Featured Image by Joey Roulette

The Citizen Curator Project[1] reimagines citizenship for the internet age by continuing the work of Henri Lefebvre and Jürgen Habermas. Lefebvre believed that citizenship requires participation in the public sphere and Habermas noted that the public sphere is an unfinished project of the Enlightenment, unfinished because many groups remain excluded. Bourgeois democracies, like the United States, exclude many people despite efforts to expand civil rights.[2] The suffrage movement expanded the voting franchise to women, the civil rights movement ended some of the most blatant forms of racial segregation, and the LGBTQ+ rights movement ended still more forms of discrimination. Nevertheless, a tiny minority of very wealthy people sets national policies and priorities while blocking others from participating in the political process.

Political participation by itself does not qualify as citizenship. Fascism, for example, is a mass movement that draws normally-uninvolved people into politics.[3] Trump supporters participate in politics but to the detriment of the public sphere, and today’s Republican Party, for the most part, disavows even the pretense of democracy. Meanwhile, mass media floods the zone with disinformation and right-wing operatives strip marginalized groups of their voices, their votes, and their influence. Increasingly, people reject expert authority and turn towards demagogues or else turn away from politics altogether.

A diminished public sphere sets up a growing wealth gap, corporate impunity, a degraded environment, public health crises, and the rise of intolerance and extremism. The right-wing backlash against democratization denies rights to minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, the disabled, the poor, and many others. Is it possible, despite these conditions, to develop a healthy cosmopolitan public sphere in the digital age? Gregory Ulmer, in Electronic Monuments (2005), argues that it is. Citizenship, Ulmer argues, requires us to measure our behaviors against the sacrifices they entail. Ulmer asks us to discover how our behaviors lead to unacceptable sacrifices and then to testify to them in public spaces. We then choose whether to change our behaviors, revise our values, or both. To become a citizen is to be ready to admit that “I have made a terrible mistake”; conversely, blindly pushing destructive policies does not a citizen make. The fervent denialism at the heart of right-wing politics makes it anathema to citizenship.

Figure 1: Gregory Ulmer speaking to students in UCF’s Texts and Technology PhD program, April 2019. Image by the author.

Citizenship means little if it doesn’t partake of wisdom. One encounters wisdom and becomes a citizen through a liminal process in which we unsettle old identities while reconfiguring new ones. The citizenship process involves a traditional education that includes history and civics, but it also requires we make something—a text, an intervention in the culture—that is both an act of self-fashioning and a collective coming into being as a polis (in Heidegger’s terms, an Ereignis) defines Ereignis as “the lighting and clearing event of truth’s happening (aletheia), the temporal event of appropriation of the historical destining of Being” (Magrini 2009). This citizenship-forming process involves aesthetics and affect in addition to science and critique.

Ulmer disagrees with claims that the public sphere is declining. He states only that the public sphere as defined within the apparatus of print literacy is declining; in Ulmer’s view, a new apparatus—electracy—is emerging and with it a new public sphere.[4] Whereas the public sphere of the nineteenth century and earlier had been limited largely to urban areas, the Internet creates a virtual public sphere (though a problematic one due to private ownership of the digital commons). A person can be anywhere in the world, no matter how remote, and—if there is an Internet connection–participate in this public sphere.

The rise of anti-democratic movements around the world makes me less sanguine than Ulmer is about the prospects for an Internet public sphere, though I agree we must make efforts to create one. Citizen Curating offers some hope for a renewed public sphere. Anyone with an interest in creating exhibits to affect public policy—including students, artists, activists, educators, and members of the community—can be Citizen Curators. No previous experience with curating is required, though guidance from more experiences curators is recommended.

Citizen Curating aims for the emergence of a renewed urban and virtual public sphere, one that includes a framework for an operative fifth estate, the tools and materials for doing public history work, and access to officials who set public policy.

