Public Sphere and Experience

Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere

Alexander Kluge, Oskar Negt

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784782412
• eBook ISBN: 9781784782429
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour

The "public sphere" is a key concept in political discourse, designating a space for political action. But is this a single authoritative and universal space in which various positions compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local spaces spread over diverse collectivities? In Kluge and Negt's groundbreaking book they examine the material conditions of experience in an arena that had previously figured only as an abstract term: the media of mass and consumer culture.

With new, up-to-date introduction from Alexander Kluge.

Chapter 1

The Public Sphere as the Organization of Collective Experience

At the heart of our investigation lies the use-value of the public sphere. To what extent can the working class utilize this sphere? Which interests do ruling classes pursue by means of it? Every form of the public sphere must be examined in light of these questions.

It is difficult to determine the use-value of the public sphere because it is a historical concept of extraordinary fluidity. “The use of the terms ‘public’ and ‘public sphere’ reveals a diversity of competing meanings. These derive from different historical phases and, when applied simultaneously to the conditions of an industrially advanced society and the welfare state, amount to an opaque combination.”¹

To begin with, there is a limiting factor underlying the usage of the term. Public sphere is understood as the “epochally defining category” (Habermas) of the bourgeois public sphere. This definition, in turn, is derived from the distributional network of the public sphere. The latter thus appears as something invariable; the form in which the public sphere manifests itself conceals the actual social structure of production and, above all, the history of the development of its institutions.

Amid these restrictions, “public sphere” as a frame of reference fluctuates confusingly. The public sphere denotes specific institutions, agencies, practices (e.g., those connected with law enforcement, the press, public opinion, the public, public sphere work, streets, and public squares); however, it is also a general social horizon of experience in which everything that is actually or ostensibly relevant for all members of society is integrated. Understood in this sense, the public sphere is a matter for a handful of professionals (e.g., politicians, editors, union officials) on the one hand, but, on the other, it is something that concerns everyone and that realizes itself only in people’s minds, in a dimension of their consciousness.² In its fusion with the constellation of material interests in our “postbourgeois” society, the public sphere fluctuates between denoting a facade of legitimation that is capable of being deployed in diverse ways and denoting a mechanism for controlling the perception of what is revelant for society. In both of these aspects of its identity, the bourgeois public sphere shows itself to be illusory; it cannot, however, be equated with this illusion. As long as the contradiction between the growing socialization of human beings and the attenuated forms of their private life persists, the public sphere is simultaneously a genuine articulation of a fundamental social need. It is the only form of expression that links the members of society to one another by integrating their developing social characteristics.³

This ambiguity cannot be eliminated by definitions alone. These would not result in the actual “utilization of the public sphere” by the masses that are organized within it. The ambiguity has its roots in the internal structure and historical function of this public sphere.⁴ It is, however, possible to exclude from the outset one incorrect use of the concept: the swaying back and forth between an interpretation of the intellectual content (or, for that matter, of the actual fundamental need for public, social organization) and the reality of the bourgeois sphere. The decaying forms of the bourgeois public sphere can neither be salvaged nor interpreted through reference to the emphatic concept of a public sphere of the early bourgeoisie. The need that the masses have to orient themselves according to a public horizon of experience does nothing to reform the public sphere as a mere system of norms when this need is not genuinely articulated within this system. The alternation between an idealizing and a critical view of the public sphere does not lead to a dialectical, but rather to an ambivalent outcome: one moment the public sphere appears as something that can be utilized, the next as something that cannot. What needs to be done, rather, is to investigate the ideal history of the public sphere together with the history of its decay in order to highlight their identical mechanisms.

The Concept of Experience and the Public Sphere

The public sphere possesses use-value when social experience organizes itself within it.⁵ In the practices of a bourgeois mode of life and production, experience and organization have no specific relationship to the totality of society. These concepts are primarily used in a technical manner. The most important fundamental decisions about modes of organization and the constitution of experience antedate the establishment of the bourgeois mode of production. “What we call private is so only insofar as it is public. It has been public and must remain public in order that it can be, whether for a moment or for several thousand years, private.”⁶ “In order to be able to isolate capital as something private, one must be able to control wealth as something public, since raw materials and tools, money, and workers are in reality part of the public sphere. One can act in the market as an individual, one can buy it up, for instance, precisely because it is a social fact.”⁷

The interdependent relationship between that which is private and the public sphere also applies to the way in which language, modes of social intercourse, and the public context come into being socially and publicly. Precisely because the important decisions regarding the horizon and the precise definitions of the organization of experience have been made in advance, it is possible to exert control in a purely technical manner.⁸ In addition, bourgeois society’s awareness of its own experience and the organization of that experience is almost consistently analogous to genuinely existing commodity production.

