Discussion Questions for Habermas
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
November 25, 2012
GEOG 5100
Habermas Response DRAFT
Jurgen Habermas traces a historical-sociological genealogy of the public sphere in his seminal, and highly organized, habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Spatially situated between civil society and the state, Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere was temporally dependent on the advent of capitalism and the new social classes and relations to which it gave rise. His account of the “emergence, transformation, and disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere” moves from the representational structures of classical politics to the ideologies of 18-19th century European political philosophy to the modern culture-consuming state of “Social-Psychological Liquidation” (Habermas, xi). In so doing, Habermas illustrates how capitalism is both a creator of the public sphere and, with the eventual commercialization of modern mass media and rise of the social-welfare state, also its destroyer.
Habermas moves from the political structures of the ancient world to the relationship between popular opinion and modern media culture in his engagement with the public sphere. Starting with the Hellenic and Roman ancien regimes, Habermas follows the arc of representational culture (and the historical absence of the public sphere) through courtly life and the sovereign/emperor/monarch/lord paradigm of the Middle Ages up to advent of Industrial-capitalist society in 17th and 18th century Europe. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, Habermas utilizes Marxian theory on political economy to illustrate how the transition from feudal to capitalist society yielded (indeed, necessitated) a public sphere for private landholders to engage on matters related to private property, capital and trade, first in ‘liberal’ England and then in France and Germany. Moreover, out of these coffeehouses, salons, and lodges came newsletters, papers, and journals, providing first a place to exchange news and trade information and, second, the space for critical dialogue on politics, art, literature, and what came to be known as ‘culture.’ Although these cultural formations – media outlets – initially fostered popular, critical dialogue, their capitalist transition into systems of cultural consumption led to the eventual demise of the public sphere.
Just as Habermas engages a retinue of western philosophers in his discussion of the bourgeois public sphere’s “Idea and Ideology,” including Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, and Tocqueville, so Habermas’ theory itself resonates strongly with a number of modern political philosophers, including Arendt, Harvey, Agamben, and Butler. As did Arendt, Habermas illustrates how colonial and imperial capitalist designs were a Harvian spatial fixe for the crises of surplus capital present in 18th century Industrialized Europe. Grand expeditions, financed by joint stock companies and informed by trade journals, opened new markets for exotic and domestic products, further supported by taxation systems, administrative bureaucracies, treasuries, and technocrats.[1] Habermas further engages (in fact, quotes) Arendt in his discussion of how the bourgeois public sphere connects the private with the social for mutual benefit: “Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance, and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (Habermas, 19).
Although Habermas’ terms were social-economic rather than juridical, his genealogy on the paradoxical relationship between the private and public in the bourgeois public sphere brings to mind Agamben’s “inclusive exclusion.” That is, the post-aristocratic “public” sphere present in 18th century salons were initially inclusive only insofar as members were educated and of a social status that provided ample time for leisure, contemplation, and debate. However, it was only once the coffee houses and salons “flattened” the social hierarchies from which they developed and opened the doors and dialogues to all shop-owners, guildsmen, and laborers that the truly critical and public nature was born. Of course, Feminists like Judith Butler would no doubt have something to say as to the virtual absence of women in these “public” spaces, as they perpetuated sexist gender norms and patriarchal cultural systems.
At the close of Part II, “Social Structures of the Public Sphere,” Habermas foreshadows the demise of the public sphere by identifying a social act of “fiction” as the inherent problem in the relationship between the public sphere and capitalism. “The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple” (Habermas, 56). The roles were “fictitious” because, as Marx recognized, such individuals cannot at once exist as both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Rather, they must remain in dialectical tension, as the former will always exploit the latter. Therefore, co-joining these two roles in the space of public sphere was a false truth. Habermas recognized this according to the commodification and commercialization of culture and public opinion in the public sphere – capitalism’s natural tendency to appropriate surplus and reproduce capital.
[1] It is interesting to note that Habermas does not draw a connection between the goods that these ‘grand expeditions’ brought home – that is, coffee, tea, tobacco, and spices – and the fact that their consumption and popularity (to say nothing of publicity) is what gave ambience, and name, to the coffee houses and salons.
Ian Rowen
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
November 25, 2012
Commentary: Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
This book provides an account of the creation and dissolution of the “public sphere”—a space in which the bourgeoisie engaged in “rational-critical” public debate that transmitted the will of the people to the state. This public sphere, in Habermas’s estimation, disintegrated with the advent of mass media and corporate public relations. These technological and social developments then precipitated the degeneration of information and opinion into mere commodities.
Habermas’s style of weaving historical facts and social theory into a smooth and straightforward narrative recalls that of Arendt. His focus on European social history also feels regionally reminiscent of Foucault, even if Foucault does not reference him in the works we’ve read for this class, and would likely dispute Habermas’s faith in the possibility of a “rational-critical” debate that was not exacerbating some hierarchical power relationship. It would be interesting to compare Habermas’s argument that the “dialectic of a progressive ‘societalization’ of the state simultaneously with an increasing ‘state-ification’ of society gradually destroyed the basis of the bourgeois public sphere—the separation of state and society” (142), against Foucault’s argument in STP that modern governmentality is characterized by the “‘governmentalization’ of the state”.