In 2014, The Citizen Curator Project was formed by faculty, students, archivists, artists, and curators affiliated with the University of Central Florida. It produced exhibits about a variety of themes such as biocultural diversity loss (Mauer et al 2015) and African American history (Hill et al 2018). Scholars with the Citizen Curator Project provide the resources–access to archives, funding, exhibition space, and technical assistance–to assist citizen curators.

Though we have had local success, our larger goal of revitalizing the public sphere faces big challenges. Individualism, in its extreme form, undermines collective identity and action and encourages atomization and disinterest in collective issues. It encourages people to be idiotes.[5] Another challenge we face is the common belief that the public sphere must be open to all. The public sphere cannot survive, though, if it includes those who would destroy it. Karl Popper noted: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance” (2012, 581).[6]

Other conditions can corrupt or weaken the public sphere, including:

1. Abuse of power by those in authority such as internet hosts, moderators, and corporate executives at social media companies.
2. Breakdown of trust in public forums and/or authority figures who maintain them.
3. Breakdown of trust in fact-gathering institution such as science, government, and journalism.
4. Infusion of misinformation, disinformation, and dismediation–the discrediting of reputable sources (Bustillos 2016).
5. A public that lacks interest, training, or knowledge to participate in public deliberation.

In “The Cognitive Immune System: The Mind’s Ability to Dispel Pathological Beliefs,” I argue that science and journalism belong to a society-wide cognitive immune system that protects against pathological beliefs. “A pathological belief [is] one that is likely to be false, to produce unnecessary harm, and to be held with conviction and tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is likely false and will produce unnecessary harm” (Mauer 2021).[7]

A healthy public sphere can operate in both dialogic and eristic modes. In the dialogic mode, people of good faith exchange ideas. The participants within a dialogue try on one another’s beliefs to see how they feel. In this exercise, participants put forth their best efforts to represent others’ beliefs fairly and convincingly. Dialogue is understood as a lifelong search for truth among mutual friends in which the participants are expected to perform the arguments of various contrasting and complementary views. Tullio Maranhao described dialogue as a process of searching for new knowledge rather than as a means of defeating one’s opponent: “In dialogical understanding . . . the debate follows the logic of dialogue, that is, the turns of stating and questioning, and the synthesizing in consensual agreement” (1990, 1). Consensual agreement is not a victory of one side over the other; it is the measured and optimal viewpoint in which all sides of an argument create new knowledge and understanding about an issue.

This exchange of ideas within dialogue, however, does not mean we abandon critical thought. The point of trying on others’ beliefs is for all parties to find blind spots or problems with each other’s arguments. The dialogical realm exists only in an atmosphere of trust. Dialogue can occur in classrooms, in museums, and in other institutional settings; also, it can occur in non-institutional settings, but dialogue does require some facilitation and ground rules. “Arguments can be legitimized only in particular contexts of dialogue, not by virtue of claims to universality” (Maranhao 1). The site of dialogue is liminal; it is a place where particular discourses cross, including the particular situations of the participants.[8] Defensiveness, dishonesty, and other behaviors that impede or destroy trust damage the space vital to the achievement of dialogue.

In eristic (or adversarial) modalities, a clash between two ideas may result in the victory of one idea over the other. “It is characteristic of the eristic to think of some arguments as a way of defeating the other side, by showing that an opponent must assent to the negation of what he initially took himself to believe” (Irwin, 585). Eristics can expose false beliefs and reveal truth, but truth often loses in eristics against bluster and deceit. In Plato’s time, the agora was a place for eristic battle. Plato opposed it precisely because the truth lost too frequently there. Instead, he instituted the Academy as a place where the truth could be nurtured and protected. Modern eristic realms include public debates, opinion pages, and social media forums. In these forums, people are less likely to challenge their ideological presuppositions since eristic battle sets up defensive structures.[9]

The eristic realm has become a vehicle for scientifically-guided mass manipulation. Modern “public spaces” are not spaces for true democracy but are, in the words of Walter Lippmann, spaces for “guided democracy” (1922). Financial elites determine the acceptable range of opinion and then police their forums to ensure that opinions outside of this range are ignored, marginalized, or delegitimized. An untrained polis is ill-equipped for eristic battle. The polis needs forensics and rhetoric as well as archival and presentation skills if it is to have any chance within the eristic realm.

