Rethinking the Public Sphere Through Transnationalizing Processes

Europe and Beyond

A. Salvatore, O. Schmidtke, H. Trenz, A. Salvatore, O. Schmidtke, H. Trenz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137283191
• eBook ISBN: 9781137283207
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book discusses the extent to which the theoretical relevance and analytical rigor of the concept of the public sphere is affected by current processes of transnationalization. The contributions address fundamental questions concerning the viability of a socially and politically effective public sphere in a post-Westphalian world.

Part I

Rethinking the Public Sphere: Beyond the National Arena?

1

Struggling with the Concept of a Public Sphere

Klaus Eder

Introduction

In this chapter, three issues in recent public sphere research will be addressed: first, the theoretical issue of the social and cultural embeddedness of the public sphere; second, the methodological issues that arise from the changing conceptions of the social and cultural embeddedness of public spheres; and third, linked to the two former ones, the issue of clarifying the link between the reality of public spheres and their normative presuppositions.

The key theoretical issue here concerns how public spheres emerge and reproduce themselves in changing social and cultural environments, which in turn are shaped (at least in part) by their public spheres. This issue has come to the fore to the extent that we are forced to leave the container of the European experience and have to reckon with the empirical variability of what we call a public sphere. The dominant theoretical narrative is the story of its emergence as a bourgeois public sphere that has evolved into public spheres embedded in the nation-state. The debate has concentrated on how these public spheres were selective in terms of topics raised and of groups included or excluded from them. This again was linked to the question of whether this selectivity has to do with class, gender, or ethnic differences. All this no longer poses a major issue in the development of public sphere theory.¹ The emergent problem is not whether class differences are withering away or entering complex intersections with other dimensions producing social differences among people, but rather the problem is that the public sphere is to a certain extent dis-embedded from these social structures and re-embedded in social structures that are characterized by transnational or global social relations. Yet this is only one aspect of the ongoing evolution of the public sphere. A second one running parallel to this transnationalization is the intrusion of the public sphere into the everyday lives of social groups and individuals, thus blurring another boundary: the boundary between private and public life. The public sphere’s transcendence of both national boundaries and public–private boundaries has in turn produced a paradoxical outcome, fostering on the one hand the idea of a cosmopolitan public sphere and on the other hand the idea of a banal public sphere that reaches into the everyday life of people. The issue of how these two processes are linked and how they relate to the semantic dimension of a public sphere, namely to the normative ideas that are attributed to a public sphere, provides a challenge for further theory development.

The methodological issue, meanwhile, relates to both of these boundary-shifting processes. The key question is how to make observable and measurable the changing embeddedness of the public sphere. Apart from the macro-sociological description of the semantic outcome (interconnectedness of arguments and their temporal structuring through narratives) and of the social outcome (networks of communicative relations and power nodes in these relations), the micro-sociological issue focuses on how arguments connected through stories run through individuals and groups to finally form a public sphere. Describing this connectedness requires methodological techniques that make such interconnectedness visible not only at the micro-level but also at the macro-level. As soon as the boundaries of the public sphere become fluid, the empirical eye needs appropriate instruments able to capture this amorphous object; it requires methodological approaches which are apt to follow permanent changes of boundaries.

The social embeddedness of the public sphere

The dis-embedding of the public sphere

The discourse on the decline of the public sphere is paramount. Some claim that we are back to the coffeehouse of 200 years ago, referring to both the mass media that are dominated by talk shows and semi-public gossiping and the virtual public sphere of the internet where people increasingly present their private selves to the public. Others argue that we are seduced by the political news that provides systematically distorted interpretations of reality by the mass media. Yet it is exactly this kind of public critique of the public sphere that keeps the public sphere evolving.

Some argue that the presentation of everyday life in the public sphere happens at the expense of the presentation of political life. This argument stems from the class-specific origins of the modern Western public sphere. Born in the circles of the educated upper class in the18th century the modern public sphere is seen as part of a specific world: the social relations of a select few relating to each other the story of enlightenment. Philosophers became the kings of the public sphere and provided the stories of the self-constitution of the public sphere by their equal participation in argumentative contest (Habermas 1989 [1962]). This contest had to be separated from the constraints of everyday life, something only the educated classes were able to do. Thus the public sphere was a site to be separated from low culture and staged as high culture. This distinction is now blurred; the private and the political have been fused as the low culture enters the high culture (a process described as the formation of omnivorous tastes, Lizardo and Skiles [2009]), thus constituting a public sphere that allows switching between the private and the political. This fusion signals a fundamental change in the sociocultural embeddedness of modern public spheres.

