and new modes ofperception. As art historian W.J.T.Mitchell suggests, “The difference be-tween a culture of reading and a cul-ture of spectatorship, for instance, isnot only a formal issue; it has implica-tions for the very forms that sociabilityand subjectivity take, for the kinds ofindividuals and institutions formed bya culture” (1995, p. 3). These implica-tions can be extrapolated both forwardto the Internet and back to the ava-lanche of communication technologiesof the 19th and 20th centuries, espe-cially photography, telegraph, tele-phone, radio, and film.

These technologies have intensifiedthe speed of communication and oblit-erated space as a barrier to communica-tion (Kern, 1983; Carey, 1989). Theyphysically shrink the world while simul-taneously mentally expanding it, pro-ducing a vast expansion of geographi-cal consciousness. Thoreau’s causticcomments about the telegraph havecome true. We know and care when

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Princess Di has a car crash. Texas maynot have much to say to Maine, but it istransmitted nevertheless. Further, seg-regated space is breached, flatteningmultiple forms of hierarchy (Meyro-witz, 1985). As media scholar Ian An-gus explains, “Media of communica-tion constitute primal scenes, a complexof which defines the culture of a givenplace and time, an Epoch of Being”(2000, p. 190).

This quotation warrants elaboration.Angus is stating that at any historicalmoment a plurality of media coexistand interact. This point, suggestedby McLuhan’s observation that “the‘content’ of any medium is always an-other medium” (1964, p. 23), is use-fully extended by Bolter and Grusin’sdiscussions of remediation and hyper-mediacy. Remediation is “the represen-tation of one medium in another”(1999, p. 45) and examples includecomputer games like Myst or Doom thatremediate photography and film or websites that remediate television. Impor-tantly, Bolter and Grusin argue thatremediation is not a linear process andthat “older media can also remediatenewer ones” (1999, p. 55). For ex-ample, newspapers like USA Today re-mediate both television and the Win-dows layout of computer screens.Remediation is closely linked to thelogic of hypermediacy: “contempo-rary hypermediacy offers a heteroge-neous space, in which representation isconceived of not as a window on to theworld, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself–with windows that open on to otherrepresentations or other media. Thelogic of hypermediacy multiplies thesigns of mediation” (Bolter and Grusin,1999, p. 34).

The notions of remediation and hy-permediacy are crucial to our discus-sion of the public screen, for when we

discuss the public screen primarilythrough television and newspaper ex-amples, it is with three understandings.First, TV is never simply TV, but amedium immersed in the process ofremediations among multiple media.Second, the public screen is a scene ofhypermediacy. Third, at a meta-level,remediation provides a frame for con-ceptualizing the relation between thepublic sphere and the public screen.The latter neither simply succeeds theformer nor are they utterly distinct are-nas. Rather, the public screen and thepublic sphere exist in a dialectic ofremediation. To herald the emergenceof the public screen is not to announcethe death of the public sphere, thoughit may suggest its eclipse.

Angus, in making the now commonobservation that media do not merelytransmit information and represent re-ality but fundamentally constitute it,goes one step further. Yes, media pro-duce culture, but they are also the pri-mal scene upon which culture is pro-duced and enacted. In other words, intechno-industrial culture media be-come the ground of Being. To pushthis point, media are not mere meansof communicating in a public sphereor on a public screen; media producethe public sphere and public screen asprimal scenes of Being. Particular con-figurations of media institute the sceneor open the spaces from which episte-mologies and ontologies emerge.

Today’s scene is predominantly avisual one. TV trades in a discoursedominated by images not words, a vi-sual rhetoric. In our television culture,we are experiencing a shift from Rorty’s“linguistic turn” to what Mitchell termsa “pictorial turn” (1995, p. 11). TV’simagistic discourse has become sodominant that even newspapers cando no better than imitate TV, moving

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to shorter stories and color graphics.The epitome of this trend is the na-tional newspaper, USA Today, but eventhe grey New York Times now printscolor photographs on the front page. Ifwe take remediation seriously, SusanSontag’s observations on photographyare also illuminating with respect tothe ceaseless circulation of images inour media matrix: “Industrial societiesturn their citizens into image-junkies.. . . turn experience itself into a way ofseeing. . . . an event has come to mean,precisely, something worth photo-graphing,” something that has appearedon the public screen (1977, pp. 24,18–19). Baudrillard pushes this point:“Photography brings the world intoaction (acts out the world, is the world’sact) and the world steps into the photo-graphic act (acts out photography, isphotography’s act)” (2000, p. 3). Thesecomments are suggestive for thinkingabout a public discourse of images.John Hartley’s provocative analysis ofthe politics of pictures more explicitlygets at the transition from public sphereto public screen. Hartley suggests thatthere is no real public, but, rather thatthe public is the product of publicity,of pictures. The public’s fictional sta-tus, however, should not be “taken as adisqualification from but as a demon-stration of the social power (even truth)of fictions” (Hartley, 1992, p. 84). Im-ages, then, are important not becausethey represent reality but create it:“They are the place where collectivesocial action, individual identity andsymbolic imagination meet—the nexusbetween culture and politics” (Hartley,1992, p. 3).

Transforming Publicity

So what do these technological trans-formations portend for democracy?

Advocates of the public sphere oftencriticize the contemporary politicalimagescape by evoking the fullness ofthe public sphere ideal and a pastgolden age. Michael Schudson cites arepresentative example:

Christopher Lasch, for instance, bemoans“the transformation of politics from a cen-tral component of popular culture into aspectator sport.” What once existed buthas been lost, in Lasch’s view, is “the oppor-tunity to exercise the virtues associatedwith deliberation and participation in pub-lic debate.” What we are seeing is “theatrophy of these virtues in the commonpeople—judgment, prudence, eloquence,courage, self-reliance, resourcefulness, com-mon sense.” (1992, p. 142)

Of course, Lasch’s position suggeststhat our fall from grace could be recti-fied by a collective act of will. Studyingmedia suggests not. New technologieshave transformed our social context,generating new forms of social organi-zation and new modes of perception.TV places a premium on images overwords, emotions over rationality, speedover reflection, distraction over delib-eration, slogans over arguments, theglance over the gaze, appearance overtruth, the present over the past.

