Reporting on the automobile industry on NPR this morning, a Journalist said something to the effect that, ‘These designers really know what the public wants.’ The class of these designers was being compared to the relatively much larger one that evidently does not know what the public wants. Because their are so few of them, they are highly compensated. This last point is only significant here insofar the fact of the compensation may corroborate the fact of their scarcity.

What struck was the use of the word ‘public.’ On the face of it, if ‘the public’ wants something, knowledge of what the public wants should be common place. Why, then, is someone who knows what the public wants somehow made exceptional by that knowledge?

I am not complaining about or curmudgeoning the usage. I simply find it interesting.

"Knowledge of what the public wants" refers to a skill or talent of divination. I reject this notion. Or it may refer to special knack for formulating hitherto the unexpressed or unamalgamated wants of the public, a sense of various trends: an intuition for potential markets. Or it may refer to something else.

It remains that ‘public,’ at least in certain usages (perhaps including electoral) makes ostensive reference (if I may be forgiven the redundancy) to a concept that is, to something something not ostensible. On the one hand (as used by the reporter), the word functions in the context of production—perhaps by means of the fabrication of an entity at whom the production is directed. By the same token, it functions to define a class and endow it with consciousness. Although it was not my intention to arrive here, it does seem as though the concept of class consciousness is alive and well at the heart of capitalism.

[I will not extend the discussion to the public’s wanting presidents.]