Re-Imagining Public Space

The Frankfurt School in the 21st Century

D. Boros, J. Glass, D. Boros, J. Glass

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137383433
• eBook ISBN: 9781137373311
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Public space, both literally and figuratively, is foundationally important to political life. From Socratic lectures in the public forum, to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, public spaces have long played host to political discussion and protest. The book provides a direct assessment of the role that public space plays in political life.

CHAPTER 1

HABERMAS, THE PUBLIC SPHERE, AND DEMOCRACY

Douglas Kellner

Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989b; 1962) is an immensely rich and influential book that has had a major impact in a variety of disciplines. It has also received detailed critique and generated extremely productive discussions of liberal democracy, civil society, public life, social changes in the twentieth century, and other issues. Few books of the second half of the twentieth century have been so seriously discussed in so many different fields and continue, more than 50 years after its initial publication in 1962, to create controversy and insight.

While Habermas’s thought took more philosophical twists and turns after the publication of his first major book, he has himself provided detailed commentary on Structural Transformation in the 1990s and returned to issues of the public sphere and democratic theory in his monumental work Between Facts and Norms (Habermas 1998). Hence, concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Habermas’s work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny in the contemporary moment.

In this chapter, I will first explicate Habermas’s concept of the public sphere and its structural transformation in his early writings, and then will note how he takes up similar themes in his later work from the 1990s to the present within the context of a structural transformation of his own work in a linguistic turn. After setting out a variety of critiques that his analysis has elicited, including some of my own, I attempt to develop the notion of the public sphere in the contemporary era. Hence, my study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas’s problematic and its relevance for debates over democratic politics and social and cultural life in the present age. At stake is delineating a concept of the public sphere that facilitates maximum public participation and debate over the key issues of the contemporary era and that consequently promotes the cause of radical democracy.

The Dialectics of the Public Sphere

After delineating the idea of the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion, and publicity (Offentlichkeit), Habermas analyzes the social structures, political functions, and concept and ideology of the public sphere before theorizing the sociostructural transformation of the public sphere, the transformation of its public functions, and shifts in the concept of public opinion in the concluding three chapters. The text is marked by the conceptual rigor and fertility of ideas characteristic of Habermas’s writing, but it contains more substantive historical grounding than much of his work and in retrospect discloses the matrix out of which his later work emerges. My summaries in the following sections merely highlight a few of the key ideas of importance for explicating the conception of the public sphere and its structural transformation, which will help to evaluate the significance and limitations of Habermas’s work for elucidating the conditions of democracy in contemporary society.

The bourgeois public sphere, which began appearing around 1700 in Habermas’s interpretation, was to mediate between the private concerns of individuals in their familial, economic, and social life contrasted to the demands and concerns of public life in the state. This involved mediation of the contradiction between bourgeois and citoyen, to use terms developed by Hegel and the early Marx, overcoming private interests and opinions to discover common interests and to reach societal consensus. The public sphere consisted of organs of information and political debate such as newspapers and journals, and institutions of political discussion such as parliaments, political clubs, literary salons, public assemblies, pubs and coffeehouses, meeting halls, and other public spaces where sociopolitical discussion took place. For the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and interests while influencing political practice.

The bourgeois public sphere made it possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society. Habermas’s concept of the public sphere thus described a space of institutions and practices between the private interests of everyday life in civil society and the realm of state power. The public sphere thus mediates between the domains of the family and the workplace—where private interests prevail—and the state, which often exerts arbitrary forms of power and domination. What Habermas called the “bourgeois public sphere” consisted of social spaces where individuals gathered to discuss their common public affairs and to organize against arbitrary and oppressive forms of social and public power.

The principles of the public sphere involved an open discussion of all issues of public concern in which discursive argumentation was employed to ascertain general interests and the public good. The public sphere thus presupposed freedoms of speech and assembly, a free press, and the right to freely participate in political debate and decision making. After the bourgeois revolutions, Habermas suggested, the bourgeois public sphere was institutionalized in democratic constitutional orders that guaranteed a wide range of political rights, and which established a judicial system that was to mediate claims between various individuals or groups, or between individuals and groups and the state.

