Habermas 1962

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Jürgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Pub. 1962. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Print.

Introduction

"Preliminary Demarcation of a Type Of Bourgeois Public Sphere"

  • ‘Öffentlichkeit’ a synonym of "public,” “Stadt,” “Volk,” “Welt”
  • Translation Intro (Thomas McCarthy)
    • xi ...[this is] an effort to grasp the preconditions, structures, functions, and inner tensions of this central domain of modern society. As a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed, the liberal public sphere took shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy. In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state;, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.
  • xii The consequent intertwining of state and society in the late c19 and the c20 meant the end of the liberal public sphere. The public sphere of social-welfare-state democracies is rather a field of competition among conflicting interests, in which organizations representing diverse constituencies negotiate and compromise among themselves and with government officials, while excluding the public from their proceedings. ...The press and broadcast media serve less as organs of public information and debate than as technologies for managing consensus and promoting consumer culture.
  • [Stakes] In a post-liberal era, when the classical model of the public sphere is no longer sociopolitically feasible, the question becomes: can the public sphere be effectively reconstituted under radically different socioeconomic, political and cultural conditions? In short, is democracy possible?

(1) Initial Question

  • 1-2 difficulty of defining "public"
  • 3 [Greece - Hellenic public sphere] Status in the polis was therefore based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos. The reproduction of life, the labor of spaces, and the service of the women went on under the aegis of the master’s domination[.]
  • 4 just as the wants of life and the procurement of its necessities were shamefully hidden inside the oikos, so the polis provided an open field for honorable distinction, citizens indeed interacted as equals with equals, but each did his best to excel.
  • “res publica" formed based on this idea’s transmission in Roman law into the Middle Ages
  • [Now collapsing] Tendencies pointing to the collapse of the public sphere are unmistakable, for while its scope is expanding impressively, its function has become progressively insignificant. Still, publicity continues to be an organizational principle of our political order.

(2) Remarks on the Type of Representative Publicness

  • 7 [in the Middle Ages] ...not by accident did the English king enjoy "publicness"— for lordship was something publicly represented. The publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute[.]
    • public display of representation as embodiment of "higher" power
    • As long as the prince and the estates of his realm "were" the country and not just its representatives [8], they could represent it in a specific sense. They represented their lordship not for but "before" the people.
      • this could tie to Anderson 1983 with the historical conception of the "nation" being constituted of an imagined group of people sharing (or not) the same spatial coordinates
  • 9-10 recession of public festivities into private could be tied to Bakhtin carnivalesque
  • 10-11 [shift in early capitalism from courtly nobility to "good society" in c18] The final form of the representative publicness, reduced to the monarch’s court and at the same time receiving greater emphasis, was already an enclave within a society separating itself from the state. Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in an officially modern sense.
    • i.e. Public power wasn’t based on private authority but on public authority
  • 11 "Private" designates the exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus; for "public" refers to the state that in the meantime had developed, under absolutism, into an entity having an objective existence over against the person of the ruler.
  • The authorities were contrasted with the subjects excluded from them; the former served, so it was said, the public welfare, while the latter pursued their private interests.
    • this can happen with in a person too: Esther observes this in the "person" of the Lord Chancellor in Bleak House (1853)
  • Reformation as turning religion from a public to a private matter
  • 13 [discussing Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister] The nobleman was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced[.]

