Page 27 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

22 Jürgen Habermas

an enjoyment without being tied to stringent presuppositions. Of course,
such enjoyment is also entirely inconsequential … [M]ass culture leaves
no lasting trace; it affords a kind of experience which is not cumulative
but regressive. 88
But, at the very least, Habermas would have to relativise this tale of

two commodifications in order to make it convincing. Even when

maximum profit was not the raison d’être of the cultural industries
– Habermas points out, for example, that for eighteenth-century
89
literary journals a degree of loss-making was the norm – it is hard
to accept that content somehow remained utterly untainted by the
logic of the market or that cultural producers could ever proceed
merrily without any regard for commercial success. Habermas cites
the mass production of what we now call ‘paperback classics’: this, he
suggests, is the contemporary exception that proves the rule because
market logic broadens distribution and access without damaging the
90
integrity of the cultural product. But this is a fl awed argument:
the mass appeal of particular ‘classics’ is what makes large, cheap
print runs of some (and not other) titles economically viable. The
mischievous response would be to ask Habermas to wander down
the bookshop aisles containing all the abridged and audio editions
of the ‘classics’ and invite him to comment on the integrity of the

content. But the real point is that commodification has manifold and
potentially ambivalent consequences for the cultural public sphere.
It can improve access when economies of scale and competition
lower costs, but it can also lead to the cultural industries policing
supply, keeping costs high and excluding the less well-off; it can
undermine elitism by rendering content responsive to the tastes
and experiences of ‘ordinary’ folk, but it can also work to silence
marginal and innovative forms whose market appeal is anything
less than calculable (the recent popularisation of opera embodies
these ambivalent tendencies). It’s simply untenable and unhelpful
to claim that the Penguin edition of Jane Austen and the Mills and
Boon book signify two distinct modes of commodifi cation: analysis
of the contemporary cultural public sphere must instead be attuned
to the consistently ambivalent potentials of commodifi cation, even
where we suspect the darker consequences to be in ascendancy.
With this in mind, we can now return to the basic kernel of
Habermas’s thesis: namely, that the mutually reinforcing tendencies
of a citizenry bereft of space and time, and a cultural ‘market place’

which reduces the citizen to a ratings, box-office or circulation

23/8/05 09:36:21
Goode 01 chaps 22 23/8/05 09:36:21
Goode 01 chaps 22