Yet even theorists aware of the struc-tural transformations introduced bytechnologies fall into Lasch’s reaction-ary pose. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, af-ter skillfully explaining how TV hasrendered traditional public address ob-solete, concludes that we need moreoccasions for traditional public address(1988, pp. 238–255). Neil Postman, inhis book Amusing Ourselves to Death(1985), understands the new contextbut tips his hand with his title andframes his discussion in terms of theloss of the pre-TV golden age of theLincoln-Douglas debates [Schudsonnicely explodes that myth (1992)].

These critics base their critiques on

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the assumption of an idealized publicsphere predicated on rationality, face-to-face talk, consensus, equality, con-templation, and the bracketing ofpower relations. Such a frame unneces-sarily limits understanding of the possi-bilities of participatory politics in amass-mediated society. Technologicaland social changes have produced thepublic screen. For a cultural critic, thekey response to the structural transfor-mations of our moment is neither toadopt a moral pose nor to expressyearnings for a mythical past, but toexplore what is happening and what ispossible under current conditions. Ifembodied gatherings of culturally ho-mogenous, equal citizens engaged inrational dialogue with the goal of con-sensus is no longer a dominant modeof political activity, what constitutespolitics today? One answer is the pub-lic screen. Groups perform imageevents (DeLuca, 1999) for dissemina-tion via corporate-owned mass mediathat display an unceasing flow of im-ages and entertainment. Although to-day’s televisual public screen is notthe liberal public sphere of whichHabermas dreams, wherein a rationalpublic through deliberative discussionachieves public opinion, neither is itthe medieval public sphere of represen-tative publicity that Habermas fears, asite where rulers stage their status inthe form of spectacles before the ruled.Rather, on today’s public screen corpo-rations and states stage spectacles (ad-vertising and photo ops) certifying theirstatus before the people/public and ac-tivists participate through the perfor-mance of image events, employing theconsequent publicity as a social me-dium for forming public opinion andholding corporations and states ac-countable. Critique through spectacle,not critique versus spectacle. Green-

peace’s image fare against Soviet andJapanese whalers (DeLuca, 1999), col-lege students’ shantytown campaignagainst corporate and institutional in-vestment in apartheid South Africa(Williams, 1986), and Act Up’s in-your-face activism against AIDS indiffer-ence (DeParle, 1990) attest to the possi-bilities of such practices.

Note that the public screen containsa shift in the function of public opin-ion. In Habermas’s public sphere, pub-lic opinion is designed to criticize andcontrol the power of the state. As al-ready argued, in the present historicalmoment corporations have eclipsed na-tion-states in many respects as thedominant players on the world scene.For Habermas, the rise of corporationshas corrupted the public sphere:

“Public opinion” takes on a different mean-ing depending on whether it is broughtinto play as a critical authority in connec-tion with the normative mandate that theexercise of political and social power besubject to publicity or as the object to bemolded in connection with a staged dis-play of, and manipulative propagation of,publicity in the service of persons andinstitutions, consumer goods, and pro-grams. (1989, p. 236)

Although not disagreeing withHabermas’s account, we think it is onlypartial and neglects the opportunitiesthe public screen engenders for citi-zens to hold corporations accountable.The publicity activists generate via thepublic screen is just as often directedtoward corporations as toward govern-ments. Given the importance of imageon the public screen, even powerfulcorporations are vulnerable to image-fare and must be protective of theirpublic image (for examples, see Beder,1997; Greider, 1992). A compellingrecent example has been the campaignagainst sweatshop labor. Activists,

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many of them college students, haveused the public screen to generate pub-lic opinion against the use of sweat-shop labor by global corporations, in-cluding Nike, Wal-Mart, and the GAP(Gourevitch, 2001; the major groups inthis effort are United Students AgainstSweatshops, the National Labor Com-mittee, the Fair Labor Association, andthe Worker Rights Consortium).

Image Events in a Time of Distraction

The public screen is a constant cur-rent of images and words, a ceaselesscirculation abetted by the technologiesof television, film, photography, andthe Internet. These technologies’ speed,stream of images, and global reachcreate an ahistorical, contextless flowof jarring juxtapositions. The publicscreen promotes a mode of perceptionthat could best be characterized as “dis-traction.” The public sphere, in privi-leging rational argument, assumed amode of perception characterized byconcentration, attention, and focus.German social theorists contemplatingthe effects of film, radio, photography,and urbanism recognized the emer-gence of a new mode of perception.Horkheimer and Adorno lamented theeffects of film,

Real life is becoming indistinguishable fromthe movies. The sound film, far surpassingthe theater of illusion, leaves no room forimagination or reflection on the part of theaudience, who is unable to respond withinthe structure of the film. . . . They are sodesigned that quickness, powers of observa-tion, and experience are undeniablyneeded to apprehend them at all; yet sus-tained thought is out of the question if thespectator is not to miss the relentless rushof facts. (1972, pp. 126–127)

Observing the state of middle-classGermany amidst the new technologies

and the culture industry in the 1920sand 30s, Siegfried Kracauer wrote ofpeople living in a state of distraction:“Society does not stop the urge to liveamid glamour and distraction, but en-courages it wherever and however itcan” (1998, pp. 89).

Eschewing mere judgment, WalterBenjamin sought to understand distrac-tion as the mode of perception mostappropriate to the technologicallytransformed conditions of the 20th cen-tury. Benjamin conceived of the audi-ence as “a collectivity in a state ofdistraction” and asserted that “the taskswhich face the human apparatus ofperception at the turning points of his-tory cannot be solved by optical means,that is, by contemplation, alone. Theyare mastered gradually by habit, underthe guidance of tactile appropriation”(1968, pp. 232, 233). Benjamin is sug-gesting that the focused gaze has beendisplaced by the distracted look of theoptical unconscious, the glance of habit,which is tactile in the sense that one isnot an observer gazing from a criticaldistance, but an actor immersed in asea of imagery, a self pressed upon bythe play of images and driven to distrac-tion to survive. The self utilizes “a wayof looking and experiencing the worldin which the eye does not act to holdexternal objects in a firm contempla-tive gaze, but only notices them inpassing and while also keeping a seriesof other objects in view” (Latham, 1999,p. 463; see also Abbas, 1996).

