Sunday, January 31, 2016

Nancy Fraser--"Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy"

Fraser points out that Habermas attempts to answer problematic questions for socialists, namely how a system that espouses control from the workers became synonymous with authoritarian dictatorships that enslave the worker. In addition, Habermas's public sphere, for feminists, becomes problematic as its definition of anything outside the familial sphere wongly conflates "the state, the official-economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse" (57). As such, addressing issues like housework and childcare are easily cast as domains of the private sphere, not to be infringed upon by the public.

"I am going to take as a basic premise for this essay that something like Habermas's idea of the public sphere is indispensable to critical social theory and to democratic political practice...I contend that his analysis of the public sphere needs to undergo some critical interrogation and reconstruction if it is to yield a category capable of theorizing the limits of actually existing democracy" (57).

THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES, COMPETING CONCEPTIONS

Fraser believes Habermas's public sphere is highly idealized. She looks to Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and Geoff Eley for alternative historiographies.

Landes: bourgeois public sphere excludes admission based on gender. Opposition to feminine salon culture gave rise to "many" republican discourse. As such, patriarchal constructs influenced the republican sphere.

Eley: Like Landes' critique of French salons, the bourgeois public sphere of England and Germany, the public sphere was a "training ground" for an ambitious class of bourgeois men who prepared to displace older aristocratic hegemony with their own.

These findings "suggest that the relationship between publicity and status is more complex than Habermas intimates, that declaring a deliberative arena to be a space where extant status distinctions are bracketed and neutralized is not sufficient to make it so" (60).

Habermas excludes competing public sphere, too. His omission might account for his idealizing of the public sphere.
  • Habermas excludes all-female public spheres engaged in philanthropic activity, participation in protests, and women's rights campaigns. 
  • Women were able, even without the vote, to access public arenas, showing that Habermas's public sphere is ideological. 
  • There were competing publics (gender, working class, etc.); THE PUBLIC was only THE PUBLIC as much as it laid claim to it. 
"We can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal; it was also a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule" (62).

Furthermore, the bourgeois public sphere marked a transition from authoritarianism to hegemony. "The important point is that this new mode of political domination, like the older one, secures the ability of one stratum of society to rule the rest" (62).

Revisionist historiographies of the bourgeois public sphere calls into question four assumptions:
  1. participants can truly bracket social inequality in participatory democracy, rendering equality unnecessary for political democracy
  2. a single large public sphere is "always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics"
  3. discourse in public spheres about private interests is categorically undesirable
  4. working public spheres must be separated from the private sphere and the state
OPEN ACCESS, PARTICIPATORY PARITY, AND SOCIAL EQUALITY

It isn't enough to assert that the bourgeois public sphere was exclusive rather than its claim of inclusiveness. We should also examine the discourse within the public sphere to interrogate how effectively the participants were at bracketing their differences. Style and decorum highly influenced and signaled markers of social standing. Therefore, even after everyone is allowed to participate, the vestige of the masculine public sphere reverberates as male-dominated after its borders become opened.

Deliberation as a mask for domination. "such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates" (64).

Fraser also argues that the ineffectiveness of bracketing calls into question the cultural neutrality of the bourgeois public sphere. "In this public sphere, the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit. Consequently, subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the material means of equal participation. Thus, political economy enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally" (65).

Liberal political theorists like to imagine a political system free (liberated/liberty) of the influence socio-economic systems. "The problem for liberals, thus, is how to strengthen the barriers separating political institutions that are supposed to instantiate relations of equality from economic, cultural, an socio-sexual institutions that are premised on systemic relations of inequality" (65). Since differences cannot be bracketed from the systems that create them, "political democracy requires substantive social equality" (65).

EQUALITY, DIVERSITY, AND MULTIPLE PUBLICS

This section examines the relations within multiple, disparate publics. Fraser disagrees with Habermas that having one public is preferable and more democratic than multiple publics that represent a "departure form, rather than an advance toward, democracy" (66).

"In this section I shall assess the relative merits of single, comprehensive publics versus multiple publics in two kinds of modern societies--stratified societies and egalitarian multi-cultural societies" (66).

Subordinated groups cannot participate effectively in democracy within a comprehensive public sphere.

subaltern counterpublics--"parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate conterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (67). example:late 20th century feminist movement. They both act as a place of "withdrawal and regroupment" and "function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics" (67). This way they allow excluded members of a stratified society to proclaim their discourse to a wider public.

Stratified societies need multiple publics and counterpublics to increase parity and democratic efficacy.

Even egalitarian, multi-cultural societies must utilize multiple publics. It isn't the class division alone that necessitates multi-pubs, it's also culturally specific discourse. This doesn't preclude intra-public discourse.

Fraser has set up an interesting problem. By creating a hypothetical society, one devoid of class division but multi-cultural, she problematizes how multiple publics can effectively communicate with one another. "would participants in such debates share enough in the way of values, expressive norms, and, therefore, protocols of persuasion to lend their talk the quality of deliberations aimed at reaching agreement through giving reasons?" (69).

Fraser believes this is possible with multi-cultural literacy and the acknowledgement that multiple publics will overlap. "All told, then, there do not see to be any conceptual (as opposed to empirical) barriers to the possibility of a socially egalitarian, multi-cultural society that is also a participatory democracy. But this will necessarily be a society with many different publics, including at least one public in which participants can deliberate as peers across lines of difference about policy that concerns them all" (70).

PUBLIC SPHERES, COMMON CONCERNS, AND PRIVATE INTERESTS

"What counts as a public matter and what, in contrast, is private?"

