Introduction
The public sphere is and has always been a virtual space projected onto some physical space. It is this virtuality, this lack of real placement and its amenability to all, that has allowed for the coalescence of alterities in communities of care and practice and has consistently determined the reshaping of the political. Arguably, the historical unfolding of political configurationsāthe historical unfolding of the state, its rules and practicesāhave been entirely dependent on the internal insufficiency of the political sphere and its susceptibility to the heteronomous force of the impinging other. The formal constitution of the public sphere has always been determined by the ability to instrumentalize technologies capable of bridging distancesāwriting in its most rudimentary and digital communication in its most recent form. Digitality does not change the formal and functional features of the public sphere. The production, distribution, exchange, negotiations and contestation of meaning remain the fundamental functions of this virtual space and remain the constitutive features of the manner in which communication takes normative hold and becomes political. The virtual space in which alterities can overcome the status assigned by the public sphere has been greatly expanded by the proliferation of the digital technologies of distance, bringing not only the peripheral but now also the very distant other into the space of care and deliberation of the polity.
What the Public Sphere Is Not
The public sphere as a distinct horizon within which to place the political practices of the public was first presented by Habermas in 1962 in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Partly owing to poor reading habits and partly owing to political and professional agendas, the conflation of descriptive and normative accounts of public deliberation have resulted in widespread misunderstanding of the concept of public sphere, especially in the various subfields of political sociology. No work has been more tendentious and more pernicious in fostering the misconstrual of Habermasā account of the public sphere than Nancy Fraserās failed attempt at āRethinking the Public Sphereā (Fraser 1993:109). Fraserās main charge is that Habermasā historical description is a politically insufficient normative principle to guide political inclusion. Yet, nowhere in the book does Habermas claim to have produced a recipe book for the construction of an ideal public sphere.
In the same book that put Nancy Fraserās career on the map, Habermas himself attempts to disabuse the supposition that his early work was meant to advocate for the reconstruction, let alone a return, to eighteenth-century bourgeois liberal politics. Yet the various rejoinders were entirely incapable of countering the appeal and political utility of Fraserās protestation. Indeed, Fraserās misreading has been far-reaching, and its impact can be most acutely felt in disciplines in which the lack of philosophical rigour and systematicity has permitted the fundamental conflation of the descriptive and the normative to prosper. Relevant to our concerns is the emergence of this problem among what we now call media theorists in their attempt to account for the digital expansion of the public space.
In this context, the term public sphere is very often used as a thinly disguised avatar of democratic valuesāand with it, the moralization of political teleologies. A true public sphere, we are told, is something to be achieved and something of which Habermas seems to have fallen short.
Through the conflation of the bourgeois public sphere and the public sphere in general, Habermas is assumed to have disingenuously formulated a guiding principle for democratic life, which is in essence undemocratic. Among other things, this chapter is intended to offer a corrective reading aimed at disentangling the confusion of formal and substantive elements in the formulation of the public sphere and addressing the persistent conflation of normative and descriptive articulations of publicness.
What the Public Sphere Is
The most significant limitation of Habermasā account of the public sphere is not its supposedly unwitting and implicit endorsement of a proverbial liberal bourgeois elite but, rather, the modelās over-reliance on deliberative reason and its thoroughgoing demand. For Habermas, reason operates as the fundamental mechanism of contestation of authoritative meaning. This Habermas shares with the Kantian tradition on which he built his metaethical modelādiscourse ethics.
But while it may be desirable to promote rational deliberation as a core mechanism for a healthy politics, rational deliberation does not exhaust the political. The normative sphere of the political is not dominated by sufficient justifications. So, indeed, a descriptively and predictively robust account of the public sphere must quite simply take stock of the forces beyond the effective deployment of arguments to modify opinions and modes of valuationācategorical or hypothetical.
I will propose a not-so-slight emendation to the definition of public sphere so as to accommodate in its articulation a broader account of modes of cohesion than deliberative consensus can afford. In some sense, this model is not a correction of Habermasā but rather a modification capable of integrating non-deliberative forms of influence while emphasizing the unity of its normative field. I want to argue that the public sphere is the space of the promotion and contestation of individual and collective cares what amount to reasons to. Visible or invisible to the agent himself, these are essentially political cares and, thus, political reasons.
