10 Habermas’ Public Sphere

Aritra Bhattacharya

1.      Introduction

 

A strong public sphere, many would argue, is one of the most important requirements of a functional democracy. In common parlance, the public sphere is an arena of informal deliberation between citizens, wherein the participants reach an agreement through rational dialogue. Jürgen Habermas (18 June 1929—till date), a German thinker, is often the starting point for all discussions relating to the public sphere, as he provides us with the most systematically developed theory of the concept.

 

In this module, we will consider various aspects of Habermas’ account of the evolution and dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere, his basic arguments, the limitations in his theory of the public sphere, and the many directions in which theorists have tried to respond to his formulation.

 

This module is divided into three sections. The first section locates Habermas within the critical theory school by delineating the basic preoccupations of the school and the connection they have with Habermas’ work. The second section looks at his conception of the public sphere in detail, highlighting its most important aspects. The third section focuses on some of the most important criticisms and limitations of his theory.

 

2.      Habermas and the Frankfurt School

 

In the words of Stephen Eric Bronner1, critical theory came into being a major ‘philosophical tendency ‘some time in between World War I and World War II. Born with the crucible of Marxism, it “refuses to identify freedom with any institutional arrangement or fixed system of thought. It questions the hidden assumptions and purposes of competing theories and existing forms of practice. It has little use for what is known as ‘perennial philosophy’. ”

 

Critical theory came to be identified with the works of the Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 in Frankfurt. Over the years, it came to be known as the Frankfurt School, and the task that theorists belonging to the school set for themselves was simple: they were disillusioned with the decadence in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and were of the opinion that socialism as practised in the post-revolutionary Russia was in many ways helping the advance of regressive elements. At the same time, they were highly critical of the workings of modern capitalism and its ability to morph constantly in order to be able to exploit people and resources more and more.

 

The rejection of the Soviet style of socialism was not, however, a rejection of Marxism. Although the Frankfurt School theorists rejected Orthodox Marxism (Marx’s later works), they sought to further the emancipatory project that Marx had embarked on as a young humanist. In this, the works of early Marx were close to that of Hegel; Frankfurt School theorists underlined the importance of historical materialism, and employed it to various degrees in their own work.

 

They sought to discard the economic determinism of later Marx, which had gained ascendancy in the years after the Russian Revolution. They believed Marx’s later formulations on capitalism were not adequate to deal with the complications presented by advanced capitalism and socialism as it was being practised in post-revolutionary Soviet Union. The theorists at Frankfurt School launched “an unrelenting assault on the exploitation, repression, and alienation embedded within Western civilisation”2 and focussed on exposing how everyday processes worked to heighten these tendencies.

 

1Bronner, Stephen Eric. Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press: New York, 2011.

The most important theorists of the Frankfurt School were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas. Theorists of the school, including the trio, worked within an interdisciplinary framework and sought to bridge the gap between theory and empirical work. One of the most important examples of this was Dialectic of Enlightenmentco-authored by Adorno and Horkehimer and published in 1947. The book examined the reasons for the failure of the promises of Enlightenment; the authors showed how the contradictions that ensured the preservation of status quo were in fact already a part of the dialectic of Enlightenment. An important essay in this book is ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, which suggests that popular culture was a way of manipulating society into passivity. Adorno’s deep knowledge of music was important in the context of this essay, as the authors showed how popular culture was created in factory-like setups by the ‘culture industry’. The culture industry was responsible for producing standardised products that did not require people to think, certainly not on contentious issues; instead, its role was to keep people occupied in sundry stories such that they would have no time, desire or option to think.

 

An example of this culture industry is Bollywood. One only needs to look at the kind of cinema that was created in the 1990s in Bollywood to understand this best. The ‘90s were characterised by films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ), which were set in foreign locales, and showed the protagonists overcoming odds of all kinds to emerge victorious. In a globalising world, they were winning on their own terms, by preserving their own culture. This was escapist cinema at best, as India at the time passing through a terrible economic crisis, and the first world was intent on opening up the country’s economy to gain entry into its market. Films like DDLJ dulled the audiences into believing that all was well; there were a bunch of such films that looked like assembly-line productions designed to manipulate people into passivity.

 

Jürgen Habermas was Horkheimer and Adorno’s student, and among the most prolific thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. Bronner says his “writings touch upon all facets of social life, including religion, and his essays extend from interpretations of the philosophical canon to commentaries on the issues of the day”3.

