Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Quotations assembled by Laura Mandell <http://miavx1.muohio.edu/~mandellc/index.html>

Definitions:

Representative Publicity:
I. In Feudal society-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. . . . [T]he manorial lord . . . . displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some `higher' power. . . . Representation in the sense in which the members of a national assembly represent a nation or a lawyer represents his clients had nothing to do with this publicity of representation inseparable from the lord's concrete existence, that, as an `aura,' surrounded and endowed his authority" (7). "The staging of the publicity involved in representation was wedded to personal attributes such as insignia (badges and arms), dress (clothing and coiffure), demanor (form of greeting and poise) and rhetoric (form of address and formal discourse in general)--in a word, to a strict code of `noble' conduct" (8). "For representation pretended to make something invivisble visible through the public presence of the person of the lord: `something that has no life, that is inferior, worthless, or mean, is not representable. It lacks the exalted sort of being suitable to be elevated into public status, that is, into existence. Words like excellence, highness, majesty, fame, dignity, and honor [me: "eminence"] seek to characterize this peculiarity of a being that is capable of representation'" (quoting Carl Schmidt's definitions of "representative publicity" in Verfassungslehre; Habermas 7). II. In court / Renaissance to Baroque society-"Under the influence of the Cortegiano the humanistically cultivated courtier replaced the Christian knight. The slightly later notions of the gentleman in Great Britain and the of the honnte homme in France described similar types. Their serene and eloquent sociability was characteristic of the new `society' centered in the court. The independent provincial nobility based in the feudal rights attached to the land lost its power to represent; publicity of representation was concentrated at the prince's court. The upshot of this was the baroque festivity in which all of its element were united one more time, senstationally and magnificently." (9) "Like the baroque palace itself, . . . in which the festivities were staged, the castle park permitted a courlty life sealed off from the outside world. However, the basic pattern of the representative publicness not only survived but became more prominent. . . . [T]he people were not completely excluded: they were ever present in the streets [looking on at the festitivities.] Representation was still dependent on the presence of the people before whom it was displayed. Only the banquets of bourgeois notables [took] place behind closed doors. . . . In the etiquette of Louis XIV concentraton of the publicity of representation at the court attained the high point of refinement" (9). III. Change from representative publicity to the public sphere: "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" (9). "The reduction in the kind of publicity involved in representation that went hand in hand with the elimination of the estate-based authorities by those of the territorial ruler created room for another sphere known as the public sphere in the modern sense of the term: the sphere of public authority. The latter assumed objective existence in a permanent administration and a standing army" (18). Between the 16th and the 18th c.s, "`Private' designated the exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus; for `public' referred 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" (11). "The so-called freedom of religion historically secured the first sphere of private autonomy; the /

Church itself contied to exist as one coporate body among others under public law. The first visible mark of the analogous polarization of princely authority was the separation of the public budget from the territorial ruler's private holdings. . . . Out of the estates, finally, the elements of political prerogative developed into organs of public authority: partly into a parliament, and partly into judicial organs" (1112). IV. In bourgeois, civil society-"Only after national and territorial power states had arisen on the basis of the early capitalist commercial economy and shattered the feudal foundations of power could this court nobility develop the framework of a sociability . . . into that peculiarly free-floating / but clearly demarcated sphere of `good society' in the eighteenth century" (10-11). "The nobleman was authority inasmuch as he made it present. He displayed it, embodied it in his cultivated personality . . . . [As Bourgeois society came into existence,] the `lord' who was `public' by virtue of representation, was stylized into the embodiment of gracefulness, and in this publicity he ceremoniously fashioned an aura around himself. . . . [The traditional concept of] `public person' . . . . was immediately modified into the `cultured personality.' . . . [T]he nobleman . . . served as something of a pretext for the thoroughly bourgeois idea of the freely self-actualizing personality . . . . [T]he bourgeoisie . . . , by its very nature, could no longer create for itself a representative publicness . . . . The nobleman was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced: . . . . `The former has a right to seem: the latter is compelled to be, and what he aims at seeming becomes ludicrous and tasteless' [qtg. Goethe]. The representative bearing that the nouveau riche wanted to assume turned into a comical make-believe" (13). "Now continuous state activity corresponded to the continuity of contact among those trafficking in commodities and news (stock market, press). Public authority was consolidated into a palpable object confronting those who were merely subject to it and who at first were only negatively defined by it. . . . `Public' . . . was synonymous with `state-related'; the attribute no longer referred to the representative `court' of a person endowed with authority but instead to the funcitioning 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 to `police'; the private people under it, as the addressees of public authority, formed the public" (18). The change involves "the objectification of personal relations of domination" (17). "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" (18). Elements of the private sphere ("the privatization of the process of economic reproduction") become "publicly relevant" because "The economic activity that had become private had to be oriented toward a commodity market that had expanded under public direction and supervision" (19). V. Criticism "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. . . . Because, on the one hand, the society now confronting the state clearly separated a private domain fromt he 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 challenge 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" (24). Change in the press: The Prussian King regulated the Hallenser Intlligenzblatt from 1729 on: "In general `the scholars were to inform the public of useful truths.' In this instance the bourgeois writers still made use of their reason at the behest of the territorial ruler; soon they were to think their own thoughts, directed against the

