Session I: The Question of the Media and the Public Sphere: The Idea of the 'Public Sphere'
October 10, 1997
Session II: Media Systems and Technologies in History
Session III: The Concept of "Media" and "Mediation"
Session IV: Types and Forms of Discourse
Andrew Arato, NSSR/GF:
[. . .] The primary reason for recording our sessions is so that they may be referred to later. The secondary reason, of course, is we wouldn't mind being able to refer to it ourselves. And perhaps, although it is still undecided, we will do something with the results. One thing we didn't discuss so much last time at the organizational meeting, and I just want to announce it now, is that this group is not aiming at one enormous research project that deals with all the relevant issues in a systematic way. Instead, what we thought would be much more appropriate for us, given the methodological and disciplinary diversity among us, not to mention the geographical and cultural diversity, too, would be to aim at a series of projects and we may indeed ask different subgroups within this larger group to work with us on a variety of projects.
Just to mention one that was not talked about very much at the organizational meeting. Several of us here are interested in the new role of personality in media-created and media-mediated personality in politics. Internationally, this is a really significant phenomenon from Ecuador to Italy, to Eastern Europe and so on. We thought one thing we could do here is to produce an anthology around key personalities as linked to very specific national and cultural media systems. That is one project but this is not the project of the group. We are planning to sponsor, not just this year, but in a period of, who knows, four, five more years a group of projects of this type. Some of them more traditionally research oriented, some of them more qualitative, some of them more political, some of them less. It really all depends on this group and what form those projects are going to take. So, the first point then: things will be taped here for whatever use we want to make of it later on and for distribution to our international groups.
The second related matter this time, from a slightly different communications point of view, is that we want to have a single e-mail network into which all of us are linked. Currently, we have two senders that hopefully we can all pay some attention to. This is relatively new language for me but I'm slowly getting into it. MediaCor and LYYRA will be two sources from which you will be getting messages. Not just messages but papers for example. Most of you got some of the papers for today's session by LYYRA, I suppose. Shelley Hurt will be in charge of MediaCor@newschool.edu. When you see MediaCor that means that Shelley is communicating to you on behalf of the seminar and when you see LYYRA it means that Timo is. Hopefully, they will communicate the same messages or communicate with each other before they communicate to the rest of you. Those of you who cannot receive papers in electronic format as e-mail attachments please sign a sheet which Timo will send around. Provide us with mailing addresses where, in those cases, we can send you the same thing that everyone else is going to get through the electronic mail. If anyone during the process, I know this happens to me often, if anyone experiences difficulties of translation because of whatever computer language they choose to use or any other incompatibility, then please let us know that as well. Evidently, you will get the normal e-mail but the attachment might be a problem. In that case, let us know through the normal e-mail that you are having trouble to either MediaCor or LYYRA. Then you will get it either in a different machine language or you will get it in hard copy or both. So that's the last announcement concerning organizational matters.
Most of you, I hope, would have received papers, two papers through the e-mail. One by Nancy and one by me [Andrew Arato] and Jean Cohen. Nancy's paper has been available widely in different anthologies and I assume people would have seen that at least even if they didn't get the e-mails. But both papers were in the e-mail and hopefully people received it. If you look at the program, the way the seminar is now working, and this is very much under the impact of the work of our graduate fellows who pushed us in this direction and Paolo Carpignano who raised this issue as well, we have moved toward more abstract conceptual issues than we initially wanted to discuss. Originally, we thought that the concept we wanted to problematize was the public sphere and then we would go into empirical areas of varying kinds. As it turns out, the concept of media itself has to be equally problematized as Carpignano's suggestion demonstrates and we certainly are going to do that. But since we are going to handle a historical section which is in a way complementary to the discussion of the public sphere that will take place today. That will go first and then we will go on from there to a discussion of media as an abstract conceptual matter that has to be discussed. From there we will go on to more empirically relevant issues. For those of you who have not been here for the first session let me just mention. The general plenary sessions that you will see on the schedule are on the whole oriented toward problems of United States media. But what does not appear here and will be integrated into the larger schedule are the case studies which will be international and very broad in terms of international reach. So, this Fall's schedule, at the very least, will have to be completed by adding whatever case studies we will be able to discuss during the Fall part of this. There is so much on organizational matters and how we are going to proceed. You will get increasingly developed schedules as we go on.
Today, originally, we were going to have Craig Calhoun as the third participant and he was not really in the end able to join us. So, somehow spontaneously or whatever my name was included in the group. I will make only some introductory remarks and the bulk of the discussion will be by Jean and Nancy. As far as our procedure, these papers are distributed so we didn't ask anyone to come here and give a formal and developed lecture on the basis of either the paper or any new work. Rather the papers are available and the lecturers are asked to simply give introductory remarks that will help discussion. So presumably in about a half hour or so we can open up the floor to general discussion.
As all of you can see, by simply the way the seminar has been constructed, the concept of the public sphere is a key concept and in it media. 'Mass media' and the 'public sphere' are two key concepts as we now see. We are going to do in the case of mass media relatively soon the same thing that we plan to do in the case of the public sphere today. The aim of today's discussion is to introduce the philosophical concepts and the debates around them and not to deal with the media directly. Of course, no one will be restricted in any particular kind of way. But as far as I can tell the three of us will focus on that concept and perhaps to paraphrase Benedetto Croce "what is alive and what is dead." Croce asked that about a work of Karl Marx and that would be a worthwhile exercise also for some other time but today I think our problem is an easier one then that, well not easy in itself. What is alive and what is dead in the concept of the public sphere. Well, which concept of the public sphere? Well, obviously there are many but the way the seminar uses the concept has been introduced by Jurgen Habermas in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. A work that I think everyone in this seminar is to one degree or another familiar. This work was a milestone in the history of ideas. On the one side, of course it has been tremendously influential and when one asks the question in forty or fifty years from now what is dead and what is alive in Habermas one is going to refer to the book on the public sphere and not perhaps on many things that were written subsequently. Well, in any case, the work has been immensely influential also on his own work and on the work of many others. On its own it is also an important stage of the history of ideas. Certainly, many of its themes have been systematically discussed by Carl Schmidt in the 1920's and Hannah Arendt in the late 1950's and after. Another line of development of course is the Frankfurt School. In Habermas's own mind, this was a typical and classical Frankfurt School thesis which added another decline thesis to other decline theses. The decline of the individual, the decline of the family, the decline of culture, were familiar themes to the Frankfurt School even before the Dialectic of Enlightenment was ever written in the 1940's.
Well, the decline of the public sphere, the structural transformation means really on the whole the decline of the public sphere and Habermas introduced the book in that tradition. He didn't convince Horkheimer that the issue belonged to the tradition sufficiently well. He was banished to Marburg which was a place he could do his dissertation in. It's kind of amazing that this book was turned down for a higher doctorate in Germany, but it was, and we really don't know the reason. Maybe Horkheimer smelled a rat or more likely he thought of the book as too leftist because the place of exile was not a bastion of liberal studies but was a bastion of much more orthodox Marxism. Today, we have to agree with Horkheimer at least to some extent, even Habermas himself [. . .] are most likely to discuss the aim of this book not to renew or develop the work of the Frankfurt School but to somehow synthesize liberal and republican conceptions of freedom. The freedom of the ancients and the freedom of the moderns brought together in some way. This is not probably the way Habermas saw his book at that time, but because of his own subsequent work he, too, today would be much more likely, as we, to notice the normative promise that shines through the work rather than the sociological decline which dominates most of its pages.