There are two criticisms which I will focus on for the remainder of this paper. The first: Habermas evinces a bracing condescension towards popular culture, biasing his analysis of mass media. This is made plain by quotes like, “…mass culture has earned its rather dubious name… by adapting to the need for relaxation and entertainment on the part of consumer strata with relatively little education, rather than through the guidance of an enlarged public toward the appreciation of a culture undamaged in its substance” (165). Another example, in his discussion of electoral practices, is, “The parties address themselves to the ‘people,’ de facto to that minority whose state of mind is symptomatically revealed, according to survey researchers, in terms of an average vocabulary of five hundred words” (217). With such a snobbish attitude, it is no wonder that Habermas mourns the collapse of the earlier, dispersed, and less profit-oriented press organs—yet, I have no doubt that even those would have much lowbrow material for him to dismiss. I think a more interesting approach would be an analysis of the changing social functions of radio, TV, and more recently, the Internet—first as an open space for debate, perhaps even approximating Habermas’ ideal of the public sphere, before largely succumbing to capitalist rationalization and “degenerating” into channels for corporate branded content. Habermas seems to ignore these public functions of non-print media.
My second concern is that in his praise for the cafes and uncommodified media and salon culure of 18th and 19th century Europe, he overlooks the possible competition for social capital and class interest that likely characterized these spaces, and instead treats them as constituting a unified public sphere of open, egalitarian debate. This assumption is all the more problematic when one considers--and Habermas admits this limitation—that this so-called public sphere only included male property owners. Even within that privileged group, there were no doubt other social cleavages that were exploited or widened through “public debate”, belying Habermas’ claims of unity.
Eric Reiff
Eric A. Reiff
GEOG 5100 – Social Theory
Discussion Paper 10
Jürgen Habermas, The Transformation of the Public Sphere
26 November 2012
In this work Habermas shows us where he thinks the Enlightenment project went off track. The focus of his discussion is on how the public sphere has changed over time with the goal of demonstrating that what we call the public sphere today is a fiction of what it was or at least what it could and should be. Habermas makes the argument that in England, France, and Germany at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century there existed a unique rational-critical public sphere. This sphere was a place outside the private home and outside the institutions of government. It even predated the press as we know it today. In this public sphere the liberal bourgeoisie came together to critically discuss ideas which were fueled by (quality) literature that they engaged with in private spaces (i.e home and work). Habermas argues that over time this public sphere lost its rational-critical nature as exemplified by mass literature which became more psychological than ideological. The public space was transformed from this rational-critical space into a space of consumption, where people consumed symbols of ideas rather than engaging critically with ideas. Even worse, and part of this trend, is that the privacy in which people used to engage with literature and ideas became public facing. People began to behave in their home and at work as if they were in public and the public began to influence what happened in the home and at work. This blurring of public and private is important to Habermas’ argument in that it shows how a truly public space was. The government and institutions also began to work in and influence the public sphere as a means of controlling the private sphere to the point at which what we now call the public sphere is neither rational nor critical.
Habermas’ ideal rational-critical public sphere arose from the interactions of the liberal bourgeoisie outside the direction of government and at first had an ideological, moral component; but was quickly grounded to the material world when it became the modern fictional liberal market place in which everyone (the masses too) is equally capable to go out into a free marketplace to sell and consume. This fictional liberal market space of exchange equality is the direct decedent of the welfare state governments that have codified the public sphere in rights to property, speech, congregation etc. This act of codifying the public sphere through government took away the spontaneous formative action that was so essential to an authentic rational critical public sphere. The process of constituting and sustaining the public sphere that Habermas opines for is just as important as the sphere itself. If it cannot emerge organically through multivoiced critical debates and instead is instituted by the state then it is a lifeless fiction in which nothing really critical can come about.
Once could fill volumes in support of Habermas’ analysis that the state cannot create a public sphere. One only need to look at the apathy of voters who feel they have no voice in policy or even electing those who pretend to enact policies on their behalf. These are the same people who may not even bother to show up to vote, because they have very little chance of finding someone who truly (and critically) represents them. We can also see the sad state of the public sphere on Facebook (FB)—it’s an easy target and I can’t resist. FB is Habermas’ nightmare in its purest form. First, it is your private life set in the public and vice versa. Second, critical debate on FB is in most instances reduced to reposting something or “liking” it—that is voting for symbols. Over the last year probably everyone on FB in America was inundated by uncritical repostings of political symbology which spread dogma and lies. I once mistakenly entered into a debate with one of this uncritical mass over what they posted and quickly found that because FB blurs the private and the public, my rational public critique was taken as a personal slight.
In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Habermas sees this rational-critical bourgeois public sphere as an important historical category on the road of history. He doesn’t offer us a prescription other than to point out that we don’t currently have a rational-critical public sphere. Since we can’t legislate or decree the rational-critical public sphere into existence it would seem that it has to materialize on its own in order to be authentic. Presumably the way that we can (re)create a rational-critical public space is by being rational-critical bourgeoisie ourselves. This interestingly brings my mind back to performance theory and Judith Butler, but that is a different paper topic.
