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So …what are public texts?

Michael Warner, author of Publics and Counterpublics , describes 3 “senses” of the word “public”. 

First, we have the public: a kind of social totality, or “the people in general”. this sort of public is thought to include everyone within the field in question - whether that be nation, commonwealth, city, state or some other community. (65)

Second, Warner talks about a public: “a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public.”  A public, in this sense of the word, is bounded by an event or shared space, and “knows itself by knowing where and when it is assembled in common visibility and common action” (66)

It is the third sort of Warner’s senses of publics that we English MA geeks are most concerned with, of course - “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (66). 

Warner  discusses at length the sort of publics - both the public and a public - that exist around texts. Some key features - and the 7 points he uses as headings for sections in writing about textual publics: 

1. A public is self-organized (and circular - texts create publics and publics create texts and in some cases there is no answer to which comes first) 
2. A public is a relation among strangers
3. The address of public speech is both personal and impersonal
   
4. A public is constituted through mere attention
5. A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse
6. Public act historically according to the temporality of their circulation
7. A public is poetic world making  (i.e. there is a performative dimension to it)

Is a blog, then, a public text? Always, or only sometimes or some blogs? Does Wikipedia have publics? What about YouTube videos? 

Me, I think there are a whole lot of publics - and public texts - on the Internet, just as there are anywhere else that texts are produced, performed, discussed, interacted with….  and I am far more interested in how the Internet impacts on the creation of publics - and on how that is likely to impact on society, publics, texts…..  than I am in studying historical “public texts.”  But that’s just me - always looking to steer clear of ancientLit

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