Page 17 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

6 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

itself, of Habermas’s later work, is found in Fraser (1987). In the
present volume, Liesbet van Zoonen takes up the strategic uses and
implications of femininity in Dutch TV newscasters.
2 He is silent on alternative, ‘plebeian’, popular, informal or
oppositional public spheres. This leaves a big theoretic vacuum.
For under both the periods of liberal and advanced capitalism there
have existed other fora which have shaped people’s political
consciousness, served as networks for exchange of information,
rumour and gossip, and also provided settings for cultural
expression. Oskar Negt’s and Alexander Kluge’s attempts to
formulate a ‘proletarian public sphere’ is one example of an effort
to conceptualize such an alternative (see Knödler-Bunte 1975).
Historically one can point to the unions and other popular political
movements which combined cultural, social and informational
functions and provided significant settings for debate.
3 A corollary to this second point arises from the perspectives of
today’s intellectual horizons and research in such areas as media
reception, semiotics, cultural theory and general ‘postmodern’
modes of thought. In Habermas’s book there seems to be an
implicit understanding of how people carry on conversation and
arrive at political opinions which seems strangely abstract and
formalistic. References to the complexities and contradictions of
meaning production, and to the concrete social settings and cultural
resources at work, are absent. With almost three decades of
research and hindsight at our disposal, this observation could smack
of all too easy criticism. Yet it could be argued that his later work
in such areas as universal pragmatics and ideal speech situations
makes explicit a highly rationalistic orientation to human
communication which is only implicit here.

Lurking in the shadows at this juncture of the discussion are the debates
over postmodernism, in which Habermas has been a central figure
(Habermas 1987, Bernstein 1986). While this topic would take us too
far from our present concerns, I do want to call attention to the
importance of a domain—let us call it the process of sense-making—as
central for understanding at the micro level the conditions of citizen
involvement with the public sphere. Perspectives and approaches from
Cultural Studies are as imperative here as those deriving from, say,
traditional political science or linguistics.