On Sunday, November 25, 2012 5:05:03 PM UTC-7, mikeszub wrote:
Kaitlin Fertaly
GEOG 5100
Response to The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Habermas
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is an early work by Habermas with the goal of providing an historical analysis of the social, cultural, and political changes that have affected the process of participation in democratic processes. To do so, Habermas maps the emergence of a bourgeoisie public sphere in 18th century Europe that arose through discussions among a reasoning and literary public in salons, clubs, and coffee houses. For Habermas, this was characterized by a group of private individuals coming together to discuss public issues of debate and where individuals, regardless of class status, were able to participate as equals. This was further enabled by the establishment of civic rights to freedom of association and the emergence of a free press and resulted in the ability of participants to discover and express their needs and interests that would be presented to state authorities as "the common good."
Eventually, public opinion gained in authority and influence to the point where it was able to influence or serve as a check on the legitimacy of authoritarian government. However, Habermas went on to show that the public sphere is both idea and ideology(88). That is, the public sphere was an ideal place for participants to engage as equals in discussions. In reality, though, participation was limited to educated men with some degree of wealth, excluding women, the poor, and the uneducated (88). Furthermore, the notion of the "common good," which was thought to represent all, was really based on the interests of the few(56).
The second goal of Habermas's work was to describe the transformation of the public sphere from "a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that merely consumes it" (175), which he clearly sees as a story of negative decline. Habermas shows how the public sphere was transformed through practices of consumption turning the public sphere into a space where participants consumed stage-managed images and messages that were aimed at entertainment as much as for information (175). Habermas's view of the current public sphere is pessimistic in that he argues the co-option of the public sphere to capitalist corporations has led to diminished freedoms and hollow democracy.
One interesting component of Habermas's analysis was his discussion of the family and its disassociation with the processes of social reproduction as the private sphere itself became deprivatized (152). Throughout this entire work, Habermas is focused on making connections between transformations in the public sphere and the expansion of capitalism into more aspects of individual and household lives. This is even more true in his discussion of the deprivatization of the family where he argues that "along with its function in capital formation the family increasingly lost also the functions of upbringing and education, protection, care and guidance--indeed, of the transmission of elementary tradition and frameworks of orientations" (155). In other words, as families evolved into consumers of income and leisure, they lost their power to shape conduct, though a sense of autonomy was maintained through the power of consumption. In the end, Habermas argues that this gives the illusion of a private space (159) which is where people withdraw to for leisure time but is largely spent consuming, not participating in a "world of letters." I find this line of reasoning intriguing because Habermas seems to be problematizing the commodification or "deprivatization" of social reproduction. However, in other lines of geographical inquiry, such as calls for work on geographies of care, scholars including Victoria Lawson argue for an analysis of the retreat of the state in providing for social institutions that support education, health care, etc. and the problems for women that ensue when they are forced to deal with the additional burdens of care work. While I understand the perspectives of both scholars, I wonder how a re-imagining of institutions that provide social reproduction might help or hinder Habermas's project of deepening and expanding social participation in democratic processes and what he might suggest as an alternative.
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Jurgen Habermas)
24 November 2012
GEOG 5100
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas explores the production of a temporal period where “private people” (27) first came together as a public and used newly reconfigured power to, for the first time, influence the sovereign. This new space emerged after the failure of the courtly-noble society. The bourgeois public sphere was a place where power was redistributed, shifting solely from the sovereign, to the public seeking a common good. By engaging in critical, rational discourse about the sovereign, the public (in this case wealthy, land-owning men) could unify and push back against rules they deemed unjust. This public sphere was marked by a transition not only of space, but also in modes of communication. Rather than public communication as spectacle, it became a place where the intimacy of a familial conversation was incorporated into group or non-familial discussions. Intimate, private communication was expanded beyond the private and included criticism of public authority (49-51) in multiple forms, including a free press. What developed, then, was a sort-of “sovereignty of the people,” that used its collective power to push against the modern state (237).
The bourgeois public sphere can be explored though Foucault’s notion of govermentality. Govermentality as a mindset assumes an omnipresent power, and a fear of observation, that leads the public to maintain its status quo. The emergence of the public sphere worked in a similar way, with an inner circle of chosen representatives imagining and vying for a “common good.” While in theory the bourgeois public sphere was a place for all people to participate, in reality is was the discourse of the wealthy male (87). While not the sovereign or state power, wealthy men—who were often successful capitalists—rules this space, and defined the common good. It is this power imbalance, and rule by a social superior that reflects govermentality. If a whole subset of society has no part in imagining the common good, how is it common (or good)? And must women or lower class men follow the trajectory of the bourgeois because they don’t have a voice? Is that not a form of govermentality?
