Page 25 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

20 Jürgen Habermas

is not the expansion of the ‘public’ per se but the way in which the
untrammelled commercialism of mass culture congeals into tried and
tested formulae. It favours the palatable immediacy of human-interest
stories over complex processes, whilst fostering a facile intimacy.
The complex characters and narratives of modern literature give way
to advice columns, emotions laid bare, ‘real life’ stories, with ‘real
people’ – celebrities and ‘ordinary’ folk – we can swiftly identify
with: quite possibly Habermas would see the recent glut of cheap,
high-rating ‘reality TV’ programmes as the apex of this culture of
immediacy. Mass culture deprives audiences of the space to carry out
psychological work for themselves: it takes on all their emotional
needs and problems directly for them. The intimacy is ‘illusory’,
though, precisely because this personal immediacy is handed down in
depersonalised form – the psychological guidance is administered, en
masse, in formulaic fashion: Habermas would likely see the bespoke
‘interactivities’ of today’s digital mediascape as the latest achievement
of this ‘administered individualisation’ (see Chapter 4).
To put it in McLuhanite terms (though Marshall McLuhan was
much more approving), there is an implosion of the public and the
private. Private life is publicised and public life is simultaneously
privatised as public figures (stars, politicians and the like) are fed to

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us as predigested chunks of biography and psychological profi le.
Debate and discussion of cultural goods, though increasingly
‘unnecessary’, hasn’t been altogether killed off. But, like the cultural
goods themselves, debate has become administered, carried out within

the confines of professional media spaces, to a set of predefi ned
rules and generic conventions: it serves as a ‘tranquilising substitute
for action’. 81
Whilst the commodifi cation of cultural supply is what troubles
Habermas most in Structural Transformation, there is undoubtedly
a thinly veiled but less than reasoned technophobia at play.
Habermas’s print-centric bias comes to the fore when he charges
the new broadcast media with discouraging distanced refl ection or
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extended discussion. The relentless and frenetic churnings of radio
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and television are the main culprits. Habermas has since conceded
that his analysis was one-sided and that empirical research on media
reception since he wrote Structural Transformation has increasingly
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problematised the assumptions of audience passivity; on the
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other hand, however, recent remarks suggest that Habermas has

neither renounced nor properly qualified his logocentric antipathy
towards the audio-visual media. The problem is not that Habermas

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