The key point is that these theoristsunderstand distraction not as a lack ofattention but as a necessary form ofperception when immersed in the tech-nologically induced torrent of imagesand information that constitutes publicdiscourse in the 20th and 21st centuries.Speed and images, singly and in con-cert, annihilate contemplation. Al-

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though distraction and the glance areantithetical to the public sphere andwere read negatively by theorists suchas Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kracaueras signs of the decline of civilization,the dialectic of Enlightenment, we sug-gest that they be read not morally butanalytically as signs of the emergenceof a new space for discourse, the publicscreen, that entails different forms ofintelligence and knowledge.

Given that in modern industrial soci-ety people “directly know only tinyregions of social life” and that of “allthe institutions of daily life, the mediaspecialize in orchestrating everydayconsciousness. . . . They name theworld’s parts, they certify reality asreality” (Gitlin, 1980, pp. 1–2), the pub-lic screen is an unavoidable place ofpolitics. As Gronbeck bluntly puts it,“The telespectacle, for better or worse,is the center of public politics, of thepublic sphere. . . . we must recognizethat the conversation of the culture iscentered not in the New York Review ofBooks but in the television experience”(1995, p. 235). Citizens who want toappear on the public screen, who wantto act on the stage of participatorydemocracy, face three major condi-tions that both constrain and enabletheir actions: 1) private ownership/monopoly of the public screen, 2) Info-tainment conventions that filter whatcounts as news, and 3) the need tocommunicate in the discourse of im-ages.

These are formidable constraints; yetthey are also rich opportunities. Yes,ownership often restricts content thatis against the interests of the transna-tional corporations that own and adver-tise on the media. Yes, the fact thatprivate companies driven by profitsown the media restricts access for citi-zens and most activist groups that sim-

ply cannot afford to buy time (Mc-Chesney, 1999). Yes, the visual bias ofTV works against those deploying tra-ditional, word-based forms of argu-ment. Still, there are opportunities.First, the need for media companies tobe competitive and attract audiencesopens up the public screen to storiesbeyond the narrow ideological inter-ests of transnational capital. Further,although certain news conventionswork against activist groups, others,most notably the emphasis on the new,drama, conflict, objectivity, and com-pelling visuals, open up the publicscreen. Finally, TV amplifies voices,enabling one person (Dr. Kevorkian)or small groups to communicate tomillions via the public screen.

This understanding of mass mediahas translated into a practice of stagingimage events for dissemination. In abook written shortly before Green-peace’s first image event, early Green-peace Director Robert Hunter arguedthat the mass media provide a deliverysystem for image events that explode“in the public’s consciousness to trans-form the way people view their world”(1971, p. 22). As fellow activist PaulWatson elaborated, “The more dra-matic you can make it, the more contro-versial it is, the more publicity you willget. . . . The drama translates into expo-sure. Then you tie the message intothat exposure and fire it into the brainsof millions of people in the process”(quoted in Scarce, 1990, p. 104).

Greenpeace is an early example of agroup lacking organization, resources,and a large membership deploying dra-matic visuals and an understanding ofthe public screen to achieve astonish-ing successes. The fair trade/demo-cratic globalization protests provide acontemporary opportunity to study thepossibilities and consequences of the

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public screen. The Seattle WTO pro-tests provide a particularly rich ex-ample, in part because the public screenis more developed and complex than itwas in the 1970s and in part becauseSeattle was a contested image eventwherein several groups competed overits meaning: the Clinton Administra-tion, corporate sponsors, peaceful pro-testers, uncivil disobedience activists,and anarchists. Further, a key compo-nent of Seattle was violence (in variousforms), a type of “communication” apriori ruled out of the public sphere. Inpart, then, our analysis will focus onviolence and how it works on the pub-lic screen.

The Battle in Seattle:The Uses of Violence

There are so many legal precautions againstviolence, and our upbringing is directedtowards so weakening our tendencies to-ward violence, that we are instinctivelyinclined to think that any act of violence isa manifestation of a return to barbarism.. . . almost uninterruptedly since the eigh-teenth century, economists have been infavour of strong central authorities, andhave troubled little about political liberties.It may be questioned whether there is not alittle stupidity in the admiration of ourcontemporaries for gentle methods.

—Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence

Violence is never an appropriate way tosettle differences. I know that the violencecomes from a tiny segment who throughsuch actions detract from those who havecome there to constructively protest. TheWorld Trade Organization has sought inrecent years to expand its contacts withpeople from all segments of society. Ourefforts at transparency have not been per-fect. More work needs to be done. Butprogress in this area can only be madethrough constructive dialogue.

—Mike Moore, Director-General,World Trade Organization

A little broken glass in the streets of Seattlehas transformed the World Trade Organi-zation into a popular icon for the unregu-lated globalization that tramples humanvalues on every continent, among rich andpoor alike.

—William Greider,“The Battle Beyond Seattle”

When thinking about the WTO inSeattle, we must first recognize that itwas designed by the Clinton Adminis-tration as an image event. As politi-cians and their advisers clearly under-stand, with the advent of television,dramatic visuals have become requiredfare. For example, when then-Presi-dent Bush wanted to announce cleanair legislation he traveled to Arizona touse the Grand Canyon as a visual back-drop. Seattle, export capital of the U.S.,was consciously chosen as the scenefor Clinton’s triumphant procession.Success was scripted, with Clinton asthe star in the heroic tale of free-tradeprosperity. The title of the productionwas to be the “Clinton Round,” thesequel to the founding “UruguayRound” in 1995. Corporate sponsor-ship was secured, with companies suchas General Motors, Boeing, and Mi-crosoft paying as much as $250,000 foraccess to heads of state, ministers, anddelegates during the conference (Lean,1999). Seeing the stage set, however, adiverse range of activists decided itwould be the perfect opportunity tolaunch their issues onto the publicscreen.