In Habermas's public sphere, private individuals discuss public matters. But difference definitions of publicity determine what we mean by private and thereby public. She takes up the definition of publicity meaning "of concern to everyone." "Only participants can decide what is and what is not o common concern and thus a legitimate topic of public discourse" (71). Compare this to the feminist subaltern counterpublic that succeeded in showcasing domestic violence as a public concern.

Framed as a civic republican structure, participants must engage in discourse about the common good, speaking as a "we" in order to omit private interests. However, "this works against one of the principal aims of deliberation, namely, helping participants clarify their interests, even when those interests turn out to conflict" (72). If participants in civic republican debates must posture and position their arguments as benefiting "us," those who need to voice a minority view cannot find their voice. "Any consensus that purports to represent the common good in this social context should be regarded with suspicion, since this consensus will have been reached through deliberative processes tainted by the effects of dominance and subordination" (73).

Public and private are not easily demarcated spheres. "In political discourse, they are powerful terms that are frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views, and topics and to valorize others" (73).

Fraser then turns to the issues of "private property in a market economy" and "intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life" as definition of private, which then define public in negation.

"even after women and workers have been formally licensed to participate, their participation may be hedged by conceptions of economic privacy and domestic privacy that delimit the scope of debate" (73-74). The ability to classify certain things as economically private and sexually private and within the domain of only laws and institutions that deal with those matters sets limits on what is sanctioned as a public matter.

STRONG PUBLICS, WEAK PUBLICS: ON CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE STATE

This section pushes back against the argument that "a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation of civil society and the state" (74).

To argue this would support laissez-faire markets as a requirement for functionality, a claim rebutted by the inequality created by liberal market economics and its affect on an inclusive public sphere.

However, civil society could also mean a connection in nongovernmental associations. "The public sphere, in short, is not the state; it is rather the informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state" (75).

Fraser thinks this model creates "weak publics" that only form opinions instead of influence policy. "Moreover, the bourgeois conception seems to imply that an expansion of such publics' discursive authority to encompass decision-making as well as opinion-making would threaten the autonomy of public opinion--for then the public would effectively become the state, and the possibility of a critical discursive check on the state would be lost" (76). As such, weak publics' public opinion influences strong publics (parliaments), which act as a public sphere within the state.

"any conception of the public sphere that requires a sharp separation between (associational) civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of self-management, inter-public coordination, and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society...What is needed...is a post-bourgeois conception that can permit us to envision a greater role for..public spheres than mere autonomous opinion formation removed from authoritative decision-making" (76).


***Class Notes***







A

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Jurgen Habermas--The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Habermas begins with examining the various (mis)uses of the term public. (e.g. public opinion; informed public; public appeal).

"In the realm of mass media, of course, publicity has changed its meaning. Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion: public relations and efforts recently baptized "publicity work" are aimed at producing such publicity" (2).

Though the word public, and its reference to "civil society," emerged first in Germany, the idea of a public sphere extends back to Greece.
  • The polis was common space for free citizens and separate from the oikos or private family life. And though much interaction took place in the agora, "The public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis), which could also assume the forms of consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as well as in common action (praxis).
  • Since Greek citizens were free of productive labor (slaves), their economies were wrapped in the private sphere. "Status in the polic was therefore based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos: family, property, house.
"Still, publicity continues to be an organizational principle of our political order. It is apparently more and other than a mere scrap of liberal ideology that a social democracy could discard without harm. If we are successful in gaining a historical understanding of the structures of this complex that today, confusedly enough, we subsume under the heading "public sphere," we can hope to attain thereby not only a sociological clarification of the concept but a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories" (4-5).

Claim: If we can understand how and why we conflate "publicity" with "public sphere," we can better understand our own society.

Societies in the Middle Ages, primarily German feudalism, didn't absorb Greek and Roman ideas about public and private spaces. Though they depended on feudalism and manors as central to the economy, no laws evinced the ability "in which private people could step forward into a public sphere (5).

"Sociologically, that is to say by reference to institutional criteria, a public sphere inthe sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages" (7).

The "public sphere" during this time then "was something like a status attribute" (7). In this sense, a public person like a lord, represents (not in the same sense a lawyer or senator represents) the people which legitimate his authority. He isn't a representative of their needs; he is a representative of their presence, which lends authority to his public nature.

"Only after national and territorial power states had arisen on the basis of the early capitalist commercial economy and shattered the feudal foundations of power could this court nobility develop the framework of a sociability--highly individuated, in spite of its comprehensive etiquette--into that peculiarly free-floating but clearly demarcated sphere of 'good society' in the eighteenth century...Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense" (10-11).

Private, as a word, emerges during the 16th century to denote someone not holding a public office.

On the Genesis of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

The rise of capitalism in the Middle Ages, which the systems at hand absorbed initially, transformed the social order. As the trade in commodities expanded, so too did the exchange of news from foreign places in the medium of letters utilized by those in trade. Since the new market system depended on the expansion and opening of new markets, the state emerged as an institution that taxed in order to expand. During this time, "public" "was synonymous with 'state-related'" concerns; "the attribute no longer referred to the representative 'court' of a person endowed with authority but instead of the functioning of an apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction and endowed with a monopoly over the legitimate use of coercion" (18). Those being policed formed the public.

Whereas the home was once the economic center of "private life," homes were forced to define their private qualities in relation to the existence of markets that affected the whole of the public. "The economic activity that had become private had to be oriented toward a commodity market that had expanded under public direction and supervision; the economic conditions under which this activity now took place lay outside the confines of the single household; for the first time they were of general interest" (19).

