Jurgen Habermas--The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Introduction)

It is "an effort to grasp the preconditions, structures, functions, and inner tensions of this central domain of moder society. As a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matter of general interest was institutionally guaranteed, the liberal public sphere tood shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy. In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler's power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people."

From Habermas - A Guide for the Perplexed

"The bourgeois public sphere opposes itself not just to the private sphere but also to the state (which, today, is also sometimes referred to as public as in ‘public servant’, ‘public policy’ and the ‘public sector’). At first, the bourgeois public sphere worked as a check on government, taking care of society’s general interests against the par- ticular interests of the ruler(s). Later the public sphere became the basis for government as the idea was that the laws should be based on rational will, which would in turn emerge from the rational debate of the public sphere."

"Habermas will talk about the re-feudalization of the public sphere in the twentieth century. By this he means that the citizens (now ‘the public’) become passive consumers of infotainment and that their only role is to acclaim the ruling elites’ decisions. This is opposed to the bourgeois public sphere where the public use of reasons by the citizens themselves becomes the source of legitimacy within society (ibid., 5–14). The bourgeois public sphere supposedly

consists of an active citizenry, who consider themselves to be the source of legitimate government."

"This is important because it ushered in a critical public, a public trained in critical discussions, even if initially only in the field of literature. Eventually this critical public started debating matters beyond the sphere of intimacy, just as they started debating things beyond what had to do with their private businesses in a narrow sense. In this way, politics, law and government also became matters of taste and value – in short, matters about which citizens could arrive at rational solutions on the basis of critical debate (ibid., chapters 6–7)."

 

"What should be clear are the basics: the bourgeois public sphere emerged with capitalism and the new class of capitalist traders and producers; it was distinguished from the sphere of the market, from the sphere of intimacy and from the state, although it also interacted with, and drew upon, these in important ways; and its institutional basis was in the press and the coffee- houses."

"Progressively, the public sphere was seen as not only a check on government, but as the rational basis for government. ‘[T]he critical judgement of a public making use of its own reason’ became the source of legitimacy in society."

"The public sphere (and, by extension, liberalism) does not eradicate differences and inequalities, but abstracts from them. It claims to be a sphere where differences and inequalities are irrelevant and do no count. To paraphrase Habermas, only the better argument counts."

"Instead, what unites them is a common, sort of ‘disinterested’ interest in reason. This is the interest that is also expressed by Kant’s enlightenment thinking. The only judge should be the public, that is, rational argument, which should not be biased by particular interests."

 

"Increasingly, debate in the public sphere became debate over interests and over which and whose interests should prevail in public policy. Indeed, what used to be the site of rational-critical debate became the site of negotiation of interests, although this negotiation was increasingly hidden behind the closed doors of government, organizations and businesses. There was a shift from a universal, ‘disinterested’ interest in reason (however fictional) to the negotiation of particular interests."

"Where the public sphere was once made up of property owners and producers, it was now made up of agents who had a stable income of a certain level. They were first of all consumers. However, consumption is not mediated by rational-critical debate. All the consumer has to do is to ‘justify’ their consumption with reference to their subjective taste and to do so to themselves rather than to a public. Again we find an aspect of the decomposition or disintegration of the public sphere here. Consumption is individualized, both in the act of consuming and in the justification consumers give for their consumption. Similarly, although advertising is aimed at the masses, it is aimed at the masses as made up of individual, ‘private’ consumers who do not need to communicate with one another in order to consume."

"The public sphere not only become the generator for consumption, but its objects – opinions and information – themselves become objects of consumption by individuals who do not relate to them in a critical way."

"Habermas refers to the ‘refeudalization’ of the public sphere...producers of information and opinions are divided from the consumers of information and opinions, and in the sense that the public sphere functions merely to acclaim the authority of particular opinions and pieces of information."

"Politicians, state representatives and corporations use the public sphere as a means to generate legitimacy for their interests and policies; that is, they represent themselves before the public. The role of the citizens is reduced to that of acclaiming, or not, what they are presented with, whether in the voting booth, when shopping, or with the remote control. The best example of that today is no doubt that of spin and spin doctors, formerly known as public relations (ibid., 193). With the help of spin, politicians and corporations try to present themselves and events in a particular light in order to garner legitimacy for their cause. Public opinion is managed; indeed it is no longer a public but a ‘nonpublic’ (ibid., 211), because it has decom- posed in both its audience and its common interest in reason."