Citizen Curation

The Citizen Curator Project encourages ordinary people to curate exhibits about policy issues within the public sphere. Curating involves the selection of materials, either from archives or with new materials, and their arrangement in an exhibition. Exhibitions can serve any number of purposes, from selling artworks to educating the public, to pushing an agenda. But curating can be re-imagined as a process of attunement, of orienting ourselves to reality and of promoting wellbeing. We use the following means:

1. Build an interdisciplinary and diverse group of scholars to develop community-based projects, and conduct and publish research about our efforts.
2. Create opportunities for students and ordinary citizens to take leadership roles in professional and community settings.
3. Challenge the assumptions of both the academic and museum apparatuses which have long histories of excluding marginalized people. For instance, we challenge what counts as knowledge, what counts as art, and what counts as history.
4. Place local problems into relationship with global ones and place local history into relationship with broader histories. For instance, problems of potentially catastrophic consequence, such as biodiversity loss, pandemics, racism, sexism, climate change, inequality, addiction, the collapse of civic institution, and extremism, threaten both local communities and the planet. Without the participation of local communities around the globe, these problems will remain intractable with increasingly devastating results.
5. Understand the nature of collective emergencies by looking towards their causes in ideological practices and in histories of exploitation.
6. Broaden our understanding of curating by seeing it as a form of writing capable of serving academic and civic goals.
7. Experiment with the forms of curating by studying its history, particularly the avant-garde’s innovations in curating.
8. Seek, whenever possible, to make our work accessible to the public for free.

Because curating has been integral to the formation of community in the modern era—for example, museums arose with nation states and helped define national priorities[10]—we encourage citizens to think of curating as a means of building and shaping community. Citizen curators assume the roles of uninvited consultants who witness catastrophe, deliberate about it, and wish to share their insights and recommendations with policy makers and other community members.

In February 2017, the Citizen Curator Project invited community members, students, and artists to create a series of exhibitions focused on the theme “Eliminationism and Resilience”: “A particularly potent example of eliminationism, defined as discourses, actions, and social policies that seek to suppress, exile, or exterminate perceived opponents, is the Pulse nightclub attack, the June 12, 2016 shooting at a nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 predominantly LGBTQ+ BIPOC people and injured dozens more, whereas the Orlando United campaign may be viewed as an act of resilience” (The Citizen Curator Project). [11]

Catalog front cover design by Matthew Dunn

A group of UCF faculty members facilitated various Pulse exhibits: a gallery exhibit, library installations, and online exhibits hosted by RICHES of Central Florida.[12] During spring 2017, Dr. Connie Lester and I co-taught a doctoral seminar for UCF’s Texts and Technology Program about citizen curating. Our students designed web exhibits about the Pulse Nightclub shooting on the theme of eliminationism. I also produced my own exhibit titled Pulse: A Consultation[13], a revised version of which follows this chapter.[14]

Pulse: A Consultation

Pulse: A Consultation is a prototype exhibit that attempts to bridge the literate-electrate divide. The exhibit is in comic form and uses photographs rather than drawings; I constructed it using a software program called Comic Life. The first half of the exhibit uses literate principles of reason (inductive and deductive logic) to argue that eliminationist rhetoric incites eliminationist violence, and that mainstream eliminationist rhetoric (and violence) in the United States is almost entirely a right-wing phenomenon. The exhibit poses two research questions: “1. How can our society prevent another attack like [Omar] Mateen’s [the shooter at Pulse]? 2. How can I achieve and maintain my health living in a sick society?” By treating these questions as integral—I am in the disaster and the disaster is in me—I seek a holistic approach to the selfhood/citizenship relationship; I consult on the “object” of public deliberation by testifying to it in my subjecthood.