 

Habermas grew up under Nazism, something the other members of the Frankfurt School did not, and this left a lasting impression on him. Bronner argues that Habermas’ deep belief in the rule of law and liberal democracy, as also his concern with the manipulation of discourse and the importance of “undistorted communication” result from his growing up under Nazism. These themes run through almost all of Habermas’ works.

 

3.      Habermas and the Public Sphere

 

Habermas detailed his conception of the public sphere in his seminal book “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society” published in 1962 in German. It was translated into English in 1989 by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence.

 

2Bronner, Stephen Eric. Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press: New York, 2011. 1p.

3Ibid. 18p.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS) was Habermas’ first major work, and was overseen by political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, to whom Habermas dedicated the book. In the book, Habermas focuses on the development of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as its subsequent decline. STPS is also the book where he first outlines the theory of communicative action—something that was to be one of his major theoretical contributions and underpinned several of his later works. Before we go on to looking at how the public sphere developed, however, we must understand what precisely Habermasmeant by the term ‘public’ in the public sphere etc.

 

Public refers to any institution that is open to all members of society without any discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, caste or other categorisations. For instance, a building is said to be public when it does not refuse entry to anyone one the basis of segregations in society. In other words, public hypothetically constitutes something that is ’open’. By extension, Habermas says a public body is one where private individuals engage with each other without any restrictions or strictures. They are guaranteed the freedom to voice their opinions on matters of general interest without fear or favour.

 

“Public opinion”, on the other hand, refers to the public body’s tasks of critiquing the policies of the ruling structure organised in the form of the state. This is done with the express intention of controlling, somehow, the activities of the state in a manner so as to make it complementary to public opinion. Public bodies can engage in the process of formation of public opinion informally, as well as formally, through elections to recognised institutions.

 

“Public sphere”, for Habermas, refers to that arena of social life wherein something approaching public opinion can be formed. All citizens must have equal access in this public sphere, without discrimination on the basis of caste, class, gender et al. When private individuals congregate as part of a public body to discuss and express opinions about matters of general interest, they must do so by leaving aside their preoccupations as private individuals, including their professional goals and ambitions; they must cast aside their biases and be willing to engage with others in the public body.

 

When a public body is large and is constituted by people living far off from each other, there must be means for transmitting information among members in such a way that it reaches everybody without distortion. Habermas says that newspapers, magazines, radio and television are media of the public sphere, as they reach out to everyone without any discrimination.

 

The state however, is not part of the public sphere as conceived by Habermas. He notes that although the state is concerned with ensuring the well-being of all its citizens and is usually considered a “public” authority, it cannot be termed a part of the public sphere since all citizens do not have access to matters of the functioning of the state.

 

The public sphere must be a kind of mediator between the society and the state. Citizens who constitute the public bodies must be able to express and/or publish their ideas on matters that affect everyone in such a manner that the public opinion so generated has a bearing on the running of the various state apparatus. Only when it does this mediation does it become a public sphere in the true sense. This, says Habermas, is a characteristic of democracy, for only in a democracy is access to information guaranteed as a matter of right and citizens are allowed to express their opinions without barriers, unlike in monarchies.

 

3. 1 History

 

The concepts of public opinion and public sphere arose only in the eighteenth century, and were born out of a certain churning in bourgeois society. Public opinion can, by definition, only come into existence when a reasoning public is presupposed, and this was only possible post the Enlightenment, when reasoning and a scientific temperament took centre stage in much of Europe.

 

It’s not that a public sphere did not exist prior to the eighteenth century; only that it was distinctly different from the public sphere in bourgeois society. Habermas calls the former the representative public sphere, for it was based on a display of power.

 

The feudal lord represented his position before the people, publicly, but the public sphere constituted in the process was representational since his status was above the categories of “public” and “private”. The monarch was a manifestation of the divine power on earth, and his authority was beyond question.

 

Habermas notes that the feudal authorities to which the representative public sphere was linked—in other words those who represented their power before the public, like the church, princes and nobility— disintegrated during a gradual process. The Reformation changed the position of the church and religion became a private affair. The monarch and the nobility also lost their positions of power after their personal finances were separated from state budgets. The feudal estates, of which the princes were the negotiating heads, also changed in due course, as they made way for the parliament and legal institutions. Those engaged in trade on the other hand came to constitute a domain of genuine private autonomy that stood distinctly separated from the state.

