Habermas and the Media

Hartmut Wessler

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509530922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Jürgen Habermas is arguably the most influential social theorist and philosopher of the twentieth century, and his imprint on media and communication studies extends well into the twenty-first. This book lucidly unpacks Habermas's sophisticated contributions to the study of media, centering on the three core concepts for which his work is best known: the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy. Habermas and the Media offers an accessible introduction, as well as a critical investigation of how Habermas's thinking can help us to understand and assess our contemporary communication environment – and where his framework needs revision and extension. Full of original and sometimes surprising insights, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of media, political communication, and democracy, as well as anyone seeking guidance through Habermas's rich world of thought.

1
THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE AND ITS CRITICS

It is no exaggeration to say that Habermas “discovered” the public sphere as a separate social domain – a discovery that “occupies the same rank as a discovery in the natural sciences,” as Fraser (2009, 148) writes. The term “public sphere” denotes a “central institution of modern society for which no English word existed before” (p. 148). Briefly put, in Habermas’s understanding, the public sphere is an arena in which citizens discuss matters of common concern. This arena emerges as a separate social sphere during the transition of European societies from feudalism, in which the aristocratic class dominated society, to capitalism, which is dominated by the owners of the means of economic production. In the course of this transition the public sphere inserts itself as a third space situated between the sphere of public authority (the state, as we would call it today) on the one side and the private sphere of economic reproduction and family life on the other. Figure 1.1 illustrates this insertion of the public sphere into the societal structure of eighteenth-century European societies.

Figure 1.1 Blueprint of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century (adapted from Habermas 1989a, 30)

PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE REALM

It is important to understand that by “private realm” Habermas does not only mean intimate bonds between partners, family members, or friends, as one might presume from our contemporary usage of the word. The private realm is called private because it is “private citizens” who act in it as opposed to bearers of public authority and state functions. In this private realm we find entrepreneurs, merchants, and craftsmen (“civil society”) as well as families with male patriarchs, subordinate wives, and often domestic servants (the “conjugal family’s internal space”). These social categories and activities are increasingly separated from the state (public administration, police, army) and from the noble court in which members of the aristocracy still led privileged lives in the eighteenth century. To the degree that private citizens discovered their interest in emancipating themselves from the aristocracy and claiming leading roles in the newly emerging capitalist society, a separate “public sphere” developed. It consisted of coffee houses, salons, intellectual debate circles, print periodicals, buyers and sellers of books, journals, and works of art as well as concert- and theater-goers (“town”).

In the early phase of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the public sphere was more confined to discussing literary matters and developing specifically bourgeois tastes that differentiated it from salon conversation and artmaking in the noble courts. This initial “public sphere in the world of letters” or “cultural public sphere,” as it was later called, became more politicized when the new bourgeois class asserted itself also as the leading stratum in matters of politics and governance. The emerging “public sphere in the political realm” (or “political public sphere”) started to assume its role as an intermediary sphere between state and citizens – a role still familiar in democratic-capitalist countries today.

State actions became the object of criticism and reflection more often and the interests of private citizens came to be voiced more clearly vis-à-vis noble rulers and aristocrats. The political public sphere became a critical counterpart of state authority and challenged unjustified privileges and political oppression more explicitly. It did so by forming and circulating “public opinions” through discussion that ultimately challenged the feudal state and led to the development of democratic institutions. To organize and professionalize such discussion, political journalism evolved as a profession during the nineteenth century. The center of public life was no longer to be found in the noble court, but in the “town” located opposite the feudal palace, where an independent and self-conscious bourgeois life developed (Habermas 1989a, 30).

The public sphere in the eighteenth century is both a product and a driving force of societal differentiation. It is called “bourgeois” because it is inextricably linked to the rise of bourgeois society, a form of society in which the land- and money-owning classes assume the leading role in the polity – and push the formerly dominant aristocracy to the side. Bourgeois society developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, somewhat earlier in Britain and France than in Germany, where dozens of more or less independent small-scale principalities slowed down the transformation considerably. Bourgeois society is characterized by a differentiation of three roles that people play in society (and these roles are more clearly differentiated in the French language than in English or German): the bourgeois acting in his own interest on markets for goods and labor; the citoyen who determines his own fate by forming and expressing opinions and participating politically (through protesting, petitioning, voting, etc.); and the homme, the “private man” enmeshed in a web of personal relations with his wife, children, relatives, and friends. The use of the male pronoun and the allusion to heterosexual partnership here is in no way accidental; we will return to the gendered character of the bourgeois public sphere later.

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The rise and fall of the public sphere: How Habermas builds his argument

In his book Structural transformation of the public sphere Jürgen Habermas develops his argument in twenty-five chapters that are grouped into seven larger sections. Section I comprises three chapters in which Habermas establishes his basic understanding of the bourgeois public sphere and describes its emancipation from the earlier feudal type of “representative publicness.” Representative publicness denotes the feudal ruler’s “display of inherent spiritual power or dignity before an audience” (translator’s note in Habermas 1989a, xv). According to Habermas, this mode of public display was superseded by “critical publicity” as the dominant mode in which the bourgeois public sphere addresses the state.