The latter half of Pulse: A Consultation subsumes literate logics within electrate “conductive” logic. Conduction, a term coined by Gregory Ulmer, creates inferences through thing-to-thing (rather than concept-to-concept) using shared terms such as verbal puns or resemblance. Conduction is the logic at work in most fallacies, jokes, and in Freud’s description of dream logic. Conduction reveals patterns that conventional logic can miss, creating a sense of surprise and insight. The conductive portion of Pulse: A Consultation features a collage made from disparate elements, among them scenes from my subject formation. This section is less an act of confession than it is a performance of divination. The divinatory reading emerges from three sources:

1. My history in relation to the Ideological State Apparatuses involved in my identity construction (Ulmer’s “popcycle”: Family, School, Entertainment, and Discipline) (2005, 19-21);
2. The details of the Pulse disaster; and
3. A puncept using the word “pulse.”[15]

My citizenship emerges from raw materials into a collage-emblem that functions as a “wide-image” for the citizen facing public policy problems. Ulmer explains the wide images developed by his students:

Their imaginations tended to be composite assemblages of cultural materials drawn from family experience, entertainment or popular culture materials, schooling background, and a particular community history. I am thinking of investigations by Holton [1971-72] or Gruber [1978] that characterize how innovators draw upon an image of wide scope–an aesthetic embodiment of their attunement with the world (what the philosophical tradition referred to as Stimmung).

My pedagogy aims at helping students notice, map, and enhance their own image of wide scope (their own learning style–with the term style marking the aesthetic quality of the thinking).

Given the heuretic principle that requires me to try out for myself whatever poetics my students are using, I have been exploring my own wide image. Perhaps I can get you to test this idea on yourself as well? You will recognize that the method of inquiry into Stimmung is what I have called mystorical. It starts with finding a memory associated with family (my memories of my father, for example, and I might have to come back to those again later). In the institution of Family we are introduced into our native language, and develop for a brief time an oral culture.

Very soon in our civilization the child begins to acquire an entertainment or popular culture as well, through television being present in the home. (Weishaus, 1998)

The image of wide scope links the affective body and the archive of documents. The puncept travels the route of the signifier, carrying with it signifieds or connoted meanings. The second half of Pulse: A Consultation begins with the word “fag” a word I learned in grade school from other children that I then used to insult others, even after other boys had used the term to bully me.

The word “faggot” is related to the word fascine (a bundle of sticks), which is the origin of the word fascism. The fascis (an axe bound within a bundle of sticks) was an image of power in ancient Rome, later adopted by Mussolini’s fascists in Italy. The European fascists, such as the Nazis, persecuted homosexuals and employed eliminationist rhetoric and violence against them. The fascis image was also imprinted on the tail side of the U.S. dime during World War II. The U.S., like Nazi Germany, persecuted homosexuals (though not to the point of mass extermination).

Upon considering the resonance of these Pulse-related words to my history of subject formation, particularly as it related to sexual identity, national identity, and entertainment, a pattern emerged:

After portraying the dark side of my subject formation, Pulse: A Consultation considers its opposite: the movement towards wisdom. Here, another pun, related to “pulse,” emerges: poltos, which relates to chewing (as in ruminating–thinking things over) and poultice: healing herbs ground to a paste and applied to wounds.

The “discipline” section of the popcycle includes Robert Fludd, who published an early treatise on the pulse in 1631.

Fludd’s work includes reference to the Greek myth of Medea (Craven 1854, 194), who used healing herbs (poultices) in her adventures. She had a long and tempestuous relationship with the mythical Jason, who is my namesake (Jason is both my mother’s maiden name and my middle name).

I searched the records for Pulse victims with the name Jason and found one:

I had not known any of the Pulse victims personally, but my mourning of Jason Benjamin Josephat helps form my identity as a citizen, and shapes the way I consult on public policy issues.

The myth of Jason provides the name Medea, which links to the signifier Medes, an ancient empire that includes present-day Afghanistan, site of a U.S. war from 2001 to 2021. From Medes I link to the birth of Islam and to the first successor to Mohammed—Abubekar—renowned for his prudence in the face of mass impulsiveness. Abubekar leads to ISIS and Omar Mateen.