(3) On the Genesis of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

  • 14 With the emergence of early finance and trade capitalism, the elements of a new social order were taking shape.
    • Jardine's Worldly Goods is good on this
    • smoothly integrated into old power structure at first
  • 15 On the one hand this capitalism stabilized the power structure of a society organized in estates, and on the other hand it unleashed the very elements within which this power structure would one day dissolve. We are speaking of the elements of the new commercial relationships: the traffic in commodities and news created by early capitalist long-distance trade.
  • 16 With the expansion of trade, merchants' market-oriented calculations required more frequent and more exact information about distant events...The grade trade cities became at the same time centers for the traffic in news; the organization of this traffic on a continuous basis became imperative to thte degree to which the exchange of commodities and of securities became continous.
  • Just as...one could speak of "mail" only when the regular opportunity for letter dispatch became accessible to the general public, so there existed a press in the strict sense only once the regular supply of news became public, that is, again, accessible to the general public. But this happened only at the end of the C17. Until then the traditional domain of communication in which publicity of representation held sway was not fundamentally threatened by the new domain of a public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word.
    • deep historical/theoretical background to Brake 2001 and periodicals studies more generally
  • 17 starting in the C17 ascendency of Britain and "nationalization of the town-based economy"
    • def of nation: "modern state with its bureaucracies and its increasing financial needs" based on taxation
  • 18 the sphere of public authority...assumed objective existence in a permanent administration of a standing army. Now continuous state activity corresponded to the continuity of contact among those trafficking in commodities and news (stock market, press).
  • "Public" in this narrower sense was synonymous with "state-related"; the attribute no longer referred to the representative "court" of a person endowed with authority but instead to the functioning of an apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction and endowed with a monopoly over the legitimate use of coercion. The manorial lord's feudal authority was transformed into the authority of the "police"; the private people under it, as the addressees of public authority, formed the public.
  • 19 Civil society came into existence as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority. Activities and dependencies hitherto relegated to the framework of the household economy emerged from this confinement into the public sphere.
  • 20 concurrent shift in the meaning of the word "economics" from the household to the modern sense -- "the market had replaced the household, and it became 'commercial economics'."
  • with development of civil society, the fuller development of the press
  • 21 For the traffic in news developed not only in connection with the needs of commerce; the news itself became a commodity.
  • The interest of the new (state) authorities (which before long began to use the press for the purposes of the state administration), however, was of far greater import. Inasmuch as they made use of this instrument to promulgate instructions and ordinances, the addressees of the authorities' announcements genuinely became "the public" in the proper sense.
  • 22 Gazette of London, 1665 (under authority of Charles II)
  • Along with the apparatus of the modern state, a new [23] stratum of "bourgeois" people arose which occupied a central position within the "public." The officials of the rulers' administrations were its core -- mostly jurists....added to them were doctors, pastors, officers, professors, and "scholars," who were at the top of a hierarchy reaching down through schoolteachers and scribes to the "people."
    • craftsmen and shopkeepers (original "burghers") "suffered downward mobility"
  • This stratum of "bourgeois" was the real carrier of the public, which from the outset was a reading public.
    • though relatively small and not representative of the "nation" in broader terms (St Clair 2004)
  • 23 Not the notorious dress codes but taxes and duties and, generally, official interventions into the privatized household finally came to constitute the target of a developing critical sphere. When there is a scarcity of wheat, bread consumption on Friday evenings was prohibited by official decree. Because, on the one hand, the society now confronting the state clearly separated a private domain from public authority and because, on the other hand, it turned the reproduction of life into something transcending the confines of private domestic authority and becoming a subject of public interest, that zone of continuous administrative contact became "critical" also in the sense that it provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason. The public could take on this challange all the better as it required merely a change in the function of the instrument with whose help the state administration had already turned society into a public affair in a specific sense -- the press.
  • 25 interesting case study of the Hallenser Intelligenzblatt (from 1729) and the Prussian king
  • In a rescript of Frederick II from 1784 one reads: "A private person has no right to pass public and perhaps even disapproving judgment on the actions...of sovereigns and courts, their officials, assemblies, and courts of law...For a private person is not at all capable of making such a judgment, because he lacks complete knowledge of circumstances and motives." A few years before the French Revolution, the conditions in Prussia looked like a static model of a situation that in France and especially in Great Britain had become fluid at the beginning of the century. The inhibited judgments were called "public" in view of a public sphere that without question had counted as a sphere of public authority, but was now casting itself loose as a forum in which the private people come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion [26]. The publicum developed into the public, the subjectum into the [reasoning] subject, the receiver of regulations from above into the ruling authorities' adversary.
  • Print focused summary: Press as a central technology of the public sphere, the new zone of contact and contestatino between civil society and the state in mercantile capitalism from the late C17 and, especially, from the turn of the C19

