Page 26 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 21

dislikes mediated communication per se. As we have seen, he fears
the immediacy of electronic media and favours the distance and
space afforded by print culture as a complement to speech-based
argumentation. But what he fails to emphasise adequately is just
how precarious these distinctions are: the spoken word itself is always
already mediated through embodiment; and the printed word does
not necessarily afford more space and distance than electronic media
– compare the scatter-gun temporality of the daily press with the

reflective longitude afforded a television documentary researched and
produced over months or years. The distinctions break down rapidly
on examination and we shall have cause to revisit these problems
later in the book.
There is a more compelling line of argument in Structural
Transformation. Innovations in media technology (telegraphy, wireless
broadcasting, print processes and so forth) had important economic
consequences. They demanded high infrastructural outlay, which
favoured larger and larger markets and a low ‘elasticity of supply’
– the introduction of television, for example, was (until recently)
86
only economically viable on a truly mass scale. But rather than
developing this, Habermas focuses on the more general question of

commodification, and his arguments demand some unravelling.

Habermas’s narrative of the commodification of culture only partly
echoes that of the Frankfurt School. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer
(and more like Walter Benjamin), he paints the early phase of

commodification during the eighteenth century as a progressive,
democratising force. At what point, then, does commodifi cation
become the villain of the piece? The answer, Habermas suggests,
lies in ‘rigorously distinguishing’ between different functions
of commodification. In the bourgeois model, commodification
impacted only on distribution: it helped to uncouple culture from
status by making it available to anyone who could afford it. It did
87
not, however, drive the content. The same cannot be said of the
twentieth century:
To the degree that culture became a commodity not only in form but also in
content, it was emptied of elements whose appreciation required a certain
amount of training – whereby the ‘accomplished’ appropriation once again
heightened the appreciative ability itself. It was not merely standardisation as
such that established an inverse relationship between the commercialisation
of cultural goods and their complexity, but that special preparation of
products that made them consumption-ready, which is to say, guaranteed

23/8/05 09:36:21
Goode 01 chaps 21 23/8/05 09:36:21
Goode 01 chaps 21