Many defenders and critics of Habermas’s notion of the bourgeois public sphere fail to note that the thrust of his study is precisely that of transformation, of the mutations of the public sphere from a space of rational discussion, debate, and consensus to a realm of mass cultural consumption and administration by dominant elites. This analysis assumes and builds on the Frankfurt School model of the transition from market capitalism and liberal democracy in the nineteenth century to the stage of state and monopoly capitalism evident in European fascism and the welfare-state liberalism of the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s. For the Institute, this constituted a new stage of history, marked by fusion between the economic and political spheres, a manipulative culture industry, and an administered society, which helped produce a decline of democracy, individuality, and freedom (see the texts in Bronner and Kellner 1989 and the discussion in Kellner 1989).

Habermas added historical grounding to the Institute theory, arguing that a “refeudalization” of the public sphere began occurring in the late nineteenth century. The transformation involved private interests assuming direct political functions, as powerful corporations came to control and manipulate the media and state. On the other hand, the state began to play a more fundamental role in the private realm and everyday life, thus eroding the difference between state and civil society, between the public and private spheres. As the public sphere declined, citizens became consumers, dedicating themselves more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and democratic participation.

While in the bourgeois public sphere public opinion, on Habermas’s analysis, was formed by political debate and consensus, in the debased public sphere of welfare-state capitalism, public opinion is administered by political, economic, and media elites who manage public opinion as part of systems management and social control. Thus, while in an earlier stage of bourgeois development public opinion was formed in open political debate concerning interests of common concern that attempted to forge a consensus in regard to general interests, in the contemporary stage of capitalism, public opinion was formed by dominant elites and thus represented for the most part their particular private interests. No longer is rational consensus among individuals and groups in the interests of articulation of common goods the norm. Instead, struggle among groups to advance their own private interests characterizes the scene of contemporary politics.

Hence, Habermas describes a transition from the liberal public sphere that originated in the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions to a media-dominated public sphere in the current era of what he calls “welfare state capitalism and mass democracy.” This historical transformation is grounded, as noted in Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis, in the culture industry, in which giant corporations and the corporate state have taken over the public sphere and transformed it from a sphere of rational debate into one of manipulative consumption and passivity. In this transformation, “public opinion” shifts from rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. Rational debate and consensus have thus been replaced by managed discussion and manipulation by the machinations of advertising and political consulting agencies: “Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one can not respond by arguing but only by identifying with them” (1989b: 206).

For Habermas, the role of the media has thus been transformed from one of facilitating rational discourse and debate within the public sphere into the role of shaping, constructing, and limiting public discourse to those themes validated and approved by media corporations. Hence, the interconnection between a sphere of public debate and individual participation has been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of political information and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers passively ingest and absorb entertainment and information. “Citizens” thus become spectators of media presentations and discourse that mold public opinion, reducing citizen-consumers to objects of news, information, and public affairs. In Habermas’s words, “Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed” (1989b: 171).

Habermas offers tentative proposals to revitalize the public sphere by setting “in motion a critical process of public communication through the very organizations that mediatize it” (1989b: 232). He concludes with the suggestion that “a critical publicity brought to life within intraorganizational public spheres” might lead to democratization of the major institutions of civil society, though he did not provide concrete examples, propose any strategies, or sketch out the features of an oppositional or postbourgeois public sphere. Still, Horkheimer found Habermas’s text to be too left wing, in effect rejected the study as a habilitations dissertation, and refused to publish it in the Institute monograph series (see Wiggershaus 1996: 555ff). It was published, however, in 1962 and received both an enthusiastic and a critical reception in Germany; when translated into English in 1989, it promoted yet more discussion of Habermas and the public sphere, with lively debates still continuing, as my study will indicate.

Habermas and the Public Sphere: Critical Debates

Habermas’s study of the public sphere has been subjected to intense critical argumentation, which has clarified his earlier positions, led to revisions in later writings, and fostered intense historical and conceptual research into the public sphere itself. Few books have been so systematically discussed, criticized, and debated, or inspired so much theoretical and historical analysis. The result, I believe, is considerably better understanding of the many dimensions of the public sphere and democracy itself.

Habermas’s critics argue that he idealizes the earlier bourgeois public sphere by presenting it as a forum of rational discussion and debate, when in fact certain groups were excluded. Habermas concedes that he presents a “stylized picture of the liberal elements of the bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas 1989b: xix) and should have made it clearer that he was establishing an “ideal type” and not a normative ideal to be resuscitated and brought back to life (Habermas 1992: 422f). Yet it is clear that a certain idealization of the public sphere was present in Habermas’s text, and I believe that this accounts both for its positive reception and a good deal of the critique. On the affirmative side, precisely the normative aura of the book inspired many to imagine and cultivate more inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic public spaces and forums; others were inspired to conceive of more oppositional democratic spaces as the site of development for alternative cultures to established institutions and spaces. Habermas thus provided decisive impetus for discussions concerning the democratization of the public sphere and civil society, and the normative dimension helped generate productive discussions of the public sphere and democracy.