Social Structure of the Public Sphere

(4) The Basic Blueprint

  • 27 The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people (e.g., not state administration) come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people's public use of their reason.
  • 28 The public's understanding of the public use of reason was guided specifically by such private experiences as grew out of the audience-oriented subjectivity of the conjugal family's intimate domaine.
  • 29 Even before the control over the public sphere by public authority was contested and finally wrested away by the critical reasoning of private persons on political issues, there evolved under its cover a public sphere in apolitical form - the literary precursor of the public sphere operative in the political domain. It provided the training ground for a critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself - a process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness. Of course, next to political economy, psychology arose as a specifically bourgeois science during the C18. Psychological interests also guided the critical discussion sparked by the products of culture that had become publicly accessible: in the reading room and the theater, in museums and at concerts. Inasmuch as culture became a commodity and thus finally evolved into "culture" in the specific sense (as something that pretended to exist merely for its own sake),m it was claimed as the ready topic of a discussion through which an audience oriented subjectivity communicated with itself.
  • 30 The "town" was the life center of civil society not only economically; in cultural-political contrast to the court, it designated especially an early public sphere in the world of letters whose institutions were the coffee houses, the salons, and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies). The heirs of the humanistic-aristocratic society, in their encounter with the bourgeois intellectuals (through sociable discussions that quickly developed into public criticism), build a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere.
    • you can see this in the development of the patronage model of authorship to the commercial one -- Chartier 1994
  • diagram of social realms of the C18 on 30
  • Included in the private realm was the authentic "public sphere," [as opposed to the sphere of public authority] for it was a public sphere constituted by private people.

(5) Institutions of the Public Sphere

  • 32 Under the Stuarts, up to Charles II, literature and art served the representation of the king.
    • literally in the case of Shakespeare
  • 33 cafe & coffeehouse culture/masculine, salon/feminine in C17-18
  • In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; "opinion" became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence.
  • 36 interesting about the institutional characteristics of coffee-houses, etc
  • The domain of "common concern" which was the object of public critical attention remained a preserve in which church and state authorities had the monopoly of interpretation not just from the pulpit but in philosophy, literature, and art, even at a time when, for specific social categories, the development of capitalism already demanded a behavior whose rational orientation required ever more information. To the degree, however, to which philosophical and literary works ad works of art in general were produced for the market and distributed through it, these cultural products became similar to that type of information: as commodities they became in principle generally accessible. They no longer remained components of the Church's and court's publicity of representation; that is precisely what was meant by the loss of their aura of extraordinariness and by the profaning of their once sacramental [37] character. The private people for whom the cultural product became available as a commodity profaned it inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of rational communication with one another), verbalize it, and thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long could assert its authority. As Raymond Williams demonstrates, "art" and "culture" owe their modern meaning of spheres separate from the reproduction of social life to the C18.
    • literature (book) as commodity in print capitalism (Anderson 1983)
  • 37 ...the same process that converted culture into a commodity...established the public as in principle inclusive.... It always understood and found itself immersed with a more inclusive public of all private life, persons who - insofar as they were propertied and educated - as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion.
  • 38 [At start C18,] The masses were not only largely illiterate but so pauperized that they could not even pay for literature. They did not have at their disposal the buying power needed for even the most modest participation in the market of cultural goods. Nevertheless, with the emergence of the diffuse public formed in the course of the commercialization of cultural production, a new social category arose.
  • 39 [shift in composition of the public in music] Released from its functions in the service [40] of social representation [i.e., occasional display of princely power], art became an object of free choice and of changing preference. The "taste" to which art was oriented from then on became manifest in the assessments of lay people who claimed no prerogative, since within a public everyone was entitled to judge.
  • 40 Like the concert and the teater, museums institutionalized the lay judgment on art: discussion became the medium through which people appropriated art.
    • what about libraries?
  • 41 [the art critic] assumed a peculiarly dialectical task: he viewed himself as the public's mandatary [i.e., appointee] and as its educator.
    • suddenly, art couldn't exist without criticism
  • As instruments of institutionalized art criticism, the journals devoted to art and cultural criticism were typical creations of the C18.
  • 43 In the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian the public held up a mirror to itself; it did not yet come to a self-understanding through the detour of a reflection on works of philosophy and literature, art and science, but through entering itself into "literature" as an object.

(6) The Bourgeois Family and the Institutionalization of a Privateness Oriented to an Audience