What I briefly wanted to speak about is the relationship of counterfactual norm and complex sociology in this work because obviously there is a strong normative point of view that the work introduces, the ideal of free public communication and democratic decision making, which is based on the rationality which emerges from discussion among free, private persons which is the basic normative claim of this work. On a sociological level, what it tries to do is to explore the chances of the realization of such a norm through exploring cultural associations, institutional forms of communication and formal political processes of deliberation. Three important sociological domains play a role in this work: cultural associations, institutionalized forms of communication in media, and formal political deliberation. Now, a lot of Habermas's critics have pointed out that the counterfactual norm has never existed in history. This I think, philosophically speaking, is a futile exercise since counterfactual norms in that sense can never really be said to ever be fully institutionalized, their role in society and politics is rather different. But I think that the thesis of decline, nevertheless, suggests or seems to suggest that at some point the relationship between philosophy and sociology was a closer one and a more plausible one then somehow the one afterwards. Moreover, since Habermas is interested in institutions and in all institutions, then the question of the relationship between norm and institutional practice is always a problem, and one cannot really bypass the question of to what extent the sociological thesis, which was originally presented, could be sustained even in the context of the 18th century. Habermas's own answer tends to be, especially now, that that kind of institutionalization that occurred involved planting the seeds of rationality or the seeds of the normative promise in the real. I think [this] is genuinely a Hegelian thesis. But if that is possible how then is decline to be interpreted? Is the sociology of decline what is wrong or the stress on institutionalization that should be discarded?
There is certainly another line of interpretation which assumes the thing has never existed but has had important political functions nonetheless. This thesis was developed actually before Habermas's book already by Reinhardt Koselleck in his famous, Critique and Crisis, a book really on Enlightenment theory. This work also influenced, I think in some respects, Habermas's writing of the book but his thesis was really something rather different. What I think he argued was that concepts like public sphere and civil society are merely polemical concepts. Those who use them on the old regimes are really hypocritical critics who wish to weaken the role of the established power as the rule of the King as it were. The rule of the King whose head these critics actually hoped to and in the end succeed to chop off and whose throne they hoped to occupy. This thesis, I think for a long time forgotten, receives an interesting applicability given the events of 1989 and after which brought in a lot of places a kind of a revival of concepts like the public sphere. Places which people would not have first expected.
I want to focus, for just a minute, on the Hungarian case, which is especially interesting because Hungary, as far as I know, is the only place where Habermas's book the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was available in the 1970's. I think it was published in 1969 or 1970. I think it is funny that they published it and didn't publish any of his other works. I suppose all they saw was the critique of capitalist culture in it. Or perhaps maybe the person who published it knew exactly what it was and what it could be but could sell it to the censors as a critique of capitalism. In any case, the work was available and in Hungary the democratic opposition has been influenced by it either directly or indirectly. Miklos [Haraszti] perhaps at some point can address that. In any case, in Hungary especially the democratic opposition referred to its own activities as building an alternative public, a second public sphere, a public which will be a place of organization for a democratic opposition. They saw in newspapers as the press of the instrument as this type of communication. And they attempted to both create a new identity around the democratic opposition itself, and to influence the official publics at that time. A book which Jeffrey Goldfarb, in his second book, traced out also in the Polish case.
How are we to evaluate these experiments? Certainly, in some respects they contributed to communism's defeat. We don't have to worry about to what extent now but Koselleck [. . .] warning that in itself is normatively not beyond suspicion perhaps could be revived because to help chop the King's head off or to displace the King's throne are things which of course many people may want to do but can they make normative claims around this perhaps relatively elementary human desire. The reason for at least some suspicion is that upon the actual taking of power many of the new governments and their spokesmen, or spokespersons, were all to ready to announce that concepts of public sphere and civil society were a matter of yesterday. Reasons for not accepting Kosellek really negative judgment, even in this case, is indicated in that in many of these countries rather polemical and destructive media wars were fought subsequently where those who felt that after the democratic sovereign takes part in the public sphere, which comes only as its instrument, were certainly confronted by others who thought that the initial promise of democratic publicity could be represented also in a new democratic setting. Whether, the concept of the public sphere is merely a polemical concept depends on the outcome of wars like that. But what the outcome of wars like that is likely to be also depends on what the public sphere can be in developed liberal democracies. To which now many of the central European countries increasingly now belong. The debates which take place here are relevant there and the renewal of the concept there ought to indicate to us that the debates that are taking place there are not just intellectual matters but have deep political significance. It is now widely debated here whether the norm itself is defensible but it can be reconstructed in a plausible way. It is widely debated internationally whether the legal institutions of nations, of fundamental human rights, are sufficient and whether legal structures are needed which further make free public discussion plausible or beyond the relatively narrow foundation which fundamental rights alone can give such an outcome. And of course it is equally debatable, and is seriously debated everywhere whether a plausible sociological constellation can be worked out which could sustain institutionalizations such as the ones for fundamental rights and media regulations intend. All these three issues are extremely controversial: Whether the norm is defensible?; whether the norm can be institutionalized in a plausible way?; whether that institutionalization can be given sociological substance in such a way that the normative claims can somehow be satisfied. All these three issues, as I said, are hotly debated and fortunately the two people here who have agreed to join us have probably both made contributions to each area of this debate. So I will turn over the microphone to Jean Cohen to proceed further.
Jean Cohen, Columbia University:
Well, I already noticed one problem. I, it's probably my fault, but I thought the article that was attributed to you is the one in the book on the media and I see a slightly different version here. I noticed to my relief that there is a lot of overlap. So I'm going to present a little bit, basically it's okay because the concept is the same, but now you all are going to have to read the other article which I am referring to. The article which I thought we were discussing is included in a book, Rights of Access to the Media. And of course, it's given by a non-expert, namely me, on the media.
But what I thought I would address today, since this is what I was asked to do, is reconceptualize a bit the concept of the public sphere, drawing on Habermas but altering it somewhat. The point is that I still believe in its centrality to any theory of democracy and I think its crucial for any normatively-oriented and reform-oriented assessment of the media, and the role that they can or should play in a democracy. Since I still think that the public sphere is the normative core of the idea of civil society and any conception of democracy I think we need to sort of think about it again and especially if we have a media project. Media projects don't have to be normatively oriented, but I think they should be on some level. We could figure out how they work and how they construct all sorts of things but I think for at least some of us the reasons for doing this are still normative. So, in any case I want to argue for the importance of some kind of normative pre-understanding to the long-term project as a whole.
Anyway, I will recapitulate this very briefly. I don't know where we are in our understanding of the public sphere, so very quickly, the normative understanding of the civil public sphere, because that's what comes out of Habermas's work, the idea of civil public sphere. In first, public communication, arguments, efforts to persuade, displays by individuals without official status coming together on issues of common concern. So ideally, participation by discussion is universally accessible and inclusive and any topic can be broached and anybody can speak their mind. In civil publics, protected by sets of rights like freedom of the press, speech, assembly, personal autonomy rights, etc., discourse is on values, norms and policies [which] generate supposedly politically relevant public opinion. Legally distinct from the state, the civil public sphere and its members can develop a critical argumentative relationship to the polity. It is where the legitimacy of values and norms are supposed to be tested and generated. So in principle, discursively generated public opinion is meant to influence debates within political and legal publics proper, legislatures and courts (I'll return to that), and to bring under in a form of control the acts and decisions of the rulers and lawmakers. This is of course the principle of responsiveness that's supposed to be the definition of democracy. But that supplements simply the sanctions of elections. So, the civil public in a sense is not only liberal, in the Habermasian framework, there is a liberal model of it, but it is also democratic because it is a representative political public sphere [which] is supposed to be open to the influence of civil society and the issues and debates and opinions contested and developed within civil society [which] ought to be taken up in some form by the political public sphere. So the modern state on the ideal is to be checked, supervised and responsive to and controlled, not only through the rule of law, but the public sphere itself. Now, the civil politically oriented public, rooted in the communication processes of civil society, has supposedly this communicative conception to the legislatures and is an important mediation between the citizenry and its elected officials. In short, this communicative influence is supposed to keep elites responsive and as it were representative. In addition, through its generalized media of communication from print (which was the original, generalized media) to whatever we've got now, with TV and internet, the public sphere can mediate among the myriad, many publics that emerge within and across associations, movements, networks, etc.