Ultimately, many of the factors that lead to the development and success of the bourgeois public sphere also contributed to its downfall. The press and other modes of public communication became vessels of consumption, where the public no longer produced a critical discourse as much as it consumed one, with emphasis waning on the critical (175-176). The production of the bourgeois public sphere raises a number of questions about power and its transference, as well. For instance, Habermas attributes the influence of capitalism as a cause for the collapse of the public sphere, but in many ways it also spurred its development. Would the space of the bourgeois public sphere ever be produced if the upper-class wasn’t already gaining power through the evolution of capitalism and market-based economies? Isn’t capitalism key to what brought people together in public spaces, like markets or coffee shops, in the first place? If so, then Habermas’ work stands as an examination of spatial evolution and power transformation in the context of developing capitalisms.
Joel
Joel Correia
GEOG 5100
Reading Response
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society by Jürgen Habermas
The public sphere is a highly politicized and contested discursive space. Jürgen Habermas’ genealogical analysis in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere traces the evolution and eventual demise of the public sphere by interrogating the nascence of the notion of “public” and its manifold transmutations through time. In doing so, he critically engages with Kant, Hagel, Marx, Mill and Tocqueville to analyze the relationship of “public opinion” to the emergence of and transformations in the public sphere. For Habermas there is a close relationship between these transformations and economic development, particularly with the nascence and growth of capitalist modes of production.
Habermas contends that the public sphere is comprised of multiple privates. “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public” (27). The public sphere, in the Habermasian sense, is not an explicitly physical space for debate and discussion, but is better understood as a discursive space where the exchange of ideas, critiques, social commentaries, political debates, and expression of public opinion occurs. Habermas first illustrates this point with the example of the conjugal (bourgeois) family. This was the locus of the first important structure from which the public sphere originated and it served two critical functions. First, it established the economic credentials for participation in the public sphere (based on the requisite of property ownership). And second, through the family one developed an emotional preparedness to participate in critical rational debate, discussion, and to critique of state authorities (i.e. political domination). As private people came together in the public realm they formed a larger, more powerful group, the “public”, to contest a wide range of issues from literature to politics. Interestingly, however, there is an implicit contradiction in this notion of “public” due to the explicit barriers of entry into the public sphere. According to Habermas’ account, early iterations of the public sphere were gendered spaces only accessible to the landowners (i.e. private property); women and uneducated peoples were not allowed to participate as members of the “public”. Hence, the first structures of the public sphere developed in the coffee houses of England and salons of France were predicated on exclusion. Another central aspect of the public sphere in Habermas’ account is the role of language, media, and publicity.
Publicity is central to Habermas’ conceptualization of the public sphere. Originally it existed in as a “representative publicity” based in feudal societies where the King represented himself to an audience as the sole public person. Though with the emergence of capitalism, commodity exchange, and the bourgeois class, the nature of publicity changed. In capital exchange, publicity served as a means of communicating trade information to facilitate trading and was later manifest as “literary public sphere” (56) in salons and coffee houses. The latter of these served as a necessary bridge between the representative publicity and emergent bourgeois public sphere. However, in the literary public sphere we again find the basis of exclusion that constitutes this formulation of the public—entry was based on education and one’s ability to read. Through time the notion and function of publicity changed and it was eventually appropriated by political regimes and as a direct tool for capital accumulation through public relations and the media, respectively. Hence, information (i.e. publicity) was commodified and used as a political tool to manipulate the “public” to generate political support. Habermas is critical of these changes in publicity. He illustrates that though it emerged the purpose of challenging and exposing political domination, it has become a tool for “political opinion management” (193).
Habermas’ critique of publicity in chapter six shows us that fetishized notions of public opinion have become the tool of contemporary political campaigns. Today it seems as though the public sphere, as it once existed to challenge political domination and oppressive policies, no longer exists and that political opinion management rules the realm of publicity. “Publicity is achieved with the help of the secret politics of interest groups; it earns public prestige for a person or issue and thereby renders it ready for acclamatory assent in a climate of nonpublic opinion” (201). This is clearly evident when reflecting on the impact and role of mass media, super political action committees, and lobbyists in the most recent U.S. presidential elections. Habermas’ observations about the public sphere are astute in this context. The 2012 elections demonstrated that special interest groups have control of and employ publicity for explicit political ends that frequently disempower the “public” and influence public opinion. That is not to say that the voice of the public is dead. Yet it suggests that perhaps it is time to unite again to share information in spirited debate and critique in an attempt to take back the power of publicity and the public sphere.
Chandler Griffith
Chandler Griffith
Reflection Paper
11/26/12
Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
In Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas outlines the revolutionary mechanisms that allowed for both the creation and evolution of the “public sphere.” While Hannah Arendt focused more specifically on discourses of race and human rights, Habermas’ project labors to show how these conversations were relegated to and dependent upon the growth and development of the bourgeois society.
Drawing on Hanna Arendt’s work on “society” and “humanity,” Habermas shows how elements of the private sphere, such as familial arrangements and matters of survival, have become public affairs. Still, a dissonance arises in that the public sphere, dominated by the bourgeoisies, privileges and disproportionately represents advantaged members of the public in the name of universality. Similar to Arendt's musings on the concept of “human rights,” Habermas’ depiction of the public sphere is an account of simultaneous collusion and exclusion. Whereas Arendt chronicled a transformation from citizen to human in Origins of Totalitarianism, Habermas chronicles the transformation of private property owners into a public of collected citizens.
