Michael Bray’s “Openness as a Form of Closure: Public Sphere, Social Class and Alexander Kluge’s Counterproducts” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This essay analyzes the seductions and impasses of the “openness” of public sphere theory in class society. It does so by sidestepping the more obvious limits of formal-discursive models of publicity and critically engaging with the theory and practice of Alexander Kluge, whose foundational work with Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience, continues to ground experiential and affective models. For Kluge, this experiential turn was necessitated by the classist exclusions rationalist forms of publicity enact and it also made clear the need for “counterproducts” (rather than theoretical accounts) to combat audiovisual pseudo-publicity and construct a “proletariat public sphere.” Drawing together Kluge and Negt’s compelling account of exclusion and the specific character of Kluge’s own film and television counterproducts, shows how the latter fail to answer to the concerns the former, and helps explain the peculiar substitution, in Kluge’s films, of “feminine labor” and protagonists for the proletariat. This substitution, I suggest, is paradigmatic for the continuing shift of the “new left” away from issues of class. In closing, I propose the potential of a “populist public sphere” to more adequately address both the exclusions diagnosed by Kluge and Negt and the issues of gender “ciphered” in Kluge’s films.
“Democracy,” writes Jacques Rancière in Hatred of Democracy, “first of all means this: ‘anarchic government,’ one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern.” He adds: “Democracy is . . . the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body.” While Rancière’s suggestion that democracy is ‘anarchic government’ indeed seems paradoxical, and by all means requires careful unpacking, one thing that can be taken from it is that democracy is to be seen. That is to say, a political regime that requires active citizen-participation in which the body politic is self-governing requires political activity to therefore be made public. 
With the departure of the last American troops from Iraq, we can shift our perspective on the war from current event to one of history. Jim Vernon’s 2008 article “American Antigone: Hegelian Reflections on the Sheehan-Bush Conflict” was written in the midst of the war and just as Cindy Sheehan was moving herself out of the public eye. Now is an interesting time to revisit the dramatic conflict that ensued between Sheehan and George W. Bush and the ideological camps that formed around them. 
In his well-known visit to the United States, Alexis de Toqueville was particularly struck by the invisibility of the American state: “Nothing strikes a European traveler in the United States more than the absence of what we would call government or administration. One knows that there are written laws there and sees them put into execution every day; everything is in motion around you, but the motive force is nowhere apparent.” At the time of his visit, the state governments of Europe were indeed gargantuan compared to that of the newly founded state across the pond. While such a gap used to be the main distinguishing characteristic between governments of the old world and new, few would disagree that today this gap has closed significantly. For better or worse, the government of the United States has taken a decidedly statist turn from its original model. 
