This final haunting is the most fruitful to dwell upon, as it lets us consider Habermas’s work in light of more recent critiques and, particularly, in light of this book’s innovative historicization of abjection. In the preface he penned for Structural Transformation’s first publication, Habermas echoes Brockwell and Burke in describing a short-lived plebeian public sphere as essentially an “illiterate” bourgeois public “stripped of its literary garb.” (“die ihr literarisches Gewand abgestreift hat”).73 This phrase has served as a point of entry for working-class, feminist, and African American critiques of Structural Transformation’s flawed premises upon a notion of universal subjectivity.74 Such critiques often highlight the public sphere’s Janus face. One is productive, constituting and nurturing a public subject. The other is a negative space of abjection, silencing, and social death, conceptualized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as private and resulting in sub- or counter-public forms.75
These and other critiques of Habermas tend to pose resistance or oppositionality as characteristic of such sub-, counter-, or otherwise alternative publics.76 More congenial to my notion of abjection is the concept of vestibulary publicity. This concept is derived from Hortense Spillers’s account of vestibulary culture in her 1987 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Spillers’s essay, though essential to black feminist and queer of color critique, has not been adequately integrated into discussions of the public sphere. Published two years before the English translation of Structural Transformation that unleashed much U.S. critique of Habermas, “Mama’s Baby” seems less defensive about the Marxist humanism that would be so roundly attacked in 1989 and is perhaps more fluid as a result. Spillers’s essay uses abolitionist narrative as a way to recall histories of slave suffering that remained unrecognized in political, legal, deconstructive, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism. Spillers describes the manner in which eighteenth-and nineteenth-century doctors created scientific, abolitionist, and simply public knowledge by “profitabl[y] ‘anatomizing’ ” injured, ill, or disabled slaves. Such slaves bore “in person the marks of a cultural text” that was literally written on and by their body.77 The knowledge embodied in anatomized slaves, Spillers writes, irretrievably splits society into a mainstream “culture,” including medical, scientific, and other rational-critical debate characteristic of the public sphere, and a “cultural vestibulary,” including the slave and his or her knowledge and desires.78 Spillers’s cultural vestibulary encompasses subaltern or “infamous” speech, accessible only via traces left on public speech, as well as conflicted or corrupted spheres of publicity that arise alongside those traces.79 The vestibule—architecturally, the room between the entry and living space; medically, a cavity before the entrance to another, often more important structure; poetically, a space of transition, at the threshold, in limine—is an abject space, between the inside and outside. The varieties of abjection are created and contested in material structures, including publics, that produce embodied differences in health, safety, labor, speech, writing, and so on.
Spillers’s architectural referent clarifies the vestibulary public’s interstitial but not necessarily resistant character. As an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architectural element, the vestibule managed different publics and the boundaries between public and private spaces. Describing Thomas Jefferson’s eccentric vestibule at Monticello, for example, critic Duncan Faherty writes that the space’s ostensible edificatory republicanism belies its function as a performative space that “ripples with a complex notion of public and private.”80 The most notable feature of Jefferson’s vestibule was its staircase. Modeled after new private staircases in France, the staircase’s steep narrowness frustrated movement between floors, and its obtuse location hindered even the imagination of a host family’s symbolic descent and circulation among guests.81 Of course, design is not the same as use, and Jefferson’s daughters recorded their complaints as they struggled against his design. Struggle takes on another dimension for the enslaved, who had less access to writing and for whom the vestibule was a workplace. Some of those enslaved by Jefferson eventually established alternative religious spaces and publics. Peter Fossett, for example, founded a Baptist church that posthumously honored Fossett with a photograph in its own vestibule, and Fossett also leveraged his early association with Jefferson to tell his story in the public sphere.82 Most of the enslaved left only traces of their struggles. In some sense, these traces appear in Jefferson’s other architectural innovations. The lack of easy circulation between floors, for example, was dependent on Jefferson’s development of complementary systems—from dumbwaiters and revolving cupboards to subterranean slave quarters and tunnels—that minimized the visibility of the enslaved while still allowing for labor and surveillance.83 The innovations do not appear in the vestibule, but the vestibule’s unique design depended on their presence.
Like Jefferson’s vestibule, vestibulary publicity assumes a troubled, contested function within state, religious, or other power, as well as within itself. The vestibulary public joins, avant la letter, with critics of a rational-critical public sphere who help us understand how power adheres in bodies, texts, and publics. As such, the vestibulary public reveals the trace of those most marked by abjection, as well as the structuring principles of abjection—of inclusion and exclusion—that underlie all similar structures. Under some conditions, the vestibulary public may also work like a pressure valve, allowing or failing to allow for the ideal function of the public and private. Because the vestibulary public poses neither a necessarily oppositional (public/counterpublic) nor a hierarchical (super/subpublic) relationship, it avoids some of the pitfalls associated with narrow notions of hegemony and thereby anticipates more recent reconceptions of publics as “performative commons” or, alternately, disavowals.84
We can further illuminate the discursive field surrounding Americanist debates about publicity by considering how vestibulary publicity reveals a gap between Habermasian pronouncements on rational-critical debate and the nuances of Habermas’s work. These gaps begin with Habermas’s early account of the nonrational communicative powers of language. Spillers’s poetic incorporation of the metaphor of the vestibule into a dense but wide-ranging textual analysis resembles Structural Transformation’s evocative description of the plebian public as “stripped of its literary garb” Habermas’s most influential terms are rational social-scientific in tone, but the generally wry and lively quality of his prose lends an irony to his use of this phrase, which smacks of the cultural elitism that marked Habermas’s Frankfurt school mentors. This redolence surely encouraged critics to pounce on the phrase as a solecism revealing the sexualized and gendered frameworks of Habermas’s conception of public debate. We might peer, alongside those critics, beneath the bourgeois public to see the plebian public, with its penny press and theaters of sensation, as an obscene violation of bourgeois norms. But Habermas wrote the introduction just as he was distancing himself, geographically and intellectually, from Frankfurt and its notions of “the identity of domination and reason.” We therefore have some reason to read the phrase as a catachrestic meta-commentary on his Habilitationsschrift itself.85 In this alternate reading, Habermas’s “stripping” of “literary garb” is, like Spillers’s vestibule, a poetic, self-referential, and perhaps self-critical gesture at enduring connections between print, clothing/investment, erotic violence, and performance. Calling the plebian public “stripped” (abgestreift) connotes its undisguised, more essential character and also gestures at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious and revolutionary rhetorics of disclosure.86 This stripped public, as Habermas notes, achieved significant benchmarks in circulation and organizing.87 Rather than being excluded from political economy, the plebian public, as later literary historians would discover, flowed directly from the seventeenth-century publics