Page 42 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 37

or can’t because they are ignored by the media and other public
sphere institutions remains a pressing one today. We are not well
served by a model of the public sphere that simply substitutes praxis
for discourse at its core.
A more recent Marxist reading of Structural Transformation was
offered by the communications scholar, Nicholas Garnham. On
balance, Garnham is more sympathetic to, than critical of, the
Habermasian conception of the public sphere. The virtues he ascribes
to it are substantial:

Its first virtue is to focus upon the indissoluble link between the institutions
and practices of mass communication and the institutions and practices
of democratic politics. Most study of the mass media is simply too media-
centric … The second virtue of Habermas’s approach is to focus on the
necessary material resource base for any public sphere … Its third virtue is
to escape from the simple dichotomy of free market versus state control that
dominates so much thinking about media policy. Habermas … distinguishes
the public sphere from both state and market and can thus pose the question
of the threats to democracy … coming from both the development of an
oligopolistic capitalist market and from the development of the modern
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interventionist welfare state.
Garnham also admires the sharp pertinence of Habermas’s thesis

to trends, three decades later, of intensified deregulation of the
media industries and the now almost taken-for-granted view of
information and culture as a ‘privately appropriable commodity’
rather than a ‘public good’. By highlighting the importance of
civil society institutions which are independent of both state and
market, a text like Structural Transformation could, Garnham suggests,
inspire the Left to break out from the trap of the free-press model,
based on the ideology of a free market place of ideas, which it has
often found diffi cult to critique when the dangers of state interests
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commandeering the media seem to lurk on the other side. The
‘public sphere’ concept offers a third term usually lost in the discursive
and regulatory switches between state control and marketisation.
Garnham also claims that Habermas’s thesis requires some
reformulation in order to render it relevant ‘to the conditions of large-
scale societies in which both social and communicative relations
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are inevitably mediated through time and space’. Although I
explore the question of mediation in Chapter 4, what concerns us
here is Garnham’s argument that, by comparison with the face-to-

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