So what should be clear from this analysis, and there was some debate over Habermas's original work but we are not doing Habermasology here. What should be clear from this conceptual analysis and also from the analysis of constitutional representative democracies is that there is a distinction between types of publics. Now this is just an analytic one but in any case we could say, most importantly, between civil and political publics, and there are various types of publics within each of these broad categories that function differently according to specific discursive and procedural rules depending on their purpose. So in general, civil publics, and these are of course multiple, as numerous as the networks, movements, associations and communications within and across them that animate civil society. Civil publics are relatively unconstrained in the sense that within them deliberation and expression can be quite free and open ended because or to the degree to which the pressures of decision making are minimal.
Political publics are at the other side of the spectrum within legislatures and courts (again this is something that we should discuss), involving not only deliberations but decisions backed up by state sanctions. So there are clear and specific tradeoffs that have to be made between the openness and duration of deliberation and compromises and the need to cut off discussion in order to decide. So as I said, this is an analytical distinction and most publics can be placed on a continuum between purely discursive and decisional, and more structured forms. My point is that we have to recognize the plurality of publics and the plurality of types because they should and do follow different rules. We should also however, follow Habermas's lead, later Habermas's, this is in much later writings, and continue to try and sort of think about this as an idea a non-specialized general public sphere. Just as a sort of an idea, a non-specialized generalized public sphere and counterpose this to the various expert and specialized publics including movement publics and the discrete and selective networks of communication that operate in the various institutions and associations of civil society. Because it is the possibility of communicating across these that is crucial to the normative idea of the public sphere. It is also crucial to any discussion of the media. Now, we shouldn't be asked to choose among liberal, agonistic and discursive models, that's the wrong taxonomy anyway, we shouldn't be asked to choose among various conceptions of publics or of the types of discourses that occur within them. They are all not rational debates, there are agonistic moments and manipulative moments and all of this. In order to have to choose between weak and strong publics we should try to identify the appropriate form and place between these in a highly differentiated society.
It is crucial to broach the question of the different types of publicity that are possible and desirable in different spheres of society. We should inquire into the different constraints and discursive rules and specific institutional domains. This has obvious relevance for any normatively guided research on the media. The main point being that we should be careful not to apply an impossibly idealized norm which would then lead us, if we have a brain, to descend into so-called realism and skepticism when we discover that the moment cannot be realized. So, that's the sort of general caveat. But on the other hand I do think we need a normative framework, something with which to provide a pre-understanding, with which to orient our investigations. Unless we are just interested in the facts.
Now, in the article, this one, I think possibly in here too I address four lines of criticism in the normative concept of public space. I'm not going to go through all of these but namely that, and actually Andrew addressed some of these, that the idea of the public sphere is constitutively exclusive of certain social categories, constitutively exclusive. The claim that parliaments don't satisfy the conditions of deliberation and persuasion through argument. The idea that state intervention destroys the space for the public sphere for civil publics, and the culture industry thesis, i.e., that the new medium of communication, (there are always new ones) turns social communication into privatized responses by privatized manipulating individuals. I am not going to reverse my answers to this, I'm just going to make a point about the first and the last.
So the first, is as to the claim of constituted exclusiveness. I would formulate this issue this way now. This, I think, confuses the concept with different conceptions of the public sphere, that's the problem. I didn't put it that way but that is simply the problem. Anyway, any conception and institutionalization is going to be exclusive but then the problem is that if you assume that the very concept of the public, well, as Andrew mentioned, this idea of the counterfactual norm is exclusive through a confusion of category levels. But at the same time, it is a dangerous argument and it is a dangerous argument because, I think, it diverts effort away from arguing for and fighting for a new and more just conception and from figuring out how to expand access and influence toward policy. So the constituted exclusiveness argument confuses the conception and leaves us no where as far as I'm concerned. I also argue that the way to carry this charge is to see and understand that the concept of publicity has to be connected with a multiplicity of public spheres. Not the exclusion of one, if you add them up, but in any case with the multiplicity of public spaces. And I think if we add insights from network analysis by some of the stuff by Emirbayer, I see he isn't here, but because he has a very interesting paper on the public sphere which brings this dimension in that we can see that publics are not only enclaved with specific associations or institutions, each of which might act as exclusions, but they are also interstitial so that a set of interactions on this network analysis approach that ease transitions between specific domains by decoupling actors from the pattern of particular relations and understandings embedded in any given network. So they serve as crucial bridging functions between network realms. The mass media obviously serve this function. They allow partial publics to understand themselves as part of a larger public and to enable distant interlockings to come into contact.
So, I won't go into this but my response to the culture industry thesis follows recent work from Habermas and insists that we have to start from the assumption of the two-sidedness of the media of communication and that it is an empirical question whether they make impossible anything resembling public communication or whether they don't. And I also think that following the Habermasian core, even though I'm not saying I would follow the normative guidelines he sets up, but we should try and attempt to articulate some sort of normative desiderata, but of course, a meaningful list would only be able to emerge from actual empirical, but normatively and theoretically oriented, investigations.
Nancy Fraser, NSSR/GF:
Well, I'm probably not going to be able to contribute to the media part of the agenda here because its not something that I have any particular expertise in. My work on the public sphere has really been intended, simultaneously, as a contribution to democratic theory and critical social theory. The media has not played much of a role in my thinking about it. I'm sure that's something that I can learn from you. The writing that I have done on the idea of the public sphere, first of all, is very firmly and specifically rooted in the U.S. context. That is in the context of existing institutionalized democratic constitutional regimes. Not in the context of transitions to democracy or anything like that. The key question has been what can a concept of the public sphere contribute to our thinking about our prospects for furthering democratization in the context of already institutionalized liberal democracies. Furthering democratization under two conditions: one, the coexistence of a liberal democratic regime with an institutionalized public sphere with cross-cutting pervasive axises of dominance and subordination in society and equality and, secondly, under conditions of cultural pluralism. And, of course the hard thing is that these two things, equality and cultural pluralism, are inter-embricated with one another in very complicated ways that are not very easy to disentangle. But I think if we are interested in thinking about the uses of public sphere theory, in thinking about prospects for further democratization, we have to think it in relation to both dominance and subordination on the one hand, and cultural pluralism on the other. I would say that something like this kind of agenda our aim is very much part of an ongoing, lively, scholarly discussion of the public sphere, certainly in the United States and probably elsewhere as well. And if I try to take up Andrew's question of what is living and what is dead in the theory of the public sphere I would say, and here I may be siding very strongly with Jean, is that what is dead in the certain discussion is . . . [tape ended] And what is living, I would say then is the project of trying to rethink the public sphere or to develop a critical conception of the concept of the public sphere that could further this agenda of thinking of the possibilities for further democratization.