In an example of the hypermediacyof the public screen, the plan for Se-attle was clearly laid out on the internetand in alternative newspapers, hand-bills, and flyers circulating in Seattlefor weeks before November 30th.3 Or-ganizers anticipated that tens of thou-sands of people would converge ondowntown Seattle and “transform itinto a festival of resistance with mass

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nonviolent direct action, marches,street theater, music and celebration”(“Resist the World Trade Organiza-tion” handbill).4 Even with extensivediscussions of nonviolent tactics, orga-nizers expected violence—from the po-lice. The rules of enactment were ex-plicitly laid out. In their “colorfulfestival” of civil and uncivil disobedi-ence, the protesters would provide theprovocation and the violence wouldcome from the police.5 As anyone witha television or access to a newspaperduring those few days in 1999 willreadily agree, the protest did not turnout exactly as planned. The festival ofcolor was punctuated with black-cladanarchists and the nonviolent directaction was upstaged by images ofsmashed windows, burning trash bins,and brutal interactions with the police.

Both establishment voices and non-violent activists denounced the vio-lence, especially the symbolic violenceof the anarchists. (By symbolic vio-lence, we mean acts directed towardproperty, not people, and designed toattract media attention.) The dominantresponse lamented the violence asdrowning out the message of the non-violent protesters. An editorial in theSeattle Times opined, “It took thou-sands of peaceful protesters to shutdown the opening ceremonies of theWorld Trade Organization. It took onlya few hundred punks, vandals, andself-proclaimed anarchists to turndowntown Seattle from a festive Christ-mas scene to a dump” (“WTO Seattlebecomes a playpen for vandals,” 1999,B4). Activist Cathy Ahern complained,“I am so disappointed how this turnedout. We had weeks of training how todo this correctly. It was supposed to bepeaceful. . . . It’s been completely de-stroyed. Our message is not going toget out and I’m so mad” (as quoted in

Postman, Broom and Davila, 1999, p.A13). Arlie Schardt, president of Envi-ronmental Media Services, concurred,“I just think it’s tragic that all the newshere is about a handful of anarchistsand not the tens of thousands of activ-ists who conducted model marches”(as quoted in Cooper, 1999, A 2). Suchcriticisms fail to consider important el-ements of politics and social change ona global and televisual public screen.The WTO protests are an instructiveexample of the productive possibilitiesof violence on today’s public screen.

By definition, the news is about whatis new, what is out of the ordinary. Thenews is attracted to disturbers of orderand deviation from the routine. As thenews adage goes, “if it bleeds, it leads”(Kerbel, 2000). Aside from bloodshed,nothing fits these parameters more pre-cisely than symbolic protest violenceand uncivil disobedience. In Seattle,such acts served to highlight the lack ofcitizen access and input in the WTOdecision-making process. These actsalso encouraged the police response oftear gas and concussion grenades thatmade for some of the most compellingimages coming from the WTO protest.The symbolic violence and uncivil dis-obedience worked together in a nu-anced fashion. The non-violent protest-ers served to provoke the police atleast as much as the anarchists did.Indeed, police violence against non-violent protesters performing uncivildisobedience started before the anar-chists acted. We suspect that the anar-chists’ symbolic violence justified in-tense media coverage of the policeviolence because media framing oftenportrayed the police violence as a re-sponse to the anarchists. In other words,the presence of the anarchists allowedthe media to provide some sort of ex-planation, however inadequate, of a

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police force out of control. Police vio-lence against activists at the IMF/World Bank protest in Washington,D.C. the following spring went largelyunreported. The event also lacked sym-bolic anarchist violence. In Seattle,then, symbolic violence and uncivildisobedience in concert produced com-pelling images that functioned as thedramatic leads for substantive discus-sions of the issues provoking the pro-tests.

Since the civil rights and antiwarprotests of the 1960s, activists havelearned the lessons of images. Theyunderstood Seattle as an occasion notfor warfare but for imagefare. The pro-testers’ chants of “The whole world iswatching” clearly echo the 1960s. Thewhole world did watch—not becausethirty thousand protesters gathered inone location, but because uncivil dis-obedience and symbolically violent tac-tics effectively disrupted the WTO,shutdown Seattle, provoked police vio-lence, and staged the images the mediafeed upon. An analysis of media cover-age of the WTO protests reveals suchtactics as necessary ingredients for com-pelling the whole world to watch.

TV Screens

Analysis of the television eveningnews coverage for the first day of vio-lence, November 30, suggests the pro-ductive role of violence in social pro-test on the public screen. Combinedcoverage time on CNN, ABC, CBS,and NBC increased by 26% from Mon-day’s coverage and the placement ofthe story improved from the third,fourth, or fifth story to the lead orsecond story. The opening images wereclearly ones of violence and conflict:protesters smashing a Starbucks; po-lice in sci-fi riot gear shooting tear gas

canisters and concussion grenades;police roughing up protesters. Otherimages did get through, though: thou-sands in the labor march; environmen-talists in sea turtle costumes; protestersnonviolently blocking streets. Signifi-cantly, the protesters’ criticisms of theWTO received an impressively exten-sive and sympathetic airing–the claimthat the WTO is an undemocratic orga-nization with a pro-corporate agendathat in practice overrules national la-bor, environmental, and human rightslaws was broadcast to an internationalaudience. In addition to the power ofthe images themselves, this airing hap-pened in two ways. First, among theimages of violence were interspersedquotations from the protesters. OnNBC, for example, dramatic images ofviolence yielded to a female protesterdeclaring, “We’re just normal peoplewho are tired of the exploitation of themulti-national corporations through-out the world.” Second, the “breakingnews” stories focusing on violent im-ages were invariably followed by back-ground stories focusing on the issuesthat make the WTO controversial.ABC reporter Deborah Wong con-cluded one such story: “For these pro-testers, this single organization, theWTO, has come to symbolize justabout all that is wrong in the modernworld. So in this global economy,where bigger is better and only thefittest survive, these people complainthey have less and less control overtheir jobs and the laws which protecttheir communities.” Such backgroundstories sought out the perspectives ofprotesters. On ABC, a female protesterremarked, “There is a general dissatis-faction here with corporate culture, ab-solutely, and we’re not going to havethat slammed down our throats.” CBSinterviewed unemployed Mary Fleure

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of the United Steelworkers of America,who explained, “We’re just being swal-lowed up by corporate greed. We can’tcompete. I can’t feed my family.”