authorities" (25). the situation early in the 18thc. in France and Great Britain: "The inhibited judgments [via the dictum that a private person has no right to pass judgment on government] 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 opin- / ion. The publicum developed into the public, the subjectum into the [reasoning] subject, the receiver of regulations from above into the ruling authorities' adversary" (25-26). VI. Definition of "public sphere": "The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people 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 (ffentliches Rsonnement). In our [German] usage this term (i.e., Rsonnement unmistakable preserves the polemical nuances of both sides: simultaneously the invocation of reason and its disdainful disparagement as merely malcontent griping" (27). [Like the English word, "Reflection" = thought; satire.]
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Enlightenment or Postmodernism
During the period of the Eighteenth century known as the Enlightenment, many intellectuals began to conceive of the world in a new manner. Spurred by the rise of science, philosophers came to see nature as an entity which man could actively control through technology and reason. Additionally, this confidence coincided with a rise in the stature of the self as an autonomous being, free to shape his or her personal world. Thus the possibility for emancipation from institions like government, religion and commerce, which had suppressed the public for centuries, lay within the free and rational individual. Since the Enlightenment, reliance upon reason has "held that modern science and technology contributed to the larger... project of greater economic and political freedom in a democratic polity (Ess 234 <bib.htm>)." With the advent of virtual spaces such as the Internet, however, Enlightenment conceptions of the autonomous subject have been placed in juxtaposition with more fluid constructions of the self. This critique began with postmodernists like Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard, who claim that individuals are not inherently free, but rather defined by societal forces. The postmodern stance heralds many of the arguments which have arisen from new technologies. Like postmodernism, electronic communications constitute the subject in different ways than do modern institutions. On the Internet markers of gender, race and class <marg.htm> lose their importance because discourse in this medium is disembodied. At the same time, technology also can configure mutiple representations of the self. In a virtual space, appearance replaces the real. Indeed, the manipulation of texts on the Internet recalls the postmodern idea of 'simaculcrum'- there exists no concrete essence apart from that which is seen or reproduced. The concept of 'authority' then comes to lack relevance and the world is viewed in terms of a non-hierarchical social structure <antih.htm>. While postmodernists warn of technology as a possible instrument for control and suppression, new forms of bi-lateral communication on electronic networks can subvert what Lyotard calls the "metanarrative"- a Western, linear version of history which claims to be the only one story which merits attention. Lyotard, describes modern culture's "incredulity toward metanarratives" as a definition of society's inability to form a coherent understanding of its current conditions. Instead, he champions the

ability of smaller narratives, such as those belonging to marginalized groups <marg.htm>, to undermine Western hegemony. Expansive electronic networks further the telling of such alternative narratives by undermining the primacy of the original author of a text. The Internet also places the tools of cultural production into the hands of people who lie outside of traditional institutions. Yet while postmodernism advocates the same undermining of authority that electronic networks make possible, it also runs the risk of relying too heavily on fragmentary conceptions of the self and communication. Adherence to a relativistic view of communication threatens to nullify any possible goal of discourse. Jurgen Habermas therefore, finds it necessary to reinstill Enlightenment theories of individuality and freedom to the public sphere <publics.htm> of discourse in order create a participatory democracy <partic.htm>. Like Lyotard's observation of the decline of the metanarrative, Habermas claims that "the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness is exhausted." The time has now come for us to create a political realm in which we can move toward "paradigm of mutual understanding (Philosphical Discourse, 296 <bib.htm>)."

