|
|
|
Inside and Outside the Public Sphere
Ruth H. Bloch
| WHAT does the term "public sphere" mean, and how do scholars draw its boundaries? A once specific theoretical concept has come perilously close to dissolving into mush. Perhaps this dissolution is the fate of all analytically charged and rhetorically powerful terms, such as "class," "culture," and "gender," to name a few other examples from the past forty years. There is a special irony in the case of the public sphere, for this moment seems peculiarly anti-Habermasian: the more publications refer to the public sphere, the less "communicative rationality" (to use his words) informs the term's meaning.1 Yet the creative contributions produced in the name of the public sphere by early Americanists and others during the last fifteen years have been indisputably stunning. And in the work of some, especially historians of political culture, the underlying Habermasian concept, albeit revised, retains enough of a theoretical edge to prove critical to their interpretations. As the concept grows and stretches in any number of directions, however, becoming synonymous with words such as "public," "the public," "publicity," "print culture," and "civil society," there is a real question about its continuing ability to furnish analytical leverage even as it becomes permanently absorbed into the academic lexicon. |
1
|
|
The malleability of the term is partly due to its schizoid inception as both an ideal type and a historical entity. The Habermasian public sphere is best seen as a normative ideal of democratic politics. But in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas, drawing on his Frankfurt School roots as a critic of mass culture, also described it as a historical reality—a kind of rationalist golden age fated to succumb to the assaults of consumerism and mass culture. When read as a purely historical account, the book describes a series of stages through which democratic political culture at first rose in the late eighteenth century and then fell in the nineteenth century. As John L. Brooke has elsewhere observed, this grand narrative attracts the attention of historians more than Habermas's difficult philosophical elaborations in other works.2 Even in the quite accessible Structural Transformation, however, it is clear that the dynamism of the public sphere inheres in the democratic political agency that Habermas ascribes to it. Separate from the state in the sense of being unrestricted by legal regulation, its function is nonetheless state oriented. Within the public sphere, fellow citizens deliberate over their common course as a people, and this discussion gives rise to the force of public opinion that makes the state accountable to them. It is not only a static conceptual category between state and society but also the key moment of transition from private life into democratic self-government. The concept has deep roots in classical political theory, positing an ideal whereby individuals freely reflect on and, as a collectivity, influence the official exercise of state power. |
2
|
|
Overly schematic and out of date in various respects, Habermas's historical description of the public sphere, written in 1962 but not translated into English until 1989, inspired multiple important revisions by historians and others during the 1990s. Thanks to this revisionist undertaking, those scholars invoking the public sphere no longer conceive it as bourgeois but as encompassing historically oppressed groups. The term, as the article by Joanna Brooks illustrates, has been productively pluralized into alternative public spheres and counterpublics. Its originally masculine bias has also been transformed to accord recognition to the participation of women. Even the original stress on the importance of print culture in the public sphere has been historicized in ways that include more attention to unpublished writing and to spoken language as well as to visual symbols and performative rituals. As Harold Mah has emphasized, some stress Habermas's institutional examples and spatial metaphors, concretizing the public sphere into specific associational groupings (for example, Freemasonry) or actual places (including taverns and streets), whereas others concentrate on the more abstract and disembodied process of opinion formation.3 Within the field of early American studies, these divisions generally correspond to disciplinary distinctions, splits between historians of literature who study texts and historians of political culture who study popular movements and organizations. |
. . . |
There are about 2768 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