News emerged as a commodity alongside the commodities that gave it prominence. Though the press was used to disseminate information about trade, storms, governments, wars, etc., authorities also utilized the trade in news, thereby making those receivers of the news "the public." The news trade democratized the access to information for an emerging bourgeois class of professionals. Whereas the public once constituted the absolute ruler as the state, the existence of a new bourgeois public--which displaced the once powerful members of trade guilds--"led...to a tension between 'town' and 'court' (23).

The bureaucratic regulations of mercantilism blurred the distinction between public and private, creating tension within the "public sphere." During this time, publications also become regulated as published private thought became regulated as public consumption. The publications signified a shift where private individuals came together as a public to call for public judgments of public authority. At the end of the 17th century, people began to refer to "public" instead of readers or mankind, and "public opinion" instead of "general opinion."

Chapter 2: Social Structures of the Public Sphere

The bourgeois didn't rail against people in power as much as they used reason to revisit the "principle on which existing rule was based" (28).

As the emerging middle-class learned rational debate from the courtly public, they broke off and engaged larger issues in town meeting places: salons, coffee houses, and table societies. These meetings "built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere" (30).

INSTITUTIONS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The movement of France's "center" from Versailles to Paris signaled a transformation in the public sphere. Similarly, in Britain the Glorious Revolution marked a shift from the Court as the public to the town. "The predominance of the 'town' was strengthened by new institutions that, for all their variety, in Great Britain and France took over the same social functions: the coffee houses...and the salons.

"In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; 'opinion' became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence" (33-34). I find this notion odd. Isn't economic dependence and determinism what created the "public sphere" and allowed these nouveau riche to come together? Howe can they possibly bracket self-interest? Is it really possible to disengage with out identity when so much of our identity is wrapped up in economy?

German table societies were fewer in number and different in nature, but "their public was recruited from private people engaged in productive work" (34). The table societies sought to equalize the commonalities between humans despite social standing. However, the meetings were held in private and were exclusive. This was done to protect the individuals and reason from the threat of absolutist powers. Isn't this what we try to replicate in our classrooms?

All of these publics, however, are exclusive, which makes me wonder how something exclusive, something centrifugal, can be considered a public.

Commonalities between salons, coffee houses, and table societies:
  1. they preserved a kind of social intercourse that disregarded status altogether. They existed apart from the market and the state.
  2. "discussions within such a public presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned" (36).
  3. the public was inclusive despite its exclusiveness. They could never close themselves off from the shared world of other private citizens. It acted as the unrepresented public's mouthpiece.
The emergence of the public sphere and the bourgeois also changed the nature of art. No longer did art serve a specific purpose (music for the court or music for the church) it "became an object of free choice and of changing preference. The 'taste' to which art was oriented from then on became manifest in the assessments of lay people who claimed no prerogative, since within a public everyone was entitled to judge" (40).

The public nature of art gave way to art criticism, which also emanated from the salons. In addition, coffee houses enacted journals to keep track of the arguments and discussion put forward.

When those same people entered a salon  within a conjugal family's home, it didn't represent the formation of a society because of the way they entered into it. The family resembled closely the economic forces that gave rise to it. "Thus it was a private autonomy denying its economic origins that provided the bourgeois family with its consciousness of itself. It seemed to be established voluntarily and by free individuals and to be maintained without coercion" (46). Essentially, the market economies that resulted in this family structure hid itself in pure and common humanity.

This time also saw the rise in interest of the subjectivity of the self and self-expression in letter writing/diaries. "The relations between author, work, and public changed. They became intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically interested in what was 'human,' in self-knowledge, and in empathy" (50). The reality as illusion became FICTION.


"They formed the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself" (51). So...the family mimicked a public?

"the theme of the modern public sphere shifted from the properly political tasks of a citizenry acting in common to the more properly civic tasks of a society engaged in critical public debate...it challenged the established authority of the monarch" (52).

Based on the objectivity of rule of law, the public sphere utilized public opinion as a legitimate form of rationality and justice.

"As soon as privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings ceased to communicate merely about their subjectivity but rather in their capacity as property-owners desired to influence public power in their common interest, the humanity of the literary public sphere served to increase the effectiveness of the public sphere in the political realm (56).

Chapter 3: Political Functions of the Public Sphere

Public spheres that worked their way into the political sphere first appeared in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century. This was brought on by the development of a stock market, end of censorship, and the invention of Parliament. During this time, coffee houses were seen as anti-establishment and dangerous. The press (ca. 1726) established itself as the fourth estate, able to influence public opinion against the government.

As the power of the Parliament expanded, so too did the public's interest in the operations of Parliament. As such, members of Parliament formed factions and used the Fourth Estate to petition its position. This signaled a change in how disagreements at the national level moved from violence to debate. The minority members of Parliament were especially adept at presenting their cause as one of the people, and by extension of disinterested reason. As such, members of Parliament began giving speeches appealing to "public opinion."

MEANWHILE IN FRANCE AND GERMANY

The French public sphere couldn't criticize effectively until after the revolution. Though they held massive amounts of capital, they weren't united enough to "affect the fate of the nation" (67).

Habermas's term for officers of the public (Dewey) is the "public sphere of the political realm," aka representative democracy. The French nobility was forced to suppress the public sphere in the political realm because it "could not be put out of commission" (69).

The French Revolution brought what took 100 years in Great Britain: representation, free press, and constitutional law. However, many of these rights were exterminated with the ascension of Napoleon.
 
Habermas overtly argues that the entrance of the bourgeois public sphere into the political realm was the result of capitalist mercantilism. The term "private" "emerged precisely in reference to the concept of free power of control over property that functioned in capitalist fashion" (74). So, the pubi sphere consisted of private individuals who exercised reason free of state, church, and family to influence the political realm who stopped being the symbol of public power and instead assumed the role of a public authority expected to protect encourage what was private.