 

Owing to these changes, by the eighteenth century, the representational public sphere ceased to exist, and was replaced by the bourgeois public sphere. It is not that the state and its officials did not need to represent their power in this new formation. On the contrary, this representation was very different from that practised in feudal society, wherein the presence of the public sphere was directly linked to the existence of a ruler. The new order was characterised by the presence of a market economy and a complete separation of the state from society. The bourgeois public sphere, at this point, became the mediator between the state and society, and private individuals started laying claim to officially-regulated newspapers, resorting to its pages to criticise the public authority.

 

In Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, newspapers played a very critical role. The pages of a newspaper provided space for a public discussion on matters of interest for everyone. Through the pages of the newspaper, the public tried to influence the workings of the public authority: the state. This was something that, says Habermas, was without historical precedent; in the earlier times, estates had negotiated agreements with princes without involving the public at all.

 

The fundamental rights enshrined in the first modern constitutions were, in Habermas’ words, ‘a perfect image of the liberal model of the public sphere’: they restricted public authority to a few functions and guaranteed the society as a sphere of private autonomy. Between these two spheres were private individuals who, as part of a public body, could transmit the needs of the bourgeois society to the state.

 

During this phase, beginning the second half of the eighteenth century, political newspapers played an important role. Newspapers, during this phase, changed from being mere compilation of notices to bearers and leaders of public opinion. The press was no longer an organ for spreading news; instead, it had become an intensifier of public discussion. This can be seen in the fact that political parties, however small they may have been, had their own journals and newspapers, wherein they published their views on the most pressing issues of the day. Taken in its entirety, they constituted a part of the public sphere, where private individuals as part of a public body were holding forth on matters of general importance. Cafes, salons and discussion fora were also constituents of the public sphere during this period, as they fostered open debate between citizens without any discrimination, and the emphasis was always on reaching consensus purely by virtue of the power of rational argument.

 

3. 2 Decadence

 

The public sphere as constituted above, however, lost its character with a short span of time. Habermas is of the opinion that although the liberal model of the public sphere is still functional today, it cannot be applied to the actual conditions of an industrially-advanced mass democracy organised in the form of the social welfare state. This is because the forms in which the public sphere manifested itself began to change; once the public sphere had been constituted institutionally, the press—free from its polemical role of critiquing the public authority—was free to pursue the interests of profit-making in the market economy. Conflicts that were restricted to the private sphere now began to intrude into the public sphere through the press. This can be explained with the help of a simple example.

 

Most of the major business conglomerates and corporations in India today own some newspaper or television channel, and they seek to promote the group’s business interests through their particular media outlets. In other words, the goings-on in the public sphere are now no longer free of bias, and private entities are seeking to buttress their point of view through press outlets owned by them. This prompted Habermas to say that the public sphere had become a field for the competition of interests and competitions.

 

In other words, there has been a “refeudalisation” of the public sphere, where large organisations strive for compromises with the state and with each other, more often than not excluding the public sphere. At the same time, however, these large organisations need to keep afloat the veneer of openness, of fair play, in order to be able to project before the public the impression that they are, in fact, talking about the latter’s interests.

 

While the process of making the proceedings of the public authority were, at one point in time, intended to subject matters to public reason, the very same process today serves special interests of powerful corporations and groups. This has given rise to “publicity”, which helps proponents put a positive spin on their activities in such a manner that it appears beneficial for the general public, but in effect is a means of bypassing the public.

 

The public sphere, a sphere of rational discourse among equal individuals, has today given way to propaganda and “public relations”, which seek to secure more and more benefits for those engaging in public relations work. The promise of the public sphere, in Habermas’ view, has been lost due to the infiltration of private interests, thanks to the over-emphasis on profit-making.

 

4.      Critiques of Habermas’ approach

 

Habermas’ work on the public sphere occupies a critical position in the discourse on liberal democracy even after several decades of publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Many theorists who to argue that a strong democracy requires a vibrant public sphere, wherein citizens can informally deliberate on issues and create public opinion to guide political systems, take his work as the starting point.His work, however, has also come in for severe criticism, and this section will look at some of these criticisms, and the issues they bring to light. In STPS, Habermas says the public sphere is one that is characterised by reasoned debate, and members who constitute public bodies must cast aside their biases and professional preoccupations. The public sphere is also one where all members are considered equal, without anyone having power over another. But is such a scenario possible?