Sources for Habermas and His Work

Habermas was a student of Theodor Adorno, and a member of the Frankfurt School <frankfurt.html> of critical theory. He is perhaps the last major thinker to embrace the basic project of the enlightenment, a project for which he is often attacked. When compositionists and rhetoricians pay attention to Habermas, it is usually to pair him in a theoretical debate over issues surrounding postmodernism. Foucault <foucault.html>, Gadamer, Lyotard, etc. are often set up as his opponents. Yet the debate always seems to be a racasting of the debate between Kant and Hegel. Habermas is decidedly Kantian in his dedication to reason, ethics, and moral philosophy. At the center of Habermas's controversial project, as it is outlined in his written work <bibliography.html>, are the contested and problematic areas of universality and rationality. Of his theoreitcal intent and his debt to important German sociologists like Marx and Weber, Jefferey Alexander notes: To restore universality to critical rationality and to cleanse the critical tradition from its elitism, Habermas seeks to return to key concepts of Marx's original strategy ("Habermas and Critical Theory" 50). In many ways, Habermas is engaged in the restoration of philosophical and sociological work which has been descredited or harshly criticised. Among these are theorists such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Lukacs, Sigmund Freud, G. H. Mead, and Talcott Parsons (Foss, et. al. 241) as well as contemporary critics such as Stephen Toulmin and Jean Piaget. Habermas has no shortage of critics. His work is routinely criticized by postmodernists, poststructuralists, and <feminists.html>. A particularly damning dismissal of the political nature of contemporary critical theory is given by Edward Said <said.html>, who uses Habermas as a spokesman for theory's anti-political stance.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

Habermas's most complete exploration of the notion of the public sphere is found in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (1989). Central to many theorists in the area of print culture, the public sphere is further elaborated by Habermas in Volume Two of The Theory of Communicative Action as he discusses the distinction between lifeworld and system. As Johanna Mehan notes: This distinction between public and private parallels, but is not identical to, the distinction he draws between system and lifeworld. On the one hand, action in the modern world is coordinated by sytems which function according to means-end rationality; the market is a paradigmatic example of such a system... On the other hand, actions are coordinated primarily by communicatively mediated norms and values, and by the socially defined ends and meanings

which constitute the fabric of the lifeworld (6-7). Mehan further states that Habermas sees the differentiation and structure of the public and private spheres as "essential to the character of modernity" (Femnists Read Habermas 6).

Habermas and Communication Theory

Habermas's main contribution to communication theory is the elaborate theoretical apparatus he described in the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action, published in 1981. Power <power.html> is a key concept in Habermas's conception of communicative rationality. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas note that the publication of this work, "brought to a provisional conclusion the intellectual efforts of twenty years of reflection and research." They see the large work by Habermas as adressing the following four general themes: a meaningful concept of the rationality of actions the problem of an appropriate theory of action a concept of social order the diagnosis of contemporary society Honneth and Joas argue that the basic idea behind the two volume treatise is "that an indestructable momnet of communicative rationality is anchored in the social form of human life." This thesis "is defended in this book by means of a contemporary philosophy of language and science, and is used as as the foundation for a comprehensive social theory" (Communicative Action: Essays on Jrgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action). In Moral Consciousness and Communicatative Action Habermas defines the concept of communicative action: Communicative action <communicative.html> can be understood as a circular process in which the actor is two things in one: an initiator, who masters situations through actions for which he is accountable, and a product of the transitions surrounding him, of groups whose cohesion is based on solidarity to which he belongs, and of processes of socialization in which he is reared (135). Central to this social notion of language and human reason is the concept that Habermas terms validity claims <practical.html>, the idea by which he connects speech acts to the idea of rationality.

Discourse Ethics
Habermas defines discourse ethics as a "scaled down" version of Kant's categorical imparative--a kind of moral argumentation <argument.html>. Discourse ethics is built from Habermas's understanding of constructivist models of learning. <learning.html> He remarks that discourse ethics is: deontological cognitivist formalist universalist The primary sticking point for all of us in this class will be the last category, the univeral or what Habermas refers to as U. Central to his concept of discourse ethics is the domain Habermas terms practical discourse <practical.html>, which owes much to the work of Stephen Toulmin and the "informal logic" movement in philosophy.

The Debate over Modernity

When he was awarded the Adorno Prize in 1980, Habermas wrote his important essay "Modernity--An Incomplete Project." In his introduction to the essay, Thomas Docherty notes:

The occasion of the essay aligns Habermas with Adorno; yet the content of the lecture aligns him with precicely that rationalist tradition in Enlghtenment of which Adorno was enormously sceptical. Here, as in his later work of the 1980s, Habermas sees the possibility of salvaging Enlightenment rationality. The project of modernity done by eighteenth-century philosophers 'consisted of their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic', their aim being, according to Habermas here, 'the rational organization of everyday social life.' (Postmodernism 95). Habermas appears to be the only contemporary theorist willing to defend the tradition of modernity, and he is frequently called to do so in debates with theorists like Lyotard, Gadamer, and Foucault. <foucault.html> As Victor Vitanza's English 5352 syllabus <http://www.uta.edu/english/Z/_777.html> demonstrates, rhetoricians often cast Habermas as the modernist in a debate over modernity. His course, entitled "Major Figures in Rhetoric: Habermas, Lyotard, and the problem of the Ethical Subject," explores the problems of ethics and postmodernism.