Jürgen Habermas Democracy and the Public Sphere Luke Goode Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI Goode 00 pre iii 23/8/05 09:36:30 First published 2005 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Luke Goode 2005 The right of Luke Goode to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2089 9 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2088 0 paperback Goode, Luke, 1971– Jürgen Habermas : democracy and the public sphere / Luke Goode. p. cm. –– (Modern European thinkers) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–7453–2089–9 (hb) –– ISBN 0–7453–2088–0 (pb) 1. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. 2. Sociology––Methodology. 3. Democracy. 4. Mass media––Political aspects. 5. Political participation. 6. Political sociology. 7. Internet––Political aspects. I. Title. II. Series. HM585.G66 2005 302.23––dc22 2005014366 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England Goode 00 pre iv 23/8/05 09:36:30 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Excavations: The History of a Concept 3 The bourgeois public sphere 4 The fall of the bourgeois public sphere 14 Critical publicity and late capitalism 25 2 Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 29 Lessons from history 29 Equality and emancipation 34 Rationality and embodiment 48 3 Reconfi gurations: The Public Sphere since Structural Transformation 56 Scientism and politics 56 System, lifeworld and communicative action 62 The politics of the Other 71 4 Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 89 The fall of the agora 90 A public sphere in bits? 106 5 Unfi nished Projects: Refl exive Democracy 120 Refl exive agency 122 Risk and refl exivity 128 Revisiting the public sphere 133 Notes 142 Bibliography 157 Index 163 Goode 00 pre v 23/8/05 09:36:30 Acknowledgements There are many people – friends, colleagues, critics and inspirational teachers – who have helped to shape this book in one way or another. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the following people: Matt Connell, Simon Cross, Douglas Hoey, Conrad Lodziak, Steve Matthewman, Gabe Mythen, Nick Perry, Richard Ronald, Steve Sobol, Lloyd Spencer, Catherine Stones, Jeremy Tatman, Steve Taylor, John Tomlinson, Nabeel Zuberi. Jayne, Charis and Agatha have been invaluable sources of support, patience and distraction. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my old man who once made the mistake of lending me an intriguing little book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: this little book is dedicated to his memory. vi Goode 00 pre vi 23/8/05 09:36:30 Introduction There is a paradox in the reception of the Habermasian idea of the public sphere. On the one hand, it seems like well-trodden territory. In fact, it is now increasingly dismissed as idealistic, Eurocentric and unwittingly patriarchal. On the other hand, it continues to be routinely invoked in debates around democracy, citizenship and communication. There’s a certain parallel in the stubborn refusal of ‘ideology’ to disappear from the lexicon of social thought, despite the intellectual ‘passing’ of Marx, or the stickiness of the ‘unconscious’ long after the Freudians left the building. This book is motivated at least in part by a sense that when a key concept or intellectual fi gure is declared passé, the time is ripe for a reappraisal. What has Habermas contributed to current thinking? And if we want to understand the legacy of Habermasian thinking, we should at least try to churn up this well-trodden ground to see if there are any hidden valuables to be unearthed. The book has several aims. First, it offers the reader an introduction to the concept of the public sphere as it has been developed by Habermas. Although it does not provide a comprehensive overview of every aspect of Habermas’s critical theory, it does situate the idea of the public sphere, which occupied him early on in his career, in the context of subsequent developments in his thinking. Critical commentaries on Habermas have often treated the public sphere as a discrete topic. I hope to show that it remains fundamental to his entire intellectual project, even where it receives less explicit attention. Second, I offer a critical but sympathetic reading of Habermas. Because I want to focus on sorting those insights that are most valuable in the context of contemporary debates from those that are not, I adopt what many may see as a skewed approach. I discuss a range of criticisms and secondary commentaries on Habermas, but I give most attention to those critics who share Habermas’s concern with the problems of democracy, communication and citizenship. Unlike many commentaries, I do not devote a large amount of space to the great ‘theory wars’ that separate Habermas from opponents such as Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, for whom Habermas is scarcely even asking the right questions. In taking this approach, I hope to be able to provide a productive ‘internal 1 Goode 01 chaps 1 23/8/05 09:36:18 2 Jürgen Habermas critique’ of Habermasian thinking. But, of course, there is also plenty of insight to be lost in such an approach. Moreover, though we should be wary of artifi cial distinctions, this book engages Habermas primarily as a social, political and communications theorist, more so than as a formal philosopher. Third, I aim to turn the Habermasian concept of the public sphere outwards. As well as discussing what Habermas has said and what he may have meant by it, I try to suggest ways in which we might take the idea of the public sphere forward, intellectually and politically. Although the book takes only a few very tentative steps in this direction, it does make some suggestions on how the concept of the public sphere might be put to work in the future. The first chapter looks closely at Habermas’s classic work of historical study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The chapter is an excavation of an excavation. Chapter 2 considers some of the critical responses that Structural Transformation has provoked and asks what we can learn from them. Chapter 3 looks at some of the subsequent theoretical manoeuvres undertaken by Habermas and asks how they might recast our understanding of the public sphere. The fi nal two chapters focus on that task of turning the Habermasian public sphere outwards. Chapter 4 looks at the role of the media (both media institutions and media forms) in the discourse of the public sphere. It argues that mediation, and not merely communication, must be taken seriously when we are theorising the public sphere. In doing so, it touches on the signifi cance of new media and ‘digital culture’. Finally, Chapter 5 explores the concept of ‘refl exivity’ and argues that this must be at the core of a ‘politics of the public sphere’. Goode 01 chaps 2 23/8/05 09:36:19 1 Excavations: The History of a Concept In this book I hope to make the case for seeing The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere as a work that still resonates with some of the urgent questions facing the ‘democratic project’ today. In privileging this work and the category ‘public sphere’, I’m suggesting that if we want to enrich our grasp of the problems facing the democratic imagination, we would do well to read Habermas’s later works through the lens of Structural Transformation and its key concerns. Structural Transformation invites us to refl ect closely on the nature of public deliberation and the democratic process at a time when the rhetoric of ‘citizenship’ has become such common currency – especially, though not exclusively, in Western democracies – against a backdrop of striking developments: increasingly sophisticated political marketing techniques; changes in media culture that implicate the very institutions which aspire to connect citizens with the powerful; an ascendant politics of ethnicity and ethno-nationalism which can sometimes displace and sometimes appropriate the discourse of citizenship; and patterns of political behaviour, such as staggeringly low voting rates, which highlight widespread disaffection with the offi cial institutions of democracy, especially in the younger generations. A historicist reading of Structural Transformation could read off the present and future in terms of an unfolding historical dialectic: either a negative dialectic in which the potential for a truly democratic and rational public sphere has been irreversibly squandered, or a positive dialectic that gestures towards a radical–democratic endgame in which the rationality of the undemocratic bourgeois public sphere and the democracy of the irrational mass society might fi nally be reconciled. But what I propose instead is to read Structural Transformation as the sort of encounter between theory and history that offers a useful counterweight to the drift into abstraction characteristic of more recent critical theory. It is this kind of historically grounded attention to the evolution of discourses, practices and institutions that, I suggest, does more to energise and stimulate our thinking about democracy than either a philosophically abstract preoccupation with 3 Goode 01 chaps 3 23/8/05 09:36:19 4 Jürgen Habermas the relationship between law, morality and reason, or an institutionally abstract preoccupation with constitutional norms and human rights, both of which have been at the centre of the Habermasian project in recent years.