So what kind of conception of the public sphere can function as a critical concept that could help us expose and test the limits of actually existing democracy in our context and identify the possibilities for further democratization. Now, interestingly this discussion that originated in, and was largely inspired by, Habermas's Public Sphere book, and by people like myself who were very much in that circle, more recently this discussion has been joined by another strong and interesting tradition namely that of analytic political philosophy in which the themes of public reason and political liberalism and so on are being widely debated as well. So there is an interesting stream of normative theory now from a completely different tradition that is starting to intermingle really with this discussion, and that Anglo-analytic discussion is much more limited, I would say, to normative theorizing and some rather undeveloped thoughts about institutionalization but very little discussion about the sociological dimension. Whereas the strength of the Habermasian tradition remains the attempt to make this kind of threefold integrated concept that Andrew spoke of that brings together the normative problems of institutionalization with the sociological.
Now the other strand that I think is contributing to a wider and more interesting discussion is coming out of people who study culture. And you could say that that was the very weak side of the Habermasian framework and is equally weak in the Anglo-analytic political theory discussion as well. But, I see that more and more people who one thinks of as really doing cultural studies, as opposed to sociology or political theory, are interested in this concept so there is an interesting confluence of streams here which are enriching. In part, the bringing in of the cultural dimension helps us gets a focus on something I think was already there but in the background in the Habermasian problematic of the public sphere. And that is the idea that public discussion is a medium in many cases, not only for opinion formation and decision making, but also identity formation and self-expression. So these things are going on at once. They are not separate. In the course of arguing and persuading one is also expressing and displaying. And from a political point of view it would be very important to understand the ways in which this almost subterranean dimension of antagonism and affiliation or solidarity and the antithesis of solidarity are played out in public discussion. In other words, this dimension of identity and culture. Anyway, I think that was a very weak and undeveloped part of the Habermasian tradition. So it would be very good if this seminar were able to bring in that dimension as well.
My own specific contribution or approach to this discussion was to try to reread the normative dimension of the claims of the so-called liberal political model of the bourgeois public sphere, as Habermas called it, against a certain kind of revisionist history of social movements, a feminist historiography and so on. Not in order to debunk the concept of the public sphere but rather to think about how we can refine it or elaborate a slightly different conception of the public sphere from the liberal conception that Habermas described that would take more seriously, I would say, than the liberal one did the notion of parity of participation; to me the key norm is something like participatory parity. If we are to think about genuinely democratic processes of communication, then we have to [acknowledge in] some sense that the interlocutors are really able to meet and interchange as peers. Of course, that was an important claim in the liberal theory of the bourgeois public sphere. That this was a space, a medium in which status in polities and hierarchies could be bracketed. Now, what does it mean to take that very seriously. Well, one thing is that it reopens all the old questions about the relationship between democracy and equality or social justice. Unfortunately, these questions are no longer front and center on the agenda of much of the democratic theory. Where there is, much to my mind, an ideological fetishization of procedure without attention in a critical way to the social background conditions. Which I referred earlier to the pervasive cross-cutting relations of dominance and subordination that can undermine genuine parity of participation. In that context, like Jean, I was interested in the plurality of publics, but not only in a sociological sense of cataloging the different publics that exist, but also thinking about the ways in which the plurality of publics could actually be seen as furthering the agenda of further democratization. So I was thinking in large part about the publics of democratizing social movements as aspiring very much to reshape general public opinion rather than to constitute a separate sphere but to put new issues on the political agenda. I guess for me the model, always in the back of my mind, as the most successful of these counter publics in the United States has been the feminist counter public. So putting new issues on the agenda, challenging or provoking a rethinking or reinterpretation of familiar phenomenon so that it becomes possible to reinterpret behavior that was previously seen as flirting as sexual harassment. These kinds of examples.
In addition, and I'm not at all alone in this from this perspective, I think that it is extremely important to desubstantialize the idea that we could know in advance what sorts of topics are suitable for public sphere discussion. There was a tendency in this liberal tradition as we find it, and very strongly in the Anglo-analytic tradition today, to think that we know that when we talk about public reason what it is as a matter of public concern and what it is not. I would think that the key lesson that one learned from the history of public spheres is that this is a matter that the participants themselves decide and they decided precisely through the process of contestation. It is not something that has an a priori definition that can be given in advance. So that was my third point.
I guess the fourth main point of my article again dovetails precisely with this distinction that Jean makes between civil and political publics; [it] seems to me to correspond virtually exactly with, if I understand, with my distinction between strong and weak publics. And there too, we are in agreement that this can't be an either/or choice but really thinking about what forms are appropriate and even the possibility of hybrid forms that are strong in some sense and weak in another. So that, in a way at least, will remind you of some of the main things of the paper of mine which you have read. This conveys my own growing interest in thinking about this concept as a part of a critical theory with an emancipatory intent.
The only other thing I'll add by way of a coda is that I have recently been thinking quite a lot about the implicit national assumptions that have, I think, informed, and one could now even say limited, public sphere theory as we know it today. That is I think we have implicit in this literature the assumption that the nation state is the proper normative container of public spheres. That the bounded societies that we were talking about correspond to states and polities. The assumption of a national language seems to be already built into the idea of public spheres that we inherit from the tradition. The idea that in political publics the state is the assumed addressee or ultimately where public opinion grew to the state. The assumption that one's fellow citizens are the proper interlocutors. You could go on down the line and see that these kind of nation-state assumptions have been built into the existing public sphere theory. And I include myself as one who presumed that somehow. It seems to me that this is something we need to think more carefully about. We certainly have a lot of interesting new scholarship about transnational diasporic public spheres, international elite public spheres, like human rights communities and social movement public spheres, like feminist movements that are transnational, and so on. So, and of course, if we think about the classic definition of what a public matter is supposed to be. That it effects everyone. Then it seems very clear that many of the topics that ought to be on the agenda of public sphere discussion, as the international economy, ecology and so on are necessarily transnational in their scope. So all of these issues, I think, raise problems about this assumed nation-state assumption and it seems to me that it is time, there is going to be a seminar like this, to reopen that assumption, and really think about how our conceptions would change if we took that seriously. And that we can't assume that anymore.
Paolo Carpignano, NSSR/Media Studies:
I would like to start from where Nancy left in saying that maybe we should start with problematizing the state. Maybe also what we should problematize is the notion of the media. I think that, and I don't want here to change the topic, but unfortunately this is my main interest so my contribution can only come from this perspective. My appraisal of this specific discussion that is being presented today could not be as effective if I don't start from my knowledge of what my field is. The first impression that I have from your presentation and from reading your papers is that there is a problem, I have a problem, with the notion, the way in which the term itself, media, is used. And it's not just a problem in the sense that you don't deal extensively with the topic. I'm not here to propose the study of media, mediaologies, be included in the public sphere but I'm trying to understand how, if we have to relate the public sphere with media, how we can do it without having a much more problematic, lets say, notion of media than, much more flexible than it usually appears, not only in your presentation and in your papers, but in much of the literature that deals with this question.