The private persons in the public sphere operated on equal standing relationships who acted as legally private individuals engaging in contractual market exchange.

During this time (1800), laws changed to reflect the role of the market in the nations. Civil law (private law) changed to "free competition that governed the market of goods, real estate, labor, and even capital itself" (78). Whereas previous years maintained wage laws, apprenticeship standards, etc., new laws protected contracts and business interests.

Habermas explains Britain's rolling back of gov regulation in the markets and defines its globalized trade system as a shining and ephemeral moment of liberal free-market capitalism. He concludes, "only during this phase was civil society as the private sphere emancipated from the directives of public authority to such an extent that at that time the political public sphere could attain its full developments in the bourgeois constitutional state" (79).

The free market encouraged disinterested/rational governments that made decisions free of influence. (Contrast with Dewey's stance on whether or not a private individual can free himself from his own interests as a public official)

"The constitutional state as a bourgeois state established the public sphere in the political realm as an organ of the state so as to ensure institutionally the connection between law and public opinion" (81).

The establishment of rule by law was mean to secure freedom from domination. So great was the faith in this law, that law was thought to protect from absolutist domination as well as domination from the law.

There seems to be this dilemma (around page 82-83) concerning the fear of legislative power overshadowing the will of the people (public opinion). The power of public opinion resides in its ability to not seek or assume power to legislate but to "transform voluntas (self-interest) into a ratio (rational disinterestedness) that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all" (83). I wonder who the "all" in this public opinion are.

The state began to operate as a public entity, publicizing its actions, opening up parliament and court procedures to public scrutiny as a way to ensure the import of public opinion.

Habermas argues that the idea that constitutional governments with personal liberties masqueraded as governments of, by, and for the people. Since real control rested in the hands of comparatively few people, the constitutional state existed as an extension of their interests.

Even though the public sphere was exclusive, the public sphere, Habermas argues, could be seen as an entity that put forth constitutional law as a means to secure a place for all to enter into the bourgeois life. That is to say, the system wrought from exclusivity cannot be said to be exclusive simply because it arose from such conditions. If the bourgeois public sphere successfully bracketed difference to argue for freedom for all humans, the system that arose from exclusivity could act inclusively in as much as those who want to participate meet the criteria.

The ability of persons to enter into this public sphere required untrammeled free markets and only FREE markets.

This system seems to set up a convenient tautology. The creators of an "inclusive" system create exclusive criteria for entry--of which they already meet--and thereby protect their own interests by creating rules of entry that include them but also allow them to regulate entry as a means of self-interest. Habermas points out that the private man cannot divorce his private interest from his public role. Therefore, the system perpetuates its success for its current members. The rules of the game, based on a theoretical system, serve the current players.

Habermas seems to acknowledge the exclusivity and potential for corruption in this system, but he says publicity keeps the bourgeois from turning into a closed off ruling class. "as long as publicity existed as a sphere and functioned as a principle, what the public itself believed to be and to be doing was ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology...the dominant class nevertheless developed political institutions which credibly embodied as their objective meaning the idea of their own abolition...the idea of the dissolution of domination into that easygoing constraint that prevailed on no other ground than the compelling insight of a public opinion" (88).

Chapter 4: The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and Ideology

Much of the beginning of this chapter traces the history of public opinion as a marker or public reason and logic from the original meaning of opinion, which meant a judgment lacking proofs of truth. The shift rested on the role of the public sphere as a place to debate public matters.

In France, public opinion didn't have the same political and legislative purchase in did in England, not initially at least. In France, Rousseau's social contract assumed the ideal of legislative-shaping public opinion. Rousseau envisioned a democracy that guarded itself against the inevitable, self-serving powers that would crop up in debate. He desired government by public opinion, but he wanted the matters to be presented objectively, not through artful oratory, but as they were so the masses could let their opinion be known.  This differed from other notions in pre-revolutionary France. Some wanted technocrats (bourgeois pros) to debate and rule and others wanted democratic public opinion free of debate and persuasion to rule.

PUBLICITY as the BRIDGING PRINCIPLE between POLITICS and MORALITY (Kant)

Public opinion sought to rationalize politics morally. Kant "conceived of 'the public sphere' at once as the principle of the legal order and as the method of enlightenment" (104). Kant viewed philosophers as the purveyors of pure reason who conducted their thinking independent of governments. They spoke out to the public, which needed Enlightenment. This is odd because the public represented an entity that needed tutelage but claimed to be mature. Since all could reason, the philosophers were the center flames of a fire. "The public sphere was realized not in the republic of scholars alone but in the public use of reason by all who were adept at it" (105).

Kant's idea of universal moral truths connected politics and laws, which resulted from the pure reason of the public with disinterested moral guidance, to morality. The problem persists, though, about how private individuals can perform disinterestedly in public affairs. His answer was to limit public sphere involvement to those whose vices in the public sphere (that of commodity exchange) would negatively affect them. This, he thought, would keep their actions in line. Hegel and Marx, however, thought a public sphere under these condition would break apart based on social labor conflicts.

ON the DIALECTIC of the PUBLIC SPHERE (Hegel and Marx)

For Hegel, the sciences fell outside the realm of public opinion because they were more than knowledge in mere appearance. "The public opinion of the private people assembled to form a public no longer retained a bases of unity and truth; it degenerated to the level of a subjective opining of the many" (119). The inability of the bourgeois public sphere to extend itself to the poor masses created upheavals that needed to be checked through control. "The public sphere served only to integrate subjective opinions into the objectivity assumed by the spirit in the form of the state" (120). Public opinion, under Hegel, was not opinion as a critical mass of reasoning individuals making their will known. It was reduced to opinion as unsubstantiated thought.

