Revisionist historians of the Revolution have sketched an equally disturbing portrait of how revolutionary politics strove toward absolute consensus, monitoring and expelling all instances of division within the revolutionary public. Rather than a contest over interests, revolutionary politics became the site of symbolic legitimations.48 Benjamin Nathans aptly relates the challenge that recent historiography poses to Habermas’s model of the public sphere:
One finds here a stunning reversal of Habermas’s principle of general accessibility: rather than adjusting the public sphere (as embodied by the various clubs) to accommodate society, society was radically tailored by a series of brutal excisions and exclusions in order to fit the mold of a fictitious public of abstract individuals. The exclusion of ‘enemies,’ in fact, took the place of critical discussion as the mechanisms for establishing the ‘general good.’ Behind the fiction of a unified, authoritative public opinion, an anonymous oligarchy thus ‘prefabricated consensus’ in the form of an ideology that acted as a substitute for the nonexistent public competition of ideas.49
In fact, Habermas has observed that the discursively organized public under the terms of bourgeois representation claimed not to equate itself with the public “but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its educator.”50 Yet, he holds out the possibility that a distance can be maintained between the public and its representative (the one who claims to speak in its name). In direct contrast, Francois Furct presents the problem posed by popular sovereignty as that of eccentricity: the center is always vacant. Revolutionary politics is inherently unstable: because the source of sovereignty resides everywhere and nowhere, there is a perpetual slippage between the public and its representatives. As he states, “the Revolution replaced the conflict of interests for power with a competition of discourses for the appropriation of legitimacy.”51 Furthermore, in their respective investigations of the art public and the revolutionary festival, Mona Ozouf and Thomas Crow exhibit the repressive potential of the didactic or educative role that Habermas assigns to the public’s representative.52 In addition, Sarah Maza reveals the way in which late Old Regime lawyers used the device of the memoires judiciares to publish their (otherwise censurable) views and to influence the outcome of a given trial. Thus, by appealing to public opinion, they exploited the capacity of the public to serve as a tribunal for the nation.53 These and other empirical studies construct a much more complex picture of the workings of the oppositional public sphere than Habermas allows. Indeed, Keith Baker and Mona Ozouf have even challenged the notion that the new public sphere offered a straight-forward alternative to the traditional system. They demonstrate that the monarchy was forced to compete for the judgment of public opinion, so that contestatory politics also shaped the regime’s evolution.54
Yet, Habermas is not unaware of the conceptual and political problems posed by a concept of public opinion as transcendent reason. In an immensely rewarding chapter titled “The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and Ideology,” he charts the most conspicuous philosophical contributions to the concept of public opinion beginning with Hobbes, Locke, and Bayle, proceeding through the English and European thinkers of the eighteenth century (the physiocrats, Rousseau, Forster, Kant, and Hegel) and concluding with the critical reflections of Marx, Tocqueville, and Mill on a range of difficulties such as the role of property interest, class restrictions on the free circulation of opinion, the distorting functions of propaganda, the problems of majority rule, the issue of tolerance, and the compulsion toward conformity. His final appraisal, however, is that neither the liberal nor the socialist model were adequate for a diagnosis of the breakdown of the public sphere, especially in its loss of critical publicity deriving from both too much and too little publicity. As he remarks, “The principle of the public sphere, that is, critical publicity, seemed to lose its strength in the measure that it expanded as a sphere and even undermined the private realm.”55
Analytically, this assessment only makes sense against the backdrop of the eighteenth-century model. There, Habermas locates a crucial tension between the principle of critical publicity, on the one hand, and a legislative model of opinion, on the other. In France, the former is associated with the physiocrats and the latter with Rousseau. Thus, he observes, “only when the physiocrats ascribed it to the public eclaire itself did opinion publique receive the strict meaning of an opinion purified through critical discussion in the public sphere to constitute a true opinion.”56 In contrast to their British contemporaries who understood the public spirit to be an authority that could compel lawmakers to legitimize themselves, the physiocrats still acceded to absolutism. Yet, conceptually they achieved a novel fusion of the older contradiction between opinion and critique. 57 On the other hand, Habermas argues that “Rousseau projected the unbourgeois idea of an intrusively political society in which the autonomous private sphere, that is, civil society emancipated from the state, had no place.”58 He situates the undemocratic foundations of “Rousseau’s democracy of unpublic opinion” in the manipulative exercise of power:59
The general will was always right, the notorious passage stated, but the judgment that guided it was not always enlightened…. A direct democracy required that the sovereign be actually present. The volonte generate as the corpus mysticum was bound up with the corpus physicum of the people as a consensual assembly. The idea of a plebiscite in permanence presented itself to Rousseau in the image of the Greek polis. There the people were assembled in the square without interruption; thus in Rousseau’s view, the place publique became the foundation of the constitution. Opinion publique derived its attribute from it, that is, from the citizens assembled for acclamation and not from the rational-critical public debate of a public ёclaire. 60
We have seen that Habermas’s neat analytical distinction between the publicity function of opinion and its tendency to absolutize itself has been challenged in recent studies of eighteenth-century political culture. While rejecting Rousseau’s democracy of “unpublic opinion” and registering the limits of opinion in a class-bound society, Habermas still adheres to a phys — iocratic concept of publicity, not withstanding its appeal to a transcendent concept of reason. He most favors Kant’s cosmopolitan version of enlightenment—stripped perhaps of some of its “moral” wrapping—predicated on free and open communication between rational beings, each of whom possesses knowledge of the world (“humanity”). These citizens, Kant tells us and Habermas concurs, are engaged in rational-critical discussions concerning the affairs of the commonwealth. They are citizens of a “republican constitution” who enjoy a sphere of private autonomy, the safeguarding of personal liberties, equality before the law, and legislation that conforms to the popular will. Notably, they are not storytellers but rather critical disputants who know how to use their reason on behalf of the common good. In Kant’s estimation, “if we attend to the course of conversation in mixed companies consisting not merely of scholars and subtle reasoners but also of business people or women, we notice that besides storytelling and jesting they have another entertainment, namely, arguing.”61
Print and Other Media: On the Multiple Forms of Representation Kant’s model of free publicity is a direct antecedent of Habermas’s interest in communicative action: different versions of a language-based model of
human communication.62 Yet in the last instance, we are dealing not only with a prejudice toward “linguistically,” but with a compelling account of the historical emergence of textuality as the dominant form of representation in the modern bourgeois public sphere, in contrast to visuality or theatricality in the “re-presentative” public sphere of the Old Regime. Now, there is much to commend this position. It calls attention to a dramatic shift in the organization of the system of representation which I likened to a shift from icon to text in my own study of the gendered public sphere. However, further consideration suggests that a singular emphasis on language may be misleading from both a methodological and an empirical perspective.