The comic’s conclusion describes an epiphany about the link from Medea to media:

Curating Knowledge

Intended as a prototype for citizen curation, Pulse: A Consultation has obvious limitations; Humanities scholars like myself often value obscure paradigms far outside the cultural frameworks of ordinary people, and some of the most promising research in the Humanities involves collaborations across disciplines and across cultural and international boundaries, collaborations that are challenging for ordinary people to create on their own. Nevertheless, we can teach students and ordinary people how to work in such paradigms and to develop effective collaborative strategies. To accomplish this goal, I use the pragmatic cognitive framework developed by James Peterson in his studies of avant-garde cinema (Peterson 1994, 1996).

Peterson’s approach can help ordinary people transition into curating. He puts perception, cognition, and communication into a framework of problem solving, and his strategies for engaging with avant-garde cinema help us deal with the ill-structured and difficult problems posed by obscure paradigms and with cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary humanities collaborations. The key to Peterson’s strategy is to identify relevant principles of communication, which include schemas such as prototype, template, and procedural knowledge and discourse-comprehension paradigms such as semantics and pragmatics.

Prototype knowledge identifies which things belong to which categories. For example, in Pulse: A Consultation, I argue that the Pulse shooting is best understood as an act of eliminationist violence targeting LGBTQ+ and non-dominant racial groups, and thus part of a long history of such violence in the United States. Template knowledge identifies patterns, such as the alphabet, numbers, layout, and sequences. Pulse: A Consultation uses divination methods, derived from Tarot and other divinatory practices, to make sense of the materials I gathered. Procedural knowledge is needed to carry out tasks—like riding a bicycle or typing—and also for making sense from various discourses. We use at least two forms of procedural knowledge to understand texts; we apply semantic knowledge to make sense of a text’s meaning and we use pragmatic knowledge to understand the context(s) in which texts function. For example, Pulse: A Consultation uses semantic knowledge to note that when right-wingers use terms such as “traitor” to describe people—such as their liberal critics—they are marking those people for eliminationist violence. Also, Pulse: A Consultation uses pragmatic knowledge to understand right-wing discourse within the corrosively anti-democratic media environment in which this eliminationist rhetoric flourishes.

Conclusion

Faculty members associated with the Citizen Curator Project had a variety of responsibilities.  Dr. Connie Lester and I curated the online exhibits on RICHES. Research librarian John Venecek curated the displays at the John C. Hitt Library. Dr. Keri Watson curated a gallery show at UCF titled Resilience: Remembering Pulse. Many other faculty members and students also contributed. This exhibit, which opened June 8, 2017, was both exciting and frustrating for us. The exhibit had high attendance at opening night, despite being scheduled during the doldrums of summer when very few students and faculty are on campus. The show included works by many non-professional artists—many of whom were from marginalized communities directly impacted by the Pulse shooting—and it received numerous glowing press notices and words of praise from public officials. The mayor’s office requested works from the show to be displayed at a permanent museum to memorialize the Pulse Nightclub shooting.

We were frustrated, however, by the restrictions we faced from gallery administrators. Securing exhibition space for public use is difficult, and we recognize the needs for site administrators to ensure their spaces are used to fulfill their missions. Still, we were nearly prevented from exhibiting and, to secure the space at all, we had to abandon plans to allow citizens to curate their own sections of the gallery. Instead, Keri Watson, a professional curator, organized the exhibit. We also had to remove references to eliminationism and focus instead only on resilience (which we had planned to juxtapose against eliminationism). In online spaces, we were relatively free of constraints and could experiment with new forms of citizen-curated exhibitions that embraced more difficult material and gave more control to ordinary people.

The Citizen Curator Project is one of many such projects aimed at developing denizens into citizens and broadening the urban public sphere to include marginalized communities. We have a long way to go to create a functioning public sphere, but our limited success suggests that more is possible.

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