Media is seen as a totality and that wouldn't be the problem but it is also seen as a totality that is regulated by or analyzed by issues like access, ownership, concentration, monopolization, corporate power and so on and so forth. I was looking through your article Nancy and I noticed looking for media; I have great sympathy with the points that you are making, and of course I was trying to relate to what you are saying with issues that I'm more directly involved in and I couldn't find much there except for a reference to the concentration of monopolization. You mentioned at one point Dickens, and I have nothing against Dickens, and I have nothing against all the, in fact the majority of people in the media today that deal with these questions of access, ownership, concentration and so forth. And how to open up access, how to democratize, make media more suitable to the expression of the different publics that take place. But I have the feeling that this kind of approach, as important as it is does not provide us with the tools to really understand how media plays in the process of mediation that the publics themselves go through in defining themselves as publics. And that is why I'm interested in some of the remarks that were made today. That each issue, that cultural studies has for instance developed, should play and must play in this definition of publics. But I would add to that, it is not just a matter of enlarging the topics discussed by the various publics but also try to understand to what extent the media plays a role in the form in which this discussion takes place. So that it might be that along with the notion of concentration and ownership and access and so on it might be important to introduce notions such as spectatorship or interactivity, visuality. All issues which are debated today in media theory that do not only reflect the need to understand what a medium is and how a medium works but that by doing that we could also probably extend, if not transform, the very notion of what is public. And in that sense, I think that the understanding of the forms of mediation might introduce and develop not just the analysis between the public and the private but to what degree forms of mediation are to talk, for instance, about the "public sphere as political participation enhanced by the medium of talk." [quote from Nancy's paper] What does that really mean in a situation in which the medium of talk is only a part of the media landscape today? Does it mean that we have to establish a hierarchy of media communication? Where the talk among people is the strong medium and watching television in silence is a weak medium and not a public at all. It is in fact the colonization of the public that Habermas talked about or the Frankfurt School has so extensively analyzed. And if we look at the forms of mediation, the definition of the public through these forms of mediation, we might arrive at maybe a sociology of publics that is different from the traditional conception of publics in spite of all the addition of topics and cultural issues that Nancy referred to. But that these forms of mediation will strike at the very core of what publicity is. And if that's the case then inevitably that might bring to maybe a different idea of what the normativity of public is. If that normativity cannot only be based on participation in talking but implies also a definition of what the medium of talking is as well as all the other media that are changing the very notion of talking today in this [media-less, meaningless (?)] society.
Nancy Fraser:
I am very interested in the questions that you are raising and it seems to me that there are two different strategies that one could take here. One would be to literally redefine the notion of public to include things like watching television in ways that you are suggesting. The traditional strategy, though, has been to distinguish between a public from an audience. The question is whether from the point of view of democratic theory, with a kind of normative intent, one wants to preserve that distinction and maybe try to accommodate the points that you are making by having a much more nuanced account of the porousness. That is the ways in which sort of plural-talk oriented publics are always constellating out of and influenced by a whole set of other kinds of discursively, mediated practices such as [. . .] there are two ways to go.
Jean Cohen:
I also think this is a very interesting question to look at. What new kinds of media implied, indicate, and in turn inform the notion of the public. But I would have to say there is nothing new about this. We left that before Hannah Arendt but the whole notion of the public sphere is face to face communication. You have to be assembled directly there: the Greek model. The public sphere that Habermas is addressing is through a new medium and it's called print and you don't talk, you read. You then talk about what you read. The print does all this other stuff, granted it is really important to see how the change in the visual affects. But print portrays people. People act out their personalities there. There is the agonistic notion that was there in Hannah Arendt and has been discussed, not only through cultural studies: print constructs, etc. I am not saying that there isn't anything new about the media, there is something new. But I think we won't see it unless we see that we are talking about mass media that starts with print. That the real break is with face to face discussions and these new technologies. Then these kinds of technologies have the effects, very differential effects, which I think we need to look at, but I would also affirm Nancy's point. It is not so much a difference between a public and an audience, because print has an audience too, but people also talk about what they see on TV. So it's a question of what this means. The interactions are very complicated and multi-layered.
Jay Rosen, New York University:
Jean, you said that one thing that we could do is investigate what possibilities exist within the media for a kind of animation of certain ideals of the public sphere within certain conditions. Then you asked us to reimagine media so that it's not just this monolithic thing that just seems like one big Michael Jackson stage or something. Which I think is extremely important. One way that I have tried to do this is to distinguish, in my own work, between media on the one hand, and journalism on the other. And to see these things, not at all as equivalent but one stage in the language. But as increasingly host to one another. Media is this big institution for creating audiences and selling them to people and it's global and it's money dominated and all the other things that we say about it. But journalism is something else. It is a social practice within the media that is linked in many different ways to democratic ideals and ideas like the public sphere. Increasingly, the people who want to practice journalism, at least in the United States, in the media, are confronted with the very tensions that concern the critics of media from the outside. Hypercommercialization, a closing space to do serious work in, market pressures overwhelming professional standards and so forth. So, what I've tried to do in my own investigations in addressing journalism, and journalists, as against media actually take to them ideas about the public sphere and civil society and related notions like deliberative democracy and participatory democracy. And ask them if such ideas wouldn't help them regain some of their footing with the public, because a lot of people mistrust the media now. Wouldn't it help them regain, in some ways, an audience of citizens as against an audience of spectators. And wouldn't it help them in their battle against the media to survive by reclaiming more public support for what they do. Making it more useful to people. Making it more democratic. Making it more concerned with broad questions as opposed to narrow horse race technical kinds of concerns which have consumed political journalism. So, what I have found is that there is a tremendous interest in ideas about the public and civil life and how community life could work, and civil associations and so forth. But this does not exist within the language that we use to talk about it. Habermas is unread in American newsrooms. I know hundreds of editors around the country and I don't know one that knows what Critical Theory means or has read a page of Habermas. And yet, Habermas is in their newsrooms, in their professional lives, in their daily battle with the news media. Media as an industry. In that they are trying to preserve space for the public sphere in their work, in their staff, in their product against the very pressures that Habermas talks about in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
So what this investigation involves then is the creation of a third language. That is in between and sort of floats among two different discourses. The one that we just spoke here about, critical academic theory, about public sphere, democracy and so forth which ranges from Hannah Arendt to Dewey to Habermas, Benjamin Barber and Michael Sandel and lots of other people. That's language one. Language Three, is the professional journalists existing way of talking about these questions which is extremely impoverished. Although it does have the right words in it: 'serving the public interest', 'democracy', 'citizen', 'public service', things like this. That and the existing language of the craft which talks about stories and readers and politics. Language Two is the one that weaves between those two others. The language of ideals, norms and structural analysis of the public sphere on the one hand, and the language of the craft on the other, has been synthesized into a third language to which we gave a name, 'Public Journalism'. Some other people call it 'Civic Journalism' which is fine with me. It doesn't matter what name they came up with. These are all names for this intermediate language, this third language between political theory and public sphere theory: professional practice that people can take up and use as journalists in their battle with the media.
Jeffrey Goldfarb, NSSR/GF:
As the co-organizer of this seminar, I would like to note that I think we are in an extremely critical and difficult moment in our discussions. That indeed we come around this table with very, very different backgrounds and languages and different sets of expertise. I have so many things that I want to say and they are floating around at this point in such a disorganized fashion. I suspect that that is a common experience for many of you around the table. First of all, I am very pleased that Jay got to speak just before me because in fact, I think his work on 'Public Journalism' is an instance of trying to translate the types of theoretical issues that float around this table today, and other days, and practical action. I think it is very exciting if we can keep in mind, I think this enriches both practical action and theoretical reflection, keep in mind these two different languages. I noticed that as he was speaking that he starting using the term media in a vernacular sense as in the media as a synonym for CBS, ABC, Times Warner and so forth on the one hand. And then when I listened to Paolo I heard something very different. It's media as a kind of form of human interaction and a variety of forms of human interaction and how that constitutes the human world, the world of human making. Paolo's very strong, and I agree, contention, that we can't understand the world of human making unless we are consciously aware of the communicative media. So I just think we need to note that not that one is right or wrong but that the work is being used in two different ways. And actually they have profound implications for each other and maybe you'll want to call it Media I and Media II or something like that. So that's kind of a concern, a note that I think we ought to be aware. That when we use language we should be kind of aware of what sense we are using it in.