With this basic idea in hand Habermas proceeds to treat three large themes that characterize the bourgeois public sphere both historically and theoretically: the social structures underlying the public sphere (section II), its political functions (section III), and the ideas and ideologies that characterize and legitimize the bourgeois public sphere (section IV). By “social structures” Habermas means, as we have seen in figure 1.1, the way material production and the production of cultural goods, including the emerging media system, are organized. “Political functions” captures the contestatory relations that discussions in the literary and political public spheres establish vis-à-vis state authorities and the policies they issue. Under “ideas and ideologies” Habermas discusses the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy about what should be the purpose of public discussion and public opinion, which co-evolved with the actual rise of the public sphere itself.

In the following sections (V to VII) of the book, Habermas then describes what he sees as the degenerative transformation or demise of the bourgeois public sphere during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In doing so, he uses exactly the same three argumentative perspectives: He first analyzes the social-structural transformation of the public sphere (section V) and diagnoses a mutual infiltration of the formerly separated spheres of public authority and private life through the establishment of powerful commercial associations and political parties that position themselves above the deliberating citoyens. In section VI Habermas describes the transformation of the public sphere’s political functions as a shift from critical publicity to “manufactured publicity” directed at securing mass loyalty rather than critical, bottom-up discussion. In section VII, finally, he offers a reflection of the ideology of that transformed public sphere, which he detects in the “social-psychological liquidation” of the original, discussion-based concept of public opinion in the emerging practice of opinion polling.

The parallel, threefold organization that Habermas uses to tell the tale of both the emergence and the degeneration of the bourgeois public sphere gives the book coherence and clarity – despite the complexity of its subject matter and the density of its language. Note, however, that throughout the book, the term “public sphere” is used in both a historical-empirical and a critical-normative sense. Historically, Habermas sees the evolution of the public sphere as a process of degeneration. But normatively, he emphasizes the continuing timeliness and necessity of the critical ideal of inclusive, rational, and undistorted discussion that he associates with the original bourgeois forms of public communication in coffee houses and journals (see Fraser 2009).

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THE MEDIA OF THE EARLY BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE

What kind of media supported the early forms of the bourgeois public sphere? Habermas mentions different types of periodicals. For one, journals devoted to art and cultural criticism emerged in the eighteenth century as a forum in which the philosophy, literature, and art of the day were discussed by erudite men (and occasionally women). According to Habermas (1989a, 42) these journals served as catalysts in the process by which the educated urban classes developed a sense of their commonalities and historical mission as an enlightened public. Small, local debate circles and informal conversations began to be connected translocally because people started reading the same periodicals and discussing similar matters and trends in different locales. In this way the bourgeois public emerged.

Apart from the journals of cultural criticism Habermas points to the importance of the “moral weeklies,” which discussed matters of manners and morals: “charities and schools for the poor, the improvement of education, pleas for civilized forms of conduct, polemics against the vices of gambling, fanaticism, and pedantry and against the tastelessness of the aesthetes and the eccentricities of the learned” (Habermas 1989a, 43). These weeklies “worked toward the spread of tolerance, the emancipation of civic morality from moral theology and of practical wisdom from the philosophy of the scholars. The public that read and debated this sort of thing read and debated about itself” (p. 43).

Reading and debating were elements of the same process:

The periodical articles were not only made the object of discussion by the public of the coffee houses but were viewed as integral parts of this discussion; this was demonstrated by the flood of letters from which the editor each week published a selection. When the Spectator separated from the Guardian [two British periodicals founded in 1711 and 1713] the letters to the editor were provided with a special institution: on the west side of Button’s Coffee House a lion’s head was attached through whose jaws the reader threw his letter. The dialogue form too, employed by many of the articles, attested to their proximity to the spoken word. One and the same discussion transposed into a different medium was continued in order to reenter, via reading, the original conversational medium. (Habermas 1989a, 42)

In this passage Habermas offers a vivid account of how exactly a public emerged through the exchange of ideas – and how this formation was mediated very early on. The media involved at the time were print periodicals with a special emphasis on letters to the editor, and the process closely integrated mediated and face-to-face exchanges. The formation of a public by interactive communication between professional communicators and engaged members of their audience is not unlike some processes observed today in the blogosphere or in comment sections online. It signifies a basic constituent element in the functioning of a public sphere and has inspired many contemporary communication researchers to interpret online discussion as instances of public spheres (see chapter 5 for more details).

THE ALLEGED DEMISE OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Habermas offers a developmental account of the bourgeois public sphere leading from its peak period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to its disintegration into “manufactured publicity” during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This account offers a very bold claim that essentially rests on Habermas’s strong idealization of the early bourgeois public sphere and its subsequent juxtaposition with what he perceived as a gravely deficient reality at the place and time of his writing, namely postwar Germany in the late 1950s and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Bourgeois Public Sphere and its Critics
• 2 Nurturing Communicative Action
• 3 Media for Deliberative Democracy
• 4 Mediated Public Spheres
• 5 Deliberative Qualities of News and Discussion Media
• 6 Non-Deliberative Media Discourse
• 7 Counterpublics and the Role of Emotions Conclusion
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement