60 Cybertheology

Jürgen Habermas and Public Sphere

Jürgen Habermas1 was the leading scholar of the second generation of the Frankfurt School,
Institute for Social Research. His book “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere'
became an influential book that has promoted productive discussions of liberal democracy, civil
society, public life, and social changes in the twentieth century, among other issues. Nick Stevenson
writes, “Habermas's writing represents an epistemological break with the early Frankfurt School.
His theory of communicative rationality displaces what is usually referred to as a philosophy of
consciousness”2 which the Frankfurt School emphasized. While Habermas thought took several
crucial philosophical twists and turns after the publication of his first major book, he has himself
provided detailed commentary on structural transformation in the 1990s and returned to issues of
the public sphere and democratic theory in his work “Between Facts and Norms.” Hence, concern
with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a
central theme of Habermas' work that deserves both respect and critical scrutiny. Habermas' views
provided an essential contribution to mass communication studies and continued to inform critical
research in the context of information technology.

Habermas, after studying with Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1950s,
investigated both the ways that a new public sphere emerged during the time of the Enlightenment
and the American and French revolutions and how it promoted political discussion and debate.
Habermas developed his study within the context of the Institute analysis of the transition from the
stage of liberal market capitalism of the 19th century to the stage of state and monopoly organized
capitalism of the 20th century, developed by the Frankfurt School. 3 His study 'The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere' was published in 1962 and contrasted various forms of an
active, participatory bourgeois public sphere in the heroic era of liberal democracy with the more
privatized forms of spectator politics in a bureaucratic industrial society in which the media and
elites controlled

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1
He was a student of Adorno, becoming his assistant in 1956. He first taught philosophy at Heidelberg before becoming
a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt. In 1972, he moved to the Max-Planck Institute
in Starnberg, but in the -mid-1980s, he returned to his post at Frankfurt
2
Nick Stevenson, Understanding Media Cultures: Social Theory and Mass Communication, (London:Sage, 1995), p.51.
3
Douglas Kellner, op. cit., p.71.
the public sphere. The two major themes of the book include analysis of the bourgeois public
sphere, followed by an account of the structural change of the public sphere in the contemporary era
with the rise of the state capitalism, the culture industries, and the increasingly powerful positions
of economic corporations and big business in public life. On this account, big economic and
governmental organizations took over the public sphere, while citizens became content to become
primarily consumers of goods, services, political administration and spectacle.

Generalizing from developments in Britain, France, and Germany in the late 18th and 19th century,
Habermas first sketched out a model of what he called the “bourgeois public sphere” and then
analyzed its degeneration in the 20th century. After delineating the idea of the bourgeois public
sphere, public opinion, and publicity, Habermas analyses the social structures, political functions,
and concept and ideology of the public sphere, before depicting the social-structural transformation
of the public sphere, changes in its public functions, and shifts in the concept of public opinion. The
bourgeois public sphere, which began appearing around 1700 in Habermas' interpretation, was to
mediate between the private concerns of individuals in their familial, economic, and social life
contrasted to the demands and concerns of social and public life. The bourgeois public sphere made
it possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful interests
that were coming to shape bourgeois society. Habermas' concept of the public sphere thus described
a space of institutions and practices between the private interests of everyday life in civil society
and the realm of state power. The public sphere thus mediates between the domains of the family
and the workplace — where private interests prevail - and the state which often exerts arbitrary
forms of power and domination. What Habermas called the bourgeois public sphere consisted of
social spaces where individuals gathered to discuss their common public affairs and to organize
against arbitrary and oppressive forms of social and public power.

For Habermas, the function of the media have thus been transformed from facilitating rational
discourse and debate within the public sphere into shaping, constructing, and limiting public
discourse to those themes validated and approved by media corporations. Hence, the
interconnection between a sphere of public debate and individual participation has been fractured
and transmuted into that of a realm of political information and spectacle, in which citizen-
consumers
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ingest and absorb passively entertainment and information. People thus become spectators of media
presentations and discourse which mold public opinion, reducing consumer to object of news,
information, and public affairs. In Habermas words, “In as much as the mass media today strip
away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable
forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed.”4
Habermas offered tentative proposals to revitalize the public sphere by setting “in motion a critical
process of public communication through the very organizations that mediatize it.”5 He concluded
with the suggestion that “a critical publicity brought to life within intraorganizational public
spheres6 might lead to democratization of the major institutions of civil society.

Habermas has been criticised. Mary Ryan notes the irony that not only did Habermas neglect
women's public spheres, but marks the decline of the public sphere precisely at the moment when
women were beginning to get political power and become actors. 7 Keller holds the opinion that
Habermas does not adequately theorize the nature and social functions of contemporary media of
communication and information, they are for him mere mechanisms for transmitting messages,
instruments that are neither an essential part of the economy or politics.