In Paolo's, in some ways I would like to think about this interaction between these two notions and the presentations we just heard. I was speaking with Martin Plot yesterday and we were thinking about publics together and we came up with a quick abbreviation of a world-historic conception of how three different types of publics exist, media-defined. There was the talk of public and the classical notion of public. The notion of public that Arendt valorizes. There is the literary public. The public of Habermas. And then there is the public that we have to study here. The public which includes the electronic media in its various forms. And the question is, keeping in mind, it seems to me a central question we face, is keeping in mind some of the things that Jean said at the beginning of her presentation; that if public is central to any kind of normatively and theoretically convincing conception of democracy. How does this new sort of public function in ways that support democracy and how does this public/audience function in ways that undermines democratic capacity. I think if we keep that in mind, that the issue is the relationship between public and democracy, that there is no necessary relationship between the new media and publicity. But the relationship has to be mapped out and even acted upon in ways that keep in mind the capacity for democracy.
Back to Jay Rosen. The fact of the matter is these theoretical conceptions that we reflect upon are given life, adequacy, based upon the actions of people who are out there in the world, beyond this seminar. In some ways around this seminar table as well. And it becomes very, very interesting, and this is something that I want to study later in the seminar, is to consider how people in the media themselves formulate an understanding of their position and act upon it in ways that either give this notion of public, this new public, in this post- literary public a capacity to form democracy or not. I think that people in the institution, I look at Bill Hoynes, the analysis of public television. The issue in his work has been, I may be simplifying it, but the issue of access and who gets to speak. But an issue becomes, I think, additionally central in whether there is room in something like public broadcasting, let alone commercial broadcasting, for something like deliberation. Is deliberation possible? Is it possible as people watch television privately in their living rooms? It seems to me that these are the central questions we want to raise. And it's the reason why publicity is an apt place to begin and why it then almost automatically fits with these two conceptions of media. Media on the one hand as a general concept for understanding, in some ways, the whole of human experience and onthe other hand, media as a set of institutions as an industry that functions in our society that presents people like journalists with a set of two constraints that they have to struggle to overcome. And they do so either successfully or unsuccessfully in movements like the 'Public Journalism' movement or movements like institutional struggles like the support for public television.
Carol Wilder, NSSR/Media Studies:
Another vote for problematizing the media but also in addition, not thinking about the media as monolithic. It is also reasonable to not think of it as something of an epiphenomenon as the [inaudible] said of structuralist variables. Then we have the media as transformative. It changes everything from writing to printing to the contemporary media. I think our friend MacLuhan had a point with that one that 'the medium is the message'. It gives you the sense of how transformative it is. And it's not just another variable that you can pop on top of a bunch of other considerations. It changes the way you look at everything.
I wanted to share something I thought of during this discussion because the internet, the new media hasn't come up too much but I'm sure it will as we move along. We were at a media management speech the other day by Jerry McClowski, who is our new media guru. He was talking about media markets so this is a little bit more on the market side. He said here are the traditional media markets, print, broadcast. [As she's saying that she's holding a standard size folder and waving her hand over it to indicate the space which comprises the traditional media McClowski discussed. She then drops the envelope and says this room is the new media. All of this is to provide us with an understanding of the scope of the new media, i.e., the internet will have on the future development of communications in a number of ways.] That's how much bigger it is in terms of consideration of the market. That gives you a sense of the thing. I know that may be a show off trick but it really struck me very powerfully. I truly believe that. So we are at a pointbreak of a new transformation and I would like us to think about, and Paolo can really help us with this in terms of his bringing these two pieces together; think of the media as not monolithic or pluralist but also think of it in an essentialist kind of way. Media as transformative.
Bill Hoynes, Vassar University:
I want to take up Jay's point about the relationship between journalism and media and something that Jeff had to say also. I guess in some ways this is self-critical; next time I will be speaking a little bit about public TV. My own interests have been on the kinds of commercial pressures on journalism. On the kind of work that people who work in news are doing. But one of the things that I have learned in the last couple of years, from public talks and reading works on cultural studies, the kind of work that Nancy is referring to, if we want to think about the ways that people experience their relationship to the public sphere a great deal happens through the media that is not journalistic. Non-news forms of media. The lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurred between journalism and what we might refer to as 'entertainment media.' In teaching undergraduates this is the big question they have. They want to think that everything is simply entertainment and they are not interested in journalism. They want to think that entertainment matters. And I accept that it does matter. It is one of the central places where forms of discourse takes place. So I guess the question that I have in my own mind is what is the relationship between the entertainment pressures on the news, as journalism as a practice, on the set of institutions of the profession, etc. Which is pretty much what I have looked at in my own work. But the other question, I think, is just as important: how is entertainment itself a kind of, or increasingly central place, where the public sphere functions are occurring? I am hoping that sometime we will take that up. I noticed that the next few sessions we will. But I think it is a challenge to us and to me not to simply assume that what really matters is the news and the rest of it doesn't matter. Even though I must say I still hold onto this idea that what matters is the news but I can't quite give it up. I'm trying to give it up.
David Plotke, NSSR/GF:
I want to comment briefly on the speakers which heads back toward the theoretical territory. I'll be quite brief about this but let me just raise two points. I think that the effort to get from Habermas to the modern media debate is heroic. There is one analytical problem that I think would require some serious reworking along these lines which is . . . in a federal political system with tremendous diversity of political instruments and a proliferation of regulatory instruments and a localized civic life-that the framework that begins with that division and then tries to work out from it runs into lots of trouble. I think that it can be reworked to take account of that but it is no accident that the majority of American political scientists would even reject the use of the term 'state' to talk about this country at all. And instead, what they would say is that we should use some term like 'polity' or 'political system' that would in effect prove half of what Habermas means by the public sphere and most of but not all what he means by the state. So putting that out as a problem that even more reworking would be needed to get from the starting point of the work that you [Nancy] were discussing and to an encounter with modern American media politics. That's the first comment.
The second thing is to comment on Nancy's point on equality. Nobody wants to say they are in favor of inequality, but the way you describe it when you presented it, and in your paper is if though people have lost interest in this and moved on to procedural matters. And you [Nancy] wanted to call their attention to the need to think about equality. And I think that actually fudges the issue that is at stake here. Which is routinely most of the recent repressive moves that one can think of vis-a-vis the public sphere in this country and elsewhere were made in the image of equality. That we need to, whether protect children from the internet or whether in some other national setting we need to shut down the bourgeois public sphere so that we can have a more equal public sphere. That the history of that, in this country and other countries, is so full of difficulties that I think what it does is make people who want to talk about equality as I would also want to talk, need to be much more precise about saying what kinds of inequality they think prevent the participation of equals in public discourse. The formulations in your paper, which you didn't exactly repeat in your talk, so I might be referring just to the paper, basically sound like any substantial inequality that has a systemic character makes it impossible for individuals to meet in a public and discuss because they can't bracket [certain factors which they are bringing forward]. I don't see a warrant for that claim in the analysis that you present or others. Yet, I also think there must be certain kinds of inequalities that have that effect. So it seems that the burden is on us in a sense to be much more precise and say this kind of inequality presents an unbridgeable barrier to an equal public. And this type of inequality is a bad thing for other reasons, it also harms the public sphere but it doesn't necessarily prevent us from having one.