The consequence is that the self-description of the public sphere is no longer a reserved space for the educated higher classes but has become a space to which everyone has access. From being embedded in the bürgerliche Gesellschaft (bourgeois society) and its high-brow culture, the public sphere has become embedded in civil society and has thereby emancipated itself from being bound to a specific class. The public sphere is becoming class-indifferent. It is increasingly embedded in a network of social relations that includes in principle everybody and through which any kind of story can flow, from left to right, from the private to the political, from everyday lifeworlds to the world of political decision-making and vice versa.

The bürgerliche Gesellschaft formed the public sphere in the shadow of the Leviathan and attributed to it a holy role: that of generating the true and the good. This narrative made the public sphere a corpus mysticum, opposed to the Leviathan. Thus the bürgerliche Gesellschaft not only provided a particular social context but also relied on quasi-religious narratives, referring to metaphors and concepts deeply rooted in the religious tradition from which this postfeudal society emerged.

The event that interrupted this quasi-religious narrative and turned it into a ‘modern’ narrative (modern being defined as a marker for something that is different from the old) was the argument that this narrative did not emanate from the mouth of God but from the mouth of the people. This disruption of the religious tradition does not mean that we have indeed arrived at the end of the quasi-religious narrative; it means a re-embedding of the narratives that govern public debates among new groups claiming cultural hegemony. To keep the public sphere in the hands of these new groups following a ‘master frame’ different from the religious one, that is, the story of the enlightenment, political groups had to be mobilized to defend this story against the older religious one. This has been the task of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft incarnated in the nation, revived as civil society consisting of many different groups, situated in-between the local and the global level.

What we experience today is a discontinuation of the story of the nation as the incarnation of reason, coupled with the retelling of the story of the enlightenment. What this retelling implies is contested: for some it is the full realization of the project of the enlightenment, for others the beginning of a postenlightenment age. We can leave this issue open since it is part of the object we are looking at: a public sphere debating its own story in a world where the dis-embedding from the bourgeois class and the citizens making up a nation is taking place at an increasing speed. What we cannot know is the end of the story – we can only see which stories survive in particular contexts and how these particular histories link to the ongoing evolution of the public sphere beyond its historical boundaries.

The discourse on the decline of the public sphere

The evolution of the public sphere is – contrary to some teleological readings of the enlightenment story – a process marked by discontinuities, bifurcations, and deviations (Abbott 2001). This process has prompted returns to old stories such as the mobilization of populist public spheres in the form of authoritarian responses to democratic institution building. This includes above all the historical role of the public sphere in fascist societies both inside and outside Europe, and its role in the present-day revival of nationalist sentiments and stories in the Balkans and Greece, in former socialist nation-states such as Hungary, and in countries long considered to be stable democracies such as Denmark and the Netherlands. Populist waves are an important event in the evolution of today’s public spheres and should not be regarded as mere accidents of history but as systematic events resulting from the public sphere’s global evolution. In this sense, decline is normal in the evolution of public spheres. Decline and rise can coexist, depending on the container in which they occur. That the public sphere experiences signs of involution when locked up in the national container should not lead to the assumption of a general decline of the public sphere. Transnational public spheres might flourish while national public spheres experience decline. Since communication is going on, the issue is rather how public communication is reorganizing itself as a public sphere in reaction to such ‘local’ involutions.

Public spheres understood as networks of public communication are not only culturally embedded, but they themselves permanently change the culture in which they are embedded. Thus we have to reckon with the coevolution of structures of networks and the semantic content communicated in public argumentation. Bracketing the idea of a normative dimension in this coevolution, the theoretical idea of a process with breaks, discontinuities, blockages, and even regression can be developed. This helps to understand the evolution of public spheres in Western Europe which oscillate between populist closure and cosmopolitan opening. This also holds for Islamic public spheres that experience the same variation. Islamic public spheres alter the religious tradition from which they emerge in a way that opens a diversity of paths, including the return to either religious closure or cosmopolitan opening (Salvatore 2011a). Thus the comparison between Western public spheres and Islamic public spheres is misleading as long as we disregard their position in time. They normally do not exist on identical time frames: a populist closure in Western public spheres might coexist with a cosmopolitan trend in Islamic spheres and vice versa. Thus we need to understand constellations within a longer historical time frame in order to make visible the asynchronicity of public spheres. Time matters when analyzing public spheres.