Habermas' theory of communicative action fundamentally rests on a distinction between two

concepts of rationality that shape knowledge to guide action. 8 First, cognitive-instrumental
rationality which conducts either instrumental (e.g., through labour), or strategic (e.g., in relations
of domination). Second, communicative rationality which underlies action that is aimed at mutual
understanding, conceived as a process of reaching agreement between speaking subjects to
harmonize their interpretations of the world. However, it is important to note that Habermas'
concept of communicative action does not assume that subjects can aim at mutual understanding
only

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through speech-acts. Several forms of action such as signs and symbols that are not linguistic can

4
Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989a), p. 171.
5
Ibid., p. 232.
6
Ibid., p. 235
7
Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere” in Calhoun, 1992, p.
8
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984, pp. 8-22.
also be oriented to understanding. Habermas maintains that it is only through language that social
actors can coordinate their actions in terms of an orientation to mutual understanding. Habermas
further argues that the claims of communicative actions in everyday social life are often not
questioned or criticized because they are raised within the contours of an undisputed, shared
lifeworld.9 The lifeworld offers the commonly accepted background knowledge within which action
can be coordinated. Thus, a differentiation into three performative attitudes in communicative
action has been brought about as, an objectivating attitude towards the outer world of events and
circumstances, a normative attitude towards the social world of a community of people, and an
expressive attitude towards the inner world of the subjectivity of the individual. Habermas' concept
of the lifeworld is therefore not limited to the cultural tradition, rather it is the shared interpretations
of the world of a particular community.

The issue of the public sphere is at the centre of discussion of many researchers. In the past the tea
shops, market places, bus and train stations, churches, street corners, parks were the places people
used to meet and involved in social and political discussions. Today, though many of these places
remain, they no longer serve as organizing centres for political discussion and action. It has been
felt that the media, especially television but also other forms of electronic communication isolate
citizens from one another and substitute themselves for older spaces of politics. In context like this,
one may ask, Where is the public sphere? Where is the place citizens interact to form opinions in
relation to which public policy must be attuned? John Hartley makes the bold and convincing
argument that the media are the public sphere, “Television, popular newspapers, magazines and
photography, the popular media of the modern period, are the public domain, the place where and
the means by which the public is created and has its being.” 10 Hartley examines in particular the
role of graphic images in newspapers. The same claim is offered by Paul Virilio, “Avenues and
public venues from now on are eclipsed by the screen, by electronic displays, in a preview of the

64 Cybertheology

vision machines' just around the corner.”11

9
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2, System and Lifeworld: A Critique of
Functionalist Reason, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987a, pp. 119-52.
10
For a study of the role of the media in the formation of a public sphere, see John Hartley, The Politics of Pictures: The
Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media, New York: Routledge, 1992, p.1.
11
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 64.
The problem we face is that of defining the term public. Liberal theory maintained the ancient
Greek way of making the Greek distinction between the family or household and the polis. Family
has been considered as private and the polis as public. The political economy combined the Greek
sense of public and the Greek sense of private since economy referred for them to the governance of
the (private) household. The older usage preserved a space for the public but referred to discussions
about the general good, not market transactions. In the newer usage the economic realm is termed
political economy but is considered “private.” To make matters worse, common places nowadays
have the term “private.”12 Privacy now becomes restricted to the space of the home, in a sense
returning to the ancient Greek usage even though family structure has altered dramatically in the
recent times.

In this context, Habermas' theory of public sphere needs to be redefined. Oskar Negt and Alexander
Kluge began the critique of Habermas by articulating the notion of an oppositional public sphere,
specifically that of the proletariat. 13 Following this line, Felski seriously revises the Habermasian
notion of the public sphere, separating it from its patriarchal, bourgeois and logocentric attachments
perhaps, but nonetheless still invoking the notion of a public sphere and more or less reducing it to
politics. This becomes clear in the conclusion of her argument as she writes,

Some form of appeal to collective identity and solidarity is a necessary precondition for the emergence and
effectiveness of an oppositional movement; feminist theorists who reject any notion of a unifying identity as a
repressive fiction in favour of a stress on absolute difference fail to show how such diversity and fragmentation
can be reconciled with goal oriented political struggles based upon common interests. An appeal to a shared
experience of oppression provides the starting point from which women as a group can open upon the
problematic of gender, at the same time as this notion of gendered community contains a strongly utopian
dimension....14

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In the end, Felski sees the public sphere as central to feminist politics.

This distinction became more complex when new computer-mediated communications are taken
into account, in particular the Internet. Now the question of “talk,” of meeting face-to-face, of

12
See the discussion of privacy in relation to electronic surveillance in David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of
Surveillance Society, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 14-17.
13
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysisty the Bourgeois and Proletarian
Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, et al, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
14
Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989, pp. 168-69.
“public” discourse is confused and complicated by the electronic form of exchange of symbols. If
public discourse exists as pixels on screens generated at remote locations by individuals one has
never and will never meet, as it is in the case of the Internet with its “virtual communities,”
“electronic cafes,” bulletin boards, e-mail, computer conferencing and even video conferencing,
then how is it to be distinguished from “private” letters, print face and so forth. Many believe that
the age of the public sphere as face-to-face talk is clearly over. Pointing out the limitations of the
Frankfurt School of thought, the political economy of communication as a method of media studies
has been developed.