To think that the WTO protestswould have been lead stories and wouldhave received such extensive airtimewithout symbolic violence (there wasdifficult competition from mass gravesin Mexico) is to neglect the dynamicsof the news media. Far from discredit-ing or drowning out the message of theWTO protesters, the symbolic vio-lence generated extensive media cover-age and an airing of the issues. Compar-ing television coverage in Seattle withsucceeding protests in Washington,D.C. and Qatar is suggestive.

The pattern of TV evening newscoverage reveals that although the ma-jor networks (CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC)expected a significant story in Seattle,they did not anticipate the extent of theprotests and the outbreaks of both anar-chist and police violence. The Sundayand Monday nights preceding theopening day of the WTO meetingsreceived 10:40 and 13:10 minutes ofairtime, respectively. Tuesday, the firstday of protests and violence, saw anincrease in coverage to 17 minutes andthe WTO was the lead or second storyon all four networks. On Wednesday,when the extent of Tuesday’s “may-hem” became clear, coverage reached28:30 and the WTO protests were thelead story on all four networks. OnThursday, the WTO remained the topstory on three of the four networks andgarnered 16:40 minutes of coverage.On these nights, most reports followedthe two-part structure already illus-trated in the analysis of the Tuesdaycoverage: an opening story with a fo-cus on the violence followed by a back-ground story to cover the substantiveissues of the protesters.

After Seattle, the next major global-ization event was the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF) spring meetings in Washington,D.C. The coverage pattern was almostthe reverse of that in Seattle and sug-gests the crucial role of violence ingarnering time on the public screen.On the Saturday and Sunday preced-ing the Monday opening, the WB/IMFprotests were the lead story on six ofthe seven broadcasts (NBC did nothave a Sunday evening broadcast) andreceived 10 and 13:20 minutes of cov-erage, respectively. Coverage peakedon Monday with the opening of themeetings. Although receiving 17:30minutes of coverage, the WB/IMF pro-tests were not the lead story on anynetwork. Notably, due to a variety offactors, there was no active anarchistpresence and much less police vio-lence. Although the meetings and pro-tests continued on Tuesday, there wasno coverage at all that evening. Appar-ently, without violence or the threat ofviolence, the protests were not evenworthy of coverage despite the signifi-cance of the issues being discussed.This pattern has repeated itself at otherglobalization events and protests. Themost recent round of WTO meetingswere held November 9 –14, 2001.Doha, Qatar was purposefully chosenas the site in order to reduce the likeli-hood of protests and violence. Thatgoal was achieved, as there were justsmall protests and no violence. Conse-quently, there was absolutely no TVevening news coverage by the fourmajor networks.

Although these three events includedvarying contextual factors, the resultsare very suggestive. In the Seattle andWashington, D.C. cases, preliminarycoverage was modest. When violencebroke out in Seattle, coverage esca-

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lated. When dramatic violence did notoccur in DC, coverage disappeared. InQatar, where violence was ruled out apriori by the choice of venue, televisioncoverage was nonexistent. Clearly,then, the symbolic violence and policeviolence did not detract from moresubstantive coverage of the protesters’issues. On the contrary, without suchviolence or its threat, TV news cover-age quickly evaporated.

Newspaper Screens

Interestingly, The New York Times intheir lead editorial comes to the samemistaken conclusion as the peacefulprotesters: “The violence and propertydestruction diverted attention from thebasic point the demonstrators soughtto make–the need to reform theW.T.O.’s procedures and values”(“Messages for the W.T.O.,” 1999, p.A30). The editorial, in its remaining sixparagraphs, details the grievances ofthe non-violent protesters, argues forthe need to respond substantively, andconcludes: “vital issues affecting thehealth and prosperity of the planet de-serve a visibly fair hearing” (p. A30).This editorial serves as a microcosm ofthe newspaper coverage generally: theviolence serves as a dramatic lead thatopens into expansive and extensivecoverage of the issues surrounding theWTO protests.

As was true for television, imagesplayed a dominant role in the printmedia coverage of the WTO protests.Headline stories were accompanied byquarter-page images (some as large asten and a half inches across) of policeand protesters facing off in teargas-fogged streets. From November 28th,1999 to December 2nd, 1999, The NewYork Times, Washington Post, Los AngelesTimes, and USA Today ran sixty-five

images of the WTO convention andrelated protests in downtown Seattle.Of those sixty-five images, the vast ma-jority, forty-one, were uncivil disobedi-ence shots. Eight were of peaceful pro-tests. Ten of the pictures documentedthe negotiations of the delegates, theproceedings taking place in the conven-tion, and the address of President Clin-ton. Three images were of the anar-chists and their actions. This emphasison images supports notions of remedia-tion and hypermediacy—viewers wit-ness the events in Seattle through thepublic screens of both their televisionsand newspapers.

Prior to the anarchists’ symbolic vio-lence, the uncivil disobedience, andthe violent police response of TuesdayNovember 30th, newspaper coveragewas fairly limited (thirteen images andtwenty-four articles). Judging by thenumber of articles covering the WTOconvention (three on the 28th, 12 onthe 29th, and 9 on the 30th), the newspa-pers’ interest in the protest was begin-ning to wane by the morning of the30th until the violence in the streetsshifted the coverage dramatically. Theaggressive direct action protests andsymbolic violence (which intensifiedthe police response) catapulted the pro-tests into national headlines. For thefirst time, on December 1st all fournewspapers ran front-page images ofthe convention, each opting to displaypictures of the violent interaction be-tween police and protesters. Fifteen ofthe images that accompanied the eigh-teen articles covering the WTO wereof acts of uncivil disobedience or of theviolent police response. Two imageswere of the anarchists and their ac-tions. Two images were of the conven-tion proceedings. Although violencewas a focus of the photographs and thelead stories, the papers reported criti-

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cisms of the WTO and the predomi-nantly peaceful character of the pro-tests was emphasized. This trendcontinued on December 2nd, with thefour newspapers running a noteworthysixteen images of uncivil disobedience.If we are thinking of the newspapersthrough the metaphor of the publicscreen, then the front page becomesparticularly important. Out of thirteenfront-page images during the days ofprotest, eight were of uncivil disobedi-ence, two were of peaceful protest, twowere of the convention proceedings,and one was of an anarchist.

