Page 44 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 39

The first assumption was that ‘it is possible for interlocutors in

a public sphere to bracket status differentials and to deliberate as
if they were social equals; the assumption, therefore, that societal
29
equality is not a necessary condition for political democracy’.
Aside from the actual patterns of unequal access to the bourgeois
public sphere, Fraser does not accept that the formal principle of
‘participatory parity’ was (and is) unproblematic. The bourgeois ideal
requires the formal bracketing rather than the elimination of inequality
such that interlocutors of differential status could debate as if they
were peers.

But were [social inequalities] really effectively bracketed? The revisionist
historiography suggests they were not. Rather, discursive interaction within
the bourgeois public sphere was governed by protocols of style and decorum
that were themselves correlates and markers of status inequality. These
functioned informally to marginalise women and members of the plebian
classes and to prevent them from participating as peers. 30

Informal, frequently subtle, modes of domination and control
are almost inevitably present in arenas of public deliberation.
Already subordinate and under-represented groups tend to be
further disadvantaged in their encounters with dominant modes of
communication in terms of their capacity and obligation to conform
to prevailing conventions of discourse (those pertaining to style,
rhetoric, ranking and turn-taking, for example), and their likelihood
of being listened to and taken seriously: they often lack the requisite
‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu). Feminist research into gender differences
in public communication contexts (political meetings, for example)
reinforces this observation in a contemporary context. For Fraser,
the formal requirement to bracket status differentials can itself lead

to mystification, an obfuscation of underlying inequalities, and a
bolster to dominant ‘default’ cultural values.

Insofar as the bracketing of social inequalities in deliberation means proceeding
as if they don’t exist when they do, this does not foster participatory parity.
On the contrary, such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant
groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates. In most cases it
would be more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly
thematising them – a point that accords with the spirit of Habermas’s later
communicative ethics. 31

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