Enriching the Palette
Let us begin with the following picture:
To be sure, this is not a description of the Coliseum or the forum in Rome or an arena in another ancient city. The description comes from Wessler et al. (2008: 4), a book on the modern Public Sphere (PS) and this is a metaphorical description of PS .In an arena a number of speakers communicate with each other, observed by an audience seated in the gallery. […T]here are mediators (that is, journalists) who organize the exchange between speakers […] In the catacombs below the arena is a backstage area in which speakers and mediators prepare their communications and seek advice […] from public relations coaches. The entire complex of arena, gallery and backstage area can be called a forum.
Theorizing PS (as any subject of scholarly interest) can be compared to enriching the palette of a painter. More and more is learned about the subject at hand. As a result, the palette required for expatiating on all various aspects becomes richer and ever more sophisticated.
PS is definable as the sphere of public life that serves as a platform in which a range of multifarious and multifaceted topics, considered socially important, are conferred about. In this sketchy definition it is already obvious that PS and its existence depend on several factors.
Firstly, there should be a public ready, willing and enjoying a possibility to exist in such a sphere, more or less actively partaking in its discussions and debates and more or less successfully influencing the course of social and political life through publicly staged parleys or deliberations. This kind of public is different from social agents who participate in other types of discussion , such as authorities, that is, state or governmental officials, or professionals , for example, lawyers, scientists, experts in other fields. This does not mean to say that a president, a past master of an organization or a savant cannot act as a private individual. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, politicians comment on different personages and events; they intervene in the public dialogue about all sorts of issues that find themselves in epicentres of public interest or concern; professionals may be invited to explain the phenomena that come into the public purview. A great deal depends on how they position themselves and how they are perceived by the audience they address. One and the same statement of one and the same person may be viewed differently and that will affect how it functions in the PS (see Chap. 3).
Yet it is one thing when a cabinet of minister discusses a socially important issue, and it is another thing all together when private individuals discuss the same issue in a tea house or in a chat room on a website. There is a difference between a laboratory staff’s collegial assessment of the progress in their work on a medication and the general public’s external discussion of their project. PS is found when politics is talked about in a coffee house or a TV talk show, or when public funds spent on medical research become a subject of general discussion . PS debate may be, and usually is, conducted according to different principles and may come to different conclusions as compared to a governmental meeting or a laboratory powwow. In words of one of the PS experts , Nancy Fraser ,
[t]he public sphere is not the state ; it is rather the informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state […T]his extragovernmental character of the public sphere confers an aura of independence, autonomy, and legitimacy on the ‘public opinion ’ generated in it (1992: 134).
The public should be socially developed to dare to discuss and they should be informed well enough to conduct a productive and constructive discussion . A productive and constructive discussion is different from spreading rumours or gossip; rather it leads to the formation of what is referred to as ‘public opinion ’. A strong, well-informed and constructive public opinion may, and should, be able to bring about changes in law and social policies.
Secondly, PS is a platform or a space. It is a public sphere. This can be a physical sphere for example, a market place or some other space used for gathering people for public discussions of vital civic matters. In Ancient Greece, such physical spaces were called agorae. In early-modern Europe, coffee houses or salons were places where people gathered to discuss publicly relevant topics. PS can also exist in other discursive spaces, such as a plethora of virtual spaces we use today. For instance mass media, journals and newspapers, radio and TV, and the Internet —all serve as examples of virtual spaces in which public discussions take place.
Thirdly, discussion in the PS concerns socially important matters. ‘Socially important’ is different from ‘privately important’. What you eat is normally your private matter; what, according to a famous historical legend, the Queen consort of the French King Louis XVI ate, became a public matter. When she was told that the French people revolted because they had no bread to eat, Marie-Antoinette (1755–93), allegedly, cynically responded that she did not eat bread either, and that, like her, they should have eaten cakes (or in French, les brioches). That answer, if Marie-Antoinette really did say that, was taken as a sign of the upper classes’ callous inhumanity towards the plight of the lower classes of French society, and the Queen’s eating habits added to an acrimonious and, in fact, bloody public conflict.
It is difficult to draw a clear boundary around PS , the topics discussed in it and the circle of participants in those discussions . PS is in a constant state of flux: the number of people involved changes depending on time and space; the discussions deal with different matters some of which may, at one time or in one society, be considered private while at another time or in another society—socially relevant or public. In fact, even in one society, the line between what is viewed as public and what is viewed as private tends to move, usually towards broadening PS (although not always). Thus, we can hardly speak of one PS , rather there are many PSs .
Yet if we are pressed for an answer as to what, despite all changes and differences, variations and deviations, characterizes any PS structurally, the following features may be singled out:This basic structure of PS was introduced in a crystallized fashion in Jürgen Habermas’s seminal book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit [The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere], originally published in German in 1962 and translated into English in 1989. It still enjoys the status of ‘the locus classicus of all discussions’ on PS (Fraser 2014: 11; also Kurasawa 2014: 79), although Habermas’s original model of PS is not the only one (Benhabib 1992) and has passed through a long evolution especially since its English publication, some stages of which were prompted by critics and some by Habermas himself (Calhoun 1992; Nash 2014; Habermas 1996, 2001).
- Who participates in the PS ;
- What is discussed;
- How the discussion is conducted.
Habermas argued that in the period from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century in Western Europe, PS was practiced among white, educated bourgeois propertied males who acted privately, that is, their participation in public discussions was outside whatever other involvements they might have had elsewhere, whether in state bodies or in independent businesses. The topics of their discussions included the principles governing social relations in such areas as trade and labour, publicly relevant matters of private family life (for instance, inheritance laws or gender roles), public authority represented by state and court, political matters as well as mass media and culture events and products. The debate was conducted in such a way that participants’ status was disregarded (at least in principle), in other words they all were considered equals in the discussion ; they had the right to problematize areas that until then had not been questioned by the general public (for instance, governmental decisions); and the discussion had to be based on rational reasoned discourse, that is, only those opinions were taken into consideration that were presented logically and persuasively.
Yet this was the dawn of the modern type of PS in Europe and Habermas (1962/1989) was the beginning of theorizing it. Inevitably, as in any beginning, the picture painted by Habermas , as further developments showed, was not yet sufficiently complex and, to use the metaphor of this section’s title, the palette could hardly be considered rich and adequate for the painting attempted, although as has been admitted time and time again, the initial attempts of theorizing PS , firstly, helped seeing society as more complex than a state ...