Page 101 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

96 Jürgen Habermas

gender, style or taste subcultures, opinion and political affi liation,
interest group, status group, identification with public fi gures and

so forth. The public sphere is, of course, also a site of confl ict and
contradiction in which particular world-views, tastes, aspirations
and opinions clash with one another. It constitutes space in which
feelings of intense antipathy, as well as identification, are evoked.

Democratic citizenship remains dependent, nevertheless, upon
membership, however abstract, of a shared social space in which

conflicting opinions and identities can interact with one another.
In a pluralistic society, a sense of membership or of belonging to a
political community is not, as we discussed in the previous chapter,
conditional on buying into a monolithic or homogeneous identity,
but does depend on the extent to which the public sphere is perceived
as inclusive and representative by its diverse citizenry.
However, the ways in which the media situate citizens within
the public sphere seem, once again, to have only a limited affi nity
with the dialogical ideals of Habermas’s model of public discourse.
Large-scale modern publics are ‘imagined communities’ precisely
because we interact directly with just a fraction of our fellow citizens.
Again, the media facilitate those connections, on the citizenry’s behalf,

through the configuration and dissemination of symbols and the
selective staging of public debate and cultural encounter. The feelings
of antipathy or identification evoked by media symbols are not, for

the most part, conveyed back to the producers of those symbols. They
are, instead, refracted into localised contexts. Similarly, the extent
to which citizens experience themselves as members of a political
community depends on the depth of a largely imagined bond: the
extent to which various citizens see themselves as included in or
excluded by the ‘communality’ of watching a televised event of

‘national significance’, or the ritual reading of the morning papers
along with millions of absent others, for example. We should
point out also, the increasing scope for participating in displaced
‘imagined communities’ such that migrants, diaspora and travellers
can opt to read the morning papers from their home country on the
Internet, or cheer their home nation in a televised sporting event.
An increasingly globalised mediascape makes it increasingly, though
differentially, possible for citizens to selectively opt in and out of
specific imagined communities.

In other words, Thompson points to a serious lacuna in Habermas’s
historical account of the public sphere. In framing the development
of the press during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as

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