In the very opening paragraphs of his book, Habermas points out that the emergence of the concept of public sphere is a way to account for public opinion and its deployment in matters of governance and public policy (Habermas 1991: 1ā2). Two features are critical to Habermasā account. The first is that the public sphere has first and foremost a contestatory political function united in formal but not substantive consensus:
The second critical feature concerns the fact that this act of public contestation consists in the public employment of private reasons, and this entails a level of contestation hidden in the antechambers of public expression. The public sphere is, in this sense, the domain of public rational deliberation in which prescriptions and their respective justificatory claims are confronted, mutually gaged and negotiated. Habermasā historical survey of the political coming of age of the bourgeoisie is defined by the projection of the private intentions, interests and aspirations into a space beyond the confines of the private that, by thrust, deliberative competence and coalescence, collectively constitutes publicness.The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour. (Habermas 1991: 27)
Two caveats are in order here. First, the public sphere is not itself an actual space. Rather, the geography of the public sphere is determined by the confluence of the projections of private practical deliberative reasons. That is to say, the public sphere is a virtual space defined by the encounter of prescriptive claims and their subtending reasons in an economy of normative demands and justifications. In this sense, the locus of publicness is virtual.
Second, like any form of virtuality, the sphere of rational contestation must lack a persistent structural integrity. Habermas himself makes this quite clear when in his response to critics he points out that āfrom the very beginning, the universalistic discourses of the bourgeois public sphere were based on self-referential premises; they did not remain unaffected by a criticism from within because they differ from Foucauldian discourses by virtue of their potential for self transformationā (Habermas 1993: 429).
But the lack of persistent integrity does not mean that one cannot trace a formal continuum to account for the multiple structural and substantial processes of transformation. The persistence of the formal features of the sphere where sociocultural engagements coalesce in political identities can best be seen in Habermasā own account of the embryonary life of the political public sphere (politische Ćffentlichkeit) in the literary public sphere (literarische Ćffentlichkeit), to which we now turn.
The Forms of Contestation of Authority
According to Habermas, āthe public sphere in the political realm evolved from the public sphere in the world of lettersā (Habermas 1991: 30ā31). It is useful to look at the forerunner of the political public sphere in search of the formal elements that will define its political inheritor. In the diffuse collection of events that constitute Habermasā literary public sphere, the formal features of the political public sphere are already present and already visible. These events functioned as the training grounds in which participants of the forthcoming political public sphere ālearned the art of the critical-rational public debateā (Habermas 1991: 29).
As opposed to the private act of reading, the critical elaboration of textual sources in a social setting amounts to a game in which players can exercise and mutually gage analytic power and prowess. Interpretative authority is built by way of a confrontation in which participants negotiate and accommodate the power of the putative authorial intentions behind the work, the authoritative assertions of philological fitness of specialists and the individual interpretative ingenuity built into the intimacy of the private reading. Indeed, the game in question seems to be essentially concerned with interpretative authority measured by the capacity to infer collectively the greatest degree of proximity to the source and its meaning, the master pantomime, the author. 1 These mechanisms of deliberative contestation help to map a field of deliberation that deploys and disputes reasons that proceed from beyond this virtual sphere along those that are native to the private space of the readers. The reading and the conversation amount to the construction of an ideological figureāas Foucault so aptly puts itāthat is first and foremost a struggle for the imposition of a meaning by limiting alternative signification, and so on (Foucault 2006: 221).
At the same time, the literary public sphere was what, also following Foucault, we may call a heterotopia (Foucault 2006: 179). This was essentially a sphere of discourse emerging as the locus of contestation of a dispersed variety of interpretative authorities. This space of contestation stands at a distance from the exercise of the authoritative interpretation of the institutions involved in the governance of culture, the public expertise of the scholar and the multiple strategies, interests and proclivities of private readers. Because the locus of conversation is not proprietary, it is there that the āother real emplacements that can be found within the culture, at the same time are, represented, contested, and invertedā (Foucault 2006: 179).
Being coextensive with none, the literary public sphere blooms in the salon or the coffeehouse as Tischgesellschaften, where readers bring their private ways of reading and interpreting the works, political comm...