 

     Let us look at the discourse around genetically modified crops in India to understand how the public sphere operates, and if it is possible at all to have the kind of scenario that Habermas describes in STPS. Various governments at the Centre have been trying to push for the introduction of commercial cultivation of genetically modified crops, suggesting this would be key to improving the country’s food security. This is a crucial point in the argument of large biotechnology corporations that own technologies of genetic modification; they argue that earlier varieties of seeds, including hybrids, are just not capable of giving the kind of high yields that GM crops can give. Genetic modification involves the introduction of a trait from another organism into a particular crop. In some instances, this trait can help fight a particular pest that affects the said crop the most; in other cases, it may help the crop to grow in a geographic region where it does not grow naturally owing to a difference in weather. For instance, the industry argues that genetic modification can help create drought and flood-tolerant varieties of crops like rice and wheat, thus increasing the range of climates where such crops can grow, thereby increasing food security.

 

Critics of genetic modification argue that there are not enough tests to show the effects of consumption of GM food crops over the long term. Studies conducted by biotech corporations have shown that mice fed on genetically modified crops have developed serious organ disorders, but such studies are often hidden from the public. They also say the technology is a means for the biotechnology industry to take over control of the seed sector.

 

Since there are contradicting views on the matter, the creation of public opinion would involve reasoned debate by all stakeholders. This would mean that those for GM crops would have to be on the same pedestal as those opposed to GM crops. What happens in reality though is far removed from reasoned debate. Proponents of GM technology routinely argue that activists against the technology base their opposition on emotional matters. The former group routinely fields scientists from government bodies, who second the claims of biotech corporations; they say the anti-GM activists’ approach is non-scientific, while deciding on the matter of GM crops requires emphasis on pure science.

 

The media, a crucial part of this debate, more often than not takes the side of the government scientists, since they are supposed to know more about science that lay activists. What must be considered in this case is the fact that India has very few opportunities in private research for scientists. Scientists must toe the government line; else they would risk being shunted or expelled from their jobs. When such scientists come to the discussion table, therefore, they do not and cannot leave aside their professional preoccupations and personal interests—if they do, they could be without a job. Companies pushing for GM technology also have far more money and muscle power than those opposed to it, and are able to arm-twist governments and the media into buying their side of the story. Journalists are also taken on paid trips by these corporations—this, in effect, is a form of bribe to ensure that the discourse around GM crops in the media is in favour of these corporations. In the end, then, one can see how skewed the debate on GM crops is. As opposed to reasoned debate with the intention of reaching a consensus— something that Habermas has termed communicative rationality in his later work—there is severe imbalance, with one group clearly outmatching the other.

 

Even otherwise, in debates that are less contentious, equality in the public sphere is something that is far from possible. Amir Ali shows why this is so in the essay Evolution of the Public Sphere in India.Ali says that the present configuration of the public sphere in India was shaped by the experience of British colonialism and the nationalist struggle. Following the argument of SandriaFreitag4, he says the British relied on a representational mode of governance, wherein native elites from clearly defined and classified communities were privileged as representatives of their communities, and it is with them that the British conducted discussions of any kind. Unlike in the West, there was no direct relationship between the individual and the state under colonialism. This privileging of native elites meant that certain people enjoyed more power and privilege over others and equality of any kind between members of even one community was not possible.

 

The nationalist movement that grew in opposition to the colonial rule, on the other hand, privileged upper caste Hindu symbols as its own symbols. This is reflected in, among other things, the reference to India as Bharat Mata and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram, which promoted the idea that all Indians were bowing down to mother India—something that practitioners of Islam do not agree with5.

 

The controversy around the Shah Bano judgement is another major point that shows how the public sphere has come to be constituted in India. Ali says the Shah Bano controversy actually imparted an unparalleled momentum to the emerging politics of Hindutva as the former was effectively used by the latter to reinforce the idea that the Indian state was appeasing Muslims. It may be recalled that Muslim groups reacted with alacrity at the Supreme Court judgement in the case, which they saw as an encroachment of their public sphere. Hindutva groups, on the other hand, criticised the Rajiv Gandhi government’s move to bypass the judgement, saying the Indian state was appeasing Muslims. This controversy provided an impetus to the Hindutva movement and helped it stamp its symbols on the public sphere.