"Marx criticized the constitution based on neo-estates as propunded in the Hegelian philosophy of the state, using the criterion of the bourgeois constitutional state only to unmask the 'republic' before its own idea as the existing contradiction and, holding fast to the idea of the bourgeois public sphere, to confront as in a mirror with the social conditions for the possibility of its utterly unbourgeois realization" (124).

"Marx denounced public opinion as false consciousness: it hid before itself its own true character as a mask of bourgeois class interests" (124).

Because the bourgeois public sphere prevented entrance from below, it created the weapons of its own demise.

THE AMBIVALENT VIEW of the PUBLIC SPHERE in the THEORY of LIBERALISM (John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville)

In response to the socialist predictions about the expanse and exclusion of the public sphere, conservatives viewed the public sphere, not as an historical act of nature, but of something more attune to common sense.

As the public sphere expanded through press and propaganda it came to include those who desired to regulate the market. The bedrock principle that created the public sphere--liberal markets--was criticized.

Mid-19th century, Tocqueville and Mill decried the rule of public opinion as an act of conformity instead of one that used critical discourse. Whereas public opinion once marked the innate natural reason of the bourgeois, it now resembled a group think tidal wave. Tolerance now was preached to protect the minority belief from the masses instead of the masses from the absolutists.

Since the public sphere now contained mostly proles, "the political public sphere no longer stood for the idea of a dissolution of power; instead, it was to serve its division; public opinion became a mere limit on power" (136)

The uninformed and gullible masses scared Mill and Tocqueville into believing governments should run based on representational democracy, whereby an educated few run the state.

"In the hundred years following the heyday of liberalism during which capitalism gradually became 'organized,' the original relationship of public and private sphere in fact dissolved; the contours of the bourgeois public sphere eroded. But neither the liberal nor the socialist model were adequate for the diagnosis of a public sphere that remained peculiarly suspended between the two constellations abstractly represented in the models. Two tendencies dialectically related to each other indicated a breakdown of the public sphere. While it penetrated more spheres of society, it simultaneously lost its political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it had made public to the control of a critical public" (140).

Chapter 5: The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

The end of the 19th century brought the close of liberal market economies/politics. Liberal markets gave way to protectionism and oligopolies. As such, governments enacted anti-trust measures.

"laisser-faire capitalism...was actually a function not of the system as such, but of concrete historical circumstances...society was forced to relinquish the flimsiest pretense of being a sphere in which the influence of power was suspended...Contrary to these expectations, however, under conditions of imperfect competition and dependent prices social power became concentrated in private hands" (144).

As capitalism concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few, states saw it necessary to regulate and promote social welfare through services and market regulation.

Socialist critique of bourgeois law: its only as good as it is inclusive and open to upward mobility. However, the separation of the producer from the means of production subordinates the worker to the capitalist.

The power of the private world seeped into the public realm.  As such, private law (contracts, property, inheritance) became regulated as a public matter (e.g. collective contracts, tenant laws, etc.)

In the 20th century public, private, and occupational spheres blended into grey. The public regulated the businesses, but workers' time at the job bled into their private lives, and their private lives were now supported by a welfare state. "As a result there arose the illusion of an intensified privacy in an interior domain whose scope had shrunk to comprise the conjugal family only insofar as it constituted a community of consumers" (156).

"In proportion as private life became public, the public sphere itself assumed forms of private closeness--in the neighborhood the pre-bourgeois extended family arose in a new guise...Discussion as a form of sociability gave way to the fetishism of community involvement as such" (like watching TV together) (158).

The resulting physical space that accompanies the loss of the private world, occludes the necessary coming together [like the salons and coffeehouses] for a public sphere. The occupational sphere has created a sense of internal, private leisure that now assumes and pretends to be the same private sphere that allowed the propertied masses to discuss.

The private world of letters became one of cultural consumption, a signal of its demise. Whereas the public of salons and letters weren't mere ideology, the rise of a leisure-private sphere replaced rational-critical debate with consumption, "and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated reception, however uniform in mode" (161).

The demise of the family as a sounding board for ideas and rational debate disappeared with culture consumption.

Habermas argues that we still have debates, discussions, round table panels, but these are commodified and marketed as products to be consumed. I wonder, though, if this is just a modern iteration of Mill's desire to have educated elites (philosophers) publicizing to the uneducated masses.

Habermas asserts that such monetized debates act as a tranquilizer that substitutes for action and "loses its publicist function" (164). Whereas the market gave rise to ideas, now the ideas become part of the market.

Habermas implicates paperback fiction and the mass distribution of newspapers  as supplying the "psychological facilitation" of an engaged public. Instead of educating the masses in a way that would enable them to engage in critical discourse, mass consumption of culture presents spectacle and sensationalism as the bourgeois public sphere's equal.

Habermas also contends that it's false to assume an educated center is still convening in the way the 18th and 19th century bourgeois public sphere did based on the way people consume media.

"The sounding board of an educated stratum tutored in the public use of reason has been shattered; the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical. Consequently, it completely lacks the form of communication specific to a public" (175).

The public sphere becomes a medium of advertisement for economic and political propaganda rendering it "pseudo-privatized."

Habermas argues that Marx was incorrect in what the proles would do when they came to power. Instead of changing the public to an all-inclusive state, "the occupation of the political public sphere by the unpropertied masses led to an interlocking of state and society which removed from the public sphere its former basis without supplying a new one. For the integration of the public and private realms entailed a corresponding disorganization of the public sphere that once was the go-between linking state and society" (177).

