Defense of Modernity?
Construed as a narrative of modernity, Strukturwandel reads as a tale of the rise of the public sphere (against great political obstacles posed by censorship and other forms of political despotism practiced by the absolutist state); its triumph (in the vibrant institutions of a free press, clubs, philosophical societies, and the cultural life of early liberal society, and through the revolutionary establishment of parliamentary and democratic regimes); and its fateful decline (under the pressures of a late capitalist economy and state). In short, a sorrowful voyage from reason to mediatized consumption.4 Are we then in the company of another “dialectic of Enlightenment” ? Has the once autonomous and rational subject ended life as a candidate for Foucault’s disciplinary society of total surveillance? Is this an early anticipation of Habermas’s plaint against the “colonization of the lifeworld”; a Marxist protest against capitalist economic and state organization; or perhaps a civic republican defense of virtue against the evils of commerce?
Surely, Habermas shares with others a dark outlook on modern public culture. Those who would characterize him as a blind and bland proponent of modernity therefore risk misunderstanding the complexity of his vision and the novelty of his attempt to sketch an historically saturated discourse theory of society.5 Nor is language in some abstracted sense Habermas’s sole object of concern. Rather, he proposes to investigate the political effects of a specific discourse on society, along with the institutional (that is, social and cultural) preconditions for this discourse to have come into existence in the first place. By beginning with an etymology of the terms public and private, Habermas signals from the outset the inherited ideological weight of these categories. He observes how the vocabulary of Greek political categories stamped by Roman law characteristic of the Renaissance civic republican tradition continues to structure political scholarship on the topic of public life even in the late twentieth century.6 Inviting his readers to examine their own unacknowledged premises about public and private matters, Habermas proceeds to a critical reconstruction of the category of the modern bourgeois public sphere by way of its immediate historical antecedents.
Just as feudal authority could not be made to fit the Roman law contrast between private dominion (dominium) and public autonomy (imperium), so too according to Habermas medieval “lordship was something publicly represented. This publicness (or publicity) of representation in late medieval society was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute.” Hence, the lord “displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some sort of ‘higher’ power.”7 Habermas calls attention to the features of visibility, display, and embodiment; that is, the “aura” that surrounded and endowed the lord’s
concrete existence. He observes that something of this legacy is preserved in recent constitutional doctrine where representation is deemed to be a public, never a “private” matter. Moreover, these medieval features of staged publicity are fundamental to the “re-presentative” public sphere of absolutist society within early modern territorial nation-states. The “re-presentative” public sphere was not a sphere of political communication, nor did it require any permanent location. Rather it was marked by the staged performance of authority, displayed before an audience, and embodied in the royal subject. After the Renaissance, aristocratic society also came less to represent its own lordliness (its manorial authority) and to serve more as a vehicle for the representation of the monarch. Thus, the grand spectacle of absolutism required a repeated reenactment of the sources and conditions of public power through festivals, balls, banquets, coronations, and entry ceremonies in which the visual aspects of theater were in command.
Habermas relates the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere to changes in the social organization and communication networks of early modern territorial states: the growth of urbanism, capitalist commerce and stock markets, new systems for news and the mail, and finally, state administrations for taxation and “policing” subject populations. Consequently, civil society came into existence “as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority.”8 To a well-worn view of the privatization of economic production, Habermas adds a strong appreciation for the role performed by a new set of cultural institutions that flourished in urban centers: coffeehouses, clubs, reading and language societies, lending libraries, concert halls, opera houses, theaters, publishing companies, lecture halls, salons, and above all, journals and the commercial press. He charts the way in which state authorities first made use of the press as a vehicle for addressing its promulgations to the public, and he identifies the crucial position of a new stratum of the bourgeoisie within the educated, literate public of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century society. Thus, Habermas marks the emergence of a critical public within Old Regime society:
Because, on the one hand, the society now confronting the state clearly separated a private domain from public authority and because, on the other hand, it turned the reproduction of life into something transcending the confines of private domestic authority and becoming a subject of public interest, that zone of continuous administrative contact became ‘critical’ also in the sense that it provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason. The public could take on this challenge all the better as it required merely a change in the function of the instrument with whose help the state administration had already turned society into a public affair in a specific sense—the press.9
The bourgeois public sphere is conceived to be a sphere of private people coming together as a public through the “historically unprecedented” public use of their reason. This informal association of private persons mediated between, on the one hand, civil society (the economy or sphere of commodity exchange and social labor) and the family, and, on the other hand, the state (the realm of the police or state administration and the court). The bourgeois public sphere consists of both a literary/cultural and political public sphere. Habermas addresses the process whereby culture was constituted as an object for discussion and packaged for purchase. At the same time, he insists that the literary public sphere functioned as a precursor to the public sphere operative in the political domain. “It provided the training ground for a critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself—a process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness.”10 Nor could this have occurred without the emergence of a new form of the private sphere—the patriarchal conjugal family’s intimate domain—and the intensification of processes of (psychological) individualism. As a result, an audience oriented subjectivity on the part of private individuals promoted the commodification of culture and served the polemical functions of the political public sphere.