 

"Thus, Habermas’s solution is to take democratic associations and institutions as the building blocks of the public sphere, fostering rational-critical debate within them, among them and between them and the state. If properly democratized, these organizations would function as the channels for public reasoning and for demands from below. Although Habermas (ibid., 210) gives up on a public sphere made up of individual citizens, he sees some possibilities in the democratization of these organizations:
To be able to satisfy these functions in the sense of democratic opinion and consensus formation their inner structure must first be organized in accord with the principle of publicity and must institutionally permit an intraparty or intra-association democracy – to allow for unhampered communication and public rational-critical debate"

"Another reason for Habermas’s pessimistic view may be that Habermas does not spend much energy on social movements, whether historical or contemporary (Calhoun 1992b, 36f.). This is linked to the point about alternative publics. Both historically and today, social movements often emerge from the bottom and from the fringes of society. Thus they may be imperceptible from a perspective that focuses on the bourgeois/liberal public sphere."

"Weak publics feed into strong publics. The ‘wilder’ publics of civil society are more sensitive to demands and pathologies in society, and they are better at generating communicative power, that is, power generated from action oriented towards mutual understanding. The conditions for this kind of practice are better in the informal net- works of civil society. However, the opinions developed in the weak publics must be fed into the political system in order eventually to become law. In this way Habermas talks about the ‘circulation’ of communicative power, and the source of this circulation is the weak publics."
 

"The solution to the problems with the public spheres lies in better communication, that is, better conditions for participants to engage in a domination-free, rational dialogue."





 
Outline of Argument from Dr. Justin Lewis's blog: http://justinlewis.me/?p=240

Outline of Habermas’ Argument:
Thesis:  What are the social conditions for rational-critical debate about public issues by private people who let argumentation, not status, determine decisions?

• Social systems of “public”
  • The Greek Model – freedom is found in the public; however, those who are able to participate in the public must be masters of their private (oikos) (3).
  • The European Middle Ages Model –
    • Characterized by “representational publicity” (8).
    • In this period public is considered something of a “status attribute” (7).
• The “Enlightenment” or 17^th & 18^th Centuries Model –
  • Divided into three separate realms (30):
    • The private realm:
      • Civil society (realm of commodity exchange and social labor)
      • Conjugal family’s internal space (bourgeois intellectuals)
      • Public sphere:
        • In the political realm
        • In the world of letters (clubs, presses)
        • Market of culture products (“town)
      • Sphere of Public Authority
        • State (realm of the “police”)
        • Court (courtly-noble society)

• Habermas’ Themes:  social structure, political functions, ideology

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere:  Economics
  • Social reproduction was a matter of private people left to themselves.  This resulted in the “completed privatization of civil society” (74)
  • Personal freedoms were a result of this freedom of social reproduction and ownership of property (protection) (75)
  • For a brief amount of time – before government intervention in capitalist systems – unmitigated free trade and laissez-faire economic philosophies created a “civil society as the private sphere emancipated from public authority” (79)
  • This new economic situation viewed bourgeois as both homme and citoyen (man as owner of private property and citizen as the person who wants to protect that property order as outside the government)
    • Habermas sees this as one of the fundamental aspects of bourgeois ideology:  this belief in man must be propertied to be man is a false consciousness that Marx also identified (88).

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Codification
  • The family is reconceived as the private sphere where the patriarch participates in the public sphere (similar to the Greek model)
  • The public sphere is constituted in the world of letters – this leads to politics

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Institutional Bases
  • Coffee houses (London)
    • Operated without censorship from the crown
      • Abandoning censorship allowed for a new, non-revolutionary politics.  H. notes on 64 that this signaled that critical debate of the public stopped violence but also “took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition”
• Salons
  • Public institutions in private residences because of censorship
  • Changed after the Constitution of 1791 that allowed free communication of ideas without censorship (70).  Napoleon later reversed this policy
• Table Societies (Germany)
  • What makes these Bourgeois public sphere institutional bases special?
    • Disregarded status (36)
    • Rational argument was the basis for all argumentation.
    • There was an openness of topics for discussion (36)
    • The public was inclusive in principle if not in practice – if you had access to cultural products, then you could jump in on the culture-debate (37)
    • The bourgeois rational debate of cultural products resulted in the questioning of “absolute sovereignty” be relying on the idea that public opinion alone could discover the “natural order” (55).
      • Habermas works back to the disagreement between Hobbes (Leviathan) and Locke (Two Treatises) on the role of gov’t.
      • Early in the development of the public sphere by private individuals, critical debate was used to discover laws that were inherent to society (83 – center paragraph)