Publicity in this eliding of the public and private sphere changes from a checks and balances to the "manipulation of the public as much as legitimation before it" (178).

Pertaining to the formation of law: Since law no longer represents the absolute truth of innate pure reason (Kant), law now must justify itself through publicity. In the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion and rational critical discourse blended morality and law as the will of the people. Now that the spheres have been blended, law must now utilize publicity to mandate itself.

Chapter 6: The Transformation of the Public Sphere's Political Function

The capitalization of the press helped commodify news as factional and sensational. Habermas acknowledges that the early producers of the press were also capitalist, but he continues to argue that they bracketed their own self-interest and profitability for the objectivity and truth of the product they produced. I wonder though how much of this had to do with their morality and how much had to do with their limits in technology and experience in commodifying culture. I don't think it's beyond the men who plundered Africa, India, and the Americas to imagine its morally corrupt to monetize information. Just like it didn't strike most shoe producers to market footwear to athletes until Nike came along, Habermas, in my opinion, romanticizes the capitalists of ages past who were only limited by their (in)experience in the thing they were selling.

The market systems Habermas extols for creating the conditions necessary for the bourgeois public sphere are the same principles that lionize competition to bring down prices, expand markets, monetize anything, and maximize product. I don't understand, then, how he can deride the expansion of those market principles into modernity. Just because older newspapers weren't vehicles for advertisements doesn't mean that the impulse to maximize profits didn't exist. It just had yet to realize its ability to grab larger market shares through a certain medium.

Interestingly, the success and growth of private industry and its stake in the media production of news encouraged governments to secure the means of news production (think BBC) in the form of public corporations to protect publicity from capitalist purposes.

The public sphere now constitutes a canvas for advertising. Advertising masquerades as a vehicle for the public to form informed opinions, veiling its private interests. "Public relations fuses both: advertisement must absolutely not be recognizable as the self-presentation of a private interest. It bestows on its object the authority of an object of public interest about which--this is the illusion to be created--the public of critically reflecting private people freely forms its opinion" (194).

Special interests can also exercise and manipulate public opinion for personal gain, causing the functions of government to form factions and govern, not through legislation and discourse, but through the exchanges of favors.

The use of publicity by special interests refeudalizes because it becomes the representation of public power rather than an invitation to rational debate.

As such, political parties are not representatives of the people; they are representatives of the people who control political parties.

"Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one cannot respond by arguing but only by identifying with them" )206).

To fix the system Habermas says we need to "permit an intrparty" democracy and publish the influence of private interests in the affairs of the state.

On the surface, modern political participation resembles the bourgeois public sphere. The wealthier males participate more readily. However, they do not often put forth their ideas as the subject of political debate. On the contrary, it's often "those who are most decisively predisposed to avoid a public opinion formed by discussion are the ones most likely to be influenced in their views–but this time by the staged or manipulatively manufactured public sphere of the election campaign" (214).

Chapter 7: On the Concept of Public Opinion

"without the substitution of public opinion as the origin of all authority for decisions binding the whole, modern democracy lacks the substance of its own truth" (238).

Although public opinion is now mostly a fiction, it continues to legitimize authority and laws necessary in a welfare state that promotes inclusion.


***Class Notes***

Habermas

Last key member of Frankfurt school. Trained by Adorno and Horkheimer. Frankfurt school seeks to engage a number of social sciences (Habermas trained in sociology). Use critical lens to engage and explore society; emerges between WWI and WWII.

  • They believe society is changes. They engage with this idea using Marx and Freud. 
  • Marx brings critique of capitalism.
  • However, they're suspicious of state communism/ state politics, which utilizes party platforms (not very Marx). They believe this doesn't incorporate the whole human being.
  • Adorno: "The self is liquidated." The western push to dominate and rationalize kills the individual. We're so divorced from ourselves and critical capacities that we cannot have experiences. 
  • Habermas thought there's nothing left if we're incapable of having experiences. How can we change this? he wondered. 
  • The space he imagines capable of this change is the public sphere. 
  • He believes in rational critical debate can change society. 
  • He's criticized for being ideological. Wasn't a fan of post-modernism because it abandons rationality as a possibility. 
  • Capitalist democracy quite different from the polis. 
Discussion of book
  • In polis there's a division between polis (public) and private (oikos). Economics weren't handled in the polis. Inclusion of citizens. What is fused in the bourgeois public spheres is separate in the polis. 
  • Renaissance: the public was intimate. Behaviors and standings were codified. The public was a display of power. Festivals and rituals were displays of power, authority, prestige. Representation of legitimacy. There's is a crucial performance of power so the public will buy into their ability to rule. Not just ostentation/ideology. A flexing of muscles. That's what they were publicizing. This helps understand refeudalization and the consumption of instituted power. 
  • Mercantilism bridges absolutism to capitalism. The state begins depending on people who do have money because they don't tax. Individuals begin financing things like war. Private interests become tethered to state interests. 13th-17th century. 
  • The changes in state/economic/private overlap helps him develop and draw spheres and how those spheres change with structural changes. 
  • Nation states: creation of laws and military.
  • A separate bourgeois class emerges from reading and reading about culture. 
  • Newspapers carried information, but they also carried with them critical reasoning. The people consumed criticism in private, thought about it, and then came together in the public sphere to discuss the ideas, which seek legitimation from authority. It is a public sphere of a reading people. 
  • A series of things emerge that make literature's new function possible: the town is set up differently (the exchange of goods is different from the walling in of the king's castle). 1st private political sphere then the political. Nobles intermingle with bourgeois intellectuals interested in art. They come together to discuss art and literature. Not socially equal but they are equal within that space and within a topic. 
  • Critical judgments become cultivated in coffee houses and form public opinion, a normative judgment. 
  • Salons differed from coffee houses in that they were held in the structural home, which brought the public literally into the private house. In these salons people could bracket their domestic roles to engage in debate/discussion. (e.g. wives could engage in the salon because they were emancipated from their domestic role).
  • THE FALL OF THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE
  • The rise of the welfare state and mass consumer culture. Opinion polls create a means by way people determine what they think. The structural shift becomes a package of thinkable options. Our opinions are represented for us in mediums instead of emerging through critical, engaged participation. The welfare state removes you for rational decision making. 
  • How does the shift to a neo-liberal state and digital media market change his argument.