Habermas’ conclusive discussion of “public opinion,” as a fiction of constitutional law, claims that public discourse has been co-opted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other shapers of said opinion. Thus, in his eyes public opinion is now managed and manufactured, and no longer simply made up of private citizens and private property holders represented as a collective public. I find this to be among the most salient and applicable facets of Habermas’ project. This assertion supports the notion that dominant political powers directing military and humanitarian intervention are reliant upon the cultivation and congruence of manufactured public opinion in order to justify and bolster support for said interventions.
By synthesizing these ideas from Habermas and Arendt, it becomes easier to appreciate the complexity of contemporary debates regarding human rights and national sovereignty. When rights and threats to humanity are defined by public and international consensus, notions of humanity, terrorism, and need become fodder for public discourse. The press, the state, and NGOs as the shapers of public opinion, are hardly just a conglomerate of property owning opinionated capitalists. Instead, these entities appear to act as contemporary sovereigns drawing from the power of collective thought rather than simply having power over it.
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Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas analyzes the historical genesis of the public sphere - which first emerged in Britain, France, and in Germany in the 18th century, but subsequently degenerated in the 20th century because of structural transformations. By tracing this process, Habermas is also critiquing the current decline of democracy that is heightened by the rise of a media-consuming - as opposed to argument-producing - culture.
Habermas distinguishes between the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion, and publicity. "The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public" (p. 27). In the bourgeois public sphere, individuals debated the ways in which their private interests including familial and economic interests compete with their social or public interests. Public and political debate was encouraged by both newly available print material, i.e., newspapers and journals, and public accessible spaces such as coffee houses and salons. In this sphere, and through debate, public opinion emerged. Habermas argues that the public sphere was universal, accessible, and disregarded rank; therefore, the public opinion that emerged was both critical and rational as well as capable of opposing state power.
It is important to note that an ideal public sphere was/has never been achieved. When public spheres emerged in the 18th century "private" individuals were male, property-owners. While this slowly changed, and ethnic, gender, and class barriers began to erode, the public sphere was degraded in other ways including the advancement of social welfare, a change in culture, and the evolution of large private interests. States began offering more programs aimed at promoting social welfare, the distinction between "private" and "public" eroded. At the same time, citizens became passive consumers more interested in private concerns than any public good. Furthermore, mass media disseminates "manipulative publicity" and "it became the gate through which privileged private interests invaded the public sphere" (185).
Habermas distinguishes between different types of publicity. Representational publicity preceded the literary public sphere, and was how the king, prince or nobility represented their power in front of an audience; it was a display or show of power. In more modern times, publicity came to be a way to "create an aura of good will for certain positions" (p. 177). He argues that originally it "guaranteed the connection between rational-critical public debate and the legislative foundation of domination, including critical supervision of its exercise" (p. 178). Now, it has not only become less critical, it is an exercise in domination of nonpublic opinion, "it serves the manipulation of the public as much as legitimation before it" (p. 178). It is the misuse of publicity from our current politicians, organizations, and media that undermines the public sphere; political arguments can no longer be debated for they "are translated into symbols to which again one can not respond by arguing but only by identifying with them" (p. 206).
I think Habermas's criticism of publicity in the public sphere is even more applicable today given our media climate. His argument immediate brought to mine the recent election, the ways in which the politicians are postured according to which news station is doing the posturing – or worse the ways in which we feed our particular ideology by choosing with internet sites we visit. I just wish he had offered a few solutions to this problem and how we recapture true public discourse.
Lindsay Skog
Lindsay Skog
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
Week 14: Habermas
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas traces the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in 18th and 19th century in Western Europe. Habermas argues that out of a growing market economy during that time —specifically, the long distance exchange of goods and news—emerged a civil society as the public sphere between the private home and the state. Along with the emergence of the public sphere of civil society developed a public consciousness that challenged the law of the sovereign by both demanding and legitimating law rooted within itself. Habermas argues that this movement is the antecedent of the liberal democratic project; however, he goes on to demonstrate that the ideals and interests of the bourgeoisie dominated project at the expense of other classes and groups. Overall, Habermas is calling into question the ideals of the democratic project by asking if true liberalism is even possible.
Habermas argues that the emergence of a public sphere was a direct extension of rational thought from the enlightenment. That is to say that as rational thought defined a separation between the individual and the church, a public sphere developed and fueled the rise of a liberal democratic ideal. Such rational thought took the form of critical debate in the coffee houses and salons of 18th century Western Europe. Yet, participation in such debate was limited to those (men) who owned property and/or were educated, which narrowed participation in the public sphere to the property-owning, educated, bourgeois elite. In this way, the rational undertaking of the project to construct a liberal democratic society was in fact neither liberal nor democratic.
The limitations on participation in the emerging public sphere to the bourgeoisie had two results. First, the contradiction in the notion of a liberal public sphere that was limited to the ideals and interests of a single class discursively constructed both the formation and the role of civil society vis-à-vis the private sphere and the state. Moreover, the exclusion of groups outside of the bourgeois elites from the public sphere undermined the very notion of a public sphere altogether.
