Marketing Logics and the Politics of Public Spheres: On Discursive Engineering and Enclosure

Scholarship on publics has proliferated during the past two decades, especially in linguistic anthropology. Drawing Michael Warner’s famous formulation, are now routinely theorized as a social form predicated reflexive circulation of discourse. This article, however, identifies tension within conception publics. On one hand, Warner levels critique liberal publicity, noting its exclusions and contradictions, but other he models his own account public sphere assumptions voluntaristic, free speech. Working from ethnographic research government-sponsored nation-branding project undertaken Macedonia, article develops different perspective their politics. It examines how practices marketing strategic communication pervade spheres valorize not voluntaristic participation discursive engineering, that is, concerted efforts to determine discourse can will circulate some public. When tethered projects centralized political control, happened Macedonia Nikola Gruevski’s prime ministership (2006-2016), engineering result enclosed spheres. Ultimately, asks, what attention elite engineer enclose teach about struggles over contemporary contexts mass publicity?