The General Theory of Dissipative Publicness advances the thesis that publicness is best understood as a dynamic process governed by the generation, circulation and dissipation of discursive energy, rather than as a normative ideal, an institutional sphere or a set of communicative arenas. Dissipation is not merely a sign of decline but a constitutive force of public life: publics emerge when reflexive discursive energy condenses and weaken or dissolve as it disperses. Under contemporary conditions, discursive visibility and access proliferate while publics increasingly fail to stabilise, as communication accelerates and collective orientation diminishes. To account for this constellation, the book advances a general theory of dissipative publicness, shifting attention from questions of expansion or decline to the conditions under which publics emerge, stabilise, liquefy and dissipate. Drawing on classical sociological theory and contemporary debates on media, platforms and performative visibility, Slavko Splichal’s book reconstructs the logic of publicness across historical contexts, synthesising and extending his analyses of liquefaction, datafication and performativisation into a unified theoretical framework.