  • literature, especially domestic, as a site of development of public-oriented subjectivity characteristic of the liberal bourgeois public sphere
  • 43 The moral weeklies which flooded all of Europe already catered to a taste that made the mediocre Pamela the best seller of the century. [!] They already sprang from the needs of a bourgeois reading public that later on would find genuine satisfaction in the literary forms of the domestic drama and the psychological novel. For the experiences about which a public passionately concerned with itself sought agreement and enlightenment through the rational-critical public debate of private persons with one another flowed from the wellspring of a specific subjectivity. The latter had its home, literally, in the sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family. As is well known, [44] this family type -- emerging from changes in family structure for which centuries of transformations toward capitalism paved the way -- consolidated itself as the dominant type within the bourgeois strata.
  • 45 [talking about public-facing "family rooms"] ...'This salon does not serve the 'house' -- but 'society'; and this salon society is by no means to be equated with the small intimate circle of friends of the house.' The line between private and public sphere extended right through the home.
  • 46 This space was the scene of a psychological emancipation that corresponded to the political-economic one. Although there may have been a desire to perceive the sphere of the family circle as independent, as cut off from all connection with society, and as the domain of pure humanity, it was, of course, dependent on the sphere of labor and of commodity exchange -- even this consciousness of independence can be understood as flowing from the factual dependency of that reclusive domain upon the private one of the market.
  • Thus it was a private autonomy denying its economic origins (i.e., an autonomy outside the domain of the only one practiced by the market participant who believed himself autonomous) that provided the bourgeois family with its consciousness of itself.
  • 47 ...naturally the family was not exempted from the constraint to which bourgeois society like all societies before it was subject. It played its precisely defined role in the process of the reproduction of capital.
  • useful for marriage plots: Even the contractual form of marriage, imputing the autonomous declaration of will on the part of both partners, was largely a fiction, especially since a marriage, to the extend that the family owned capital, could not remained unaffected by considerations regarding the latter's preservation and augmentation. The jeopardy into which the idea of the community of love was thereby put, up to our own day, occupied the literature (and not only the literature) as the conflict between marriage for love and marriage for reason, that is, for economic and social considerations.
  • 48 family as a key structuring ideology leading to the idea of "humanity"
  • 49 Thus the directly or indirectly audience-oriented subjectivity of the letter exchange or diary explained the origin of the typical genre and authentic literary achievement of that [18th] century: the domestic novel, the psychological description in autobiographical form.
  • 50 The relations between author, work, and public changed [based on the public, audience oriented subjectivity that originates in "private" domesticity]. They became intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically interested in what was "human," in self-knowledge, and in empathy.
  • The psychological novel fashioned for the first time the kind of realism that allowed anyone to enter into the literary action as a substitute for his own, to use the relationships between the figures, between the author, the characters, and the reader as substitute relationships for reality. ...The sphere of the public arose in the broader strata of the bourgeoisie as an expansion and at the same time completion of the intimate sphere of the public family.
  • On the one hand, the empathetic reader repeated within himself the private relationships displayed before him in literature: from his experience of real [51] familiarity, he gave life to the fictional one, and in the latter he prepared himself for the former. On the other hand, from the outset the familiarity whose vehicle was the written word, the subjectivity that had become fit to print, had in fact become the literature appealing to a wide public of readers. The privatized individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted.

(7) The Public Sphere in the World of Letters in Relation to the Public Sphere in the Political Realm

  • 51 [The transition] was one of functionally converting the public sphere in the world of letters already equipped with institutions of the public and with forums for discussion. With their help, the experiential complex of audience-oriented privacy made its way also in the political realm's public sphere. The representation of the interests of the privatized domain of a market economy was interpreted with the aid of ideas grown in the soil of the intimate sphere of the conjugal family
  • 52 The political task of the bourgeois public sphere was the regulation of civil society.
  • 54 The cliches of "equality" and "liberty," not yet ossified into revolutionary bourgeois propaganda formulae, were still imbued with life. The bourgeois public's critical public debate took place in principle without regard to all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with universal rules. These rules, because they remained strictly external to the individuals as such, secured space for the development of these individuals' interiority by literary means. These rules, because universally valid, secured a space for the individuated person; because they were objective, they secured a space for what was most subjective; because they were abstract, for what was most concrete.
  • 55 The ambivalence of the family as an agent of society yet simultaneously as the anticipated emancipation from society manifested itself in the situation of the family members: on the one hand, they were held together by patriarchal authority; on the other, they were bound to one another by human closeness. As a privatized individual, the bourgeois was two things in one: owner of goods and persons and one human being among others, i.e., bourgeois and homme.
  • 56 The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple.

A little context

  • Source
  • Frankfurt School
  • from rights to property gaining rights to free speech/press in c18 in the notably egalitarian coffeehouse culture (not hierarchical)
  • coincided with liberal political thought
  • it's bourgeois because it excludes poor and uneducated
  • this changes in 1830s with consumerism and industrialization; liberalism tries to save itself with the welfare state
  • power of the publishing industry leads to lowering of standards of literary journal free speech; publishing companies becoming beholden to the stock market
  • advertising recreates the conditions of lord-serf relations through new technology of psychology
    • mass media
  • does the Internet work as an effective public sphere? (Increasingly the evidence is "no")
    • traditional media still controls the debate
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