The privilege that Habermas accords to the institutions of the press and literature has been only partially sustained in subsequent examinations of the eighteenth-century public sphere. On the one hand, research on the French language press before and during the Revolution has augmented Habermas’s appreciation for the central contribution played by the print media in the rise of public opinion.63 Investigations of the workings of provincial academies, free-masonry and salon society, as well as the role of literary and art criticism have more than repaid Habermas’s invitation for a text-centered criticism; and sustained his insight that reading practices are best understood not merely as a personal habit but as a new kind of institution.64 Indeed, even those who view the Revolution as a “return to the oral” acknowledge that the culture of the spoken word “always rests on writing or printing.”65
On the other hand, studies of the print media and political discourse have introduced complexities not originally entertained by Habermas. Robert Darnton’s portrait of critical journalism in late Old Regime France—hack writers in the cafes of “Grub Street”—subverts any representation of the literary profession restricted to its most successful, enlightened publicists. By implication, Darnton also challenges Habermas’s effort to link literary subjectivity and political criticism by presenting the libelle, not the confession, as the characteristic genre of the period.66 Likewise, Bernadette Fort finds in the parodic art criticism of Darnton’s Grub Street an appropriation of figures, forms, and strategies from popular theater and from carnival.67 Contributors to Lynn Hunt’s recent collection Eroticism and the Body Politic explore the intimate connections among political, sexual, and gender themes in printed and graphic political pornography within Old Regime and revolutionary France. Together, then, these studies offer a perspective on political representation that diverges in good measure from Habermas’s explication of rational and introspective forms of political opinion.68 In addition, other scholars point to the restrictiveness of a narrowly defined print model. The selections in Revolution in Print demonstrate the extent to which political messages were communicated through a range of media that employed mechanically reproduced words or images.69 And, studies of the revolutionary graphic arts explore how political communication is manifested through visual as well as textual means.70 In short, even in a period which saw the incontestable triumph of the print media, the production of complex representations involved as well the creative intermixing of media. Political arguments, we may want to allow, may be communicated in discursive and non-discursive forms, and the two may interact in unanticipated ways.
Furthermore, Habermas has noted but hardly accounted for the symbolic structure of bourgeois representation; that is, the ability of one to stand in for, substitute for, or otherwise represent an absent other who remains the only legitimate source of authority for that representative. To speak in the people’s name, to act on its behalf, and to claim to do so on behalf of the universal or general good, all bespeak a fundamental alienation in the source and nature of power. As Michael Warner observes, the transition from what Habermas would term the “oppositional” bourgeois public sphere to the national state was grounded in a cultural formation of print discourse, and not just in the legitimacy of the people or the rule of law:
It required assumptions between individual subjects and general sovereignty. These assumptions derived not just from any popular group, but from a model of a reading public. Through the new constitutionalism, the metapolitics of print discourse became entrenched as an ideology of legitimate power. If this is a way of saying that the modem state commits a kind of fraud in claiming to represent the people and the law, it is no simple fraud. For the fraud is only the pretense that representational democracy derives its legitimacy from the people and their law, when in fact it performs what it claims to describe. A way of representing the people constructs the people.71
In practice, democratic discourse has exhibited an unfortunate potential for substituting its own universal for the real competition of interests. Likewise, appeals to the universal have concealed the gendered division of space and power; and, the creation of open spaces for public speech has fostered a conception of a transcendent, theoretical public which sanctioned the silent participation of spectators. In any event, I have observed that not all speech-acts or styles of talking are necessarily equal. More generally, by privileging speech-acts Habermas distorts the performative dimension of human action and interaction. In the specific context of the bourgeois Revolution, for example, an analysis of the iconography of power in the new republic might want to describe the theatrics and arguments of the Assembly as well as its published laws and proclamations; and further, to explore the graphic arts as well as acoustic media—speech, song, and music—alongside printed and verbal discourse. Habermas may be right to assume that certain representations are privileged for the representation of power in a given regime—hence textual representations under the early bourgeois regime. On the other hand, a theory of “public representations” needs to account for the culturally variant ways that humans produce and make use of multiple representations. Pragmatics, the formal use of language in interaction, is best accompanied by a theory and observation of (stylized and informal) bodily gestures and postures. As Dorinda Outram insists, “words do not give up their full meaning without an account of the physical behaviour which accompanies them.” We are in agreement, then, on the need to examine “both verbal and physical behaviour and both verbal and physical symbolism”; while recalling that “physicality [is] always mediated, for individuals, by words.”72