This attention to the conflict outsideof the conference not only increasedscrutiny of the action of the protestersand police, but also increased cover-age of the WTO in general. For ex-ample, The New York Times ran twoarticles on the WTO on November28th, four on the 29th, four on the 30th,seven articles, editorials and letters tothe editor on December 1st, and a re-markable fourteen documents on De-cember 2nd. The shocking close-up ofa woman’s bleeding face on A1 in theL.A. Times directs readers to A18 whereanother image of protesting in thestreets draws readers’ attention to thecolumn, “WTO: What’s at Issue?” Thecolumn lists and briefly explains themajor issues facing the trade ministersin Seattle: agriculture, Uruguay roundassessment, anti-dumping measures, la-bor and environment, WTO reform,intellectual property and China (Iri-tani, 1999). The New York Times makesa similar move on the 1st, creating achart listing “Who’s Protesting andWhat They Object To” in the firstcolumn and “What They Want” in thesecond (“Behind the Hubbub in Se-attle,” 1999). The article focuses solelyon the issues of worker, environmen-tal, and consumer groups. A similar

dynamic was at work in the WashingtonPost and USA Today. “This weird jambo-ree” inspired USA Today to detail theissues of unions, environmentalists,steel workers, food-safety advocates,and poor countries (“Cover Story: Thisweird jamboree,” Cox and Jones, 1999,p. 1A). Far from stealing the limelightfrom the legitimate protesters, the com-pelling images of violence and disrup-tion increased the news hole and drewmore attention to the issues.

This increase in coverage can becompared to the coverage of the WB/IMF protests in Washington, D.C. thefollowing spring. Police cracked downon activists before the start of the con-ference by closing down protest head-quarters and making preemptive ar-rests. These preventive strikes by theWashington, D.C. police curtailed mostof the symbolic violence and directaction seen on the streets of Seattle.Backing our claim that the violence inthe streets of Seattle actually producedmore media coverage, the reportingon the WB/IMF conference did notspike as it did in Seattle. For example,in The New York Times coverage re-mained modest as the conference wenton: three articles April 15th, six on the16th, six on the 17th, six on the 18th,and three on the 19th.

In even starker contrast to the pro-test in Seattle was the recent WTOmeeting in Qatar, where the protesterswho did attend were reduced to hand-ing out anti-globalization pamphlets.The entire WTO-Qatar coverage inThe New York Times from November10th to November 15th 2001 was lessthan that of December 2nd, 1999 alone(thirteen documents). None of the ar-ticles graced the front page of the news-paper and nearly half the documents(six) were in the C section of the paper.The Los Angeles Times gave the talks

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even less attention, with a mere sixarticles covering the convention. Thisagain reinforces our claim that theWorld Trade Organization and its far-reaching agreements fall below thelevel of consciousness of most mediaorganizations in the absence of thecompelling images constructed throughthe symbolic violence and uncivil dis-obedience that marked the conventionin Seattle. As we found in the televi-sion coverage, such protest actions didnot detract from the message. On thecontrary, they increased the visibilityand extensiveness of newspaper cover-age of the protesters’ criticisms of theWTO.

Screen Effects

The WTO protests accomplishedmuch. On an immediate level, ordi-nary citizens excluded from the meet-ings managed through protest to affectthose meetings and contribute to theirfailure. As European Union trade com-missioner Pascal Lamy admitted,“What’s happening outside is havingan effect on the negotiations” (quotedin Sanger and Kahn, 1999, p. A14). Ata more general level, on the difficultterrain of a corporate-dominated pub-lic screen, thousands of global citizensmanaged to turn a summit dedicated tostreamlining the world for corporateprofits into an unruly “forum” on hu-man rights, environmental standards,and social justice in the emerging newworld. In exposing the often arcaneissues of trade policy to the glare of themedia, the protests provoked a debateover free trade versus fair trade. Publicdiscussions about trade are now consid-ering environmental concerns as wellas profit concerns, human rights aswell as property rights. Indeed, Presi-dent Clinton was moved to echo many

protester concerns in his speech to theWTO. Clinton called for economic jus-tice, worker rights, human rights, envi-ronmental protections, and an openand accessible WTO (1999). This pub-lic discussion has continued. The Ameri-can Prospect’s recent special issues onglobalization and its critics, The Face ofGlobalism (Summer 2001) and Global-ism and the World’s Poor (Winter 2002),are examples of some of the fallout ofSeattle.

On a global level, the Seattle pro-tests have sparked an international pro-democratic globalization movementthat has staged protests in Washington,D.C., Prague, Quebec City, Salzburg,Genoa and other cities around theworld. A front page story in the Wash-ington Post prior to the WB/ IMF meet-ings opened: “The last time opponentsof global capitalism confronted theranks of domestic law enforcement—inSeattle, Nov. 30 to Dec. 3—the resultswere clouds of tear gas, volleys of rub-ber bullets and the makings of a massprotest movement whose energy andappeal have surprised even some of itsorganizers. Round 2 is scheduled forApril 16 and 17 in Washington.”Though the article dismisses the anar-chists as “vandals” and “looters” “run-ning amok,” it also admits that theyhave changed the topography of thepolitical terrain: “Last year, as everyyear, a demonstration was called dur-ing the IMF and World Bank springmeetings in Washington. Twenty-fivepeople showed up.” A veteran critic ofthe World Bank and IMF remarks,“Something has changed. We mayfancy ourselves good organizers, but Idon’t think we could have planned forthis” (Montgomery and Santana, 2000,pp.1, 5).

In provoking an international mael-strom over globalization, activists have

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accomplished a substantial politicalachievement. The activists in Seattleand since have been able to link sweat-shops, union-busting, human rights vio-lations, environmental degradation,and poverty as consequences of corpo-rate globalization. In short, they haveunified farm and environmental andunion and anti-colonial groups into avoice that has effectively named corpo-rate globalization as a problem and siteof struggle, not an inexorable naturalprocess. The activists have puncturedthe claims of corporate globalization touniversality and to inevitability by giv-ing voice to those left out.