The value abstraction (above all the division of concrete and abstract labor) that underlies commodity production and has the world in its grip provides the model and can be recognized in the generalizations of state and public activities, in the law. Although anarchistic commodity production is motivated by private interest, in other words by the opposite of the collective will of society, it develops universally binding patterns. These patterns are mistaken for and interpreted as products of the collective will, as if the actual relationships, which have only been acquired retroactively, were based upon this will.

The structures of this bourgeois tradition also determine the way of life and production practices of the present, whose classes and individuals are themselves no longer citizens in the traditional sense. Today’s middle classes, those sectors of the working class influenced by the bourgeois way of life such as students, the technical brainpower, all successors of the educated and petty-bourgeois class of the nineteenth century, are repeating the individual elements of these models of organization and experience under late-capitalist conditions. The purely technical application of these models within the context of a mastery over nature and of the social network is no more elementary than it was in the bourgeois epoch. Perhaps the possibility of a purely technical functioning rests upon a high level of learning processes, of the socialization required by these learning processes, and of those decisions that are made in advance within a social and public context but are experienced subjectively as second nature. The actual dialectical character of all of these preconditions only becomes clear if one goes back to this prehistory.

In the classical theory of the bourgeoisie, this multilayeredness is reflected in the opposition between the concept of experience derived from the Humean tradition⁹ and the critique of that concept in Hegelian philosophy. “The dialectical movement, which consciousness performs on itself, both on its knowledge as well as on its object, in so far as the new, true object emerges for consciousness from this movement, is in fact what is known as experience.”¹⁰ This dialectic concept of experience indicates the real workings of bourgeois society and any other society and its experience, regardless of whether the empirical subjects of this society are aware of the dialectic or not. In what follows, the concept of organized social experience derives from Hegel’s definitions, which underlie the work of Marx as well. This is not to say that the concepts of experience and organized experience (in the sense of the dialectical social mediation of this experience) play only a subsidiary role in orthodox Marxist vocabulary.

An individual worker—regardless of which section of the working class he belongs to and of how far his concrete labor differs from that of other sections—has “his own experiences.”¹¹ The horizon of these experiences is the unity of the proletarian context of living [Lebenszusammenhang].¹² This context embraces both the ladder of production of this worker’s commodity and use-value characteristics (socialization, the psychic structure of the individual, school, the acquisition of professional knowledge, leisure, mass media) as well as an element inseparable from this, namely, his induction into the production process. It is via this unified context, which he “experiences” publicly and privately, that he absorbs “society as a whole,” the totality of the context of mystification.¹³ He would have to be a philosopher to understand how his experience is produced, an experience that is at once preorganized and unorganized and simultaneously molds and merely accompanies his empirical life. He is prevented from understanding what is taking place through him because the media whereby experience is constituted (that is, language, psychic organization, the forms of social interaction, and the public sphere) all participate in the mystificatory context of commodity fetishism. Even if he did understand what was happening, he would still have no experience, but at least he would be able to analyze why he had none. Not even philosophers could produce social experience on an individual level. Before the worker registers this lack, he encounters a concept of experience derived from the natural sciences, which, in that narrow sector of social practice whose object is domination over nature, has a real function and suggestive power. He will take this scientific body of experience, which is not socially but rather technically programmed, as the form per se in which experience is secured. This will lead him to “understand” that there is nothing he can do with “experience,” that he cannot alter his fate with its help. It is an issue for his superiors in the workplace and for specialists.

Nothing in this situation would change even if this worker is promoted in the company hierarchy or if he is elected to positions in the union or in public office. This public sphere (e.g., the vantage point of the executive committee of a political party or of the heads of a trade union) lies, without a doubt, far outside the proletarian context of living; it provides new, largely technical experience, which relates to the functioning of individual social forces. It is possible for the worker to have new individual experiences here; however, none of the barriers of his libidinal structure, of language, of socially recognized modes of intercourse are torn down. He has increasingly distanced himself from the production process, yet neither alone nor with the aid of the organization at his disposal is he able to set in motion to a sufficient degree new production processes, whose object is, for instance, the production of social relationships between people. What is more, after a while he comes to the conclusion that he is dragging around inside himself the proletarian context of living, within which both his experiences and the blocking of this experience are bound. Thus prepared, he encounters a universal fact of the labor movement experience: as soon as the worker participates in the bourgeois public sphere, once he has won elections, taken up union initiatives, he is confronted by a dilemma. He can make only “private” use of a public sphere that has disintegrated into a mere intermediary sphere. The public sphere operates according to this rule of private use, not according to the rules whereby the experiences and class interests of workers are organized. The interests of workers appear in the bourgeois public sphere as nothing more than a gigantic, cumulative “private interest,” not as a collective mode of production for qualitatively new forms of public sphere and public consciousness. To the extent that the interests of the working class are no longer formulated and represented as genuine and autonomous interests vis-à-vis the bourgeois public sphere, betrayal by individual representatives of the labor movement ceases to be an individual problem. It is not a question of an individual’s strength of character. In wanting to use the mechanisms of the bourgeois public sphere for their cause, such representatives become, objectively, traitors to the cause that they are representing.

