Page 16 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

INTRODUCTION 5

overstates his case, that the discourse of the bourgeois public sphere
even at its zenith never manifested the high level of reasoned discourse
he suggests, and that the situation under advanced capitalism—dismal
as it may be—is not as bleak and locked as he asserts. But these are
questions of historical evaluation. In terms of the logic of his own
argument, however, there seems to be three related and very central
points of ambiguity in the analysis:

1 The ideal of the bourgeois public sphere, with its salons and literary
pamphlets, is retained as a model, a vision, at the same time that its
historical manifestation is found lacking and needs to be
transcended. Thus his devastating critique is coloured both by a
quality of romanticism verging on nostalgia as well as a pervasive
pessimism. He seemingly clings to an ideal whose historical
concreteness he has penetratingly found to be an ideological
distortion. There is consequently a sense of a dead-end about the
study. In later work, such as in the two-volume Theory of
Communicative Action (1984, 1987), while he takes up issues on
communication within the social system, he only in passing
addresses the specific and concrete issues of the public sphere.
Within the framework of that study, with its central distinction
between system and life-world—a problematic separation, as some
commentators have noted (e.g. Baxter 1987)—the public and
private spheres fall within the domain of the colonized life-world.
There, normatively grounded communication is subverted by the
system’s instrumental rationality. In short, one could say he
essentially repeats his thesis at a higher level of abstraction,
subsuming it under a systems-theoretic mode of exposition.
To this point should be added the observation that there is
a major blind spot in Habermas’s critique of the bourgeois public
sphere: while he clearly reveals its class bias, he neglects to identify
its patriarchal character. His ideal of a public sphere is predicated
on a public-private dichotomy, but, from a feminist perspective,
uncritically accepting this separation, as liberalism itself has tended
to do, results in complicity in the subordination of women. The
universalism and equality of democratic theory is thus subverted not
only by class but also by gender. Even alternative, socialist models
have failed adequately to address gender, as recent feminist writing
has pointed out. However, such critics readily concede the
complexity of the problems (cf. Patemen 1987). An excellent
feminist analysis, much in the tradition and spirit of Critical Theory