Page 43 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

38 Jürgen Habermas

face dialogue by which Habermas places much store in Structural
Transformation, mediated communication presents particular
challenges to the principle of universal access, which can only be
addressed through redistributive measures. As we saw in Chapter 1,
Habermas’s analysis does acknowledge the materiality, and not merely
the ideology, of the public sphere: unequal patterns of access to time,
space, literacy skills and the like underpin unequal opportunities
to participate in the public sphere. But it is also true that, under
conditions of increased technological mediation, these problems of
material inequality are magnifi ed.
Nancy Fraser’s reading of Structural Transformation addresses the
question of whether the Habermasian public sphere can sustain a
critique of material inequality whilst engaging with and remaining
sufficiently attentive to problems of autonomy, cultural difference

and pluralism. Fraser’s reading of Habermas has done perhaps
more than any other to open up productive lines of inquiry. In the
Anglophone community, at least, it is also one of the most frequently
cited critiques by those who (unlike Fraser herself) would dismiss
the Habermasian understanding of democracy as hopelessly naïve,

patriarchal and anachronistic. Given the influential role Fraser’s ideas
have played in mediating the Habermasian public sphere in recent
debates, I will devote some attention to them here.
Aspects of Habermas’s theory, Fraser claims, are insuffi ciently
developed to fully withstand the competing impulses of universalism
and pluralism but, as a point of departure, Habermas’s theory of
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the public sphere is an ‘indispensable resource’. Most importantly,
Habermas’s focus on a public realm of debate not commandeered
by the market or the state provides a counterweight to socialist

discourses that conflate state control with ‘socialisation’ and thus
become apologia for bureaucratic, patrician, even authoritarian,
statism; and to feminist discourses which conflate the public
sphere with the state and/or the official economy, resulting in

dubious campaigns for, say, the commodification of housework
and childrearing, or increased state censorship of pornography.
But the theory of the public sphere sketched by Habermas requires
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some ‘critical interrogation and reconstruction’ if it’s to provide a
productive framework for thinking through contemporary problems.
The bourgeois public sphere was based, according to Fraser, on at

least three dubious assumptions that lacked sufficient critical scrutiny
in Structural Transformation. Further scrutiny can, she argues, shed
further light on those contemporary problems.

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