Habermas’ work complements Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. While Arendt focuses on the problematic ideals of the rights of man that emerged from the formation of the complex of nation-states, Habermas focuses on the formation of the public consciousness that came to define the ideal of the nation-state. For Habermas, the rise of the bourgeoisie to contest the authority of the state was less about capitalist interests—as Arendt would argue—and more about the rise of rational pubic consciousness and liberal ideals. Despite this difference, Habermas would argue along with Arendt that the interests and ideals of the bourgeoisie, at the expense of others, dominated the formation of the complex of nation-states.
While Habermas is less concerned with the ways in which the processes of capitalism shaped the rise of bourgeois political power, nonetheless he is in conversation with Marx in two ways. First, Habermas’ work explores the void that Marx left in his explanation of the transition from a feudal mode of production to capitalism. Where Marx attributes this movement to enclosure laws that forced the rural population into urban centers, Habermas complicates this movement to demonstrate the ways in which the formation the proletariat and bourgeoisie shaped a liberal, yet problematic, democratic ideal. Second, like Marx, Habermas demonstrates that human experience is shaped by material conditions, not language or symbolism.
mikeszub
On Sunday, November 25, 2012 5:05:03 PM UTC-7, mikeszub wrote:
mikeszub
Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Michael Szuberla
Habermas’s groundbreaking work The Structural Transfomation of the Public Sphere explores the historical/sociological conditions in which the public sphere flourishes and fades. He extols the capacity of rational-critical debate to create a “genuine domain of private autonomy [that] stood opposed to the state” (p12).
In the paragraphs that follow I will present the ideas of Habermas in the context of several of the thinkers that we have encountered this semester: Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Rancière and Michel Foucault.
Habermas outlines a mode of direct democracy that could potentially address “bare life” and the hollowness of the “rights of man.” His argument calls for the re-creation of a political public sphere capable of transcending the denatured democracy that characterizes industrialized societies. Such a project would create “a real presence in a coherent and permanent process” (p210). This assertion of rights from below might address the short-comings that Arendt, Agamben and Rancière raised related to the process of securing the rights of man from above. Of course such a project is anything but easy – the population has destructive tendencies towards the mob and tribalism while western political systems frequently are “transformed into a lethal machine” (Agamben, HS p175).
Foucault’s ideas are much more antagonistic towards the work of Habermas. For Habermas, rationality served as a something of a “guard rail” against abuses of power. But Foucault argued that reason could lead to a “universally and publicly punitive society in which ceaselessly active penal mechanisms would function without delay, mediation or uncertainty” (D&P p273). Foucault offers a critique of Enlightenment rationalism that illustrates (again and again) that the “modern” project led to new forms of bondage and control. Habermas, on the other hand, asserts that “only in proportion to advances in this king of rationalization can there once again evolve a political sphere as it once existed in the form of the bourgeois public of private people” (p210). Finally, Habermas and Foucault agree that print was the medium of “reason” but they disagree on the nature of its impact. Habermas illustrates how 19th century print helped free discourse from the control of the church and state while Foucault argues that writing “functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection” (D&P p192).
One can certainly argue that Habermas and Foucault mean very different things by “rationality” and “reason” but what remains clear is that they evaluate the legacy of the Enlightenment very differently. For Habermas the cup is half empty with insufficient reason to sustain civil society for more than “one blissful moment in the long history of capitalist development” (p79). Foucault, however, finds the cup is a half full artificial space saturated with normalizing practices, discipline and “efforts to rationalize the exercise of power” (STP p101).
Habermas differs from Agamben, Arendt and Foucault in his defense of reason and modernity. While Habermas defends reason and “modernity” as a safety mechanism against barbarism, Agamben, Arendt and Foucault view systemized oppression as tendencies (or at least latent possibilities) of modern society.
Elizabeth Wharton
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas describes the emergence of a public sphere that became a driving force in the shaping of democratic governance in the modern (European) nation state. The public sphere grew out of a specific historical moment as early mercantile capitalism, along with the emergence of the state system, created the circumstances for its growth. In the public sphere, private persons – the property owners of the newly established private markets – gathered to discuss their shared concerns through the medium of rational debate. The public sphere was distinctly different from the arena of public authority, i.e. the state, in fact regarding the state with critical scrutiny and opposition, and making the apparatus of the state increasingly accountable to the public. The ideal form of the public sphere, however, has seen a century long disintegration according to Habermas. The state-civil society division in which it emerged has blurred as states took on an increasing number of social-welfare responsibilities; the institutions that provided the key conduits for the critical debate of the public sphere have disappeared or become unrecognizable in their new form (he is particularly dismissive of modern media institutions as a pale comparison to the free press of the past); and the emergence of multiple interest groups has led to a splintering of the public into an arena of competing private interests in place of a rational public.