Analytically speaking, we can grasp these oscillations by marking conceptually the two ends of a continuum in which public spheres vary: the closed public sphere on the one end and the open public sphere on the other end. This conceptualization however does away with the normative bracketing carried on so far. Both extremes are normatively loaded and are themselves part of public communication. As long as we take the national container as given, the normative issue can still be bracketed. The openness of the public sphere is constrained by the people that form a nationally defined political community. Thus the definition of what makes a nation is superimposed upon the public sphere and determines its potential for openness.

To the extent that the nation (be it defined as an ethnos or a demos)no longer works as a container and the boundaries of the public sphere no longer coincide with the nation, a different term for describing the social basis of a public sphere has been offered: ‘civil society’. Civil society has a clear counter concept: uncivil society. Thus the notion of openness and closure is no longer tied to describing forms of (civil or uncivil) nationhood but to describing ways of organizing social relations within and across national boundaries.

In no longer being coextensive with a national society, civil society has now become the carrier for a public sphere corresponding to its own normative ideals. In civil society, debate, argument, struggle over recognition and distribution, openness and transparency are the properties that create a public space, and in which the idea of free debate opens the path toward a new public sphere. Yet civil society is not necessarily civil; civil society can easily turn into an uncivil society, ranging from public hate speech to more subtle forms of symbolic power denouncing certain groups as inferior to others. This provides a dynamic to the public sphere going beyond the goodwill conception of those praising its emergence in Europe since the 18th century. The evolution of the public sphere is kept going by debates regarding its decline.²

The idea of uncivil society is pushed a step further with the observation that the public sphere crosses the boundaries that separate itself from the private sphere. The public sphere not only reaches into private life via the mass media (and even more so via the new media) but is also colonized by private life, thus turning the critique of the colonization of the lifeworld on its head. This critique of colonization turned upside down, apart from fuelling public debate, points to an interesting change in the inclusionary and exclusionary effects of a historically situated public sphere. As indicated above, involving ‘everybody’ via the new media (especially via the ubiquitousness of the mobile phone and other handheld technology) opens a new space for the public sphere that is even more encompassing than the transnational space.

Thus boundary shifting is a double process: it addresses the boundary between the individual and her or his partial involvement in the public sphere, thus leaving a realm for the individual, a communicative space decoupled from public life (Habermas called this refuge the ‘lifeworld’)³ and the boundaries between groups who are no longer defined along stable and clear-cut national lines, thereby allowing for greater heterogeneity and diversity of living than was the case for the older national groupings.

A micro-model of the public sphere

Embedding public communication in social relations

Already Deutsch described the making of the nation as a process of bounded communication (Deutsch 1953). This idea has been taken up in attempts to describe emerging transnational spaces of public communication. The only parameter to be modified in Deutsch’s theory was to transform into a variable the boundaries of the space in which public communication takes place. Instead of assuming that the linguistic boundaries provide a kind of natural boundary to a space where public communication can develop, a different theory of who can communicate with whom introduced the idea of shifting public sphere boundaries. The monolingual perspective on public communication is replaced by multilingual perspectives which show how people of different national languages can communicate across national boundaries and which equally show how even within the same national language people can be divided along symbolic lines (Doerr 2012). This in turn does not imply a people speaking two or three national languages. This would simply continue the hegemony of national language competence as defined by a national high culture. What is appropriate language use becomes contingent on what those speaking to each other define as appropriate, a phenomenon visible among immigrant groups or transnational groups. Hybrid forms of language use and the increasing speed of generational language change provide the basis for formulating the theoretical claim that it is not simply a shared language but a specific form of living together in which the semantic forms evolve that makes communication possible. Thus the ‘high culture of language’, developed through literary role models, through language imposition in public schools and through public media, has given way to various modes of communication which in turn have been fostered by the diversity of everyday communication technologies.

In this emerging communicative world the structures underlying public communication become even more visible. This world offers a laboratory with permanent experiments in making new languages, a laboratory only marginally taken into account in present-day social research.⁴ Given this new diversity of ways of speaking together, we now have a broader range of cases to stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Rethinking the Public Sphere Through Transnationalizing Processes: Europe and Beyond
• Part I: Rethinking the Public Sphere: Beyond the National Arena?
• Part II: Between European Citizenship and Transnational Collective Identities
• Part III: Inclusion and Exclusion: Addressing the Cultural Other in Europe
• Index