Page 57 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

52 Jürgen Habermas

institutional practices, whilst others undeniably obscure and deaden
public debate in favour of spectacular infotainment. It is true that
aesthetic symbols can mediate large-scale ‘imagined communities’
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in Benedict Anderson’s sense. But it is also true that they can feed
irrational hatreds and exclusions. It may also be true that his personal
memories of Nazism predisposed Habermas to an excessive reaction
against aestheticised politics: after all, Nazism remains a ‘sobering’
reminder of the dangers of excessively aestheticised politics! Peters’
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wisdom that symbolic politics is ‘more than Nuremburg rallies’
invites us not simply to embrace a more ‘catholic conception of
(mass) communication, appreciative of its gloriously raucous as well
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as soberly informative qualities’, but, rather, to investigate ways in
which we might untangle its progressive and destructive threads.
Michael Warner’s critique of Habermas emphasises the role of
desire in the public sphere, something which seems extremely
marginal to Habermas’s narrative. Central to Warner’s argument is the
relationship between the public sphere and the body. The ‘universal
reason’ of the bourgeois public sphere was exercised according to the
ability to detach from the particularities of the self:

In the bourgeois public sphere, which was brought into being by publication
…, a principle of negativity was axiomatic: the validity of what you say in
public bears a negative relation to your person. What you say will carry
force not because of who you are but despite who you are. Implicit in this
principle is a utopian universality that would allow people to transcend the
given realities of their bodies and their status. But the rhetorical strategy of
personal abstraction is both the utopian moment of the public sphere and
a major source of domination. For the ability to abstract oneself in public
discussion has always been an unequally available resource. 59

Bodily identity is most readily disregarded when a citizen belongs
to the dominant or ‘default’ group, which was white and male
in the case of the bourgeois public sphere. At one level, this is a
development of the theme introduced by Fraser (see the previous
section): only when personal attributes perceived to impact on the
fairness of the public sphere itself may be explicitly articulated and
debated can the power relations of the bourgeois model come under
challenge. But the process of ‘refeudalisation’ described by Habermas
has indeed, via the visual media, placed the body at the centre of
the public sphere:

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