Page 67 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-03.qxd 5/9/2007 6:08 PM Page 56

••• Douglas Kellner •••

rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured
opinion of polls or media experts.
For Habermas, the interconnection between the sphere of public debate and
individual participation has thus been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of
political manipulation and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers ingest and
passively absorb entertainment and information. ‘Citizens’ thus become spectators of
media presentations and discourse which arbitrate public discussion and reduce its audi-
ences to objects of news, information, and public affairs. In Habermas’s words:
‘Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of bour-
geois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services pro-
vided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed’ (1989: 171).
The history of and initial controversy over The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere are best perceived within the context of Habermas’s work with the Institute for
Social Research. After studying with Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt, in the 1950s,
Habermas investigated both the ways that a new public sphere had emerged during
the time of the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions and how
it promoted political discussion and debate. Habermas developed his study within
the context of the Institute analysis of the transition from the stage of liberal market
capitalism of the nineteenth century to the stage of state-and monopoly-organized
capitalism of the twentieth century developed by the Frankfurt School (Kellner,
1989).
Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is an immensely rich
and influential book that has had a major impact in a variety of disciplines. It has
also received detailed critique and promoted extremely productive discussions of lib-
eral democracy, civil society, public life, and social changes in the twentieth century,
among other issues. Few books of the second half of the twentieth century have been
so seriously discussed in so many different fields and continue, more than fifty years
after its initial publication in 1962, to generate such productive controversy and
insight. While Habermas’s thought took several crucial philosophical twists and
turns after the publication of his first major book, he has himself provided detailed
commentary on Structural Transformation in the 1990s and returned to issues of the
public sphere and democratic theory in his monumental work Between Facts and
Norms (1998). Hence, concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions
for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Habermas’s work that
deserves respect and critical scrutiny.
Habermas’s critics contend that he idealizes the earlier bourgeois public sphere by
presenting it as a forum of rational discussion and debate when in fact many social
groups and most women were excluded. Critics also contend that Habermas neglects
various oppositional working-class, plebeian, and women’s public spheres developed
alongside of the bourgeois public sphere to represent voices and interests excluded
in this forum (see the studies in Calhoun, 1992, and Kellner, 2000). Yet Habermas is
right that in the period of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in
which for the first time in history ordinary citizens could participate in political dis-
cussion and debate, organize, and struggle against unjust authority. Habermas’s
• 56 •