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***







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