Yet Habermas’s idealization of the earlier bourgeois public sphere as a space of rational discussion and consensus has been sharply criticized. It is doubtful if democratic politics were ever fueled by norms of rationality or public opinion formed by rational debate and consensus to the extent stylized in Habermas’s concept of the bourgeois public sphere. Politics throughout the modern era has been subject to the play of interests and power as well as discussion and debate. It is probably only a few Western bourgeois societies that have developed any public sphere at all in Habermas’s sense, and while it is salutatory to construct models of a good society that could help to realize agreed upon democratic and egalitarian values, it is a mistake to overly idealize and universalize any specific public sphere as in Habermas’s account.

Moreover, while the concept of the public sphere and democracy assume a liberal and populist celebration of diversity, tolerance, debate, and consensus, in actuality, the bourgeois public sphere was dominated by white, property-owning males. As Habermas’s critics have documented, working-class, plebeian, and women’s public spheres developed alongside of the bourgeois public sphere to represent voices and interests excluded in this forum. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge criticized Habermas for neglect of plebeian and proletarian public spheres (1972 [1993]), and in reflection Habermas has written that he now realizes that “from the beginning a dominant bourgeois public collides with a plebeian one” and that he “underestimated” the significance of oppositional and nonbourgeois public spheres (1992: 76).

Mary Ryan notes the irony that not only did Habermas neglect women’s public spheres, but he marks the decline of the public sphere precisely at the moment when women were beginning to get political power and become political actors (1992: 259ff). Indeed, the 1999 PBS documentary by Ken Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone, vividly illustrates the vitality of a women’s public sphere in nineteenth-century America, documenting the incredible organizing efforts of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others from the 1840s well into the twentieth century in a sustained struggle for the vote and women’s rights. A visit to the Hull House in Chicago reveals the astonishing interventions into the public sphere of Jane Addams and her colleagues in developing forms and norms of public housing, health, education, welfare, rights and reforms in the legal and penal system, and public arts. These and other women’s groups discussed in Ryan (1992) were an extremely active element in a vital women’s public sphere.

Indeed, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (2005) and Lawrence Godwin’s The Populist Movement (1978) document the presence of oppositional movements and public spheres throughout US history to the present. Reflections on the civil rights movement in the United States, the 1960s movements, and the continuation of “new social movements” into the 1970s and beyond suggest that Habermas’s analysis downplays the continuing richness and vitality of the public sphere well into the twentieth century. And in a concluding section, I will suggest how activities in the emergent public spheres of new media, social networking, and cyberspace provide further expansion of the public sphere and new sites for democratic politics.

Despite the limitations of his analysis, Habermas is right that in the era of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in which for the first time in history ordinary citizens could participate in political discussion and debate, organize, and struggle against unjust authority and militate for social change—a sphere institutionalized, however imperfectly, in later developments of Western societies. Habermas’s account of the structural transformation of the public sphere, despite its limitations, points to the increasingly important role of the media in politics and everyday life and the ways that corporate interests have colonized this sphere, using the media and culture to promote their own interests.

Yet in retrospect, Habermas’s analysis is too deeply embedded in Horkheimer and Adorno’s philosophy of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment and theories of mass society which became a dominant paradigm in the 1950s. As noted, Habermas’s account assumes the validity of the Institute for Social Research analysis of the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Habermas, The Public Sphere, and Democracy
• 2 Reflections on the Meaning and Experience of Public Space: A Critical Psychoanalytic Perspective
• 3 The Public Sphere as Site of Emancipation and Enlightenment: A Discourse Theoretic Critique of Digital Communication
• 4 Walter Benjamin and the Modern Parisian Cityscape
• 5 Critical Spaces: Public Spaces, the Culture Industry, Critical Theory, and Urbanism
• 6 Idealizing Public Space: Arendt, Wolin, and the Frankfurt School
• 7 Spatial Form and the Pathologies of Public Reason: Toward a Critical Theory of Space
• 8 Adorno and the Global Public Sphere: Rethinking Globalization and the Cosmopolitan Condition of Politics
• 9 The Carnivalization of the Public Sphere
• 10 #OccupyTheEstablishment: The Commodification of a “New Sensibility” for Public Space and Public Life
• Index