"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.
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:
- they preserved a kind of social intercourse that disregarded status altogether. They existed apart from the market and the state.
- "discussions within such a public presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned" (36).
- 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 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.
- 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
No comments:
Post a Comment