Page 59 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

54 Jürgen Habermas

‘the public sphere is not simply corrupted by its articulation with
consumption. If anything, consumption sustains a counterpublicity
that cuts against the self-contradictions of the bourgeois public
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sphere.’ This in turn helps to explain the prevalence of the politics
of identity and difference in recent decades. 66
Habermas himself finds it difficult to recognise the relevance of

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Warner’s narrative to a theory of democracy. But there are some
pertinent issues at stake here, even if we do not concede such a
foundational role to desire and self-contradiction as Warner’s
psychoanalytic view of the subject embraces. The productive aspect
of treating consumerism as a site of ‘counterpublicity’ lies not in
substituting a Frankfurt School view of the consumer as hapless
victim for a celebratory postmodern view of the consumer as a
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‘semiotic guerilla’ (Eco ). Instead, it reminds us to take seriously the
seductions of a culture that hails us as consumers rather than citizens.
Consumerism may be seductive not simply because, following
Adorno, our spirits have been dulled by the routines and rhythms
of modern life. It may also be a site that, in the absence of better
alternatives, offers some kind of a framework for working through
issues of self-identity. Consumerism, as we know, is not a domain of
social life that is somehow separate from the political public sphere:
the logic of consumerism has in large part pervaded the political
public sphere itself. If, in Structural Transformation, Habermas seemed
to take at face value the bourgeois principle of bracketing questions of
identity, his later work (Chapter 3) highlights the role public life can
play in the processes of identity formation. But his emphasis here is
on questions of cultural and group belonging. He does not have much
to say about the public dimensions of individual self-identity which,
as postmodern discourse has suggested, may be best understood as an
ongoing project of differentiation within networks of signifi cation. The
desire to simultaneously identify and differentiate, which seems to be
the piston of contemporary consumer culture, is not taken especially
seriously by Habermas. But if we were to take this seriously, and to
acknowledge that it implicates the political public sphere as well as
the shopping mall, what would we have to take account of?
We might recognise not only that the public sphere is populated
with bodies as well as words, thoughts and ideas, but also that it
is shot through with tensions and contradictions that make the
pseudonymous writer of letters to the editor, the poster of Nelson
Mandela, the rubber George W. Bush mask worn by the protestor,
and the music played at a political rally, all of a piece. The Internet

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