Mr. Warner

One summer afternoon three years ago, I heard a lecture by Michael Warner as a largely clueless high-school student. And I remember very little of the experience. I can visualize what the room looked like, a big lecture hall with theater-style seating (but that memory might have come from another lecture, since I heard several others in that same room). I remember Michael Warner basically reading from a paper, looking down and flipping through the pages, with an occasional symbolic raised glance to signify that he wished to engage the audience. Most vividly, I remember my teachers telling me in advance how part of his appeal was due to his resemblance to a young Michel Foucault.

Most strikingly, I do not remember a word of what Mr. Warner said. I have no idea even what his lecture was about, except that it related to critical theory (the subject of the lecture series). Yet according to "Publics and Counterpublics," I am nonetheless part of that lecture's public, it seems, by the simple fact of my attention, "the mere fact of active uptake" (61). My lack of recall (or admittedly, even comprehension at the time) is perhaps no different from the person watching television while vacuuming that Warner mentions. But this seems awfully inadequate to me, putting too much emphasis on the facts of discourse and too little on the character of the audience, though it does admittedly make more sense in the context of written works. Doesn't intelligibility matter, or is that assumed?