Their Publics and Ours: PSAs and the Constructions

of Publicness

presenters

Brian Ganter + Lori MacIntosh

PUBLICS + CITIZENS

what is a citizen?

what is a public?

who is asking?

and why?

Citizens + Nations

"I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community ... imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion ... it is imagined as a community, because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail ... the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship ... "

-- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: 6-7

• printing press• homogenous time

• simultaneity of story/narrative

• print-capitalism laid the groundwork for the modern nation

"[T]he national culture industry is also in the business of generating paramnesias, images that organize consciousness, not by way of explicit propaganda, but by replacing and simplifying memories people actually have with image traces of political experience about which people can have political feelings that link them to other citizens and to patriotism. – L. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to

Washington City, 57