Vera Zolberg, NSSR/GF:
I just wanted to say in connection with Jay and Bill Hoynes comments. Especially Bill's about the importance that we should not separate or try to make a strong separation between entertainment and journalism, including even public journalism. At least for analytic purposes. I am not saying that in reality 'Public Journalism' should fall into the traps of entertainment like some movements have done in recent years. But I thought I would illustrate this by an earlier moment in media and that is when in the 19th century one of the great forms of entertainment was the introduction of serialized fiction which was a device to sell newspapers in the mid-19th century. And one of the most popular novels that was serialized was in France and written by [name?] called, The Mysteries of Paris. It was simply pure entertainment but it got a huge amount of response from the reading public who not only read it and drove up the numbers of newspaper circulation by thousands throughout France. It was immediately pirated and translated into English. And was equally successful everywhere else. But in addition, it evoked a huge correspondence from the ordinary readers. And in the course of writing and corresponding the novel as it evolved in the serials responded to the readers. The man himself [author] then ran for government representative and was elected. As was another poet who wrote also and was very popular. In a way you could say that this is really demonstrating this boundary problem of entertainment and politics and the use of entertainment medium in order to have a rather important political debate. Both of these people, by the way, didn't stay in politics long because they weren't really interested in it and never attended sessions. Maybe that was not so good for democracy but it was anyway a step.
Elzbieta Matynia, NSSR/GF:
I would like to go back to the more general issue that this seminar is dealing with, i.e., the relationship between the three factors: the public, the media, and democracy -- and especially the role of the media in introducing democratic practices or in nurturing the culture of democratic participation.
There have been moments in history that illustrate with particular clarity certain media-related ways of mobilizing the public, or creating a participatory society. The spoken word played such a role when it was addressed to the largest kind of social gathering in fifth-century Athens: a theater audience. One can just imagine the impact of The Persians on the 17,000 Greeks watching it, with its strongly anti-war message, delilvered just seven years after the victory in Salamis, which lobbied for the war hero, Themistocles, before the vote would be taken as to whether he was to be sent into exile by a thankless Athenian citizenry or not.
I am talking about this because I want to make sure that we think about the power of the publicly spoken word, and about the deliberations concerning things social and political that can result. There are no direct democracies any more, yet Athens -- with its theater as a spacce where both civic responsibility and public opinion were exercised -- remains as a useful model.
There was another striking moment in more recent history when an emerging civil society -- private people acting on behalf of the public good -- expressed itself through print media. I am talking about a phenomenon which cannot be called simply samizdat anymore. When half of the adult population is involved in writing, printing, binding, distributing, or circulating more or less regular newsletters, magazines, or journals -- when every factory, school, or other institution creates its own independent system of information and forum for discussion , independent of the state printing houses and free from censorship -- we are looking at another moment when the emergence of an active, civic-minded public was facilitated by media. This is what happened in Poland in the early 80's, when countless individuals, acted as publishers, writers, printers and distributors -- and as private agents for the public good -- systematically tranforming the private into the public. And the primary medium for this transformation was a ragged sheet of paper filled with tightly printed and poorly copied -- but unrestricted -- information and commentary on the real world.
And I wonder now whether we are not entering a similarly paradigmatic moment with the Internet. The Internet, with its home pages and interactive technology has become another stage on which individuals can enter public space. The question is whether the Internet, as a medium, constitutes that kind of public space which can also -- as seen in previous models -- be conducive to democracy or further democratic culture.
Robin Wagner, Swarthmore:
I guess we are looking through our point of expertise. What I have always been interested in is what I would call the aesthetic dimensions of politics, political life, political discourse. And with that perspective in mind, I've been reminded in several of the comments, Vera's among others, of the need to really pay attention to the forms in which the various publics speak their talk or write their language. I was taken with the idea in the papers of the multiplicity of competing publics as a more reasonable and more fertile model than a sort of homogeneous model. But, I think within that, we really need to pay attention to the specific discourses that these different publics are speaking and not just to identifying these publics but asking the more difficult empirical question of how these discourses interact with each other and what effects do they have on each other. This gets back in some ways to the inequality questions. And I say questions because, I agree with David, that I don't think it's just an issue of equality (good) and inequality (bad) but I think there are certain inequalities that are reasonable and that a specific and empirical analysis of language use can help us ferret out. Just one example is the inequality between parents and children, between adults and children. I think there is a reasonableness to that inequality. That's the only one that comes to mind right now because I have some other points to make. I am reminded of Basil Berstein's fraught work on the elaborated codes and different family configurations based on one combination or another. So I would just like to urge us to try to be specific at many different kinds of levels. On the different discourses that are being spoken in terms of their interactions with each other and the how of it. The mechanisms by which they interact with one another. Also, specific in terms of time and events. I have found it impossible to write or theorize without thinking about specific events and I might claim that that is a flaw of mine but I think it helps ground it in the analysis.
Richard Kaplan, NSSR:
I was trying to think if there was some other kind of limit to the public sphere that was not totally themetized in the Arato/Cohen paper. And I was thinking that there is within the tradition of thinking about the public sphere, there is a kind of movement of decentering that originally arose, and is in some ways an animating force for us still today. Here's the way that it draws upon republican notions of participation and face to face dialogue as some kind of self-creation, self-governance through public arenas. But in some ways there is a more complicated, decentered notion of public speech that is necessary. Perhaps Habermas made the first move of moving the public from a governmental arena into civil society. And there is another move of a pluralizing of publics and Nancy is proposing that even the centered notion on the nation as a self-governing entity needs to be challenged. Perhaps the public sphere derives some of its problems from its republican heritage. I was wondering if there wasn't something else in civil society, in the idea, that is a more differentiated concept of civil society, of people partially rooted in solidarities, background traditions, cultural traditions that aren't immediately accessible. If there isn't a certain kind, [which] doesn't pose limits to the kind of critical reflection on the norms and ideas that one is thinking about, that are governing action. That those norms are always in some sense partially background but there is also some sort of cultural movement there and perhaps this connects to the idea of popular culture. Which in many ways is a dialogue about norms, is an appropriation, but it is not a very explicit, politicized reflective notion of public discussion. So I am wondering if this is possible as another move of decentering the public sphere which perhaps even dissolves strong notions of public reflection.
Nancy Fraser:
I guess the way to bring together the comments is [to ask] how to develop an empirically adequate way of thinking about public spheres in the current context which includes the new media and so on that doesn't lose the normative dimension and the link between the problematic of democracy and democratization. I can see us with this very diverse group of people pulled in two different directions. There is an understandable tendency for a really empirically rich and adequate account of what is really going on; and then there is another tendency that wants to really define these notions in a strong normative sense. To keep the democracy in focus, I think the key and trick to this seminar will be to figure out how to hold all this together. I can see it going in at least two different directions. I guess it seems to me, one idea to sort of draw out, as I think you just suggested, the implicit forms of discourse, deliberation [possibly] stretches it too much, but political discourse that are in things that we usually think of like entertainment and the commentary they provoke in everyday life. And draw out the political dimensions of that and think about the ways it helps construct political subjectivity of individuals and a sense of identity. All of that is so relevant to what people bring to more formalized deliberative contexts. So, I don't know my approach would be to sort of open up the lines between the cultural and political somehow but without losing the normative issue and asking that question that somebody, I think Jeff, brought up. In what sense are democratic capacities furthered and in what sense not? And I don't want to lose that sort of question.