 

One must also keep in mind the deep-set caste differences in Indian society while examining the concept of public sphere. In the present time, caste differences have become disguised as economic differences owing to a host of issues, as shown by AnandTeltumbde in The Persistence of Caste. The presence of such sharp, morphed divisions does not allow private individuals to confer with each other as equals even when opportunity exists, thus making Habermas’ notion of public sphere seem more like utopia.

 

The other major criticism of Habermas’ conception of the public sphere is that is privileges a certain mode of communication—one that is reflexive, impartial and involves reasoned exchange of validity claims wherein only the force of better argument wins out. Critics argue that this conception privileges a particular form of discourse—a discourse that encourages “representational accuracy, logical coherence and dispassionate contestation of opinion”6. It also draws upon the style of communication that is held in high regard in Western philosophy and is in practice in academics.

 

This style of rational argumentation, say critics, muse be seen in exclusion to other styles of expression that are “aesthetic-affective” in nature. This includes modes of everyday communication like rhetoric, myth, metaphor, poetry and theatre.

 

 

 

4 For more on this argument, see Freitag, Sandria. Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1990.

5 On Bankim Chandra’s influence on Indian nationalism, see Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Oxford University Press: Calcutta, 1985. Chapter 3.

6Habermas, Jürgen and Lennox, Sara and Lennox, Frank. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. ” New German

Critique, No. 3. (Autumn, 1974): 49-55.

 

Critics have also argued that the public sphere conception excludes marginalised groups like women and non-Western persons. According to Iris Young, such groups of people have styles of communication that are markedly different from Western males. Women and non-Western persons employ aesthetic-affective speaking styles more readily than Western males, says young; the former’s “speech culture” tends to be “more excited and embodied, more valuing the expression of emotions, the use of figurative language, modulation in tone of voice, and wide gesture. ” The “speech culture” of Western middle class men on the other hand tends to be “more controlled, without significant gesture and expression of emotion”7.

 

Privileging the non-affective style of communication and making it constitutive of the public sphere, in fact, places these other groups at a distinct disadvantage. The only way they could be a part of the public sphere is by subscribing to the privileged mode of communication. The Habermasian public sphere, in other words, works to promote the interests of groups that already enjoy a position of power in society.

 

Yet another criticism of Habermas is the fact that he imagines that communication can somehow be separated from power, when in fact power is ingrained within the very terms within which communication is framed. Habermas imagines that insincerity, domination, manipulation etc in communication can be identified clearly and purged in such a manner that allows subjects to arrive at an understanding based on reason.

 

This criticism comes from the Foucauldian school of thought. Michel Foucault, in Birth of Biopolitics, shows how the operation of power can never be clearly delineated along the lines of Habermas’ conception. Foucault argues that in fact, the operation of power in contemporary societies rests on the fact that it is made invisible through the process of subjectification—the the process of the formation of the subject in modern societies is such that it normalises a certain way of being, thereby treating all other ways of being, all other streams of thought as pathological. In modern societies, says Foucault, subjects must always be on the lookout for threats to the social body, and this threat could come from the self. The modern subject must, therefore, watch himself constantly; there must be constant vigil not only on others around the self, but the self itself. When power operates in this way through subjectification, it becomes invisible. There is no coercion, no manipulation in the self-censuring the self. In the context of Habermas’ public sphere, this power operates by normalising the non-affective mode of communication, and subjects must always be vigilant, lest he himself strays into affective modes of communication.

 

This line of thought would show how the non-affective mode of communication is steeped in operation of power; the absence of rhetoric is in fact a rhetoric that is achieved through training the self in a certain manner. If power cannot be separated from communication, following this stream of thought, then it is impossible to conceive of a public sphere free of domination and manipulation.

 

 

  • 7 For more on speech cultures, see Young, Iris M. “Communication and the Other” in Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000. p123-124

FURTHER READINGS

 

 

  • Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford University Press, 2002
  • Habermas, Jürgen.The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. The MIT Press, 1991
  • Ali, Amir. “Evolution of Public Sphere in India.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 26 (Jun. 30 – Jul. 6, 2001): 2419-2425
  • Freitag, Sandria. Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1990.
  • Teltumbde, Anand. The Persistence of Caste: India’s Hidden Apartheid and the Khairlanji Murders. Zed Books, 2011
  • Habermas, Jürgen and Lennox, Sara and Lennox, Frank. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.” New German Critique, No. 3. (Autumn, 1974): 49-55.
  • Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Oxford University Press: Calcutta, 1985.
  • Young, Iris M. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000
  • Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979. Picador, 2010

 

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