Page 24 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 19

each in the interests of the reproduction of his own life and, on the other
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hand, the sort of action that united people into a public.

This passage is helpful in clarifying Habermas’s arguments. The
ideological nature of eighteenth-century bourgeois universalism is
indisputable. Yet the bourgeois public sphere could be more than
mere ideology precisely because of the structural dominance of the
bourgeoisie: to use the Aristotelian distinction, once favoured by
Marx, the bourgeois public sphere could imagine itself to exist in the
‘realm of freedom’, rather than the ‘realm of necessity’. The same
could not be said for a majority of citizens in the post-bourgeois
public sphere. Habermas, echoing the views of his Frankfurt School
predecessors, treats the domain of ‘leisure’ less as a realm of freedom
than as a recuperative and compensatory necessity shaped by the
onerous demands of the world of work; for the most part leisure, in
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Adorno’s phrase, is a ‘mere appendage of work’, an extension of
worker dependency. Whilst the ‘leisure’ enjoyed by the bourgeoisie
stood at least at arm’s length from questions of survival, leisure in
the post-bourgeois world lacked the capacity ‘to constitute a world
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emancipated from the immediate constraints of survival needs’. The

foundations of an autonomous realm of reflection and debate were
lacking. Urban and suburban lifestyles were eroding the integrity of
both privacy and publicity, and the solitary act of reading and the
sociability of public debate, once symbiotic, were imploding into the
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television-dominated living room. The frenetic pace of modern life
didn’t lend itself to critical reasoning. Neither, moreover, did the
evolving mass media and cultural industries, for whom Habermas
reserves much of his contempt.
Habermas’s impassioned critique of the twentieth-century
mass media and cultural industries is provocative and a little less
than coherent. The reader is left to untangle the twin threads of
sweeping polemic and more nuanced critique which enjoy an uneasy
coexistence. I shall attempt, very briefly, to do a little unpicking here.

Twentieth-century mass culture is drawn, for Habermas, towards a
lowest common denominator. As the public sphere expands, the
complexity of cultural products is lowered to make them more
readily saleable: individuals do not have to raise their own levels

of understanding and reflection to meet the requirements of the
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cultural supply. Intellectuals, critics and the avant-garde become
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alienated and aloof from this homogenising mass. This depiction,
Habermas assures us, does not amount to elitism: what he laments

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