Anticipating what Stephen Greenblatt has termed “self-fashioning,” Habermas describes the interplay between the codes of intimacy characteristic of fiction (the novel), the forms of subjectivity that were fitted to print, and the appeal of literature to a widening public of readers.11 Likewise, by appropriating aspects of the Frankfurt School’s account of “authority and the family,” Habermas concludes that the experiential complex of audience — oriented privacy affected the political realm’s public sphere. He thereby undermines Hannah Arendt’s despairing survey of the emergence of the categories of the social and the private.12 Accordingly, Habermas rejects the Greek model of a citizenry acting in common to administer the law and to ensure the community’s military survival. Instead he locates the specificity of the modern public sphere in the civic task of a society engaged in critical public debate to protect a commercial economy. In contrast to the older res publica, he deems the bourgeois public sphere to be the site for the political regulation of civil society, and credits it with a willingness to challenge the established authority of the monarch. Such a public sphere was from the outset both private and polemical. Neither trait was characteristic of the Greek model of the public sphere:
for the private status of the master of the household, upon which depended his political status as citizen, rested on domination without any illusion of freedom evoked by human intimacy. The conduct of the citizen was agonistic merely in the sportive competition with each other that was a mock war against the external enemy and not in dispute with his own government.11
In this manner, Habermas critically reconstructs the specific contours of the modern public sphere. He provides nuanced descriptions of the distinctive institutions of eighteenth-century French, British, and German society: e. g., salons, coffeehouses, and Tischgesellcbaften. Acknowledging their differences, he nonetheless identifies a series of common institutional criteria that they shared. First, the ideal of equality was institutionalized and stated as an objective claim insofar as a kind of social intercourse occurred irrespective of social status so that the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy. Second, cultural communities, stripped of their former “aura” and extracted from their ties to the Church’s and court’s re-presentative forms of publicity, established new meanings and new domains of common concern based on rational, verbal communication among private people. Third, no matter how inclusive the newly constituted public may have been in practice, the issues discussed became general in their significance and in their accessibility. In principle, everyone had to be able to participate.
On the basis of these social criteria, Habermas claims that the “liberal fiction of the discursive formation of the public will” was created.14 In addition, political objections to the secret dictates of absolute sovereignty encouraged appeals to general, abstract, objective, and permanent norms: e. g., to constitutional law wherein “a rationality in which what is right converges with what is just; the exercise of power is to be demoted to a mere executor of the norm.”15 Against secrecy and will, the new rationality—anchored in the principle of critical public debate among private people—held out the goals of publicity and universality.
But Habermas also grants the practical limitations of the bourgeois model of the public sphere. From the outset, a tension arose between the formal criteria of abstract moral reason and the goals of substantive rationality. Ambivalences in the principle of privacy derived from the system of private property and from a family caught up in the requirements of the market. In addition, conflicts arose in the identity of the privatized individuals who occupied the public sphere, insofar as their status derived either from a position as property owners rather than from their basic humanity; e. g., a conflict between Rousseau’s bourgeois and citoyen. Hence, class and its accoutrements (property, income, literacy, and cultural background) were major barriers to full participation in the bourgeois public sphere.16 The bourgeois public sphere was for the most part a restricted male preserve, except for salon society that was shaped by women “like that of the rococo in general.”17 Still, Habermas suggests that the exclusion of women from English coffeehouses may have been an advantage insofar as “critical debate ignited by works of literature and art was soon extended to include economic and political disputes, without any guarantee (such as
was given in the salons) that such discussions would be inconsequential, at least in the immediate context.”18 On the other hand, he distinguishes between the literary and the political sphere, observing that whereas women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere, “female readers as well as apprentices and servants often took a more active part in the literary public sphere than the owners of private property and family heads themselves.”19