240 Mediated Publics
what were the implications of multilingualism for constructing public-
ness? How did these papers situate themselves vis-à-vis their respective
audiences? How did their readers envision themselves as part of the pub-
lic, at once imperial but also confessional, regional, or ethnic?
e relationship between these “multiple publics” is relevant not Th
only for the Ottoman Empire; it also lies at the heart of understandings
of the public sphere itself. Scholars such as Geoff Eley have argued for
the existence, indeed the centrality, of fragmentation, characterizing the
public sphere as a “field of conflict, contested meanings, and exclusion.”^8
Indeed, whereas Nancy Fraser identified two models of public sphere,
stratified (characterized as “counterdiscourses” of subordinated groups
that “formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests,
and needs”) and egalitarian (where “members of... more limited publics
talk across lines of cultural diversity”), for Fraser, the egalitarian public
sphere remained an ideal type.^9
thers such as Harold Mah have sought to retain the Habermasian O
vision of a unitary, neutral public sphere, arguing that the fragmentist
camp neglects “how the public sphere constructs itself as a unitary entity
and in doing so mysteriously changes forms.”^10 That is, the public sphere
as a free space of contestation is only a preliminary condition before its
necessary transformation into a collective subject. For Mah, the universal-
ity of the public sphere requires “abstract individualism,” that is, the strip-
ping of all social characteristics from people as the cost of entry into the
modern public sphere. Mah sees the persistence of corporate identities of
difference (what Fraser sees as a “counterpublic”) as evidence of premod-
ern forms of publicness squarely outside the (one, indivisible) modern
public.
hile Mah is certainly correct in identifying the need to further W
interrogate the role of groups and groupness within the public sphere, the
strict Habermasian reading he argues for is, to my mind, overly deter-
ministic. Instead of simply reifying hegemonic universality, we must
consider that the constitution and articulation of particularistic groups
takes place in parallel to as well as against more universalizing discourses,
and thus the very publicness of this process is central. Craig Calhoun has
argued that the relationship between various clusters and the broader
public sphere was not proscriptive but rather variable, precisely in “how