Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration,
Recognition
Dilip Gaonkar, Elizabeth Povinelli
Excerpt Below:
To be sure, there is no fixed mode of reading form as a moving, transfigurative, and transfigurating element of public life. Indeed, neither this issue nor the essays in this issue aspire to fix it. Quite the opposite: the essays demonstrate that public cultural forms are corrigible not only because they are bound to contingencies of audience, occasion, and the material nature of the sign, but also because they are bound by the analytic mode by which they are tracked. What form-sensitive reading can do, whether of a poststructural, metapragmatic, or culturalist sort, is to signal reflexively its own mode of tracking, marking, and reading cultural semiosis.