Page 100 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 95

makers. ‘Trust’, as Anthony Giddens puts it, ‘is related to absence
in time and space. There would be no need to trust anyone whose
activities were continually visible … All trust is in a sense blind
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trust.’ The media constitute us as citizens by offering us processed

insights into an array of significant domains – economic, political,
scientific and so forth – through which democratic choices and

opinions can emerge, and not by breaching the boundaries between
decision makers and those on the receiving end of their decisions.
According to this view, Habermas’s theories misguidedly encourage
us to dismiss questions of image and repute as mere communicative
distortions, or to understand them in terms of a ‘refeudalisation’ of
the public sphere. In so doing, the Habermasian model has no means
of engaging critically with what is an intrinsic and vital dimension
of the democratic process.
In this reading, the key problem for contemporary democracy is
not how society presents or, via communications media, represents
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itself, but, rather, how we communicate with the absent. Habermas,
it seems, may have been barking up the wrong tree. If Thompson’s
emphasis on ‘trust’ reflects his concern with the problems of
democracy and legitimation, he also acknowledges the range of
different ‘connectivities’ that can be engendered by mediated quasi-
interaction, including feelings of love, hatred, sexual attraction or
intimacy that can be projected onto public figures. What’s interesting

here is that Thompson constructs a sociological discourse that differs
greatly from the post-structuralist critique of reason usually invoked
against Habermas. Thompson’s is a rather pragmatic (and, as I shall
suggest, perhaps even utilitarian) discourse that is poles apart from
the anti-foundationalist and politically abstracted tenor of most
post-structuralist discourse. Yet it still winds up by highlighting the
dangers of treating, as Habermas tends to do, the condensations,
aestheticisations, ellipses, spectacles and intensities of mediated
communication as creases that can be progressively ironed out
instead of seeing in them the very texture and fabric of contemporary
public life.
(4) The media play a crucial role not only in mediating between the
citizenry and the various loci of decision-making power but also in
constituting interactions between citizens themselves. The suspicion
must be that Habermas’s model of the public sphere is to be found

wanting here as well. The configuration and dissemination of symbols
and cultural forms through the media facilitate the development of
identities that draw upon discourses of nationhood, ethnicity, class,

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