Key Terms
  • Structures: Institutions that allow certain things to emerge in one way or another. What encourages engagement (e.g. Government; media; press; family; education) are structural.

A

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Elenore Long--"Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics" Ch. 1-4

Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

Going public and the public turn of rhetoric and composition foreground public engagement.

"The purpose of this book is to pull together alternative theoretical accounts of public engagement...Second, the promise of public engagement calls reader located in relative institutional privilege to speak wisely and persuasively for social change" (4).

The question how do we go public shifts the focus away from the academy and academy driven scholarship to the combined private-public world outside institutional space.

Where normal people "go public" are called local publics. 

Most of this chapter outlines the focus of the later chapters and sets the foundation for the book's thrust: how one goes public, what does it mean to turn to the public, what does that reveal, what problems come with the public turn, and why the book focuses on physical versus virtual public spaces.


Chapter 2—Definitions and Distinctions

The question how do we go public shifts the focus away from the academy and academy driven scholarship to the combined private-public world outside institutional space, so in public engagement  “ordinary people go public.” Wait! Who you callin’ ordinary?
·      ordinary: not political; not celebrities; people participating in a public sphere that their participation in creates
Community literacy undergirds the ability to “go public.”
·      community: NOT geographic; symbolic spatially and temporally constructed “shared exigencies.” synonymous with local publics.

Five Point Local Public Framework Heuristic (used to compare researchers’ going public and what stemmed from that)

1. Metaphor: How researchers conceptualized, structure, and define. The metaphors act as research heuristics, revealing in their connectivity ways of theorizing local publics.
2. Context: physical location and social/cultural characteristics that give meaning to local discourse.
·      Location: the politics of place; the term is rather plastic and can shift depending on what it modifies (attitude, knowledge, literacy, etc.)
3. Tenor of the Discourse: linguistic affectation that “encodes attitudes, relational cues, and power differentials” (21). Learning tenor can help “perform specific literacies in the tenor of a given local public” (21).
4. Literacies: “organize how people carry out their purposes for going public” (22).
5. Rhetorical Invention: “how a discourse permits people to respond to exigencies that arise within its discursive space” (22). So, what we write about when we write about a local public?

Chapter 3—Locating Community Literacy Studies

This chapter provides an overview of how literacy has changed and how that change affects the way people go public.

“the history of community literacy is tied up in efforts to define the local public as an object of inquiry and a site for rhetorical intervention” (25).

Different scholars use different verbiage to rationalize their aims, which “coalesced around the connection between vernacular literacies and public life” (26).

Historically, community literacy is quite young, emerging from Halloran in 1975 and gaining ground with Freire’s pedagogy and Pittsburgh’s Community Literacy Center. However new it is, CLS engages Aristotelian and sophistic rhetorics that utilize praxis and build on contingent judgment.

Though separate from literacy and public sphere disciplines, Long argues that community literacy borrows from both areas in its own distinctive space to study going public and intervention design.

The mid-20th century worldwide literacy scare placed literacy in the public arena. However, scholars wrongly assumed literacy was generalizable, cross-cultural, trans-communal skill (autonomous model). People like Freire disagreed with the conformist take and argued instead for a literacy that allowed people to “participate in the transformation of their world” (30).

1980s—New Literacy studies movement: focus literacy studies anthropology and ethnography. Replaces UNESCO’s autonomous model.

1990s placed literacy in public domains, literacy and language shifted toward social, fluid, adaptable, and rhetorical.

In this shift, scholars wrote descriptively about literacy’s surface features (sociolinguistics) and how communities culled their literacies together to tackle pressing social issues. Features of situated public literacies help people go public: performance, collaboration, problem-posing lenses, institutional affiliation, and they contain non-affiliated alternative discourses.

Studying participatory democracy via community literacy, scholars like Fraser and Hauser pushed back against Habermas’s elitist, exclusive, and panoramic theories of democracy in favor of local publics that contain marginal discourses, which enrich and legitimate participatory democracy. Long provides a list of programs that engage vernacular literacies and local publics. They do so by helping local publics write for/about themselves, partner with communities to write with them, and/or create technes for public engagement.

Chapter 4—An Impromptu Theater: A Local Public That Turns Its Back on Formal Institutions

This chapter outlines Heath’s “analysis of community life in 1970s Trackton. Heath uses the metaphor of a stage where improvised, contingent performances take place within the local public.

The dramas that took place depended on the stage and the contexts of the moment (paycheck=treats; plaza=social hierarchy sorting).

Conditions of difference—geographic, social, economic, political, etc.—defined the borders between Trackton and its surroundings.

The stages also allowed children learning their community literacy ways to practice and negotiate power dynamics.

Performance in the plaza allowed Trackton residence a way to perpetuate their difference from similar ethnicities that displayed “snobbish” socio-economic characteristics. Though varied in their nature—aggressive play, girl talk, matriarchal stories—“Trackton’s residents used these literacies both to call into being and to access their local public” (60).