Finally, the symbolic violence anduncivil disobedience of protesters ex-posed the violence of the state andtransnational capital as the allegedlyprogressive haven of Seattle crackeddown with a show of force worthy of1960s Birmingham or Los Angeles.The trashing of civil liberties, notStarbucks, may be the lasting imageof Seattle. Violence often helps fo-ment activism and form community(Browne, 1996). In addition to expos-ing the violence of the state on behalfof corporate interests in Seattle, in chal-lenging the WTO the protesters havesparked a conversation about the vio-lence of global corporations in theirdaily practices. A smashed Nike store-front dims in comparison to the vio-lence of sweatshop labor around theworld. Yes, violence is disturbing. Butfor people excluded by governmentalstructures and corporate power, sym-bolic protest violence is an effectiveway to make it onto the public screenand speak to that power. Such sym-bolic protest violence is often a neces-sary prerequisite to highlight the non-violent elements of a movement thatmight otherwise be marginalized in thedaily struggle for media coverage. In

the “Battle for Seattle,” symbolic vio-lence helped make real the protestchant “Whose world? Our world!Whose streets? Our streets!”

Dense Surfaces: Contemplating ImageEvents

As the preceding content analysissuggests, the symbolic violence andthe uncivil disobedience fulfilled thefunction of gaining the attention of thedistracted media. Counter to chargesby peaceful protesters, then, such im-age events did not drown out theirmessage, but enabled it to be playedmore extensively and in greater depth.Media coverage of this issue was not azero-sum game. Uncivil disobedienceand the anarchists’ actions expandedthe totality of coverage. If we take im-age events seriously as visual discourse,however, we cannot simply reducethem to the function of gaining atten-tion for the “real” rhetoric of words. Itis our claim that image events are acentral mode of public discourse bothfor conventional electoral politics(Dahlgren, 1995; Donovan andScherer, 1992; Gronbeck, 1995; Jamie-son, 1988; Postman, 1985) and alterna-tive grassroots politics in an era domi-nated by a commercial, televisual,electronic public screen (Szasz, 1995;DeLuca, 1999). We must consider im-age events, then, as visual philosophi-cal-rhetorical fragments, mind bombsthat expand the universe of thinkablethoughts.

Image events are dense surfacesmeant to provoke in an instant theshock of the familiar made strange.They suggest a Benjaminian sense oftime, where any moment can open upon eternity, any moment can be themoment that changes everything, themoment that redeems the past and the

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future. And it is all there on the surface.In a familiar city, Seattle, home of theMariners, computer geeks, airplanes,rain, and coffee, a familiar place, Star-bucks, the national neighborhood cof-fee shop, is shattered by a hammer,everyday object and sign of nationalindustriousness. The familiar madestrange, the shock of recognition thatthe familiar is not necessarily innocu-ous, the hint of the “banality of evil.”The chain of targets reinforces the mes-sage: Nike Town, Old Navy, Mc-Donalds, Banana Republic, Planet Hol-lywood (for a detailed explanation ofthe choice of targets, see Hawken,2000).

This is made clear in the intentionsof the anarchists. Though intentional-ity cannot dictate meaning or effect, itcan help us glimpse possible surfacesof the multi-faceted image event. In a13-minute 60 Minutes II report on “TheNew Anarchists,” reporter Scott Pelleyframes the story with these openingwords: “Who were those masked menand women in Seattle? Those violentdemonstrators who attacked down-town, toppled a police chief, andwrecked the Clinton Administration’scherished trade conference?” The storyitself consists mostly of stunning videoof the protests (shot by the anarchists)and of interviews during which theanarchists explain their positions. Af-ter images of people in black shatteringstorefronts, the reporter asks, “What isthe point?” An anarchist responds,“Economic incentive to not hold meet-ings like that at all. Psychological incen-tive to reconsider the kind of societywe live in that fills our world withStarbucks and McDonalds.” The psy-chological impact is emphasized againin the words of an anarchist that closethe story: “You stare at a television andyou see logos and you’re in a daze and

these symbols pop up everywhere inyour life. When that is shattered, itbreaks a spell and we’re trying to getpeople to wake up before it’s too late.”

These comments display an acuteappreciation of the public screen andimage events. The anarchists’ imageevent of shattering windows obeys therules of the public screen. It both par-ticipates in and punctures the habit ofdistraction characteristic of the contem-porary mode of perception. It partici-pates in order to be aired—it is brief,visual, dramatic, and emotional. Itpunctures to punctuate, to interruptthe flow, to give pause. It punctures bymaking the mundane malevolent, thefamiliar fantastic.

Charting the Public Screen

The point of this essay has been toexplore the constraints and opportuni-ties of the public screen, a current placefor participatory democracy. It is in-cumbent upon activists, academics, in-deed, all citizens of the world, to under-stand the new topography of politicalactivity. Under contemporary condi-tions, the public screen is the essentialsupplement to the public sphere. Incomparison to the rationality, embod-ied conversations, consensus, and civil-ity of the public sphere, the publicscreen highlights dissemination, im-ages, hypermediacy, spectacular pub-licity, cacophony, distraction, and dis-sent. We have focused on the imageevent as one practice of the publicscreen because it highlights the publicscreen as an alternative venue for par-ticipatory politics and public opinionformation that offers a striking contrastto the public sphere. Our account, how-ever, is not an exhaustive treatment ofthe public screen. This is true evenwith respect to Seattle.

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The public screen includes the pun-dits on talking head TV, whose politi-cal discourse is molded as much by therequirements of the public screen as bythe rationality of the public sphere. Itincludes the staged campaigns of elec-toral politics, managed by contempo-rary wizards of oz such as MichaelDeaver, Lee Atwater, and James Car-ville. It includes sitcoms and other en-tertainment TV, where national “dis-cussions” on race, class, feminism, andsexual identity take place on Cosby,Roseanne, Ally McBeal, and Ellen. It in-cludes films that deliver the definitiveverdict for public memory on such keymoments as the Holocaust (Schindler’sList), World War II (Saving PrivateRyan), the Kennedy assassination ( JFK ),and the 60s (Forrest Gump).