Indeed the need to expand the space for rational political discourse independent from private interests and state power seems more urgent than ever in our post “Citizens United” world; however, the specific contours of Habermas’ version of the public sphere and its breakdown raise significant questions. First, the bourgeois conjugal family at the center of the public sphere’s idealized moment, was a highly exclusionary institution. By upholding this as the foundational institution of the public that can engage in rational political debate, Habermas seems to uphold an arrangement that left access to participation in political life restricted to a privileged male minority. While Habermas does acknowledge the exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere, he also seems to excuse it as nonetheless containing sufficient equality of access. It is, to an extent, possible to argue that access to the public sphere (and the related privileges of property and education) has extended to a wider and wider circle over time. However, feminist critiques have forcefully argued that the structure of the public sphere itself, as produced in early modern Europe, was exclusionary by its very structure, and in fact required the exclusion of women in order to develop the highly gendered public/private structure (Fraser, 1990). Further, Habermas seems to undermine his case regarding equality of access with his views regarding the influence of an increasing number of “publics” asserting their interests in political discourse. Rather, he upholds the bourgeois public sphere as the normative model for a single sphere, while declaring the increasing ability of other populations to assert their own interests as a splintering that helped produced the breakdown of the public sphere.
Some additional questions:
· Although Habermas seems to be arguing for a revival of the best aspects of the bourgeois/liberal public sphere, he does not provide a model that fits our current circumstances, and that avoids the serious exclusions of the original. Is it possible to retain the core idea of the public sphere while addressing the problematic aspects?
· Was the bourgeois public sphere really an emancipatory institution? Or should it be viewed instead as a revised form of dominance? Can we usefully deploy Foucault’s concept of discipline to understand it? That is, as a form that helped ensure the desired behavior of members of society without the need for direct conversion?
· Can we usefully apply Arendt’s conception of rights to critique Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere? Habermas does not explicitly discuss questions of rights at much length, but there is an implicit set of important rights – the rights of political participation – that he associates with the bourgeois public sphere. As essentially rights of membership (in this case in the propertied class) can we view these rights as having a parallel in the rights Arendt associates with state membership?
jacquelynjampolsky
Jacquelyn Jampolsky
11/21/12
Reflection Paper
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas articulates the development and demise of the public sphere in. The bourgeois public sphere originated in the late eighteenth century when the rise of finance and trade capitalism prompted new delineations between state and society, and new ideals. It became the sphere where private people- as human beings and as property owners- came together to engage in ‘rational-critical debate.’ These reflective debates resulted in the phenomenon of public opinion to challenge the authority of the monarch. At its peak, the public sphere cultivated liberal public opinion, which worked to regulate civil society by promulgating laws.
For Habermas, the fundamental structure and purpose of the public sphere was also the cause of its collapse. Continued growth of capitalism increased tensions within the public sphere, as excluded classes systematically disadvantaged by the free market looked to the state to restore equality. The state became increasingly involved in the regulation of property, contracts, and the distributions of goods, which blurred the classic separation between public and private and founded the formation of the welfare state. By the 20th century, the public sphere had morphed into a heterogeneous space of conflicting interests, where “publicity is achieved with the help of the secret politics of interest groups; it earns public prestige for a person or issue and thereby renders it ready for acclamatory assent in a climate of nonpublic opinion” (201). This created a new system of control where the public is dominated by biased media and consumerism, and liberal public opinion no longer existed.
The primary issue I have with Habermas’ argument is the idea that liberal public opinion, as it previously existed, is better than the modern ‘public’ sphere. The 19th century bourgeois public sphere is necessarily and admittedly classist, which excludes issues such as gender, and neglects the value of multiple public opinions in maintaining legitimate democracy. Reflecting on this reading, I am left with three major questions: (1) Why is the strict separation between state and civil society necessary for a legitimate public opinion? (2) How would Habermas problematize the power dynamics within public sphere(s)? (3)There has been much discussion on the overlap between Arendt and Habermas with regards to humanitarianism and the rights of man- how would either of them respond to the new human right to media?
Ahn Lee
Geog 5100
Review: Habermas
Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere chronicles the relationship between the initially disparate realms of the private and the public and the ways in which the expansion of capitalism transformed each. Habermas's inquiry begins in the mercantilist era with the birth of the bourgeois public sphere and economic liberalism and ends, essentially, today, in the contemporary world of mass media and mass consumption. While Habermas bemoans the demise of a truly public sphere for private individuals as the byproduct of an increasingly commercialized press and a disengaged populous, it's hard to ignore the connections he draws between such an undesirable transformation and the expansion of the the voting citizenry. In this sense, his arguments often come across as somewhat cynical and also pretentious. At the same time, even a brief consideration of the role of mass media in this year's election makes clear Habermas's ongoing relevance.
Chronologically, Habermas begins in the transition from the mercantilist era and the earliest iteration of a capitalist society. Here, the development of long-distance trade and the accompanying innovations in commodity trafficking and news simultaneously gave way to a new class of diffuse, private individuals, who would claim power through rational-critical public debate, and also "unleashed the very elements within which this power structure would one day dissolve" (15). This new bourgeois society consisted of anyone educated and propertied, presupposing an equal opportunity to attain such characteristics, and operated within the burgeoning institutions of coffee shops and salons. Here, rational-critical debate, facilitated by a growing circulation of printed literary and political critique, created the realistic approximation of a functioning model of economic liberalism. In essence, the overarching goal of the bourgeois public sphere (the replacement of dominating sovereign for with a rationalized law-based state legitimated by public opinion) and its faith in the liberal model of social mobility appeared to hold together.
