Page 50 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 45

surveillance practices. But it avoids pre-assigning aspects of social
life to a black box marked either ‘private’ or ‘public’: it emphasises
the significance of discourses that shed new light on previously

hidden arenas of social power and domination, from exploitative
employment practices through to domestic or sexual violence.
The fact that so many issues – domestic violence, pornography,
smoking in public places, car use, chemical pesticides and the like
– provoke not just ethical judgments but also questions about their
relevance to the public interest suggests that the terms ‘public’
and ‘private’ may be dangerous insofar as they encourage a spatial
framework of understanding: we are not simply considering the
boundaries between ‘areas’ of social life but between a vast complex
of social phenomena that cut across virtually all domains of society.
We might, then, prefer to switch over to the vocabulary of moral
philosophy, one that plays a prominent role in Habermas’s recent
thinking, which distinguishes between particular conceptions of
‘ethics’ (or ‘the good life’) and generalisable principles of ‘justice’
which can accommodate a plurality of ethical positions. But, as we
shall see, Habermas argues forcefully that the actual application
of principles of justice in the ‘public interest’ is always already an
‘ethical’ project that favours a particular ‘way of life’. Moreover, the
terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ continue to pervade cultural and political
discourse and the controversies and boundary disputes they give
rise to show no signs of waning. We are, then, stuck with a less than
perfect vocabulary. 40
Fraser is right to emphasise the importance of this contestation
over the very scope of the public agenda. This includes confl icts over
questions of identity, including gender and ethnicity, that may be
perceived by some, but not others, as relevant to the distribution
of power and status within the public realm itself – something not
captured by Habermas’s tacit acceptance of the bourgeois conception
of the public sphere comprising private, ostensibly anonymous persons
whose identity and status are matters outside its scope. We need to
remember in all this that there are various levels of generality at which
public debate can ensue on various topics. There are various ways in
which sensitive issues can be publicly debated without necessarily
trampling over people’s desire for privacy, including fi ctional media
narratives or voluntary (and sometimes anonymous) testimony. Of
course, even under such conditions, public ‘debate’ can still give
rise to hysteria and witch-hunts that leave citizens vulnerable to
intrusive and oppressive reactions. But the point is that a progressive

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