The public screen includes the adver-tising and public relations of corpora-tions, arguably the dominant discoursesof our time (Ewen, 1996; Beder, 1997).This statement rings truer when oneconsiders how the structure of newspa-pers in the United States is built aroundadvertising and public relations. News-papers (as well as TV news) are finan-cially dependent on advertising, withthe news hole dependent on theamount of advertising. Consequently,as a rule advertising comprises at least50% of page space in most newspapers.Though not as visually obvious, publicrelations releases comprise much ofthe news in newspapers and television.For instance, one study found that morethan half of the Wall Street Journal’snews stories were based on news re-leases (Beder, 1997, pp. 112–113, 116–117). The enormous expenditures ofcorporations on advertising and publicrelations are evidence of the impor-tance corporations attribute to the pub-lic screen. McDonald’s and Coke, own-ers of two of the most recognizable

icons in the world today (rivaling theChristian cross), annually spend over$1 billion and $800 million, respec-tively, on advertising alone (Farley andCohen, 2001, p. 26). It is worth notingthat advertising and public relationsbecome dominant discourses with theadvent of 20th Century mass communi-cation technologies—the very sametechnologies that Habermas arguescontribute to the decline of the publicsphere.

Even the conversation of book cul-ture is centered not in the New YorkReview of Books but on the public screen,as acclaimed novelist Barbara King-solver laments while on book tour:

Can modern literary success really comedown to this, an author’s TV persona? In aword, yes. . . . but what criteria that couldpossibly fit in a fifty-eight-second TV spotwill guide them to an informed choice?The quality of a book’s prose means noth-ing in this race. What will win it a massaudience is the author’s ability to travel,dazzle, stake out name recognition, holdup under pressure, look good, and be witty–qualities unrelated, in fact, to good writing,and a lifestyle that is writing’s pure nem-esis. . . . Where would we be now if ourwhole literary tradition were built uponapproximately the same precepts as theMiss America competition? Who wouldwin: Eudora Welty or Vanna White? (1995,pp. 163–164).

This essay is an opening sketch in aneeded exploration of the conditionsof possibility for rhetoric, politics, andparticipatory democracy in the techno-industrial corporate-controlled culturethat bestrides the planet. As Kingsolv-er’s dismay displays, measuring con-temporary discourse by the criteria ofan idealized public sphere and roman-ticized past merely produces despairand nostalgia. Such dismay and nostal-gia are characteristic reactions of crit-ics of the contemporary “corrupted”

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public sphere, which always falls shortof an imagined golden past, a LakeWobegon polis. A public sphere orien-tation inevitably finds current discoursewanting.

Thinking about rhetoric, politics, andculture through the prism of the publicscreen, however, enables a seeing ofthe world anew. Pro-democratic global-ization protests, TV sitcoms, Holly-wood films, advertising, and public re-lations do not represent lack, multiplesigns of the decline of civilization. In-stead, thought through the metaphorof the public screen, such practices areproductive of new modes of intelli-gence, knowledge, politics, rhetoric, inshort, new modes of being in the world.It is not a simple seeing, however. Thedescriptor “new” is not attached with amoral meaning of “good” or “bad;”rather, “new” is an analytical termmarking the emergence of difference.Similarly, the concept “public screen”is neither working within a moraleconomy nor positing a normativeideal, but is opening a space for retheo-rizing the places of the political. Thepublic screen images a complex worldof opportunities and dangers. This com-

plexity is evident in the very term “pub-lic screen.” In the move from publicsphere to public screen, retaining theterm “public” is problematic. The air-waves in the United States are by lawthe property of the public, but they areleased in such a way that media compa-nies own them for all intents and pur-poses. The Walt Disney Co. need notgrant us a soapbox from which to airour views. Although the airwaves areprivately controlled territory, they nowfunction as the sites of public space,much the way a shopping mall does inthe stead of the town square. Clearly,in many ways this is unfortunate fordemocracy (McChesney, 1999; Boggs,2000). In addition, both theoreticallyand practically the very distinction be-tween public and private has eroded.Still, the public screen, though pri-vately controlled, is public. The com-plexity of the public screen warrantsneither bemoaning a lost past nor cel-ebrating a technological utopia. Thecharge for critics is not to decry alacking present or embrace a naivefuture. The charge for critics is to chartthe topography of this new world. �

Notes1Our choices of the terms “fair trade” and “democratic globalization” to describe the protests is a

political and intellectual move designed to work against the labeling of such protests in the massmedia as “anti-globalization” or “anti-trade.” Such media labels are the first step to dismissing theprotesters as Luddites, Nativists, simpletons, or unruly college kids who simply are against thingsand do not understand the realities of the world. Our terms recognize the specificity of the protests,the comprehensiveness of the critique, and the global nature of this activist movement.

2Although Habermas is credited with the term public sphere, concern over the public has a longhistory that can be traced at least to Aristotle. The 1st Amendment of the United States can be readas a theory of the role of the public in a democracy ( Jhally, 1989). In the first half of the 20th

Century, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, and Hannah Arendt were important theorists of thepublic in a mass-mediated democracy.

3The following analysis focuses on televison and newspaper coverage. This is largely a practicaldecision. Internet information is notoriously ephemeral. Sites that had extensive WTO protestcoverage now have, at most, abbreviated archives (zmag.org; indymedia.org). Since we argue thatthe public screen and its technologies are characterized by hypermediacy and remediation, theephemeralness of internet material is not analytically decisive.

4The organizations responsible for planning the direct action and printing the literature were all

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identified as cosponsors: Direct Action Network, Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network,Ruckus Society, Project Underground, National Lawyer’s Guild, Green Party (Seattle), Earth First!(Seattle), Adbusters, Center for Campus Organizing, Committee in Solidarity with the People of ElSalvador, 50 Years is Enough, Industrial Workers of the World, and Mexico Solidarity Network.

5Uncivil disobedience includes such tactics as verbal harassment and blocking streets andbuildings in the hopes of provoking a response and creating an image event and is in contrast topeaceful protests like marches. Besides being more disorderly, it is also qualitatively different fromthe respectful civil disobedience espoused by Martin Luther King Jr., though the latter is oftendesigned to provoke a violent response. King’s civil disobedience was founded on love of one’sopponents and predicated on the belief that one’s opponents were fundamentally good and couldbe converted from their erroneous practices. Democratic globalization activists are motivated bythe irreconcilable conflicts between the goals of capitalist corporate globalism and the values ofdemocracy, fair trade, and environmental sustainability.

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Received January 1, 2001Accepted February 27, 2002

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from public sphere to public screen: democracy, …from public sphere to public screen: democracy,...

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