Page 40 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 35

Transformation so much as to Habermas’s methodological challenge
to economistic orthodoxy:

In the final analysis, Milde’s critique is directed against the tendency to
qualify the orthodox interpretation of the relationship between base and
superstructure in favor of an approach in which interaction … is regarded as
being no less primarily important than work … The goal of the public sphere
is intersubjective agreement on values and standards, which can then be used
to resolve practical questions. What Habermas sees institutionalised in the
public sphere – individuation, emancipation, extension of communication
free of domination – appears in [later work] … under the category of
‘symbolically mediated interaction.’ Since these deviations from orthodoxy
are voiced already in Structurwandel der Öffentlichkeit, the reservations of
the orthodoxy camp were to be expected. 16

Two less orthodox critics offered a more considered and less dismissive
critique of Structural Transformation. Oskar Negt and Alexander
17
Kluge took up the category of the public sphere in their own work.
The idea of a democratic public sphere was an important concept
for analysing the possibilities and challenges of progressive social
change that had been lacking in historicist versions of Marxism. The
public sphere was a necessary institutional basis for the formation
18
of a ‘collective will’. But Negt and Kluge disapproved of two key
aspects of Habermas’s thesis. First, they criticised his tendency to
take the bourgeois claim that the public sphere could be the site for
clarifying a ‘general interest’ too much at face value. The unifying
term ‘bourgeois’ merely conceals the fact that ‘what Habermas
had described as an institution turns out to be a loose association
19
of heterogenous organisations’. (Hohendahl rightly retorts that
Negt and Kluge are unwilling to differentiate between the plurality
of associations and the outwardly consensual orientations which
Habermas ascribes to them and identifies as their unifying principle.

I shall come back to this question of plurality below.)
Second, they condemn Habermas’s fixation on the redemptive

powers of discourse. They propose an alternative conception of the
public sphere that is both proletarian and which privileges praxis over
discourse. Despite the anachronistic language, these tensions in fact
still speak to debates surrounding the public sphere today: actions, for
many, speak louder than words and few use the terms ‘talking shop’
and ‘the chattering classes’ as compliments or badges of honour!
The term ‘proletarian’, for Negt and Kluge, is not simply about social

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