Habermas's general argument is that such an arrangement was more serendipity, the consequence of a "complicated constellation of social preconditions" (87), than the realization of the bourgeois constitutional state dream. Building off the critical commentaries of Hegel and Kant regarding the notion of civil society, Habermas traces the breakdown of the public sphere. Here he argues that the "mutual infiltration" of the public and private spheres (in the form of state interventionism and private contractual formulations) has ultimately given rise to "minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical" (175). We live, he seems to say, in an era of manufactured publicity, of pre-formulated sound-bites and political advertising.
My biggest concern with Habermas, despite (thanks to 2012's abundance of political propaganda) what might have been a banner year for his line of inquiry, is the way he breezes over the expansion of the electorate in his analysis. This piece of the puzzle, the exacerbation of the inherent contradictions of the liberal model of the public sphere, which accompanies its inclusion a more socially and economically diverse citizenry, seems under developed. Habermas seems to attribute the growth of professional politicians, modern propaganda, and the "integration party" to the inclusion of politically "immature" voters in the public sphere (203). It's unclear to me whether Habermas would actually consider a limited definition of citizenship to be an answer to political immaturity, but his disparaging treatment of the masses certainly leaves the question open. For me, a more direct inquiry into the role of capitalism in the dissolution of the public sphere (and the concurrent rise in mass media and culture consumption) might have softened my distaste for this seeming unreflective class pretension.
Caitlin Ryan
11-25
Habermas response
Habermas’ main goal is to trace the transformation of the “public sphere” from its ideal type in the early capitalist days of the 18th century to its adulteration in modern times. To do so, Habermas’s method consists of an impressive array of academic genres and tools -- an investigation of the term “public” across three languages (French, German and English) and two ancient societies (Greek and Roman); a Marxist structural analysis of the capitalist system of production; use of literary and philosophical texts; and even spatial analyses of the changing architecture of homes and cities. In this response, I will summarize Habermas’ main arguments, drawing particular attention to the role of property ownership, and then compare Habermas’ conception of power with that of Foucault.
Habermas begins in the feudal Middle Ages with the following maxim: land belongs to the public sphere. Because the feudal lord owned all land, the head of a household was simply a secondary order of the lord’s publicness (p. 5). There was no distinction between public and private or between the common and the particular at that time. The two spheres overlapped (a point that will be important to Habermas’ characterization of the degenerative modern public sphere towards the end of the book). Early capitalism (mercantilism) from the 16th century was the cause of a new traffic in both commodities and news (p. 17), and by the 18th century took the form of a bourgeois public sphere whose heyday in coffee houses and salons was characterized by critical open debate on political matters among equals. This public discourse had a real influence on the political process, serving as a rational check on lawmaking in the name of the public good and forcing government to adopt the principle of publicity, or openness and transparncy, in its activities. Yet the public sphere remained informal, located somewhere between the state and civil society, which is defined in a strict sense as “the realm of commodity exchange and social labor (p. 3),” a realm of trade unions and commercial interests. Furthermore, although the public sphere claimed to be inclusive and open to everyone, it was in reality only accessible by those those who had an education, which was no different from those who owned property. Thus, the public sphere upheld ideals about equal participation, universal suffrage, etc. which it was incapable of actually supporting; in other words, the public sphere ideology.
Eventually the public sphere is invaded by competition between private interests, “the public is split apart into miniorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly.” (This, by the way, is reminiscent of Arendt’s accounting of the multi-party democracies in in post WWII-Europe, in which multiple private interests compete but fail to represent a majority.) The publicity and openness that the public sphere demanded from lawmakers made possible a new and peculiar kind of publicity that is able to manipulate the public. Society is ultimately “refuedalized” under this process, by which Habermas explicitly means that the boundary between state and society is blurred, they overlap and become involved in one another. The media’s role is now to “manufacture consensus” rather than to foster critical debate.
In many ways, Habermas’ historical-economic approach resembles Foucault’s genealogical method of understanding modes of power in his Security, Territory, Population lectures of 1977-78 (e.g. the pastorate, the feudal/juridical state, the administrative state, and the governmental state), although in fact Structural Transformation precedes Foucault’s lectures by nearly 15 years. Yet despite similarities in method, there are some key differences in the way these two authors conceive of power. Firstly, Habermas is interested in recovering what might be called the power of “resistance” (although he does not use this term himself), inasmuch as his understanding of the original public sphere is related to its ability to subvert domination and to influence legislation through critical reasoning. Foucault’s understanding of different modes of power never affords much ability to society at large to push back. Another key difference is that Foucault’s understanding of the transformation of power across these economic-historical periods is cumulative. That is, discipline, punishment, administrative power, etc. are all present in the contemporary period in which governmentality also operates. One does not supplant the other. Habermas, on the other hand, focuses on the way in which modes of power emanating from the public are revesed and usurped. The bourgeois public sphere was a source of power through the publicity mentioned above, but this power was overtaken by changes wrought by capitalism - changes in family structure, property ownership and the nature of public discourse.