Then on this question of inequality. I think there might be some kind of confusion between the notion of inequality and the notion of parity from my point of view the notion of participatory parity as the governing normative notion for thinking about public spheres and democracy. That is, I don't think we have a defensible notion of publicity if we give up the idea that the interlocutors talk to one another as peers. So then the question would be what are the various obstacles that exist to parity. And I completely agree that it is not required that everyone have the same income and it certainly doesn't require that children and parents, who I usually don't think are in a public sphere of deliberation together, maybe sometimes a simulated one as a clever tactic. In other words, and I don't claim David, where to draw this line but I'm convinced that the idea that we could insulate a special space of discourse from all the axises of dominance and subordination, systemic inequality in our society and there we could be peers even if everywhere else in life we are subordinate. I am convinced that is not possible. So we need to think about different, not only economic inequality but also issues of status and those aren't the same as issues of class. That has to do with forms of respect and disrespect and devalorization of some speakers. One problem of parity is what I thought of parity within a given public space. And then the other one that you brought us back to and rightly so, and it's in Jean's paper as well, is the problem of more or less empowered publics. Because we have publics that are relatively egalitarian but they are rather uninfluential and unsuccessful in getting the word out to other people. So there are many dimensions of which the problem of inequality impacts on this problem of parity within and across different publics. I don't know the answers but I know that those are key questions.
Jean Cohen:
Well David, after your annihilating critique of both of our papers I have to defend. If my intervention was read as society against the state, liberal public sphere against the state, forget it. It's not what I meant. I don't see much of the cash value in the distinction you made. I mean I don't think it makes a difference because since I argue that parliaments or legislators are publics in the state or is principle publicity in it, then the difference between using the word political system or state escapes me. I just don't see what the difference is. And I also would not embrace the old liberal conception of the public sphere. So I don't really see much of a difference here. And who really cares about Habermas here. We are talking about the conceptions. The only important thing is that he doesn't use the republican model and that's the important thing. There are other things on the table and we want to keep some of the moments of all of them. It is important to have presence, meaning actually having face to face communication, not mediated through words or pictures or anything else. And there are spaces for this; this is one. You would have to have a multi-leveled thing there.
But I find it very interesting this distinction between journalism and media. I also think Paolo's point about reflecting on the media is very important. I don't think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge in the sense of saying that the interventions that were made today are irrelevant to it. But I think it raises a challenge in another way. What was said about journalism and the media, I mean this is a dimension that we all must look at. But journalism is guided by, ideally, what: professional ethics. That's the crucial intervening moment. That's why these things can come together. It's all public journalism in that sense. It's professional ethics. I'm not sure, Jeffrey responded to this, but I'm not sure that entertainment is bad journalism. I just think it is different. I don't think the norms of journalism should apply to the other aspects of entertainment in the media. I don't think this is a zero-sum relationship between lots of entertainment and thinking, reasoning publics. I'm not saying that you said that but Jim Fishkin is someone who goes around saying that we need to have deliberative democracy on TV. I don't know if you've ever seen this stuff but there is these weird, totally artificially constructed publics that are supposedly realized in this ideal. This is one of the points I tried to make. I think we need to be careful about attempting to put the wrong model in the wrong place. That doesn't mean, on the other hand, that some of the principles of publicity won't apply. I mean it matters in entertainment what are the cultural images that are being projected to us, of us. So in this sense the visual matters a lot. It is an area of contestation. We know perfectly well that ways in which you were allowed to present blacks or women are no longer allowed. But it's not only that. This of course applies to many levels.
I think it is a really interesting and crucial issue to see what is the specific difference between specific media. I mean TV is different from the internet, obviously. This is crucial to the questions that Nancy raised. If you take the constructivist approach, one could take the constructivist approach and look at the effects, not axises but effects first: (a) of the media if we could figure it out just as a technology, I'm not so sure that could be isolated; or (b) of the technology, media and related to other powers. Money or whatever kind of other powers there are. What are the effects on constructing not just images of people, but publics. They do have an effect of course. You can't have a reading public without print. That's one line of consideration. I think we always have to pursue both. The other consideration is the axis issue remains relevant even to that. Not that everybody needs to run their own TV station but nevertheless there is a line of influence where certain things no longer become permissible. Because of public pressure these things are not completely cut off. On the other hand, the issue of the media, in the sense of an industry and journalism this is not it. I mean print was a media, as you were saying, you have to sell newspapers. So the problem of money and media is not a new problem but it takes a new shape and we should certainly look at that.
Andrew Arato:
Balzac discussion of journalism in Lost Illusions, would be a nice thing to read in the context of what you say. The difficulty is within journalism, I would say, if you take what you write seriously. It is not journalism against media but journalism itself incorporates a tension between public and heteronomy. So the struggle you are waging is within, so I think, it is very impressive. We should talk much more about it as we go on. [Arato is referring to Jay Rosen's 'Public Journalism' movement].
Just two issues: one issue is strong/weak decision influence. Nancy is right. She made the distinction between strong and weak publics in, at least, her original version of her article. And we follow from there. I think there is a difference between us and Nancy on the point that we argue that publics in the strong sense are not decisional. Strong publics are deliberative in the strong sense but they are not decisional and cannot become decisional. Whereas publics in the weaker sense, parliaments, courts and so on, where there are important restraints on the free flow of communication, are decisional. And that we are not ever going to be free to remove that distinction. I think that's a difference. I think that's a difference between the extent to which someone would stress direct democracy today. I think that all the attempts to institutionalize direct democracy as decisional are either attempts at aristocracy or they are doomed to fail. But they certainly are not democratic efforts that have a chance to succeed.
[Fraser objects]
I would say a second and related issue is of the national focus. I agree with Paolo and in my portion of our joint paper I stress civil society is now a global thing and that it has to be understood in terms of global flows and that means global movements and global communication and indeed it means global media, and publics and all the rest. But I think one has to be quite careful not to forget the other side. Namely, that to a very important extent decision making either occurs on the level of national states or conglomerations of states but it's not international quite in the same sense. Now the extent to which we want to maintain this tension between strong and weak publics, decisional and nondecisional, between civil society. I agree with David on this point that political system is a better term for this. But still the decision-making centers are of the political system. We need to not internationalize the discussion so much to forget that on some level decision making takes place still quite traditionally. Although, of course, there is international forums for decision making, but they are not really international. They tend to be regional conglomerations of some centers of power. And very often dominated by some states. Where decision making remains still national in this sense.
So these are the two comments. One is that we are in agreement that strong and weak have to be linked together but whether public in the strong sense can be the center of decision making. I don't know, we might not agree about that now but I think in your original paper that was the sense that that is the project, to turn the strong public in the center of decision making. This I don't think is possible but what does happen is that publics in the strong sense become international and thereby their cultural power can be very great but a cultural power that operates over a long period of time and cannot be translated in simple decisional terms.
Jeffrey Goldfarb:
I think before we close today we should thank our presenters
because they had the hardest task in presenting to this group because we
had no tradition of discussion. The other is that the reason why their
task was particularly difficult is because they presented their work and
then commented on their work and the location, the ground for the commentary,
was not clear to them. Now we have a seminar. I hope that what happens
is that we are going to read materials next time, distributed by Richard
[Kaplan] and Bill [Hoynes]. Their task will be to comment on their materials
in light of our discussion. Our task will be to read the material in light
of this discussion. So the problems that we have raised, but of course
left unanswered, are part of the work for the sustained deliberations of
this seminar. Until next time.
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