One arrives at a different result only if one resorts to a fiction: if the collective worker existed as a real, thinking subject, the situation would present itself differently.¹⁴ It is true that initially the situation would be the same: the proletarian context of living, the tools and media of the process of social transformation, experience itself—all of these would be an alienated context for the collective worker, which he could not confront without separating himself from his own real life. Even this hypothetical subject, the collective worker, would be exposed to the suggestive power of the scientific method and its particular concept of experience. This form of experience would flatter the macrosubject since the latter feigns an immediacy of experience, an experience of the subject to the object. These apparent advantages, along with the “objective dimension within the collective worker as subject,” would lead the subject to this undialectical understanding of experience. This applies, however, only to the initial situation. Every method, even an intentionally undialectical one that further organizes the experiences of the social producer-subject, would—through the totality of the production process that is integrated in the subject—broaden the concept of experience as production, experience in the production of experience. This social experience, which is in the process of organizing itself, recognizes the limitations of commodity production and makes the context of living itself the object of production. This production tends toward a public form of expression that bases the dialectical subject-object relationship not upon the impotent opposition of thinking individual and social totality but on the subject character of organized social experience. It is evident that organization is no longer to be understood here in a technical sense but dialectically, as the production of the form of the content of experiences themselves.¹⁵

The Concept of the Public Sphere in Classical Bourgeois Theory

The concept of the public sphere is originally one of the revolutionary rallying cries of the bourgeoisie.¹⁶ It comes as a surprise when Kant ascribes to the public sphere the status of a transcendental principle, indeed that of the mediation between politics and ethics.¹⁷ The public sphere is, according to Kant, a principle of the legal framework of society and simultaneously a method of enlightenment; it is the only medium within which the politics of the revolutionary bourgeoisie can articulate itself. The emphasis of this principle of the public sphere becomes apparent through what is accepted along with it: secret societies are, for instance, generally unsuited to take part in true politics. “The injustice of rebellion becomes clear as a result of the fact that the latter’s maxim would, if one publicly committed oneself to the rebellion, render its own goals impossible. One would therefore necessarily have to conceal these goals. This would, however, not be necessary from the point of view of the ruler. He can freely proclaim that he will punish every rebellion with the death of the ringleaders, even if the latter believe that he has himself been the first to transgress the law.”¹⁸ When the head of state declares publicly that he will punish every rebellion with death, this does not contradict his own intentions to uphold the authority of the state by every means. In other words, one has to accept the fact that the state is in occupation of the public sphere and the rebel is not, for this is the only way that legitimate discussion and communication between citizens can be maintained.

The statement “that reason alone has authority,” and that this reason is the product of a collaborative, communicative, intellectual exertion on the part of those members of society who are qualified for this task has been a cardinal point of emancipatory bourgeois political thought since Descartes. When I think, I ascribe my capacity for thought not to my isolated existence but to my connection with all others who think, with the community of rational individuals, such as mathematicians, astronomers, natural scientists, logicians. “I think, therefore I am” could therefore also be formulated as: “I am, precisely because I am able to disregard the fact that I am an isolated individual.”

The medium of the public sphere, which performs this task of collective mediation, is based on the model of the republic of scholars; the public, made up of private individuals making use of their reason, also behaves as though it were composed of scholars. “What I understand by the public use of one’s own reason is, however, that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of leaders.¹⁹ The pathos with which Kant stresses the moral code, the abstract character of civil laws, the rigid imperative of all rules that determine human conduct, is a reflex of the fact that bourgeois commodity production is in the process of development. The inner violence of these principles, including the principle of the public s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: On New Public Spheres
• Chapter 1: The Public Sphere as the Organization of Collective Experience
• Chapter 2: On the Dialectic between the Bourgeois and the Proletarian Public Sphere
• Chapter 3: Public-Service Television: The Bourgeois Public Sphere Translated into Modern Technology
• Chapter 4: The Individual Commodity and Collections of Commodities in the Consciousness Industry
• Chapter 5: The Context of Living as the Media Cartel’s Object of Production
• Chapter 6: Changes in the Structure of the Public Sphere: Capitalist “Cultural Revolution”—Proletarian Cultural Revolution
• Index