• The ideological Structure of the Public Sphere : A critique on the conception of public opinion as a reasoned form of access to truth (Chapter 4)
  • Kant:  the most developed philosophy of the bourgeois public sphere
    • Public discourse is a way to lead individuals to enlightenment (104)
      • This renders communication (read: rhetoric) fundamental in the communalization of the bourgeois subject
      • This new “world” community is really the community of the bourgeois subject and the attendant “mixed companies” that participate in argumentation for enlightenment through rational discourse.
• Hegel:  the “public” created by civil society are an ideology
  • Common sense is actually just mass opinion dispersed among people in the form of prejudices (122)
• Marx: the “public opinion” is actually just bourgeois class interests in disguise
• Mill / Tocqueville:  Develop a liberalism that treated freedom relatively
  • Wondered about the future of public sphere discourse in the face of increasing membership in said sphere
  • What to do with all the new people in the public as a result of expanded suffrage (133)
  • Both authors wondered about whether the critical aspects of public discourse would dissolve into what is “popular” and as such worried about protecting minority populations (134).
    • Is this a recognition of an argument against the public sphere or just the beginning of the disintegration of the public sphere? (135)
    • The Disintegration of the Public Sphere: On the Refeudalization of Society
      • Private organizations began to increasingly assume public power
        • This undermined the value of public discourse because of the class issues brought about by mass industrialization beginning in the 18^th and extending to the 19^th centuries.  The social inequalities eroded the principle of disregard of status (36).
• The state began to encroach on the private realm
• Instead of using rational debate to discover universal / absolute natural orders/truths, public debate began to be used for negotiation (176).  This negotiation occurs between a lot of large, non-public bodies (private bureaucracies, special-interest associations, parties, and public administration) and the public is included as something of a stamp of approval.
  • Because of the diminished role of the public in discourse, the movement toward the welfare state comes into being.  Some “social rights” or protections afforded by the state are put into place to counterbalance the obvious injuries sustained by lumpenproletariat and proletariat populations.
• The move away from rational debate toward consumptive models (think Adorno and Horkheimer here) is noted on 162.
  • Similar to A&H’s thesis, H. notes here that individual gratification replaces the rational-critical debate; further, the role of public communication technologies replaced the acts of “individuated reception” that engendered critical-rational discourse on topics (161)
• In essence, in expanding the public sphere, the form of participation by interested parties was changed drastically from a rational-critical engagement of public discourse to a culture of consumption that isn’t critical about it’s work (169)
  • This point is part of the program of the entire critical theory line of thinking that comes out of the Frankfurt School.
• Because the consumption of media is much more intimate and related to financial ability, the status issue that the original bourgeois public sphere dissolved is reintroduced and becomes “unbracketed” and impossible to ignore (172).
• This weakening of the public isn’t perceived by the public as such – in fact, they look back to their previous critical engagedness and believe that they are still practicing critical-rational discourse; rather, they are actually engaging in a recycled form of representative publicity that coerces but doesn’t critically engage (194).
• The diffusion of mass culture also has a couple of deleterious effects:
  • Most folks tastes are met; however, a critical review of those tastes doesn’t take place (174)
  • The diffusion of mass amounts of goods means that the public isn’t ever capable of focusing in on one object for critical discussion (174 – – in the example of Pamela)
• When this mass consumption removes critical-rational discourse, academics and other “thinkers” are put in the position of culture-producers and critics who stand in opposition to the mass of culture (175).
• The Modern Age:  Representational Publicity
  • The media is used to create opportunities for consumers to identify with public personas
  • The public sphere becomes a stage for corporations and other statist/corporatist regimes to develop legitimacy through popularity instead of responding to critical-rational challenges.
  • Parties move beyond critical-rational debate into mobilization regimes for ideological integration into party-lines (203)
  • Interest-groups replace non-rational-critical debating citizens because the politicians no longer have to listen to the voters – just manage the media machine that provides the consumptive qualities.  Interest-groups win (204).
  • Social integration of rational-critical discourse is ultimately the hope of communication in the future instead of mass-culture domination.  Hope for the future? (210)