Page 149 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

144 Jürgen Habermas

69. J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann 1976).
70. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 156.
71. Ibid., p. 157.
72. Ibid., p. 159.
73. Ibid., p. 159.
74. Ibid., p. 160.
75. T.W. Adorno, ‘Free time’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).
76. In view of the common criticism that Habermas overplays the
ideologically integrative effects of the culture industry, it is worth
noting the attention he devotes to these material questions. His citation
of H.P. Bahrdt reinforces this: ‘The reciprocity of the public and private
spheres is disturbed … not … because the city dweller is mass man
per se and hence no longer has any sensibility for the cultivation of
the private sphere; but because he no longer succeeds in getting an
overview of the ever more complicated life of the city as a whole in such
fashion that it is really public for him. The more the city as a whole is
transformed into a barely penetrable jungle, the more he withdraws into
his sphere of privacy which in turn is extended ever further.’ Structural
Transformation, p. 159.
77. Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 157–9.
78. Ibid., p. 166.
79. Ibid., p. 175.
80. Ibid., p. 171.
81. Ibid., p. 164.
82. Ibid., pp. 163, 170–1.
83. ‘In comparison with printed communications the programmes sent
by the new media curtail the reactions of their recipients in a peculiar
way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at
the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under “tutelage”,
which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something
and to disagree.’ Ibid., p. 171.
84. J. Habermas, ‘Further reflections on the public sphere’, in C. Calhoun

(ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1992), p. 439.
85. For example, in a recent discussion of Kant he makes the following
remark: ‘He [Kant] could not forsee the structural transformation of
the bourgeois public sphere into a semantically degenerated public
sphere dominated by the electronic mass media and pervaded by
images and virtual realities. He could scarcely imagine that this milieu
of ‘conversational’ enlightenment could be adapted both to nonverbal
indoctrination and to deception by means of language.’ Habermas,
Inclusion of the Other, p. 176.
86. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 189. Today the situation is more
complex. Advances in digital technology have made smaller-scale and
niche broadcasting (‘narrowcasting’) more viable. But the implications
for diversity are not all positive as demographics and communities of
low priority to advertsisers tend to get marginalised. Moreover, even
today, television remains a ‘mass medium’ in many respects. In my

23/8/05 09:36:15
Goode 02 chap04 144 23/8/05 09:36:15
Goode 02 chap04 144