Heath’s conclusions about Trackton allow Long to draw four conclusions about local publics:

1. Local publics can be physically geographic and constrained within metaphysical space (shared ideology).
2. Local publics can be safe, familiar spaces for members who depend on its individual integrity.
3. The operative metaphor used in the research can be revealing but also constricting (e.g. Trackton as “closed community” elides race relation complications)
4. Performative practices are especially effective in creating publics.

****Class Notes from Jim Webber

Ideological model of literacy: Literacy isn't learned or defined in a vacuum. Community literacy doesn't transfer from one context to another.

Heath argues that Trackton is a public sphere. Their languages and performances are "world-making." Intentions were for inclusion of language (think Students' Rights to Their Own Languages). Think of Heath's work as a language response to Habermas.

Publics aren't just out there. They are called into being through performances.

Dewey's public (placed/defined) in the political sphere.
Long/Heath's public focus more on community life, culture, and the maintaining of standing to participate in a community.

Discourse (Burke): symbolic acts

Saturday, January 23, 2016

James P. Purdy--"What Can Design Thinking Offer Writing Studies"

"I argue that design thinking not only offers a useful approach for tackling multimodal/multimedia composing tasks, but also situates the goal of writing studies as textual action and asks us to reconsider writing’s home in the university."

Purdy begins by acknowledging the growing interest in writing studies to align writing programs with art and design disciplines rather than its traditional home in English departments.

If many in writing studies are turning to writing-as-design and design writing, they should know the reasons they make such moves.  "Writing studies has arguably not yet realize this “fuller turn,” and that is where this article seeks to intervene" (614).

"Ultimately, I argue that design thinking offers a useful approach for tackling 'wicked' multimodal/multimedia composing tasks, an approach that asks us to reconsider writing's home in the university" (614).

The Categories of Design Use: What Do We Mean by Design?

After identifying the way "design" is used in articles and which publications use design ideas, Purdy concludes authors invoke design for five reasons in writing studies.

1. "to serve as a synonym for the words plan or structure." Since this represents a banal usage of the early ideas concerning design, Purdy doesn't address it.

2. "to conceptualize composing as multimodal." "This use of design coincides with the visual turn in writing studies, when teacher- scholars advocated seeing texts as visual; treating images as texts; and analyzing the rhetorical nature and function of images, layout, and other design features."
 "importing vocabulary from design...helps teacher-scholars account for and theorize compositions using multiple modalities" (617).

3. "to recognize digital, multimedia composition...a desire to move the field beyond a sole focus on print and to account for texts in multiple media." "design offers a way to make better sense of the rhetorical work of digital media." "drawing on design ofers a perceptual lens for making sense of an inclusive range of textual productions."

4. "to draw attention to the material conditions of composing." "use design to make visible how processes and products of writing are inherently physical, embodied, and ideological...emphasize the nonneutrality of forms and acts of writing" (618). 

5. "to discuss the academic discipline of design studies...they call attention to the discipline of design studies and ways in which writing studies should (or should not) draw on it." They explore possible disciplinary and interdisciplinary links. 

Design Thinking: How Might We Approach Design in Relation to Writing Studies?

"Design thinking is an approach to solving complex design problems that is associated with work in architecture, engineering, and art and design disciplines" (620).

The orientations of design thinking:

1. Forward orientation: focus on future problems
2. Use of synthesis as well as analysis: focuses on combination and connection more than critique
3. Generation of many, diverse solutions: initially focuses on quantity of ideas rather than quality.

"Design thinking treats composing decisions as deliberate and consequential." Design thinking is generative and focused on creation more than critique. Therefore, design thinking doesn't abandon analysis; it links it to synthesis.

Similar to process-oriented composition, design thinking utilizes steps. Purdy uses Stanford's design school's heuristic:

1. Understand (research in writing process): gaining background knowledge in primary and secondary research
2. Observe (think about audience): observation of interaction with physical spaces
3. Define: focus on user's needs;  "create an actionable point of view.
4. Ideate:  generate multiple ideas to meet user needs without assessing the idea's quality
5. Prototype: "create a quick, rough representation"
6. Test: trying it out and receiving feedback


 The overlap in writing process and design thinking supports writing studies' interest in design. 
The "ideate" step offers an interesting notion of invention, one that stresses multiple variations on a theme.

The Saving Our Stories Project: An Example Application of Design Thinking

The example in this section combines the understand and observe step into a singular empathizing step. Defining an actionable need helped them frame and create ideas.

Conclusion: What Does Design Mean for Writing Studies?

"we need to consider what set of intellectual questions are signaled by using design in our scholarship and adopting a design orientation to writing" (632).

"Through the lens of design, a central concern of the discipline [that is, writing studies/composition] is to explore the ways in which people make meaning with any and all available resources." This movement will help the discipline focus on communicative practices, not just writing.

We can be qualified to teach the gamut that design studies includes through collaboration, which is a long-standing strength of the writing studies discipline. 

Since design is by nature generative, Purdy argues that it belongs in writing studies based on its focus on meaning making. "Through the lens of design, writing studies is not defined by what we know but by the ways in which we create" (634).

Design thinking can help validate the field of writing in the university. 

Purdy avoids answering whether or not writing studies within a design paradigm belong in English departments because that isn't the most fruitful question to ask. Instead we should ask these questions first:

1. Which disciplinary associations (e.g., design studies, library and infor- mation science, digital humanities, architecture, multimedia arts) are consonant with our focus and goals? 

2. In what ways can we (formally and informally) cultivate these relationships on curricular and programmatic levels?

3. In what ways can we effectively communicate the need for these changes to the range of stakeholders affected by them?

4. How can we train the next generation of writing studies scholars to enact these changes?