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OverviewIn recent decades, media outlets in the United States-most notably the Internet-have claimed to serve the public's ever-greater thirst for information. Scandals are revealed, details are laid bare because ""the public needs to know."" In Publicity's Secret, Jodi Dean claims that the public's demands for information both coincide with the interests of the media industry and reinforce the cynicism promoted by contemporary technoculture. Democracy has become a spectacle, and Dean asserts that theories of the ""public sphere"" endanger democratic politics in the information age.Dean's argument is built around analyses of Bill Gates, Theodore Kaczynski, popular journalism, the Internet and technology, as well as the conspiracy theory subculture that has marked American history from the Declaration Independence to the political celebrity of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The author claims that the media's insistence on the public's right to know leads to the indiscriminate investigation and dissemination of secrets. Consequently, in her view, the theoretical ideal of the public sphere, in which all processes are transparent, reduces real-world politics to the drama of the secret and its discovery. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Jodi DeanPublisher: Cornell University Press Imprint: Cornell University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.454kg ISBN: 9780801486784ISBN 10: 0801486785 Pages: 224 Publication Date: 26 July 2002 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsCultural theorist Jodi Dean's latest book tackles the issue of the public sphere in a refreshingly contemporary and relevant way by focusing on the role of the technological media in the exercise of public democracy. . . . One of the most interesting discussions in the book is that of subjectification in terms of a drive toward celebrity, which seems to suggest, in a Sartrean vein, that we experience existence only in the eyes of multiple beholders. . . . The book serves, however, to raise the question of what democracy would look like without the rational monolith of 'the public' and goes some way to clearing the ground that has served to bolster this (from Dean's perspective) dangerous avoidance tactic. Kieran Laird, Contemporary Political Theory, Summer 2004 Removing secrets from the soul, where we traditionally suppose them to hide, and from the acts of divination that pretend to uncover them, Jodi Dean examines the genesis of secrecy as a ploy of modern technology. In doing so she does far more than place the secret 'out there' in the various technologies that have become the life-support of a thriving capitalism, she exposes the way a new ideology of intimacy threatens the very possibility of radical democracy. Political, cultural, and psychoanalytic insights spring from each page of this lively and timely book, raising critical concerns about our hasty acceptance of degraded notions of publicity. -Joan Copjec, University at Buffalo Author InformationJodi Dean is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author of Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace and the editor of Cultural Studies and Political Theory, both from Cornell. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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